Simulation in Cyberspace and Touch of the Flesh: Kissing, the Blush, the Hickey and the Caress
Several critical and constructive purposes fill this article. The broad overarching aim, vital for a balanced understanding of the relationship between cyberspace and embodiment, is to challenge what most shackles human-social research, viz., philosophical rational-dualism and scientific positivism. Secondly, it specifically spurns the alleged war between desire and technology as an abstract polarization and ideological artefact. Within the everyday lifeworld, contrariwise, flesh and metal coil together comfortably around postmodern love. Beyond sheer criticism, the article presents sketches of commonplace fleshy phenomena which go missing because of mainstream social science's narrow, prejudicial positivism. Females and males, as part of the politics of everyday romance and Eros, blush in each other's presence, kiss one another, trade hickeys and caress. Vivid narratives, generated by existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic methods, portray those sensual-sexual experiences, depict the dynamic power of cyberspace, and sketch a vignette of bionic embodiment. This article, to clarify cogently what authorizes its divergent standpoint on embodiment, also expresses its underlying deconstructive nerves: the trenchantly nuanced analyses of Nietzsche on nihilism, and Heidegger's views on death and the essence of technology. It also articulates its constructive concepts, , i.e., Merleau-Ponty's "lived body" and Levinas' "carnal intersubjectivity."
