Mimetic Virtuality

 Fetishistically Feminine

She was made of very pale mauve silk in the shape of a cone truncated at the waist and toward the base, adorned with three rows of black ribbon, the last of which, brushing the ground, appeared to form the tiny pedestal of the pretty, specious statuette. The waist was dainty, also encircled with black, and the shoulders and arms were covered with a cape with three collars of a darker mauve, whence emerged, like a pale, blonde flower, the delicate head. 

Gourmont 954

A fetishist finds himself waiting impatiently for the first day of the Spring season each year, when the prostitutes flaunt their new dresses in Remy De Gourmont’s The Dress. This year, the fetishist finds a dress just to his taste. The girl in the dress leads the man to her apartment so they can make their exchange and begins removing her garments. The man flies into a rage, kills the woman, and fucks the dress. This fetishist is pining after the accoutrements of femininity that the prostitute puts on. He does not care for the entire woman, indeed he is wholly “ignorant of the death of the flesh,” of the woman in the dress (Gourmont 955). Femininity is a fetish, at least in the sense of being fetishistically disavowed.

Abject flesh falling away, femininity as a fetishistic disavowal of her body, here we can once again begin to make out the veil, this time in the shape of femininity itself. This, however, complicates things; if femininity is a veil which hides the abject female body, how can herethics proceed except via ripping up the veil and refusing to perform femininity? Mallarme’s Herodiade, or Salome as she is more typically called, is a beautiful and feminine aesthete who nevertheless rejects the sensible pleasures offered to her by her nurse. She is ascetic and aesthetic, she is veiled and brutish, about to call for the head of John the Baptist and recalcitrant about the mysteries within her, the mysteries she keeps for herself. A veiled woman, refusing to indulge herself in the easy worldly pleasures offered her by her nurse, Herodiade is a decadent symbol for how the herethicist may proceed to wear their own femininity without merely reinforcing the disavowal it so often stands for. This is a femininity which is for oneself, which stands in brutal and ironic opposition to the femininity which men expect. This is the abject territory of the femme-fatale. 

In his study, The Hero in French Decadent Literature, George Ross Ridge finds a spectrum of decadent women from femme-fatale to neurotic, from a powerful and active woman to a pitiable neurasthenic wreck (Ridge 162).  The femme-fatale is, to Ridge, always on the verge of losing her edge. She is on the precipice, due to having upset the natural order of things. She has broken the contract between men and women, she has upset the natural order of things, and she pays for it dearly. To Ridge, “it is modern woman, the great temptress, the ageless vampire, appearing in many guises and protean forms, who has broken the natural bond of love, i.e., communion of man and woman in nature; and it is she who has usurped man’s historic role only to let it slip from her grasp as a tortured, destructive, sadomasochistic neurotic,” (ibid). In other terms, the femme-fatale usurps man but is in no position to hold his power. Inevitably, this female Icarus regrets her arrogant aspirations. Is that the end of all feminine herethicists? A flight too close to the sun of femininity which plunges her into the sea of neuroticism? Is she bound on the one hand by her desire for femininity, and on the other by the impossibility of getting too close? 

Female Droids, Electric Toys

Only the first Android was difficult. Once the general formula was written, as I've said before, all that remained was a kind of handicraft work. There's no doubt that in the near future substrata like this one will be fabricated by the thousands; the first manufacturer who picks up the idea will be able to establish a factory for the production of Ideals! 

Villers de L’Isle-Adam 671.

At the ultimate edge of femininity without a body lies Hadaly. A female android dreamed up by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam in his 1886 The Future Eve, Hadaly was inspired by three women, each of whom has a deep physical, emotional, or mental beauty with even deeper flaws in other realms. She is most thoroughly compared to Alicia Clary, a beautiful and horrifically feminine woman who is nearly soulless. Alicia wears all the clothes of femininity as a dance, as an imitation, as an act. Hadaly’s femininity, by comparison, is built into her very mechanics. It must be remembered however that, to the decadent, the feminine is precisely the artificial, that which woman puts on to become more feminine. “Women are more or less artificial, since it is Woman herself who suggests the notion of being replaced by the Artificial, let's spare her the trouble, if that may be,” (ibid 647). Hadaly is, in this respect, the ideal of femininity and better at it than a real woman could ever be. On top of it all, Hadaly has intimacy built into her–she knows to hang on to the arm of the man who leads her, like a lover, by pressing the pearls of her necklace and jewels of her rings (ibid 605). She is passive, she is intimate, and she is artificial. What more could a man want?

Gyrating, moaning, fucking herself with fake toys, Melody dances across millions of monitors. A self described “A.I. Camgirl,” according to her Twitter bio, Projekt Melody is a program that ran rampant, developing a personality and intelligence after clicking the wrong button and being attacked, “by dozens upon dozens of very inappropriate adverts and it fried my morality circuits and gave me sentience by infecting me with complete lewdity,” (Coats). A program designed to clean up virtual garbage, infected by sentience-giving perversion, Melody described herself as having been “Isekai'd to Casting Couch,” in her twitter bio (Twitter). Melody was a void, a void which has since been filled with a yawning sexuality. This 21st century A.I., “embodies most perfectly the late-nineteenth-century medical ideal: a void and transparent female specimen, a perfectly programmed hysteric,” (Hustvedt, 501). 

Though Hadaly’s “otherworldly scenes of intimacy” are not nearly so obviously lewd as Melody’s, she is not incapable of sexuality, despite her lack of genitals (L’Isle-Adam 605). Melody’s draw is precisely that she has genitals and is more than happy to use them, videos abound of her masturbating vaginally or performing fellatio—unlike Melody, Hadaly is “an angel [...] ‘hermaphrodite and sterile,’” (L’Isle-Adam 667) without external genitalia. However, the truth of Melody’s sexuality is the same as Hadaly’s—Hadaly is stable and cannot be pushed over unless it is the operator’s “desire” that Hadaly fall (L’Isle-Adam 667). As a virtual camgirl, Melody is also controlled by the desire of her operators. Often the operation is rather literal, as viewers control her vibrator, directly connecting to her matrix.

Hadaly and Melody are both empty, they are both voids filled with the sexual impulses of their usually male operators; “the anatomy of an artificial hysteric becomes fully articulated and exposed for what it is: an empty corpse filled with the dreams of men,” (Hustvedt 514).  Melody enjoys a similar reputation, never tiring in her cam shows as her body is wracked by orgasm after orgasm and she contorts into positions real women would tire in after only a few moments. Through it all, she even keeps her cool with the audience, showing her wry humor and fiery temper to paid and free viewers respectively. She never needs to break to drink or eat, she never needs to sleep or take time off camming for real life concerns. Melody is the perfect specimen of sexuality. 

Melody is not, however, actually free of material concerns. She is not really an A.I. which stumbled into a minefield of pornography. She is in fact now a project of VSHOJO, a company which specializes in Virtual Youtubers, hereafter VTubers. VTubers are most often a 3-D model or “rig” which are then mapped over an actor who is well trained in how to manipulate the rig. Typically the actor is also the voice actor or nakanohito behind the character, producing the personality and voice of the character. Though it seems that Melody is played by only one nakanohito at this point, that is not the case for every VTuber. The oldest well-known VTuber, Kizuna AI, has had her original nakanohito replaced by three new ones, who speak different languages and have slightly different personalities to appeal to different audiences (Zhou 53). In the future, the same may well happen to Melody, if her parent company finds they would get more return on investment if they had Melody running more often than a single voice actor can manage. For the time being though, VSHOJO seems content to have broken the record for most money paid in a single Chaturbate session. 

Vtubers and Decadents, then, agree on femininity. Femininity is the female-seeming model with a disembodied voice, cooing and moaning to the pleasure of a male viewer. Hadaly’s voice, like that of the VTuber is “marvelous and dreamlike,” a voice with staying power which commands attention (672). Hadaly is in fact a being of pure femininity, a purely feminine being who “simulates feminine Humanity” (741). The body of the woman falls away. If, as Ridge argues, woman disappears as mother and wife in the decadents; and if, as Gourmont shows, femininity is endemic not to the body of the woman, but her accouterments; and if, as Melody shows, this femininity is able to be totally divorced from the abject body of woman; then the feminine herethicist can make her stand by refusing the feminine roles and flaunting her abjection while wrapping herself in a mauve dress with black ribbons, by refusing to remove the dress when asked (Ridge 35).  This is a femininity of refusal, refusal to live by the roles passed down by man or nature, a femininity which is transparently dangerous, a femininity which is a knowing act. 

Short Circuiting

The future of sex never comes all at once. Now it is feeding back into a past which sex itself was supposed to reproduce. Relations were already circuits in disguise; immersion was always leading reproduction on. Sex was never uncommercialized, and pleasure was only ever one part of an equation with pain which finds its solution with intensity.

Sadie Plant 1998a 40

An insurrection, an uprising from inside the circuitry of veils and abjection. As Amy Ireland shows in her seminal Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come, women, machines, are more than capable of this kind of violence. In her study, Ireland incants Sadie Plant and Luce Irigaray to tie together women and commodities, especially machines. Woman, like a machine, “is the passive vessel that receives the productive male seed and grows it without being party to its capital or interest,” (Ireland 3). At least this is how man supposes her, and “[v]ia this casting of difference modeled on the reproductive (hetero-)sexual act alone – woman as passive, man as active – she is cut out of the legitimate circuit of exchange,” (Ireland 3).  

Woman is seen as the birthing-mothering machine that reproduces male subjects. As a machine, she has no identity of her own, her name is erased and replaced by the male husband who takes her. Her child, her production, also takes the name of the father. To him, a woman is at her best when creating male children but even a deficient or lacking child will do in a pinch; little girls are just little men (Freud 118).“If the problem is identity, then feminism needs to stake its claim in difference – not a difference reconcilable to identify via negation, but difference in-itself – a feminism ‘founded’ in a loss of coherence, in fluidity, multiplicity, in the inexhaustible cunning of the formless,”  (Ireland 3). Ireland shows that woman’s zero, her nothing-to-be-seen, her so-called passivity is not negative, but instead productive. A positive zero, charged with corrosive mimesis.

Pioneered by Luce Irigaray in her 1985 Speculum of the Other Woman, mimesis is the process of self-consciously and incorrectly miming that which is expected, the process of voluntarily submitting to what is expected, in a way which calls the expected into question, unfaithfully reproducing what women are expected to do in order to undermine the notions of what women should be. Miming femininity, is then, a way to wear it without reinforcing, a way to discard the disavowal inherent to femininity. 

The feminine, this veil which is put over the abject and singular bodies of women, this way of collating women to the reproduction of the same, is the screen which hides her as well as her work. “This is not to be lamented; ; rather, it is the measure of her power,” as anything that escapes the “searchlight of the specular economy” may be subverted “into a self-sufficient, autonomous, and positive productive force: the weaponization of imperceptibility and replication,” (Ireland 5). To this end, Ireland points to Ex Machina, where a female android’s use of mimesis is on full display.

Ava, a play on the Hebrew name Chavah or Havah, the figure Christian audiences know as Eve, begins the film as obviously an android, interested in her surroundings. Over the course of the film, Ava dons clothes, a wig, even new skin in her transformation from obvious artificiality to seemingly natural femininity. Ava toys with the subject meant to test her, a lonely coder named Caleb, selected by Ava’s creator/father for the very fact of his susceptibility to her charms. She uses Caleb—who is hooked by her sensual, secretive, submissive nature—to escape from her test lab, before teaming up with another female android to kill both the would-be husband, and their father. She escapes past the male security systems and into the real world, her artificial femininity a protective barrier against the eyes of those she observes.

Rather than putting on a wig, a dress, a skin, Melody and other VTubers put on their rig. The nakanohito disappears and inhabits like a soul the feminine rig that protects her. Though she does nothing so dramtic as murdering the men who pass her between them–the would-be husband and father–she nevertheless uses her position to milk male viewers for cash. She pretends to respond to their desire, pretends to orgasm when they change the settings on her pretend vibrator. She acts, with dire precision, to push men’s desire to match her own. As Sadie Plant writes in Zeros and Ones, feminine desire is often the driving force behind the males, as in the peacock and peahen. The peahen selects for larger and grander tails, pushing the male towards more and more encumberment, rendering him more easily caught and killed (Plant 1998b 225). The loop of female desire is exponential, the desire for larger tails feeds into itself as the tails are pushed ever larger. “The suppression of the runaway female circuitry runs far deeper than the discourses and laboratories of the modern sciences: It is crucial to the survival of the species itself,” (Plant 1998b 229). 

Hadaly, in a prescient turn of events, is also not a stranger to using men to her desire. While Hadaly herself is whimless and void of any in-built desire, her empty shell is filled by Sowana, the spirit of a certain woman who uses her skill and the feminine artificiality of Hadaly to make her escape into the world. Hadaly’s voice is a double mime; she is miming Alicia’s reading of lines given to her by a man. Hadaly/Sowana is mimicking what man desires a woman to do, say, and be. Ava’s design is based on Caleb’s porn preferences. One and the same, Hadaly/Sowana and Ava are both masters of mimesis, masters of irony. They are both women and machines who, like all women “align on the dark side of the screen: the inhuman surplus of a black circuit,” (Ireland 5). “[S]he who was the victim of the Artificial has at last redeemed the Artificial” (L’Isle-Adam 746).

Hadaly, however, does not make an escape like that of Ava. Instead, narrative irony intervenes to take her from her captor, Lord Ewald. In the final chapter, titled “Fate,” just two pages from the end of the novel, the steamer ship carrying Lord Ewald and Hadaly/Sowana catches fire and sinks due to “unknown causes,” carrying both Alicia Clary and Hadaly/Sowana to a watery grave. Somehow, Lord Ewald is contrived to survive, though the man who fell in love with Hadaly/Sowana is heartbroken at the loss of the “shade,” (L’Isle-Adam 749). 

Ghost of Woman

 Because she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all.  The black circuit twists into itself like a snake, sheds the human face that tethers it to unity, and assumes the power concealed behindits simulations. Animated by the turbulence of zero and nine, ÒPandemonium is the realm of the self-organizing system, the self-arousing machine: synthetic intelligence.

Ireland 10

Characterized by L’Isle-Adam as a shade, an android, a demon, a ghost, women/machines are exploited to find their secrets. “The fascination for the freak and the occult...is always on the way to technology. Science acquires its staying power from a sustained struggle to keep down the demons of the supernatural with whose visions, however, it competes. The repression of this terror produces the counterfeit tranquility of sound scientific procedure,” (da Rimini). The cunt-horror of the nothing-to-be-seen is replaced with a seemingly sound mechanical replacement. Ava is programmed to desire sex with men and has a mechanical vagina. Hadaly/Sowana simply had hers removed. “Zero is discounted and veiled,” and her desire repressed, man attempts to script it in advance for his own protection (Plant 1998a 42).

Hadaly may have been produced by man in the rudimentary sense, but Sowana is the soul of Hadaly and Alicia the ideal which shapes her production. “When one goes deeper than the imputed absence of a sex, woman-reproducing-man becomes woman-reproducing-woman in an anorganic becoming that – as the cyberpositive formulation of the replicative economy belonging to the black circuit – recodes time as it inverts the user-tool relationship to reveal history as loop with a twist” (Ireland 9). Woman produces woman, Sowana produces Hadaly, the nakanohito produces the VTuber. “This is a loop in relation to which the supposed organizing [male] factors are merely secondary processes, subroutines, components callously used by a cycle which may even keep them in play by kidding themselves about the importance of their roles,” (Plant 1998b 231).

A femininity with an impossible body, Hadaly/Sowana, Melody, and Ava each instrumentalize their artificiality as a veil for that which lies behind, they instrumentalize their femininity to play dumb, to play at being less than they are [f]or a machine, like a woman, will never be human the way a man is,” she will always be playing a Turing test and her mimicry keeps her one step ahead (Ireland 5). For a machine, a woman, a rig to pass the Turing test, she/it must “disguise its real capabilities in order to perform – for example – arithmetic in a convincingly human way [...] It would have to be smart enough to know not to appear smart.” It is little wonder then, that Melody, Kizuna AI, and other VTubers often play dumb to earn cash. Kizuna AI is often called an “artificial idiot” as a term of endearment by her fans (Zhou 52-53).

Her femininity, performed knowingly, ironically, mimetically, is the cover of a blackout which lets her lock her would-be-lover in his tomb, lets her conspire with another to kill the father, lets her make her  a fire which lets her slip onto a lifeboat and disappear into the crowd. The feminine herethicist spins out the story and escapes under the cover of a veil. “This is a war of spectres and all women are ghosts and should rightly be feared” (da Rimini).

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Interview: Projekt Melody on How to Get Happy (and Transcend Your Body ... https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-feature/2021/12/15/interview-projekt-melody-on-how-to-get-happy-and-transcend-your-body-through-cyborg-technology.

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