After meeting with E, when we awoke our gils were slightly numb but we knew we were safe within our symbiotic envitronment. We extracted the great E muscles, the great dorsal nets, spreads them out like smooth sleeping dolphins, made ourselves habitable, turned ourselves into neighbourhoods for glowing microspecies of words, lines, sentences. We then slipped our scales into the post-sexual swimsuits to discover possible near futures, incited by pharmaceutical accidents. Performing pharmacopornographic politics onto our skin, us the gender pirates and gender hackers exposed:
– Spichtig 2015
Sent from my iPhone
[We're copyleft users who consider sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn't be regulated by the state or commandeered by pharmaceutical companies. When I decide to take my first dose of testosterone, I don't talk about it to anyone. As if it were a hard drug, I wait until I'm alone in my home to try it. I wait for nightfall.I take a packet out of the glass box, which I close immediately, to be sure that today, for my first time, I'll take one, and only one, dose. I've barely started, yet I'm already behaving as if I were an addict of an illegal substance. I hide, keep an eye on myself, censure myself, exercise restraint. The following evening, almost at the same time, I take a second fifty-milligram dose. On the third day, the third dose. During these days and nights, I'm writing the text that will go with Del's last book of photos. I don't speak to anyone, just write. As if writing were the only accurate witness of this process. All the others are going to betray me.]
It is my first time that I am part of the Young Girl Reading Group (YGRG) and as I am on my way to the Kunsthalle Zürich I am curious who are these girls that are so disciplined to meet every sunday to read books. I arrive a bit too late for session #101 and am welcomed with tea and peanuts by Dorota and Egle. No one else there? It’s the day after Halloween and it’s going to be an intimate evening with Chapters 4 & 5 of Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie – Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The what era? The system we are living in. The regime that is the result of ‘processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity’. Ok. Beatrice Preciado’s book is a liberation of the body from the money making biocapitalism that is producing almost invisible ‘mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul’ to make business with the invention of the subjects and its global reproduction. How to escape this kind of power structures?
[When I decide to take my first dose of testosterone, I don’t talk about it to anyone. As if it were a hard drug, I wait until I am alone in my home to try it. I wait for nightfall. I take a packet out of the glass box, which I close immediately, to be sure that today, for my first time, I’ll take one, and only one, dose.]
Preciado is writing along her first experiences with testogel – testosterone in gel form applied on the skin. It is her way to reflect the process of becoming a man. Writing as the only accurate witness of this process. Concurrent she writes about the history of technosexuality, technogender, pharmacopower, pornpower and micropolitics of gender. This combination of fiction and non-fiction opens up a door to her own private world and is at the same time a theory essay that is reflecting the business with the body.
[I decide to keep my legal identity as a woman and to take testosterone without subscribing to a sex change protocol. It’s a bit like biting the dick that’s raping you, the parmacopornographic system’s dick.]
The YGRG was reading chapter three and four of this fabulous book and after two hours they were testo junkies without taking testogel, asking the question what comes next. After the techno-body. Maybe the animal era.
– Magda Drozd
Rendezvous with E:
After meeting with E, when we awoke our gils were slightly numb but we knew we were safe within our symbiotic envitronment. We extracted the great E muscles, the great dorsal nets, spreads them out like smooth sleeping dolphins, made ourselves habitable, turned ourselves into neighbourhoods for glowing microspecies of words, lines, sentences. We then slipped our scales into the post-sexual swimsuits to discover possible near futures, incited by pharmaceutical accidents. Performing pharmacopornographic politics onto our skin, us the gender pirates and gender hackers exposed: gender is our trouble, the female trouble – The World of Heterosexuals is a Sick and Boring Life!
[lf it is true that Foucault's analysis up to this point, although not always chronologically exact, seems to have great critical acuity, it is no less true that his analysis loses intensity the closer it gets to contemporary society. Foucault neglected the emergence of a group of profound transformations of technologies of production of the body and subjectivity that progressively appeared beginning with World War II. They force us to conceptualize a third regime of subjectivization, a third system of knowledge-power that is neither sovereign nor disciplinary, neither premodern nor modern. In the postscript to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, inspired by William S. Burroughs, use the term "control society" to name this "new monster" of social organization that is a by-product of biopolitical control. Adding notions inspired by both Burroughs and Bukowski, I shall call this the "pharmacopornographic society." A politically programmed ejaculation is the currency of this new molecular-informatic control. After World War II, the somata-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." The testosterone that I use is a part of these new gelatinous technologies.]
Having grown up plant-like, in accordance to the taxonomies and stemming out of arborescent structures, our bodies got nevertheless slightly polluted with xenoE. We got hooked at an early age. We assumed and entailed an evolution or a transformation of forms, the relations of matter and form and the intervals between.
A vulnerable hyperbody is anyways composed not only of particles and molecules that circulate within, but prefaces, dedications, citations, appendices, illustrations, references, notes, diagrams and also thoughts traveling in reverse.
Our aqua-botanical environment was distinct from the purported stability of the soil. Many of us grew breasts and facial hair. Some formed a body of a fish, frog or forest that still reacted to EE2. Realising the connectedness to other sources, resources, leaks and leads, we were no longer sidelined or downplayed. Most other plants were rooted, but we grew up to be intelligent, obsessional, highly manipulative, deceitful, scheming and thoroughly determined young girls. Advocation for new forms of corruption. With just the right amount of cuteness glistening across the face. A boat under construction in freudulent waters.
[In disciplinary society, technologies of subjectivization controlled the body externally like orthoarchitectural apparatuses, but in the pharmacopornographic society, the technologies become part of the body: they dissolve into it, becoming somatechnics. As a result, the body-power relationship becomes tautological: technopolitics takes on the form of the body and is incorporated. One of the first signs of the transformation of the somato-power regime in the mid-twentieth century was the electrification, digitalization, and molecularization of these devices for the control and production of sexual difference and sexual identities.
Little by little, orthopedic-sexual and architectural disciplinary mechanisms were absorbed by lightweight, rapid-transmission microcomputing, as well as by pharmacological and audiovisual techniques. If architecture and orthopedics in the disciplinary society served as models for understanding the relation of body to power, in the pharmacopornographic society, the models for body control are microprosthetic: now, power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our immune system; silicone takes the shape of our breasts; neurotransmitters alter our perceptions and behavior; hormones produce their systemic effects on hunger, sleep, sexual arousal, aggressiveness, and the social decoding of our femininity and masculinity. We are gradually witnessing the miniaturization, internalization, and reflexive introversion (an inward coiling toward what is considered intimate, private space) of the surveillance and control mechanisms of the disciplinary sexopolitical regime. These new soft technologies of microcontrol adopt the form of the body they control and become part of it until they are inseparable and indistinguishable from it, ending up as techno-soma-subjectivities. The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control. This moment contains all the horror and exaltation of the body's political potential.]
Now the gender and sex became one and an E generation submerged in abstraction. We are mirrors of those legends surrounding Cryptids: in the ocean, we are those who combine the liquid grace of Water with the tempestuousness of a raging storm. We grow the longest hair that wraps around corals, weaves methodically like a machine through the crevices of alphabet. Performing our language and our bodies, we now display the ability to make ice-cool headed decisions and yet wield the destructive power of thunder.
Read out loud with your mouth full — a story of transgression.