technogender’s Comments (group member since Aug 11, 2018)

technogender’s comments from the Queer Theory 2.0 group.

This is an old post, maybe you already talked a lot about it, but I'm going to comment anyway to encourage discussion.

The pharmacopornographic era, or pharmacopornography, is a concept developed by the author within a very specific theoretical grammar: a foucauldian one. Foucault's genealogical works (History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish ....) introduced the notion of regimes of production and control of the bodies to construct a history of sexual practices, our affections, the political management and social view of the male and female body, etcetera.

In this genealogy, Foucault talked about two regimes. The first is a necropolitical one, also called the sovereign regime, which is located from early medieval era to the XVIII century. In this regime, the body was made and perceived with the figure of the king (and the father) as the starting point. Sex was some kind of isomorphic model, and there were no modern concepts of sexual "species", such as the heterosexual or the homosexual. Power, in this type of society, existed as the right to give death to the servants by the monarch. Power was vertical, theocratic and masculine.

The second regime described by Foucault is the Disciplinary Regime, or the Biopolitical Regime. The disciplinary power is a power to govern life, to control the collective body, and this was done through control institutions like the school, the prison, the hospital. There is no longer a need to rule over the people as some kind of absolute authority, since the population began to "discipline and punish" itself thanks to the panopticon architectural model. This is also a regime that separated women and men in a very different way that was not from a system of analogies, rather one of differences. Hence, the notion of two distinct sexes was created, and two different sexualities as well. If the medieval sodomite was a regular person practicing sinful actions, the modern homosexual achieves the status of a pathological being.

I talked about Foucault's work in very short terms, so this is certainly unjust to the complexity of his work. I just wanted to give a brief view in order to introduce the third regime: pharmacopornography. See, the thing is: Foucault never finished his genealogy, and I've heard he had like 4 more books to add into his History of Sexuality, but he died along the way. A lot of authors tried to continue their work, or to understand the contemporary societies as a different regime quite unlike Foucault's Discipline. Deleuze and Guattari talked a lot about the "society of controls" which would be this third regime. Preciado, in his own way, proposed the pharmacopornography to theorize the period that came after the Second World War, to a post-disciplinary regime of control and production of our bodies. Sex, gender, the body, the sexualities, the techniques and institutions of power management would be all distinct from the previous cold archictecture of the late XIX century. In this new type of regime, as the author says:

"We are being confronted with a new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism." Such a transformation is imposing an ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols. (techno-blood, techno-sperm, techno-ovum, etc.), on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of legal and illegal synthetic psychotropic drugs (eg, bromazepam, Special K, Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, poppers, heroin), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of the form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted to high concentrations of sex-capital. "

As for the origins of the term itself:

"The term refers to the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity — of which "the Pill" and Playboy are two paradigmatic offspring."

It is important to understand that these three regimes do not substitute one another, but rather, they create a juxtaposition. Sometimes their different techniques of power battle each other, sometimes they collaborate to produce our bodies.

That's it! As I said, I tried to summarize really fast the gigantic philosophical and historical work of both Foucault and Preciado, but I hope it can be useful!

Paul B. Preciado is a pure genius of feminist radical queer theory. Sadly he is not very known in english-speaking countries. Or maybe he is not very known anywhere, even though he has such an impressive carreer and important works to the feminist, LGBT, queer and transgender movements/theory. That link is only a piece of his first book, which was writen in english but published originally in a french translation (weird, I know). The book's english version is going to be published in december by Columbia University Press.

I would be very happy to talk about all of his writings! :)