Annotations ¶
the raw materials of today’s production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction. The real stake of capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity, whose products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, testosterone, antacids, cortisone, techno-sperm, antibiotics, estradiol, techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs, citrate of sildenafil (Viagra), and the entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotence and total control. In these conditions, money itself becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance. Sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production. The dependent and sexual body and sex and all its semiotechnical derivations are henceforth the principal resource of post-Fordist capitalism.
Heterosexuality must be understood as a politically assisted procreation technology.
If we agree with Marx that “workforce is not actual work carried out but the simple potential or ability for work,” then it must be said that every human or animal, real or virtual, female or male body possesses this masturbatory potentiality, a potentia gaudendi, the power to produce molecular joy, and therefore also possesses productive power without being consumed and depleted in the process. Until now, we’ve been aware of the direct relationship between the pornification of the body and the level of oppression. Throughout history, the most pornified bodies have been those of non-human animals, women and children, the racialized bodies of the slave, the bodies of young workers and the homosexual body. But there is no ontological relationship between anatomy and potentia gaudendi. The credit goes to the French writer Michel Houellebecq for having understood how to build a dystopian fable about this new capacity of global capitalism, which has manufactured the megaslut and the megaletch. The new hegemonic subject is a body (often codified as male, white, and heterosexual) supplemented pharmacopornographically (by Viagra, coke, pornography) and a consumer of pauperized sexual services (often in bodies codified as female, childlike, or racialized):
“When he can, a westerner works; he often finds his work frustrating or boring, but he pretends to find it interesting: this much is obvious. At the age of fifty, weary of teaching, of math, of everything, I decided to see the world. I had just been divorced for the third time; as far as sex was concerned, I wasn’t expecting much. My first trip was to Thailand, and immediately after that I left for Madagascar. I haven’t fucked a white woman since. I’ve never even felt the desire to do so. Believe me,” he added, placing a firm hand on Lionel’s forearm, “you won’t find a white woman with a soft, submissive, supple, muscular pussy anymore. That’s all gone now.”41
Contemporary biocapitalism at the same time produces and destroys the species. Although we’re accustomed to speaking of a society of consumption, the objects of consumption are only the scintilla of a psychotoxic virtual production. We are consumers of air, dreams, identity, relation, things of the mind. This pharmacopornographic capitalism functions in reality thanks to the biomediatic management of subjectivity, through molecular control and the production of virtual audiovisual connections.
if we are still waiting for the commercialization of a vaccine for malaria (a disease that was causing five million deaths a year on the continent of Africa), it is partly because the countries that need it can’t pay for it. The same Western multinational companies that are launching costly programs for the production of Viagra or new treatments for prostate cancer would never invest in malaria. If we do not take into account calculations about pharmacopornographic profitability, it becomes obvious that erectile dysfunction and prostate cancer are not at all priorities in countries where life expectancies for human bodies stricken by tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS don’t exceed the age of fifty-five.43
We are living in a toxopornographic era. The postmodern body is becoming collectively desirable through its pharmacological management and audiovisual advancement: two sectors in which the United States holds—for the moment but, perhaps not for long—worldwide hegemony. These two forces for the creation of capital are dependent not on an economy of production, but on an economy of invention. As Philippe Pignare has pointed out, “The pharmaceutical industry is one of the economic sectors where the cost of research and development is very high, whereas the manufacturing costs are extremely low. Unlike in the automobile industry, nothing is easier than reproducing a drug and guaranteeing its chemical synthesis on a massive scale, but nothing is more difficult or more costly than inventing it.”44 In the same way, nothing costs less, materially speaking, than filming a blowjob or vaginal or anal penetration with a video camera. Drugs, like orgasms and books, are relatively easy and inexpensive to fabricate. The difficulty resides in their conception and political dissemination.45 Pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces movable ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and affects. In the fields of biotechnology and pornocommunication, there are no objects to produce; it’s a matter of inventing a subject and producing it on a global scale.
I am reading the Testogel package insert, realizing that I’m holding a manual for microfascism, at the same time as I’m worrying about the possible immediate or side effects of the molecule on my body. The laboratory assumes that the testosterone user is a “man” who isn’t producing enough androgen naturally and who, obviously, is heterosexual (the safety instructions concerning the cutaneous transfer of testosterone allude to a female partner). Does this notion of a man refer to the chromosomal (XY), genital (possessing a penis and well-differentiated testicles), or legal (the specification “Sex: M” appearing on one’s ID card) definition? If the administration of synthetic testosterone is prescribed for cases of testosterone deficiency, when and according to what criteria is it possible to affirm that a body is deficient? Does an examination of my clinical symptoms indicate a lack of testosterone? Isn’t it the case that my beard has never grown and that my clitoris does not exceed a centimeter and a half? What would the ideal size and degree of erectility of a clitoris be? And what about the political signs? How can we measure them? Be that as it may, in order to legally obtain a dose of synthetic testosterone, it is necessary to stop defining yourself as a woman. Even before the effects of the testosterone are apparent in my body, the condition for the possibility of administering the molecule to me is having renounced my female identity. An excellent political tautology. Like depressions or schizophrenia, masculinity and femininity are pharmacopornographic fictions retroactively defined in relationship to the molecule with which they are treated. The category depression does not exist without the synthetic molecule of serotonin, the same way that clinical masculinity does not exist without synthetic testosterone.
he discontinuity of history, body, power: Foucault describes the transformation of European society in the late eighteenth century from what he calls a “sovereign society” into a “disciplinary society,” which he sees as a shift away from a form of power that determines and ritualizes death toward a new form of power that technically plans life based on population, health, and the national interest. Biopouvoir (biopower) is his way of referring to this new form of productive, diffuse, sprawling power. Spilling beyond the boundaries of the legal realm and punitive sphere, it becomes a force of “somato-power” that penetrates and composes the body of the modern individual. This power no longer plays the role of a coercive law through a negative mandate but is more versatile and welcoming, taking on the form of “an art of governing life,” an overall political technology that is transformed into disciplinary architectures (prisons, barracks, schools, hospitals, etc.), scientific texts, statistical tables, demographic calculations, how-to manuals, usage guidelines, schedules for the regulation of reproduction, and public health projects. Foucault underlined the centrality of sex and of sexuality in this modern art of government. The biopower processes of the feminine body’s hysterization, children’s sexual pedagogy, the regulation of procreative conduct, and the psychiatrization of the pervert’s pleasures will be to Foucault the axes of this project that he characterized with some degree of irony as a process of sexual modernization.1
After World War II, the somato-political context of the body’s technopolitical production seems dominated by a series of new technologies of the body (biotechnology, surgery, endocrinology, genetic engineering, etc.) and representation (photography, cinema, television, internet, video games, etc.) that infiltrate and penetrate daily life like never before. These are biomolecular, digital, and broadband data-transmission technologies. This is the age of soft, featherweight, viscous, gelatinous technologies that can be injected, inhaled—“incorporated.”
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 63–108.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 136–39; see also Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
The clinical notion of gender invented by Money sees it above all as an instrument of rationalization for a living being whose visible body is only one of the parameters. The invention of gender as an organizing principle was necessary for the appearance and development of a series of pharmacopornographic techniques for the normalization and transformation of living beings—a process that includes photographing “deviants,” cellular diagnosis, hormonal analysis and therapy, chromosomal readings, and transsexual and intersexual surgery.
If the concept of gender has introduced a rift, the precise reason is that it represents the first self-conscious moment within the epistemology of sexual difference. From this point on, there is no going back; Money is to the history of sexuality what Hegel is to the history of philosophy and Einstein to the conception of space-time. It is the beginning of the end, the explosion of sex-nature, nature-history, time and space as linearity and extension. With the notion of gender, the medical discourse is unveiling its arbitrary foundations and its constructivist character, and at the same time opening the way for new forms of resistance and political action. When I bring up the idea of a rift introduced by the notion of gender, I’m not claiming to be referring to the passage from one political paradigm to a radically distinct other, or to an epistemological rupture that will give rise to a form of radical discontinuity. Rather, I’m referring to a superimposition of strata in which different techniques of producing and managing life are interlacing and overlapping. The pharmacopornographic body is not passive living matter but a techno-organic interface, a technoliving system segmented and territorialized by different (textual, data-processing, biochemical) political technologies.
Let us examine, for example, the displacement of production of body hair from the disciplinary sex regime to the gender pharmacopornographic regime. In the sexodisciplinary system of the nineteenth century, the “bearded lady” was considered to be a monstrous abnormality, and her body was becoming visible within the spectacularized framework of circuses and freak shows. In the pharmacopornographic regime, “hirsutism” has become a clinical condition, making women potential clients of the medical system and consumers of manufactured molecules (specifically, Androcur, which is administered to neutralize testosterone production, but also insulin regulators), the purpose of which is not hormonal, but political, normalization. After 1961, hirsutism was measured by the Ferriman-Gallwey scale, which examines nineteen body areas (from sideburns to toes) to assess normal hair growth.21 The Ferriman-Gallwey score establishes a correlation between gender, ethnicity, and hair; for example, in a Caucasian woman a score of eight is regarded as indicative of androgen excess whereas in East Asian and Native American women a much lower score reveals hirsutism. According to the same clinical method, Ashkenazi Jews and Hispanic women are “high-risk ethnic groups.”22 Hirsutism becomes here a method to clinically assess race as much as gender. Biopolitical loop: femininity-body-hair-visibility, circushirsutism-Androcur-race-cosmetic-treatment-invisibility-femininity. Different “techniques of the body”23 and visual frameworks produce different somato-political living fictions: formerly exhibited in the circus, the racialized pharmacopornographic hirsute body becomes the object of the plastic surgery clinic and the beauty salon and their techniques of hormonal regulation and electrolysis.
In the changing definitions of gender, there is no succession of models (sovereign, disciplinary, and pharmacopornographic) about to be supplanted historically by others, or any ruptures or radical discontinuities, but rather an interconnected simultaneity, a transversal effect of multiple somato-political models that compose and implement subjectivity according to various intensities, different indexes of penetration, and different degrees of efficiency.
If this is not the case, then how to explain the fact that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, rhinoplasty is considered plastic surgery whereas vaginoplasty (the surgical construction of a vagina) and phalloplasty (the surgical construction of a penis) are considered sex change operations?24 One could say that two clearly distinct regimes of power-knowledge traverse the body and that they construct the nose and the genitals according to different somato-political technologies. Whereas the nose is regulated by a pharmacopornographic power in which an organ is considered to be private property and merchandise, the genitals are still imprisoned in a premodern, sovereign, and nearly theocratic power regime that considers them to be the property of the state and dependent on unchanging transcendental law. But in the pharmacopornographic society, a conflicting multiplicity of power-knowledge regimes is operating simultaneously on different organs, tearing the body apart. We are not bodies without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered under the same skin. Those who survive the mutation that is happening will see their bodies moving into a new semiotechnical system and will witness the proliferation of new organs; in other words, they’ll cease to be the bodies that they were before.
We could call the “programming of gender” a psychopolitical neoliberal modeling of subjectivity that potentiates the production of subjects that think of themselves and behave like individual bodies, aware of themselves as private organic spaces and biological properties with fixed identities of gender and sexuality. The prevailing programming of gender operates with the following premise: an individual = a healthy body = a sex = a gender = a sexuality = a private property. But constructing gender, as Butler has argued, always amounts to taking the risk of dismantling it. Producing gender implies a collection of strategies of naturalization/denaturalization and identification/disidentification. Drag king devices and hormonal self-experimentation are only two of these derailment strategies.
Within the pharmacopornographic regime, gender is constructed in industrial networks of biopolitical materialization; it is reproduced and reinforced socially by its transformation into entertainment, moving images, digital data, pharmacological molecules, cybercodes. Pharmacopornographic female or male gender exists before a public audience, as a somato-discursive construction of a collective nature, facing a scientific community or a network. Technogender is a public, scientific, community network biocode.
Ocytocin, serotonin, codeine, cortisone, the estrogens, omeprazole, testosterone, and so on, correspond to the group of molecules currently available for the manufacturing of subjectivity and its affects. We are technobiopolitically equipped to screw, reproduce the National Body, and consume. We live under the control of molecular technologies, hormonal straitjackets intended to maintain biopower: hyperestrogened bodies–rape–testosterone–love–pregnancy–sex drives–abjection–ejaculation. And the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our pornogore subjectivity.
The objective of these pharmacopornographic technologies is the production of a living political prosthesis: a body that is compliant enough to put its potentia gaudendi, its total and abstract capacity for creating pleasure, at the service of the production of capital and the reproduction of the species. Outside such somato-political ecology of “sperm and egg carriers,” there are neither men nor women, just as there is neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality, neither ableness nor disability.
Some semiotechnical codes of white heterosexual femininity belonging to the postwar pharmacopornographic political ecology:
Little Women, a mother’s courage, the Pill, the hyperloaded cocktail of estrogens and progesterone, the honor of virgins, Sleeping Beauty, bulimia, the desire for a child, the shame of deflowering, The Little Mermaid, silence in the face of rape, Cinderella, the ultimate immorality of abortion, cakes and cookies, knowing how to give a good blowjob, bromazepam, the shame about not having done it yet, Gone with the Wind, saying no when you want to say yes, not leaving home, having small hands, Audrey Hepburn’s ballet shoes, codeine, taking care of your hair, fashion, saying yes when you want to say no, anorexia, knowing in secret that the one you’re really attracted to is your best friend, fear of growing old, the need to be on a diet constantly, the beauty imperative, kleptomania, compassion, cooking, the desperate sensuality of Marilyn Monroe, the manicure, not making any noise when you walk, not making any noise when you eat, not making any noise, the immaculate and carcinogenic cotton of Tampax, the certainty that maternity is a natural bond, not knowing how to cry, not knowing how to fight, not knowing how to kill, not knowing much or knowing a lot but not being able to say it, knowing how to wait, the subdued elegance of Lady Di, Prozac, fear of being a bitch in heat, Valium, the necessity of the G-string, knowing how to restrain yourself, letting yourself be fucked in the ass when it’s necessary, being resigned, accurate waxing of the pubes, depression, thirst, little lavender balls that smell good, the smile, the living mummification of the smooth face of youth, love before sex, breast cancer, being a kept woman, being left by your husband for a younger woman . . .
Some semiotechnical codes of white heterosexual masculinity belonging to the postwar pharmacopornographic political ecology:
James Bond, soccer, wearing pants, knowing how to raise your voice, Platoon, knowing how to kill, knowing how to smash somebody’s face, mass media, stomach ulcers, the precariousness of paternity as a natural bond, overalls, sweat, war (including the television version), Bruce Willis, Operation Desert Storm, speed, terrorism, sex for sex’s sake, getting hard like Ron Jeremy, knowing how to drink, earning money, Rocky, Prilosec, the city, bars, hookers, boxing, the garage, the shame of not getting hard like Ron Jeremy, Viagra, prostate cancer, broken noses, philosophy, gastronomy, Scarface, having dirty hands, Bruce Lee, paying alimony to your ex-wife, conjugal violence, horror films, porn, gambling, bets, the government, the state, the corporation, cold cuts, hunting and fishing, boots, the tie, the three-day growth of beard, alcohol, coronaries, balding, the Grand Prix, journey to the Moon, getting plastered, hanging yourself, big watches, callused hands, keeping your anus squeezed shut, camaraderie, bursts of laughter, intelligence, encyclopedic knowledge, sexual obsessions, Don Juanism, misogyny, being a skinhead, serial killers, heavy metal, leaving your wife for a younger woman, fear of getting fucked in the ass, not seeing your children after the divorce, the desire to get fucked in the ass . . .
For a long time I believed that only people like me were really in deep shit. Because we aren’t and will never be Little Women or James Bond heroes. Now I know that shit concerns all of us, especially Little Women and James Bond heroes.
White heterosexual femininity is, above all, an economic function referring to a specific position within biopolitical relationships of production and exchange, and based on the transformation of sex work, the work of pregnancy, body care, and other unpaid activity within industrial capitalism.25 This sexualized economy functions through what Judith Butler has called performative coercion:26 by means of semiotechnical, linguistic, and corporal processes of regulated repetitions imposed by cultural conventions. It’s impossible to imagine the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism without the slave trade, colonial expropriation, and the institutionalization of the heterosexual dispositif as a mode of transformation in surplus value of unpaid sexual services historically performed by women. It is reasonable to posit an unpaid debt for sex work that heterosexual men historically contracted with regard to women, in the same way that Western countries should be, according to Franz Fanon, forced to reimburse a colonial debt to colonized peoples.27 If interest were applied to the debt for sexual services and colonial plundering, all women and colonized peoples on the planet would receive an annuity that would allow them to spend the rest of their lives without working.
trans” gender is neither better nor more political than “cis-” gender. It comes down to saying that, in ontopolitical terms, there are only technogenders. Photographic, biotechnological, surgical, pharmacological, cinematographic, or cybernetic techniques come to construct the materiality of the sexes performatively. Some transsexuals claim to have been born “imprisoned in the body of the opposite sex” and say that the technical mechanisms placed at their disposal by contemporary medicine are only a way of revealing their true, authentic sex. Others, like Kate Bornstein, Del LaGrace Volcano, or Susan Stryker,30 affirm their status as gender queers, or gender deviants, and refuse any summons as man or woman, declaring them to be impositions of the norm. Del LaGrace Volcano puts it this way:
As a gender variant visual artist I access “technologies of gender” in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their “ambiguous” bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at “normalization.”31
The unique pleasure of writing in English, French, Spanish, of wandering from one language to another like being in transit between masculinity, femininity, and transsexuality. The pleasure of multiplicity. Three artificial languages, expanding as they become entangled, fight to become or not become a single language. Blend. Finding their meaning only in this blending. Production among species. I write about what matters most to me, in a language that doesn’t belong to me. This is what Derrida called the monolingualism of the other;1 none of the languages that I am speaking belong to me, and yet there is no other way to speak, no other way to love. None of the sexes that I embody possess any ontological density, and yet there is no other way of being a body. Dispossessed from the start.
More than forty years have gone by, and one element seems to have changed: all the grotesque characteristics that Solanas attributes to men in capitalist society at mid-twentieth century seem to have spread to women today. Men and women are the bioproducts of a bifurcated sexual system with a paradoxical tendency for reproduction and self-destruction. “To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited . . . egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection, of tenderness.”
As a body—and this is the only important thing about being a subject-body, a technoliving system—I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of political imagination. I am my own guinea pig for an experiment on the effects of intentionally increasing the level of testosterone in the body of a cis-female. Instantly, the testosterone turns me into something radically different from a cis-female. Even when the changes generated by this molecule are socially imperceptible. The lab rat is becoming human. The human being is becoming a rodent. And as for me: neither testo-girl nor techno-boy. I am a port of insertion for C19H28O2. I’m both the terminal of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point through which escapes the system’s power to control. I’m the molecule and the state, and I’m the laboratory rat and the scientific subject that conducts the research; I’m the residue of a biochemical process. I am the future common artificial ancestor for the elaboration of new species in the perpetually random processes of mutation and genetic drift. I am T.
Everything we are today, our way of comprehending ourselves as free, individual, and desiring bodies, begins with printing, the Industrial Revolution, magnetism and its transformation into electricity, rapid transport, long-distance communication, and the organization of the modern city and its territorial grid. It also begins with the displacement of millions of non-white human bodies from Africa to Europe and America as labor and as a reproductive force for capitalism, but also as bodies used to produce pleasure and wealth. It also includes the commercialization of white male bodies as prostheses of wage-earning industrial work; the transformation of the white female body into a reproductive, domestic being; and the changing of the surface of the planet into a single, endless railway .
There is a Pill geography where bodies, fluids, molecules, and capital are produced and distributed. An examination of the economic and technical networks that resulted in the production of the Pill reveals that, while originating with Pincus’s project, the Pill was perfected by John Rock within the unexpected framework of experimental research on aiding procreation for sterile white Catholic families.51 Pincus’s and Rock’s research projects, although conflicting in relation to their vision of the function of white women in society, shared an understanding of nonwhite and deviant subjects as bodies whose reproductive power should be restricted by the state in order to “reduce hunger, poverty, and disease while fostering economic stability.”52 The antibaby molecule was intended to be made into a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people.”53 In the context of an emerging politicization of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities in the United States, the contraceptive molecule was thought of as an urban eugenic device and as a method of controlling nonwhite population growth, as well as the population growth of nations that had not yet entered postwar liberal capitalist economies.
Although the Pill was an effective form of birth control, the FDA rejected the first version invented by Pincus and Rock in 1951 and tested at Puerto Rico from 1956 on, because the agency’s scientific committee felt it threw doubt on the femininity of American women by suppressing their periods altogether. FDA standards led to Searle’s production of a second pill, commercialized in 1959, that was equally effective but could, unlike the first, technologically reproduce the rhythms of a natural menstrual cycle, inducing bleeding that created the illusion of a natural cycle’s taking place and somehow “mimicking the normal physiological cycle.”79 The Pill forces us to extend Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity from theatrical imitation and linguistic “performative force” to living mimicry, the technical imitation of the very materiality of the living being, the pharmacopornographic production of somatic fictions of femininity and masculinity. I will call this process biodrag, in reference to the culture and practices of drag, drag queens, and drag kings, and define it as the pharmacopornographic production of somatic fictions of femininity and masculinity. What is being represented and imitated technically by the Pill is already no longer a sartorial code or a physical style, but a biological process: the menstrual cycle.
The process of feminization as it is linked to the production, distribution, and consumption of the Pill reveals that hormones are sexopolitical fictions, technoliving metaphors that have the capacity to be swallowed and digested, absorbed and incorporated. They are pharmacopornographic artifacts that can create physical formations that become integrated with vaster political organisms such as our medico-legal institutions, the nation-states, or global networks through which capital circulates.
The monthly package of pills, with its imperative of daily administration but also the risk of forgetfulness or incorrect management, with its time-based ritual and pop design, evokes a chemical calendar in which each day is indicated by the indispensable presence of a pill. Its presentation in circular form invites the user to follow the movement of time on a dial, as if on a clock, where the alarm announces the time of ingestion.90 It functions as a device for the domestic self-surveillance of female sexuality, like a molecular, endocrinological, high-tech mandala, a book of hours, or the daily examination of conscience in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. It is a hormonal domestic microprosthesis that regulates ovulation, but it also produces the “mind” and living body of the heterosexual woman as modern sexual reproductive subject.
As pointed out by Christian Laval:
The panoptic is not only the eye of power, a kind of imaginary figure suspended over a splintered and isolated people, but also, in the reverse sense, the eye of the people that must remain constantly focused on the ruling class so that the latter won’t betray the interests of the greatest number. This double meaning of surveillance is based on the principle of the goal of generalized transparency. The model of the panoptic has the advantage of combining what is usually thought to be distinct and separate: the most intrusive social control, the free market and the most advanced democracy.95
The Pill is a miniaturized pharmacopornographic laboratory distributed within the domestic environment and destined to be placed inside the body of each consumer, thus fulfilling the demolition of imprisonment institutions predicted by Deleuze and Guattari in their epilogue to A Thousand Plateaus.98 The Pill works according to what Maurizio Lazzarato, following Deleuze and Guattari, calls the logic of “machinic enslavement.” “Machinic enslavement,” explains Lazzarato:
consists in mobilizing and modulating the pre-individual, pre-cognitive and pre-verbal components of subjectivity, causing affects, perceptions and sensations as yet un-individuated or unassigned to a subject, to function like the cogs and components in a machine. While subjection concerns social selves or global persons, those highly manipulable, molar, subjective representations, ‘machinic enslavement connects infrapersonal, infrasocial elements thanks to a molecular economy of desire which is far more difficult to maintain within stratified social relationships,’ and these are the elements that mobilize individuated subjects. Machinic enslavement is therefore not the same thing as social subjection. If the latter appeals to the molar, individuated dimension of a subjectivity, the former activates its molecular, pre-individual, pre-verbal, pre-social dimension.99
It is no longer necessary to shut up individuals within state institutions in order to subject them to biochemical, pedagogic, or penal tests, because experiments on the living human being can now be carried out at home, in the valuable enclave of the individual body, under the watchful, intimate supervision of the individual herself. And all of it happens freely, by virtue of the sexual emancipation of the controlled body. The biopolitical promise of governing free bodies that Foucault identified is here fully accomplished.
Pill leads to TikTok. The smartphone is the drug delivery device of the now
Ivalon, a derivative of polyvinyl alcohol, would be used to produce the first breast implant by subcutaneous injection. The first recipient of these rudimentary implants were Japanese female sex workers, immediately following the war, whose bodies would need to undergo a process of standardization that conformed to the heterosexual requirements of American army consumption.106
While I am following my testosterone protocol, several European governments, including the French government and the generality of Catalonia, are studying the use of “chemical castration” technologies as a penal measure (rather than a therapeutic one) for sex offenders (and especially for pedophiles). The French right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy’s intention, made public on August 21, 2007, to create a law mandating the use of chemical castration therapies for sex offenders, is one more step in the escalation of the use of biopolitical power to produce and control male sexuality. What processes of bodily transformation are really entailed by such chemical castration? When, how, and on which bodies have similar means of the pharmacological management of identity been already used? What are the underlying political fictions of masculinity and femininity connected to this legal project, and what type of subject are we trying to produce collectively?
Let us examine our pharmacopornopolitical archives: chemical castration consists in administering a cocktail more or less full of antiandrogens (cyproterone acetate, progestogen, or gonadotropin regulators), in other words, molecules that inhibit the production of testosterone. Although one of the effects of antiandrogens can be the diminishment of sexual desire (thought of in this case as excitation and erectile response), it is often not mentioned that the side effects of these drugs are a reduction in the size of the penis, the development of breasts, modification of muscle mass, and accumulation of fat in the hips. In other words, it is a process of “hormonal feminization.” We ought not be surprised to discover that substances with similar antiandrogen effects are used (voluntarily) by transsexuals who are beginning a process of feminization and are changing their gender.
If we explore the political history of the chemical castration technology, we will learn that it was used in the 1950s in the repressive treatment of male homosexuality; it was, for example, the type of therapy prescribed by English law for Alan Turing, one of the originators of modern computer science. Accused of homosexuality, grave indecency, and sexual perversion, he was compelled to submit to a program of hormonal therapy.115 One sign of a certain scientific confusion is the fact that the same drug is part of current research on a “gay bomb,” a hormonal compound that the American army intends to use to transform its enemies into homosexuals.116 While the United States needs testosterone, its enemies need hormonal feminization.
As a contraceptive method, feminism could have made masturbation obligatory, promulgated a sexual strike among heterosexual and fertile women, and advocated lesbianism en masse; made it obligatory to tie the Fallopian tubes at adolescence; and legalized abortion and made it free—if not permitting infanticide when necessary. And there is a political-fiction scenario that could have been even more promising: it was possible, from a biotechnological point of view, to require all women who are of child-bearing age to take a monthly microdose of testosterone, as both a contraceptive measure and a political method of regulating gender. Such a measure would have ended once and for all sexual differentiation and the hegemony of heterosexuality. This doesn’t mean that cis-females (on testosterone) would stop having sex with cis-males, but the act would not continue to be interpreted as purely heterosexual. It would have no reproductive goal; in addition, it would no longer be a question of an encounter between two people of opposite sexual orientations, but rather, between two people of gay orientation with the added possibility of vaginal penetration. Postwar feminism could have concerned itself with the management of the cis-male body and declared it to be of national interest: castration, male homosexuality, the obligatory use of condoms, the sealing of the seminal channel, mass administration of Androcur (to lower the production of testosterone in cis-males), and so on. Yes, there were other possibilities, but liberal feminism made a pact with the pharmacopornographic regime.
Why bother changing your mental state when you can change your sexopolitical status? Why change your mood when you can change identities? Behold the sexopolitical superiority of steroids.
We must know whether we want to change the world to experience it with the same sensorial system as the one we already possess, or whether we’d rather modify our body, the somatic filter through which it passes. Which is preferable: changing my personality and keeping my body, or changing my body and keeping my current manner of experiencing reality? A fake dilemma. Our personalities arise from this very gap between body and reality.
Power girls—orgasms—adrenaline—extravagance—social recognition—success—glucose—family acceptance—inclusion—strength—tension—camaraderie—financial ascent. In the space of six months, these are the political surplus values obtained by a cis-female who ingests testosterone.
From Canguilhem, whose words strike deeper than Sloterdijk’s: “Successes are delayed failures; failures are aborted successes. What decides the value of a form is what becomes of it. All living forms are, to use Louis Roule’s expression in Les poissons, ‘normalized monsters.’”1
TRANS OR JUNKIE?
This is how things appear, and it’s going to be necessary to face them: if I don’t accept defining myself as a transsexual, as someone with “gender dysphoria,” I must admit that I’m addicted to testosterone. As soon as a body abandons the practices that society deems masculine or feminine, it drifts gradually toward pathology. My biopolitical options are as follows: either I declare myself to be a transsexual, or I declare myself to be drugged and psychotic. Given the current state of things, it seems more prudent to me to label myself a transsexual and let the medical establishment believe that it can offer a satisfying cure for my “gender identity disorder.” In that case, I’ll have to accept having been born in a biobody with which I don’t identify (as if the body could be a material given that is there before linguistic or political action) and claim that I detest my body, my reproductive organs, and my way of getting an orgasm. I’ll have to rewrite my history, modify all the elements in it that belong under the narrative of being female. I’ll have to employ a series of extremely calculated falsehoods: I’ve always hated Barbie dolls, I’m repulsed by my breasts and my vagina, vaginal penetration makes me sick, and the only way I can have an orgasm is with a dildo. All this could be partly true and partly nonsense. In other words, I’ll have to declare myself mentally ill and conform to the criteria established by the DMS-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, of the American Psychiatric Association, in which, beginning in 1980, transsexuality was designated as a mental illness, just like exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, masochism, sadism, transvestism, voyeurism . . . just like almost everything that isn’t straight reproductive sexuality and its binary gender system.
There are not two sexes, but a multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, chromosomal, genital, sexual, and sensual configurations. There is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions.
As an underground sector, the sex industry reveals the truth about all other aspects of the communications and entertainment industry. Literature, film, television, the Internet, comics, video games, and so on want pornography, wish to produce pleasure and pornographic surplus value without having to suffer the marginalization that comes with pornographic representations, in the same way that contemporary producers of the legal pharmaceutical industry want to produce pleasure and sexual (addiction) and toxicological surplus value without suffering the marginalization and criminalization that come with doing business in illegal drugs.
The peculiarity of the dominant form of pornography is its tendency to produce the visual illusion of irruption within the purely real. Pornographic excitation is structured according to the boomerang: pleasure-in-the-desubjectification-of-the-other/pleasure-in-the-desubjectification-of-the-self: watching a subject that can’t control the force of its sexual production (potentia gaudendi) and seeing it at the very moment it renounces that force, to the benefit of an all-powerful spectator (oneself, the person who is watching) who, in turn, and through the representation, sees him- or herself desubjectified, reduced to a masturbatory response. The one watching is pleasured by his or her own process of desubjectification.
Gooning
But behind this hegemony hides the cultural industry’s wish to affect the techno-organic centers of the production of subjectivity (centers for the production of pleasure, affect, a feeling of omnipotence and comfort) with the same efficiency as pornography. The cultural industry is porn envy. Pornography isn’t simply a cultural industry like others; it’s the paradigm for all cultural industries.6 Pornography—which sexualizes production and converts the body into information—and its closed circuit of excitation-capital-frustration-excitation-capital provide in a particularly clear way a key to understanding any other type of post-Fordist cultural production.
The new global corporations produce nothing. Their only goal is the accumulation and management of patents in order to control the (re)production of bodies and pleasures. This politics of copyright, which oversees the sexualizing of production and the conversion of life into information, is what I’ve called pharmacoporn politics; its purpose is to transform your ass and mine, or rather, your desire and mine, into abstract profits. Your clitoris and my cock are subjected to the same fate as an ear of corn, given the way that multinationals employ genetic engineering to produce new transgenic strains whose seeds will be infertile. In the same way that the multinationals are currently controlling world production of corn thanks to the privatization of germoplasms, but are also busy—and this is primordial—transforming the entire planet into potential consumers of the new transgenic seeds (which are themselves infertile), the pharmacopornographic industry is striving for the exponential control and production of your desiring body. Along with “the computerization of agriculture,”8 we are witnessing a process of the conversion into information of sex and gender, through which capital is seeking to produce and possess narcotic, audiovisual, molecular, and narrative models, all of which serve as regulators of desiring subjectivity. Your sex, your desire, and your gender are the new transgenic supercorn of the pharmacopornographic industry. If you want to get hard: Viagra; if you want to avoid sexual reproduction: the Pill; if you want to get pregnant: clomiphene and human chorionic gonadotropin; if you want to change the timbre of your voice or your muscle mass: androgens; if you want to have sexual fantasies: Dorcel, Hotvideo, Playboy, and so on.
For the 2005 soccer World Cup, Angela Merkel’s German government gave the green light to the building of Artemis, a thirty-two-thousand-square-foot multimedia brothel located at three subway stations of Berlin’s Olympic stadium, accelerating at the same time the pornification of the city and the Fordization of the sex industry. The inside of the building has a decorative aesthetic that the promoters have deemed “worthy of Las Vegas.” Endowed with four floors, the complex includes a swimming pool; several saunas; two movie theaters; and a large number of rooms, enough to hold one hundred sex workers and 650 customers. The German government’s reasoning reveals the foundations of today’s pharmacopornographic capitalism: “There’s a necessity to offer the four million spectators who are coming to Berlin for the World Cup the best sexual services possible, just as they’ll be offered the best amenities in terms of hotels and restaurants, and the best of our cultural and communications services.”10
Despite the radical differences between Jenna Jameson’s and Thierry Henri’s thighs, it’s interesting to observe that, quite often, athletes from the major European teams and sex workers engaged to serve soccer fans by Artemis belong to the same worldwide economic, political, and racial stratum: they come from the classes of poor workers or the former colonies of the European nation states, and they make their way through the contemporary pharmacopornographic market (winning European residency at the same time) by selling their somatic and affective capital, their potentia gaudendi. What the German pharmacopornographic industry is making available to the spectators (both the physical and virtual kind) of the World Cup are the eroticized and sexualized bodies of athletes and sex workers. The process of the pornification of labor, as present in the industry of the spectacle as it is in the sex industry, extracts a pharmacopornographic surplus value from racialized and pauperized bodies (nonwhite bodies from places referred to as “developing countries”) that have been completely shut out of legal access to the West by any other means.
Let’s stop beating about the bush and say it: in a porn economy, there is no work that isn’t destined to cause a hard-on, to keep the global cock erect; no work that doesn’t trigger the secretion of endorphins, no work that doesn’t reinforce the feeling of omnipotence of your basic heteromacho consumer. Our current form of capitalism or production could be defined as an economy of ejaculation. The only authentic surplus value is the index of the cock’s elevation, its hardness and rigidity, the volume of its spermatic ejaculations.
All the criteria that has been recategorized under the label feminization of work, such as flexibility, total availability, high level of adaptability, vulnerability, talent for improvisation, and so on are only the basic and previously unpublished curriculum vitae of any virtuoso sex worker. The characteristics of sex work—lack of security, sale of corporal and affective services at a low price, social devaluation of the body that performs the work, exclusion from the right to residency—are becoming central in the post-Fordist paradigm of the twenty-first century. Or more precisely, they were always there, but their character is becoming structural and explicit, revealing the slimy engine of production. Today, no structure of capitalist production functions without the aid of a masturbatory device and without a certain quantity of spilled sperm (spreading from the industry of culture and spectacle to telephony and telecommunications, by way of computer programming, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, etc.). All these forms of work are becoming gradually pornified, and their casualization and apparent feminization are indicative of a new process that is making the orgasmic force of each body available to capital.
a counterintuitive way, the technologizing of sexual work is not revealed by the presence of technical tools for sexuality. It operates more subtly, by means of the biotechnological production of the cultural body of the sex worker, a process we could dub “sex-worker-becoming-cyborg,” according to Klynes and Clyne’s concept, as repoliticized by Donna J. Haraway.33 Or, to put it another way: the ideal sex worker, the high-tech cock-sucking machine, is a mouth treated with silicone that is silent and politically subaltern and belongs to an immigrant cis-female or transsexual without access to administrative identity and full citizenship. The sex machines of the third millennium are living bodies denied entrance into the political sphere, deprived of public discourse, stripped of union rights and strikes, and lacking medical care or unemployment benefits. Unlike for traditional Fordism, there is no longer any competition between machine and worker. On the contrary: the worker is becoming a sexual biomachine.
The mushroom cloud left in the sky by the atomic bomb, the photograph of the completely naked little girl running away from the Vietnam village Trang Bang in flames after a napalm attack, the sperm-filled lips of Linda Lovelace, piles of mutilated limbs in Rwanda, double penetration, the terrifying feats performed in Big Brother and the surgical scenes in Nip/Tuck, the liters of fat suctioned from the buttocks of American housewives for the cameras of Extreme Makeover, murders at the maximum-security San Quentin State Prison filmed by security cameras—all of them say more about the current state of our species than any philosophy book of the twentieth century, from Husserl to Sartre. The distinctive feature of the techno-porno-punk moment is snuff politics: rip away everything from life to the point of death and film the process, record it in writing and image, distribute it live over the Internet, make it permanently accessible in a virtual archive, an advertising medium on the global scale. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our species had literally stuck good philosophical intentions up our ass, filming the thing before marketing the images from it. The philosophy of the pharmacopornographic regime has been reduced to an enormous, dripping butt-plug camera. In such circumstances, the philosophy of such high-punk modernity can only be autotheory, autoexperimentation, auto-techno-penetration, pornology.
When surmising about the future of the planet, Donna J. Haraway encourages us to avoid two kinds of narrative traps of the metaphysical and semiotico-fascist kind. First, there is the messianic temptation: someone will come to save us—some unique religious or technical force, an all-powerful understanding that possesses all the answers needed to transform the human condition. Second, there is the apocalyptic temptation: nothing can be done, and the disappearance of the species is imminent. Haraway tells us, “We might profitably learn to doubt our fears and certainties of disasters as much as our dreams of progress. We might learn to live without the bracing discourses of salvation history.”11 The problem resides precisely in the fact that no one will come to save us and that we are still some distance from our inevitable disappearance. It will thus be necessary to think about doing something while we are on the way out, undergoing mutation or changing planets, even if this something consists in intentionally accelerating our own disappearance, mutation, or cosmic displacement. Let us be worthy of our own fall and imagine for the time left the components of a new pornopunk philosophy.
On the night of March 9, 1943, an air raid on a library in Aachen destroyed five hundred thousand books. In 1993, Croatian militia destroyed dozens of libraries (among them, those in Stolac). In 2003, American bombs and Saddam loyalists sacked and destroyed the National Library of Baghdad13 . . .
The theorico-political innovations produced during the past forty years by feminism, the black liberation movement, and queer and transgender theory do seem to be lasting acquisitions. However, in the context of global war, this collection of scholarship could be destroyed also, as fast as a microchip melting under intense heat. Before all the existing fragile archives about feminism and black, queer, and trans culture have been reduced to a state of radioactive shades, it is indispensible to transform such minority knowledge into collective experimentation, into physical practice, into ways of life and forms of cohabitation. We are no longer pleading, like our predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s, for an understanding of life and history as effects of different discursive regimes. We are pleading to use discursive productions as stakeholders in a wider process of the technical materialization of life that is occurring on the planet. A materialization that each day resembles more and more a total technical destruction of all animal, vegetable, and cultural forms of life and that will end, undoubtedly, in the annihilation of the planet and the self-extinction of most of its species. Alas, it will become a matter of finding ways to record a planetary suicide.
One of the most intense and transformative workshop techniques is experienced when you explore the city as a drag king. Walking around, getting a coffee, going down to the subway, hailing a taxi, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette leaning against a school wall . . . A new cartography of the city takes shape; for the first time you can enjoy the pleasure of the public space of the male flaneur, nonexistent for a body culturally encoded as female until that moment.
Once the drag king virus has been triggered in each participant, the hermeneutics of gender suspicion extend beyond the workshop and spread to the rest of daily life, causing modifications within social interactions. Drag king knowledge isn’t the awareness of being an imitator of masculinity surrounded by anonymous male and female bodies, businesspeople and mail carriers, mothers pushing baby carriages, young guys mainlining next to garbage cans; rather, it resides in the fact of perceiving others—all others, including oneself—for the first time, as more or less realistic biofictions of performative gender and sexual norms that are decodable as male or female. In strolling around among these anonymous bodies, all these masculinities and femininities (including one’s own) appear like caricatures that, thanks to a tacit convention, are seemingly unconscious of being so. There is no ontological difference between these embodiments of gender and mine. All of them are performative products to which different frames of cultural intelligibility confer various degrees of legitimacy. The difference is found in the degree of self-reflection, of consciousness, of compulsion, of the performative dimension of these roles. Becoming a drag king is seeing through the matrix of gender, noticing that men and women are performative and somatic fictions, convinced of their natural reality. This vision of the world makes you laugh, blows a current of buoyant air under your feet, makes you float—political ecstasy.
I don’t recognize myself. Not when I’m on T, or when I’m not on T. I’m neither more nor less myself. Contrary to the Lacanian theory of the mirror state, according to which the child’s subjectivity is formed when it recognizes itself for the first time in its specular image, political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation. It is fundamental not to recognize oneself. Derecognition, disidentification is a condition for the emergence of the political as the possibility of transforming reality. The question posed by Deleuze and Guattari in 1972 in Anti-Oedipus remains stuck in our throat: “Why do the masses desire fascism?” It’s not a question here of opposing a politics of representation to a politics of experimentation, but of becoming aware of the fact that the techniques of political representation always entail programs of the somatic production of subjectivity. I’m not opting for any direct action against representation, but for a micropolitics of disidentification, a kind of experimentation that doesn’t have faith in representation as an exteriority that will bring truth or happiness.
In order to accomplish the work of therapy for the multitudes that I have begun with these doses of testosterone and with writing, I now need only to convince you, all of you, that you are like me, and not the opposite. I am not going to claim that I’m like you, your equal, or ask you to allow me to participate in your laws or to admit me as a part of your social normality. My ambition is to convince you that you are like me. Tempted by the same chemical abuse. You have it in you: you think that you’re cis-females, but you take the Pill; or you think you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra; you’re normal, and you take Prozac or Paxil in the hope that something will free you from your problems of decreased vitality, and you’ve shot cortisone and cocaine, taken alcohol and Ritalin and codeine . . . You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is awakening in me.
Years ago, I asked a Buddhist and Jesuit teacher what philosophy was and how I’d know someday if I was capable of philosophizing. The answer is a fable: A fledgling philosopher is climbing a mountain with his aged master. They take a torturous, steep route, go along a mountain, and find themselves at the edge of a precipice. The master has promised his pupil that, before reaching the summit, he will offer him the probability of wisdom and the opportunity to embark on the task of philosophy. He has warned him that the test of endurance will be difficult. But the disciple has insisted. The ascent is arduous, and the young man begins to lose hope. They have been walking for hours and are on the point of arriving at the highest point, when suddenly, the master takes from his backpack a spinning blade and, with a flick of his hand, sends it into the air. The propeller-like blades diminish into the distant clouds, then grow larger as the object comes back in the direction of the two men, its sound intensifying, until it slices off the head of the master with one perfect cut. The blood spatters the disciple’s face as he watches, astounded. The cleanly severed head, eyes open, rolls to one side of the mountain, while the body, the arms of which are still wriggling, slides to the other side, toward the precipice. Before even having time to react, the disciple wonders if he should run to the side of the mountain to retrieve the head, or to the other, to collect the body. Sever your own head. Take some distance from your own body. Experience separation. In the West, until the current time, we had believed that philosophy was a thinking head (the presupposition of a cis-male, who, assuming he was putting his body aside, created an economic system, and whose cock was able to assume a universal position). But in the Buddhist fable, the second alternative is as valid as the first: running to the side of the body and, like Artaud, forcing the body to produce text. Two irreconcilable paths: an automatically typing head, which needs no hands to write, or a decapitated body that produces, as if by discharge, an intelligible reflection. That is the challenge and the temptation of all philosophy: running after the body or after the head. And what if the answer was in the act of the master, the act itself? If the potential for philosophy lay not in the choice between head and body, but in the lucid and intentional practice of autodecapitation? At the beginning of this book, I took testosterone (instead of providing a commentary on Hegel, Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, or Butler); I wanted to decapitate myself, cut off my head that had been molded by a program of gender, dissect part of the molecular model that resides in me. This book is the trace left by that cut.
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