El traslado en circunstancias especiales

The Problem of Pleasure

In his famous critique of the institutionalization of sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the forces at work in the construction and regulation of the body should be under-stood not as a matter of boundaries enforced or superseded, but rather as “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.”¹ If there are, all too obviously, those who command by saying no to “wayward or unreproductive” sexualities, Foucault redirects our attention to the secret animating yes that affirms the pleasure felt in using such power.

Yet pleasure, as it turned out, has proven a less than seductive object of cri-tique. The vast theoretical literature on biopolitics inaugurated by Foucault has applied itself to an endless variety of problematics, and yet this discourse of power has largely remained just that: an analytic of power, of control, of the regulatory no, with far less attention paid to the nature, function, and co-determining role of pleasure. This curious blind spot in post-Foucauldian critique is the subject of a recent essay by Tim Dean titled “The Biopolitics of Pleasure.”² Dean attempts to unknot the elusive concept of pleasure and account for its marginalization in contemporary thought. Power stripped of pleasure tends to isolate its position and externalize its effects, whereas the immanent model proposed by Foucault allows no easy demarcation between, say, sovereign power and homo sacer.³ Missing from the dominant biopolitical critiques of power, Dean claims, is an account of the

“microphysics of its functioning at the corporeal level.”⁴ He returns to the figure of the spiral, suggesting that Foucault may have had the double helix of DNA in mind as his model. Thus aligned to the discourse of molecular biology, Foucault’s spiral may, according to Dean, shift the terms of critique toward a “radical immanentism”

accounting for what Foucault elsewhere called the “subindividual microphysics of power and pleasure.” A biological perspective on biopolitics would reframe the scale of analysis and recast the problems of control and relationality within a domain of subindividual multiplicity.

1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 45.

2 Tim Dean, “The Biopolitics of Pleasure,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer 2012):

477–96.

3 “One might venture that Agamben’s sovereign–bare life relation caricatures that of Hegel’s master-slave, were it not for the fact that the former hardly qualifies as a power relation in Foucault’s terms, owing to the extreme centrifugation that deprives one half of the couple of any leeway whatsoever.” Ibid., 491.

4 Ibid., 492.

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There’s nothing novel about this vantage point. Biologists have long understood the human body as a vast, ever-mutating colony of microbial agents whose agendas may or may not coincide with—or even determine—our own. “A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities,” Lewis Thomas observed as long ago as 1974.

“We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied.”⁵ How pleasure might be brought to bear on this indwelling swarm is a far less settled matter and one that reemerges as a critical question given the advent of a sexual practice whose intense devotion to plea-sure is organized around the transmission and affirmation of a microbe: the HIV virus.

Infection as Filiation

In his 1993 essay “The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous,” Gregg Bordowitz fantasizes about barebacking with Charles Ludlam, the founder of the legendary Ridiculous Theatrical Company:

In my fantasy, I want Ludlum to fuck me without a condom. I’d receive his cure as gift. Searching for a model, I wish for a legacy—the love and approval of a father. I want to achieve his stature. In my fantasy, Ludlam’s greatness can be passed on to me through his semen. A condom would thwart this transference. This is a fantasy about immortality; that some-thing exists greater than ourselves, shared between us.⁶

Bordowitz doesn’t use the word “barebacking” because he couldn’t: the term entered the lexicon a few years after the writing of his essay.⁷ Barebacking is a notoriously mul-tivalent term that falls into two general applications. In the widest sense, it describes any instance of anal sex without the use of condoms, whether calculated and deliberate (between monogamous partners with the same HIV status, for example) or spontaneous and circumstantial (the situational “slip”). Another, more specialized use is devoted to a subculture for whom the abandonment of condoms is linked to a self-conscious explo-ration—and celebration—of what it means to exchange HIV through sex. Barebacking, in this more specific and radical sense, has developed its own rituals and language,

5 Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 3–4. For a recent popular account of current microbial research and the challenges it poses to concepts of agency and subjecthood, see Michael Pollan, “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs,” New York Times, May 15, 2013.

6 Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986–2003, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 47.

7 Barebacking emerged more or less simultaneously with the advent of antiretroviral drug therapies in the mid-late 1990s and thus designates a historically specific practice; people fucked without condoms before HIV/AIDS, but no one barebacked. For a concise overview on the origins of barebacking, see Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (New York: Haworth Press, 1998), 12–17.

social networks and structures of assembly, fantasies and identifications. And while barebacking in general has been met with an outpouring of discussion in the popular press, as well as a growing corpus of attention from the social sciences, it is this more limited, subcultural usage that has produced a vigorous body of theoretical critique.

More than some dubious, marginal kink, barebacking poses crucial problems of bodies and intimacy, relationality and ethics, genealogy and futurity, fantasy and iden-tity. This new twist on the spirals of power and pleasure has received its most insightful analysis by Dean in Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, a book that questions what happens when we self-consciously open our bodies to nonhuman life. For Dean, sexual adventure opens a space for other forms of cultural or political adventure; and it is the distinction of bareback subculture to organize

“an arena of invention that involves experiments in how to do things with viruses.”⁸ One of Dean’s most striking examples is the concept of “viral kinship”: an embrace of viral transmission as the mechanism for transindividual connectivity.

Bareback “breeding” reconceives infection not as contamination by a destructive foreign agent, he argues, but as an inscription—an unlimited intimacy—of genea-logical power. The peopling warned of in safer sex discourse—be careful when you sleep with someone, for you are sleeping with everyone they have ever slept with—is reconceived as a positive value. Affirming HIV transmission as a technique for sus-taining relations to the past inverts the perspective on barebacking as a disavowal of history. Barebacking, for those who lived through the AIDS crisis, may be practiced neither in ignorance nor as a dismissal of the battles won by their fallen brothers, but precisely as a way to maintain affective ties with them. (Dean goes so far as to herald barebacking as “the next logical step in the enterprise of gay promiscuity.”⁹) Likewise, for those who inherited the AIDS crisis as an historical event, barebacking cannot be dismissed as (nor excused from) ignorant self-interest. Just as Bordowitz dreamed of being inhabited, and enriched, by Ludlam’s semen, viral kinship can be deployed as a vehicle for transgenerational solidarity. What would it mean, Dean wonders, for a young gay man to trace his virus back to Michel Foucault?

Micro(meta)physics

Provocative as such ideas are in their revaluation of sex and HIV, Dean’s theo-rization of barebacking remains bound to a model of thought predicated on the desiring subject. If, as he writes, “the peculiarity of bareback sex resides in its deliberate involvement of a pathogenic parasite,” his critique nevertheless largely conceptualizes this involvement as a one-way relation.¹⁰ The corporeal critique—a

8 Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 47.

9 Ibid., 5.

10 Ibid., 94.

microphysics of bareback power and pleasure—would proceed from the proposi-tion that the things we can do with a virus are tied up with the things a virus can do to us. What are these weird little bundles of molecules capable of doing? What are their involvements, affects, and modes of relationality?

Such questions are founded on a primary indeterminacy. Viruses trouble our criteria, unsettle our classificatory systems: biology has reached no consensus as to whether they constitute a life form at all.¹¹ Like all living beings, viruses contain genetic material in the form of RNA. They reproduce, they evolve. Yet they lack fundamental categories of the organic such as cell structure, and their reproduc-tive power is parasitic rather than sexual, dependent entirely on union with a host.

Entering into relations with so liminal a being as HIV calls for, if not a definitive classification, at least some clarity about how it operates.

A single HIV virion contains two strands of RNA bound by a shell of viral protein. This viral RNA is in turn enclosed by a layer of fatty molecules called lipids.

Seventy-two copies of a protein called Env protrude from this viral envelope, with each Env consisting of three glycoproteins (gp120) attached to a “stem” of three other gly-coproteins (gp41). On entering the body, HIV virions come into proximity with T-cells either in the bloodstream or lymphatic tissues. The trio of glycoprotein 120 molecules protruding from the viral envelope engage a structure of glycoproteins called CD4s, with which they form a perfect match. This “docking” of HIV to T-cell is compelled by the polar or nonpolar charges carried by all molecules: the molecular “key” of the HIV virus is drawn to, and perfectly fits, the molecular “lock” of the T-cell.¹²

Figure 1. “HIV Virion” (Image by US National Institute of Health, redrawn by Carl Henderson CC BY 4.0)

11 For an overview of this matter, see Luis P. Villareal, “Are Viruses Alive?,” Scientific American 291, no. 6 (December 2004): 100–105.

12 This primitive biochemical mechanism is commonly described as the capacity of HIV to “look for” and “attack” its desired object, the T-cells. The anthropomorphic character of such language has been the object of longstanding critique in HIV/AIDS discourse. For a classic analysis of the linguistic construction of AIDS, see Paula A. Treichler, “Aids, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” in Aids: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). On the militarized tenor of HIV/AIDS discourse, see Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

Such charges operate throughout molecular biology, and are determined by the electrostatic forces of chemical bonding. Chemical charge, in turn, is linked to the play of strong and weak forces at the atomic and subatomic level. Scaling these forces down to their epistemological vanishing point brings us to the position less indeterminacies of quantum mechanics—which is to say, the domain of onto-logical speculation.

Unnatural Participations

Immunologist John Dwyer has remarked that the evolutionary changes distin-guishing the ancestor of the AIDS virus found in monkeys from the human virus we call HIV “would seem to have been planned by some viral architect who knew his immunology, so clever are the design changes incorporated.”¹³ If Dwyer’s analogy indulges in the familiar anthropomorphic metaphors—with intimations of “intelli-gent design” no less!—he is quick to follow with another that points us back in the direction of impersonal processes: “And yet in biological terms these apparently deserved triumphs are more like those of a man who, having no idea of a safe’s combination, sits patiently twiddling the dials at random until suddenly he gets it right and the safe door swings open.”¹⁴

The moment an HIV virion first encountered a human T-cell was not an event predetermined by either of their histories, but rather a co-becoming that cut horizontally across their fields of being. This is what Deleuze and Guattari have named “unnatural participations”: the open-ended potential of bodies at any scale—from a single HIV virion to a bareback orgy—to connect, commingle, and inaugurate the New.

How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it, but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemic, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again very time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.¹⁵

13 John M. Dwyer, The Body at War: The Miracle of the Immune System (New York: New American Library, 1989), 130.

14 Ibid, 130.

15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 241.

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Unnatural participation, thus conceptualized, reframes the question of viral kinship on the plane of immanence and depersonalizes Bordowitz’s desire for “something greater than ourselves, shared between us.” Within the microphysics/metaphysics of barebacking, pleasure in the Foucauldian sense is what officiates these nuptials.

It could be said to operate something like the will in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: an impersonal, universal striving as the motor of becoming. Pleasure would then link up with radical affirmation, the absolute Yes to existence advocated by Nietzsche so that existence can be transformed, revalued, overcome.

It is certainly striking that Paul Morris, founder of the notorious porn studio Treasure Island Media and the most articulate polemicist from within bareback cul-ture, describes the practice in a manner that sounds like pure Nietzsche. Confronting head-on the monstrous implications of affirming viral transmission, Morris heralds barebacking as radical irresponsibility, devoted only to the perpetuation of a subcul-tural ethos “with little regard for anything else, including life itself.”

The everyday identity evanesces and the individual becomes an agent through which a darker, more fragile tradition is enabled to continue.

Irresponsibility to the everyday persona and to the general culture is nec-essary for allegiance to the sexual subculture, and this allegiance takes the gay male directly to the hot and central point where what is at stake isn’t the survival of the individual, but the survival of the practices and patterns which are the discoveries and properties of the subculture.¹⁶

Have we reached becoming-imperceptible, the “cosmic formula,” per Deleuze and Guattari, of all becomings?¹⁷ Or has one persona (the self-perpetuating neoliberal subject) merely been replaced by another (the self-indulgent libertine)? If bareback subculture constitutes the next logical step in the enterprise of gay male promiscuity, that scarcely ensures the value—ethical or ontological—of its discoveries. That it does constitute a discovery calls for a new image of thought, one that asks what it means to form a rhizome with our viruses.

16 Paul Morris, “No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn.” Paper presented at the World Pornography Conference, Los Angeles, California, August 8, 1998. Cited in Dean, Unlimited Intimacy, 57.

17 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 279.