Learning from the Virus (2020) Paul B. Preciado. I read the article as a plead to prioritize social and existential diversity in the face of a body flattening pandemic. Diversity has to be activity performed because societies are faced my enormous pressures by the constant surveillance executed by cyber-conservative forces (professors and priests peeping into my bedroom using the Zoom.app — We should explore the kink potential of this arrangement!). The text introduces a lot of fun terms such as “pharmacopornographic” and “cyber-oral”, which references a form of post-internet literacy. “We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation.” Preciado calls and I fear I spot an accelerationist tone (but agree).
We are still in the throes of the transition from a written to a cyber-oral society, from an industrial to an immaterial economy, from a form of disciplinary and architectural control to forms of microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control. In other writings, I’ve used the term pharmacopornographic for this type of management and production of the body as well as to describe the political technologies that produce sexual subjectivity within this new configuration of power and knowledge. […] I use the term pornographic because these management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.
I’m under a ridiculous workload. Ridiculous, as in I can only respond to it with a strange smile and the work evades attempts to structure it. It comes like a stealth bomber. Seems like rescheduled events from the past year (or two) are being organized during the next month. These zombie-events come with weird hybrid-baggage. Some talks are organized online but thanks to a recent drop in death counts, there is an interest to organize events face-to-face too. So, there are always two events organized. Performers execute a face-to-face performance bundled into online-performances, wrapped into publications. Working double time space! I’m not worried about a burn-out… I’m morbidly curious as to what shape it will take.