Artificial Love: An Introduction to Fancy Design

1. 
Contemporary sex designers bear no relation to power. If the traditional 
question of power has become empty, then we set foot on a new, unexplored 
terrain - or so it seems in the hype surrounding "VS" at any rate. The 
reason this promising discovery raises so much enthusiasm is because sex 
has finally returned to its pre-Fall paradisal condition. If the sixties 
needed a revolutionary social approach to liberate sex, the nineties lack 
all legitimation.

"Virtual sex cannot be real," mutters our critical-ethical consciousness. 
It must, by definition, consist of lies and deceit. Many have claimed 
that "virtual" sex simply can't and shouldn't be. Prophets of doom warn 
against the first signs of decay. VS causes addiction, paralyzes the 
'Net, signifies narcissism, cynicism and autism, and is assumed to 
encourage the loss of reality. The cyberjunkies' automated surrogate sex 
is seen as a detestable escapist reaction to AIDS. Safe sex, it is true; 
but this condomless gratification could well be worse than the ailment. 
In short, this typically European line of thinking still thinks of sex in 
terms of danger and ruin.

The traditional critique of VS is a masked appeal for the survival of 
actually existing sex. What the critics conceal is the ongoing crisis in 
current intercourse. The United European marital bed is used to talk, 
watch television, sleep, make phone calls, do sports, or read in, but 
begetting offspring is limited to a minimum. The European population 
increase is an imported one. The link between a critique of VS and the 
explosive increase of immigrants and refugees cannot be made, because it 
falls under the racist taboo. The waxing middle classes beat around the 
bush, smiling coyly about the whole affair in an act of willful 
repression (Freud). In fact, the best thing to do for Europeans would be 
to return to Victorian sexual intercourse. Don't get immoral with 
machines, rubber, pets, booklets - get real, in the sense of "legally 
joined in marriage." Any criticism of VS runs the risk of getting caught 
in this kind of cramped, law-and-order conjugal ethics; after all, the 
antithesis of "virtuality" is "reality," and is sexwise in a terminal 
condition. Jokes about the disabled Other, condemned to mechanized 
copulation, bear a bitter connotation: What is disapproved of is 
unproductivity, but what is really meant is one's own (white) impotence.

After the feminist critique of masculine sexism through man's behavior, 
through advertising, on the job, and between the sheets, we have entered 
an era of hypersexual awareness. In magazines, art, on the dance floor, 
in music (Prince/Madonna), we witness a passionate revival of hard, 
playful, expressionist sexual techniques. The body needs to express 
itself, while sexually correct body culture requires maximum effort to 
get what you came for. "Suck it, baby!" Guided by a mass culture of signs 
and regulations, the postfeminist body, propped up by a variety of 
academically sound gender constructs, once again becomes a "sex machine." 
But it is not the same body that James Brown knew. The point is no longer 
to liberate sexuality or practice perverted urges, but to circulate them. 
Sex has reached the superstructure, where it is traded as an intangible 
asset. Whereas Freud still had the illusion that sex resided in the 
substructure, nowadays we are all superconscious of it. Sex is not to be 
suppressed or liberated; it must be celebrated, is the present motto. Sex 
is a sacred activity which is not to be taken lightly because of its 
image-quality.

What is the secret of Intersex? This is no innocent question by some 
sympathetic newspaper journalist who wants to have a go at a nice, hip 
story for a change. The question of VS can only be seen within the 
context of the classical European tradition of Sex, Knowledge, and Power 
(as analyzed by Foucault in his three-volume "History of Sexuality"). The 
"concern with VS" many times surpasses the actual state of affairs. The 
number of "VS-related" special issues, legislation, scandals, art 
installations, books, Master's theses, prognoses, movies and TV items, 
sects, postcards, and sex fiction exceeds the imagination. Fooling around 
with "real personal" computers has once more been overrun by 
representation. Neither hardware nor software will ever manage to live up 
to their promises. The intense interest in VS should not be interpreted 
in terms of marketing strategy. No matter how exciting the stories may 
seem, they do not advertise an impending reality, since their effect is 
ultimately a reactionary (and racist) one. What seems at first glance 
like the promotion of cybersex and supertechnology in general serves no 
other function than to make VS more pliable in order to bring it back 
under control. Thus, the supramechanical expectations turn out to be a 
cunning strategy to frustrate the excited user.

2. 
The virtual-sex discourse, furthermore, is part of a long prosthetic 
tradition of man and machine. Starting with 17th-century automata, there 
has been the question of humanity's domination by inert machines. The 
history of this is recorded, for instance, in Sigfried Giedon's 
"Mechanization Takes Command" (1948). It even features a chapter on 
"mechanical fertilization," in which he warns against a "point of danger" 
that is reached when human beings become capable of artificial 
reproduction. In Karl Marx, too, we see an analysis of human exploitation 
by machines as a condemnation of inhumanity. It is not until the 1960s 
with their automation that the emphasis is shifted towards the 
libidinous, productive relationship between human beings and their 
"bachelor machines" (from Reich to Deleuze/Guattari). Machines become 
toys; an unpleasurable machine is a bad machine, something well 
understood at Nintendo. Donna Haraway-style cyborgs and 'Net sexologists 
may claim to be part of a future underground movement all they want, but 
they have long been incorporated in the dominant discourse. 
Cybervisionaries, from Howard Rheingold and Michael Heim to Mark Dery, 
Douglas Rushkoff and Sandy Stone, look at machine sex as a new productive 
force that needs to be released. The "body electric" must be 
electronically dressed up to help it escape from everyday dreariness, 
with all its sociable rubbish. It accepts the proclaimed abolition of the 
social and the disappearance of public space, advocating total 
abandonment to "virtuality" - in the full interest of the emerging 
"virtual class" described by Kroker and Weinstein in their book, "Data 
Trash."

The West Coast prophets always describe virtual sex as an ecstatic 
connection of body to machine. Therefore, the "cyberculture" discourse 
may be defined as "fancy design." Thus, "Get Wired" is to be taken 
literally, as a simple exhortation to connect your body parts, rather 
than communicate. To the extent that exchange occurs, it takes place on 
the level of the "interior dialogue" - of fancy. Virtual sex as we have 
encountered it possesses no haptic or sensual qualities whatsoever - nor 
does it need any. Plastic accessories strike us as asexual, too clumsy 
and heavy, too garish and elaborate, lacking the subtleties of seduction. 
However, as fancy design, situated in a dreamy, hallucinatory 
environment, they are quite successful, both sexually and financially.

The design of fancy simultaneously speculates on and denies the human 
surplus. Virtual sex as a concept accompanies a shift in the body's 
sensitive, erogenous zones. If we stick to Sigmund Freud's lectures, we 
find that imagination which does not result from a specific temptation no 
longer requires the "user's" masturbation, the "sex without secretion" 
mentioned by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. With the appearance of 
cybersex, the erogenous zone shifts from the genitals to the hands, 
fingertips, ears, eyes, even to such metazones as the abstract matrix of 
one's own mind and personal display screen. Fancy design collects and 
organizes the methods and techniques of these shifts. It knows how to 
appeal to, and tap, the weak spots. In this specific design, dreamwork is 
charted and condensed under electronic circumstances. The point is the 
power of imagination, not the perfection of machines. Fancy design as a 
positive science acknowledges the limits of mechanization, and does not 
give in to paranoia. Virtual sex as a successful phantasm is an explicit 
continuation of the Gospel according to John the Lennon: "Make Love, Not 
War."

3.
Virtual sex as fancy design no longer considers the link between man and 
machine to be problematic, since that classical antithesis has been 
turned into a natural symbiosis. Machines do not operate well when 
tampered with by human beings, but man has become next to inconceivable 
without a mass of machinery. Even mechanical sexual props - from 
vibrators to love dolls - have become an established social fact. But the 
step towards electronic sex opens up new perspectives. If the human body 
sufficed itself, there would be no sex. Every body suspects it contains 
far more exploratory potential than it can realize with the available 
partners and accessories. For centuries, the solution has been sought in 
the exotic, localized in racially other bodies. Because the foreign races 
are nowadays available on the sexual market, this creates an interest in 
a new exoticist experience. The foreign is now projected onto the level 
of chips and sensors. There, something is conjectured, a link which none 
of the earlier fusions managed to produce. VS, if it is to be successful, 
must never be realized. Talk about the technological obstacles that 
remain to be cleared is no concern of ours. As long as fancy meets the G 
spot, hardware is irrelevant. "Gratification through fascination" is the 
new device.
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