Media rodeo 6: Extra! xtra! a! E!
Dune: Part Two, 2024, dir. Denis Villeneuve
https://letterboxd.com/film/dune-part-two/
I saw this at the AMC on 84th St. in a theater with reclining seats. The theater was not full but crowded for this 3:20pm matinee showing. Most Friday evening shows I checked in theaters around the city were sold out.
I’m hesitant to discuss the narrative. My thoughts have been clouded by discourse about the movie on social media that largely either critiques the movie or critiques that criticism for its supposed lack of media literacy. There’s something to say for the representational power that Dune: Part Two grants to problematic tropes, though I largely agree that the narrative form of the movie subverts and critiques those tropes (yet doesn’t representation have power worth discussing absent narrative redemption?). I hope to return to Dune: Part Two sometime soon for a more robust engagement with the narrative, but for now I’d rather explore it as a media object.
Pop cinema is back! Seeing this in theaters made me feel like I was watching a film that will have generational impacts on the level of something like Star Wars. The movie is loud, relentless in its pacing, beautiful in its construction of sci-fi worlds, and a star-studded event that nonetheless makes good use of its myriad settings, narrative strands, and wonderful actors. Dune: Part Two embraces this status as a cultural object; it begins exactly where Part One ended, but each subnarrative could also be viewed as its own contained object of analysis. Seeing this also caused me to return to others of Villeneuve’s films; works like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 reflect his mastery of producing a film in conversation with both its genre and the tropes of representation that plague its narrative undercurrents. I don’t have too many more thoughts on Dune: Part Two yet, but I left the theater thinking: Villeneuve is one of the pop directors today, Dune will be a cultural phenomenon and object worth examining for decades, and this is a movie that must be seen in theaters. Perhaps Walter Benjamin was right about the work of art in its original context—mechanical reproduction is here the condition of viewing, but a particular sort of reproduction is essential to understanding the… prophesied… impact of this film.
Where Art Belongs, 2011, Chris Kraus
https://www.bookforum.com/print/1801/chris-kraus-s-where-art-belongs-7335
Interesting… to say the least. In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus narrates a series of topics connected only by her interest. She discusses art collectives that preceded (and encouraged) gentrification in their locales, her global experiences, and meditations on medium in the contemporary. While reading, I never found myself wondering why something was included—Where Art Belongs works effectively in its ability to weave together phenomenal experience, formal criticism, and a move toward archival work such that the reader feels enmeshed in Kraus’s interests, entranced by the bourgeois lives she’s lived whether for their narrative value or theoretical importance.
I was intrigued, however, that this is included in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series. The series also includes texts like Jean Baudrillard’s “The Agony of Power,” Sayak Valencia’s “Gore Capitalism,” and Paul B. Preciado’s “Can the Monster Speak?”. What does this book have to say about sociality, about politics? Does it need to say something like that, or does this reflect my misreading of the other texts in the series? The answer, I suppose, lies in the subterranean importance of some of Kraus’s writing. In chapter 8, “Indelible Video,” she writes:
There is no longer anything singular about video. Images are everywhere. To attempt one single definition of video would be as meaningless as asking “what is conceptual art?” All art is now conceptual, defined by its stance in relation to other art and its place in the market. It would be more fruitful and interesting at this point to ask how an image transcends other images, or even more to the point: How can the market be used to do what art used to do?
If video has undergone a similar deterritorialization to conceptual art, are all images now video? Images today are first defined by their status as signifiers in circulation. Is this not video—the circulation of images? What would it mean to consider capital’s internal logic one that’s equivalent to video’s logic as an artistic medium? Perhaps it opens up possibilities of resistance; practices like datamoshing corrupt video such that frames (images) in a video escape their spatiotemporal constraints, forcing their movement or pixel information onto preceding and forthcoming frames. Here, video is haunted by the image; the indelible traces of relation overdetermine video’s signifying power. For capital, each circulation of value is haunted by its preceding and forthcoming manifestations. Perhaps resisting capital lies first in denaturalizing that serial relationship to value, resisting the interchangeability of commodities, signifiers, bodies. Then again, capital would be happy to hear this: time spent datamoshing capital is time not spent on material resistance. To Kraus’s point regarding using the market to actualize art’s lost power, the answer is that the market cannot be used in that way. Ultimately, datamoshing capital and using the market in subversive ways are but reterritorializations that sustain capital’s dominance by failing to imagine robust alternatives to its violence.
Arden Anderson and Nora Murphy, 1972, John De Andrea
available at https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta_5
This work must be seen in person to be engaged properly, but even the black-and-white image cataloging Arden Anderson and Nora Murphy steals my attention. This was exhibited at documenta 5 in 1972; curated by Harald Szeemann, documenta 5 is important in the history of international art exhibitions for its deterritorialization of the field of art objects. Szeemann included cultural objects like advertisements, performances like Joseph Beuys’ Boxing Match for Direct Democracy, and even critiques of his curatorial method in the exhibition. Here, Kassel becomes the site of a breakneck expansion of artwork, allowing even the detritus of capital to become objects worthy of analysis. (Unfortunately, his proposed pornography section was vetoed.)
John De Andrea’s Arden Anderson and Nora Murphy is similarly revelatory in its treatment of sculpture. Its pedestal is but the floor—this is artwork that belongs in our space. It borrows the photorealism that exploded in painting in the early 1960s with artists like Gerhard Richter, asking why only painting can represent the real in such frank terms. Most of all, its true site is not the museum but the psyche of its viewer; only the vitalism embedded in lived experience can animate the sculpture, giving meaning to its intertwined forms that otherwise lay meaninglessly dormant. Each of these qualities amplifies the sense of intimacy present in De Andrea’s work, inviting the viewer to project themself onto the work. And one is not meant to see themselves in the man—his face is presented for all to see, immediately rendering him transparent as Other. Instead, De Andrea compels the viewer to inhabit the symbolic space of the relatively obscured woman, prompting a reckoning with one’s attached-ness to others and the vulnerability contained in intimacy as it knocks on the door of every relational moment.
Ultimately, that’s probably not true—the figures have names, they’re modeled after real individuals, and the viewer is confronted with the radical alterity of the other before mapping themself onto the sculpture. But I can dream!
Extra!: “Transuranic Flesh,” Miriam Cahn: I As Human, 2019, Paul B. Preciado
I wrote this about Preciado’s “Transuranic Flesh” about a year ago. It reads as a hasty polemic against identity in the pharmacopornographic age. I only re-encountered it a few days ago and thought it might be worth including as context for the foundations of how I am thinking about media. I now take issue with portions such as the turn to pathological optimism, but it’s nonetheless an artifact of a past utopianism. Be warned! Never revised!
Return to Life: Self in Paul B. Preciado’s “Transuranic Flesh”
Nestled within the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw’s “MIRIAM CAHN: I AS HUMAN” is writer, curator, and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s work “Transuranic Flesh.” The essay/short story/fiction/reality depicts a world ravaged by radiation and a sort of Bataillean fantasy of hypernationalist unproductive expenditure in which humanity “wrap[s] a neutron bomb in a national flag and throw[s] it directly at the sun” (195). The consequences affect the Earth and its inhabitants for centuries to come, resulting in injury, death, violence, and perhaps most brutally, the deconstruction of the self into a mass of transuranic flesh. Yet, like everything Preciado writes, embedded in this work is a dense theoretical engagement with modes of life, living, and identity, all of which are unearthed through the melting of the individual into neon-colored masses of transuranic flesh. I argue that “Transuranic Flesh” offers a robust theoretical deconstruction of the self, elucidating the modes with which identity becomes acquired and ultimately proposing a guide to living under conditions that are always already anticipated by fabrication and fiction.
Preciado’s description of the effects of radiation reveals the ways in which the body and self are constructed.
A transuranic fuel flows from female testes. Bones disappear. The ability to speak disappears. Skin disappears. The new less-than-human flesh is exposed. It is almost liquid and acquires the color of plutonium in four degrees of oxidation: pink, green, yellow, and finally, when it mutates, phosphorescent blue. Sometimes it is possible to see the four degrees of oxidation in the same body. Then flesh becomes a screen that reflects the power of the bomb. All this is filmed and retransmitted—visible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. (Preciado 195)
First, the body falls apart. Bones disappear, removing the structure underpinning the body. Then, the ability to speak disappears, a process Lacanians might understand as a regression; here, the subject loses its status as such, regressing to a point before their initiation into the symbolic regime of language and communication. After the speaking subject has lost its structure and its claim to the realm of subjecthood, its skin falls away, nullifying the last layer separating the self from the world. We’ll return to this process, but not before we understand how it comes to be in the first place.
Elsewhere, Preciado argues that the constitution of the self and gender take place within an episteme of pharmacopornographic capitalism. The processes of capital and violence converge and work through each other to define the self, where “Gender and pharmacopornographic masculinity and femininity are artifacts that originated during industrial capitalism and would reach commercial peaks during the Cold War” (99). We endure the remnants of this system of gender classification today, but these processes aren’t permanent. Referencing modes of embodying and experiencing gender and sexuality that we tend to understand as artifacts of the past, e.g., Greek pedophilia, Preciado writes that “Some lost their potential for subjectification […] when the political technoecologies inside of which they functioned disappeared” (113). Capital, pharmaceuticals, and pornography aren’t the end of the line in terms of gender and identity, and they’re mutating and shifting even today. Pharmacopornographic capitalism weaponizes those mutations in favor of its own self-constitution. For example, the return of soldiers from World War I could’ve been a continuation of the deep homosocial bonds formed during imperial conquest, but the nuclear family remained strong, with women largely deserting the roles they had taken in the workplace and men returning to the safe confines of heterosexuality. It wasn’t until later that capital saw homosexuality as advantageous, but ‘rainbow capitalism’ and the commodification of Pride Month are common evidence of the definitive shift in capital’s organization. Why these mutations did or didn’t happen at a particular time is less important to this argument than the fact that they occurred, demonstrating that the processes of capital and violence converge to territorialize the self, identity, gender, and sexuality.
Subjectivity is tied up within this epistemology of capital and violence. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus:
As long as we are content to establish a perfect parallel between money, gold, capital, and the capitalist triangle on the one hand, and the libido, the anus, the phallus, and the family triangle on the other, we are engaging in an enjoyable pastime, but the mechanisms of money remain totally unaffected by the anal projections of those who manipulate money. (28)
This reveals the conclusion that “social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions” (28), and that, avec Preciado, the way that these processes of pharmacopornographic capitalism come to be is not purely external to the self but always already anticipated by and made possible through the self and its construction as an internal unit opposed to the external world. We become porno/pharma/desiring-machines, where the desire for a self only makes sense with the epistemological underpinnings of pharmacopornographic capitalism. The necessary question is then: What does this do to the subject? What does it mean for one’s desires to be preceded, generated, engendered, and caused by the very objects of those desires, all while the object of desire is being produced, created, and constituted by the intersection and overlapping of these processes? Anticipating their famously controversial conclusion that individuals began to desire fascism on a collective scale, Deleuze and Guattari write that “Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of such production under various conditions that we must analyze” (29). In a pharmacorpornographic world, of course desire is pornographic and the self pharmaceutically modified. Of course the self is produced by the overlapping of violence and capital – what else could be? Can we imagine identity otherwise? What remains after the necessary entanglement of social production and desiring-production as two elements that were only ever one in a self that desires its own constitution, but also a self that desires its own repression, liberation, freedom, violence, capital, and most importantly, reality. How might we understand and experience life as a pharmacopornographic fabrication?
One mode of experiencing this pharmacopornographic fantasy, which is to say fiction, which is to say fantasy, is consumption. Individuals seek out modes of expression of self and identity, often relying upon the guideposts of signifiers that bear some resemblance to or maintain some association with those identities. These signs circulate between individuals but simultaneously through individuals as well, taking form in transition. This circulation enables identity to be experienced meaningfully by establishing the collective terrain upon which it’s understood. Yet, this circulation of signs undermines itself:
Consumption of fashion actually draws on the endless revival of past cultural forms as empty signs. Fashion simulates the innocence of becoming and the cyclical process of exchange. There is fashion wherever forms are reproduced from models, and not through their own determinations. The light play of fashion replaces the heavy meanings of production. Although this is part of the system’s internal change, it is also subversive of the system. The free play of fashion renders all signs relative, rendering power arbitrary. (McLaverty-Robinson)
Writing in conversation with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and semiotics, Andy McLaverty-Robinson describes the circulation of signs that enables the progression of the fashion industry; this circulation demonstrates that the signs themselves simultaneously lack meaning as references to past models while generating meaning as signs themselves. Rick Owens’ divisive ‘Dustulator dunks’ were criticized and eventually removed from production for borrowing Nike’s ‘Air Force 1’ silhouette, but did they not disrupt, reshape, and remake that original idea? (Here, capital’s contradictions emerge: intellectual property is informatic enclosure in a time when circulation recasts enclosure as a relic of the past.) This circulation of signs is a form of consumption, especially when pharmacopornographic; capital’s fabrications can’t be engaged with in a ‘real’ manner because they were never real, because they are necessarily the tools of a pharmacopornographic fantasy. And yet, that consumption is always already tied up with the processes of production and meaning making. To return to Preciado’s description of the body’s recording, filming, replaying, and screening in the process of becoming transuranic flesh, and Baudrillard’s argument that this circulation of meaningless signs moves toward systematic implosive violence (McLaverty-Robinson), Deleuze and Guattari reveal in Anti-Oedipus that this “recording falls back on (se rabat sur) production, but the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording” (16). And yet, what does this mean for the subject? What does it mean to become a speaking subject by being initiated into the world of pharmacopornographic signifiers of identity, latching onto the meaning they might make in one’s own life? When ‘latching onto’ those signifiers is necessarily a relation of consumption, or the production of consumption, or the production of the production of consumption, or the recording that enables the production, or the production underpinning that recording that’s enabled by consumption? In short, this means that the subject is “a strange subject,” “with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs […] garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of becoming or […] of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state” (Deleuze and Guattari 16). The subject consumes, yes, and this consumption produces the subject as such. But this consumption produces the subject as more, as always already more, different, changing, and becoming because that production cannot be reduced to a simple relation of production.
We take another sip of “Transuranic Flesh” with the understanding that identity, then, is acquired; and in that acquisition, or that relation of acquisition, is the necessity of production and reproduction and relation. Facing the violence of Preciado’s radiation, we meet his fiction for a moment of action:
Less-than-human bodies run away cut wide open. Some of them introduce an arm into their vagina to prevent their organs from falling through the open hole. They escape from the necropolitical celebration of national honor. Since they have no skin, their bodies mix with the environment. They become atmosphere and sound. They soak up feelings and light. (196)
To speak about the social acquisition and production of identity necessitates this return to the production of self. The splitting of the body, which is to say the rupturing of the boundaries of the self, caused by this radiation produces new relations. The vagina becomes phallic by connecting to the arm. And of course, a return to the phallus means a return to the phallic works of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Here, the arm could be understood as an erotogenic zone which “behave[s] in every respect like a portion of the sexual apparatus […] in just the same way as do the actual genitalia under the excitations of the normal sexual processes” (169). The (abnormal) survival tactics of these less-than-human bodies necessitate the production of a phallic erotogenic zone, but, as unearthed by McLaverty-Robinson, this production is truly an uncovering of what was always already present, which is to say, avec Deleuze and Guattari, the introduction of something totally and meaningfully unprecedented. The discursive trick of the above quotation from the Three Essays lies in what was elided – Freud not only describes that erotogenic zones might act like the “actual genitalia” but that they “become the seat of new sensations and of changes in enervation” (169). “New” here may be an unintentional linguistic slip, but it reveals the relations underpinning this production of new zones and modes of relationality. The newness of these relations mimics the “actual genitalia” under the “normal sexual processes,” but these relations themselves are not abnormal; instead, they mark the induction of the child into the sexual regime as a mode of discovery. For Freud, this is a natural process of development that requires abnormal, inverted sexuality. What’s revealed is not that this sexuality is actually already normal and naturalized – Preciado’s instructions for countersexual practices that involve similar treatment of erotogenic zones in Countersexual Manifesto prove otherwise – but that all relations of sexuality are involved in the production of new modes of feeling and being. Erotogenic zones don’t act like actual genitalia as much as the penis might act like the arm or the vagina like the ear and vice versa. An inversion of Freud is at hand.
Along with this inversion of Freud’s theories of sexuality, might we understand the introduction of the arm into the vagina (Preciado 196) as something other than a sort of phallic penetration? Quoting Bini Adamczak, McKenzie Wark writes in Reverse Cowgirl: “I wish to propose to you a new term, one that has been missing for a long time: circlusion. It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective” (41). Circlusion, if we wish to understand power, inhabits the antipode of penetration, where Preciado’s less-than-human bodies experience a relation of the vagina encircling the arm rather than the arm penetrating the vagina. And yet, it remains tied to this action of penetration, “speak[ing] differently” (Wark 41) but about the same relations of sex. Circlusion is a useful discursive tool, much like our inversion of Freud, but what’s required of us is a more radical relationship to these relations; it might require stripping our analysis away from Preciado’s less-than-human bodies, understanding the arm entering the vagina as simply that rather than a relation of the phallus, of remaking sexual organs, of penetration, and/or of circlusion. The survival of these bodies is at once all, some, and none of these things, made possible by the constant production, reproduction, and transformation of relationality necessitated by the circulation of empty pharmacopornographic signifiers. To speak directly to Freud as Preciado did to the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne with Can the Monster Speak?, “Perhaps this process of transformation alone, terrible and devastating as it may seem to you, now deserves the name of psychoanalysis” (52). Unearthing the layers of production that determine the survival of Preciado’s less-than-human bodies as a meaningful relation, stripping them back, removing them, removing them, and starting once more enables us to utilize the discursive tools, the grammar generated by psychoanalysis for a transformative project of seeking a new paradigm to challenge the “epistemological violence of the binary regime” (Preciado 51).
If this iterative process of identity production, reproduction, and consumption enables both collective and personal understandings of the self, how might it enable an understanding of that which is conventionally understood to lie outside of the self – the other?
The only animals that exist are those that have survived dismemberment in slaughterhouses. They walk through an empty place without skin and without viscera, but have a very attentive look. There are less-than-human fetuses on the edge of reality. They wait for the border to open again: Once every twenty-two hours a very narrow passage opens. Some pass. None come back. There is nothing behind the border. (Preciado 196)
In the apocalyptic now-world of “Transuranic Flesh,” the remaining less-than-human animals on the irradiated side of the border lack form but maintain a “look,” or what we might understand to be a gaze. Lacking viscera requires that they lack the internal structure and organs that make up the self, and lacking skin ensures that they lack a border to seal the self away from the world. Avec Fred Moten’s In The Break, what’s generated by this stripped down, acoustic animal is a phonic substance made possible by the gaze. And yet, this substance doesn’t allow for much. The reader is left with a proliferation of additional signifiers lacking signifieds. What’s on the other side of the border? Might their passage resemble that of the psychoanalyst as proposed by Lacan? Does this bleak border world even remember Lacan? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much; the passers never return. And yet, the interstice between the stripped down violence of the here and now and the bleakness of an indeterminate space beyond the border reveals what the self cannot. Here, the “less-than-human fetuses [inhabit] the edge of reality” (196), but seemingly remaining outside of it. Lacking the organs that would allow them to engage with the world and others in a self-contained manner, these animals don’t inhabit reality (though they don’t exceed it either).
Rather, in the process of becoming otherwise, they’ve begun to meaningfully become part of the world. Prompted to produce a portrait of an individual who is in the process of becoming otherwise, Preciado’s apocalyptic “you” temporarily resists:
You say: I do not paint portraits of anyone. Have you forgotten that you lost your face? One of those days, one hundred twenty-two thousand years before the end of the Earth, you decided to make an exact pictorial translation of the decomposing reality. It is the act of erasing the face that interests you rather than the portrait. You started with your own less-than-human figure. For its excess of vitality, of masculinity, of chlorophyll, of fire.
Life finds a way. You change your mind, giving up your resistance to depicting what can’t be depicted and what will shortly decompose after your production of it. Needless to say, your painting will be tied up in that forever production/reproduction/deproduction, and, as revealed by our engagement with Baudrillard’s hyperreal, your painting will be and has always been as real as this decomposing reality. Importantly, your process starts with the self. Only by erasing the face that signifies the self in all its vitality, masculinity, chlorophyll, and fire can you begin to produce that which is other. Here, the deconstruction of the self serves as a necessary precondition for meaningful engagement with the other. This idea has been knocking on our theoretical doorstep all along; in line with Michael Hardt’s “The Power to be Affected,” if we understand our condition as one that requires negotiating how we’re affected by and affect the pharmacopornographic foundation of modern life, then, of course, every interaction with an other, another, the other, an Other deconstructs and pushes at the borders of the self. When the viscera and skin fall away, what’s left is something without borders, something in the world that might engage meaningfully with others. As Marquis Bey writes in their essay “All In,” “the ‘self’ is a construction of the validity of the ‘inside’ and the justifiability of violating those ‘outside’” (33). Enabled by a closed-off ontology of the self is exactly that – the production of borders and of violence, and the necessity of a rejection of the self as a locus of violence. Preciado pushes this argument further, demonstrating the additional necessity of rejecting not only this use of the self but the category of the self as a meaningful understanding and embodiment of identity and being itself. Countersexual Manifesto’s practices enable an individual to act as a countersexual and embody countersexual desire, but even this formulation is incorrect, as they’re necessarily collective and eschew any sense of contained individuality. Instead, we must move with a rejection of the self. The pharmacopornographic induction of empty identifying signifiers allows the construction of a self, but by living at the edge of reality, by desiring that phosphorescent blue that comes from the mutation of one’s transuranic flesh, we might seek a return to life.
If we come to understand ourselves as transuranic flesh and seek a phosphorescently blue mutation, then we must seek to be constituted as something meaningfully different than the conservative self. Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of this call for constitutions is the question of how we seek to get there, wherever there is.
I say: I want you to paint the only existing portrait of me. I want your portrait of me as a legal document opposing the government’s description of what my life was like. They will see that I did not have the sex that they believed. They will note that one of my arms was given to me and came to take the place of a penis. They will see that my hair was made of luminescent algae. They will not believe it. But you will invent it as true. You will paint that image with traces of plutonium that will last eighty million years. (Preciado)
Again, to constitute ourselves in ways counter to the pharmacopornographic binary regime that generates violence, we must actively seek subterranean methods of doing so. Those methods exist everywhere – in resistance to government stratification, in countersexuality, in modes of encompassing those sources of affect that shift and mutate one’s life like a body modification – and yet nowhere. There’s no one source of mutation, and this process is necessarily ongoing. Preciado also teaches us that this process is not a solitary one; only in the relation between the signified and signifier (where signifier refers to the one doing the signifying) might we embrace the movement toward a phosphorescently blue way of life. Contained within this imperative is the world itself: “The intensity of your blue will set the computer of the world on fire and the skin of nuclear power plants will fall revealing a woman’s belly. Utopia or death. Color or death. Painting or death.” (Preciado 198). And because this imperative calls the epistemological organization of contemporary identity, subjectivity, and society into question, also at stake is life itself. What exists then, is a choice – phosphorescent blue mutation or death.
The tactics of this mutation have already been laid out, allowing “Transuranic Flesh” to become a sort of introductory guidebook to countersexuality, to mutation, to transuranity. We must enact a sort of blurring of self and other, breaking down the borders that securitize and maintain distance between the two. We must reject the pharmacopornographic underpinnings of capital’s insistence upon identity and the violence it engenders. We must reject the simple inversion of conservative modes of thought that becomes a reactionary liberalism, instead embracing the looping, folding, repeating, differing modes of production and consumption that enable the liveability of contemporary life. We must live these fabrications as if they were real, producing our own fiction and fantasies as we move along because we know that “There is only one kind of production, the production of the real” (Deleuze and Guattari 32). Attempting to juxtapose these lived fabrications with a true reality underpinning them is a false movement of reactionary liberalism. Instead, we must understand these fabrications as real and embrace a pathological optimism that allows us to live meaningfully with and through them amidst the violence of pharmacopornographic capitalism.
I’m pathologically optimistic. […] It’s not the idea that things will be better—that, I don’t know—but the desire to transform things. Even beyond that, this is an extraordinary moment, a revolutionary time, and for a philosopher I can’t think of a better moment to be alive, to be able to participate in this. And I want to let this transformation vibrate in my thoughts, almost as if I’m becoming a receptive organ for it. I’m not interested anymore in stable institutions, like couples, families—there can be joy as much as misery there, but for me, this is not my way of life, it’s not what I have to offer, and I want to jump into the sense of chaos and change in the world, which I like.” (Preciado)
Perhaps only then may we embrace a pathologically optimistic mode of producing, reproducing, deproducing, circling, repeating, embodying, producing, mutating, producing, troubling, reproducing, rupturing, mutating—or, returning to life.