DETERMINATION
FROM THE OUTSIDE:
STIGMATA,
TELEDILDONICS AND
REMOTE CYBERSEX
(BOGNA KONIOR)
In 1928, at the age of 23, Faustyna Kowalska had her first experience of stigmata:
When I experienced these sufferings for the first time /…/ I saw
a great brilliance and, issuing from the brilliance, rays which completely
enveloped me. Then suddenly, I felt a terrible pain in my hands, my
feet and my side and the thorns of the crown of thorns /…/ There is
no outward indication of these sufferings /…/
The fire of Your love burns in me.
She lived in a simulation of
sadomasochism, designed by an
ardent God who always kept his
hand on the “fast-forward” button
and called it love. Throughout her
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KOWALSKA, Faustyna, Diary of Saint
Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy
in My Soul, Misericordia Publications of
the Congregation of the Sisters of Our
Lady of Mercy, 2012, p. 795. Note that
I use the original, Polish spelling of her
name throughout the text.
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twenties—she died at thirty-three—she frequently lay immobile in
her bed, hallucinating. Once she was visited by a pack of demon dogs
that wanted her dead, threatening to tear her to pieces. She replied
that if that was her Lord’s will, let it be, because she was a bad, bad
sinner. The air around her had teeth, and she never knew when it was
going to bite. When she had a vision of a soul trapped in the fires of
the purgatory, she’d say, “Take me instead of them! Make me suffer
instead of them!” For this, she’d been made a saint later. But mercy
was a half-forgotten friend of Faustyna’s. To any honest reader of her
Diary, it should be plain that she was jealous. “Let me take on the
suffering of others so that you continue to look at me, so it is through
me that you look at anyone.” She’d never doubted that pain was a sign
of attentiveness, that it made for a special bond. She believed that
she alone was able to handle the pain of souls both alive and dead,
that God trusted in her with deliberation. When other nuns taunted
her, calling her a conceited narcissist who veiled her ego in faux
martyrdom, she noted in her diary, “My lips were sealed. I suffered
like a dove, without complaint.” A pain so splitting that by the end of
her life she could often not bear to lay her head down on a pillow was
simultaneously a sweet kind of torture, melting reality away, opening
up another one. Pain was the shadow cast by the ethereal body of her
lover, Jesus, to whom she was proudly obedient. Stigmata was the
most intimate kind of pain because it was a direct simulation of what
he had experienced, one body physically simulating another body, as
close to coitus as it could get under the circumstances. Her
relationship with Jesus was spiritual, physical, and erotic:
Suddenly, I saw the Lord Jesus near me, He graciously said
to me, All that I created for you, My spouse, and
known that all this beauty is nothing compared to
Ibid., p. 126.
what I have prepared for you in eternity.
Ibid., p. 158.
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I heard these words from the Host: I desired to rest in your hands,
not only in your heart.
Then Jesus spoke these words to me: I have been waiting to share
My suffering with you, for who can understand My suffering
better than My spouse?
Up to ninety percent of all stigmatics are women. These mystical
visions are often—although the Church speaks only sheepishly about
this—erotic, heavy with descriptions of physical ecstasy found in
pain, and expressions of an all-consuming, obsessive love for Christ,
a lover that is withheld, unavailable but that cherishes them above all
others. Faustyna’s stigmata were of the hidden type. They did not
manifest externally, but they sang candied songs of love in her veins.
She believed pain—and pleasure—should be hidden because it was
intimate; outwardly manifesting stigmata only drew attention to the
afflicted, it was like having sex in public. Instead, silent sensations
settling on her body formed invisible evidence of pain, the highest
form of erotic pleasure. Stigmata, one body channelling another. This
non-dischargeable, processual type of erotics was traceable only
from the inside of the body, but nevertheless caused by an external
determinant. Faustyna did not know when he—it—would start
dismantling her. When it did, she took pleasure in knowing that no
one could tell from simply looking at her.
*
2019. Some other Faustyna, now
sitting under bright neon sings in an
outdoor food court, waiting for her
order of spicy crab with deep-fried
garlic and rice noodles. Maybe we
found her, on a rainy day, in an arcade.
Or maybe she’d stepped out of the
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Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 348.
CARROLL, Michael,
Catholic Cults and Devotions:
A psychological Inquiry,
McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1989, pp. 80–84.
sweet-smelling no-space of a shopping mall, followed by the softs
sounds of K-pop, with a scent of cherry in her hair. In her bag, there
is a device. Or maybe it is already on her body, maybe underneath
her cotton shirt, or clipped onto her earlobe, masked as a piece of
jewellery. Wrapped around her waist, underneath her dress. Between
her legs. Perhaps she is wearing sunglasses that only gently vibrate
behind her ears. Maybe she has the remote today, but more probably,
she’s left it with someone else. She moves through her city without
cultivating any type of paranoia, although what happens to her
body is contingent on who has that remote. It might bring her pain,
or pleasure, or what lies between: stigmata. One body channelling
another. Sensations visible only from the inside, but caused by an
external determinant.
Teledildonics are technologies for remote sex. They could be wearable
silicone pieces of sensing jewellery that can transmit the sensation of
touch and breath to the wearer when activated. Svakom’s Siime is
a vibrator-camera connected to wi-fi and an app, which allows you to
take photos from the inside of your body and send them to someone
else. OhMiBod’s Lovelife Krush is a biofeedback tool that works
through Bluetooth for women who use toys for pelvic pain relief so that
they can monitor the tension in their muscles in real time on an
accompanying monitor. There is also a teledildonic Fleshlight, KIIROO
Onyx, which you can connect to KIIROO Pearl, a vibrator with
capacitive rings that allows your touch to be transmitted to the user of
the Onyx, and vice versa. Depending on the reach, you can stay home
with your toy and give your partner the remote. Or you can go outside,
knowing that they can activate the device from somewhere else.
All of these toys are mentioned
Expect the unexpected. “There is no
in NIXON, Paul, “Hell Yes!!!:
outward indication of these
Playing Away, Teledildonics and
the Future of Sex”, in: NIXON, Paul,
sensations but the fire of Your love
DüSTERHöFT, Isabel (ed.), Sex in the
burns in me,” to paraphrase Faustyna. Digital Age, Routledge, pp. 205–207.
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The term “teledildonics” first appeared in 1974 in Computer Lib/
Dream Machines by Theodore Nelson, his love letter to a personal
computer, but only rose to prominence with the work of Howard
Rheingold entitled “Teledildonics: Reach out and touch someone”.
What did these men imagine when they thought about these tools?
A lightweight full-body stocking that fits neatly and effortlessly, and
a head-mounted display that melts one reality away to reveal another.
Inside the suit, an army of intelligent sensors clinging to the body like
drops of water resting on cold skin, vibrating, caressing. On the
World Wide Web, tactile sensations travel through data links. In this
virtual reality, you have a lifelike double and you can feel the texture
of silk, wood, flesh. But this body works differently, as “there is no
reason to believe you won’t be able to map your genital effectors to
your manual sensory and have direct genital contact by shaking
hands. What will happen to social touching when nobody knows
where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?” A decade after
that, in the early 2000s, Barbara Creed points to two different
directions for cybersex: with a machine and, “what is predicted to be
at least 30 years away /…/ sex with people who are not present”.
Her idea of the latter draws on the conception of teledildonics as
a predominately visual medium. Creed, a film theorist versed in
psychoanalysis, saw in this type of
NELSON,
Computer
teledildonics the fulfillment of cinematic
Lib/Dream Machines
voyeurism. Visual fantasies would no
longer be mass produced, but custom
SKUL, Dennis
(ed.), Net.sexxx: Readings on Sex,
made. Pleasure would be based around
Pornography, and the Internet, Peter
anonymity on the web, which allowed for Land, 2004, pp. 319–324. Note
that the Rheingold essay was first
repressed desires to emerge effortlessly.
published in Mondo 2000, no. 2,
1990, pp. 51–54.
Isolated in your head-mounted display,
RHEINGOLD,
you would not be ashamed to ask for what
, p. 321.
you truly wanted. This idea of pleasure is
CREED, Barbara, Media Matrix:
based around the eyes, and sight takes
Sexing the New Reality, Allen &
Unwin, 2003, p. 123.
the centre stage. But Creed had also
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already assumed that “touch may come to assume the primacy now
accorded to the visual. Some players may construct scenarios that displace
voyeurism together as a dominant source of pleasure.”
Indeed, today’s teledildonics can be found in the fields of augmented
reality, wearable tech and robotics rather than virtual fantasies.
A team led by Daisuke Yukita in Japan, for example, is prototyping
a cute “lollipop device for remote oral interaction”, the Teletongue.
It consists of two lollipop-shaped devices—one that records licking
and the other that vibrates accordingly in the mouth of the receiver.
Perhaps dreams of immersive virtual reality are still there as
afterimages, flares in the eye of the beholder, but today, remote sex is
not about entering a separate dreamworld. Tactility still travels
through data links but does not circulate in another dimension. It
seeps through to the everyday life, augmenting our interactions with
other humans and with machines. “Virtuality” is a grater and what we
call “real life” are the holes in it, we
Ibid., p. 126.
sieve ourselves through it, one does
not exist without the other. Two
humans no longer need to be
Science and
physically in the same room to touch Engineering Ethics, no.:23/3,
2017,
pp. 801–823.
each other.
While J. G. Ballard wrote in 1984 that
with cybersex “we are getting
a whole new order of sexual
fantasies” and Claudia Springer
claimed in “The Pleasure of the
Interface” that teledildonics would
be a completely novel experience for
humanity, at least some of it echoes
Faustyna’s exploits. It wouldn’t be
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YUKITA, Daisuke, ASSILMIA,
Fathima, ANNDHINI, Nadira,
KAEWSERMWONG, Dolhathai,
“Teletongue: A Lollipop Device for
Remote Oral Interaction”, in CHEOK,
Adrian, DEVLIN, Kate, LEVY, David
(ed.), Love and Sex with Robots:
Second International Conference, LSR
2016, London, UK, December 19–20,
2016, Revised Selected Papers,
Springer, 2017, pp. 40–50.
Ballard is cited in CREED, Media
Matrix, p. 115; SPRINGER, Claudia,
“The Pleasure of the Interface”, in:
Screen, vol. 32, 1991, pp. 303–323.
without precedent to take an older form of mediation in order to
understand new media. In Zeroes and Ones, Sadie Plant does just
that, writing about weaving as a proto-cyberspace, and of femininity
itself as a primordial form of mimicry that constitutes the ontology of
modern computational simulations and artificial intelligence.
Similarly, stigmata is a model for media like teledildonics because it
allows us to think about sensations like pain and pleasure caused by
a determination from the outside. What is thinking about technology
if not thinking about an inhuman determination from the outside
acting on humans even though it was humans who initially produced
it? In the past, the determination from the outside was God, a force
beyond human affairs even if humans originally gave birth to it.
Faustyna had sex with the man in the clouds. Today, we are having
sex with the cloud and our stigmata are wireless.
*
In her experience of communion, Faustyna describes herself as
distributed, decentred, dissolved: “I felt the separation of my spirit
from my body. I felt totally immersed in God. I felt I was snatched up
by the Almighty, like a particle of dust, into unknown expanses.”
Both pain and pleasure, especially when they are induced from the
outside, dissolve subjectivity and in turn erase and assert the
boundaries of the body in relation to the inhuman determinant. This
dissolution is as sought after by some as it frightens others. “[He] fell
into the prison of his own flesh,” writes William Gibson in
Neuromancer, describing the despair of coming back to the confines
of the body after surfing the cyberspace. While this desire to let the
body melt away is often mistakenly
PLANT, Sadie, Zeroes and
called “patriarchal”—an overused
Ones: Digital Women + the New
word by now—writers who explicitly Technoculture, Fourth Estate, 1997.
wanted to advance lesbian erotics,
KOWALSKA, Diary, p. 439.
such as Monique Wittig or Jeanette
GIBSON, William,
Neuromancer, Ace, 1984, p. 6.
Winterson, also dealt with such
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technologies of dissolution. Winterson: “Myself in your skin, myself
lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate
every surgeon’s wall.” Wittig: “Each drop of your blood spurt from
your arteries striking m/y arteries vibrates through m/e.” For them,
intense desire dissolves us, disassembles our body, and this is good.
Like Faustyna, they like taking clichés such as I can’t live without you
to extremes, allowing love to disrupt basic constructions such as
agency or the self. If you follow someone to the end of the world
because you love them, well, the potential for violent transformation
is there. Something might collapse. The chain of causality shakes in
its foundation. Stigmata is one body channelling another, falling
apart, reassembling.
prefer technical erotics and await the arrival of sex robots. Machines
spread our phantom bodies over the globe, opening it up to titillation,
annihilation, de-subjectification, livestreaming us. Sexuality needs
to adapt. Paul Virilio was enraged by this kind of erotics allowed by
remote-control tools, writing that
And if your lover is in no particular place? Our bodies today are
spread over a number of apps, each limb tended to by another
wireless device, a piece of a body on the phone, a recording of
a body on a website. A disembodied voice on your lover’s smart
watch. The body needs to be pieced together like a puzzle across
all of our appliances. Stimulation comes from everywhere, each
street brimming with erotic possibilities if seen through an app that
scans the metropolis for willing partners, human or machine. Coitus
is never the only way to experience it; in fact, we are talking here
about the erotic superposition of bodies, cities, and tools. Longdistance relationships are normalised on volatile markets, where
working commitments take precedence over romantic needs and
our true loyalty is, in the end, to our own pleasure and fulfilment,
and to capital. A growing number of women in monogamous longdistance relationships live like
Cited in MOORE, Lisa,
“Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the
nuns, experiencing erotics
Fiction of Jeanette Winterson”, in:
from the outside, disembodied
GROSZ, Elizabeth, PROBYN, Elspeth
(ed.), Sexy Bodies: The Strange
and spectral rather than with
Carnalities of Feminism, Routledge,
1995, pp. 110, 111.
a flesh-and-blood partner. Some
Old-school Freudian paranoia? If coitus and ejaculation, the disposal
of possible life inside someone who has the power to actually make
it, are the only thing that allows men to get on with their lives without
obsessing about death, the withdrawing of this option calls for
a proper meltdown. In a psychoanalytic reading, men, themselves not
able to give life, are forever reduced to hysterically wanting to deposit
it into women, who can reverse death and therefore give some order
to chaos. But our bodies are becoming detached from their
reproductive function, oriented towards remote pleasures and pains
rather than procreation. This is why in Abstract Sex: Philosophy,
Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, Luciana Parisi welcomes
ways of thinking about sexuality beyond human sexual reproduction,
beyond the obsession with renewal and the fear of death, and
towards a paradigm of sexuality where humans are just one cog in the
machine of erotics. Bacteria,
VIRILIO, Paul, Open Sky,
technologies, humans, all splitting
Verso, 1997, pp. 104–105.
themselves, scattering themselves in
PARISI, Luciana, Abstract Sex:
Philosophy, Biotechnology
the information age, re-defining
and the Mutations of Desire,
erotics to mean dissolution.
Continuum, 2004.
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what was till now still “vital”, copulation, suddenly becomes optional,
turning into the practice of remote-control masturbation /…/
[Current] innovations /…/ have actually managed to interrupt coitus,
to short-circuit conjugal relations between opposite sexes, with the
aid of biocybernetic (teledildonics) accoutrements using sensoreffectors distributed over the genital organs.
“O my Creator and Lord, my entire being is Yours! Dispose of me
according to Your divine pleasure and according to Your eternal
plans.” What is our inhuman determinant today, the one that
dissolves us according to its own plans? It’s the market itself. Parisi’s
optimism around distributed sex contrasts with contemporary takes
on networked, fluid societies ordered by the inhuman logic of the
economy that has no regard for human needs (or lives). Some say this
fluidity has become an even tighter form of control than the old,
hierarchical model of God presiding over the affairs of men. Of
many ways in which we’d expected the “cyberspace” to revolutionise
sexuality, apps like Tinder augment the physical space, providing an
available lover at your fingertips. As Solange Manche writes, this is
not about freeing people from social conventions, but synchronising
them with the erotic pulse of the economy:
If my only desire, and thus my whole being [under neoliberalism], is
to be an efficient employee, I have to move with the rhythm of
capital accumulation. I have to become liquid myself if I am to
mobilize for capital. I have to always
be available and always ready to
KOWALSKA, Diary, p. 440.
hamper me [as a worker].
Alexander Galloway and Eugene
Thacker, for example, draw our
attention to how past dreams of
non-hierarchical and de-centred
spaces have become the new mode
of power, allowing it to penetrate
our lives even more completely
than before. (GALLOWAY, Alexander,
THACKER, Eugene, The Exploit: A
Theory of Networks, University of
Minnesota Press, 2007)
Capital, an inhuman determination
from the outside, although (maybe)
started by us, produces alien erotic
effects in our bodies. We could
imagine that teledildonics could
MANCHE, Solange, “Tinder,
Destroyer of Cities – When Capital
Abandons Sex”, in: Strelka Mag,
20/09/2019, https://strelkamag.
com/en/article/tinder-destroyerof-cities-when-capital-abandonssex?fbclid=IwAR1ytoqgnXpBqv4AW
x5wraU5mIBu9KQM7WoTRuZGKaTf
OuZpQO38u_sPsAU.
respond to the fluctuations of the
market. Tinder, then, allows me to
function as the perfect employee in
a liquid market. I can choose to
have sex at moments that do not
become a way to validate the fact that volatile markets often draw
couples apart, making it the new normal that we do not have “body
to body” encounters with our lovers. “What’s the problem if you
can have sex with them online?” your boss asks, annoyed when you
try to negotiate a contract that would let you move your partner to
a new place of work. In this way, long-reach teledildonics could be
to long-distance relationships what mindfulness workshops are to
precarious contracts. You can now prioritise being a good worker
without worrying about choosing a job over the relationship—in the
end, you can still enjoy wireless intimacy with your lover.
But the real potential of teledildonics is not as mediators of our
increasingly fraught relationships with other humans. Thus far, the
markets re-route human desire within detached, scattered, fluid but
still recognisable forms. We’re one leg in, one leg out. But how long
until capital truly has the remote, until what humans had started ends
up somewhere that they could not have predicted? What if these
signals could be automated or activated by a different than human
intelligence? How many times do you need to have sex with a machine
to stop caring who its operator is and start caring for the machine
itself? In 2019, another Faustyna waits for the input. Her lover is not
Jesus. Her lover is capital, making her body volatile, fluid, scattered
across remote control devices. “With Him I go to work, with Him I go
for recreation, with Him I suffer, with Him I rejoice; I live in Him and He
in me. I am never alone, because He is my constant
companion. He is present to me at every moment.”
KOWALSKA,
Diary, p. 317.
Something else is making love to all of us now.
(BOGNA KONIOR) IS A WRITER, A LECTURER IN NEW
MEDIA AND DIGITAL CULTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF AMSTERDAM, AND A POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN
INTERACTIVE MEDIA ARTS AT NYU SHANGHAI. SHE
TWEETS @BOGNAMK. MORE AT WWW.BOGNAMK.COM.
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