1NC
We’ll begin with a wild thesis: Sex is the principal resource structuring the post-Fordist economy, which might better be called pharmacopornism, or pharma-porn.
Preciado 13. Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political History of the Body, Gender
Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, Testo Junkie, pg. 38
If we consider that the pharmaceutical industry (which includes the legal extension of the scientific, medical, and cosmetic industries, as well as the trafficking of drugs declared illegal), the pornography industry , and the industry of war are the loadbearing sectors of post-Fordist capitalism, we ought to be able to give a cruder name to immaterial labor . Let us dare, then, to make the following hypothesis: the raw
materials of today’s production process are excitation , erection ,
ejaculation , and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction , omnipotent
control , and total destruction . The real stake of capitalism today is the
pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity , whose products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, testosterone, antacids, cortisone, techno-sperm, antibiotics, estradiol, techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs, citrate of sildenafil (Viagra), and the entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotence and total control.
In these conditions, money itself becomes an abstract , signifying psychotropic
substance . Sex is the corollary of capitalism and war , the mirror of
production . The dependent and sexual body and sex and all its semiotechnical derivations are henceforth the principal resource of post-Fordist capitalism .
Although the era dominated by the economy of the automobile has been named
“Fordism,” let us call this new economy pharmacopornism , dominated as it is by the industry of the pill, the masturbatory logic of pornography, and the chain of excitationfrustration on which it is based. The pharmacopornographic industry is white and viscous gold , the crystalline powder of biopolitical capitalism .
The system of pharma-porn is powered by an orgasmic force, potential gaudendi, the sum potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule – biopower has morphed into an irreversible technoliving force
Preciado 13. Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political History of the Body, Gender
Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, Testo Junkie, pg. 41
To understand how and why sexuality and the body, the excitable body, at the end of the nineteenth century raided the heart of political action and became the objects of a minute governmental and industrial management, we must first elaborate a new
philosophical concept in the pharmacopornographic domain that is

equivalent to the force of work in the domain of classical economics . I call
potentia gaudendi , or “orgasmic force,” the (real or virtual) strength of a body’s
(total) excitation .33 This strength is of indeterminate capacity; it has no gender ; it is neither male nor female , neither human nor animal , neither animated nor
inanimate . Its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject ; neither does it know the difference between being
excited , being exciting , or being-excited-with . It favors no organ over any other, so that the penis possesses no more orgasmic force than the vagina , the
eye , or the toe . Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule . Orgasmic force is not seeking any
immediate resolution , and it aspires only to its own extension in space and
time , toward everything and everyone , in every place and at every moment .
It is a force of transformation for the world in pleasure—“in pleasure with.” Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all the structures of the mind.
In pharmacopornographic capitalism, the force of work reveals its actual
substratum : orgasmic force, or potentia gaudendi. Current capitalism tries to put to
work the p otentia g audendi in whatever form in which it exists, whether this be in its
pharmacological form (a consumable molecule and material agency that will
operate within the body of the person who is digesting it), as a pornographic
representation (a semiotechnical sign that can be converted into numeric data or transferred into digital, televisual, or telephonic media), or as a sexual service (a live pharmaco- pornographic entity whose orgasmic force and emotional volume are put in service to a consumer during a specified time , according to a more or less formal contract of sale of sexual services).
Potentia gaudendi is characterized not only by its impermanence and great
malleability , but also and above all by the impossibility of possessing and
retaining it . P otentia g audendi, as the fundamental energetics of pharmacopornism,
does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property . I can
neither possess nor retain another’s potentia gaudendi, but neither can one possess or retain what seems to be one’s own . P otentia g audendi exists exclusively as
an event , a relation , a practice , or an evolutionary process .
Orgasmic force is both the most abstract and the most material of all workforces.
It is inextricably carnal and digital, viscous yet representational by numerical values, a phantasmatic or molecular wonder that can be transformed into
capital .
The living pansexual body is the bioport of the orgasmic force . Thus, it
cannot be reduced to a prediscursive organism ; its limits do not coincide

with the skin capsule that surrounds it . This life cannot be understood as a
biological given ; it does not exist outside the interlacing of production and
culture that belongs to technoscience. This body is a technoliving, multiconnected entity incorporating technology.34 Neither an organism nor a machine , but “the
fluid, dispersed, networking techno-organic-textual- mythic system.”35 This new condition of the body blurs the traditional modern distinction between art, performance, media, design, and architecture. The new pharmacological and surgical techniques set in motion tectonic construction processes that combine figurative representations derived from cinema and from architecture (editing, 3-D modeling, 3-D printing, etc.), according to which the organs, the ves- sels, the fluids (techno-blood, techno-sperm, etc.), and the molecules are converted into the prime material from which our pharmacopornographic corporality is manufactured . Technobodies are either not-yet-alive or already-dead: we are half fetuses , half zombies . Thus,
every politics of resistance is a monster politics . Marshall McLuhan,
Buckminster Fuller, and Norbert Wiener had an intuition about it in the 1950s: the
technologies of communication function like an extension of the body . Today, the situation seems a lot more complex—the individual body functions like an
extension of global technologies of communication. “Embodiment is significant prosthesis.”36 To borrow the terms of the American feminist Donna J. Haraway, the twenty-first-century body is a technoliving system , the result of an irreversible
implosion of modern binaries (female/male, animal/ human, nature/culture).
Even the term life has become archaic for identifying the actors in this new technology. For Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” Donna J. Haraway has substituted
“techno-biopower.” It’s no longer a question of power over life, of the power to manage and maximize life, as Foucault wanted, but of power and control exerted over a
technoliving and connected whole .37
Follow the line of flight – the 1AC’s positioning of itself inside legal claims for inclusive personhood and statist anti-discrimination ensures there is a necessary outside – specifically, this produces the terms and conditions under which the prison industrial complex realizes itself now. What is necessary is a disarticulation of the human organism, the racializing assemblage par excellence, through a desubjectifying mode of abolition taking its lead from slave revolts and pirate colonies.
---trans-violence DA
Weheliye 14. Alexander G. Weheliye, professor of African American studies at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus, pg. 82
We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world , and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law , what the law
cannot capture , what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property

ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of
identity- based activism that respond to structural inequalities , legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion , recognition , and equality based on a narrow legal
framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws ) not only
hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “ distribution of
life chances .”22 If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority
politics , it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in
comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others , thus allowing for
the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans , not-quite-
humans , and nonhumans . This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream
feminist , civil rights , and lesbian-gay rights movements , which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly
criminalized and disposable populations ( women of color , the black poor , trans people , the incarcerated , etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical
assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its
endorsement of racial slavery , indigenous genocide , Jim Crow , the prison-industrial
complex , domestic and international warfare , and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world
of Man . Instead of appealing to legal recognition , Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the
“ racialized (trans)gender entrapment ” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave
contraband settlements in the Americas) to “ foreground the ways in which often
overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-
prison work ,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on
reforming the law .24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the
“‘ impossible’ worldview of trans political existence ,” which redefines “the insistence of
government agencies , social service providers , media , and many nontrans activists and
nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible .”25 A relational maroon
abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the in-
compatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how
putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within hegemonic frameworks but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in
movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered .

The 1ac’s model of parliamentary politics precludes a revolutionary
Presaido 13 [Interview between Ricky Tucker and Beatriz Precaiado, 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.
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 self-experimentation 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 cisfemales. 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.
Independently, the 1AC accepts Western common law’s understanding of itself, their discussion of the war on drugs is devoid of racial signifiers, existing in the ether of legal simulation. We asked you if you wanted to take it back before the debate – we’re taking the ground of historizing the penal system as a rhetorical act. The 2AC is too late, and doing so then would be a concession to us.
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 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 tax-paying 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.
Political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject fails to recognize their own representation. This disidentification is the fundamental condition for political transformation. Anything else hides the biopolitical, capitalist monster lurking within yourself.
Preciado 13 [Beatriz, translated by Bruce Benderson, 2013, Testo Junkie, Feminist
Press: New York, NY, p. 396-8]
Hormones are chemical prostheses.
Political drugs
. In this case, the substance not only modifies the filter through which we decode and recodify the world
; it also radically modifies the body and
, as a result, the mode under which we are decoded by others.
Six months of testosterone, and any cis-female
at all, not a should-have-been-boy or a lesbian, but any girl
, any neighborhood kid, a Jennifer Lopez or a Rihanna, can become a member of the male species who cannot be told apart from any other member of the hegemonic class.
I refuse the medico-political dose
, its regime, its regularity, its direction. I demand a virtuosity of gender ; to each one, its dose; for each context, its exact requirement
.
Here, there is no norm, merely a diversity of viable monstrosities.
I take testosterone like Walter Benjamin took hashish
, Freud cocaine, or Michaux mescaline. And that is not an autobiographical excuse but a radicalization
(in the chemical sense of the term) of my theoretical writing.
My gender does not belong to my family or to the state or to the pharmaceutical industry. My gender does not belong to feminism or to the lesbian community or to queer theory
.
Gender must be torn from the macrodiscourse and diluted with a good dose of
micropolitical hedonist psychedelics .
I don’t recognize myself. Not when I’m on T, or when I’m not on T.
I’m neither more nor less myself. Contrary to the Lacanian theory of the mirror state, according to which the child’s subjectivity is formed when it recognizes itself for the first time in its specular image, political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation
.
It is fundamental not to recognize oneself .
Derecognition
, disidentification is a condition for the emergence of the political as the possibility of transforming reality
.
The question posed by Deleuze and Guattari in 1972
in Anti-Oedipus remains stuck in our throat: “ Why do the masses desire fascism
?”
It’s not a question here of opposing a politics of representation to a politics of experimentation
, but of becoming aware of the fact that the techniques of political representation always entail programs of the somatic production of subjectivity
.
I’m not opting for any direct action against representation, but for a micropolitics of

disidentification , a kind of experimentation that doesn’t have faith in
representation as an exteriority that will bring truth or happiness.
In order to accomplish the
work of therapy for the multitudes that I have begun with these doses of testosterone and with writing, I now need only to convince you
, all of you, that you are like me
, and not the opposite
.
I am not going to claim that I’m like you
, your equal, or ask you to allow me to participate in your laws or to admit me as a part of your social normality
.
My ambition is to convince you that you are like me.
Tempted by the same chemical abuse.
You have it in you: you think that you’re cis-females, but you take the Pill; or you think you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra
; you’re normal, and you take Prozac or Paxil in the hope that something will free you from your problems of decreased vitality
, and you’ve shot cortisone and cocaine, taken alcohol and Ritalin and codeine
. . .
You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is awakening in me
.
Fantasies structure our political lives – disavowing affect in favor of consequentialism cedes influence on our future political lives
Shanks 15 [“Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract,” Torrey Shanks, Assistant
Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York,
Theory & Event, Volume 18, Issue 1, 2015]
Cruel optimism highlights
the workings of affect beyond familiar oppositions
in the tradition of political theory, in which it is assimilated to rational social interests
and the individual’s private preferences or seen as detrimental to political and social order. In contrast, cruel optimism enables us to consider how fantasies
– say, fantasies of freedom as choice and unencumbered individualism – structure and animate our collective political as well as personal lives, even as they disappoint and discourage
.
Cruel optimism
is particularly rich for the way that it recalls
us to the importance of affect mediated by shared fantasies within historical, social and political conditions
. For Berlant, it is
not fantasy that marks the failure of the otherwise rational subject, but
fantasy as a condition of political subjectivity that is important
. This subjectivity is not forged prior to
or outside of social life, but instead
its intersubjectivity
is situated culturally, historically
, and politically
.20 Reading political affect with
Berlant cautions
us against two depoliticizing tendencies
: first, disavowing the affective attachments of our social and political condition in favor of a notion of reason
and/or interests untouched by, or prior to, affect
; and
second, disavowing the intersubjective and specifically social, cultural and political conditions of affect in favor of affect as an unmediated experience. Berlant’s work in
Cruel Optimism is primarily directed at seeking out
the psychic, affective
and material sources of a recurring sense of political failure
.
The project is not only diagnostic, however.
Cruel optimism as a critical lens gestures forward
, optimistically (which is not necessarily to say happily), that is, toward a future that might be otherwise
.
The possibility of other futures begins in imagining “a potentialized present,” in what is both an undoing and a remaking of worlds that “requires fantasy to motor programs of action
, to distort the present on behalf of what the present can become.”21
The closing call of Cruel Optimism is “ to reinvent
, from the scene of survival,
new idioms of the political , and of belonging itself, which requires debating what the baselines of survival should

be in the near future
, which is, now, the future we are making.”22
Cruel optimism invites us to engage
and work inventively from within affective attachments
and fantastic scenes for transformative effects.
That does not entail a flight from the “affectsphere
,” but
rather requires an affective reorientation in which relations and conditions
(political, social, and historical) come to be seen in new ways.
Such a project is imaginative, aesthetic, and passionate. Because it requires the capacity to communicate such imaginations and desires, it is necessarily rhetorical
. More precisely, rhetoric as an imaginative language includes the power to persuade as well as to move the passions
, but its more capacious meaning includes the ingenious placing of things into new relation and drawing new images into view. In this way, rhetoric not only strikes affectively
, but its effects may also reorient our attention and our encounters with the world and with others.
The essential work of analogy and metaphor in transferring or borrowing meanings for new contexts and new uses, on this account, is far more powerful and integral for critique than persuasion alone.23
Contract theory
, capacious construed to include classical and contemporary modes and importantly critical contract theory, gives us a robust tradition in which to consider how political idioms can be ingeniously reinvented for critique that engages the affects
.
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.
Analysis of political economy comes first – otherwise pharma-porn coopts the plan’s ability to function. Indeed, we relish the possibility of social panic engendered by such a novel discovery.
Preciado 13. Beatriz Preciado, professor of Political History of the Body, Gender
Theory, and History of Performance at Paris VIII, Testo Junkie, pg. 291
For the moment, the restriction of prostitution from the category of work as it is defined by unions and laws to which government institutions in the West subscribe (with a few near exceptions that we can view as testing grounds of
political dissidence ) and the control of the circuits of production and
distribution of pornography , which prevents pornography’s assertion as a
cinematic industry equal to any other branch of entertainment , are not the result of a desire to protect the rights of women facing objectification of their body on the market, which various voices from the left, the right, and feminism have claimed in unison. On the contrary . If it seems to be necessary (in right-wing as
well as left-wing discourses ) to deny that sex can be the object of work , of economic exchange, services, or contracts, it is because the potential opening of the
category of work puts into question the so-called Puritan values of the spirit of capitalism, or even worse, makes visible the real porn val- ues inherent in them.
Thus, what is at stake here is a particular way of avoiding the public emergence of the true engines of pharmacopornographic capitalism, of avoiding, by any means, the
social panic generated by the following revelation: it isn’t rationality and
production , but potentia gaudendi , that sustains the world economy . And this is a panic that would trigger the total dislocation of work as a fundamental
value of modern societies . Panic in admitting that behind the economy of the
steam engine and Fordism hid and emerged the giant war-porn-drug-
prison industrial complex .

Producing discourse, producing writing, even from within the academy, is the main way that subjectivity itself is produced. What type of subjectivity will you design for yourself? We can’t script the form self-experimentation undertakes, but we do embrace the possibilities it fosters.
Presaido 13 [Interview between Ricky Tucker and Beatriz Precaiado, 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]
What was the benefit to designing your own protocol, of being the lab rat in your experiments with testosterone?
It’s interesting that you mention design.
Design is at the center of the pharmacopornographic more than anything else
, because design invents techniques of the body. Chairs and buildings are designed relative to the body, and body techniques define relationships between body, space and time, and the spaces that you can or cannot use
.
It’s crucial that activists with the right questions permeate these fields
.
Designers are typically driven by the commercial.
In terms of becoming a rat in your own laboratory , that’s what
happens when you write . Writing is becoming the rat in your own laboratory
.
Writing is the main technology of production of subjectivity that we invented a really long time ago
. What I do in the book is underlying this, making it hyperbolic through the invention of the protocol.
There are moments when you go beyond what is traditionally
done , in research and within the academy , that you think you are losing your mind, but you have to give yourself a kind of reference of heroes , whoever it is, be it
Freud or Foucault
.
How did Freud influence Testo Junkie?
I was looking through all of these books for research when I was building up my protocol for testosterone.
Freud learned that cocaine was being produced by pharmacological companies
in Germany because of the war.
At the end of the nineteenth century it was being used for barbarian soldiers. They would go to war exhausted, and were able to take these cocaine pills for energy. What was very funny was reading this text by
Freud called About Cocaine. He wrote a letter to the company saying he was a psychologist and would like 500 grams of pure cocaine that would eventually be delivered to his house
.
As soon as he got the cocaine, he tried it
and began his protocol. He immediately knew that this would change the psychological/psychiatric field.
He thought it would be the substance of the century.
He actually wrote letters to his future wife saying, “Dear Martha, I bought five hundred grams of cocaine. I have a project.” So, when I was there with my testosterone, I realized that this was the relationship I had to the book. I had this testosterone and I had a project. Nietzsche, Freud, and Benjamin used self-experimentation as a form of knowledge production. It does not only happen
with molecules and substances , but it can also happen in other areas .
Every crucial book
— piece of literature
—in a way, somehow
, has a certain
technique or technology attached to it .