Towards Xenofeminism (Session 2)

So, hi everyone and welcome to our second session on towards Xeno Feminism, Gender Technology and Reason in the 21st Century. In this session we're looking at Transfeminism and Biofeminism, and focusing on Beatrice Presciato's Testo Junkie, and a couple of other bits and pieces. So, Luca sends her apologies. She's unable to join us for the first part of the session. I think we might have an appearance from her in the last half hour or so. She's been having a couple of computer problems, though, so we're not too sure whether that'll come through

or whether we'll just have her audio stream or what. So, hopefully we'll hear from Luca, because this is really part of one of her areas of interest and expertise as well, much more so than me. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't have a blurb like I did last week, Helen, but maybe unless anyone has any opening questions about the format or anything that's been going on in the classroom, I might just dive straight into Testo Junkie. Does anyone have any questions or any comments before we start? If anything crops up or if you suddenly think of something that you do want to have a little

chat about, do feel free to maybe just drop a note in the little chat bar down the side and then myself and Amy can come back and pick up on it. Make sure that everything is running smoothly when we're not kind of live together as well. That would be good. It would be really great to make this more of a discussion-heavy session as well. As we said last week, we kind of started off with quite a lot of content because we were aware that people hadn't had a chance to do the readings. So it would be excellent to make this a bit more of a kind of discursive week. So don't feel afraid to interject or as Helen said to use the sidebar and we can address those problems. Yeah, it might kind of seem like I'm sort of rumbling through as I talk, but do never

hesitate to interrupt me because I'm really quite open to that. So you just dive straight in. And I'm also really looking forward to hearing kind of Ivan's take on this and hopefully using that as a really interesting trigger. Yeah, so I'm going to chat a little bit today about Presciado, about Testo Junkie, and about her kind of molecular politics in Testo Junty, and her attempts to kind of re-engineer gender and sexual embodiment. So kind of when I started with Presciardo, my interest in the project was largely around its status as a generically ambiguous literary work. So I was quite attracted to how hard it is to kind of place Testo Junty as a text

in terms of its genre. But today though I kind of want to think about Testo Junkie by just kind of introducing some of the key elements of Presciardo's treatment of the gendered body as a site of resistance and then moving on to problematise the kinds of political insurrections that Testo Junkie proposes. Because I mean I've got a lot of love for this book and I keep kind of coming back to it in everyday discussions and when I'm trying to process a lot of ideas, I found it incredibly useful. But as with Firestone, there are also parts of it that I think are very problematic and that I think is quite helpful for helping me think through where I stand. So figuring

out why I find certain bits a bit problematic and where I think it becomes super useful for what might become a xenofeminist politics and where I think it might be a little bit more problematic or difficult and where I kind of want to set myself off of it or use it as a springboard for doing something different. So kind of, yeah, that's that general kind of one. So first published in French and Spanish in 2008 and released in English just last year, Testo Junkie is an idiosyncratic and hybrid of its work in which reflections upon the pharmaceutically mediated nature of contemporary sexual embodiment are positioned alongside semi-autobiographical accounts of the author's illicit experimentation with testogels, which

those of you who've had a chance to read the extract will know is a synthetic androgen that is administered as a gel through the gene. And the test itself is somewhat hard to place, one of the reasons why I found it so compelling. And presciado gestures towards its generic instability in the introduction. He says, this book is not a memoir. This book is a testosterone-based voluntary intoxication protocol which concerns the bodies and affects of BPs. A body essay. Fiction, actually. If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a tomato-political fiction, a theory of the self or self-theory.

If Testo Junkie is a theory of the self, however, it's not simply a theory of the individual, but one which firmly positions the self within the network of wider forces and structures which shape it. Preciado claims, for instance, I'm not interested in my emotions in so much as their being mine, belonging only uniquely to me. I'm not interested in their individual aspects, only in how they are traversed by what is mine. And there is an investment throughout Testo Junkie in exploring the material factors and and discursive processes, which simultaneously construct and kind of constrain contemporary

experiences of sexual subjectivity, including the biochemical transformation of feeling and the production and distribution of pornographic images. Since the end of the 20th century, the author argues, the post-industrial West has been dominated by the processes of a biomolecular, pharmacos, and semi-optic, technical, pornographic government on sexual subjectivity. And the drugs and other medical practices which alter our moods, our fertility, the contours of our bodies, combine not always harmoniously with the circulation and capillary

diffusion of pornographic images of every species and persuasion to create the contemporary gendered self. Impreciado's words, pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul. In biotechnology and in porno communications, there is no object to be produced. The pharmacopornographic business is the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction. Our sense of self then must be understood as a kind of function produced by a collection

a collection of body technologies, pharmacologic and audiovisual techniques that determine and define the scope of our potentialities. And these performative processes help to ensure the continued reproduction of those forms of gendered and sexual embodiments that best lend themselves to the commodity economy. Now, for Preciado, one of the things that we have to notice about biopolitics at this time is the way in which it extends beyond certain interpretations of a Foucauldian notion of discipline. So, she suggests that our concept of disciplinary power knowledge still draws heavily upon the

idea of power and its specific mode of surveillance materialize in the form of physical architecture. whether at the prison, school, hospital barracks, or factory. That automates movement, controls the gaze, programs action, and ritualizes everyday bodily practices. This is a vision of the disciplinary as an assemblage of apparatuses, which acts upon the body and upon our subjectivity in the form of a kind of heavy power, A power that's easy to identify and externally imposed. For Presciado, however, the forces which differ in the body have changed and are changing

in response to the industrial manufacture of subjectors. They have now been shrunk and softened, transformed into something that, rather than being imposed upon us from without, we in fact seek out and are willing to open ourselves up to it. And she uses one particularly resonant image to explore this, an image that I find quite interesting, which is this comparison of the contraceptive pill with the panopticon. The contraceptive pill, and its various forms of dispensers and packaging, also have the potential to regulate bodies and programme behaviours. But this process is now guided by the subject who self-administered it.

In Presiado's words, the surveillance tower has been replaced by the eyes of the not-always-docile user of the pill, who regulates her own administration without the need for external supervision. following the spatial calendar marked on the passage. The width has been replaced by a convenient system of oral administration. So this is the kind of the miniaturization and the infiltration and ingestion of a power which operates within the private and domestic sphere. Indeed, techno-feminists have long been attuned to this move towards the smaller and softer forms of power. which have largely been facilitated by technological advances.

So to return to somebody whose name cropped up last week, and whose name will continue to keep cropping up, as Sadie Plans talks about the exponential miniaturization of computer technology, in which everything valued for its size and strength finds itself overrun by microprocessing, once opposed to small and instant-y-sotting scale. As whilst Donna Haraway suggests that miniaturization has turned out to be about power. Small, if not so much beautiful, as preeminently dangerous as improved nithophiles. And it's not just within the sphere of medicine that we see the scaling down of the disciplinary apparatus,

but across many other areas of technological development as well. In Presiado's words, as the disciplinary regime gives way to the contemporary order of biocapitalism, social orthopedics is mutating into pharmacopornographic microprosces. I think Pat Presciado somewhat glosses over the extent to which the seeds of this are already quite apparent in a Foucauldian account of biopolitics. So Foucauld's conception of the panopticon, of course, emphasizes the internalization of power and the partial incorporation of the police and gays.

And I would suggest that a presciardo account is at least as much an extension as it is a challenge. But this idea that disciplinary forces are now actively sought out, that in the pharmacopornographic era the body swallowed power, is important when it comes to thinking about testojumci treatment of embodiment. The total occupation of bodies and subjectivities is not to be thought of as a unidirectional movement in which miniaturized liquid power from the outside infiltrates the obedient body, in part because this very infiltration has come to be thought of as empowering.

As Presciato states, all of it happens freely, by virtue of the sexual emancipation of the controlled body. In the move from panopticon to contraceptive pills, punishments and edifying sermons have been replaced by rewards and promises of freedom and sexual emancipation. But Alvea Preciado presents pharmaceutically mediated collectivities as the product of post-industrial Western capitalism after 1970. She does not try to claim that hormones, mood stabilising drugs or mind altering substances inevitably or invariably play into the hands of power.

In fact, the heart of her project in pesto junkie can be found in attempts to disrupt the pharmacopornographic regime through experimentation with these tools. The reader is regaled with accounts of her self-administration of a range of intoxicants, from coffee and cigarettes to alcohol, coke and ecstasy. Well, the most obvious example of what Presciado calls the principle of the auto guinea pig is, of course, BP's self-survived voluntary drug protocol. He writes that, I am my own guinea pig for an experiment on the effects of intentionally increasing the level of testosterone in the body of a cis female.

Instantly, the testosterone turns me into something radically different from cis females. And of course, the self-experimentation involved in this process is crucial to the project of the book. She is taking testosterone outside of the narrowly defined territory of its socially acceptable usage. She is not taking it with the permission of the medical authorities in order to transition. She is illegally self-administering it in an act of auto-experimentation without preconceived goals and without ideal outcomes. As Elizabeth Stevens has commented, Preciado's focus is on experimentation rather than identity,

a decision about which she is herself highly ambivalent, and one she is aware is not politically neutral nor without potentially negative consequences for people who do not live in her reasonably privileged and independent circumstances, and whose relationship with the pharmaceutical industries may be completely different. A preshesia of the territory of the auto guinea pig is an act of resistance for Presciado, and it makes up much of the substance of the political project that she sketched about in Testo Junkies. She expresses this quite forcefully, stating the first principle of a trans-feminism movement

capable of facing porno-punk modernity, the fact that your body, the body of the multitude and the pharmacopornographic networks that constitute them are political laboratories, both effects of the process of subjection and control, and potential spaces for political agency and critical resistance to normalization. By taking testosterone in an unsanctioned fashion, BPE seeks to contest the pharmacopornographic regime that constitutes them. Now, Pesto Junkie's project takes various forms, with Presciado invoking alternative kinds of resistance at different junctures in the text.

However, I still think we can advance certain theories about the biopolitics of the autogenetic principle. Joshua Rivas, for example, connects it with another key Foucauldian idea, the reverse discourse. For Rivas, testo-junkie affects the reverse discourse against the pharmacopornographic regime in several respects, of which all arise from instrumentalization of the writings of the self as a fight for resistance by compliance. Bresciade theatricalizes to critical effect the pharmacopornographic regime by textually enacting her own subjectivation by and through its discourses and technologies.

So we can see BP attempting to act as what Foucault has called a hindrance, a stumbling rock, a point of resistance, but without overtly resisting the foundational principles upon upon which pharmacopornographic subject to it is built. So her embrace of pornography, there are moments in the text that she kind of produces her own kind of porn. She talks a lot about the politics of producing porn that is proliferating pornography at this kind of current moment. Also her utilisation of pharmaceuticals of course and all this kind of thing, all attempts to adjust the meanings of these pharmacopornographic tendencies in order to generate the space

for new possibilities of gender and sexual embodiment. As Rebus notes, perhaps the most obvious example of Presiado's reappropriation of the codes of somatopolitical control is gesture towards in the title of the work. Presiado characterizes her autobiographical persona as a testo junkie. This is not a simple question of taking on the designation to which Presciado is already medically and legally destined for the pharmacopornographic regime. Presciado transforms the abject, marginal position of the addict into a viable, legitimate subject position from which to speak. And this is another side to Testo Junkey's trans-feminist theory of embodiment, then.

A politics that's defined not by outright rejection, but by a kind of appropriation and partial acceptance. But, alas, this kind of leads us into some quite choppy waters when it comes to critically assessing the book's strategic usefulness for a radical politics. Indeed, for some readers, this partial acceptance shades into over-identification and represents the text as its most problematic. Benjamin Noyde, for example, has noted that the strategy Presciano pursues is one of immersion with these new forms of power. The drug experience, this molecular intoxication, is not a device of transcendence or escape

per se. but rather insertion with and within the chains of signifiers and materialities of the presence. So this is the reverse discourse as, in Rebus's words, resistance through compliance, except that the resistance within this compliance can arguably be somewhat difficult to locate. As Noyes points out, Presciado's description of using testo gel is also distinguished from other drugs, coke, speed, to indicate the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the city. This already suggests the resonant immersion in the forms and forces of contemporary global

capitalism figured in the rhythm of the city. Now, sort of, Neuss himself admits that he's focusing on particular areas in this essay, which is sort of a more general piece on intoxication, which is also kind of a really fun read. But he admits that this reading does rather put aside some of the important gendered dimensions of Cresciardo's project. So her desire to take up public space whilst on testo channel is explicitly framed as leaving the space of domesticity, linked with the semiotechnical codes of white tetrosexual femininity in the post-war pharmacopornographic political ecology. The enjoyment of the city is not simply the enjoyment of immersion in

pharmacopornographic capitalism, but also part of the new possibilities of gendered embodiment that the co-option of maculane privilege can provide. A new cartography of of the city takes shape," Preciado argues. For the first time, you can enjoy the pleasure of the public space of the male planeur, non-existent for a body culturally encoded as female. So, despite this kind of point, I can see why the politics of over-identification is viewed as problematic. The lines between resistance and surrender in this case might be considered somewhat less than clear, and Noyes points out that we are not asked to reflect upon the conformity

of this strategy with neoliberal capitalism's own imaginary. Preciado's use of reverse discourse seems to lead us to a resistance through compliance and immersion that arguably results in opposition becoming all but indistinguishable from capitulation. And this of course just happens to be one of the images of the accelerationists that haunts contemporary debates. This is kind of an aside about contemporary debates, about the bad radicals whose radicalism is indistinguishable from passive acquiescence and indeed the championing of the market. And in kind of elsewhere I've thought a little bit about the comparisons between Presciado

and accelerationist political tendencies at the current moment. the extent to which Presciado might be thought of as an accelerationist, and where she kind of pulled away. Okay, so where does this lead us, then? Where, if anywhere, are we to locate the political potential of Presciado's account of pharmacopornographic embodiments? And this is kind of where I want to start laying down some maybe more speculative markers for later discussion. So do forgive me if this becomes a little bit fragmented at this stage, I'm just kind of throwing stuff out there. So of course the alignment or conformity of certain ideas and practices with neoliberalism is hardly an isolated phenomenon,

and should not in itself be seen as sufficient to render an activity irredeemably problematic. Not everything that's come out of neoliberalism is unmitigated shit. You know, so just saying that something is a bit neoliberal is just not enough. It's not sufficient, I think, for argument to get to it. For me, though, there are issues with the framing of political agencies and testo-junction. For all the personal risks undertaken by BP as a pioneering autogeneity, the text itself can arguably be seen as kind of lacking a little bit of ambition in places, or rather lacking certain kinds of ambitions, or certain species of ambitions. So throughout most of the texts that are junky,

Preciado talks primarily in terms of small-scale interventions of appropriation, arguing that self-experimentation is, quote, a requirement for the possibility of any future micro-political action. And this micro-politic seems to manifest itself almost exclusively at the level of the atomised subject, with precious little imaginative space being given to the ways in which the project might be expanded or scaled up. As Preciado herself admits, romantic auto-experimentation carries the risk of individuality and depoliticization. And her projects might all too easily coincide with both currents

of neoliberalism that suppress awareness of shaping structural influences such as class. Despite the fact that, you know, Presciano is really up on thinking about the self-concerns of these wider social networks, something about the proposed solutions seems to lapse back a little bit into focusing on individual bodily tinkering, if that doesn't kind of diminish her argument too much. So in Testo Junkie, the perceived dangers of coalescing into a recognizable movement, of thinking beyond the individual, or making concrete demands only to have them kind of

co-opted, appropriated, or turned against one, seem to kind of restrict the framework, at the same time, the restricted kind of ambition, or restricted kind of scope, I guess. Preciado, it would appear, is all too aware of the fact that the discourses of feminism can be, and have been, co-opted by the pharmacopornographic regime. After all, it exploited the revolutionary and emancipatory rhetoric of the feminist movement of the 1960s to pass off the chemical and contraceptive management of the female body as a step towards sexual liberation. Of her proposed movement of gender self-experimentation, meanwhile, Presciado declares that it'll have no single name that can be transformed into a brand.

So, kind of, no brand identity to be recuperated, appropriated, or seized. I kind of wonder if there's sort of an Occupy-like thing here, so not kind of articulating specific demands. And again, if we think back to Firestone, that's the moment where she's saying this is dangerous. Advancing specific concrete proposals is inevitably dangerous, but it does mean that everybody who's reading the text without concrete proposals thinks, hmm, why? Why isn't there more here for me to come and latch on to? There are moments, though, in which Presciado, almost despite herself, reaches beyond the individualised, small-scale action of her molecular politics. And this happens particularly through her sensitive and balanced engagements with biotechnology.

Presciado is at her most incisive, I think, when reflecting upon medical innovations and technological advances in a sceptical and critically rigorous fashion, without allowing this critique to segue into wholesale dismissal. It is a uniquely rich history of techno-feminist thinking to which Presciado's project is contributing here. He's operating within a tradition in which theorists, aware of how supposed advances have differentially disadvantaged women, queers, and the gender nonconforming, have been especially alive to the potential misuses of technology, while refusing to revert back to an unhelpful celebration of the equally problematic notion of the natural or the organic.

And again, we saw this kind of last week, one of the things that runs through Firestone and Plant, who is seen as being like crazy techno-utopian, is that actually undergirding that is a constant reference to, well, you know, this is a problem. So there's the Firestone thing where it's like, oh, to envisage artificial reproduction in the current moment is to envisage a nightmare. You know, it's not an unqualified wallowing in the potential of the technology to come. There is this kind of repeated check that keeps coming in there, being like, whoa, hold on, let's not get this. So there is this kind of tendency. But there's also this, she's very much alive to the fact that at present hormone treatment

and other pharmacological innovations perpetuate a normative regime. And yet she remains open to the radical possibilities of biotechnology and to the innovative political uses to which they might be put. So, after all, as Testo Jumkey rightly asserts, political agency does not depend only on molecules, but rather on their use and critical reappropriation. So, you know, that might be making us think about what we were talking about last week in terms of the social factors and the technological factors in Firestone and her steepest thing of revolution. But there is this kind of thing that I think one of the real problems with Testo-Joggy in

terms of scale is that she thinks in this kind of really small scale, localised fashion about individual bodies and doing things with individual bodies, sort of implying that there is a way to connect her up to do something more collective, but not really going into that part of it very much at all, focusing on the kind of auto-experimentation that individualises it. But then she veers from this small scale stuff to massive over scale stuff where she's kind of talking about like a huge, huge, massive utopian, like seemingly impossible kind of dreams of what this technology will be. So she talks about adjusting the hormonal metabolism of bodies in order to bring about

an endocrinal reprogramming, making the leap from an individualized micro-politics embodiment to a wider reaching political vision, no less radical than, quote, the transformation of the species. And so there's this kind of problem, I think, with what's lacking is the miso-political, which is, this is kind of a term that came up in discussion between me and Benedict Singleton when we were talking about this page, that there is no miso-political kind of level here. So the space which we might associate with the advances of pragmatic and actionable activist tactics is almost entirely evident. Nevertheless, it is worth remarking that biotechnologies are positioned by Presciado as a space more

a possibility than a threat, and that they thereby become a means of remembering the future. I think I will stop there. I have talked a lot. Thank you very much for your patience. So we had quite a lot of questions coming up on the sidebar, actually, as you were talking, Helen. So maybe we can go back and just address a couple of those. I think there were four kind of main issues that came up. First of all, Petra was asking about the whole issue about pronouns and reference, which is really interesting considering that you started off talking about the idea of genre and style as something that can be problematised through hybridity

and that this is exactly Bresciato's technique in the work. And it made me think, I mean, I don't know the definitive answer to your question, Petra, which was how does she identify, what pronoun does she use to refer to herself? But I think, I mean, when I read secondary literature about the book, and maybe Helen you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I've probably read more of it than I have, but that she does use the pronoun she, and considers, as you said, the experiments in Testo Junkie as not being part of any kind of program of transitioning, but more this illicit kind of use of testosterone as a recreational drug and hence occupies a subject position that

doesn't actually have a space marked out for it already. And I wanted to add on this point, just because I remember Luca was talking about this online I think in a Facebook conversation, that one of the, this connects to with the problem a scale, Helen, and the idea of mesopolitical action. One of the things that would be a kind of moderate start towards this idea of rethinking the malleability of gender is just simple kind of formal, legal changes like not having gender listed on identification, gender listed on identification, or at least even having like a larger spectrum of gender

possibilities. And it reminded me actually of a local who lives in my area in Sydney known as Norrie, who recently was the first person in our state in Australia, and possibly in Australia to actually succeed in winning a court case that would allow Nel and Nori to not have to identify a gender on any of the identification. And I think Nori uses the pronoun Z or prefers to use it. I can put a link to the... Yeah, I've included a little bit of stuff on the pronoun thing in the little sidebar

there. I'm always really annoyed by the fact that it doesn't translate when I'm speaking because I follow what's on the back of the book. I don't know if you can see this. There's a little blurby bit. They use this s slash he, so she, because she, well, at this point At this point I've been looking for stuff directs from Preciado about which pronouns she prefers. And the stuff that I found from the she talked at the tape here last year and used s-he there in her blurbs and stuff. And people who've emailed her relatively recently have seen that being used. So that's kind of what I've faked and tried to kind of keep in depth with.

But obviously the difficulty with that is written down, you can see that there's this element of the genderqueer about it. But then when you're speaking it becomes completely oblivious. So I apologise. I maybe should have just prefaced with something about that. But yes, so Presciardo explicitly said she doesn't want to transition and that the idea of transitioning or using it to legally become, legally and medically become something else, she ups down the sphere of possibility embedded in taking testosterone. Because she thinks that in ingesting it you become radically different from a Swiss woman, but she wants that kind of space of difference, not to be then immediately foreclosed and

becoming a specific thing. So she kind of opens up this kind of chamber of resonance around gender and different possibilities. And it's kind of like the cute little love story bit in Tessa Junkie that not many people kind of talk about. It's like her relationship with BD, who is the woman that she falls in love with over the course of this old narrative. And that is a real space where what she's exploring is femininity. so it's almost like at the start there is this kind of she expresses a deep discomfort with the feminine and it's through her relationship with VD who kind of makes her get manicures and kind of fucks her with her own strap on and stuff like that that Preciado starts to kind of

experiment with her own femininity as she experiments with her masculinity not as something natural coming out of the body but as a kind of a space of opportunity and something, a new sphere of semiotic possibility, I guess. This is something that came up. I was talking, I mean, cyberfeminism, I think, is also really interesting in relation to the semantic encoding of gender in especially, I suppose, early online spaces where this was like a whole new world of possibility. And I had a chat to Virginia Barrett from BNS Matrix, who will be joining us next week, which will be really interesting, I think, about some of the ways that this was occurring

on early multiple user domains. And she said, I mean, it was great back then you'd log into something and set up an avatar, and you could identify as different genders consistently. consistently you didn't have to just choose a gender at the beginning of your design of your avatar, but you also had this massive spectrum of genders. She said there was something like, a particular one she was talking about using, there was something like eight possibilities, which is already a set of limitations, but it's a far cry from the masculine, feminine or other that Google gives you, for example. And there were things like and neutroid was the centre, and then there was stuff like a splat, and all these kind

of great sort of cyber words, cyber bacterial words describing these possibilities of gender, which were undefined in themselves, apart from the kind of resonance of the word. But just that possibility of a spectrum, I think, was really interesting as far as semiotic coding goes. Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that in relation to porn as well, where a lot of the kind of some early pro-sex porn studies work, with talking about how, oh yeah, you can use online porn, you know, it's freely available, it's coming in from sort of all different areas, you can choose what you want to like experiment with, you can kind of like, yeah, watch, you can watch like gay porn, and then you can watch straight porn, you

you know, the one or the other and there's a whole spectrum of stuff in between. But there's this kind of tendency to valorise the kind of the digital as this space of gender and sexual possibility, which especially in the case of porn, I think, ignores a lot of the ways in which it is quite heavily regulated. So it's a very active of categorisation. and even on free porn sites it's not just like an open kind of river of delicious smut that you just kind of flow through you're constantly being asked to choose select, pick and you're kind of put in this position of shaping your sexual identity through essentially consumer preference and so I think

I also kind of, as I think you know it might have come up in conversations with us before I'm always a little bit wary about the tendency to relish the digital as this space of gender disembodiment because I'm getting very cautious about the way the body can become kind of occluded or whatever in these kind of discourses I don't think it's enough to be like oh hey we now live in a land of limitless possibilities because I'm in a cyber cafe and I could pretend to be a dick or whatever, a slap. Because I think there needs to be more of a material focus on what's really involved in body movement and gender, I think.

I don't think it's enough just the hope that we've transcended it. I think you have to think really strategically and precisely about how we can use the digital for the basis of a techno-materialist trans-feminism. I think as xeno-feminist politics, we need to be filleting out what is the high-quality context in a cyber-feminist point of view. Because I think there is a lot of stuff which just gets into a kind of a revelling impossibility and also in language and poetics, which is wonderful, but sometimes at the expense of a kind of slightly more like Thaestonian, like, focus on the real world now and like, I don't think

that just wishing to transcend the meat world is sufficient. I think starting from meat is still very necessary. You know? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really important part of what we're trying to set up here is that there is an important role played by biological and material strata and the technology that can intervene there. But as well, it's a shame that Luca's not here because this conversation that she had on Facebook, I think she sent it to us a while ago, Helen, with Choose and Show about the, I mean there was this kind of sticking point about total gender abolitionism

and whether or not you're... I think Katarina Kosova said something like one does not emancipate a category by erasing it. And then this really interesting conversation erupted about whether or not altering biological material strata is enough to entail some kind of revolution in the field of gender politics or not. And I think the idea is that, I mean, it's not, it's absolutely not sufficient. It might not be necessary, but I think it definitely has effects that are important and cannot be neglected in deference to this idea of some kind of natural, original, authentic body.

so I mean these are the two poles that we have to kind of construct ourselves between this idea of complete transcendence of meat space through some kind of digital virtual utopia and then this very heavily naturalistically inflected ideal authentic organic body as well this whole space of movement in between which is this is where the Gil Peterson article is very interesting which has this whole continuum of technological, organic bio-material stuff that can be moved through and manipulated in positive and negative ways, but the key is to

identify the positive ones and figure out how to mobilize the use of those as a political project. Have you read Anne Catherine Hale's book on the post-human? Sorry? Have you read N. Katherine Hales' book on the post? Yeah. Yeah, because I think I had this... All of that is obviously about how information lost its body, and how it could have gone multiple ways, but it became seen as being this disembodied flow. And this is something that happens in Testo Junkie as well, where she's kind of aware... Obviously she's very clued into the importance of embodiment, She is talking about how a world's gender is code and she's thinking about genetic code

and the idea of semiotic code and technical code. And so she kind of, despite being really astute on this in some places, lapses into this idea of disembodiment. So the body, like identity being genetic or being programmed through code and information. but there's this wonderful bit in the in the Hales book she's talking about the like a cybernifics kind of conference and event where one of the very few women who was there crops up in the minutes talking about the material labour required in order to make this happen so the actual it's this kind of little

itty bitty glimmer of the boring grunt work that goes into making books appear, make cybernetics develop as a discipline. And I'll think about maybe... I'll reread it and then come in and talk a little bit about it for next week because it's one of the most incredibly powerful, I think, bit of writing. There's a lot in that book that I really didn't dig. I was a bit bored with all the stuff. I'm sorry, no. my patients were going to war very thin. But this moment where she's talking about this, it's just a really ecstatic theory moment for me where I was reading it and I was just exhilarated by the way she reintroduced the body, reintroduced labor, reintroduced the feminine

into this kind of sphere in a really interesting, engaging and simple way. So I'll go and read it and report back to this one. Also, I've noticed that Luca is back. She's just messaged me on Facebook. So I think she's going to be cropping up in the very... Awesome. In the very near future. I just need to figure out how to call her in and then she'll be in. Oh, awesome. Thank you, Tony. Okay, well, would now be an appropriate time to maybe defer to Ivan, since he's just lit up a cigarette and we're just interrupting in the middle of it. Put it out, come on.

Well, that's actually something that Amy made for my girlfriend. I just It's funny to get some up there. Sorry, Tim. One second. If this works, it's going to make a phone call. It's going to be annoying. So hold on. While we're waiting for Luca, I'm just going to paste in a little chunk of... into the sidebar, a little chunk of an interview that Sadie Plank gave in 1994 where she talks about this problem about the contemporary feminist discourse either being on the side of embodiment or disembodiment, and this problematic space of the in-between, and how that's something that's actually more important

than just escaping off into the virtual. I'll read it out while we're waiting. Basically, the two positions that are established at the minute in contemporary mid-90s feminist discourse are either that you talk about disembodiment or you talk about embodiment. Either you're out of the body in some stratospheric zone or you're in the organism. I think that neither of those are correct. When people talk about getting out of the body, they are still assuming that there is some kind of great transcendent space or heaven for the soul or something non-material at any rate to occupy. And as far as I'm concerned, that isn't there. The universe isn't like that. It's a material process, not some sort of idealist construction.

So you can't get out of matter. that's the crucial thing but you can get out of the confining organization of matter which is shaped into things and of course organisms So the point is religious thing in this desire for technological transcendence which is the transposing of the religious desire to escape materiality to go into a techno realm of perfection Yeah, absolutely. And this is connected, interestingly enough, to the historical denigration of, in feminist discourse, of reason as something that's a particularly masculine trait because of this idea that there's some kind of, and this is something we should talk about in the last week, these different delineations of reason.

But this received notion of reason as an instrumental idea that is gunning for some kind of transcendent space or trying to transcend embodiment and materiality, which is typically conceived in the discourse as a kind of feminine domain. And this is a completely problematic construction that we need to kind of rethink. But I won't open a whole kettle of worms there. We can do that in the last week when we talk about reason specifically. Petra, I just put the link for the interview in the sidebar for you. The plugin for the conference is not working right now, so continue and I'll try to fix

it up to get Luca in. Did you want to kind of take the reins, Ivan, and do your little presciato thing? Yeah, I didn't read the whole book, and Helen's covered most of the points a lot better. I just had a few little observations as well. I was thinking a lot of not so much... Not so much. Yeah, biopolitics, before he developed biopolitics, he did his History of Sexuality. And he does talk about, he had that 1975 semi-text discussion that got people accusing him of

being a CIA agent where he said, we are not repressed. So even today's pornography, it's all categorized. the further discussion of sexuality, it seems to be liberatory, but in essence it's actually a way of normalising what is normal. If you go to any sort of psychiatric appointment, you have to do a bunch of checklists, and it's all to define these statistically defined models of what's normal. And Preciado does a good job of expanding that to gender as well. So, yes, if you do identify as trans in any way, you can go and undergo a transition.

However, this is where Gil Peterson is really interesting because I kind of mentioned that in the chat. She kind of takes the options given to her as a subject of today and goes with them. And then Gil Peterson kind of goes and looks at the science of endocrinology and how it was influenced at the turn of the century by sort of gender and race ideas of precocious non-white females and men who undergo, who are just more sexually active because of the heaps and the tropical zones they're in. and it's almost like she gets problematic because of that personal thing.

So the novelty she's doing is she's taking a hormone. But there is a lot of other work. Even you know Nick Land better than me, but he took a lot of drugs as well as a form of self-experimentation. It brings even back the idea of transgression in a Bataille sense of finding an outside via transgression, whereas probably a more constructive way would be to take a step up the ladder of knowledge, of that knowledge production chain and research endocrinology and pharmaceuticals and the laws surrounding even, you know, psychedelics and hormones to really operate a true change to give us new options.

because otherwise there's a real limitation to personal transgression as the mode of resistance, I feel. But I do like her point as well where she talks about what came first, the substance or the disease, and she talks about this at the beginning. She mentions what came first, Prozac or infertility, the pill, depression or Prozac, and it is really true today you know I can more come from like a a dopaminergic substance perspective and we were discussing last night kind of the whole range of substances that operate on dopamine they still operate on dopamine in very similar fashions they're either antagonists

or agonists create more dopamine in the brain which is very much linked to satisfaction capitalism and competition However, there's acceptable ways of, there's acceptable substances and there's then stuff that non-whites use and then there's high class substances like cocaine. So yeah, it's a very interesting text on that level. I don't see it as having so much revolutionary potential. I really like the Gil-Peterson article for that reason. We have the intelligence and knowledge to, say, revise endocrinology, to look at all these myths. An example of self-experimentation that was really useful

was Alexander Shulgin, who went about and studied hundreds and hundreds of phenomines and tryptamines, but he had the knowledge as well to do so so he didn't just take a bunch of random strange drugs he left us with these two phone books of knowledge on pharmacology and psychedelics and that would be an ideal kind of acceleration is sort of feminist subject who's able to if we could revolutionize an endocrinologist or someone who could start looking at these things from that sort of knowledge perspective then we wouldn't be just us and we're doomed to fail but not not out of because it's bad don't go there and merely out of it's

an epistemological limit it's a limit to our knowledge as individuals and individuals experimenting with drugs or hormones will always be um be a bit impaired from a lack of knowledge. That was my take on it. That was awesome. Thank you Ivan. One of the things that I think my reaction to when I first read Tesla Junkie was a bit like, no. Having read descriptions of it and having having read blurbs a bit, I was really expecting a text that was about trying to transform biotechnical hegemony, something that was really thinking about how to rebuild the body

and something that was a bit more collective and a bit more transformative in that way. And so I was kind of expecting it to be a little bit more kind of along an acceleration line and then was quite disappointed that I kind of encountered. But because, I mean, one thing that like Presciano doesn't talk about and that I think is kind of quite, would be quite an obvious part to start any kind of analysis on pharmacopornographic It's stuff like cognitive enhancers. So, you know, the kind of things which circulate quite widely on the black market already as a tool for all the kind of grey, murky, muddy markets. You know, stuff like Modafinil, Adderall, stuff that's kind of, you know, around and

available and lots of people use as part of the auto experimentation, the principle of being auto-agentive. But it kind of doesn't play in so much into her radical reimagining of pharmaceuticals or this kind of attempt to resist through compliance. Because rather than stuff like testosterone or other drugs which enable kind of supposed sexual or gender transgressions, cognitive enhancers are a way of better adapting the body and mind to contemporary conditions of work. You know, this idea that there is only so much that we can do, but we're expected to

do more, so we will use pharmaceuticals to make us more able to handle the contemporary challenges of hyper-employment, as we were talking about last week. And that's exactly what's an improvement, but for what? To be a better capitalist? To be a better... yeah. Yeah, so she tactically misses that out. She doesn't really talk about something where it is really like, where those implicit possibilities for resistance are kind of less obvious. She kind of goes for something where it is, if you point out, it plays more into existing ideas of revolution of transgression, which I think is very, very problematic. Yeah, which isn't of course to say that cognitive enhancers are inherently bad.

It's to say that it's strategically left out. I think of course there are possibilities that we could use drugs that enhance our ability to concentrate to get our work done quicker so we can spend more time having massive roles. But she just sort of leaves that out which I think is quite interesting. And there's similar debates happening around stuff like soylent and food replacement. Where this idea that on the one hand it means you don't have to worry about constantly fueling the body, you don't have to give up time to fuel the body, and then you can spend more time doing stuff that you actually want to do and be independent of the need of substance to the same extent. But then there's the other point of view which is well, is then how about will our employers

get rid of our lunch breaks and expect us to chug at our desk. I think it's really, really important to recognize that there is no inherent revolutionary possibility or inherent kind of constricting possibility within specific technologies. Oh, hello, is that Luca? Can you hear me? I can hear you, yeah, I can hear you. Oh, wonderful, alright, I got a chat. I heard you narrowed your arms, you're brief. I'm invisible, but I've managed to get on. I had to do some tinkering. Okay, sorry to interrupt. Please continue. I'm running to the end of the thought there. Can you see us, Luca? Can you see the comments? I can see the comment.

I can see everything. Okay, cool. I did it. I am thumbing you up. Sorry, Helen. I was thinking it. I was thinking as well of, you know, under the principle of radical equality, getting away from this labour and even division of intellectual domains, you know, the workers and the thinkers, that really does speak to someone who is interested or has a tendency, an interest in these domains involving pentacles, endocrinology, medical science to really, from an accelerationist perspective, get involved in that sort of labor of understanding what

medical science gives to us as truth, as normality, as the correct way to take certain drugs or not take certain drugs, rather than this kind of punk sort of I'm going to be a human guinea pig, which I know is very present in people who take all sorts of experimental research drugs. and I think it's a lot more constructive. Shulgin to me seems a real... If we had like a Shulgin for an endocrinologist Shulgin or a cognitive enhancement Shulgin today, that would be fantastic. So any psychopharmacologists out there that we can radicalise... I've got a question on that account.

This idea that there can be, I suppose, a scientific, institutional, epistemological entity that is incorporating these kind of projects and, I suppose, executing them on a scale, which obviously needs to have some kind of political backing behind it in order to be instituted in the first place. and not so much the kind of individualistic, romantic, preciado kind of self-administration of drugs as a kind of project of the self. But as Petra kind of mentioned in the comments there,

black market custom HRT routines organized by message boards and reminded me of something that, Luca, you were saying at PATH about the possibility of 3D printing hormone gels and this kind of DIY culture that's grown up around the latent possibilities of these new technologies where it's really not that inconceivable that there'll be widespread access to all kinds of biological substances for kind of home modification just because you can you can print you can print it at home and you can

you know obtain it on the internet and have these kind of not individualistic but still this punk collective what am I trying to say this connects also to this idea of at the very end of the Gill Peterson reading where he's talking about the fact that this kind of technology needs to take on forms of autonomy. On page 414 he argues right at the end in the conclusion. So he talks about this idea of it becoming an ecological politics which is sort of plugged

into this kind of vibrant materialism and a kind of animism, which I think can be a little bit problematic on its own terms. And then connects this to a sort of critique of a particular understanding of the Enlightenment legislative impetus, and then kind of opposes this with this sort of idea of these autonomous forms of technobiological intervention. But I think there's a spectrum of those possibilities and the institutional form or the scientific and epistemological form that you talk about, Ivan, is going to have the biggest large scale effects but it's not at all to undermine these DIY approaches as well.

Absolutely. Yeah, we just open ourselves to critique when people can embrace these failed cases. There's even a case of a guy, I think Alexander Trocchi, who intentionally became a heroin junkie to write books on it. We don't want to be that romantic figure, that romantic tragic figure. Even though not, there is, yeah, there is middle ground between the Habermasian, you know, and punk collectives of highly skilled people who put their knowledge to a project. I really like that point. Yeah. Did you want to? Sorry. Sorry. I was just going to say, like, obviously, kind of the way that my paper played out was

I was really focusing on how there were some points in test that were quite different from where I would imagine a Xeno7S kind of position coming from. And particularly the way that we kind of, and we've been talking a lot about how it doesn't seem to tap into some of the momentum of an accelerationist moment in the way that some of us may have envisaged that it might. But I did just want to say a few words about some of the points of kind of confidence as well. So, I mean, so there are, I think, some comparisons with a broadly accelerationist project. So, Testo Junkie revolves around the strategic misuse of fiber tech, after all, and the repurposing of technology has long been recognized as one of accelerationism's flagship policies.

And when I say policies, I mean whatever, and when I say long been recognized, I mean for the past months or however long accelerationism has been around. As Sernick and Williams write of workplace technology, so in Inventing the Future, which is Nick Sernick and Alex Williams' next book, they write that the given technology always exists in excess of the purposes it may have been designed for. Even granting the strong argument that all technology has been designed solely for control and exploitation, it still would not hold that these technologies could only be used for these purposes. design does not end with the launch of a technology rather the design, meaning and impact of a technology is constantly shifting

altering as users transform it and as innovations continue to emerge moreover the conditions of genesis are not equivalent to the conditions of persistence and the limited uses made of a technology at a particular time do not exhaust its potential future so yeah, I mean obviously BP's voluntary intoxication protocol quite literally embodies this kind of principle deploying testosterone in ways that run counter to medically sanctioned uses in order to kind of re-engineer gender and sexuality. And as you kind of talk about the Gail Peterson, I have it printed out somewhere but I don't have it in front of me but there's that moment at the end where what is kind of being said is like oh it's already kind of

infiltrating the kind of our environment, our cultural environment, our physical environment is already kind of infiltrated with testosterone and what we need to do is to develop a more purposeful politics of it, one that's about seizing it rather than being victim to it being active in relation to things that are already out there rather than just kind of like letting it wash over us and I kind of think that there is that point but what frustrates me about Cresto Yarder is there's not enough saying, okay, well, this is how we do it or this is how we take it further. I don't want to totally shit on Testo Junkie because I think it's such a great book and it just is always on my mind right now. But I enjoy the longings that I feel when I read it for something more.

And I want to do stuff with it and push it further. and this is what I would hope that we might kind of begin with. You know? Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yes, I would concur with that. Can... is my volume okay? Can you hear me? You sound great. Yeah, can you... Can you...? Okay. So I'm kind of like not caught up, but I read Testo Junkie earlier with you, and I thought

that I agree that it's like very useful and problematic in the ways that you mentioned. And one thing I think is that in the most exciting kind of accelerationist in the way that I understand it kind of way, a lot has changed since it was written in 2009. things like Bitcoin and like widely available prepaid anonymous credit cards at like 7-elevens, you know, which is where like you hang out when you're in high school, you know, like and you have an open campus. So like these are everywhere in the environment in a way

that they weren't. And what that means for, like, much younger people is that their relationship to, like, the pharmacopornological complex, if I have that right, is, like, very quickly been renegotiated. but of course only under certain privileges, only within certain classes and geographical locations and whatnot, where these things are common. But on top of that, there are much younger projects, like things called smart contracts.

I can't remember the name of the group that does this project. but if anybody knows Rob Myers he's written a lot about this but what they are is like they use the Bitcoin block structure if you know anything about that they take that code which is open source and they alter it a lot because it is known to be fairly problematic in terms of it being like really actually much more pseudonymous than anonymous, than the people who use it might prefer to think when they're using it, because all transactions are by necessity

encoded in all other transactions. So they take from this code, and they do what's called smart contracts, which kind of are like programmable syndicalism in a way, I'm not actually like, I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to a lot of Marxism and vocabulary, but what looks to me like a kind of imminent syndicate inside of the smart contract wherein a transaction is mediated by this macro block structure inside of all other transactions.

And the two parties are kind of technologically compelled to very carefully consider the consent that they give in the context of this transaction. And so two parties have to put their variable into this transaction. You know, it's much unlike a currency because, I don't know, it's much more specific a trade of two self-defined services or goods or whatever. It's quite open technology.

I wish I could remember the more specific name of it, but I can provide better links later. Sorry. if that was just going on for too long. No, that was really, really interesting. I mean, I'm not quite sure how I can... No, no, no, no. Sorry, I'm having some... You okay, Luca? Hi. Helen, sorry, did you have a question? No, no, did you just say something, or did someone else say something? Sorry, I'm getting a bit lost here. No, but... Oh, okay. No, that was really interesting. I mean, I'm not quite sure how I can kind of add to that,

other than I want to go off and now have a good rifle through and have a real think about this, and it's actually really helpful in terms of maybe steering kind of my brain and our brains as a liberaleric onyx in an interesting direction. So that was very generous. Thank you very much for kind of articulating what was obviously quite kind of a complex point. Like, if I haven't gone on for too long, I can make that more of a question. I can't guarantee that any of us will be able to answer it, but please, please do. Oh, okay. Sorry, just give me one sec.

So, I think what that has to do is what is problematic in Testo Junkie, I think, but probably less problematic in terms of what is happening now. And I wonder, like, specific to what you find problematic in Testo Junkie, which I think is interesting. Maybe what I mentioned is maybe in the context of your objections, maybe,

like if you can say anything about that is my question. Probably not very much, if I'm quite honest. I mean, I think, I totally think that your point that the entire technical and biotechnical kind of landscape has transformed since the text was written. And actually, I think it's really important to reposition the book in terms of the way that things kind of have evolved. But in terms of the specifics, I'm not sure I can do anything very interesting without thinking about it a bit more. It might be that some of the other laborio-cabronics xenobitches, as we effectively call ourselves,

might be able to respond a little bit better. But I would definitely need to digest in order to be able to frame a response that is appropriate, I think. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts that you could offer, like, within New Warrior, Cibonix and beyond. I don't actually have to get my head around the blockchain a little bit more before I can give any reasonable answer. But I think maybe we need to have a xenofeminist Bitcoin or blockchain working group to develop these kind of ideas. But yeah, for the moment, I've got, I really need, looking at this Rob

Meyer's website, Petra, it looks really interesting, but I need to sort of read the project and get a better grasp on it. Are you familiar with it, Luca? With the blockchain, I'm definitely under-familiar with it. With the black market in general and the internet-based black market, I'm kind of jumping in midstream here and just trying to get my bearings, so do steer me as we go. As far as, just to take the concrete case there, the accessibility of sexual hormones,

for example, this is how just inestimably, ah, that's a word I can't say out loud, a huge effect, a huge effect on just how accessible HRT hormones are to trans people. Sorry, I'm totally losing my train of thought now that I'm speaking. And I think this is probably the single largest factor for breaking down sort of the existing extremely heteronormative, extremely conservative and, you know, as reactionary as it was enabling gatekeeping system that ran from like say the 60s to the late 90s and early 2000s. I don't know how much of this you've already covered, but you know that it used to be the

case at least, and still is to some extent, that if you wanted to access cross-sex hormones, if you wanted to access any kind of transitional care, it came in pretty much one block package which could only be obtained through an extremely rigorous gatekeeping procedure. You basically had to embody a whole battery of antiquated sexual stereotypes, present yourself more or less as a largely 1950s-ish white heterosexual image of what a man or a woman was, that you were screened out to only a very small percentage of trans people

were able to access care. or not they were given treatment depended on things like their passability, their heterosexuality, them having the correct kind of family history, fitting into certain psychoanalytic understandings of the ideology of transsexuality, and so on. It was very much a system that was really anxiously trying to re-territorialize sex after this sort of catastrophe in the 50s where the possibility of sex changes caught the medical system off guard and caught the existing order of the sexes completely off guard.

And so there was a lot of backtracking there and even a lot of the key concepts we used to understand the trans experience and transition, they have their roots in this kind of conservative re-territorializing process, which I think is definitely something that both Peterson and Perciato are kind of running up against here. And something that you see Sandy Stone, for example, in her Empire Strikes Back essay really battling against. Okay, so there was that. Now one of the things that really eroded that, I started this with the black market. Sorry if I'm just trying to grab all my little train of thought at once here. Okay, so what's had to do with the black market there is that I don't think this really would

have been eroded by just trans activism alone or feminist activism alone if it weren't for the fact that with the dawn of the internet age, not only did you have trans people being able to organize and really constitute themselves as a global population, whereas before we were just a bit too few and far between to do that effectively outside of really large cities. So not only did you have that huge shift in the connectivity of the trans population, you also had the emergence of a black market for hormones and equally importantly, to use

a cliché from the 90s, a democratization of knowledge, a democratization of endocrinological know-how. This was actually one of the cases where it really did play out like all the 90s postmodernists and cyberfeminists thought it was going to. The way like all those utopian predictions about knowledge all of a sudden being in everyone's hands, everyone can make themselves an expert in whatever field they like. This actually did come true to a large extent in terms of the world of black market hormones. it became possible to teach yourself, if not bring yourself up to expert status quickly, at least teach yourself enough endocrinological know-how to administer these hormones relatively safely.

In some cases with better expertise than your average GP would have just because you'd put more time and effort into it. And if every trans person who was shut out of this sort of gatekeeping system was able to access these chemicals themselves and know how to administer them themselves, then the gatekeeping system could only stand to lose in relevance and control and fail in sort of their mission of, you know, their good old medical mission of reducing harm and so on if they continued to maintain these stringent standards. This also caused, this also led to the eruption of this highly visible trans population that

did not fit this conservative image of what a trans person was. So it really challenged the system on that level too. Okay, I feel like I'm totally speaking into a void here and losing track of what I'm saying. The weird thing about... Yeah, okay, not having any sound effects or any crowd sounds, it's really weird. Okay, so hopefully that wasn't too, I don't know. That was great. I think that was great, yeah. So yeah, Bitcoin's definitely like a step in that direction, like a part of that process. But I wouldn't say that a revolutionary change to the black market hasn't happened with Bitcoin. It was more a matter of degree. Yeah. So what you have with like Silk Road and Bitcoin and so on,

it's like definitely what we had before but more so. But you could already get them from like Southeast pharmacies and stuff. I did for a little while before I yeah in another way like they're as easy to buy as like cigarettes maybe were from like cigarette machines that are now banned everywhere I don't know if those were a thing anywhere I kind of remember them from being really young but like anyone with cash could go buy cigarettes from a cigarette machine and the same is true of hormone meds now So, I mean, I guess one effect that has to be taken into is that this has changed the

official system as well. This didn't just provide an alternative to it, but now it is, as a result, easier to get a legitimate prescription and have it covered under socialized Medicare. So there is a kind of interplay between the black market and the above board state healthcare systems, which is worth pointing out. I think that is worth pointing out.

Okay, I'll go ahead. I think it is worth pointing out that it's a force on the market in a really interesting way, like on the pharmaceutical complex that is in review here. Like, because it's, like, within and orthogonal to it, in a way. Like, it's kind of maybe, like, a recapitulation of these biotechnical, you know, like, instruments that can't come from the gate.

And at the same time, it's, like, the streets used for those technologies that are, like, always so interesting and cyberpunk. And that actually is true. 7-Eleven is the window of the Silk Road. and all of the other related services and markets and whatever you want to call those systems, which are all based in various cryptocurrencies that can be acquired from cash at any 7-Eleven,

which is part of the street. like 7-Eleven is the street it's a really nice point that 7-Eleven is the street it is that weird sort of nexus where you often go behind to get drugs and as well where you can get the legal drugs as well like the aspirin and the caffeine and it's whatever economic neighbourhood you are from you would you would have probably you would know a 7-Eleven, so it's very kind of class neutral as well. It would be, yeah, it would be really interesting. Like, I imagine, like, a 7-Eleven noir where, like,

you can watch how the products purchased and available at 7-Elevens in different neighbourhoods are tailored to the tastes of those neighbourhoods. Like, I know for, like, near where I work, which is at, like, a private school one in a very rich neighborhood, they sell a lot of like Yerba, like extra caffeinated Yerba mate in a can at 7-Eleven, but like by my house, they sell like Arizona iced tea in a can. I just think that's an interesting like typology. That's really interesting. Someone should do an ethnography of 7-Elevens across the globe, and it makes me think of

Neil Stephenson's book, Snow Crash, where there's kind of you can acquire citizenship to 7-Elevens or some equivalent chain franchise stores in like some post-apocalyptic semi-dystopia. So, yeah, this is a really... No, not if you had something to say there, because I was just going to ask to be brought up to speed in general terms, just to know where we were at with the discussion of, you know, technicity and so on. But please go ahead, you had a more targeted point.

I was just going to say that this is an interesting area of investigation to the points of availability for these technologies and the distribution along other lines, like not just gender lines, but through class and race. But that was really... I mean, I was just sort of making that explicit other than saying anything new. Like, just to say very quickly, like it's almost like as part of the street, 7-Eleven is that strange, dark shadow of social technology that maybe a detective once was,

where they could move through all these different social strata very freely. like 7-Eleven is that it is this strange like shadow and like portal to bizarre under technologies for across all strata or across certain or many strata oh I just coughed right into the microphone didn't even realize that I thought my mic was off Sorry, guys. I think this taps into generally a broader point. I'm just trying to remember where I was reading about this. And it was actually not Preciado. It was a book that I think I taught in this biopolitics course right after Testo Junkie.

And that was William Garriott's book, Policing Methamphetamine. I think there's a link to it available on my biopolitics syllabus, which I'll link to in a bit. And just sort of the phenomenon that both Garriott and Preciado are talking about is this relation basically between the white market and the black market, and just what a moving curtain this distinction is. What we have, especially in the case of pharmaceuticals, is a tremendous amount of what I think Gary calls pharmaceutical leakage. Here he's mostly talking about this in the context of amphetamines.

But just to give one example here, let's see if I can find this figure. I mean, this is one of those memorable statistics that just kind of seems to capture so much. Okay, here we go. I'll just read this passage here. So, from 1958 to 1970, the annual legal production of amphetamines grew from 3.5 billion to 10 billion tablets. This is legal production. Approximately 20 million prescriptions were written each year during the 60s, peaking in 1967 when 31 million prescriptions for amphetamines were written. Even so, licit production consistently exceeded licit use. Of the 100,000 pounds of pharmaceutical amphetamine produced each year up to 71,

it is estimated that between one-half and two-thirds were diverted to the illicit market. So we're not talking about just like a little bit of leakage over the top per number here, But in the case of pharmaceuticals, for example, we're looking at an industry that is at least, in some cases, half to two-thirds illegal. And these are the above board major companies and so on. And so there's something really interesting here. We see this with sex hormones as well. I don't know the figures on that, but I imagine they'd be comparable. You know, just, yeah, I mean, if you look at the demand, for example, for, you know,

oh, hey, that's an incredible percentage, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the case there would say, like, with estrogen or testosterone, especially with estrogen, which flows just a little bit more freely than testosterone for, like, various legal reasons. You know, most, I think a huge portion of the consumption is on the black or gray markets. Now, what sort of point to draw from that? I wonder if I can...let's see, there's another point I had in my mind. Maybe if I start talking, they'll link up. So Peterson's essay...I mean, this is an essay that kind of really excited me and irritated me in almost exactly equal measures, but one of the points that I really liked was just the sort of...

the general point about technicity and teleology. He sort of sums it up nicely with reference to that Audre Lorde quote that, it's not so much that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, but that the tools are not technically defined by their use by any master, human or otherwise. And just this, I mean, it's a very simple, very almost kind of like truism once you point it out, but just that it's the sort of thing that can only really be forgotten in academic discussions, where something being, you know, originally purposed in this or that way somehow determines its destiny in a way that's just unescapable. So, you know, you get these general criticisms about, like, you know, the Enlightenment, for example, was viewed as a tool,

or instrumental reason, for example, being seen as just, you know, wholly conscripted to a very particular teleology. Whereas just, I mean, this is a basic point that anything produced at all is going to be co-optable and hackable. Everything is going to have this degree of leakage. And it's just a matter of finding ways to instrumentalize that. I mean, this is the sort of thing that, again, when you say it, it sounds so obvious it barely bears mention. But it's amazing how often it seems to be included in very sophisticated discussions. No, that's not... It does. That's it. You're right. I really like that as well.

This might be a more general point about instrumentality as such is that, I mean, I mean, about teleology, I mean, anything, any kind of project, any attempt to sort of substantiate some ends in the world, or to actualize some ends in the world, is going to be necessarily mediated by the stuff of that world. It's going to be materially or technologically mediated, in the most general terms. And anything that's technologically mediated is going to have, you know, a kind of, it's something that can kind of be hacked into from the side. It's not going to be something that's going to be wholly determined by the

the end towards which it's projected. If it were, then it wouldn't make sense to say it was mediated. So any organization of means and ends is going to be something that can be hacked. Any market is going to generate its black market, at least potentially. Any project can be, to use like a 90s-ism, subverted or repurposed. I guess this is something that's, again, even though it's a truism, I think it does sort of mark a kind of dividing line between these kinds of dirty hands enlightenment projects

like accelerationism or xenofeminism. That we're not after purity in the least. We don't think it's worth fussing over. But we're also not so much, it's not that we're unworried about our projects being corruptible by these nefarious, like, nightly midends. But we intend to do the corrupting of these projects towards other ends. I don't know. Again, it sounds like a truism, but... Wasn't that something Helen said? I think I took it in my notes. That came from Testo Junkie

about not differentiating between complicity. Helen, maybe you remember that. Your mic's off, Helen. There we go. Got it. There's a really weird noise I keep hearing, like kind of rumbling. I don't know, I'm not quite sure what it is. That's right, Helen. Oh, is it? You're rumbling, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was talking about resistance through compliance. Is that what you were talking about, Petra? Yeah, I think so. I think that that connects to what Luca was just saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can you say any more about what you were saying earlier then, that Luca missed? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I was just chatting about this idea that Testo Junkie represents this kind of resistance through compliance, whereby she kind of, she doesn't try and resist the basic tenets of the pharmacopornographic bio-capitalism that she critiques. So she doesn't try and say like, okay, well, we should ban pornography because it is bad, and we should get rid of all of these, all the drugs which relate to big pharma because they're all so bad and they're built on the back of these kind of like poor suffering animals and

and people who are excluded she starts from the point of view that we kind of we are where we are and we you know and essentially this idea that the only way the only way back is through you know this like this idea which is kind of like quite an accelerationism related one but she's kind of Let me dig up a kind of juicy quote from her. So she sounds like, I think Presciardo really strikes me as kind of like a sexual accelerationist when she declares that it's impossible to go back to the romanticism of a non-public sexuality or to attain a private and non-industrialized body. From now on, in fact, it's a matter of inventing other common shared collective forms of sexuality that extend beyond the narrow framework of the dominant pornographic representation

and standardized sexual consumption. And then we can kind of compare that to, like Sir Nicholas Williams' claim, that the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism. So, yeah, so basically the only way out for Presciado, as much as for less acceleration is, it's not back but through. So there's no recovery of the time before pharmacopornographic biocapitalism, and it's up to the kind of contemporary queer subjects to appropriate the tools for hand in order to push the existing order towards kind of more emancipatory, less-shit new territories.

And I think the key thought behind this is the fact that there is, I mean, we're all in this. There is not really an outside space from which to wage any kind of operation of resistance. This is our only choice, in a way, as people who are embedded heavily in the system. And there's another... I'm going to read out another passage from Testo Junkie that made me think of the accelerationist agenda, which is on page 113, where she writes, if the concept of gender has introduced a rift the precise reason is that it represents the first self-conscious moment within the epistemology of sexual difference from this point on there is no going back

money is to the history of sexuality what Hegel is to the history of philosophy and Einstein to the conception of space-time it is the beginning of the end the explosion of sex, nature nature history, time and space as linearity and extension and then I'll skip forward a little bit when I bring up the idea of a rift introduced by the notion of gender I'm not claiming to be referring to the passage from one political paradigm to a radically distinct other or to an epistemological rupture that will give rise to a form of radical discontinuity rather I'm referring to a superimposition of strata in which different techniques of producing and managing life are interlacing and overlapping The pharmacopornographic body is not passive living matter, but a techno-organic interface, which is what Peterson's talking about, too.

A techno-living system segmented and territorialised by different textual data processing, biochemical, political technologies. So there's already this complete rejection of the fact that there's an imaginary space outside from which a revolution or a resistance can be waged. the methodology that we have at our disposal is this reappropriation of the tools that exist. Like you said, Luca, the subversion and retooling of them. I like that techno-organic interface. That's a fantastic point. And it speaks also not to this transcendence

by technology we spoke of, but rather possibilities, corporeal and material possibilities which are not defined from this regime. So rather than transcendence it's… Should we talk a little bit about the idea, this idea of the originary technicity of the body that's foregrounded in the Gil Peterson article? Yeah, a very butlerian kind of point I think he makes there, where obviously the

key butler point, I think it's in her article Imitation and Gender Interordination, she talk about this idea of the butch-femme couple and all kind of the lesbian or gay couple being seen as a bad copy of an original kind of heterosexual couple. So this idea that it's somehow, that those kind of relationships are trying to ape or appropriate something that they can't be. They'll never be the original. They're just sort of a copy that is aspiring to be something it can't be. And then what she does is she sets about trying to destabilize the assumption

that the heterosexual relationship is itself in any way original. So she stresses that it is always itself a copy of this kind of idealized notion of what a heterosexual relationship is. And so it's kind of quite one of the classic tropes of queer theory, I guess, like questioning the idea of the original. Which then, I guess, plays into a lot of the stuff that keeps cropping up around xenofeminism in terms of questioning the natural and the holistic, never trying to fall back onto this idea that there's something that already exists that we should valorise. And that the technicity of the body and the idea of the...

is always already there to some extent. It's just some examples are more obvious than others. And this is kind of one of the issues with discourse on the cyborg, I think, is that the word cyborg brings to mind something that seems like it should be very obvious, that it is all about these kind of cumbersome external prostheses, which makes the cyborg kind of obvious and marks it very clearly for what it is. Whereas something that TestoJunkie is very good on is pointing out that there are a lot of technologies which are less obvious that circulate and exist. from... So when she's talking about the pharmakon, she extends that notion of the pharmakon of not just to drugs and pharmaceuticals

but to text, to symbols, to things that can kind of we can ingest to induce new affects. That is a kind of more generalised notion. That is itself a technology, if that makes sense. again it is one o'clock here so it might not make any sense at all I don't know if it makes sense but I like the way it sounds well that's one thing I think I need to kind of clarify it for myself a bit but yeah just essentially this idea that when we're talking about the technologies which shape themselves we're not just thinking about the things which are obviously technologies or at least Presciado is not just thinking about those things.

She's thinking about a whole spectrum of things, which is why she can talk about pornography and pharmaceuticals together, why she can form this cumbersome neologism of pharmacopornographics because both of them are associated with these ideas of the pharmaceuticals. They are both technologies of pseudocamity, technologies of affect, and they induce specific effects. We can use texts and symbols as much as we can use drugs in order to make ourselves feel something. I mean, and that's just obvious from the idea of rhetoric, right? The idea that you can make an impassioned speech and make people believe. For Preciado, those are in themselves kind of technology.

What do you think of this gesture in general? I mean, there's a lot here I think is true. You see that transsexuality, for example, is just an expression of the body's original or originaly technicity, the mutability of gender and so on. And so, or that the cyborg isn't such a big shift because, oh, look, we were always cyborgs. And I think that there's something—I mean, there's definitely a true element in this. I think there is something correct in seeing these phenomena as kind of topping potentials

that were already there in the base that they supplement or that they seem to depart from. At the same time, I think—I mean, David Rodin makes this point in his post-humanism book, that there is something slightly conservative to this gesture as well, and slightly obfuscatory. It seems that if the body is always already technical, if gender and sex is always already unstable and non-dimorphic and so on, then the comforting message at the end is that the Christine Jorgensen story broke, nothing really happened, for example. That there was

no real great change in the world, for example. There was no real threat. And yeah, I think there's definitely, like I said, there's truth to that, and that it's always important to sort of find the conditions for what happens in what was already there. But the way David sort of spins this out with reference to post-humanism is that this kind of what he calls this sort of critical post-humanism, the sort of post-humanism that sees the post-human as having always already occurred, that the human never really existed as such. Part of the subtext of this is that, so don't worry about these new technological changes, they've already happened, no big disruption is in the cards.

I think it's equally important to see, with respect to the human or with respect to men or women or sex or what have you, that as much as on some level we're just sort of looking at completely discontinuous movements, topping resources that were already there, there's still a tremendously, I think, significant symbolic rupture that happens. in the pre-existing organizational principles for the way sex was understood and governed and lived has changed somewhat. You know, it wasn't just kind of like a total, it wasn't like for nothing there that, you

know, when like Christine Jorgensen is sort of like struggling to find like words to describe her experience, describe her discovery that, oh my god, I can go into a pharmacy and get my hands on some hormones and change my fucking sex. She compares it to the atom bomb being discovered, to the possibility of fission. There was something major there. So I'm sort of suspicious of these efforts that you see both on this general theoretical level with Peterson, but also on the level of the increasingly popular self-understanding, some sort of personal narratives of trans experience, to minimize this, which I think

is a very difficult to deny experience of a break. There is some cut there, there is some break, and there is some important difference that happens and that's experienced. you know it is I think on the personal level transitions and experience that has I mean the only kind of I think parallels in terms of magnitude are on the level of like childbirth and death I mean this is like a major experience a major disruption and transformation of what you were and on the social level as well too I mean that you know after the 50s like sex is not the same anymore Like, something happened in this axis that, in some form or another, has organized virtually all of human history in various modalities, in various forms.

So, yeah, I don't know. That's my thought. Sort of maybe an old lumber-splitter dichotomy I'm picking on there. That's a really great point, Luca. Yeah, I really like that point. We can't compare technicity as the stick that the primordial human used to today's technology. There is something new we have to negotiate with and deal with, and there's been lots of breaks. That's a really good point. That's almost highlighting the other extreme, like the other extreme of let's just continue as we always are. It's a great point. Thank you, Adam. Yeah, I agree. I think there's a lot to absorb from that, that actually acknowledging that there is novelty

and there are moments and it is important to privilege those rather than to do this kind of reading from the present where, okay, well, we are where we are, so there must always have been this possibility implicit in what came before, which is obviously true, but recognizing the breaks and the heritages and the genealogies is really important. I think a lot of the time why that point gets made about the we have never been human kind of point, is to try and flag up the sheer amount of effort that goes into upholding the idea of the original. The amount of work and labour that goes into saying, well, there is something that has always been this way, that there is something that is kind of new.

of the things that really struck me in recent weeks about some of the discourse around the cyborg for example, and maybe this kind of run thing because we'll be doing next week is I read a 1995 article with Manfred, an interview with Manfred Klein, because obviously Manfred Klein, and Nathan Klein who coined the term cyborg in the 60s in relation to aeronautics. And so I kind of read this interview with him where he's saying loads of stuff about how we have become a simple cyborg when we put on a pair of glasses. We've become a simple cyborg when we learn to ride a bike. You know, stressing all these things that basically the idea of the cyborg is about a technologically enabled human enlargement

of function. But then he kind of, he later in the interview pulls up shorts and makes a really weird, weird comment where he says that the idea of cyborg in no way implies an it. It's a he or a she. It is either a male or female cyborg. It's not an it. It's an absurd mistake. The cyborgs are capable of the same emotional expression and experience as an uncyborg. So the gender bet he's like, okay, so there's cyborginess in no way impacts some gender. And then he follows that up by saying the cyborg per se, talking now of men and women who have altered themselves in various cyborgian ways, in no way has that altered their sexuality. It hasn't altered their essential identity. And I think the work that he is

that he's doing there in terms of trying to protect gender and sex as a sphere from which no technical intervention can change it, something that remains essential, is a way of trying to make the idea of the cyborg less terrifying to a certain set of people. And again, this brings me back to the N. Katherine Hale's work, where she's talking about Norbert Weiner and cybernetics and the way that there's this kind of insistence upon liberal humanism in some of his work that kind of doesn't stick with some of the kind of subcontents, but always wanting to draw limits around the potential of these technologies and ideas to try and defend it, you know, and just defend some kind of continuing essence of the human being.

I guess in order to make stuff seem less scary or make it seem like you haven't unleashed a really terrible can of woollens, but with a complete disregard for the people for whom the idea of gender and sex being always the way they are is totally crap. You know, a complete disregard that, like, actually it's not comforting for a lot of people to think that male and female are essential or that sex is the way it is and it will always be the way it is and no ways that we can use technology will ever change it. That is not a soothing idea for a lot of people who think that the cyborgian re-engineering of embodiment might be massively emancipatory. That's just kind of something that sprang to my mind

as you guys were kind of chatting there. I think that there's some, if there's kind of a way of you know, sublating this old oh look, no, we've always already been this way, you know, like cyborg's nothing new, it's just sort of like da da da, like you know, glasses were already cyborgs walking sticks were already cyborgs, there were shoes and so on, versus like, oh my god, like something has just happened, like something technological has just happened, or has just become possible that changes what humans can be, changes what humans are, you know, might make us no longer human anymore, like this sort of you know, continuity perspective versus the radical break perspective. I think when one of these shifts comes along, whether it's cyborg technology or transgenderism

or what have you, and this is by no means I think just only applies to these sort of changes in the notions of human, but kind of in anything that affects our fundamental concepts in this way, is that they do kind of have this tendency to retroactively cast everything that happened before. It is like, to use an old cliche, it is a paradigm shift. It does change the world in which it occurs. And so you can say we've always been cyborgs, but we haven't always, always been cyborgs. Something happened that made the entirety of human history legible as the history of cyborgism. you know, with the sort of like the sex change event in the mid-20th century.

It wasn't that like, oh, you know, this was just sort of like actualizing a possibility that was always inscribed in the very being of human sexuality and so on. Like, no, no, I mean, what happened there is that something happened that forced a revision of the very, you know, key concepts of sexuality, sex and gender and so on. they're forced, you know, kind of what eventually became a more or less consensual splitting of, or a hegemonic splitting of the notion of sex into sex and gender, and into sex, gender, and sexuality, and so on. You know, a fissuring that's still kind of continuing, seems to be ramifying endlessly today, so that now people speak of, you know, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, sex. These were all things that in the 19th century were just like one concept, sex.

So what happened then is that now you can look back through all of history and talk about Julius Caesar's gender, even though at the time, on the one hand, this is a complete anachronism, but on the other, it reformats all of human history by concepts that, as concepts, didn't exist until this moment. So every sort of sufficiently radical break does produce this appearance of continuity. I mean, this is nothing really radical or fancy I'm saying here. This is basically just like what Thomas Kuhn says in History of Science, right? That it's the nature of a paradigm shift to kind of reconstruct the history of its science as a history of continuity and progress.

And so, you know, it's the nature of a... or the way Foucault talks about various sexual revolutions, it's their very nature to cast their history as one of the gradual liberation of whatever their own mode of expression. This kind of Whigism is almost like a sort of structural feature of certain kinds of conceptual shifts. So, yeah. That's how I to do that. Isn't it as well this renormalization? It's useful you're trying to find a moral basis for this new concept. Or it's useful to see and like look there's nothing strange

or unnatural versus natural. It's useful giving its necessary normality that the relationship hasn't happened I guess. Like discussing gender technology, it doesn't mean we've departed, I guess that's the point. I don't know, I use it as that just mere point of sort of moral, if you try and have a moral principle and Reza talks about the continuous revision of those moral principles then it's useful to conceive of sort of techniques in body in that sense, I guess, without discounting the shit that that technology is actually causing and will cause. Yeah.

Yeah, I would see that. I mean, what we're seeing there is that, yeah, the revision of, you know, of normative frameworks. So this isn't wholly something to be disparaged, either. It's something to be treated as. even if I kind of sound slightly cynical or suspicious about these and all, there is something in these revisions of concepts that, you know, this is to some extent, there's elements of this that are rational and rational revisionary process, an emancipatory process even. But But I don't know, I really am kind of of this whole like, you know, nothing here in history is either good or bad, but just dangerous to various degrees, school thought.

And so like what you have with, you know, let's just say again with sex and gender. You know, the sort of splitting of sex into sex and gender, the proliferation of these sort of, of these kind of, you know, other dimensions, other like coordinate axes, on which your sexual life could now be plotted. On the one hand, it gives you more degrees of freedom. And this is something that's, I think, very justly celebrated by various queer activists. They'll say, like, they find it's very important and useful to emphasize on the orthogonality of sexual orientation, of physical sex, gonadal sex, endocrinal sex, gender identity, gender expression. it's good to kind of have this bigger space in which you can be a butch trans woman who

may or may not hormonally transition. It's good to have those kind of degrees of freedom. These also offer you more, you're also offering a kind of broader surface to power at the same time. You're giving your movements more coordinates by which to be located and governed. So it's not just this pure emancipation. You're giving yourself a larger space in which to legitimately move, greater degrees of legitimate freedom. Yeah, how do I want to phrase that? Yeah, I think that might be a good formulation. You're giving yourself a higher dimensional space in which you can legitimately move and

locate yourself. And so, you know, this is why, I mean, this is, again, like, this is not an original observation here. This is why, like, you know, like Foucault and Butler, for example, were both, like, very cautious about identifying as, like, a gay man or a lesbian or what have you. You know, they saw this is kind of, like, you know, always like a two-edged sword, that they were both liberating themselves and capitulating to have a new hegemonic order by taking these positions. So, yeah, that kind of describes where I'm at largely with trans politics.

The gay movement was for Foucault and the lesbian movement for Butler, I'm kind of, I've served similar attitudes with my own relation to trans politics. Yeah. I can say a little bit about that in my own experience, just briefly. like when it came time like in my early 20s that I was like exposed for the first time to like transgender people outside of like maybe just you know like the worst kind of like transploitation on like television and movies um it it may

discover that nuance that you just mentioned about um butler and foucault and like their resistance to identify with like what is maybe provided I mean you can probably say more about that but like provided by like the available like um discourse like which like you know perhaps is now or has always been like interesting to try and negotiate, but like at the same time always on other terms maybe that may not be

like something you just want to come to accept. Like I maybe feel like that might be somewhat typical. I don't know. Yeah, I guess we should kind of maybe think about drawing things to a close at some point to be, but I mean I guess the one thing I would kind of say in relation to that is that obviously kind of identification, definition, it's a kind of idea that has a kind of loop gesture towards both risks and possibilities attached to it. So it is, you know, whilst there are, I mean, it is in that imitation and gender and subordination

essay where Butler is saying how suspicious she is of being invited to stuff to talk as a lesbian. So she's, you know, the difficulties she has with kind of holding that identity because of the foreclosures that it enacts around what a lesbian is and might be. But at the same time, I'm kind of, there is a space of possibility in preparing. You know, you kind of see it in Butler's later work on hegemony where she's kind of talking about the need to assert a kind of universal, however kind of risky that is.

And the same kind of stuff we kind of talked about in Tessa Duffy, the way she doesn't want to provide a name or a label or an identity for what she's trying to do because of the risks involved, because it could be appropriated in the way that kind of previous feminist movements have been identified, defined, and then appropriated by kind of, I think she's thinking about the Christian right in relation to anti-porn feminism, for example, the way that as soon as you kind of advance something, it gets swallowed up. But I'm really, really wary of this in relation to stuff like, and Luca and Amy will have to excuse me because I've kind of been on about this for a while, stuff like the old boys network, the old 90s cyber feminists art activist collective who said that if you

say you're a cyber feminist you are a cyber feminist and who seek to define, who seek to not define cyber feminism because they don't want to foreclose it. advance these 100 anti-theses of it which are stuff like cyber feminism is more for banana and I think it's really not very helpful to do that it kind of takes the feminism out of cyber feminism because it stops being kind of oriented towards something collective and so I think this is a real difficulty for everybody who's kind of interested in this kind of stuff. Like, how do you articulate an identity

that enables you to act collectively without enacting exclusions? And the way that Butler talks about doing it is by keeping it open-ended and by allowing the idea of being a lesbian to be subject to continuous iterations, repetitions, contestations, challenges, to enable it, to use it only provisionally so that it can mutate and evolve in response to the needs of a particular community at a particular time. And acknowledging that there's, and this is kind of an accelerator thing as well, so in Nick and Alex's new book, they're talking about this idea of the universal and the need to kind of have a universal that we acknowledge is constantly, has to be challenged and expanded.

You know, the universal has to be provisional, has to enable us to do things, and we have to acknowledge that it will typically, in formulating universal, it may exclude new populations, new demographics, and we need to continuously work to mutate the universal so that it is as useful a concept as it can be and is as open as it can be, so that it can be useful for radical politics. Again, I'm not really sure if that may sound so super-exful at this point, but I just wanted I just kind of mentioned that that is, it's a space of both risk and opportunity and those things have to be very actively negotiated and kind of thought through if we're trying to do anything.

Yes, I think that's absolutely spot on. This is why it's equally I think an act of bad faith to sort of suppose yourself as being free of every identity. If you do it, to say, oh, you know, I'm just nothing. I'm just human. I don't believe in labels or whatever. I mean, this is just sort of another, you know, a repetition of the kind of, you know, the other, like there's kind of like two major sort of forms of bad faith, you know? You either just say, I'm a cafe waiter. You know, I'm a cafe waiter. I'm wholly and fully a cafe waiter, as if anyone, I guess, you know, there was at least one cafe waiter that seemed to be doing this, as far as anyone knows. Or on

the other hand, I'm an absolutely free and sovereign subject. I am completely unsullied by facticity. And I think every really interesting articulation of the problem of freedom and universality, which I really take to be sort of the same problem. What you have in Sartre is just of course talking about there. You also have that in, this is everything that Baju is doing, theory, the subject, being an event. This is I think behind most of what Butler is doing as well. Oh, goodbye Natalia. Thank you for joining us. I just see that Natalia is saying goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for staying up so late.

Okay. So, I mean, this is the problem then. To sort of resist this forced choice between an empty universal, a totally abstract universal, which kind of always ends up being, to the extent that it can actually appear in the world, to the extent that it can actually claim some semblance of existence is almost always going to be a kind of bloated, unmarked particularity in disguise. Peterson points this out well enough that to the extent that we can kind of pretend to be raceless, usually this means like being white. Or if sex is not an issue for you, usually you've adopted some kind of traditionally

male position. And so these are all really familiar. If you don't believe in gender, if you don't have a gender, you just have sex, take a piece of rad femme rhetoric, then you're probably sex, and so on. So we have to avoid that temptation. Any kind of attempt to say that the abstract universal has a concrete existence in the world or something is actually acting as the abstract universal almost always falls into this trap. a particularity which is both bloated and unmarked and insulated from criticism in that way. Why? Because the abstract universal is not a particularity. No particularity can

instantiate the universal as such. It's a different kind of thing. But does this mean that all there are are particularities, then, well, in some sense, all there are are particularities, but, you know, universality has to remain this kind of, and here, you know, my dialectical prejudices are showing here, but, you know, universality can never really be anything but this sort of, you know, kind of sustained and organized restlessness in the particular. This is what the Jew means in a nutshell when he says that the universal has to exist as the generic, this is what Sartre means when it says that it has to exist as situated freedom, what Butler means when she talks about freedom existing as miscitation. Not the abstinence

from citation, but just this miscitation, this sort of difference in repetition. And so it's a matter of sort of finding that kind of margin of freedom in these spaces where power is inscribed and where particularities are governed. And to make this something other than just kind of a static buzz of restlessness. Because to the extent that it's just that, there's just miscitation, then you have individual freedom. You have just the pure individual negative freedom of the existentialists or the subversive queer acting in isolation. So the question is, well, how do you organize that? How can you have organized universality, organized freedom?

I think that's sort of the doozy of a problem in its most abstract terms. Does that make sense at all? Yeah, absolutely. I hope the next session, too, will be more in this universal. It's very interesting, you know, to hear a feminist take on universalist concepts, because they've traditionally been enlightenment-based, or humanist, as Gil Pedersen raises, the concept of race. So I'm really interested in the next sessions, hearing more from feminists and queer and trans, you know, perspective what this part of universalism would entail. Without just eliminating distinctions, like Gil Peterson speaks of, you know, race, the humanist perception is just

take away race, so the blank body becomes just white. And race is actually a form of a form of technicity of people who have organized around a certain way and therefore they come to be considered a race so yeah really interesting concept that I think about we might try and the thing about address in the last Sorry, I've got feedback. Sorry, I've got feedback. Good. Go ahead. Okay. You're good. Thanks. Yeah, we'll probably try and pick this up directly in the last session, I think, Nico. I mean, we're going to talk about reason. Ben Woodard is going to be joining us to kind of unpick this concept as well.

He's recently written a paper on it. the different understanding of different versions of this understanding of reason and how it operates specifically in this feminist history as a kind of masculine trope but we might try and interrogate it a bit next week as well we should probably wrap up because we're we're at the end of our two and a half hour kind of window So did anyone have any sort of final comments they wanted to make? Nope. Thanks guys, that was really enlightening.

Yeah, thanks everybody for coming. Yeah, thank you. Sorry I missed the first half. I had to go see my daughter sing Christmas carols at the neighborhood tree lighting. It was really lovely. It was really lovely. Yeah. Oh, now I'm echoing too. We had quite a couple of really interesting threads that have far from exhausted come up over the two and a half hours. So we should definitely start some of those conversations in the classroom. I think Ivan's posted Christina's article as well concerning this idea.

I think, what was it about, Christina, about cyborg and the idea of the cyborg as a distributed kind of identity? Yeah, so that's in the classroom. Ivan's posted the link for that. And there are a couple of other things. Oh, yeah, the blockchain project. The idea of the cyborg as a topology. It sounds really great. But basically, go in and use the resources in the classroom and let's continue some of these conversations over the week. Next week we're going to be focusing on cyberfeminism. We'll be joined by Virginia Barrett from VNS Matrix and we're going to be reading a couple of the VNS Matrix pieces as well. And I think she's excited to see how this idea of cyberfeminism can be, I suppose, retooled

for the 21st century or what can be carried on and what needs to be critiqued and kind of jettisoned in that respect. So that's going to be really exciting to actually have her input. The other thing I wanted to quickly mention is that there's quite a lot of readings for next week. If anyone wanted to take on board the responsibility of writing a sort of short 500 word-ish piece like Ivan did for Preciado last week and posting it in the classroom or kind of using that as like just a lead into the piece. I'll make up another one of those little forms so you can sort of tick a piece if you want to take charge of thinking about it.

And I'm going to put in, I've got Sadie Plants zeros and ones in there at the moment but it's a whole book, it's quite a lot to read. So I'm also going to put in an article of hers called On the Matrix. I'll do that this afternoon. So it'll be there from tomorrow if you wanted to do some plant but you didn't want to take on the whole of zeros and ones. So yeah, thank you everyone. It's been a really great session. Thank you everyone. It's been a really great session. Thank you. Thanks Helen and Luca and Amy. We'll see you guys all next week. See you again. Bye. Bye. See you next time.