Sex and the posthuman condition

107 Pages·2014·0.941 MB·English

by  Hauskeller, Michael

Sex and the Posthuman Condition
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Sex and the
Posthuman Condition
Michael Hauskeller
University of Exeter, UK
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
© Michael Hauskeller 2014
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by 2014
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137393500
For Teo
Posthuman or human,
young or old,
for me you will always be
the sexiest woman alive.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Contents
Preface vii
1 After the Singularity: The Glorious
Sex Life of the Posthuman 1
2 S exbots on the Rise 11
3 Th ree Literary Paradigms: Pygmalion,
The Sandman and The Future Eve 24
4 Promethean Shame and the
Engineering of Love 41
5 Th e Rehabilitation of the Human
Body: Lawrence and Houellebecq 53
6 Th e Marquis de Sade on Happiness,
Nature and Liberty 64
7 Synthetik Love Lasts Forever 73
8 Kissengers and Surrogates 80
Bibliography 90
Index 94
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0001
Preface
This book is meant to be a sequel to my last book, Better
Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project, which
Acumen (now Routledge) published last year. In that book,
I looked at the various proposals for human enhancement
in order to understand why certain proposed changes of
the human condition are promoted and perceived as forms
of human enhancement, that is, as an enhancement of the
human as a human. I was interested in the ideas of human
perfection and/or human nature and the values informing
them that underlie those proposals and that lend them
credibility.
However, one particular area of human enhancement
was not addressed in the book, mainly because it only
became a topic of discussion very recently and I didn’t
immediately realise its significance. It is what Julian
Savulescu and Anders Sandberg call the “neuroenhance-
ment of love and marriage” (see for instance Savulescu and
Sandberg 2008, Liao 2011, Earp et al. 2012). The basic idea
is that we should use neuroenhancers to control our love-
related emotions so that they better match our values and
preferences. Thus lust, physical attraction, attachment and
pair-bonding for instance can all be modulated, that is,
strengthened or weakened (depending on what is thought
to be better given the circumstances) by chemical stimuli.
And it is recommended (even urged as a moral obligation)
that we explore these options to enhance our love life.
Proposals such as these initially sound reasonable
enough, but they are also symptomatic of a wider ten-
dency to endorse technologies that promise to help us gain
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0002 vii
viii Preface
autonomy over our bodies, and especially our sexual bodies, which are
often perceived and described by proponents of radical human enhance-
ment as “messy” and detrimental to human dignity, as “meatbags” or
“deathtraps”. Yet despite this negative assessment of the flesh-and-bones
body and the concomitant commitment to the goal of discarding that
body altogether (for instance, by uploading our minds to a computer),
sexuality features remarkably often in the posthuman scenarios that
are designed to sell us the idea of the posthuman. Sex, in those visions,
will not only be infinitely more intense and infinitely more pleasurable,
but also be unhampered by negative emotions such as jealousy or by
(misplaced) moral scruples. We will be in complete control of our own
bodies, and will always perform perfectly. If no human is available, we
will have marvellous sexbots who will be able to fulfil all our desires. If
there is a danger that we lose erotic interest in our partner or our partner
in us, we can easily rekindle it by means of love pills that change the
chemistry of our brains. Likewise, if we are in danger of loving too much
and for that reason becoming too dependent, there will always be a way
to tone down our love to a healthy level that leaves our autonomy intact.
I was intrigued by all those possibilities and by the apparent eager-
ness with which they were promoted and embraced, so I wanted to have
a closer look at what was going on and, if possible, to make sense of it.
This book (which initially I intended to call “Automatic Sweethearts
for Transhumanists”) is my (admittedly rather unsystematic) attempt
to do so.
Exeter, July 2014
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0002
1
After the Singularity:
The Glorious Sex Life
of the Posthuman
Abstract: It has been predicted that in a decade or two our
computers will have become so powerful that we will finally
be able to do and be whatever we like. The posthumans
that we will have become in the wake of this event,
commonly referred to as the singularity, will not only be
super-intelligent, but also capable of experiencing pleasures
that go far beyond anything we can experience now. Yet
this emphasis on pleasure, and especially sexual pleasure,
seems to be at odds with the logocentric outlook and the
contempt for the human body that many transhumanists
embrace. What resolves the apparent conflict is an
instrumental understanding of the body and the conceptual
transformation of the sexual partner into a masturbation
device.
Keywords: hedonism; instrumentalisation; pleasure;
posthuman; singularity; transhumanism
Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman
Condition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
doi: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137393500.0003 1