17 June 2010: "Lady Gaga releases sex doll so u can pretend 2 have sex with her"

This post is about the body without organs. Is sex, as constituted and constructed by the matrices of power/knowledge within the paradigms of consumer capitalism, ever anything but a pretense? Carles wonders. Are we always having to "pretend" to sex while finding ourselves trapped within the prison-house of language, climbing the walls, as it were, of textuality, hemmed in from the carnal and the somatic and even the abject by layers upon layers of discourse? Our own visceral sensual experiences are filtered through to our consciousness only in the hegemonic discourses of heteronormative sexuality, such that our bodies themselves become as lifeless and inanimate as mannequins, or better yet, ventriloquist's dummies waiting to be spoken through.

"Seems really lifelike," Carles points out sardonically, but the straitjacket of gender norms that have already transfigured popular culture are not so easily rendered inert. As Carles explains, the commodification of sexuality and its reification as a modality of discourse, a series of speech acts, has allowed the culture industry to produce a different kind of star engineered to massage the liminal nodes along the gender divide: "the new brand of female singers is all about ‘being a slut,’" he points out, detailing how they "try to make it seem like they are ‘the man’ of the relationship just to be edgy & empower women who don’t really have high self-esteem and consume 2 much celeb gossip." Libidinal subversion is reintegrated into the matrix of capitalist consumerism and distributed among a series of valves meant to dissipate it harmlessly, leaving subjects experiencing an impotent "empowerment" that consists of an actual intensification of subjection. The implication in the juxtaposition of this analysis with the inanimate doll is to indicate how reversing gender roles no longer decalcifies the status quo but instead serves as a virtual mortification of the flesh. Subversion itself has become rigidified, codified into prepackaged gestures, strategies of instrumental reason toward the ultimate systemic goal of profit.

Is the doll a desiring machine, or a body without organs? The doll is a metonym for the virtual, which has, in a dialectic reversal, begun to colonize the real. Tracing the emergent geneology of postpostmodern id, Carles points out that "now u can just buy this lifeless body to cum with, instead of just cumming while u look at your computer screen." The virtual stakes it claim to the living body, seeking to assimilate it by means of spatio-theoretical pleasure and countercathexis. By liberating pleasure from the tyranny of the other, the libidinal-industrial complex dupes individuals into adopting a cybernetic and highly programmable subject position. Carles dramatizes this abdication of reciprocity, the abiding ethical responsibility for the Other: "I sorta want the warmth/form of another human, but don’t always want to deal with the responsibility of ‘their feelings’ in the post-coital era."

In announcing the "post-coital era" Carles seems to be staking out a positionality beyond that of Foucault and his followers, positing an epistemic rupture that interrupts the operational flow of sexualized power/knowledge. He imagines an episteme of "progressive merch" which, under the banner of mechanized sexuality, becomes the "future of the music industry." The mode of reproduction, in other words, has become completely industrialized, along with the production of desire and its servicing. No escape from the circuit of synthesized pleasure.