Thanks to the force-feedback control glove (DataGlove) and, especially, to the DataSuit, everything is ruled by lightning, and the coup de foudre of disunited lovers suddenly becomes a coup de grace. From erotic entertainment we then move on to sexual diversion and shortly to a fatal divergence – that of the reactor that set off nuclear fission.
It’s a very thin line between ecstasy and distaste for, in future, it is at the speed of electromagnetic radiation that cybernetic orgasm will occur.
In effect, if distancing brings (interactive) lovers together to the point where they manage to love those far-off as they do themselves, the gap between the wedding and the divorce will have been closed off once and for all.
By way of a provisional conclusion, let us review the early ethical reactions to this telematic mutation in sexuality. In an apostolic letter published in 1994, in honour of the International Year of the Family, Pope John Paul II declared: ‘Union and procreation cannot be artificially separated without altering the intimate truth of the conjugal act itself.’
Far from chiming in as a simple rejection of contraception or the usual repetition of the indissoluble nature of the bonds of marriage, this statement points to another major question: the question of the nature of the separating artefact. What artificial construct are we in fact talking about when even bodily union is eclipsed by a virtual telesexuality that advocates the separation of bodies and no longer just divorce?
What happens not only in the future of holy matrimony, but also to divorce, when they are not literally dissolving, not the couple, but copulation?
–Paul Virilio, Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose (New York: Verso Books, 2008), 117.
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