Sex is again liberated. It’s discursive dissemination through the social body generates always already outdated forms of its presentation. Its manifest image – a ‘framework in terms of which man encountered himself’ (Wilfrid Selars), allows for infinite irreducible discontinuity to remain the core of its conceptual machine. Sex appears now more than ever in the realm of the ever escaping ‘contingent- possibility-mechanism’ – a contradiction that maintains the basic flows within the sexuality market.
We have returned to the sex discourse of the classical era with a sexuality weaponized with an accelerating value-form. The bourgeois disciplining of sexual language and its practice, the domestication of sex for the purposes of reproduction, the medicalization and punishing of abnormal sexual behavior, all of these have been overcome for some time now. The ensuing encouragement of ‘the perverse’ with the aim of norming, controlling and keeping it into check, as described by Foucault in History of sexuality, is also over. What we experience today is the total mobilization of a variety of resources for the hyper-intensification of the sexual freedom. Neither the bourgeois putative morality, nor the disciplining apparatuses have any value-producing capacity for the Capital today. The exchanged value, the price that is paid in today’s market increasingly relates to a pure abstraction. Sexuality today represents the most sublime form of such an abstraction.
Contained in the form of the Young-girl – a cross-gender concept, the “living currency” (Klossowski) is the condensation of a set of advanced contemporary social relations managed by sexuality that is never there. The Tiqqun collective, almost a decade before the ‘social network’ came into being, in their “Raw materials for the theory of the Young-Girl” published in 2001, noted the rise of a new champion of the economy:
“Money is no longer the ultimate term of the economy. Its triumph has depreciated it. A naked king that has abandoned all metaphysical content, it has also lost all value. Nothing shows it respect anymore, in the biopolitical flock. Living currency has taken the place of money as a general equivalent; that which relative to which it is worth anything. It is its value and its concretion. The purchasing power of living currency, and a fortiori of the Young-Girl, has no limit; it extends over the whole of everything that exists, because in her, wealth enjoys itself doubly: as symbol and as fact”.
In their brilliant analysis of the process of commodification of the Young-girl, following Marx’s thoughts the process of differentiating in itself, they come to declare that the Young-Girl is absorbed by price, she is nothing beyond it. The centrality of the Young-Girl as the dictating order and locus of the relations of sexuality-distance/fixation and money-exchange/movement maintained a degree of operational sovereignty although remaining always already fully embedded in the territory of Capital.
Under the ‘eye of the algorithm’, the living currency does not live anymore. Instead, it has been fully integrated in the global datascape through the “despotic mega-machine of cognitive capitalism based on the accumulation of valorising information, extraction of surplus value of code and transformation of collective knowledge into the machinic intelligence of new apparatuses.” (Pasquinelli, 2014).
Online gestures and acts such as pictures, posts, likes and shares are all connected within the new desire-coding-algorithm of the ‘social network’ which structures what is desirable, likeable and ultimately what sticks to the upper levels of feeds of these massive networks. “By structuring the environment, Facebook is training people implicitly to behave in a particular way in that algorithmic environment” writes a TIME magazine expert. The social network performs the gesture of ideology – it structures our experience of reality. The operational sovereignty of the Young-Girl is now completely annulled. The price of the Young-Girl is evacuated in the mega-machine of the algorithms. She/he is a disposable piece connected to the planetary network of value generating data processors. Multitudes of reports on the successful performance of the well-behaved within the algorithmic environment are the sole priced items.
Desiring machines have broken loose of the production chain leaking enormous quantities of sexuality out of the social machine. The algorithm deterritorializes the assemblage, it charges the molecular fluids with the agent of pattern to its final configuration – the virtual non-production of desire. The only productive process that takes place in the environment of the algorithm is the production of new meta-planes for the acceleration of sexuality patterning and coding towards higher molecular efficiency. The dislocation of the productive Deleuzo-Guattarian relationship desire-reality is finalized via the affirmative action of the molar ‘social network’ towards sexuality as a primary mode of algorithmic coercion at the molecular level.
Sexual drives are not produced any more in the chain of flows of desires within the assemblage. The algorithm devises the territories of drives, it takes action, it calculates and structures and sends back a path for action on the side of the users who do not produce sexual drives through their interactions in the ‘social network’ – they produce data. As the production works in factory lines, the algorithmic environment has very precise modes of production of data, although the users of the network might experience their behavior as freed from any code.
The internet of people and the internet of things have collapsed into the singularity of sexuality which paradoxically came before that of the AI. Sexuality has gained a new form of independent existence within the domain of the algorithmic coded terrain of the ‘network’. It produces flows of life for the users, it multiplies packaged models of the pleasure principle condensed with ‘likes’. The online profile of the user undergoes a process of differentiation in itself via the labor of the algorithm embedded sexuality, thus remaining always already a separate entity – commodity to witch the user is a slave-laborer.
The online profile is a sexualized commodity – thus it has a life, fully resembling the one of the user.
The primitive accumulation of ‘likes’ serves not the slave-user, but the mega-machine which by proliferating its immanence, makes life outside of the network impossible, there are no more humans outside of the ‘user-online profile’ correlation. Within its territory, the use of the master-slave dialectics is conceptually impossible due to very lack of any locus for asymmetric recognition between the user and his online profile. To him/her, the online profile is a destiny, he/she always aspires to resemble back what the profile resembles of his labor in the factory of the desiring-network. There are no affirmative forces that can differentiate the user from his online profile, therefore he/she is caught in an inverted Deleuzean trap – experiencing his online profile as the thing with the potential to differentiate from him.
Under the pressures of the algorithmic accelerated reproduction of value that circulates through the online profile – the sexualized commodity, the commodity of commodities, the users most intimately desired destiny, he/she can survive only in a constant state of paranoid monophrenia. His/her sexuality is maintained only via the fear of the possible cracks of the monophrenic desire for unity with his/her online profile.
Using Alexandre Kojeve’s treatment of history through the concept of desire as its main driving engine, and applying it to the virtureality of the desiring-network we reach at the definitive end of history. The common settlement of the desire that unifies all humanity has been reached in the satisfaction and recognition of each individual with his/her online profile – the end of the history of sexuality as we know it.
Technology has not only deprived man from the World (Heidegger), but its essence, the enframing – sexuality, is always already a true materialization of what Heidegger sought to be the intrinsic ‘something’ of technology. The sexed viral span of the profile-relation is not a common superficial deception, for it brings forth a new, full bodied and to-be-gasped, poetics of its own. It “let[s]what is not yet present [to] arrive into presencing,” (QT) into the order of the presence or the real.
The early cubernegative fashion found in Heidegger’s thought, one that considers technology as obscuring the world from man, and even depriving man of world, is finally laid to the grave through the passing from the “derivative kind of instrumental thinking” to the instrumentalization of thinking as a derivate of the labor of the algorithmic sexuality. Technical reason and action have successfully been evacuated to the submissive terrain of the *anti-dialectical swarm-like colonizing desire-inducing* algorithm. This form of thinking is not merely a consequence, it represents a genuine new mode of behavioral presence, a new planet with its own codex of references, reproducing a ‘new earth, a new people’, one which Deleuze and Guattari would vomit instantaneously.
Under the terms of the Capital, the revolution was inaugurated through the agency of the algorithm. Its radicalism fully embedded in the ‘metaphysical principle of economy’ (Batailles), continually re-roots the subject-sex entity within the primitive field of accumulation through a novel drive, the code-drive. This is the process that surgically removes the death drive – ‘sexual expenditure’, replacing it with the hyper-productive real sexual austerity – the investment in the future of the profile.
Living currency is dying, algorithm feeds on the living currency. With every post on the ‘network’ comes a share in the global libidinal economy – becomings and affirmations in the minoritarian terrains of the planetary disbursed spaces of the algorithm. Lines of flight are out of sight.
Artan Sadiku
machinesloops 