Metasexual society
Last week, I attended a lecture given by a friend of mine who can perhaps best be described as a mediatective. Part semioticist, part interpreter of electronic entrails, he presented a compelling case of how the medieval symbology of the Catholic Church has been turned on its head by the iconic language of corporate advertising.
Whereas a millennia's worth of art once spoke of a vast and comprehensive order rising from the muck and mire to eventually approach the rarified heights of the Almighty God dwelling on His throne, corporations have made the profane sacred, and the sacred profane, in their never-ending campaign to seduce via shock value.
It is possible that this has happened for no reason in particular, that there is no meaning behind the great symbolic tearing down and that it is nothing more than a natural reaction to the public announcement of God's death and public burial. It is possible, but it is not probable, and anyone who rejects the Accident Theory of history is unlikely to find this lack of an explanation convincing.
It is also interesting to note that this iconic revolution has sparked little alarm in conservatives, especially considering their powerful reaction to what some have described as the "porning of America." (We shall leave for another day the fact that it is only visual porn of primary appeal to men that is so troublesome, while the emotional pornography of television and romance novels is considered less offensive, if it is considered at all.) And yet, it seems likely that the two phenomena are related when considered from a neurosomatic metaprogramming perspective.
Consider this description of a theoretical programmed sexual environment conceived by Robert Anton Wilson in 1983:
Let us call this, in memory of Hermann Hesse, the Magic Theatre. We start with what is concurrently available in high-priced brothels in the Sun Belt section of America. Massage, a first-circuit tranquilizer, has all the advantages of the opiates without being habit-forming. Our Magic Theatre, then, would include computerized body-relaxers-and-energizers better than current massage techniques.
Porn movies are available, for stimulation, in the better brothels. Our Magic Theatre would have them in 3D on all four walls, obviously. Marijuana and stimulants like cocaine or speed are available in brothels everywhere. Our Magic Theatre would have better chemical rapture-agents ...
A strange thing has happened in constructing this cyberneticized brothel. We seem to have gone beyond sex to something that might be called meta-sex.
While Wilson believed this experience was available in one's brain as the end result of neurosomatic reprogramming - the true Philosopher's Gold of the alchemists - I imagine he would still be very surprised to see the similarities between his ideal brothel and the current reality of porn-surfing Ritalin kids whose mothers are stoned on Xanax and Dr. Phil, while their fathers get off on Viagra and sympathetic adrenaline rushes.
Like the Marxists, the neurosomaticists placed their faith in a god of human progress, although in the place of awakening class consciousness they hoped to awaken the full potential of the individual human brain. Unfortunately, like the Marxists, their vision of Utopia is far more likely to turn out to be yet another dystopian second-circuit trap, albeit a particularly mind-bending one.
Now, it is certainly possible that this column is nothing more than a second-circuit response to a perceived threat to my extant fourth-circuit imprint, or perhaps my third circuit has gone somewhat haywire. But shining the light of semiotic analysis on today's dominant media culture appears to indicate that someone, somewhere, was taking Mr. Wilson's eccentric but extremely interesting ramblings very seriously indeed. What else, one asks, is rising in company with Prometheus?