1NC
They will not be able to provide a definition of “human” that isn’t racist. What is
necessary is a queering of “life.”
Chen 12. Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and women’s studies at UC Berkeley, Animacies:
Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U Press, pg. 10
Furthermore, political interest stokes public alarm toward “toxins.” We must therefore
understand the ways in which toxicity has been so enthusiastically taken up during times
of economic instability and panic about transnational flow . Animacies demonstrates
that interests in toxicity are particularly (if sometimes stealthily ) raced and
queered . Indeed, toxins participate vividly in the racial mattering of locations ,
human and nonhuman bodies , living and inert entities , and events such as disease
threats . This book aims to offer ways of mapping and diagnosing the mutual imbrications of
race, sexuality, ability, environ¬ment, and sovereign concern.
In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools through which we can rethink the
significance of molecular, cellular, animal, vegetable, or nonhuman life.22 Animacies not only
takes into account the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper object , but even
more sensitively, the animateness or inanimateness of entities that are considered either
“ live ” or “ dead .” Considering differential animacies becomes a particularly critical
matter when “ life” versus “death ” binary oppositions fail to capture the affectively
embodied ways that racializations of specific groups are differentially rendered. Sianne
Ngai explores the affective meanings of the term animatedness, focusing on its manifestation as
a property of Asianness and of blackness: “the affective state of being ‘animated’ seems to
imply the most basic or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or
another, ‘moved.’ But, as we press harder on the affective meanings of animatedness, we shall
see how the seemingly neutral state of ‘being moved’ becomes twisted into the image of the
overemotional racialized subject.”23 Animacy has consequences for both able-bodiedness and
ability, especially since a consideration of “inanimate life” imbues the discourses around
environmental illness and toxicity. For instance, the constant interabsorption of animate
and inanimate bodies in the case of airborne pollution must account for the physical
nonintegrity of individual bodies and the merging of forms of “ life” and “nonlife .” This
book seeks to trouble this binary of life and nonlife as it offers a different way to
conceive of relationality and intersubjective exchange .
I detail an animacy that is in indirect conversation with historical vitalisms as well as Bennett’s
“vital materiality.”24 Yet this book focuses critically on an interest in the animal that
hides in animacy, particularly in the interest of its attachment to things like sex , race ,
class , and dirt . That is, my purpose is not to reinvest certain materialities with life ,
but to remap live and dead zones away from those very terms , leveraging animacy
toward a consideration of affect in its queered and raced formations. Throughout the
book, my core sense of “queer” refers, as might be expected, to exceptions to the
conventional ordering of sex , reproduction , and intimacy , though it at times also
refers to animacy’s veering-away from dominant ontologies and the normativities
they promulgate. That is, I suggest that queering is immanent to animate transgressions ,
violating proper intimacies (including between humans and nonhuman things).
For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I include the
notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages
many bodies at once , rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single
body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet I am also interested in the
relatively subjective, individually held “emotion” or “feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I
also attend to the latter (with cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in the case
of environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity, the entry of an exterior object not only
influences the further affectivity of an intoxicated human body, but “emotions” that body: it
lends it particular emotions or feelings as against others. I take my cue from Sara Ahmed’s
notion of “affective economies,” in which specific emo¬tions play roles in binding subjects and
objects. She writes, “emotions involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively
within them. Indeed, emotions may seem like a force of residence as an effect of a certain
history, a history that may operate by concealing its own traces.”25 The traces I examine in this
book are those of animate hierarchies. If affect includes affectivity — how one body affects
another— then affect , in this book, becomes a study of the governmentality of animate
hierarchies , an examination of how acts seem to operate with, or against , the order
of things (to appropriate Foucault’s phrasing for different purposes).26
Queer theory, building upon feminism’s critique of gender difference, has been at the forefront
of recalibrating many categories of difference , and it has further rewritten how we
understand affect, especially with regard to trauma, death, mourning, shame, loss, impossibility,
and intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/ aids crisis); key thinkers here include
Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber- lant, Heather Love, and Lee Edelman, among others.27 As will be
dem¬onstrated, these are all terms that intersect in productive ways with animacy.
Carceral reform produces an affective investment in anti-queer penality – this
preclude them from accessing “reformism good” offense because this affective
attachment makes us come to desire the violent protection of the state
Lamble 14. Sarah Lamble, “Queer Investments in Punishment” in Queer Necropolitics, pg. 163
Examining these queer investments in punishment and necropolitics, we can identify several
recurring patterns. First, these trends suggest the emergence and expansion of a
specifically queer penality . Although punishment is widely endorsed and socially sustained,
it appears that LGBT organizations increasingly engage in citizenship claims that are
explicitly bound up with punitive norms and values . The popularity of LGBT
campaigns for the passage and enforcement of hate crime legislation, with the specific aim of
increasing carceraI penalties for those convicted, sutures claims of queer safety and freedom to
state practices of caging. Second, these trends reconfigure the neoliberal carceral state
as the guardian of sexual citizenship rather than the perpetrator of violence . As
Haritaworn argues: The redefinition of crime, security, and integration as sexual problems lends
an intimate touch to the hard arm of the state. The move of LGBT activism into the penal
state enables the police to reinvent themselves as protector , patron , and sponsor of
minorities at the very moment that their targeting of racialized populations and areas
is reaching new levels. (Haritaworn 2010: 83) In an era of neoliberalism, where faith in the
welfare state has been almost abandoned, it is striking how much faith is placed in the
carceral state’s capacity to dole out justice , particularly when the state itself has begun
to acknowledge the limits of this capacity (Garland 2001). In this context, queer
investments in punishment become mechanisms through which the state enlists
LGBT subjects as responsibilized partners in the ‘co-production of security’ (Garland
2001: 124) and acquires consent and support for one of its most systemically violent institutions.
Whereas law and order politics once belonged more firmly in a right- wing conservative agenda,
policing and punishment in these contexts have been transformed into ‘ symbols of social
inclusion and care for sexual diversity’ (Haritaworn 2010). Third, these processes go
hand in hand with the perpetual (re)invention of a dangerous Other , who is easily
recognized through older tropes of criminality : the ‘ homophobic Muslim’ , the
‘ working-class job’ or the ‘ backwards immigrant’ (Haritaworn 2010). State
recognition of the respectable , enlightened and worthy sexual citizen is thus
produced through the reproduction of a dangerous Other who offers a scapegoat for
the insecurities and vulnerabilities produced by the contemporary political
economic order . The production of these dual figures works to entrench the dividing line
between those who are marked for life and vitality and those who are marked for abandonment
and death.
In this way, LGBT investments in punishment can be seen to occur at multiple levels, through
(a) discursive investments in the myths of the neoliberal carceral state (by endorsing
rhetoric which equates community safety and violence prevention with state
punishment and securitization politics ); (b) affective investments in the
racialized and classed politics of fear and danger (by invoking discourses of ‘dangerous
others’ who threaten LGBT claims to citizenship and security); (c) labour investments in the
neoliberal carceral state (by literally taking on the work of the carceral state through
partnerships that provide training, develop criminal justice policy and undertake state-based
criminal justice work) and; (d) financial investments in the expanding carceral state (by
channelling community resources into practices of state punishment and by supporting policies
that increase state spending on prisons and policing). These punitive trends arc not restricted to
LGBT organizations, but are occurring more broadly within leftist and ‘progressive’ politics
(Aharonson 2010). Feminists who advocate for the criminalization of sex work and
trafficking , for example, have increasingly become engaged in what Elizabeth Bernstein
(2010) describes as ‘carceral feminism' . Similarly, feminist anti-violence goals increasingly
operate in tandem with ‘law-and-order’ politics and are used to justify increased
imprisonment , policing and immigration controls (Bumiller 2008; Critical Resistance
and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 2006). The issue is not simply that activist
agendas have been co-opted by pro-criminalization agendas, but rather that social movements
are redefining their politics in ways that actively infuse traditional recognition claims with
punitive logics. These trends raise larger questions about why ‘ progressive’
movements have turned to policing and incarceration as means for achieving
movement goals, and why ‘law-and-order’ agendas that were previously associated with
repressive politics have been reconfigured as signs of sexual justice. Do these trends stem from
broader moves away from a politics of ‘liberation’ towards more rights- and recognition-focused
strategies or have these movements always contained the seeds of punitive politics (Hanhardt
2008; Kunzel 2008; Spade 2009)? Are these trends symptomatic of broader changes in
governance which reflect ‘cultures of control’ (Garland 2001) and ‘governing through crime’
(Simon 2007) or are they specific to particular elements of LGBT and feminist organizing? In
what ways do these changes reflect movement desires to organize around achievable goals,
combined with the state’s willingness to work more cooperatively with particular ‘minority’
constituencies (Moran 2007)? Exploring the specific reasons for these changes is beyond the
scope of this chapter and warrants further empirical investigation; however, it seems clear that
simple explanations of co-optation, false consciousness or social conservatism are insufficient to
fully account for the complex and contradictory terrain of punitive sexual politics.
We have the only ethical solution to 1ac—in the context of organ sales, re-thinking
the definition of human is a necessary step to taking ethical love out of the endless
equivocation of exchange value
Chakravorty and Neti 09. Mrinali Chakravorty, professor of English at the University of Virginia,
and Leila Neti, professor of English and comp-lit at Occidental College, “The Human Recycled:
Insecurity in the Transnational Moment,” d i f f e r e n c e s Volume 20, Numbers 2 and 3 doi
10.1215/10407391-2009-009 pg. 214
The stasis of the characters’ lives mirrors the stasis of the ethical dynamic of the film. The subject of
organ transplantation provides the point of entry into the question of ethics where life is the
ultimate limit at stake.37 When an organ is taken from one individual so that it may be given to
another, the donor will have one of two concerns. If the organ is given as a gift , the greatest
concern is for the life of the other .38 If, by contrast, the organ is taken or offered for sale, the
greatest concern may be for one’s own life . Within the context of the film, the migrants who sell
their kidneys do so in exchange for passports, highlighting what Agamben points to as the rift
between man as the subject of rights and man as citizen. In this instant, the interests of the human
as bare life are at odds with the interests of the human as citizen . For the migrants who must
sell their organs in order to receive their citizenship papers, fraudulent though they may be, the
only possible condition under which the organ may be given is through an economic
transaction . This, in turn, strips the migrant of ethical volition to act out of concern for an
other . The migrant-refugee, forced to sell his organ, is precluded at the outset from participating
in an act of generosity and is subsumed instead by the sheer force of the economic. As a result, the
migrant-refugee is denied the capacity to act out of love and to share in affective structures of
community that are not reducible to models of citizenship and rights.39 One mode of violence
that the film represents, then, is the removal of the migrant-refugee from the realm of the ethical.
The limit of concern for the other is revealed as the fear of risk to one’s own life, and this is the
position the characters in the film occupy.
Contemplating Emmanuel Levinas’s dyadic framing of the demands of concern for one’s self and the
other, Judith Butler offers the following:
Within the ethical frame of the Levinasian position, we begin by positing a dyad. But the sphere of
politics, in his terms, is one in which there are always more than two subjects at play in the scene.
Indeed, I may decide not to invoke my own desire to pre- serve my life as a justification for violence,
but what if violence is done to someone I love? What if there is an Other who does violence to
another Other? To which Other do I respond ethically ? Which Other do I put before myself? Or
do I then stand by? Derrida claims that to try and respond to every Other can only result in a
situation of radical irresponsibility. And the Spinozists, the Nietzscheans, the utilitarians, and the
Freudians all ask, “ Can I invoke the imperative to preserve the life of the Other even if I cannot
invoke this right of self-preservation for myself?” (139–40)
These are the questions with which the film ultimately leaves us. Even as the forces acting on the
migrant-refugees demand that they preserve the life of the other at the risk of their own, the body
of the donor undergoes commodification the moment this demand is met.
Yet the final words exchanged between Senay and Okwe are “I love you.” In what we read as an
attempt to recapture a space for the ethical, Senay and Okwe articulate an alternative to the
horizontal bonds of kinship imagined through the metaphor of citizenship.40 Instead, they
enable a collective politics that moves around the demands of the state rather than toward
the satisfaction of those demands . Because their passports are fake, they grant these refugees no
real protection, but neither do these documents signify any real allegiance on the part of their bearers. The words “I love you,” spoken by two friends, encapsulate the film’s final gesture of
representing different horizontal communities . As such, the film offers a model based not on ties
of proximity but rather one that is specifically and insistently territorially unbounded .
Importantly, it is an affective relationship that is consolidated at the moment of parting . As an
instance of affection that cannot be verified, what Senay and Okwe offer is the singular possibility
of an ethical ideal of love.
In closing, we would like to think about this ethical ideal of love in relation to the metaphor of the
gift . While we indicated above that the migrant-refugee is radically foreclosed from the ethical
field because, for him or her, the possibility of the gift is transformed by the economic exchange
of an organ for the rights of citizenship, the metaphor of the gift nevertheless attaches itself to two
referents within the film, namely, the gift of the organ and the gift of the utterance of love with
which the film closes. On this basis, we argue, the film reinstates the ethical through the gift of love.
In Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Jacques Derrida theorizes the gift as an instance of “ the
impossible ” because of its state of suspension in relation to the economic:
But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy ? That which, in suspending
economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange ? That which opens the circle so as to
defy reciprocity or symmetry , the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view
of the no return? If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the
gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving (let us not already say to
the subject, to the donor). It must not circulate , it must not be exchanged , it must not in any case
be exhausted , as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle
in the form of return to the point of departure . If the figure of the circle is essential to
economics , the gift must remain aneconomic . (7)
As Derrida’s analysis makes clear, the migrant-refugee’s giving of an organ cannot be considered a
gift, precisely because the act of donation is grounded in the realm of the economic. Because the
organ is given in exchange for the rights of citizenship, it remains outside the aneconomic demands
of the gift. But what of our suggestion that the film’s second rep- resentation of the gift occurs in the
exchanged utterance “I love you”? For Derrida, the ethical imperative of the gift is the proscriptive
commandment that it “ must not circulate .” The moment the words are said, there is no way to
verify either the sincerity of the claim or the materiality of the gift. Moreover, because these words
of love are uttered at the moment of departure, it will be impossible to call forth the gift at a later
date. Neither is there a way to demand that the gift be equally sincere on the part of each of the
speakers. Yet the words remain the most profound gift that Okwe and Senay could give one
another. Though reciprocity in love can never be verified, or demanded, one’s best hope is that it
exists. The commandment that the gift “must not circulate” falls short of capturing the magnitude of
human relations freely given through the exchange in friendship of the words “I love you.” What
Derrida seems unable to account for , then, is the possibility of thinking of reciprocity in a way
that cannot be reduced to the economic .41
Indeed, within the terms of Western capitalism, reciprocity is wholly conflated with the
economic, as we see demonstrated in the complex transactions surrounding the giving and taking of
organs in the film. Nevertheless, we insist, the film closes by opening another possibil- ity of the gift
that, by virtue of its intractability, interrupts and alters the very terms of economic exchange. The
words “I love you” in the film are aneconomic not because they resist exchange but because they
might enter into reciprocity. The final affective moment of the film unmoors exchange from
market relations. In this event, what the film offers is the possibility of thinking of human affection
and sociality—thus of humanity itself—in a way that is not wholly reducible to the workings of
capital . The film’s final refusal to anchor the human to the recyclable body turns us instead toward
a mode of humanity that the market can neither imagine nor completely subsume. That is, the
possibility of love.
Independently, the 1AC accepts Western common law’s understanding of itself,
their discussion of the organs is devoid of racial signifiers, existing in the ether of
legal simulation.
Comaroff and Comaroff 07. John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American
Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard, and Jean
Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,
Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,”
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144
Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past,
too, is being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of
atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local leaders,
unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33 By these means
is colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to submit to the
scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it. And to be reduced to a cash equivalent,
payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism is being
indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare : the use of its own penal codes, its
administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, to
discipline its subjects by means of violence made legible and legal by its own sovereign word.
Also, to commit its own ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy.
Lawfare – the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of
political coercion, even erasure (Comaroff 2001) – is equally marked in postcolonies. As a
species of political displacement, it becomes most visible when those who ‘serve’ the state
conjure with legalities to act against its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the
Mugabe regime has consistently passed laws to justify the coercive silencing of its critics.
Operation Murambatsvina, ‘Drive Out Trash’, which has forced political opponents out of urban
areas under the banner of ‘slum clearance’ – has recently taken this practice to unprecedented
depths. Murambatsvina, says the government, is merely an application of the law of the land to
raze dangerous ‘illegal structures’.
Lawfare34 may be limited or it may reduce people to ‘bare life’; in Zimbabwe, it has mutated
into a necropolitics with a rising body count . But it always seeks to launder visceral
power in a wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge the
capillaries of capital. Hence Benjamin’s (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence and lives
by violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one another . Of course, in 1919
Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of the
weak, turning authority back on itself by commissioning courts to make claims for resources,
recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty.
But this still does not lay to rest the key questions: Why the fetishism of legalities? What are its
implications for the play of Law and Dis/order in the postcolony? And are postcolonies different
in this respect from other nation-states?
The answer to the first question looks obvious. The
turn to law would seem to
arise directly out of growing anxieties about lawlessness . But
this does not explain the displacement of the political into the
legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever greater range of
wrongs. The fetishism, in short, runs deeper than purely a concern with crime. It has to do
with the very constitution of the postcolonial polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is
undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often
xenophobic shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of neoliberalism – with its
impact on population flows, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies of
production and accumulation – has heightened this, especially in former colonies, which were
erected from the first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because, with
growing heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of commensuration
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of standardised terms and practices that permit the
negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage.
Hence the flight into a constitutionalism that explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly
individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where states are paying less and less of the
bills. Hence the effort to make human rights into an ever more global, ever more authoritative
discourse.
But there is something else at work too. A well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall,
has been the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional operations of governance,
including those, like health services, policing and the conduct of war, integral to the
management of life itself. Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions, of course. But
most 21st century governments have reduced their administrative reach, entrusting ever more to
the market and delegating ever more responsibility to citizens as individuals, as volunteers, as
classes of actor, social or legal. Under these conditions, especially where the threat of disorder
seems immanent, civil law presents itself as a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the
strong and everyone in between. Which , in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare . The
court has become a utopic site to which human agency may turn for a medium in
which to pursue its ends . This, once again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where
bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; and in which heterogeneity
had to be negotiated from the start.
Put all this together and the fetishism of the law seems over-determined . Not only is public
life becoming more legalistic, but so, in regulating their own affairs and in dealing with others,
are ‘communities’ within the nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities,
corporate communities, residential communities, communities of interest, even outlaw
communities. Everything , it seems, exists here in the shadow of the law . Which also
makes it unsurprising that a ‘culture of legality’ should saturate not just civil order but also its
criminal undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where organised crime
appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends of both the state and the
market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a
lumpen stand-in for those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their taxpaying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions of government, not least security
provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow
judicial personnel and convene courts to try offenders against the persons, property and social
order over which they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing that the state either has
stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions. A few are
even structured as franchises and, significantly, are said to offer ‘alternative citizenship’ to their
members.35 Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested, famously, that modern states operate much
like organised crime. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states.
Self-evidently, the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal underworld feeds the
dialectic of law and disorder. After all, once government outsources its policing services and
franchises force, and once outlaw organisations shadow the state by providing protection and
dispensing justice, social order itself becomes like a hall of mirrors . What is more, this
dialectic has its own geography. A geography of discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties.
We said a moment ago that communities of all kinds have become ever more legalistic in
regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing, in fact, that they become
communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification. Herein lies their
will to sovereignty, which we take to connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives,
deaths and conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview – and the extension
over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law . ‘ Lawmaking’ , to cite Benjamin
(1978: 295) yet again, ‘ is power making .’ But ‘power is the principal of all lawmaking’. In
sum, to transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of
legalities . Or their simulacra.
The 1ac’s attempt to predict market outcomes relies on an economic model of
rational self-interest that ignores how an individual’s affective tendencies resonate
with others – the entire economic discipline is built on a faulty foundation, as the
infra-economic layer undergirds micro-economics itself – means they can’t solve,
but they do produce liberal subject formation
Massumi 15 [Brian, political theorist, writer, and philosopher, Professor of Critical Empiricism
at the European Graduate School, Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at
the University of Montréal, The Power at the End of the Economy, 2015, Duke University Press:
Durham and London, ch. 1, System Distrust]
System Distrust In times of crisis,
the first words out of the mouth of any economic leader are: “we must
restore trust in the system.” But as systems theorist Niklas Luhmann blithely observed, under these endemic conditions
“trust rests on an illusion” (Luhmann 1979, 32). In a chaotic economic field personal relations of trust
are impossible to guarantee . “In actuality, there is less information available than would be required to give
assurance of success” (32). “Linear causal explanations come to grief” (83). However well intentioned other parties may be, they
cannot be trusted . The nonlinear dynamics of the economy could well frustrate their best
intentions. What’s an enterprise system to do? If relying on personal bonds of trust is out of the
question, there’s only one option: “ depersonalize ” trust. Make it “impersonal” (Luhmann 1979, 93).
Entrust the system . “System trust” is the only answer. But how does an individual trust a system that
doesn’t trust itself to follow its own line? “There must be other ways of building up trust which do not depend on the
personal element. But what are they?” (46). Luhmann has an ingenious answer to his own question. You actually
“ shift forward the threshold of effective distrust ” (75). In other words, you foster distrust as a
starting condition (88). You foster distrust, but not as the opposite of trust: as its “functional equivalent” (71). What on earth
does that mean? It means that you “interlock them so that they intensify each other” (Luhmann 1979, 92). You bring trust
and distrust together into a zone of indistinction where they are in such immediate proximity to
each other that one can easily tip into the other at the slightest agitation. They resonate together,
intensely. As actions are taken, the resulting affective state of the individual oscillates between
them. Foucault notes that the “horizon” of the neoliberal field of life is one of increasing differentiation that is constitutively open
to “oscillatory processes” (Foucault 2008, 259).6 By differentiation, he is referring to capitalist society’s overspilling of disciplinary
modes of power based on normative models imposed on the individual, and the accompanying proliferation of “minority practices”
(259). When he mentions oscillatory processes he is talking about the fluctuation of economic
indicators such as salaries, job creation figures, industrial orders, and most fundamentally prices, which
mark the ups and downs of the system’s selfregulatory mechanisms. But the same description applies equally
well to the smallest unit of the economy, the enterprising individual , as it does to the system as a
the individual level, trust and distrust interlock and intensify each other, resonating
together in immediate proximity , forming their own oscillatory system. As do fear and hope, satisfaction
and self-denial, all in it together.7 The individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of
capitalist society is internally differentiated, containing its own population of “minority
whole. On
practices” of contrasting affective tone and tenor, in a zone of indistinction between rational
calculation and affectivity. In other words, there is an infra-individual complexity quasi-chaotically
agitating within the smallest unit. The individual remains the smallest unit despite this infralevel complexity, because what resonates on that level are not separable elements in interaction.
They are intensive elements, in intra-action (Barad 2007, 33).8 They are immediately linked
variations, held in tension, resonating together in immediate proximity. Their oscillatory co-motion expresses
itself at the level of the individual, where it is marked by fluctuating indicators, just as the actions of individual economic actors
express themselves on the systemic level in fluctuating indicators such as prices. We call the indicators of the intra-
action occurring on the infra-individual level moods . “Moods,” Gilbert Ryle writes, are like “the
weather, temporary conditions which in a certain way collect occurrences, but they are not
themselves extra occurrences” (Ryle 1949, 83). Moods collect infraoccurrences and sum them up in a
general orientation giving direction to the next level up, just as price fluctuations collect the
microeconomic decisions of individual actors and sum them up in the general orientation of
the economy as a whole . This means that we need to add a whole new dimension to
economic thinking . Beneath the microeconomic level of the individual there is the
infraeconomic level . At that level, an affective commotion intra-churns . Its variations
are so immediately linked that we cannot parse them out into separate occurrences .
The individual, speaking infra-ly, is not one . It may collect itself as one. It may figure as one, for
But in itself, it is many . Many tendencies: potential expressions and orientations
held together in tension. The individual is buffeted by these tendencies’ coming turbulently together, divided among them
in its relation to itself. Divided among them, awaiting their complex playing-out in a shift in general
orientation, the “individual” is the dividual (Deleuze 1995, 180). The dividual is the individual as affective
infra-climate, in relation to itself, commotionally poised for what may come , storm or
shine, doldrums or halcyon days.9 Nothing divides and multiplies the individual so much as its
own relation to the future. The uncertainty is not just external, relating to accidents and the unpredictable
actions of others. It agitates within. Even if you play it as safe as possible by deferring a decision until
sunnier days to come, all you have done is find another way to increase uncertainty:
higher levels.
now it is not just others’ decisions that are unknown to you but your own as well. “ These
unknown nondecisions
recur endlessly ” (Pixley 2004, 33). Who knows what will possess you to decide when to decide, or
what you will decide when you do? You don’t know your future self yet . You are infrabuffeted by your own unworked-out tendencies awaiting a complex playing out that is as likely to
surprise you yourself as any stranger. Weather forecasting is as unpredictable in the infra-climate of the (in)dividual as
at other scales. The affective infra-climate of the dividual poised for what may come is the rabbit
hole of the economy . The unknown nondecisions and not-quiteoccurrences recurring
endlessly in a turbulence of tendency are complex in the same way as the economy as a whole.
Both are like the weather, quasichaotic self-organizing systems. This puts a whole new perspective on
“ rational ” choice. The individual, Foucault said, is unconditionally referred to itself, and this referral is
irreducible and nontransferable. This means that rational decision is unconditionally, irreducibly, nontransferably referred to an
infraindividual zone of indistinction with affect.
Rationality and affect become “functional
equivalents ” by Luhmann’s definition: interlocked and mutually intensifying, in a zone of indistinction, at the “forward
threshold” of economic existence. Luhmann’s analysis of trust posits that this infra-level of individual complexity is directly
connected to the collective, macrolevel of the economic, without necessarily passing through the mediation of the intervening
microeconomic level at which the individual is but one. It is a defining characteristic of complex environment that the extremes of
scale are sensitive to each other, attuned to each other’s modulations. This is what makes them oscillatory. They can perturb each
other. Systemwide changes in the weather are sure to resonate at the infra-level, for example, in a localized patch of fog.
Perturbations channeling back up from the infra-level are apt to amplify into multiplier
effects . Think of the way a local fog can amplify into a mega traffic jam. The individual blindness of the subject of interest is the
fog of the economy. When multiplier effects channel upward, the individual is not mediating between
the levels in any conventional sense. Self-organizing effects channel through the individual level on their infra-way to
larger things. The individual is an amplifier mechanism for multiplier effects’ selfforming. It
channels the threshold noise of the system—the functional indistinction between rational
calculation and affective response—into an emergent economic ordering that is as ever-changing
and continually selfrenewing as the winds. In a very real sense, the infra-individual is the
crucible of the system . When Foucault says that the individual’s choice is irreducible, he can only mean that the
individual’s tendential dividedness in relation to itself is irreducible. The dividual is irreducible.
The infra- of the individual is irreducible, in the sense that when systemwide perturbations blow down its
hole, they can go no further. They have nowhere else to go but to turn around and blow back out. The economy
ends in the recesses of the infra-individual, which as Foucault said is not only irreducible but nontransferable. What
is nontransferable is inexchangeable. At the infra-individual level, the possibility of exchange comes to an
end. If the economy is defined by exchange, then the economy ends in the recesses of the infraindividual. It reaches a limit, as a function of which it is organized—but which lies outside its logic.
Foucault speaks of this affective infra-level as the “regressive endpoint” of the economy
(Foucault 2008, 272). The infra-individual is the regressive —recessive or immanent—endpoint of the
economy. The dividual is the noneconomic wonderland of intense and stormy life on the brink of
action that lies at the heart of the economy: its absolute immanent limit. Endpoint—and turnaround. It is only
ever possible to approach an absolute limit. The movement toward the endpoint of the economy either disappears
into its own infinite regress, or spins itself around into a movement of return.
Moreover, economies relies on SELF-interest, but the choice whether to act in
collective self-interest at the expense of the self is an affective choice that is
fundamentally non-rational – assessing these affective positions is crucial to
determining whether capitalism is capable of overcoming the collateral damage it
wrecks on the environment and the global periphery before it swings back to
equilibrium
Massumi 15 [Brian, political theorist and philosopher, Professor of Critical Empiricism at the
European Graduate School, Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the
University of Montréal, The Power at the End of the Economy, 2015, Duke University Press:
Durham and London, ch. 3, Beyond Self-Interest, Your Life For My Middle Finger?]
Politically, things are never as simple as a bull in a ring. Capitalism’s
fences don’t keep its bullishness in, or the
movements it’s most afraid of out: unofficial or unregistered flows of goods and people, unregistrable financial flows,
and systemically imperceptible forms of capital. Unofficial and unregistered flows include the smuggling of
legal and illegal commodities, such as drugs, and the press of refugees and undocumented
workers. Unregistrable flows include highly abstract forms of financial capital, such as
derivatives and credit default swaps, whose complexity defies calculation1 and at times even
makes tracing ownership impossible (this has been a problem in the wake of the US subprime mortgage crisis).
Systemically imperceptible forms of capital include neocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Capitalism is
afraid of these movements to the extent that it tends to its own metastability, counter to its dominant
tendency of irrationally exuberant passion for reckless liquidity. But at the same time these movements are its
indispensable crutches, and its cutting edge (its profit hedges, and its probe-heads of futurity). Hence porosity
is the order of the day. Through the pores, distant events resonate and correlate. To paraphrase
Foucault, the neoliberal denizen is complexly dependent on an uncontrollable, unspecified whole of
the flow of things and the world in which “the most distant event taking place on the other side
of the world may affect my interest, and there is nothing I can do about it” (Foucault 2008, 277). Given
the cross-scale sensitivity of the dividual to the transindividual and considering the troubled equation
between choice and satisfaction, a question arises that is as challenging to neoliberalism’s founding figure
of the subject of interest as the question whether rational choice actually works. What if by events
that “affect my interest” we don’t just understand events that can go against my interests? What if
events occur that affect my commitment to my own interest? After all, for what good reason should a
nonpersonal autonomy of decision that does itself through me do what it does for me? Given the
resonant sensitivity of infraindividual oscillatory processing, is there any a priori reason why
decisions pivoting on the individual should cut the flows of the unspecified whole of relational
activity for my benefit? Given the transindividual attunement of my dividual dimension to that of others elsewhere in the
economic-relational field of life, why should the decisions moving through me not benefit a distant me,
even to my me’s disadvantage? On the other hand, what prevents decisions that I do manage to make, against the odds,
according to my own best rational interest, from harming others? In the long run, the theory goes, everybody
benefits. But who can deny the collateral damage that occurs along the way, as
inequalities grow and whole swathes of the earth’s population are consigned to
misery ? What if the long run gets lost along the route and dead-ends in yet another crisis? What
the present perspective,
with no end in sight of the last crisis years later and the threat of irreversible climate change and
the attendant global upheavals hanging over our heads and with international efforts to reverse it
foundering for fear that it will harm the neoliberal economy (never mind the people it
theoretically benefits), the question is more: what are the odds that it won’t run
if the neoliberal promise of prosperity and satisfaction for all runs permanently off course? From
permanently off course ? Your Life for My Little Finger? The two-pronged question of what ensures that choices are
made in accordance with the decider’s selfinterest and, when that is the case, what prevents the choices made here from doing
immediate harm elsewhere before multiplier effects have had a chance to bubble through the relational field, in theory to everyone’s
satisfaction, were of central concern to the early theorists whose thought informed the doctrine of the subject of interest. They
sought to respond to them by turning to moral philosophy. Turning instead to politics— as will be suggested here—was excluded on
the one hand by their mistrust of the State, and on the other by the fact that non-State-based collectivist politics are pointedly
incompatible with the economic individualism they advanced. Foucault cites Adam Smith’s elder, David Hume, on these points,
rather than Smith’s own Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is presumably because the radicality of Hume’s position on the relation
between rationality and affectivity is more resonant with the unspecified whole of the flow of things and the world of today’s
neoliberalism, and involves a significantly different view of how selfinterest plays out. Foucault cites a famous passage from Hume’s
Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals on the decisional impotence of reason: It appears evident that— the
ultimate
ends of human actions can never , in any case, be accounted for by reason, but
recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind,
without any dependance on the intellectual faculties . Ask a man WHY HE USES EXERCISE; he
will answer, BECAUSE HE DESIRES TO KEEP HIS HEALTH. If you then enquire, WHY HE DESIRES HEALTH, he will readily
reply, BECAUSE SICKNESS IS PAINFUL. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason WHY HE HATES PAIN, it is
impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object. Perhaps to your second question,
WHY HE DESIRES HEALTH, he may also reply, that IT IS NECESSARY FOR THE EXERCISE OF HIS CALLING. If you ask,
WHY HE IS ANXIOUS ON THAT HEAD, he will answer, BECAUSE HE DESIRES TO GET MONEY. If you demand WHY? IT IS
THE INSTRUMENT OF PLEASURE, says he. And beyond this it is an absurdity to ask for a reason. It is
impossible there can be a progress IN INFINITUM; and that one thing can always be a reason why another is desired. Something
must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection.
(Hume 1912, Appendix 1)2 It is an absurdity, Hume says, to push the questioning further. To do so would tip it into an
infinite regress. We’d end up in a black hole from which something monstrous, something more ugly and destabilizing than the
merely unreasonable, might pop out. Not just a white rabbit. Beyond unreasonable lies the realm of what does
not accord with human affect. Somewhere in the infinite regress that we must avoid there lies the limit of what is
affectively unthinkable: what we as humans think to be unfeelable. Viewed from the lip of the rabbit hole, this impossible limit of
human feeling is abject. But what if we do push past, in spite of that horror we feel as putative subjects of interest, to the
“regressive endpoint” of human sentiment? What
if we confront the abject question, Why should I prefer my
pleasure over pain? So what if I prefer your well-being to mine? If the ultimate ends of human action can
never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, then “it is not contrary to reason to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least
uneasiness of an Indian or a person wholly unknown to me” (Hume 1984, 2.3.3, 463).3 And in any case, aren’t there even more
horrific monstrosities that arise from selfinterest? For neither is it “contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to
the scratching of my finger” (463). What prevents an individual from skirting around the human endpoint
and spiraling into the beyond of its own self-interest? On the other hand, what prevents human selfinterest itself
from being taken to abject and monstrous extremes? Hume’s explanation of why the endpoint is not regressive, and why the choices
made there both serve the individual’s interests and rebound for the common good, appeals to “natural sentiment.” It is simply a
characteristic of human nature to prefer pleasure to pain in all circumstances. One of the things that human nature obtains most
pleasure from, Hume continues, is the approbation of others: what pleases others pleases us, and we benefit by the affective synergy
because conventions of mutual benefit emerge from it (“general rules” of conduct, “custom,” “habit”). The reason that what
pleases others pleases us has nothing to do with reason. It is in no way a calculation .
Rather than a calculation, it grows from an “affectation.” We are directly,
affectively touched by the pleasure and pain of others. We literally feel their pleasure
and pain through a direct “communication of sentiments” due to our natural faculty of sympathy,
“which makes us partake of the satisfaction of every one” (Hume 1984, 2.3.5, 407). “’Tis sympathy which is properly the cause of the
affection” that establishes the communication between myself and others (2.3.5, 408). It works like this: When any affection [of
another, causing pain or pleasure] is infused by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the
countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a
degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection. However
instantaneous this change of the idea into an impression may be, it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not
escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, though they may the person himself, who makes them. (Hume 1984, 2.1.11, 367–368) The
word “idea” should not mislead. For Hume, an idea is a type of perception.4 This account of the transformation effected by sympathy
is entirely compatible with the earlier discussion in this essay of perceptual judgment and abduction if the process is understood as a
mutual inclusion in the same event of differing modes of activity: affection, perception, impression, idea, passion. “Affection” is
meant in the simple sense of a beingaffected: an undergoing. A perception of another’s affection gives rise to an
idea of the other’s pain or pleasure. The idea strikes me, and the force of the strike converts the idea into an impression.
This yields a vivacity of feeling, which generates a passion—which I directly experience as an affection in me, of
myself. All these modes must be seen as co-occurring “instantaneously,” fused into a single event
occurring at a nonconscious level of immediate experience. The “communication” of the affective force of the
other’s experience into an affectation of my experience is no less direct for being multimodal. In the instant, the modes involved are
in superposition—as are the other and me, in shared undergoing. The “views” and “reflections” are immanent to the sympathetic
perception’s arising.5 Hume’s
concept of passion encapsulates this occurrent coming
together . He defines passion as the “double relation of ideas to impressions” (Hume 1984, 2.1.5, 338). A passion is
when an affecting impression, and its “instantaneous” reflection in a simultaneously arising idea of the affection, fuse
as two aspects of the same perceptual immediacy of experience. The event is then a double relation between
thinking and feeling, in the sense that a two-way circuit is established between them. In virtue of this, a passion can give rise to a
sympathy, just as sympathy generates a passion (3.3.1., 627). In the back-andforth, acquired tendencies may be created that work to
mutual benefit (the “artificial virtues” of social convention; 3.3.1, 628). But already in the immediacy of the event, the
thinkingfeeling fusion launches a tendency: a self-driving of oriented activity. Tendency is part of the very definition of passion. With
a passion comes a vivacious “facility for transition”: activity more easily circulates among the modes of activity that come together in
perception, and because of that can more readily transition into an acting out.6 Passion is already an incipience of action in
readiness potential. This means that perception is not only a thinkingfeeling: it is an already-almost-doing thinking-feeling. It is a
germinal fusion of action and perception: an incipient action-perception. More radically, not only social conventions but whole new
passions may emerge from the “double impulse” provided by the emergence of the first-order passion (2.1.4, 336). Passion upon
passion, in inventive proliferation, growing in a communicative contagion of actionable affectability. Hume’s favorite word for what
the force of passion does is “actuate” (for example, 2.2.2, 393). Actuate: activate. The theory of perception, in its relation to
understanding, is an activist philosophy. It would not be stretching it to equate the superpositional process of undergoing just
described with “bare activity” coming to determinate expression. The bare activity that is the germ of experience’s taking form is
inseparable from sympathy. Bare activity can be summed up as the tendency for tendencies to form and settle into the world, as a
function of sympathy. There is no mediation by the faculty of reason involved in the thinkingfeeling process of sympathy. No subject
of interest steps in. There is just the inventive complexity of the perceptual event, passing through me on the way to further
transitions. The workings of reason come after the perception’s genesis and the generative event, in the reflections of the philosopher
in a moment of pause, or perhaps in the reflections of the person who was affected in all immediacy and now thinks back on the
encounter at a remove. In the latter case, reason can inflect the process only if the thinking included in the feeling was for some
reason off the mark. After all, “external signs” can be ambiguous. One way the process goes off the mark is when the perceived effect
in the other’s countenance or conversation that triggers the sympathetic process is erroneously attributed to the wrong object. For
example, you might hurt someone by something you say, but you misconstrue which comment it was that caused the affection. The
other way an error occurs is when the tendency that arises with the newly minted passion falls into the wrong groove, so that it is
insufficient as a means of effecting the impassioned transition (Hume 1984, 2.3.3, 463). These errors are “false judgments”—false
perceptual judgments.7 Reason’s only role is as a reflective corrective to false perceptual judgments (see
Supplement 1). Hume
has no patience for the standard rhetoric of the “combat of passion and
reason” (Hume 1984, 3.1.3, 460–462). How could they enter into hand-to-hand combat when they really
don’t even touch? Reason holds itself at a reflective remove from the inventive life-process that
comes flush with perception. Because of this , reason has no motive force . That is why it
can’t dictate that I should not prefer disaster for an other to a scratch on my little
finger,
or that I should not prefer my own pain to pleasure, potentially acting to the benefit of a faraway other against my own
self-interests. “ Reason
alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition ” (3.1.3,
is simply no common ground between rationality and affectivity that can become a
battleground. “A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of existence, and contains not any representative
quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification” (460). A thinking that contains a
representative quality is what is referred to these days as a cognition, and as such belongs to
reason. Passion, containing not any representative quality, is noncognitive. As a modification of
existence, it is a becoming. Put the two together, and you get a noncognitive becoming. As the processual hub around
460). There
which tendencies grow, and grow into conventions of behavior that orient life activity, passion in and of itself is tantamount to a
This is where the issue of choice comes back in .
Although a passion is a volition, it is not a choice: it is at the hub of a process that runs its course
automatically, in the instant, without any intervention by a deciding subject. The process is selfdeciding. Choice comes out between passions. It comes from passions entering into combat with other passions,
volition: its noncognitive becoming is an ontopower.
tendencies with opposing or elsewise-oriented tendencies, in bare activity. “Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but
a contrary passion” (460). In bare activity, passions duke it out among themselves, flush with perception,
imbued with nonconscious thought, already potentially readying an issue in action. This affective
thinkingfeeling is not the opposite of rationality. It is not reducible to the simple negation
of rationality. It may be nonrational, but it is not irrational . The passion with which it comes is
an “original existence.” It is an original, tendentially self-affirming existence, and as such must be described in
positive terms as its own ontopowerful process . Does that sound like a moral philosophy? If you add to this
account the idea of priming and other forms of event-conditioning and the wholesale modulation of the relational field effected by
event-conditioning— including the potential for new, emergent action-paths to be invented—then what you have is much
more like a politics: a fundamentally affective politics . In the affective politics implied, rational
choice has no foundational role or reality . Fundamentally, it’s not about choice—it’s
about sympathy . And sympathy is in the immediate communication of affections
between individuals: it is transindividual .8 This means that the individualism of
self-interest also has no foundational role , despite Hume’s own attempt to save it. At any rate, Hume
doesn’t seem convinced by his own argument that preferring pleasure to pain is an incontrovertible “natural sentiment” and that the
approbation of others is naturally a pleasure, and that together they block any ungrounding approach to the regressive limit of the
dividual, thus exorcising the possibility that out of the complex and uncertain oscillatory process of which the dividual is the inmost
endpoint a decision might make itself that by the conventions of society would fall to an unacceptable extreme: either the callous
extreme of preferring the destruction of the whole world to a slight discomfort of a little digit, or the opposite extreme of choosing
my own total ruin to the slightest discomfort of a person on the other side of world who is totally unknown to me. Untempered by
self-interest, sympathy would seem to move us naturally in the latter direction. In its own processual terms, there is no reason why a
contagion of feeling of the kind Hume theorizes would not issue in actions expressing a preference for someone else’s well-being
over my own. With reason unable to give a motivation for why this should not be the case, the field would seem to be affectively
weighted at least as much in this direction as toward callous disregard. Only systematic event-conditionings priming for self-interest
could disarm this tendency, and they have their work cut out for them if they are to overcome in all cases the possibility of an
“unnatural” outcome flowing from the formative role of sympathy in the very genesis of perception. It is no wonder neoliberalism
keeps itself so busy touting the virtues of self-interest and implanting the presupposition that its denizens are subjects of rational
choice, making all manner of maneuvers aimed at instilling transitions that make selfinterested rational choice the dominant
tendency. It is also no wonder—given reason’s Humean impotence, on top of the necessary blindness of the subject of interest that
Foucault sees as freeing the invisible hand of the market—that this tendency of neoliberalism to foster tendencies
of self-interested rational choice leads to the paradoxes of decision described earlier, as
exemplified in deliberation-withoutattention and choice blindness. Oddly, given his skepticism toward religion, Hume
appeals to the trump card of the “Supreme Will” to save some semblance of a solid foundation for self-interested choice, in what can
only be read as an implicit admission that the argument from natural sentiment needs otherworldly reinforcement and is in the end
no more convincing than its rival, the argument that there is a combat of affectivity and reason and that reason wins.9 Invisible
hands, it seems, have a finger in many liberal pies, of both economic and philosophic confection. What do invisible hands do when
their finger gets scratched
The 1ac’s model of parliamentary politics precludes radical self-experimentation
Preciado 13 [Interview between Ricky Tucker and Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political
History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII,
“Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado,” December 4, 2013, The Paris
Review]
We don’t have to be afraid of questioning democracy, but I’m also very interested in disability,
nonfunctional bodies, other forms of functionality and cognitive experiences. Democracy and
the model of democracy is still too much about able bodies, masculine able bodies that have
control over the body and the individual’s choices, and have dialogues and communications in
a type of parliament . We have to imagine politics that go beyond the parliament ,
otherwise how are we going to imagine politics with nonhumans, or the planet? I am interested
in the model of the body as subjectivity that is working within democracy, and then goes beyond
that. Also, the global situation that we are in requires a revolution . There is no other
option . We must manage to actually create some political alliance of minority bodies,
to create a revolution together. Otherwise these necropolitical techniques will
take the planet over . In this sense, I have a very utopian way of thinking, of rethinking new
technologies of government and the body, creating new regimes of knowledge . The domain
of politics has to be taken over by artists . Politics and philosophy both are our domains .
The problem is that they have been expropriated and taken by other entities for the production
of capital or just for the sake of power itself. That’s the definition of revolution , when
the political domain becomes art . We desperately need it .
Pharmaporn’s legal biocontrol threatens our survival, but forecloses the
possibility of majoritarian political responses. A minor strategy, in contrast, shifts
the code. Instead of CopyRight, a CopyLeft revolution entails gender hacking, an
infection of chemical signifiers that structure political practices. Jack into the
gender matrix. Do what you’d like with your organs.
Preciado 13 [Beatriz, professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of
Performance at Paris VIII, Testo Junkie, translated by Bruce Benderson, 2013, Feminist Press:
New York, NY, p. 394-6]
The cis-males and cis-females (indiscriminately heterosexual or homosexual), as well as transsexuals, who
have access to surgical, endocrinological, or legal techniques of the production of identity, are
not simple economic classes in the Marxist sense of the term, but genuine
“pharmacopornographic factories”—existing simultaneously as raw materials, producers (but rarely proprietors) of
biocodes of gender, and pharmacopornographic consumers. Porn actors; whores; the
transgender; genderqueers; and producers, traffickers, and consumers of illegal drugs inhabit
different cultures, but all are used as living pharmacoporn laboratories. All of them sell, buy,
or get access to their biocodes as pharmacopornographic property. The sudden emergence of new
gender statuses is creating a novel type of conflict between owners and managers of the patents of
the microtechnologies of subjectification (sex hormones, psychotropic molecules, audiovisual codes, etc.) and the producers and
traffickers of these techno-biocodes. The pharmacopornographic entrepreneurs, who are among the contemporary
leaders of global capitalism, are trying to restrict and privatize the biocodes of gender and
convert them into rare and naturalized objects by means of legal and market techniques.
Computer hackers use the web and copyleft programs as tools of free and horizontal
distribution of information and claim that they should be in reach of everyone. The pharmacopornographic
gendercopyleft movement has a technoliving platform that is a lot easier to gain access to than
the Internet: the body, the somathèque. Not the naked body, or the body as unchanging nature, but the technoliving
body as a biopolitical archive and cultural prosthesis . Your memory, your desire, your
sensibility, your skin, your cock, your dildo, your blood, your sperm, your vulva, your ova . . . are
the tools of a potential gendercopyleft revolution . The various producers of sexual
biocodes are very different from one another. Some get off on economic and social privileges,
such as the models through whose bodies the dominant codes of male and female beauty are
produced. Others, such as porn actors or sex workers, suffer from the lack of regulations for the
open market of their biocodes . But all of them depend on the pharmacopornographic
industry and its local alliances with the police forces of the nation-states. One day, they
will all become hackers . Agnes, mother of all the techno-lambs: Del LaGrace Volcano, Kate Bornstein, Jacob Hale,
Dean Spade, Mauro Cabral, Susan Stryker, Sandy Stone, King Erik, Moises Martínez— all are
master hackers of
gender, genuine traffickers of semiotico-technological flux, producers and
tinkers of copyleft biocodes . Gender copyleft strategies must be minor but decisive : the
survival of life on the planet is at stake.
For this movement, there
will be no single name that
can be transformed into a brand. It will be our responsibility to shift the code to open the
political practice to multiple possibilities . We could call this movement , which has
already begun, Postporn, Free Fuckware, BodyPunk, OpenGender, FuckYourFather, PentratedState, TotalDrugs,
PornTerror, AnalInflation, UnitedUniversalTechnoPriapism . . . This book, a legacy of Agnes’s selfexperimentation politics, is a protocol for self-tests carried out with testosterone in gel form,
exercises of controlled poisoning on my own body. I am infecting myself with a chemical signifier culturally branded as masculine.
Vaccinating yourself with testosterone can be a technique of resistance for bodies that have been assigned the status of cis-females.
To acquire a certain political immunity of gender, to get roaring drunk on masculinity, to know that it is possible to look like the
hegemonic gender.
1NR
The model quickly runs into a dilemma: as neoliberal capitalism complexifies and
makes economic forecasts more uncertain, affective judgments mix with rational
ones to create an utterly chaotic result – that causes speculative bubbles that result
in economic collapse
Massumi 15 [Brian, political theorist and philosopher, Professor of Critical Empiricism at the
European Graduate School, Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the
University of Montréal, The Power at the End of the Economy, 2015, Duke University Press:
Durham and London, ch. 1, The Market In Wonderland]
The Market in Wonderland The
“invisible hand” makes at least a cameo appearance in every discussion
of the free market. Foucault’s is no exception. As its inventor, Adam Smith, conceived it, Foucault argues, the concept of
the invisible hand had nothing of the godlike quality that has come to be attributed to it. The whole
point of the concept was that the economic system is too churningly complex for there to be any
possibility of a lordly overview upon it. In his genealogy of neoliberalism, Foucault makes the point in no uncertain
terms: when it comes to things economic, there is no “total transparency” (Foucault 2008, 279). Not only is there no total
transparency— there is no transparency or totality. The concept of the invisible hand, as Foucault interprets it, is a principle of
blindness in an open field of ceaseless activity whose contours, always shifting, are by nature indefinite. “Being in the dark and
the blindness of
all the economic agents is an absolute necessity” (297). For neoliberals, this is actually a
good thing: it makes economic liberalism unavoidable. It means that the economy can have no sovereign. The
invisible hand actually means “hands off.” The liberal’s principle of laisserfaire, Foucault quips, becomes for the neoliberals “do-notlaisser-faire government”: tie the government’s hands (Foucault 2008, 247). Foucault is quick to add that in practice
neoliberalism entails a large and even expanding range of forms of governmental intervention. But
these are designed, paradoxically, to maintain the ability of market mechanisms to self-organize the
economy free from undue government interference (175–176). They do not operate from a position of
sovereign command. They are in the midst.2 Any governmental attempt from on high to weave the strands together
into a welldefined, predictably regulated whole will just fray the fabric to the ripping point. Government purports to act allknowingly
in the general interest, and in its hubris always fumbles. Individuals, too, are under the injunction, in the name
of the general good, to act without regard for it . For it is only then that the “invisible hand”
can work. But it’s not a hand at all . It’s an accumulation of little-handed decisions which end
up serving the general good in spite of being self-interested . Individual decisions, made in
the darkness of selfinterest , percolate through the field . To the extent that the results of these
decisions form positive feedback loops, they give rise to mutually beneficial multiplier effects and there occurs a “spontaneous
synthesis” of what’s best for all (Foucault 2008, 300). The synthesis is entirely involuntary with regard to each individual (275–276).
This “rationalization” of the economy to which the subject of interest’s decisions involuntarily
contribute is an emergent property of a complex, self-organizing system: a novelty and a creation, forever
self-renewing. The synthesis, Foucault continues, is a “positive effect” of an “infinite number” of
“accidents” occurring at ground level in the “apparent chaos” (277), or quasi-chaos, of the market
environment. These are bound together by a “directly multiplying mechanism”—competition—which,
Foucault emphasizes, operates in the absence of any form of transcendence (275–276). In other words,
the positive synthesis of market conditions occurs immanently to the economic field. The choice of
the subject of self-interest rabbit-holed in that field of immanence is “irreducible” and “nontransferable” (272). It is
“unconditionally referred to the subject himself” (272). At its core, Foucault says, the liberal economic
model is one of “existence itself”: it concerns first and foremost a relation of the “individual to
himself” (242). This is existence in its dissociative dimension.3 Here, in its relation to itself, the subject
circles itself more and more tightly around its individual power of choice, like a dog to sleep, wrapping
itself centripetally around a center of promised satisfaction. It circles in on itself, away from the social,
unmindful of noneconomic societal logics. But it all works out for the best for society in the end, they say, thanks to the positive
synthesis of multiplier effects. Relation to oneself involuntarily amplifies across the multiplier effects to become a systemwide social
fact. The inmost dimensions of individual existence are operatively linked to the most encompassing level, that of the market
environment that is the economic field of life. What is most intensely individual is at the same time most wide-rangingly social. The
smallest scale and the largest scale resonate as one, in a quasi-chaos of mutual sensitivity. To relate selfinterestedly to oneself is in
But there is a problem . It has to do with the
future. Success, of course, is not guaranteed for any particular act, or any particular individual. The
selforganizing of the system at the largest scale can synthesize its way past many a microfailure. As choices
percolate through the economic field, the negative impact of individual failures is compensated for
overall by the multiplier effects of the successes. Given the infinity of accidents riddling the economic
field of life and the existential blindness of all economic actors, there is an ever-present threat of a misstep. Every
economic calculation is a calculus of risk. “Behavioral finance (psychology) and rational actor models (the
‘rational economic man’, or REM) rarely emphasize how uncertainty differs from risk and
probability” (Pixley 2004, 18). You can calculate risk in terms of probabilities, but probabilities by
nature have nothing to say about any given case. The affect accompanying uncertainty is there in
any case. Choices in the present become highly charged affectively with fear for the uncertain future. The present is shaken,
the very same act to relate, involuntarily, to everyone else.
tremulous with futurity. There is no calculus of risk independent of an individual’s affective self-relation to uncertainty. Even in the
best-case scenario, rationality
and affectivity cannot be held safely apart . Unlike the juridical
subject of the law and the civil subject of society, the economic subject of interest is never called upon to
renounce its selfinterest for the general good.4 Selfinterestedness remains “unconditional.” It is measured in
satisfaction. We have been successful in our selfinterestedness if we have attained satisfaction for
ourselves . What the economically productive subject of interest ultimately produces is its own
satisfaction (Foucault 2008, 226). Paradoxically, the measure of how “rationally” a subject of interest
behaves can only be measured affectively , in the currency of satisfaction. Rationality and affectivity
are joined at the selfinterested hip, in one way or another, for better and for worse. “Emotions function in the
core structures of the financial world” (Pixley 2004, 18). The subject of interest is never called upon to
renounce self-interest. But it is frequently called upon to defer the very satisfaction by which its
self-interest is measured. Feeling insecure? Be reasonable. Defer your satisfaction to a more
secure time of life. Work toward retirement. But this is a rational choice only if you trust the
system’s selforganizing . This is an increasingly difficult sell as crises follow each other
in rapid succession . Each crisis is a shock to the system , at all scales. Uncertainty
starts to feed on uncertainty. Fear builds into panic . Negative multiplier effects
take over . Household savings vaporize and national economies crumble. Suspicions grow that the invisible
hand suffers from a degenerative motor disease. All signs are that the condition is congenital. Crisis no longer
seems a punctual interval between periods of stability. Crisis is the new normal. That this should be the
case only stands to reason. The premise of any rational calculation is that similarly strategized actions
will yield similar results. But the whole point of an economy that selects for creative
multiplier effects is that multiplier effects are nonlinear . By definition, they are effects that are not
commensurate with their causes, even if the causes be known. The whole point of capitalist enterprise is to
“leverage”: to extract a surplus yield of effect over and above what would normally be expected to
follow from an investment. The capitalist process is driven by the potential for, and yearning after, an excess of effect over
any given quantity of causative input: surplus value. The more complex the system is, the more uncertain the future becomes. And
complexification has been a constitutive tendency of the capitalist system from its
beginnings. Capitalism, always a farfrom- equilibrium system, is becoming ever more so.
same multiplier mechanism that promises future satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain.
The
Why defer
satisfaction if the capitalist future is constitutively uncertain ? But on the other
hand, how can you not play it safe by deferring your satisfaction, precisely because
the capitalist future is so uncertain? This conundrum of deferral is an expression
of the paradox that neoliberalism’s promise of satisfaction unnerves the
rationality it extols, giving it the affective shakes that cannot be cured. The rational
risk calculations of the subject of interest become more and more affectively overdetermined by
the tension between fear of the future and hope for success, and between satisfaction and its
uncertain deferral. The embrace of rational self-interest and affective agitation becomes all the
closer. They fall all the more intensely into each other’s orbit, to the point that they contract into
each other, entering into a zone of indistinction, at the heart of every act. It’s a vicious circle .
Positive multiplier effects can be counted on only when individuals’ rational choices mutually reinforce each other, catching like a
contagion. This
is the point at which rational choice is indistinguishable from “ irrational
exuberance ” (in the legendary phrase of US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan). This is also precisely the
mechanism that forms speculative bubbles leading to crisis .5 More radical than the fact
that the same mechanism that promises satisfaction makes it exponentially less certain is the fact
that the attainment of the very satisfaction promised can itself bring on a crisis. The tired hound
of self-interest, circling in for satisfaction, traces its own private vicious circle in its self-relating
movements. Its sleep will be agitated. It will twitch with dreams of disappearing rabbits .
Using our bodies as laboratories of experimental subjectivities can foment the
critical resistance to normalization needed to produce political transformation
Preciado 13 [Beatriz, professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of
Performance at Paris VIII, Testo Junkie, translated by Bruce Benderson, 2013, Feminist Press:
New York, NY, p. 348-53]
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 . I
am pleading here for an array of politics of physical experimentation and
semiotechnology that (in the face of the principle of political representation, which
dominates our social life and is at the core of political mass movements , which can be
as totalitarian as they are democratic ) will be regulated by the principle that—in accordance with Peter
Sloterdijk’s intuitions—I will call the “principle of the auto-guinea pig.”12 In China, in 213 BC, all books were burned by
order of the emperor. In the fifth century, after a series of wars had ransacked and decimated the
library at Alexandria, it was accused of harboring pagan teachings contrary to the Christian faith and was destroyed by the decree
of Emperor Theodosius. The greatest center of research, translation, and reading disappeared. Between
1330 and 1730, thousands of human bodies were burned during the Inquisition, thousands of books were destroyed, and hundreds
of works related to the expertise and production of subjectivity were relegated to oblivion or to the underground. In 1813, American
soldiers took York (now Toronto) and burned the parliament and legislative library. A year later, the Library of Congress was razed.
In 1933, one of the first actions of the Nazi government was the destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for
Sexual Research) in Berlin. Created in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, this center had for years played a role in the research and
dissemination of progressive ideas and practices concerning sex and sexuality. Twenty thousand books from the Hirschfeld Institute
were burned on May 10, 1933, on Opernplatz on a gigantic pyre whose flashing flames were imprinted on the camera film of Hitler’s
reporters. On the night of March 9, 1943, an air raid on a library in Aachen destroyed five hundred thousand books. In 1993,
Croatian militia destroyed dozens of libraries (among them, those in Stolac). In 2003, American bombs and Saddam loyalists sacked
and destroyed the National Library of Baghdad13 . . . The
theorico-political innovations produced during
the past forty years by feminism, the black liberation movement, and queer and transgender
theory do seem to be lasting acquisitions. However, in the context of global war , this collection
of scholarship could be destroyed also, as fast as a microchip melting under intense heat. Before
all the existing fragile archives about feminism and black, queer, and trans culture have been
reduced to a state of radioactive shades, it is indispensible to transform such minority
knowledge into collective experimentation, into physical practice, into ways of life and forms
of cohabitation. We are no longer pleading, like our predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s, for an understanding of life and
history as effects of different discursive regimes. We are pleading to use discursive productions as
stakeholders in a wider process of the technical materialization of life that is occurring
on the planet. A materialization that each day resembles more and more a total technical
destruction of all animal, vegetable, and cultural forms of life and that will end, undoubtedly, in the
annihilation of the planet and the self-extinction of most of its species. Alas, it will become a
matter of finding ways to record a planetary suicide. Until the end of the eighteenth century, self-experimentation
was still a part of the research protocols of pharmacology. Animal experimentation was not yet called into question, but an ethical
precept dictated that the researcher take on the risk of unknown effects on his or her own body before enacting any test on the body
of another human. Relying on the rhetoric of objectivity, the subject of scientific learning would progressively attempt to generate
knowledge outside him- or herself, to exempt his or her body from the agonies of self-experimentation. In 1790, the physician
Samuel Hahnemann self-administered strong daily doses of quinine in order to observe its effects in fighting malaria. His body
reacted by developing symptoms that resembled the remittent fever characteristic of malaria. The experiment would serve as the
basis for the invention of the homeopathic movement, which, based on the law of similars, maintains that it is possible to treat
illness using minute doses of a substance that, in much larger amounts, would provoke the same symptoms of that illness in a
healthy body, in the manner of a therapeutic mirror. Peter Sloterdijk, inspired by Hahnemann, will call the process of controlled and
intentional poisoning “voluntary auto-intoxication” and will sum it up as follows: “If you intend to be a doctor, you must try to
become a laboratory animal.”14 In order to transform conventional frameworks of the “cultural
intelligibility”15 of human bodies, it is necessary to evolve toward practices of voluntary
autointoxication . From Novalis to Ritter, the romanticism from which Sloterdijk draws his inspiration for a
counterproject to modernity will make autoexperimentation the central technique of the self in a dystopian society. Nevertheless,
romantic autoexperimentation carries the risk of individualism and depolitization. On the other hand,
two of the discourses around which the critique of modern European subjectivity will develop—
those of Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin—will begin under the form of the invention of new techniques of
the self and repertories of practices of voluntary intoxication. But the dominant discourse of
disciplinary modernity will brush them aside; the process of institutionalization that both
psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School will experience will go hand in hand with the
pathologizing of intoxication and the clinical industrialization of experimentation .
“ It
would be a good thing if a doctor were able to test many more drugs on himself ,”
declared the young doctor Mikhail Bulgakov in 1914, in “Morphine,” a text in which the protagonist describes the
effects of morphine on his own body.16 Likewise, it seems urgent today , from the perspective of
a trans-feminist project, to use our living bodies as biopolitical platforms to test the
pharmacopornopolitical effects of synthetic sex hormones
in order to create and demarcate new frameworks of cultural intelligibility for gender and sexual
subjects. In an era in which pharmaceutical laboratories and corporations and state medico-legal
institutions are controlling and regulating the use of gender and sex biocodes (the active molecules of
progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone) as well as chemical prostheses, it seems anachronistic to speak of
practices of political representation without going through performative and biotechnological
experiments on sexual subjectivity and gender. We must reclaim the right to participate
in the construction of biopolitical fictions . We have the right to demand collective and
“common” ownership of the biocodes of gender, sex, and race. We must wrest them from private
hands, from technocrats and from the pharmacoporn complex. Such a process of resistance
and redistribution could be called technosomatic communism. As a mode of the production of
“common” knowledge and political transformation , the auto–guinea pig principle would be
critical in the construction of the practices and discourses of trans-feminism
and the
coming liberation movements of gender, sexual, racial, and somatic-political minorities. To echo Donna J. Haraway’s expression, it
will consist of a positioned, responsible corporal political practice, so that anyone wishing to be a
political subject will begin by being the lab rat in her or his own laboratory .