Quote of the Week: Paul Virilio
Thanks to the force-feedback control glove (DataGlove) and, especially, to the DataSuit, everything is ruled by lightning, and the coup de foudre of disunited lovers suddenly becomes a coup de grace. From erotic entertainment we then move on to sexual diversion and shortly to a fatal divergence – that of the reactor that set off nuclear fission.
It’s a very thin line between ecstasy and distaste for, in future, it is at the speed of electromagnetic radiation that cybernetic orgasm will occur.
In effect, if distancing brings (interactive) lovers together to the point where they manage to love those far-off as they do themselves, the gap between the wedding and the divorce will have been closed off once and for all.
By way of a provisional conclusion, let us review the early ethical reactions to this telematic mutation in sexuality. In an apostolic letter published in 1994, in honour of the International Year of the Family, Pope John Paul II declared: ‘Union and procreation cannot be artificially separated without altering the intimate truth of the conjugal act itself.’
Far from chiming in as a simple rejection of contraception or the usual repetition of the indissoluble nature of the bonds of marriage, this statement points to another major question: the question of the nature of the separating artefact. What artificial construct are we in fact talking about when even bodily union is eclipsed by a virtual telesexuality that advocates the separation of bodies and no longer just divorce?
What happens not only in the future of holy matrimony, but also to divorce, when they are not literally dissolving, not the couple, but copulation?
–Paul Virilio, Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose (New York: Verso Books, 2008), 117.
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I have no idea what than man is talking about.
Kurt
This is in part a discussion on the effects of “cybersex” especially when it is able to actually imitate the feelings/sensual impressions of sex (i.e., body suit) and how Virilio sees it will lead to an end to sexuality itself for something virtual, fake. He thinks it is a danger to the human species — forget contraception, birth control, etc as causing our species to die out; he thinks when sex can be entirely divorced from copulation, the future is bleak indeed.
Here is another quote:
“What was till now still ‘vital’, copulation, suddenly becomes optional, turning into the practice of remote-control masturbation. At a time when innovations are occurring in artificial fertilization and genetic engineering, they have actually managed to also interrupt coitus, to shirt-circuit conjugal relations between opposite sexes, with the aid of biocybernetics (teledildonic) accoutrements using sensor-effectors distributed over the genital organs.” (104 – 5)
“Indeed, if industrial technologies have progressively favoured the decline of the extented family of the rural world and promoted the bourgeois, and then the nuclear, family (so aptly named) at the time of the last century’s urban expansion, the end of the supremacy of the physical proximity in the megalopolis of the postindustrial age will not content itself with promoting a boom in the single-parent family. It will go on to provoke an even more radical gap between men and women, thereby directly threatening the future of sexual reproduction. Parmenides’ great divide between masculine and feminine principles will widen further as a result of the very performance of love at a distance” (106).
Etc.