THE ONTOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DIGISEXUALITY

The body is no longer essential for communication; it is more and more an embarrassing surplus, a mass that we would be pleased to get rid of.

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Imagine two different scenes of sexual seduction and activity. In the first, I meet someone at a cafeteria; we seem to like each other and talk at length. We decide to meet again the next day. During our next meeting, we continue discussing general topics—movies, music, politics, ecology—but sexuality is already hanging in the air. When one of us takes a risky step and proposes sex, the other simply nods. We go to one of our places and start kissing passionately in the elevator. In the apartment, we frantically pull off each other’s clothing and nervously engage in our first intercourse, followed by tender caressing until we are ready for a second round—a common scenario in today’s permissive society.

Now, imagine a different scene. I am alone at home and feel an urge to have sex, so I post my profile on a platform. I quickly find a person willing to engage, but we do not physically meet. Each of us takes a pill that enhances neural links in our brains; we select the same virtual space in which we interact as digitally altered versions of ourselves—our bodies look and perform better. I put on a device called a “smart condom,” among other enhancements, and we begin to interact, each of us performing similar clumsy movements in our actual, mundane reality. (The clumsy description reveals that I have not participated in such events.) What happens in this transition from the first to the second scene?

Media bombard us with speculations about how artificial intelligence will affect our lives, asserting itself as an alien power. Instead of merely extending our bodily organs and technological machines to serve us—making our lives less stressful and more satisfying—it will effectively regulate and dominate even our innermost feelings and desires. Surprisingly, although we believe we live in an era of sexual permissiveness, there are far fewer texts on the “transformations of sociality and sexuality in relation to digital technology,” i.e., on “the ways in which devices and platforms influence and produce normative systems capable of changing the way we perceive, desire, and relate to others”. Christian Damato’s Multiplication of Organs—Body, Technology, Identity, Desire¹ addresses precisely this topic in all its dimensions, from fascinating analyses of wearable technologies to broader implications of digisexuality.

Wearable technologies in the field of digisexuality—teledildonics, smart condoms, and brain-computer interfaces—increasingly affect contemporary subjects in all aspects of life: measurement, gamification, control, and prediction of performance, emotions, and time. All these innovations reprogram how we “construct” desire, which Damato redefines as statistical desire—that is, a form of desire founded on quantification, gamification, predictability, and actions we intend to perform.²

At a more general level, Damato shows how digisexuality is rooted in the widespread unease with contact, with bodily proxemics: the discomfort with our own skin, aversion to being touched and to touching, resulting in contact avoidance. As sensorial experience is increasingly replaced by techno-semiotic exchange, perception is reconfigured; desire itself, through the hyper-semiotization of experience, is also transformed. This shift to digisexuality changes our very perception of reality. “Physical reality exists, but it is less and less the primary object of significant investment, and also of desiring investment—a cumbersome residue that we do not know what to do with.” The body is thus “no longer essential for communication,” increasingly “an embarrassing surplus in communication, a mass that we would be pleased to get rid of.” Damato's analysis focuses on the moment when this shift occurs (and is already underway): when our body is no longer “what we are,” where our self is located, but instead is experienced as something external—so that we become more “ourselves” in digital space than in our physical bodies.

One might think that the disappearance of the body will impoverish human culture, or alternatively, that human culture has been enriched by the renunciation of presence and physical contact. Damato’s intention is not to resolve this dilemma, but rather to open new avenues for investigation and reflection on a deeper question: Will this change in perception allow the emergence of a new ontology, or will the disappearance of the body mark the final dissolution of human life itself?