Reading Notes: Parisi, "The Nanoengineering of Desire"

[rax]

"Biotech's techniques of fertilisation, such as ectogenesis, indeed seem to accelerate the desexualization of difference and the disembodiment of the maternal." But, in a bunch of theory words, what does this even matter? Core question, I think: "How can we account for the way biotech contributes to changing the perception of sexual difference below the level of the discursive, in the imperceptible layers of affective relations?"

Contrary to some popular beliefs, sexuality and sexual difference have a "spatio-temporality of the body-sex now embedded in evolutionary contingencies." Biotechnologies as "Critique against the natural," I should really read Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto..." wait we're all cyborgs now? Oh right this ties back to the stuff in the earlier readings about prosthesis and the relationship with technologies of the body going way the hell back. OK. "cyborg" is being used here as a technical term that doesn't mean what I think when I first read "cyborg." Bea says: "The origin of the term 'cyborg' comes from cybernetics, the study of the structure of regulatory systems. In a sense, a 'cyborg' is merely someone who has fully integrated the technology of regulatory systems into their life." Not sure that's exactly what they're saying here but it's closer than my "robot person!"

The author summarizes Barad as "a post-humanist conception of performativity for queer studies." Well, that's better than I could do! Is there a way to connect intra-actions and "things-in-phenomena" with D&G's idea of the assemblage --- trainer and pokeball and pokemon is becoming-pokemon, player and game boy and cartridge is becoming-Pokemon? (Yes it's a ridiculous paper but that explanation for becoming/assemblages is actually really helpful.) 

Oh here come D&G and "zones of indistinction" between thinking and doing and so on. Now it's a party! They see bodies "as a machinic ecology" --- "the mutual activities of differentiation between the abstract and concrete dimensions of matter." Oh whoah, a "virtual materiality" that "cannot be disentangled from the actual intra-action between elementary components." ...So the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Sure.

"It is the abstract --- or virtual --- relationality that opens the question of what a body-sex can do." This what you can do rather than what you are line is one I like and it keeps cropping up. I think it comes out of Spinoza? Arrrgh I am going to have to read Spinoza.

Huh. "viral contagion between technology and biology." 

"Technoscience... has been used to rethink notions of transsexuality and chimerism in nature, challenging culturalist assumptions about the natural whilst developing a neo-materialist engagement with sexuality." Citation of Myra Hird --- yup, have read this already. It's always a nice feeling when I know the citations someone is making. I hear that gets more common the more time you spend in a field. Huh. She "points to the bacterial world of inter-sex as a way to rethink notions of human bodies as 'engaging in constant non-binary sex, as biologically queer.'" Maybe but I think it's reasonable to respond to "Bacteria in you are having weird funky sex all the time!" with "So what? I'm a biome, whatevs."

The author's goal here is to engage on a continuum --- "a cultural evolution of the natural and a natural evolution of the cultural variations of a body-sex." Hmm, this looks like the "Events" on a micro scale are similar to the "phenomena" in Karen Barad. Though, "micro-perceptual activities of subatomic sexes" sounds dangerously non-sensical. Let's see where the author goes with this.

The take on nanotech here is kinda scifi. I don't think nanotech currently does very much with regard to fundamentally rewriting the biome or whatever. I mean, maybe I am wrong? I do like the idea of "produc[ing] new nano-activities" through new technology and increasinf the scope of things that can be done. ...Yeah, we're getting into what nanobots "will" do and the danger that intelligent nanomachines will destroy us all.

"A body-sex is caught in the topological expansion of events where the indeterminacy of a future-past is at work in the imperceptible speeds of the present." I get the feeling "speed" is a technical term I should really learn too. Virilio, probably? Ugh. Although the footnote says Bergson (bleaugh and a half!) and Whitehead. "Nanotech profoundly interferes in the body's network of durations" --- actually that makes sense.

Arguing for "an affective rather than paradigmatic method of relating nature and culture, the sciences and the humanities." Oh, hmm, the author acknowledges that there are fictions, but says there is value to creating "novel fictions of a body-sex." Hmm, that sort of helps me see where they are going.

Science: "operating on a plane of reference able to actualize the virtual." HUH. "Affective contagion." 

Ooh, here's a good question: "Can we account for variations in modes of desire, in sexual experience without holding onto organic essence or discursive structures of sex? Does sexual experience coincide with the organic order of the body-sex or the mental representation of natural sex?" I don't feel like the conclusion answers it, though. :/ Still! An awesome question!
 

Comments

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Is there a way to connect intra-actions and "things-in-phenomena" with D&G's idea of the assemblage --- trainer and pokeball and pokemon is becoming-pokemon, player and game boy and cartridge is becoming-Pokemon? (Yes it's a ridiculous paper but that explanation for becoming/assemblages is actually really helpful.)

I'm pretty sure you can find that on fanfiction.net.

I'll be helpful some other day. :D