Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Digital Herpes

It's more like a disease than an education. Romanticism should infect you the way a virus infects your computer. It's the habitation of the other. The invasion of the allergen. [1]   It alters your body. Hence the necessity of the techno-prosthesis. There's no becoming Romantic without it. Pornography is exemplary here. You can't download without logging on. Blake understood the book similarly. Buy the thing and play around. It will infect you. You will suffer change. You will posit new norms for living. [2]   For the rest of your life this infection, herpes-like, will creep along your nerves--physically and digitally.

Notes

1. The great theorist of the virus and cultural replication is, of course, William Burroughs. See Nova Express (New York: Grove, 1964).

2. This prospect is Georges Canguillem's. See The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone, 1989), 200-1.

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