Postmodernism and Cybersex
Gravitating around the epistemological and psychological spheres, postmodernist theorists, amongst other things, make two fundamentally crucial claims when discussing twenty first century computer mediated communications (CMC). The epistemological claim is that the search for the ultimate foundations of knowledge, for depth and mechanism, is futile. Postmodernism is an anti foundationalist philosophy in the sense that it denies that there can be such a thing as transcendent, perfect knowledge. Instead all knowledge claims are justified by rhetoric, convention or authority. The psychological claim of postmodernism is that the notion of a coherent and unitary self is an illusion. The self is really a multiplicity of parts and fragments. Associated with this, the coherence of traditional identity formulations relating to classifications on the basis of race, gender and other physical characteristics are also suspect. So, in keeping with the postmodernist doctrine, what could be more postmodern than cybersex? Now "cybersex" stems from the term cyberspace, originally a term from William Gibson's science-fiction novel of 1984, Neuromancer. Basically cyberspace is the name some people use for the conceptual space where words,
Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate". The sexual power of the pagan goddess was sublimated in the symbol of the virgin, and now, says Adams, the procreative power and spiritual sensuality of the Virgin has been transfigured in the form of the dynamo. This isn't about mating or the passing on of genetic information but the satisfaction of screwing somebody who looks like the icon that terrorised your pants when you were a hormone hungry pubescent or the image that haunts your dreams when your eyes are wide shut. In modernist art, the idolatrous expressed by Adams shaded, by degrees, from religious devotion into mechano-eroticism; paeans to the machine by Italian futurists, English vorticists, and Russian supremacists often verged on soft-core porn. It is as subversive of "linear," "logocentric," "essentialist" thinking, as committed to the "aporia," "indeterminacy," "fluidity," "intertextuality," and "contextuality" of discourse, as deconstruction itself. All of the examples documented so far support this breakdown of yet another modernist dichotomy. With this development the distinctions between the biological and the mechanical, the natural and artificial, the human and the mechanical have become unreliable. Baudrillard observes that "There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. This of course is subject to whether or not one views physicality as the only constituent of reality. ' This recommendation may seem antithetical to the scientific enterprise but consciously or not, even scientists have started to harness simulation to their ends. Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is "privileged" over any other. Generations of human beings whose psyches are composed entirely of media images, seek and provide fantasy sexual experiences. For the most part, the actual physical bodies of participants are invisible unless revealed, and thus the subtle social cues, which we might have been programmed to exhibit in deference to unexamined assumptions regarding, for example, gender roles, are nonexistent in a virtual community. our world is far too complex to be understood in terms of first principles. Diana of the Ephesians was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund".
Common topics in this essay:
Neuromancer Basically,
Armageddon Putting,
FUN Cybersex,
,
David Hume,
Marcel Jean,
Virgin Violent,
Precession Simulacra,
Henry Adam's,
Nonetheless Internet,
masculine feminine,
virtual communities,
computer mediated communications,
psychological characteristics,
mediated communications,
real world,
partner partners,
beyond limitations,
sex machines,
role playing,
using computer,
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Acceptance Essays
