Chapter 13
The Nanoengineering of Desire
Luciana Parisi
Affective Relationality
It is difficult not to feel a strange familiarity when hearing about genetically
modified food, cloned mammals, and artificially grown cells and tissues. In this
biotechnological age, the evolution of the human species is bypassing sexual
exchange and the threat of the death drive.1 Yet, biotechnology seems to be
caught in the middle of a positive paradox: the more it guarantees control of the
reproduction of life the more it challenges its biological forms and functions.
The more it promises the absolute regeneration of bios, the more it exposes the
autonomy of the inorganic from the organism.
Biotech amplifies the uncertainties about the body-sex and sexual difference
at the core of evolutionary dynamics. Darwin himself suggested that sexuality
is not always compatible with the reproduction of the species and that sex’s
variations are dependent on environmental pressures (1993/1859, 117–20; 319–
74). Nevertheless, sexual reproduction and sexual difference have continued
to maintain a certain identity in biotechnologies. It has been argued that the
biotech’s apparatus of power – from IVF treatments to medical discourses –
acts to reinforce the biological determinants of gender. Biotech’s techniques of
fertilisation, such as ectogenesis, indeed seem to accelerate the desexualisation
of difference and the disembodiment of the maternal.
Yet, we may need to ask: is a body-sex the mirror of discourses? Is sex
the end-product of ideological structures? Is sexuality determined by sex? And
if the body, sex and sexuality were instead primarily thought of in terms of
movements, affects, percepts, ecologies of desire? How would we explain the
impact that biotech realises on the body-sex and sexual difference? In other
words, how can we account for the way biotech contributes to changing
the perception of sexual difference below the level of the discursive, in the
imperceptible layers of affective relations? These seem to be crucial questions
1 On the history of biotech, see Aldridge (1996); Rabinow (1996); Thacker (2000).
On the end of the death-drive, see Baudrillard (1993, 120–25); Parisi (2004, 159–62).
QUEERING THE NON/HUMAN
to ask if we want to detract sexuality from ontologies of essence and structures,
identity and signification.
In the field of science studies, there have been considerable attempts to
disentangle sexuality from ontologies of essence. In particular, the notion of
type at the core of the Aristotelian metaphysics of nature has been questioned
by scholars of evolution suggesting that the body-sex changes over time
according to environmental conditions. This crucial mobilisation of natural
science against the metaphysics of fixed essences has opened notions of
sexuality and sexual difference up to a new spatio-temporality of the body-sex
now embedded in evolutionary contingencies.2 Yet, the reattachment of sexual
difference to nature has also served as a scientific source to redetermine the
essence of sex, the normalities and the abnormalities of sexuality, a new system
of perfect correspondence between sex and gender, the natural and the cultural,
the biological and the sociological.
Many feminists in science studies have crucially shown that such a system of
correspondence is based on an ideological reification of nature as the ultimate
source of truth of human culture. Much work has then been devoted to
detaching gender from sex, to exposing the material-semiotic constructions of
sex, sexual difference and queer sexuality, and to reformulating the autonomy of
gender from its biological source. The works of feminists, such as Judith Butler,
have marked a novel approach to sexuality as performance, with an emphasis on
doing and undoing gender rather than biologically being of this or that gender.
In brief, to avoid the trap of naïve essentialism, the biologism of sexuality,
a critical tendency towards the emphasis of (semiotic) techniques of gender
performance has acquired a central voice in modes of conceptualising sexual
difference and queer sexuality.3
From this standpoint, biotechnologies, or cyborg technologies of
communication and extension of the body, have become a favourite instrument
to mobilise radical critiques against the natural. Since Donna J. Haraway’s
publication of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), such critical tendencies against
the natural have pushed the debate about sexuality, sexual difference, queer sex
towards an emphasis on the artificiality of the body, suggesting that despite
the advancement of cybernetic technologies, genetic engineering, transgenesis,
and so on in a specific historical context, it is possible to dare to say that we
2 Elisabeth Grosz, for example, has recently reread Darwinian theories of evolution
in the light of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of difference and
has argued that sexual difference at the core of all evolutions needs to be rethought as a
process of differentiation or bifurcation of one sex into two (Grosz 2004).
3 Amongst many theories taking on such a critical task in the field of queer studies,
see Sullivan (2003).
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have always been cyborgs. There has never been an ultimate essence to nature.
Rather, nature cannot be disentangled from the cultural artefacts through which
we live, experience, affect the natural. In feminist science studies, the concept
of the cyborg has helped to reformulate the specificity of a body-sex within
a set of connections – historical, cultural, racial, gender, class, and so on. The
cyborg has then become, as Haraway says, our ontology, the nesting of the
technological into the biological has only shown that the natural has always been
artificial since the technicality of the body-sex, its being embedded in situated
knowledges of production – for example, scientific, social, cultural, historical,
geographical, communal, technological, and so on – defies all attempts at
assigning a metaphysics – an abstract dimension – to the changing experience
of sexuality. More than that, the cyborg figurations of gender provide a way out
of the relativism of a structure of power where all relations are systematised in
an order of representation and ideological encoding of the body – the abstract
geometrico-mathematical grid of positions – imposed on lived experience.
Indeed, the flickering signifiers of gender in the everyday, which in turn act to
subvert such order through the unstable performances of gender, are always
ready to construct new narratives of what a body-sex is.
The centrality of such cyborg-performance visions of sex in queer theories
and theories of sexual difference is however predicated on a highly problematic
assumption. If the natural order is the site where power congeals difference within
a pregiven grid, then, it is here assumed, the place to resist repressive determination
is culture, since it is the historical lived experience of gender that triggers change,
that subverts the natural state of things, that produces new avenues for a feminist
politics of liberation. What remains assumed here is a historicised nature, a
human-centred materiality, an anti-abstract concept of sex, which separates the
concrete from the abstract, the lived from the conceived. Even when new technoscientific paradigms of science, from thermodynamics to chaos and complexity
theory and quantum mechanics have been used to radically revisit concepts of
nature in terms of a nonlinear order, the attachment to non-causal practices of
gender performances has left a metaphysics of nature behind.
Most recently, however, there has been a shift in feminist science studies from
engaging with a technoscientific reconceptualisation of nature to emphasising
the material causalities for a new vision of the body-sex. The emphasis on gender
performance in theories of sexual difference and queer sexuality has indeed left
the legacy of an inadequate reading of the body-sex as a passive container of
socio-cultural techniques of modification. By reworking the concept of
performativity in the light of technoscientific visions of materiality, some feminists
theorists, such as Karen Barad (2005/2003), have argued for a post-humanist
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conception of performativity for queer studies.4 In particular, borrowing from
the quantum mechanics theorisation of the atom by Neils Bohr, Barad sets the
scene for a performative metaphysics challenging the separateness between the
observer and the observed. The crucial re-elaboration of the notions of relation
as intra-actions between specific physical arrangements serves to rethink the
ontological inseparability of distinct agents acting together. In short, for Barad
quantum mechanics enables a reconceptualisation of causality as embedded
in specific agential practices, intra-actions and performances that defy any
attempt at splitting the material from the discursive, offering a material-physical
dynamics to the production of meaning. By reworking Butler’s performing
bodies to include nonhuman material agencies involved in the process of the
active and not just discursive materialisation of a body-sex, Barad proposes
a concept of performance beyond its assumed anthropomorphic limitations.
Thus matter is not delimited to the linguistic or discursive acts or to the humancentred vision of the organic body. The body-sex is opened up to an empirical
process of materialisation that includes the atomic, invisible microworlds of
matter.
By regiving historicity to matter, rather than imposing human history on
materiality, Barad argues, ‘reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or
things behind phenomena, but “things-in-phenomena”’ (2005/2003, 202). This
implies that specific intra-actions produce, perform and enact a changeable
being: a materiality in continual change is derived from its interactions between
its constitutive components. The discursive therefore is always already the
material intra-production of phenomena, which Barad defines as ‘agential intraactions’ constituting apparatuses – that is, particular physical arrangements
– that give meaning to certain concepts rather than others (204). These
apparatuses, resonating but not matching with the Foucauldian discursive
practices, are material reconfigurations that produce material phenomena – that
is, a dynamic relationality that is locally determined in a particular phenomenon,
through specific causal intra-actions (205). In short, Barad reworks, in the light
of quantum physics, the material-discursive practice of gender performance as
entailing specific iterative enactments – agential intra-actions – through which
matter is differentially articulated (207).
4 Barad clearly explains that the notion of performativity adapted by Judith Butler is
derived from British philosopher J.L. Austin’s study on speech acts and the relationship
between saying and doing. Butler’s notion of gender performativity indeed proposes an
engagement with gender in terms of ‘doings’ rather than being. Whilst, as Barad points out,
Butler articulates the linkage between gender performativity and the materialisation of the
sexed body, the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that performativity’s genealogy is
inherently queer. See Barad (2005, 193); Sedgwick (1993); Butler (1993; 1997).
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By assigning no priority to a given materiality or discursivity, Barad points at
how intra-actions are constraining activities that do not determine the future,
but rather remain uncertain because of the intra-activities of phenomena
– which entail human, nonhuman, cyborgian forms of agency: an enactment
or doing. By this, Barad concludes that a posthumanist materialist account of
performativity challenges the assumption that nature is passive or the endproduct of the activities of culture, defying the belief in an ultimately exterior
observational point. Rather, as elaborated in quantum theory, she suggests
that the queerness of performativity is delimited not to human interactions in
the world, but to the enacting intra-actions that are of the world (213), where
agential intra-actions – human and nonhuman – are causal enactments of the
world in its dynamics of differentiation.
Whilst Barad’s work significantly emphasises the materiality of performativity
and thus directly shifts the notion of queer sexuality and sexual difference
away from discursive apparatuses and towards a renewed physico-discursive
production of sex, exposing the relevance of technoscientific propositions to
a rethinking of nature, it may be useful here to investigate further the question
of intra-action between nature and culture, the material and the discursive, the
metaphysical and the physical. If the impact of technoscience on the ontology
of sexual difference and queer sexuality has to be taken seriously (that is,
causally) beyond its mere textual effects, then it may be helpful to develop a
philosophical concept of relationality that derives not from technoscience but
that engages in a speculative fashion with technoscientific experimentations in
matter.5 From this standpoint, the material-semiotic axis of performativity may
be rethought not merely in terms of the intra-actions between the biophysical
and discursive in so far as these still risk remaining actions added a posteriori
to relations as if these were set in motion by an external motor. Rather, this
chapter argues for an engagement with the abstract activities of relationality, the
concrete incorporeality of relations exposing ‘zones of indistinction’ (Deleuze
5 The notion of speculation here is derived from Alfred North Whitehead’s notion
of speculative philosophy, where the relation between philosophical concepts and
technoscientific functions is taken to be one of experimentation and probing into the
material capacities of nature to become culture. Speculative philosophy is not intended
to stand for an idealist vision of the future from the standpoint of a past occurrence,
but to engage with a mode of thought that evolves, via the infra-temporalities of the
past and the future, as motors of the present. Speculative philosophy includes not
the foreseeing of the future according to the progressive narrative of technoscience,
but engages with the unforeseen temporalities of the present. For Whitehead (1978),
speculative philosophy addresses what exists as part of a cosmic adventure, while
sciences address the order of nature.
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and Guattari 1994) between thinking and doing, between philosophical concepts
and technoscientific functions, which may enable us to rethink at the ontology of
queer sexuality and sexual difference in the current climate of technoscientific
experimentation, as an ontogenetic variation of material desire.
In order to do this, we may need to turn to the philosophy of the virtual-actual
relationality as developed in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and
their rearticulations of the philosophy of nature through Henri Bergson, Alfred
North Whitehead and Baruch Spinoza. It may be useful here to briefly explain
how such philosophy contributes to a materialist metaphysics of sexual difference
and queer sexuality. In the first instance, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the
body as a machinic ecology is crucial to exploring distinct layers of connectivity
that compose a body in terms of intensive degrees of affinities – that is, nonexact measures – rather than given categories. These affinities are mental, social,
technological, biological, desiring, physical, intuitive and perceptual, and operate
beneath (and across) the macroaggregations of positions such as gender, class,
race, as well as human, animal and machine. Hence a body always entails an
environment of relations between distinct milieus, which are however associated
by intensive – amodal or virtual – links. Such links are arranged in accord
with velocities of compositions – speeds and slownesses of conjunctions and
disjunctions – and affective impingement – the non-emotional yet felt activities
amongst bodies triggering transformations in the states and conditions of each
composition. There is no inherent naturalness in such ecology since this latter
envelops a primary process of relational invention. Yet such relationality entails
not simply the way different components come together to constitute a specific
body, the way in which material relationality is thought of in terms of historical
formations of a body-sex. More than this, relationality is above all machinic, entailing
the residual capacities of every intra-action between components to enter a new
composition, to mutate by virtue of a potentiality inherent in matter, connecting
actual worlds with a constellation of virtual worlds.
In short, a machinic relationality here stands for the mutual activities of
differentiation between the abstract and concrete dimensions of matter, which
are not easily reconducible to a set of intra-actions between components. Here
materiality acquires a new sense: it is a virtual materiality, the amodal relationality
that cannot be disentangled from the actual intra-action between elementary
components. Relations therefore are never relations between parts summed up
together to make the same whole. Rather machinic relationality entails a primary
invention of the new out of mismatching connections between the abstract and
concrete worlds of a body. A sense of machinic nature is then derivable from
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machinic, pointing at how the impasse
between nature and culture and the articulations of the relations between
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the mental and the physical, requires a radical rethinking of what matter is in
terms of what matter can do. This is the crucial adaptation of Spinoza’s ethicsethology of nature in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987).
From this standpoint, only a reconceptualisation of the ontology of nature
in terms of virtuality, potentiality, capacities to become, is able to abstract from
the actual intra-actions between components, a relational metaphysics that
exceeds the empirical sums of parts. A new empiricism is indeed at work here.
A radical empiricism as William James (1912) calls it, concerned not so much
with the intra-active behaviour of things in phenomena, established by sensory
measures of observation, but with the abstract dimensions of affectivity, with
the capacities of a body to experience abstraction, to prehend virtual relations.
Spinoza argues that all affective relations – any mode of encounter between
bodies – are imbued with affect, an unrealised capacity to engender an
unexpected change in the bodies affected. Affective relations therefore entail
not simply the action of a body over another action and vice versa, but their
mutual participation in the abstract capacities of affect, into a metaphysics of the
not-yet actualised, which whilst preceding and exceeding, directly accompanies,
all actual intra-action. This is the sense in which a body can only be defined in
the spatio-temporal interval between here and there, now and before, again and
anew. It is the abstract – or virtual – relationality that opens the question of
what a body-sex can do.6
This question remains crucially important to a reconceptualisation of
sexual difference and queer sexuality since it explicitly points at the autonomy
of affective relations from the biological and discursive organisations of
the body-sex. It opens the very notion of nature to an ontogenetic process,
involving above all the capacities of nature to modify itself, to engender and be
engendered by change. This may be conceived of as a historical vision of nature,
in terms of a genealogical formation through material intra-actions of distinct
components in time and space. And yet such a vision cannot account for the
nonlinear reversibility between cause and effects, where actual intra-actions are
not in royal isolation from virtual relationality. Indeed, a machinic nature entails
the viral contagion between technology and biology, the cross-pollination between
natural genes and genetically engineered genomes, the microaffections between
atoms and nanoatomic machines that expose how micro-socialities of invisible
relations act on what we perceive-experience a body-sex to be.
6 The contribution of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of sexual difference has
been extensively discussed in the field of feminist theories and science studies. The
works of Elisabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens, Sadie Plant and Rosi Braidotti in particular
have been crucial in adopting a materialist philosophy of difference in conjunction with
the philosophy of sexual difference developed by French feminist Luce Irigaray.
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This is where this chapter locates the impact of nanotech. Such impact does
not concern the atomic constitution of a body-sex, but, more importantly, the
abstract activities of atomic sexes as fully part of the material experience of
sexuality. Hence, the impact of nanotech implies no simple dematerialisation
of the body-sex, a sort of pulverisation of the specificity of sexual difference
and sexual desire into digital components, ultimate units of calculation, a
combinatorics of sex. Quite the contrary, this chapter argues that such an impact
cannot but be felt, it is a touch at a distance, a contactedness in matter prior
to sensory contact. This feeling indeed is not directly translatable via sensory
perception or mental recognition. It is not the feeling of actual phenomena – a
transparent intra-action between phenomena ready to apprehend the existence
of each other – but of an affective involvement in the virtual, the physical
resonances of the abstract capacities of matter to change, vibrating across
bodies of all sorts.
Feelings, as Whitehead points out, are vectors ‘for they feel what is there
and transform it into what is here’ (1978, 87). An impact then pushes the bodysex outside of its actual conditions to transform what is there into what is
here. An impact primarily defines the affect enveloped in the affective relations,
a transduction between distinct phases of matter. Yet affect is autonomous
from emotional and cognitive awareness (Massumi 2002, 30–31). It is primarily
intensity or vibrations passing through bodies, connecting extended parts
through abstract (virtual) dimensions. The impact of nanotech is then virtual.
It is related to the body’s capacities to be affected, its opening towards its own
imminent mutability.
Trans-sexual Nature
Before discussing the implications of the virtual impact of nanotech on the
body-sex, I wish to turn to critical discussions of sexual difference and queer
sexuality engaged with the natural sciences and biotechnologies. In particular,
I wish to draw attention to the way technoscience – from molecular biology to
reproductive technologies and xenotransplantation biotechnologies – has been
used to rethink notions of transsexuality and chimerism in nature, challenging
culturalist assumptions about the natural whilst developing a neo-materialist
engagement with sexuality. Myra Hird, in particular, clearly addresses the
problem of rethinking the natural away from the predominant critique of
science as a patriarchal tool that constructs nature from the outside. Recently,
she has written on the importance, for queer theories, of not remaining
anchored to notions of sexual authenticity in the formulation of trans-sex.
She has argued that the nonhuman living world of animals, where the natural
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order based on monogamy, fidelity, heterosexuality, two-parenthood, sexual
reproduction, is turned upside down (2006, 39–40; reprinted here), serves not
as natural justification for human transsexuality, but as a way to challenge the
naturalness of nature by highlighting the unfamiliar – non-assumable – forces
of nature itself.
Hird addresses the ‘trans’ of transsex from the standpoint of animal sex,
where homosexual behaviours, intra-species sexes, display a wide diversity of
sexuality. Whilst all plants and animals are virtually intersex – two sexes at the
same time – humans’ heterosexuality remains instead strangely anchored to the
biology of the two sexes. Hird pushes this virtuality further and importantly
points at the microworlds of bacterial genomes trading genes without any
respect for the heterologic of sexual reproduction at the core of species
boundaries. She echoes Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s claims that there
are as many sexes in nature as there are colonies of bacteria, exposing not the
authenticity but the unnatural complexity of natural sex. Hird also highlights
that to separate biology from technology – nature from culture, the authentic
from the artificial which still determines debates on queer sexuality – is a way
to overlook the ‘energetic invention and use of technology by non-human
living organisms (termite high-rise cities include “birth chambers, hatcheries,
the insect equivalent of schools, hospital”), as well as the extent to which socalled human technologies actually mimic technology already invented by other
species’ (44).
Indeed, biotechnologies, such as genetic engineering, the transfer of genetic
material amongst cells, have brought back one of the most ancient modes of
sex on the biotic strata: bacterial sex.7 Bacteria – non-nucleic cells – invented
genetic engineering three billion years ago: a viral borrowing of genes to repair
genetic material damaged by harsh atmospheric conditions.8 In a sense, bacterial
sex is the virtual biotechnology of non-nucleated cells, preceding and exceeding
the sexual reproduction of eukaryotic species: animals, plants and humans.
Similarly, biotechnologies are also virtual triggers of new bacterial superbugs.
The novelty of the relation between biotechnology and the biotic sphere is not
however the technological imitation of biology (biomemetics). Such a relation
remains open-ended: is biotechnology a vehicle for bacterial transmission or has
bacterial sex become a new technical medium? There is no easy mode of defining
such a complex, mutual modulation of nature and culture. Sexual difference and
queer sexuality are not simply to be rethought as natural or artificial but also, as
7 On bacterial sex, see Margulis and Sagan (1997, 50–70). On the relation between
bacterial sex and genetic engineering, see Parisi (2004, 147–62).
8 Bacteria are prokaryotic (without nucleic DNA) cells. Eukaryotic cells are
organised around a nucleus (Margulis and Sagan 1986, 38–53; 153–69).
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Hird suggests, in terms of an unfamiliar transsexuality that exceeds modes of
assimilating nature, where natural forces cannot simply be anthropomorphised.
Drawing on a feminist neo-materialist approach to biology,9 Hird challenges
the feminist critiques of science as the cultural analysis of materiality where
technoscience is mainly thought of as a tool of patriarchy (2002, 95). Beyond
language and discourse, a materiality of sex lays at bay. Hird proposes to give
a non-linear account of biology so as to rethink the materiality of sexual
reproduction beyond the naturalness assigned to biological sex. Drawing on
Manuel DeLanda’s nonlinear accounts of matter, inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of the ‘machinic phylum’, Hird crucially asks how such
accounts can be used by feminists to rethink the reproducing body (99). Her
detailed exploration of the heterogeneity of biological reproduction sets out to
challenge any easy ontological resolution between nature and culture, the pure
and the artificial. Indeed, she points to the bacterial world of inter-sex as a way
to rethink notions of human bodies as ‘engaging in constant non-binary sex, as
biologically queer’ (103).
Hird also addresses reproductive technologies, which complicate the
naturalness of blood-governed notions of kinship by unravelling the
unintended proliferation of chimerism and mosaicism (2004, 221). Genetic
filiation is here put into question by nonlinear molecular transmissions between
the same species and across species – for example, xenotransplantation – which
are not simply caused by human technological interventions, but rather are
part and parcel of a chimeric bio-logic, which radically challenges the cultural
assumptions of biological sex. Such cultural assumptions are here challenged
by a technoscientific knowledge of the biological and not merely by human
technological innovations. Indeed, the uncertainties of technoscientific
understandings of nature may serve to change cultural discourses on kinship,
sexuality and reproduction.
Whilst sharing Hird’s point about the importance of addressing the
materiality of sexuality away from the emphasis on the normative and discursive
conceptions of science, this chapter wishes to consider whether it is possible
to readdress the relation between nature and culture from another standpoint,
where there is no ultimate bio-logic that resists the cultural determinations of
sexuality. This chapter indeed sees an implicit falling-back – in emphasising
the indeterminate bio-logic of sexuality – onto the ground of organic nature,
where biological complexity is always already disrupting cultural norms, where
the unnaturalness of the organic remains external to the naturalness of culture.
9 She draws, in particular, on Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz for such a
definition of feminism (Hird 2004)
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Rather, this chapter points to the possibility of engaging with abstract material
relations encompassing nature-culture on a continuum, a cultural evolution of
the natural and a natural evolution of the cultural variations of a body-sex.
From this standpoint, it is important to point out that the natural is as
stratified as the cultural and that the biological imperative of sexual reproduction
and sexuality is part of the nonlinear organisation of bacteria cells entering into
nucleic sexual and reproductive orders under certain environmental pressures,
which have indirectly affected the cultural formations of bodies ordered in a
grid of biological positions. This chapter however stirs towards another, more
invisible, path of engagement with materiality emphasising the abstract or virtual
expressions of an ontogenetic sexuality that is directly prehended by all bodies
participating in the speculative exercises of technoscience. Technoscience, it is
true to say, is not a human invention since technical machines are able to enter
in direct relations with the biophysical layers of matter. Yet this does not mean
that technoscientific inventions are a direct imitation of biological complexity
since the bio-logical order does not remain immune from the technoscientific
touch. Their abstract relationality implies that new biological kingdoms can
emerge from technological interventions and similarly new technological
machines can emerge from biological realms. In short, what remains to be
addressed in debates about natural sciences, technosciences and new ontologies
of queer sexuality and sexual difference is the abstract relation between nature
and culture entailing the direct – affective – prehension of changes in matter,
resonating across micro and macro scales of the orders of sex.
This relation entails the heterogeneous formation of an event, where all
components – concepts, affects, percepts – participate in the transformation
of matter. Here culture is not the place for technoscientific normalisations of
nature, but is primarily caught up in the prehensive feeling of abstract relations,
the material potential of culture to change, which challenges its primary
functions as the governor of matter. From this standpoint, the impact of
nanotechnology on the biological and cultural order of sexuality and sexual
difference is implicated in the material prehension of their transformation
stemming from the micro-perceptual activities of subatomic sexes – a nonorganic sub-world running beneath yet throughout the bio-logic of organic sex
and the cultural determinants of gender.
Atomic Sexes
If, as argued by many feminists, biotechnologies – genetic engineering and cloning
– have pushed the conception of sexual difference away from the biological
imperative of sexual reproduction, based on genetic essence, and have therefore
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exposed the plasticity of genomes, the genetic ambivalence between animals and
humans, it is possible to say that nanotech pushes the indeterminacy of this entire
biotic realm of mutations further. In short, what we know of sexual difference
before the impact of nanotech still pertains to the biospheric realm of organic life
in accord with the cultural bio-order. Even when biotechnologically re-engineered,
sexual difference, reduced to the elementary components of chromosomes,
or egg cells, mitochondria, artificial wombs, and so on, still maintains a certain
stability in social relations: acquired parenthood, extra-partner filiation, multiple
genealogies have all modified the stabilised norms of cultural procreation, and
the social structures of the family, and yet still fall on the ground of a biologically
complex order of organic life. The impact of nanotech is of another nature
however. At stake here is no longer the biotechnological manipulation of genetic
networks, but the inorganic nanodesigning of the entire biosphere – the entire
biology of sexuality. Nanotechnology (Scientific American 2002; Turton 1995;
Regis and Chimsky 1996) moves well beneath carbon-based life, affecting the
fluctuating movement of atoms, entering the scale of inorganic dust to redesign
carbon-based life.10
To redesign atoms and molecules from scratch implies resculpturing the
genetic and neural patterns of a body-sex. Nevertheless, despite all efforts, the
nanoprogamming of matter entails no transcendent top-down designing of
bio-physical organisations. Nanodesign is structurally open to the variability
and contingency of molecular and atomic relations. Nanodesign is directed
by encounters between elements, whose potentialities are not predictable
beforehand. This is not a simple pre-programming of the body-sex echoing
the digital logic of information science. The atoms of nanotechnology do
not coincide with the 0s and 1s of digital computation, since the mathematics
of digital calculation itself does not simply coincide with exact equations. In
other words, the claims of the first wave-cybernetics about the reduction of
complexity to building-blocks, elementary units, atoms, or codes out of which
entire universes could be calculated, have undergone a new turn towards
nonlinear complexity, unexpected randomness, fuzziness, inexact equations,
incompleteness, incomputable quantities and differential relations, which, as
often argued, have been problems in the mathematical enquiry into calculation
since pre-Socratic times (Chaitin 2005, 56–85). Whilst a significant body
of critical work has been devoted to debunking the reductionism of digital
computation by showing how computer and network culture is productive of
sociabilities – artistic, political, communal sociabilities and so on – the argument
10 On recent cultural debates on the implications of nanotech, see Hayles (2004,
11–23); Attebery (2004, 161–72).
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developed here is more strictly concerned with the way atomic and subatomic
sociabilities are affected by nanotechnologies and how these sociabilities are
implicated into new experiences of sexuality. The underling grey-goo scenario
in nanotech indeed points to a mathematics of fuzziness and vagueness made
not of building elementary blocks but of intricate complexity and inorganic
variation cutting across the organic order of matter.
Nanodesign then forces us to account for a pre-emptive strike on the virtual
or abstract materiality of a body-sex – the capacity of matter to be affected. And
yet, the nanocapture of ‘chaotic molecules’ does not just reduce their potentials
to probable activities – specific tasks – but produces new nano activities of the
atoms as eventuations of new assemblages in matter. This suggests more than a
new technoscientific paradigm or discourse, which can serve us when rethinking
queer sexuality and sexual difference. Nanotech is here involved in ‘ecologies
of practices’ (Stengers 2002b, 262), articulating new techniques of relations
and the proximity between science and nature, nature and culture and thus
participating in the ontogenetic expressions of matter, the nanomodification of
sex ready to act back on what we take a body-sex and sexual difference to be.
In 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman already envisaged this nanocontrol
of matter. In his famous talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’,
he stated that there was no principle in physics that could prevent the
rearrangement of atoms. Much later, in The Engines of Creation (1986), Drexler
explained that with the atom-by-atom structuring of matter, it is possible to
design molecular machines that could reproduce themselves at incrementally
smaller scales. Nanotechnology acts upon atoms and molecules ranging from
0.1 to 100 nanometers (a nanometer is one millionth of a millimetre). Atoms
aggregate into larger compounds or molecules. By interacting with each other
they build up inorganic and organic compounds. After more than fifteen years
of research, companies, such as Intel, IBM, Bayer and Merck, are designing
real nanoproducts (from atomic computers to smart drugs and from intelligent
buildings to smart clothing)11 by using assemblers to modulate the chemical
behaviour of atoms. Assemblers or nanosystems are general-purpose devices
capable of directing chemical reactions by positioning molecules in a certain
way and thus enabling their specific replication. As Drexler reminds us,
nanomachines such as ‘Cell repair machines could reassemble the misarranged
patterns of atoms that cause cancer, and build bodies from scratch’ (1986, 98).
The novelty here is that nanomachines can rearrange the position of every
atom. Each atom can be placed in a selected position to become an active or
11 On commercial developments in nanotech, see Nanobusiness. On
nanocomputers, see Brown (2001); Goho (2004).
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structural component of a living system to design. Positional control suggests
that the high-speed oscillation and fuzziness of molecules is not an absolute but
a relative indeterminacy open to the conditions of nanoengineering. The chaotic
instability of molecules is here turned into a kind of dynamic productivity. The
quantum fluctuation of atoms implies that atoms cannot occupy a series of discrete
positions in space. This position therefore does not correspond to a permanence
of the same atom, but to the permanence of a pattern that repeats itself through
vibrating energy in far-from equilibrium conditions (Prigogine 1997, 129–51).
By redesigning atomic patterns, nanotech captures their chaotic behaviour
into new actualisations; by neutralising chemical reactions in the nanofabrication
of new compounds, nanotech intervenes in the emergence of new molecular
architectures capturing the quantic behaviour of atoms. Yet this implies no
predetermination of molecular patterns. To capture also entails the reversal
activities of being captured. Capture thus implies the potentials to actualise
new compounds, the transformation of molecular indeterminacy towards
novel determinations. Hence matter is programmable only to the extent that
nanosystems actualise new atomic functions whose future potentials remain
unpredictable. At the core of nanotechnology is not so much the artificial
manipulation of molecules, but the production of molecular-designing machines:
nanomachines able to direct quantum patterns towards new actualisations.
A perfect example of contemporary strategies of pre-emption,12 nanobots
are virtual agents inbuilt in a body and ready to act at the incipience of threat.
Nanobots will cruise our blood stream, taking blood samples, updating diagnosis
at our own design, releasing drugs targeted to certain synaptic zones and
performing self-repairing molecular surgery. As all strategies of pre-emption,
nanotech operates on the level of the virtual – future threats emerging from the
body’s atomic fluctuations. Yet all pre-emption acts to capture futurity in new
actualisations, reducing the unpredictable to the invention of the possible.
Strategies of pre-emption need not be confused with the digital calculation
of atoms based on discrete quantities and exact positions on a grid. If preemption entails the anticipation of the future in the conditions of the present, the
nanodesign of atomic complexities cannot occur without the tiniest variations
creeping into the present from the future, without the irruption of uncertainty
in atomic design. Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, warns us
against the unforeseeable dangers of nanobots in the strange new combination
of genomics and robotics: ‘Our most powerful 21st-century technologies –
robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech –are threatening to make humans
12 On pre-emptive power, see Massumi (1993, 11–12); Parisi and Goodman
(2005).
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an endangered species’ (2000, 1). The imminent threats of nanorobots to the
nature of the human species and, more importantly, to the biotic strata of
life often assume the form of dangerous self-replicating devices spreading
disastrously beyond control. In 1986, Drexler also considered the double face
of the nanotech coin, the dark side haunting the perfect nanodesigning of
matter, and named it the ‘grey-goo scenario’: when non-biotic machines start to
grow autonomous characters, behaviours, intelligences, mobilities that surpass
the ability of existing devices of control. It is when machines take on a life of
their own.
The nanocontrol of molecular patterns reintroduces the threat of nonliving
matter to biotic life: the inorganic remaking of the organic strata. The greygoo scenario envisages nanodesigned molecules spinning out of control
and taking over living systems. Moving beneath carbon-based life (the use
of protein to generate new proteins), nanotech aims to refabricate the body
through controllable abiotic nanobots. Yet, the extent to which nanobots are
not inorganic agents able to control themselves in their remaking of biotic
systems remains an open question. Nanobots do not abide by Asimov’s laws of
robotics (the human-robot distinction) or the bioinformatic rules of the cyborg
(the human-machine hybrid). Nanobots entail the inorganic redesigning of the
organic composition of matter all together. Bypassing the genetic engineering
of biotic life, nanobots force biotic life to confront the far from equilibrium
dynamics of its quantum condition. Pre-emption here works to actualise new
nanomachines of quantum matter by amplifying – or distributing – the impact
of atomic sexes throughout all scales in evolution.
Machinic Expansion
The atomic fabrication of nanobots yields neither the artificial outdesign
of evolution nor the imitation of the biosphere. Nanotech rematerialises
the biosphere by redesigning patterns of chaotic quanta in two different
directions: bottom-up molecular self-assemblage and top-down mechanical
– microelectronic – assemblers. Yet the bottom-up and top-down controls of
atomic patterns are not sufficient to map the impact of nanotechnology on the
biosphere. If nanobots are inorganic machines of the kind of those existing
in an ancient past preceding the biosphere and an imminent nanotech presentfuturity redesigning the biosphere then, we may ask, what does this connection
between inorganic matter and nanotechnology tell us about the relation between
the nature and culture of sex?
Call this connection, the extended experience of a body-sex. Stretch the
actual present far back towards a virtual past and then forward towards a virtual
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future. And stretch again the future back in the past towards the actual present.
Then name this extended experience, duration.13 Here a body-sex is caught in
the topological expansion of events where the indeterminacy of a future-past
is at work in the imperceptible speeds of the present.
The materiality of a body-sex is embedded in the events of such a future-past.
Henri Bergson affirms that time in evolution lies in the continuity of
duration where past and future are at work in the present: an elastic temporality
rubbing against the past and opening up to the future (1983, 5). Each present
experience emerges from the influence of the virtual actions of the past and
future. Yet such action concerns no psychological memory of the past haunting
the present. For Bergson, this is an ontological past linked to every present
and future. The virtual past does not lie in us, but vice versa we lie in it. The
virtual action of the past on the present pushes the present outside of itself
towards the ontological conditions of time (beyond the human condition). For,
in duration the past like the future remains virtual, undetermined in the yet-tobe-lived passing of the present.
The past is not simply supplanted by the present, but rather becomes the
field of invention for a present-futurity: the reversal ingression of change in
the present-past. Nanotech profoundly intervenes in the body’s network of
durations – connecting the abiotic sphere of matter to the virtual actions of a
future-past. By redesigning the inorganic atomic composition of biotic matter,
nanotech exposes living systems to a novel aggregation of atoms opening the
inorganic past of the biosphere to a new present-futurity. Call this abstract
temporality re-engineering the irreversible trajectories of evolution, a machinic
phylum (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 406)
A machinic phylum is neither determinable by biological dynamics nor
technological machines. Running beneath (and transversally) the biosphere
and technosphere – organic nature and culture – a machinic phylum highlights
abstract relationality in the extended experience of a body-sex, topologically
stretching beyond acquired forms in the continual variations of matter. In a
sense, nanotech is precisely embedded in such machinic trans-connection
13 Duration is inspired partly by Bergson and by Whitehead. For Bergson, duration
‘is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells
as it advances’ (1983, 5). For Whitehead, duration ‘is a concrete slab of nature limited
by simultaneity which is an essential factor disclosed in sense-awareness’ (2004, 53).
Here duration is not a continual and indivisible experience of time. Duration entails
events coming into being and perishing. Like a sequence of cinematic frames, events
interweave and pass on part of themselves to the next event. On these different notions
of duration see Whitehead (1967/1925, 148–9); Stengers (2002a, 71–3).
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implying a point of inflection, a curling line or a fold, in the encounter between
distinct layers of duration in the matter of nature and culture.
Mutant Culture
The ingression of scientific objects in the passage of nature entails an immanent
contact between physical and sense objects in abstraction. An event: something
that happens not in the world (as if it were its representation), but to the world
as much as technoscience partakes of its changes. Neither essence in things
nor mental construction of things determines the relation between nature and
culture. It is the material experience of such relation, of a zone of indistinction
between nature and culture indeed to be productive of a culture that evolves.
Scientific objects indeed do not reduce physical objects to bare facts or
cultural norms. Instead ‘All bare facts are born factoid’ (Massumi 2002, 214),
embedded in a certain virtuality that produces certain facts rather than others.
Technoscience is not primarily an interpretation of nature. Rather, it adds its
knowledge to nature, folding into relational virtualities one more time.
Drawing on Whitehead, Stengers questions the paradigmatic understanding
of science (1997, 3–18). Science is not primarily an institution that reproduces
dominant knowledge, hegemonies and discourses. Similarly, the singularity of the
sciences has not to be reduced to the ‘privileged expression of a rationality that
would be set against illusion, ideology, opinion’ (134–5). Science is itself subjected
to the ‘chance-event’ characterised by non-scientific procedures, which define
scientific history and knowledge as ‘transituational’: produced by the passage, the
interval from one phase to another. Rather than disqualifying scientific events as
always derived by structures of dominion, Stengers argues for the ‘ecology of
practices’ producing scientific facts: an affective rather than a paradigmatic method
of relating nature and culture, the sciences and the humanities. The scientific
object is an adventure in experience concurring to nature’s own activities of
change.14 In other words, a risky business: ‘Scientific hypotheses always attempt
to situate what is given within a much vaster set of possibilities. One can, in most
cases, make them commence with “And if?”’ (136–7)
14 Whitehead’s metaphysical redefinition of experience challenges the critique
of science and scientific knowledge as reductive. What is given in experience does
not belong to the intentional human subject and to the lived world. Whitehead like
Bergson is interested in the experience of the cosmos, what exceeds the subjective
world. Bergson uses the concept of duration to push human experience outside, yet
he criticises modern technoscience as unable to grasp the élan vital of time. Whitehead
instead embraces science to map the world’s own activities through its involvement in
the ‘passage of nature’. See Latour (2003).
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‘And if ?’ is a way to jeopardise what is taken to be normal and common
sense. ‘And if ?’ is the starting point of ‘a problem imposed on the collective
by any innovative fiction, and through which the sciences invent their histories’
(138–9). Scientific knowledge thus concurs with the construction of novel
fictions of a body-sex. Yet this construction cannot occur without abstraction:
an immanent invisible relationality between distinct phases of matter, a continual
invention triggered by the passing of events.
Nevertheless, we may still ponder: isn’t the ‘and if ’ of nanotechnology (for
example, and if the atomic composition of matter could be redesigned from
scratch?) another way to privilege (dominant) stories about the ontology of the
body-sex? Isn’t nanotechnology postulating new functions of matter that enclose
the virtuality of extended experiences within a set of possible – already actualised
and thus programmable – conditions of sex, sexuality and sexual difference?
To engage with these questions, science must be redefined not as the source
of new ontologies, as the cyborg ontology tends to do, but as operating on a
plane of reference able to actualise the virtual (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,
118). Science then depends on states of affair – formed matter – which are
limits set on a plane of immanence (the virtual). Every science tends to limit the
field of relationality between objects, by integrating variables together. Whilst
all sciences rub against virtuality through productive speculations, they continue
to bind functions to the event and to actualise the event into one specific thing
that can be referred to. Scientific knowledge attaches a recognisable face to
its outside limits, turning virtuality into probabilities. Deleuze and Guattari
argue that the philosophical concept, on the contrary, maps ontologies as it
abstracts from states of affair their abstract connection. In philosophy, it is
the consistency of the event to be pulled out from objects. Consistency entails
amodal or virtual links: a sort of holding together of potential situations.
Rather than appropriating potentials, philosophical concepts ‘give the virtual a
consistency specific to it’ (118).
It would be misleading however, to affirm that scientific functions are
deductions of philosophical concepts. Rather ‘Concepts and functions … appear as
two types of multiplicities or varieties whose natures are different’ (127). Virtualities do
not actualise without changing in nature. Science and philosophy are confronted
with multiplicities emerging from a common field of problems responding to
what is not known (128). For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophical concepts and
scientific functions do not cease to enmesh via a certain sensibilia towards the
unknown (131).
In a sense, science and philosophy have the task of responding to problems
posed by events in the passage of nature. Science and philosophy are symbiotic
activities in mutual complicity with the becomings of nature. They are held
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together by a ‘dynamics of infection’ as Whitehead names it (Stengers 2002,
182–90), a contagious relationship unable to transcend from variations in
nature. Infection here stands for an enduring excitation between concepts and
functions, science and nature, nature and culture, culture and science, geared
towards the immanent fabrication of ontomolecular changes. Call this enduring
excitation in the techno-cultural becomings of nature, affective contagion.
Affective contagion is a term that cannot do without calling forth a body.
For Spinoza, arguing against all mind-body dualisms, a body is a mode of
thought and extension. The idea of the body can only derive from the way a
body is primarily affected by other bodies. Thus the mind is always the idea of
a body (Ethics, II, ax. 3, prop. 11; II, prop. 13, schol.; II, props 12–31). Similarly,
Whitehead affirms that concepts are conceptual feelings which ‘primarily
derivate from physical feelings, and secondarily from each other’ (1978, 247).
Affect entails the rhythmic encounter of biophysical energy-particles enveloping
abstract capacities to think. The reverse is also true; all thoughts are as if they
were themselves feelings prompting from a transmutation in physical feelings.
In short, modes of extension and thought are linked by abstract contagion.
The affective contagion between science and nature, nature and culture
cannot but be felt. New technics of manipulation, such as nanotechnologies, are
not only techniques of observation of atomic matter, but are more importantly
implicated in the abstract relations between physical and conceptual feelings,
adding modifications to the extended experience of a body-sex. In other words,
nanotech is involved in the eventuation of new assemblages of desire on a
nature-culture continuum. Yet, we still do not know how this nanoengineering
of matter is adding variations to the feeling-thoughts of sexual difference.
Desire and Futurity
If a nanobody is not to be defined by what we take the natural and artificial to
be, then how can we rethink sexual difference in the age of nanoengineering?
If a body-sex can not only be genetically engineered, but its atomic neurogenetic determinants can be rearranged at will, then what will count as sexual
difference? Does this imply that sexual difference – in accordance with
Luce Irigaray’s conception of a mode of feminine desire detracted from the
imperative of heterosexuality based on the phallic organisation of the body-sex
– will no longer matter? Answer this question with a more difficult one: can we
account for variations in modes of desire, in sexual experience without holding
onto organic essence or discursive structures of sex? Does sexual experience
coincide with the organic order of the body-sex or the mental representation
of natural sex?
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Experience, Whitehead suggests, entails the living body as a whole (1978,
105–109). Each experience has its origin in the physical activities of a body,
which change when any part in nature undergoes variation. Thus, experience
extends outside the living towards the entire nature – including the smallest
parts, atoms, electrons, and so on. Difference in experience then cannot be
disentangled from what happens to all particles of a body, which are at the same
time entangled with what happens to all scales of matter. Experience therefore
is always extended, pushing the living outside its bio-physical architecture so as
to construct itself again in changing ecologies of connection.
For Whitehead, the basic elements of experience are ‘prehensions’ (or
concrete concepts and feelings) of actual entities, and the ‘nexus’ (or system
of relationships) which connects the development and functioning of all actual
entities (or actual occasions) (1978, 18–20). Prehensions are concrete modes
of analysis of the world. To prehend something is to have a concrete idea or
concept of that thing. But prehension is not merely a mode of thinking. A
prehension is a material process of appropriation of an element of an actual
entity, or of an element, which is derived from an actual entity. A prehension of
an object, or of an element of an object, changes the internal constitution of
the prehending subject.
Change in experience thus involves the assembling by material prehension
of particles-thoughts on a nature-culture continuum. Here the passage of
events in nature corresponds to its double ingression in culture: the event
virally propagates across regions of feeling (physical and conceptual feelings)
across scales of sociabilities – atomic, molecular, organic, technical, affective,
mental – without in turn ceasing to change its composition. It is not one and
the same event that connects nature and culture. It is the virtuality – or abstract
relationality – of an event that remains as if it were in common in an expanded
experience linking nature again to its becoming and culture to its evolution.
The nanoengineering of matter intersects with the virtuality of experiences
on nature-culture continual variation. Here, sexual difference does matter, but
in a new sense. It is not biological experience that makes sexual difference
autonomous from the cultural organisation of desire into the binarism of the
two sexes. Similarly, it is not the complex biology of sex that makes feminine sex
uniquely distinct from or fully intermixed with masculine sex. In other words,
the ambiguous biologisms of sex fail to account for how sexuality is implicated
in the virtual relationality between inorganic and organic matter, between the
concrete and the abstract experience of sex on a nature-culture continuum.
What matters in sexual difference is the way experience is extended across
nature, the way it participates in all kinds of sex disclosing the organisation
of the two sexes to molecular affections operating at the subatomic levels (of
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extension and thought) of a body-sex. What matters then is the way sexual
difference is involved in the nanoprehensions of that which happens to the
world and thus in the eventuation of new feeling-thoughts of sex. In short, it
will be a challenge for concepts of sexual difference to account for how sexuality
acts as a heterogeneous milieu of attraction of the abstract connection between
inorganic and organic matter, for how such abstraction becomes expression of
a lived sex on a nature-culture continuum.
Nanotech entails a new level of abstraction of subatomic matter initiating
a virtual action on the capacities of nature to become culture: the capacities
of inorganic subatomic matter to become nanotechnological and in turn the
capacity of nanotechnology to become enveloped in subatomic worlds. Here we
are confronted with the experience of abstract relations or transitions between
inorganic and organic nature-culture coinciding with the prehensions of the
quantic composition of matter. Nanotechnology does not explain the quantic
fluctuations of matter, but it rather adds quantum dynamics to the extended
experience of an infinitesimal world, intervening in the past-futurity of a bodysex. Call this new layer of experience: the nanoengineering of desire. The latter
has unprecedented implications for what we take sexual difference to be.
For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages of desire do not cease to produce
new modes of living the body or new modifications in nature-culture. Yet it is
clear that these assemblages are not determinable by objects, aims or sources,
identity or subjective essence (1983, 1–8). Desire here is to be defined in terms of
collective bodies, turbulent networks, viral transmutations relinquishing all logic
of lack, scarcity, survival, alterity, and the repressed unconscious.15 Assemblages
of desire are directed not by intentionality but by the fluctuating movements
of particle-forces implicated in ecologies of layered relations between their
internal external and associated milieus of composition connecting one phase
to another.
By nanodesigning the movement of molecular quanta, nanotech acts to preempt the movement of desiring assemblages, the un-calculable fluctuations of
the tiniest sexes acting back on the larger aggregates of organic sexual difference.
As such it takes sexuality, the site of modification of desiring assemblages par
excellence, as its field of action. The nanoengineering of desire demands the
biotic qualities of sexuality to face new onto-evolutionary implications: the
atomic redesigning of matter intervenes in assemblages of desire – mental,
affective, social, technical, ethical, cultural – recombining present conditions of
15 On assemblages of desire, femininity, sexual difference, queer bodies, see Grosz
(1994, 187–210; 2004, 244–60); Flieger (2000, 38–63); Driscoll (2000, 64–8); Colebrook
(2000, 110–27); Kaufman (2000, 128–43).
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experience with an ancient inorganic past and with the incipience of an atomic
future yet to come.
In such reversal of causal relations, sexual difference can no longer remain
attached to the bio-logic of organic sex, whereby the difference between the sexes
is defined by an onto-evolution of the two sexes governed by organic sexuality.
If, as Grosz has recently argued (2004, 67–70), sexual difference resonates
with the unique differentiation of the species in two sexes, whereby sexuality is
independent from survival, then it is also true that sex extends beyond the biotic
distinction of the sexes as much as nature precedes and exceeds carbon-based
life. Similarly, if the ontology of sexual difference is always already embodied,
then it is important to highlight that a body is not definable away from the
passage of nature, desiring assemblages extending throughout the sublayers of
inorganic matter.
The impact of nanotech then raises new questions about what we take sexual
difference to be as it adds to the genetic variation of biological sex – transsex, xeno-sex, and so on – an inorganic layer of atomic sexes redesigning the
biosphere of organic sexes anew, whilst exposing the unforeseen architectures
of an inorganic nature in culture. Whilst abstracting atomic assemblages from
bio-physical objects, nanotech enters invisible assemblages of desire. This
indicates no disappearance of sexual difference, but the expansion of sexuality
onto the atomic field of matter: inorganic nanosexes acting back on the organic
architecture of a two sexes culture.
Whilst focusing on the impact of nanotech on what we take sexual difference
and sexuality to be, it may be important to specify here that this is not just a
way to favour nanotechnological possibilities of redesigning sex and gender, the
genetic and neural patterns of sexual difference, the plurality or neutralisation of
sex-gender. Rather, this is a speculative philosophical gesture that probes into the
abstract conception of sexuality as the lived experience of a processual natureculture composed of events linking (pre-biotic inorganic) past and (nanobiotic)
future in the occurrences of the present, where technoscience intervenes to
question the biological ground of nature-culture, reopening the body-sex to the
durations of a past faced by a new present-futurity. Hence, it is not a question of
privileging the biological ambiguities of sexuality – the nonlinear natural ground
that exceeds the ideological, discursive, technological structures of culture. On
the contrary, this entails the importance of opening nature and culture to the
material experience of abstract relations whereby sexuality is implicated in the
imperceptible movements of assemblages of desire – not simply the crosspollination of parts but their collective participation in the production of a new
constellation of universes stretching beyond our cosmos. The experience of the
fuzzy quantities of atomic matter acts to transform the feeling-thought of sex
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beyond the biological and towards the abstract materiality of a sexuality already
felt and yet still to come.
Nevertheless, it may be misleading to assume that the expansion of sexual
difference onto the quantum field of matter is a way to favour, for example,
nanotechnological possibilities of redesigning organic sex, inciting therefore
a disappearance of the biological order of sexual difference. Rather, such an
expansion can only be thought of as implicated in the abstract architectonics of
sex, the relational experience connecting the actual occasions of sex in the quasifelt durations of matter, which remain autonomous from the chronological
evolutions of organic sex. Hence, this is not a question of the techno-evolution
of sexuality, but a way to challenge the bio-logic of sex, the organic order of
nature-culture. Here the nanoengineering of desire entails not a mechanisation
of sexuality – a queering of the future through nanobotic sex. On the contrary,
such nanoengineering is only important in so far as it is implicated in the
futurity of desire, the reversal causality between nature and culture embedded
in the abstract fabric of sexuality, whereby new kingdoms of sex can spread
out of the inorganic assemblages of nanobots, a nanoculture of sex. Here the
experience of sexual difference entails a feeling-thought for the ingression of
futurity into the present-past of a body-sex, acting to queer the nature-culture
of organic sexuality in an unforeseen fashion.
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