ReS Futurae (Nov 2017)
« KOMM, KÜSS MICH COMPUTER / KOMM, PROGRAMMIERE MICH »
Abstract
This article deals with the topic of the computer as an erotic object in contemporary German literature. The literary depiction of a desirable computer has indeed become very frequent in the second half of the 20th century, and can be found in Gert Loschütz’ novella Eine wahnsinnige Liebe (1984). Its protagonist dresses his computer up as a woman in order to experience a love story with it. F.C Delius’ Die Frau, für die ich den Computer erfand (2009) depicts the imaginary romance between Konrad Zuse, the inventor of an ancestor of the computer, and his fantasized representation of the female mathematician Ada Lovelace. Finally, the series of plays world wide web-slums, from the playwright René Pollesch (from 2001 on), presents a distopy in which humans are augmented with « body computers », and thereby enter the age of transhumanism. None of the depicted relationships is fully satisfying. In Loschütz’, the protagonist’s madness excludes him from social life, and his tendency towards anthropomorphisation (Sherry Turkle, 1990) negates the machine’s specificity ; Delius’ Zuse relies on Ada’s mediation to live his love for his machines, but this love remains imaginary and is not followed by any sexual fulfillment. Such a fulfillment happens in Pollesch’s play, but the mechanisation of sex due to the protagonists’ electronic prostheses makes it a mere disillusion, a mechanomorphic (Caporeal, 1986), dehumanised sexuality, without any erotic context.
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