Just another Reflect – University College London site
The individualistic mutation – Taking action in a determined world
Michel Foucault and Michael Stoneman, Death Valley, 1975. Foucault was visiting California, today’s training ground for upcoming generations of entrepreneurs.
„We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation“. That’s a quote that introduces one of the last paragraphs of a short article by Paul B. Preciado. Learning from the virus was published in May/June 2020 in the journal named Artforum. Preciado refers to the theories of Michel Foucault when he analyses the underlying mechanisms forming today’s subjectivities. He argues that the pandemic has been changing the form of governmentality from biopolitics back to sovereignty: Our bodies are structured by hard new borders, our personal air, self-contained inside the mask becomes an area crucial for a decision about life and death.
Visions for the future
Foucault talked about Heterotopias, places that exist and simultaneously don’t exist, but in any case, in which things can mingle and build a line of flight escaping the sharp disciplinary sword splitting and forming society and subjects. These might be a place for something different, for “other” things and humans.
Isn’t this, along with the positive vision of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the formulation of spaces for “dividuals”, a divisible and connected, in any case redistributed and moving form of subjectivity? And isn’t this what the early Cyberspace was aiming at? A network of intermingling “dividuals“, connecting their flows of desire?
That might be the case, but as Preciado says, new forms of subjectivity are occupied by “un-dividuals”: “They do not have lips or tongues. They do not speak directly; they leave a voice mail. They do not gather together and they do not collectivize “. There might be an ideal Preciado is secretly following: humans interacting immediately, literally without any medium in between blurring the essences of the messages.
The new subjects are stuck in their “I”, one could say. The highly connected horizontal workers (the prosumers, consuming media for the price of producing content) are jailed by their cellphones, according to Preciado. He supposes to turn off the devices and to start mutating “just as the virus”, starting a process of “Healing” (for my taste it sounds to much as a proclamation of the newest promise of salvation).
The acting individual
Paul. B. Preciado is a writer and philosopher, applying theory to topics as identity, gender, pornography, architecture and sexuality. Source: ICA.
Preciado is appealing to the subjects to “chose”. Is the sovereign subject, the last sign of hope inside a formed constellation of techniques “fictionalizing” a body to itself “until it is able to say ‘I’”? Is it the last agent able to start a mutation?
So, Would Preciado lead us to a neoliberal vision of freeing the human subjects and just let them “mutate” or “work” as entrepreneurs or artists of themselves? There is this difficulty of reaching a subject, that can act in a sovereign way, but is at the same time dependent on its big Other, its self-reflection in the mirror (in a Lacanian sense), and on materialistic circumstances and power structures.
For reaching utopia, the first step might be politically trying to activate hidden potentials of the subject for a change, but obviously structure must change. And in this sense, I would like you to think about it, regardless of who you are. In this case besides all doubts, Preciado might be right appealing to the subjects, even if they are not themselves.
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