The Persistence of Hard Core Porn
In The Hedonistic Imperative, a manifesto outlining how bio-engineering and nanotechnology will eradicate suffering in all sentient life, philosopher David Pearce muses that distant generations of pain-free post-humans might be moved by “intellectual curiosity” to explore extinct experiences such as suffering and despair, describing this impulse as “the persistence of hard-core porn.” The section – and essay in general – is reminiscent of post-humanist visions of future technologies that will allow consciousness to be uploaded into computers and transcend incarnation, where the body figures as a cumbersome, ultimately pornographic excess meant to be discarded. This piece suggests a different interpretation of this “pornographic” remainder that persists in the hypothetical space of a post-human society, presenting it, not as the avoidable vestige of the past accessible to a consciousness purged of all nastiness, but as the very condition that makes consciousness possible. In an endless loop alluding to a kind of anonymous production process, pain emerges as both interruption and beginning, as the “error” that sets the (conscious) process in motion. Alluding to the Christian narrative of an incarnate and suffering god, this cyclical movement presents incarnation, not as the prison of the soul, but as the ache that undoes the claustrophobic closure of a bodiless consciousness.
