Pharmaco-pornographic larking; a kindof reveiw of that book Testo Junkie which is pretty lit tbh and makes me wanna go on a sex-store spree and blow rent-money on a dildo collection coz at the moment I only have two and one of them was stolen so meh (how awesome is stuffing yourself with dildos and huffing poppers omg love it!!??!!)

What even is the importance of things like sex and gender and 'body sovereignty' in a world on fire? 

Recently finished Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and can't recommend it enough, thought it definitely bought into the affective 'ultra-modernity' of trans and queer narratives in a way that made me both exhilarated and uncomfortable; uncomfortable maybe because there are trans and queer life-worlds without access to the cultural and theoretical abundance of Preciado's semi-affluent cosmopolitan lifestyle which gives primacy to city spaces as well as travel. I mean, we really need to talk about how we premise travel as a general good, because in all seriousness it's access is entirely classed and it has a hefty carbon emission which is anything but negligible at this late stage. It's packaged with normative versions of success that, frankly, worship cosmopolitan meccas like London or Paris or New York as the only sites through which success can be measured, while anything else is small fry. Can a climate of detrimentally heavy identity rhetoric really be so blind to the ecological (and human) cost of privileged mobility? How can that same rhetoric decry post-colonial deficits in one breath and capitalise on affective victimhood aspiring towards planet-destroying affluence with the other? Double-think lol. 

That said I can't count the times I've been forced to prostitute my affective brown-ness or gay-ness, exacerbating difference to give myself an edge. Though in fairness if equity actually existed then we wouldn't be in this strange and paradoxical predicament where alleged victims are asked to perform their specific traumas for a penny, and educate well-meaning 'allies' for a dime. It's akin to being a member of the SPCA and making a liberated circus animal retell it's experiences of battery and captivity through contemporary dance. Not that I'm not a good dancer, but in the words of esteemed neo-Marxist Slavoj Zizek, 'I'd prefer not to'. 

Anyway Preciado talks about gender being a prosthesis, not just a chemical-hormonal one as per the premise of their book which sees them experimenting with testosterone doses and transforming their own makeup along lines outside the nascent prescriptions of trans-realisations (which is fun to watch and is it's own adventure in radical body sovereignty, which also really calls into question the nature of addiction and whether we can rightly pathologise any substance dependency whatsoever in a society that's gleefully integrated industrial by-products). But also they talk about gender itself being a somatic fiction, somatic here meaning enclosing desiring apparatuses which more often than not are supplemented by drugs. Though drugs in Preciado's loose designation includes things like sex (it's own ritualised initiator of the body's pharmacopeia) and even books, perhaps extolling the transformative nature of the act of reading; maybe specifically when it comes to radical theory such as their own. 

I can understand gender being some collection of fictions embodied 'somatically' and in that being a prosthesis, which makes the gendered body some kind of Frankenstein's monster (or cyborgian), and I can even more excitedly understand likening the reading of books to the ingestion of drugs, which as a notion characterises culture itself as a mind-altering substance (and by proxy a field of body-transformative resonance with changing requirements and context-specific needs, kind of like being extremely hay-feverish and alternately wading through country and city; or not, maybe that's a useless metaphor but it's Spring right now and my body is reading the world with feverish congested rejection, and I'm terrified of climate change whipping up pollen storms and asphyxiating me to death like those people in Melbourne last year because death by hay fever would just be humiliating).  

If gender is so porous then could we possibly shift this grasp of fluidity to the body itself, latent in Preciado's book, experiment freely and wantonly with the flesh sitting on these bones like a goopy catsuit, harness the dissonance which living through collapse will undoubtedly induce to look at embodiment as a game, the body not as bonded gendered signifier but as the unfathomably bottomless ground of everything, the keystone to every experience you could possibly have in this life and thusly available for adjustment per whim and fancy (or dire necessity). Which it is. 

Because I'm sick of versions of the future that preclude bodily dysfunction, that harangue every culturally conceived (normally gender-specific) imperfection or allegedly humiliating defect of the body's that technology will purportedly either gene-splice and patch up or transcend in an immaterial bolt of pixel-blue, uploading us forever from the material plane into virtual vistas and vessels of fractal quanta compounding action and thought. 

Lol.

Body sovereignty, in my opinion, means radical ownership of the body and deploying whatever means within your arsenal to feel powerful, centred, to feel whatever you need to feel day to day and however you can, even if your methods of body-fashioning go against the dictums of public health and sanity. Who the fuck is anyone else to tell you otherwise? So long as you're not hurting anyone (itself a murky concept when every purchase contributes to misery-spreading dictatorships and irreparable planetary harm; condoms, lubricant, strap-ons, poppers, all industrial by-products and all very much emerging from eco-fucking/blood-lusty consumerist complexes). 

Mechanising life and eventually the body itself, subjects becoming available to themselves as sources of capital (Instagram, cough) has always been something of a darkness in my mind like some dystopian trope, heralding society's total degeneration. But now, all things considered, the self becoming available as a tool of resource-generation appears as a school in self-fashioning, is maybe teaching people (myself included) to consider themselves as finite and malleable resources as much as the ground under our feet is comprised of finite and malleable resources. I feel like practices of treating the self and thusly the body as a technology is only opening human potential wider, and rather than slipping into some austere ontologies of post-abundance with the collapse of the western world, perhaps adorning the body in more and more somatic fictions and their tangible accoutrements (drugs, dildos, poppers, laser-eyes etcetera) is a play-book for survival. 

Or at the very least an ingredient list for a few party-focused decades of tribute to a dying planet. 

Beginning of the end

I used to think apocalyptic dreaming was the purview of the politically lazy who'd grown up on too many nineties disaster movies. Now I know differently, not because I'm an ardent conspiracy theorist (more of a casual conspiracy theorist), and not because Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization doco convinced me the cinematic image of burning cities was an affective-apparatus meant to soften us to the reception of 9/11 (though I kind of do think that), but mostly because the material effects of the western world winding down from lethal proximity with climate-change and the depletion of finite resources is a global reality, an unthinkable challenge to every existing approach to life as yet road-tested by industrial society. THE END was meant to be something laughable, a utopian fantasy whereby less rigorously minded people got to imagine alternatives to capitalism by dissociating from it and envisioning it's accelerated demise rather than engaging with the compromised beast which it is. An idealistic fantasy that was barely cognisant of the suffering and misery which actual collapse would entail even if it eventually meant a viable alternative could rise from the ashes. 

But now here we are walking the end, and the naive child in me grieving all the comforts which less enlightened times meant I could enjoy with a clear conscience is assuming the foetal position and rocking itself into a traumatised stupor, and the adult-suit I wear on the outside is pretty much on the brink of doing the same. 

So...

Where to from here?

Like any human currently living I don't pertain to having solid answers or even a remote sense of direction at this point in time, but I have tentative plans to slouch toward some austere mode of survival and endure until such a time living conditions become grossly untenable and I quit the game (morbid I know but morbidity characterises the times, if you hadn't noticed). If you have children, my condolences. You have a fixed stake in an otherwise rigged future. For myself, not having kids, my investment in a steadily dimming future becomes less and less. I would like to say I have the imagination to envision and then action a tomorrow which doesn't prioritise human flesh as the food-pyramid's base, but if the alternative is insects then just how ludicrous is cannibalism really? 

Fuck me up.

When I stop to think about the threats to human survival accumulating in the wings (for some, for others those threats are merrily devastating life-worlds as we speak), one of the more terrifying prospects is super-bugs which will mutate and spread as temperatures rise, creating warm humid atmospheres conducive to an increase of hyper-virulence; which will include the resurgence of diseases thought defeated by modern medicine. There's been half-public conversation around antibiotics losing efficacy and being out-manoeuvred by adaptive strains for years, but combine these emergent worries with climate-change's untimely nudge of archaic disease back out from the proverbial grave and into the body-public again and we have the conditions for epidemics the likes of which we've never seen. Add to this the unprecedentedly stacked living-spaces of modern cities (and the poverty they tend to camouflage) and suddenly you have urban spaces which in all likelihood will transform into mass graves virtually overnight. 

Fun!

And that's what's changed for me. This fantasy of end-times. They used to be CGI masterpieces of elegantly crumbling skyscrapers and gorgeously rendered meteorites smashing into earth and sending shockwaves across a reverently hushed humanity, swooning into death like a consumptive romantic poet. Now, I realise that things are going to be less picaresque, are going to be a lot harder and more drawn out. A slow and agonising decline as the institutions singly responsible for collapse flail possessively over their respective piles, binding the vulnerable with even worse instances of immiseration while justifying their actions as economical. 

No dragons or leviathans, no four horsemen rising up from hell to claim sinners. The time for metaphors is over.  

Instead we have destroyers masquerading as our last and only resorts, the wealthy becoming wealthier, the poor becoming poorer and being excluded from affluent solutions to collapse which more often than not entail gated Green Zones, sophisticated technological enclosures to shelter the rich from the successive waves of devastation which from here on out will only get worse. 

Most of the time I feel like I'm choking on my own hate and fear.

And then I remember sex and alcohol.