IGREY BIOPUNK

In response to Winner on the political qualities of things...I ask myself, how does this laptop embody “specific form of power and authority”? Mumford’s model presents an entry point, albeit anachronistically binary―this is either an authoritarian laptop or a democratic laptop. On a more serious note, we can consider nuclear power, or solar energy. Is this an authoritarian nuclear power? Denis Hayes affirms: “the increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism.” Is this a democratic solar energy? Hayes affirms: “dispersed solar sources are more compatible [...] with social equity, freedom and cultural pluralism.” I am tempted to describe technology as “democratizing, liberating,” however, I know that it is NOT a thing. Technology can no longer be described as “steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, and chemicals.” Technology lives, it comprises Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Algorithmic systems, Transgenics...This does not point us back to Husserl’s things themselves.

“In the case of biotechnology, the resistance is unfortunately in a position of reactivity” [1]. In this scenario, we are faced with the attempt to “slow them down.” Problems “have already arisen,” accidents “are in front of us.” CAE advocates for an “electronic civil disobedience (ECD)” as part of a “resistant culture” of “tactics” and “rogue scientists,” facing “molecular invasion.” In specific, CAE addresses intervention in the “production of transgenic life-products,” all the while, asserting: “we have no general position.” The goal then, is to “reduce the intensity and scope of these forms of labeling,” such as the unwarranted “saboteurs,” or “eco-terrorists” denunciations. “Fuzzy biological sabotage (FBS)” for instance, presents a “situational strategy,” a possible entry point into the complicated and controversial domain of tactical biotechnology. However, labels are labels, this is not the issue. The main problem is safety. Safety from harassment, lawsuits, arrest, imprisonment. The “symbolic shield” of “fuzzy saboteur,” may not be enough. This is where CAE introduces living, nonpathogenic biological agents as “disrupters,” employing “various creatures” as “agents of FBS,” a counter-molecular-invasion.

Waste makes a “claim on you” [1]. And yet, we have become habituated to the “stench and confusion” of our excess. We repress the “brute physicality” of waste. And so, we create the hole. The hole is the mechanism that offsets the confrontation with waste. From garbage shoots, toilets, bins, to the smallest can, the threshold of the hole absolves the burden of the waste object. These are interventions where the “elimination of waste” becomes the “marker of civilized modernity.” Enter Tokyo, a city without garbage cans. This minimal absence of disposal technologies confronts the wasteful subject with the daily accumulation of its excess consumption/production. And alternatively, there is the Mumbai model, the megacity peninsula of layered excess. Here, disposal/accumulation of waste is a “cultural performance” rendering a “particular subject.” Waste implicates a complicated subject/object dialectic, it “emerges and becomes recognizable and representable as the dead matter that affirms our living subjectivity, or sense of self.” Currently, animate/inanimate relations fail to ignore sets of “relation and interactions” that entail social dynamics of “mutual constitution.” Waste/self/society present forms of embodiments, and perhaps, these are “field[s] of emergence,” excess as a site of creative production.

This is about pleasure [1]. What are the ethics of inhabiting “placeless places,” “no places,” “terra nullius”? Despoilation as an ethics of assault. If it is “hardly utopian,” is it dystopian? Does “being placed” provide for such utopia? This is about inhabitation, in an epoch of displacement. Fewer and fewer of us will be able to utter the following: “my own emplacement.” Nothing is firmly placed in this age of massive migration, diasporas, refugee crises, and climate catastrophe. This is my own disemplacement. And yes, it has “underwritten the assault.” The ethics of movement are violence. There is violence in sprawl, in fracking, and obviously, there is violence in destruction. Conversely, we have the ethics of boundaries, containment, “delusions of safety.” Alaimo advocates for exposure, “the pleasure of interconnection,” “becoming in relation to a radical otherness.” We know this, as “nature,” Alaimo’s “Undomesticated Ground.” Where is this “freedom”? This “reimagining”? Perhaps, as Austin suggests, it is the “potent ideological space” of “walking.” The theoretical Deleuzian nomadology and deterritorialization. An unbounded home, blurring the authority of the border. Or Bronowski’s “ubiquitous animal,” making a “home in every continent.” The ethics of inhabiting, are the inherently liminal ethics of spatiality.

Week 8

“What does a petrochemical want?”[1] This is an inquiry into the ontology[2] of the Plasticene (a term that the software does not yet recognize, so I ‘Add to Dictionary’ it). A quick search in the digital library of academic journals yields unsatisfactory results. Wrong database, perhaps, so I ‘Google’ it... “plasticene etymology” ― “Did you mean: plasticine etymology,” it asks without a sign of affect. Perhaps that is what I meant, I think to myself. [Click] ...“late 19th century,” ‘plastic’+’-ine,’ says Google...Incorrect, and I find out that ‘Plasticine’ is brand of modelling clay. [Again] “plasticene etymology” ― “Showing results for plasticine etymology,” it tells me. [Sigh] So I dumb-it-down: ‘plastic etymology’―Finally, from the Greek plassein, plastikos, from the Latin plasticus, from the Latin plastique. I gather the following: “plastic: characteristic of molding, mid 17th century.”

This is the ontology of the Plasticene: excess waste. It is this extensive database to whom I have entrusted sites of knowledge production. As I write this, “a giant, slowly moving mass of floating plastics is caught in a swirling clockwise vortex”[3] in my software, “created by lack of winds and slow currents.” The year 2018 “marked the beginning of a growing awareness of the presence and danger of plastics” in metaphorical oceanic environments. 

Figure 00. X, 2018. https://www.academia.edu/36617779/X.

Week 7

“The most disruptive force on the planet resides in DNA.”[1] You don’t have to tell them, they know it. “An in vivo philosophy surges through the blood,”[2] their blood. Only two months into the 2018 “swine flu outbreak,”[3] the “swapping of a few genes in a virus native to pigs” shut down their body. No more parade.

I now stress about the “economic recovery.” They had warned “against travel.” And I can only hope that, just like the new swine flu strain, this will not be as “deadly as originally feared.” And all due to “a few letters,” “a few bits of disrupted DNA”! “Paradoxically, they return, and we endure it with ‘freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain [...] the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism...’[4]”[5] since “infection knows no morality.”[6]   

Figure 00. X, 2018. http://igrey.net/X.

Week 6

“The heart of the atom, was broken apart with a violence that made the earth and the heavens quake [...] Time was frozen with a heat as intense as the sun.”[1] The cloud, cited and further described in LIVING AV: X:

Wexshallxreferxtoxthexprojectxofxinterestxasx“X.”xXxasxthexresidualxsignif

ierxofxaxdecimatedxX-X-

X.xXxasxthexblindnessxandxvisionxofxXrays.xXxasxindeterminate,xunknow

n,xanonymous.xX,xdenotingxexcess,xmultiplication,xthexpluralxasxsuffix,xt

hexRomanxnumeralxfor10.xX,xdenotingxloss,xasxaxcross,xmarkerxofxdeat

h,xoverwritingxorxobliterating,xaxvoid.xXxasxhorizontalxaxis,xinxrelationxto

xanxeventxhorizonxorx[2]

Week 5

In response to the ‘sex panic’: an introduction to the f-male. Let’s begin by defining the f-male, whereby we de-fine, de-finis, de-finire, bring to an end, the fe-male, through the hack. The f-male emerges from the necropolitical regime of the giver of death, hacker, and central figure of sovereign necropolitical poíēsis. It is worth noting, that the f-male, no longer a “self-identified biopolitical factory,” [1] that is, no longer at the center of biopolitical reproduction, is the ideal citizen of emancipatory necropolitics, the model body of the pharmacopornographic regime. Perhaps, “we even might find a perverse joy here.”[2]

Week 4

Figure 00. ABYSS, 2018. http://igrey.net/ABYSS.

Week 3

The chthulucene[1] is where it’s at. I am talking about the “timespace of [...] those now submerged and squashed in the tunnels, caves, remnants, edges, and crevices of damaged waters, airs, and lands.”[2] In this place, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,”[3] and as ‘Speaker for the Dead,’ my task is to “bring the dead into the present, so as to make more response-able living and dying possible in times to come.”

..-. --- .- -- .. -. --. --..-- / -... .-.. .- -.-. -.- / .. -. -.- / .-- .- ...- . ... /

-... . -. - .... .. -.-. / -.. . .--. - .... ... /

.. -. ...- .- -.. . ... / - .... . / -.-. .... .. - --- -. / -.-. ..- -. - /[4]

[1] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 71. [2] Ibid. [3] Quote by Robert Oppenheimer (his translation from Sanskrit) from Bhagavad Gita, after the explosion of first atomic bomb. [4] IGREY, “ABYSS,” http://igrey.net/ABYSS.

[5] Tentacular Theory in Donna Haraway’sChthulucene. 

Week 2

If we “give a voice to a thing-power,”[1] what does it say? When the “object becomes Other,” what is its conatus, “active impulsion”? This is the thinking of the thing itself, the “metaphysics of the object,” which take us into the wildness of mobilized, non-human otherness. Movements outside of reason, on the loose. How did we arrive at an absolute from ab-solution and on the loose? A thing, an out-side that is “radically-free,” as they say, would be a “no-thing,” or a movement towards disintegration.

Week 1

Performing and presenting her and their soma, the research entails an inquiry of the body as both object and subject, where their soma operates on an “other than human scale.”[1] We have had enough of “somatic speciesism.” This soma is a postanthropocentric soma, the “human sensorium” is not at the center of this quest. We are seeking their other somas. It could be natural; it could be machinic code. The molecularization of this soma reads me, writes me. But they are also cellular, “entangled, embedded,” symbiotic boundaries. “This mode of being-in-the world reconfigures traditional ontological hierarchies and values,” she says introducing the “human-nonhuman-super-organism” and “living media.”

[1] Quotes to follow: Monika Bakke, “In the Quest of Aesthetics Among Nonhuman Somas,” Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics, ed. Wojcieck Malecki (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennet, Jane. “The Force of Things.” Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things.

Bakke, Monika. “In the Quest of Aesthetics Among Nonhuman Somas.” Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014.

Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Edited by Anna Tsing. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

IGREY. “ABYSS.” http://igrey.net/ABYSS.

―. “LIVING A/V: X.” https://www.academia.edu/37627815/LIVING_A_V_X.

―. “POLYMISLAND.” http://www.igrey.net/POLYMISLAND.

―. “RETROSPECTIVELY.” https://www.academia.edu/37574506/RETROSPECTIVELY.

―. “X.” https://www.academia.edu/36617779/X.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Pollock, Anne, “Queering Endocrine Disruption.” Object Oriented Feminism. Edited by Kathleen Behar. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Beatriz Preciado. “Beatriz Preciado: Pharmacopornographic counter-fictions.” Filmed 2014, UK, video, 19:36. https://vimeo.com/95171189.

Wohlsen, Marcus. “HACK/OPEN.” Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life. 2007.