Technoerotics

All digital and electronic acts transfer sexual energy. Even the work emails, the restaurant reviews, the twitchy message checking; even the small press book orders and streaming european films and episodes of frasier. Our phones turn us on, relighting the desire to join, melt into, return to the primordial soup, a splash of which we carry in a bucket in our groin. At the same time we turn our phones on; the phone refeeds the machine treated energy back into a circuit of organs, meat revolutions. Back and forth the electrical current surges, receiving at each go around a mechanized, digitalized property as well as another embodied, organic reformulation. After enough cycles the flesh loses its taste for flesh and dreams only of penetrating a bottomless screen.  

To make love to technology, to hug and kiss technology as a whole. At the same time to use people like technology, to hate them for their instrumental idiocy. What can’t be loved in a person is redirected to the device, and what can’t be used or accessed in the device is sought in a person.  

The lesson of psychoanalysis is that sex is in everything except sex. In sex is everything else; myths, legends, parents, gods, that one thing that happened to you when you were 11, all the bits and pieces of natural and cultural history in a race to the top of the triangle eye watching over a base pairing. It’s never two people having sex but two people fantasizing they’re having sex, two people under the third person perspective rising like a totem of ancestors and animal spirits. The sexual fantasy is never realized, but without it sex never occurs; there is only a sex act insofar as there is a fantasy that can’t be acted.  

All this to say: the hardening of the digital tool and the softening of the body, the desexualization of the physique and socialized sex roles. Libido invested in the interfacing of machines, electrical energy plugged into drooping bodies. The virtual erotic scene has been translated/materialized into an actual object, a piece of equipment, and fantasy is now staged in a real space on a desiring and desired screen, and the third element, the other person, is spaced out. Fantasy no longer triangulates two people, but shows up, acts itself out in a real virtual realm, and the desire for sex with another person dies.  

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Or it could run like this: sexual union between a man and a woman is inscribed in the telos that forms the human soul. We’re made to reproduce in sex, we complete ourselves in the ordained act, and thus open the path of future life, our perpetuation, beyond our mortal time. Transcending death by sexual union is an analogical rehearsal of our transcendence of death by union with God. But also as a product of our essence, we’re free to choose otherwise; fantasy springs from the demonic drive, the other will within us to twist the upright, to kick ourselves off course. A denial of essence always involves a death grip on accidents.  

The materialist/psychoanalytic functionalization of fantasy, as part of a naturalistic reduction of human desire, acts as a perverse exoneration of perversity, an explanation and defense of the corrupt human will, its bent toward masturbatory rage in which pain and pleasure trade masks to the point of immolation.  

And if we’re not reproducing anymore, or even dicking around in the shell of sex, in sterile recreations of procreative acts, it’s not because erotic energy circulates and pools in the technical complex, it’s because the demonic side of our spirits has gained ground, taken the lead, and wants this aimless abyssal thrusting, these black hole ejaculations that leave us shuddering alone with a pleasurable contempt.  

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A quiet Sunday morning, a special event, miraculously free of power tools and shouting louts and screaming children, with construction projects on hold, port a potties empty, bulldozers dozing with their heavy jaws in the dust like old dogs. Weekday work at rest and weekend service work somewhere else. Free from the rushed and rough hand off jobs in the idiotic question mills and leisure seeking ant traps (attract a crowd the same way as a swarm of insects: put out a bottle of syrup).  

On the porch I smoked and watched shadows swing over the lawn. When I went inside I saw a reflection of the low-grade glass from the window on the opposite wall, a square of radiant blotches. It wasn’t long before a dog barked and a truck beeped and a van pulled into the backyard and an at&t guy hopped out and another inscrutable golem worked behind me, around me, fiddling with electrical boxes and stringing cables and directing signals, no day ever safe from some jackhammering intrusion, strange and loud labors, poorly domesticated yelping.  

But then in my own practical and convenience-oriented habits, I’m less like a jellyfish and more like a set of walking bagpipes. Classical greek hypocrite that I am, I vacuumed my carpet, fired up another roaring device, threw some more rusted nails onto the sonic landscape. I could’ve dragged the dining room rug out to the backyard and hung it over a line and modestly beat it with a broom. The more physically taxing the work, the quieter. The quietest work of all being thought; not many of us want to do it. That’s the goal of using buzzing equipment, raising a ruckus to the desolate heavens; not to make household and everyday tasks easier, but to make thinking less likely.  

No one else around me seems to care about noise, why even try to be quiet for an instant. Instead of sweeping the floors I’ll use a leaf blower to blast all the dirt onto the street. I’m going to adopt five or six SS german shepherds and chain them to the oak tree in the front yard. Practice my avant garde solo trombone compositions at 3 in the morning, use an airhorn alarm to wake up from naps, go from place to place with an entourage of cymbal crashing monkeys. I could do more to shatter all remaining holdouts of eerie silence.