"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"

One of the Very Serious White Guys of the Future at the stealth Robot Cult outfit IEET (that is, the "Institute for Ethics" -- although Ethics aren't really discussed there much -- "and Emerging Technologies" -- although the sooper-technologies they enthuse over there aren't ever really emerging), one Dick Pelletier, declares: "Although many today might find the idea of romance with a machine repulsive, experts predict that as the technology advances and robots become more human-like, we will view our silicon creations in a much friendlier light." At the outset I want to note, but do not mean to dwell on, the customary reference to unnamed "experts" in this extraordinary assertion. I suspect that almost none of the "experts" Pelletier has in mind are trained in actually existing fields or are calling upon such expertise in making such "predictions" on whatever vapid talk show is unfolding in Pelletier's imagination when he says this sort of thing. I will also ruefully note -- not for the first time, not for the thousandth time -- that there is no such thing as "technology in general" that may be said to be "advancing" monolithically however indispensable such utterly facile falsifying declarations may be to the ongoing operation of futurological discourse.

Be that as it may, let us turn to the frothy substance of Pelletier's little futurological number. I personally think it is rather infantile and pathetic to use the word "romance" to describe what happens when a guy masturbates into a hole in a watermelon or Real Doll, although I don't find such activities particularly repulsive, any more than I do the endlessly many other non-violent and non-exploitative ways human beings find to get off. As a guy with a dildo or two in arm's reach even while typing this, I am the last one to wag my finger at the notion of prosthetically facilitated orgasms. I do think it is rather evocative just how often the sometimes sociopathic futurologists of the more assertively transhumanoid and singularitarian varieties find themselves hyperventilating about how awesome the sexbots of the future are going to be, or how sex with machines or sex via their own sooper-sexy medical enhancements will soon, so soon, Change Absolutely Everything for them.

One need not linger long in futurological precincts to discern a certain prevalence in them of representations of long-lashed big-boobied humanoids megaphoning their sexual availability (insofar as cartoons can be said in some sense to be "available") to the almost always only males whose publications these images accompany. Although the futurologists like to encrust the usual ladyparts with scales and feathers and shiny metal and curiously curvaceous circuit boards there isn't exactly a large chasm to leap from the ubiquitous sex-kitten kitsch of the transhuman imaginary to the crap conventions of Maxim Magazine or Girls With Guns Truck Stop Calendars.

Transhumanists and Singularitarians and other assorted futurologists and Robot Cultists also have demonstrated, I'm sorry to say, a distressing willingness to pretend that "intelligence" is on exhibition when spell-check software annoyingly "corrects" your proper use of a word that happens not to be included in its programming or when somebody embeds what amounts to a glorified tape-recorder into what amounts to a glorified mannequin and then some low-rent street performer calling himself a "roboticist" indulges in a stale bit of memorized theater with the contraption. So, too, these folks may be very eager to describe as "friends" people with whom they have never and will never meet but publish minute by minute accounts of their stomach contents in misspelled one-line publications on their "walls" and "feeds." This does not mean that the rest of us are required to share with them in the ridiculous fantasy that boning a hole in something like an animatronic Abe Lincoln from Disney's 1960s state-of-the-art robo-waxworks Hall of Presidents, but, you know, truncheon-cocked or balloon-busted in lowest-common-denominator versions of sexy skimpy undergarments, constitutes "romance" or something more reciprocally "human-like" while the relevant transhumanoid "experts" bask warmly in their "friendlier light" for cash.

I have argued that futurological discourses are best understood as the extreme edge of the deceptive, hyperbolic advertising and promotional forms that now utterly suffuse our public life. It is a truism that "Sex Sells" and it should, by extension, be regarded as no less a truism that it is often through sex or something like it that futurologists likewise peddle "The Future" to the rubes. But it is crucial to grasp that it is rarely the actual accomplishment of sexual gratification that advertising discourse sells when it sells sex. Indeed, the product advertising sells when it is selling sex, whether it is a hamburger or an automobile or a deodorant or a cellphone is almost never sex itself, and you can be sure that whatever else is happening when advertising is selling sex any actual sex itself is absolutely being deferred and not enjoyed to make time for the sex being sold in it in the first place.

As Adorno and Horkeimer put the point in 1944 -- decades before Debord said it again, and not necessarily better -- right about when America was busy inventing "The Future" through the promotion of which the neoliberal Washington Consensus would rule the postwar world:

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu... The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance.

It is this discursive structure of deferral of sex and substitution of sex in the selling of sex that demands our special attention when we observe the workings of these narrative and attentional mechanisms in the context of futurological discourse. For, to be sure, futurology is all about deferral -- "The Future" in which it invests its participants is forever just out of reach, usually literally twenty years ahead endlessly deferred year by year by year, a rosy promissory coloration in the present available only to those who Believe In It together in the present and in so believing, grasp its "imminence" in the present and predict its coming.

But, as I have repeatedly insisted, every futurism is always a retro-futurism: In investing us in a vision of "The Future" which mostly consists of the amplification of our present and parochial satisfactions (more, More, MORE! Of the Same... appetites gratified, but, in "The Future" without number, without cost, without end) or the disasterbatory indulgence in our present and parochial fears (dystopic amplifications of generational fears displaced onto clone armies and designer babies, perplexed and alienated negotiations of ever-disappointing landfill-destined techno-gewgaws displaced onto robot armies and brains in a vat) futurology peddles stasis while crowing about "accelerating change," defends the status quo while handwaving about techno-progress, promotes the reactionary police force of incumbent elites in the utopian and dystopian cadences of prophetic utterances. For the open futurity arising in the present out of the diversity of stakeholders to the shared world, futurology substitutes parochial projections of "The Future" endlessly amplifying the elite-incumbent vantage over the present.

Futurological deferral, futurological substitution. Let us redeploy the words of Michel Foucault in our present distress: Given the suffusion of public space with the norms and forms of deceptive, hyperbolic marketing and promotional discourse in which "sex sells" through the deferral of actual gratifications, through the fetishistic substitution of desire for commodities for pleasurable human solidarities driven by desire, we are endlessly promised that "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again."

What matters about this pronouncement is not that it takes the form, like futurological utterances tend to do, of a prediction -- but that it sexualizes the Good, that it re-writes the freedom of present futurity as a parochially projected Tomorrow in the image of a Good that has been so sexualized. My point is not to denigrate sexual pleasure -- and certainly neither was Foucault's -- but to warn about what happens when what can be good about sexual gratification is hyperbolized into an Aim at which we aspire in the name of the Good, becomes the essential Truth of the Self in the name of which we aim our emancipatory hopes. It is a circumscription, a canalization, declaring itself and mistaken for a thrust, for an opening: And so, it is one thing to bemoan the hypocrisy of the closet, say, or the pointless pain of repressing some harmless idiosyncratic pleasure, but it is quite another to buy into the fantasy that in coming out of the closet (or in boasting about your arcane fetish on the set on Jerry Springer or over drinks at a bar) we overcome the mystery of ourselves and arrive at last at perfect enlightened self-knowledge or that in throwing off an irrational repression of some modest kink we might manage to break through the impasse of politics and experience at last the plenitude of perfect self-expression.

Like a taut tanned supermodel in latex declaring a sexual availability that is in fact utterly unavailable beyond the screen, a vision of perfect satisfaction promiscuously attaching to consumer commodities that, however disappointing they may be to your hopes upon actual consumption, at least are available in your price range, a mirage of gratification that must be deferred in order to be consumed on the terms on which it is offered, to promise what is to come is not the same as what is to come, and to consume the promise of "to come" is not the same as actually to come.

The future as it arrives is always only another present, stratified by differences that make a difference, vestiges of past injuries, diversities of present stakes, struggles for future outcomes. "The Future" the futurologists sell is the deception that technological accumulation can substitute for the heartbreaking convulsive progress of political struggle in history, but in selling "The Future" the futurologists are also engaging in a present-day skirmish in that politics, diverting energy and imagination from collective struggles into faithful acquiescence to elite incumbents who deliver consumer goods in the present (rejuvenating skin creams, orgasmic chocolates, prowess via pill-popping) and promise to deliver amplified enhanced transcendent goods ever more to come.