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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathPostsexual Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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desire without gender orientation or perverse cravings. [7] As Rachel Armstrong writes in «Cyborg Film Making in Great Britain»: «[c]yborg identities have much to offer. They physically demonstrate that it is possible to defeat obliteration, annihilation, or replacement by the encroachment of the dominant patriarchal, social, technological or medical pressures on the body, and interpret them as survival technologies.» [8] If one allows one's eyes to wander over the identities of the nineties, there dominates a kind of ‹polyidentity,› a queer lifestyle, a «metrosexuality,» as Marjorie Garbner [9] described it. Ambiguities, changing sexual orientations are being played with; male and female combine, in fashion as well as in the music and pop industry. Judith Butler's «Gender Trouble» [10] and Haraway's «Manifesto for Cyborgs» have to be read together in order to make out the dimensions of the socio-political shifts.

The imperative of jouissance

The disciplinary society once analyzed by Foucault has developed into a society of control. Other laws, other performance parameters, other imperatives apply here.

 

One of these new imperatives is that of enjoyment. Enjoy! You have to have fun and find pleasure in doing everything you do, and you only do what is fun and gives you pleasure. There are a whole variety of opportunities to fulfill this urge for enjoyment: from recreational and sports activities to the various media (television, cinema) with their erotic and pornographic programs and films, to submersion in cyberspace. Whereas in the case of the old media such as television and cinema «substitute enjoyment» has priority, in the case of cyberdiving something else is possibly at work, at least that is what the various cybertheory gurus suggest. Slavoj Zizek in particular made the term «substitute enjoyment» well-known. «Substitute enjoyment» is at work in the choruses of ancient Greek theater, in various burial ceremonies with wailers standing in for mourners at funerals, in situation comedies with their «canned laughter.» In all of these cases we let someone stand in for us, and we get our pleasure in this way. With reference to television, at the beginning of the nineties Zizek made the point that this consists in doing nothing, but still being involved. [11] A few years later, in «Lacan with

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