Fresh Flesh
Emerging communication technologies make up a reality that has been affecting socialization and the construction of the social self. The idea of intimacy is being modified, leading to solitary social and sexual behaviors that seem to be at the service of narcissistic needs.
The weakening of the father figure, of religion, and the social and sexual conquests of women have contributed to a new way of acting by the subjects. In the age of information and globalization, the production of objects produced by technoscience reaches the subjects through the Discourses of Capitalism with the promise of the satisfaction of full pleasure. In a narcissistic society, focused on the spectacle and that excessively values consumer objects, having visibility on the stage of society is a remarkable feature of the contemporary subject, who seeks to consume the object – sometimes turning it into a subject – annulling the subjective division that is the source of his desire.
The search for sexual pleasure, which is mediated by machines, is a type of jouissance that insists on making the sexual relationship exist. The research on virtual sex and the construction of sexuality where the new modalities of pleasure cause a restlessness and, ironically, the desire to investigate if it is really a new modality, or if it is a «transvestite» pleasure.
We make a body, we acquire our own body – we pay a high price (political and affective) for it. Our bodies and sexualities are collective institutions that we inhabit and perform at the same time. The social technologies that produce and legitimize these living institutions are changing radically. Soon we will stop printing the book and start printing the flesh, thus entering the new era of digital bio-writing.
In the near future, we will be able to print our sexual organs on a 3D bioprinter. Made of bio-ink and with aggregates of undifferentiated cells from the body where the organ is to be grafted.