Countersexual Manifesto

Paul B. Preciado, K. G. Dunn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231548687
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire.

Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado's claim that the dildo precedes the penis—that artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexuality—forms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and "dildonics," and he invokes countersexuality's roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we've been told about sex.

1

COUNTERSEXUAL SOCIETY

How do we approach sex as an object of analysis? What historical and social factors play a role in the production of sex? What is sex? What are we really doing when we fuck? Do a writer’s sexual practices affect the project? If so, in what way? Is it better for a researcher to engage in serial fucking while working on sex as a philosophical topic, or, to the contrary, is it better to keep a respectful distance from such activities for the sake of scientific objectivity? Can queers write about heterosexuality? Can you write about homosexuality if you’re straight?

As always in philosophy, it’s easy to turn to the most celebrated examples, to make the most of fixed methodological decisions, or at least to conceal our mistakes by appealing to the authority of tradition. It’s well known that when Marx was starting his Grundrisse, everything seemed to suggest he’d base his economic analysis on the notion of population. Well, then, thinking about sexuality, I find myself faced with a similar conceptual imperative. Everything seems to suggest that I should base this project on notions of gender and sexual difference. To the shock of the philosophers and moralists of the time, however, Marx focused his analysis on the notion of “surplus value,” avoiding the paradoxes of earlier theories. Making the most of Marx’s strategy, this investigation of sex takes as its thematic axis the analysis of something that could seem marginal: a plastic object in certain queers’ sex lives that until now has been considered a simple prosthesis invented to palliate lesbians’ or transpersons’ sexual disability. I am talking about the dildo.

Robert Venturi was onto something when he said architecture should learn from Las Vegas. It’s time for philosophy to learn from the dildo.

This is a book about dildos, about prostheses and plastic genitals, about sexual and gender plasticity.

WHAT IS COUNTERSEXUALITY?

Countersexuality is not the creation of a new nature but rather the end of nature as an order that legitimizes the subjection of some bodies to others. First, countersexuality is a critical analysis of gender and sexual difference, the product of the heterocentric social contract, the normative performativities of which have been inscribed onto our bodies as biological truths.1 Second, countersexuality aims to replace this social contract we refer to as “nature” with a countersexual contract. Within the framework of the countersexual contract, bodies recognize themselves and others not as men or women but as living bodies. They recognize in themselves the possibility of gaining access to every signifying practice as well as every position of enunciation, as individuals that history has established as masculine, feminine, trans, intersex, or perverse. They consequently renounce not only a closed and naturally determined sexual identity but also the benefits they could obtain from a naturalization of the social, economic, and legal effects of such an identity’s signifying practices.

This new society takes the name “countersexual” for at least two reasons. First, negatively: countersexual society is committed to the systematic deconstruction of naturalized sexual practices and the gender system. Countersexual society is therefore a destituting society. Second, positively: countersexual society proclaims the equivalence (not the equality) of all living bodies that commit themselves to the terms of the countersexual contract and are devoted to the search for pleasure–knowledge. Countersexual society is a constituting assembly of an endless multiplicity of singular bodies.

The name “countersexuality” comes indirectly from Michel Foucault, for whom the most efficient form of resistance to the disciplinary production of sexuality in our liberal societies is not the fight against prohibition (as the antirepressive sexual-liberation movements of the 1960s proposed), but rather counterproductivity—that is to say, the production of counterprotocols and forms of pleasure–knowledge as alternatives to the disciplines of the modern sexual regime. The countersexual practices proposed here should be understood as technologies of resistance or, put another way, as forms of sexual counterdiscipline.

Countersexuality is also a theory of the body situated outside the polarities man/woman, masculine/feminine, heterosexuality/homosexuality, trans/cis. It defines sexuality as technology, and it considers the different elements of the sex/gender system2 dubbed “man,” “woman,” “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “transsexual,” as well as their sexual practices and identities, to be nothing more than machines, products, instruments, apparatuses, gimmicks, prostheses, networks, applications, programs, connections, fluxes of energy and information, circuits and circuit breakers, switches, traffic laws, borders, constraints, designs, logics, hard drives, formats, accidents, detritus, mechanisms, usages, and detours.

Countersexuality affirms that in the beginning was the dildo. The dildo preceded the penis. It is the origin of the penis. Countersexuality recurs to the notion of the “supplement” as formulated by Jacques Derrida3 and identifies the dildo as the supplement that produces that which it supposedly must complete.

Countersexuality affirms that desire, sexual arousal, and the orgasm are merely the retrospective products of certain sexual technologies that identify the reproductive organs as sexual organs, to the detriment of whole-body and whole-world sexualization.

It’s time to stop studying and describing sex as if it forms part of the natural history of human societies. The “history of sexuality” would be better served by renaming itself “the history of technologies” because sexual and gender apparatuses are inscribed in a complex biotechnological system. This “history of technologies” shows that “human nature” is an effect of the constant border negotiation not only between human and animal, body and machine,4 but also between organ and prosthesis, organic and plastic, alive and dead.

Countersexuality refuses to designate an absolute past with a lesbian heterotopia (be it Amazonian or not, before sexual difference or after, justified by some biological or political superiority or simply the product of sexual segregation) that would constitute some sort of radical separatist feminist utopia. We don’t need an origin free from male and heterosexual rule to justify a radical transformation of sex and gender. There is no historical reason liable to justify the changes under way. Countersexuality is the case. This historical contingency is just as much the material of countersexuality as it is of deconstruction. Countersexuality does not speak of a world to come. It refers neither to a pure past nor to a better future; to the contrary, it reads the fingerprints of what is already the body’s end, as defined by modern Western discourse.

Countersexuality plays on two temporalities. The first is a slow temporality in which sexual institutions don’t appear to have ever undergone any changes. In this temporality, sexual technologies are presented as fixed, borrowing the names “symbolic order,” “transcultural universals,” and, simply, “nature.” Any attempt to modify them would be judged as a form of “collective psychosis” or as the “End of Humanity.” This blueprint of fixed temporality is the metaphysical foundation of all sexual technology. All of countersexuality’s efforts are directed against, operate on, and intercede in this temporal framework. But there is also a temporality of repetition and iterability, of the occurrence in which every incident escapes lineal chance, a fractal temporality constituted by multiple “nows” that cannot be the simple consequence of sexual identity’s natural truth or of some symbolic order. This is the effective field where countersexuality incorporates sexual technologies as it intervenes directly over bodies, over identities, and over the sexual practices that are derived from these bodies and identities that are “fictional” yet still exist.

Countersexuality takes the technological production and transformation of sexed and gendered bodies as its object of study. It does not reject the hypothesis of social or psychological constructions of gender, but it does reposition them as mechanisms, strategies, and uses within a larger technological system. Countersexuality claims a close relationship to Monique Wittig’s analysis of heterosexuality as a political regime, Michel Foucault’s research on modern sexual dispositifs, Judith Butler’s analyses of performative identity, and Donna Haraway’s politics of the cyborg. Countersexuality supposes that sex organs and sexuality (not just gender) ought to be understood as complex biopolitical technologies; it supposes that it is necessary to form political and theoretical connections between the study of sexual apparatuses and artifacts (dealt with until now as anecdotes of little interest within the history of modern technology) and sociopolitical studies of the sex/gender system.

To the end of denaturalizing and demystifying traditional notions of sex and gender, countersexuality takes as its foremost goal the study of sexual instruments and apparatuses and, thereupon, the sexual and gender relationships and becomings that are established between body and machine.

THE GENITALS AS BIOPOLITICAL TECHNOLOGY

The sex organs are not an exact biological place, nor is sex a natural impulse. They are a technology of heterosocial domination that reduces the living body to erogenous zones according to an asymmetrical power distribution between the (feminine/masculine) genders, matching certain affections with particular organs, certain sensations or affects with particular anatomical reactions.

Western human nature is a product of social technology that reproduces the equation “nature = heterosexuality” on our bodies, architectures, and discourses. The heterosexual system is an epistemic regime and social apparatus that produces femininity and masculinity and operates by dividing and fragmenting the body: it cuts out organs and generates zones of high sense and motor intensity (visual, tactile, olfactory), which it afterward identifies as natural and anatomic centers of sexual difference.

Sexual roles and practices, which are naturally attributed the masculine and feminine genders, are an arbitrary grouping of regulations inscribed onto living bodies that assure the material exploitation of one sex over another.5 Sexual difference is a heteropartitioning of the body in which symmetry is impossible. The process by which sexual difference is created is a technological-reduction operation that consists of removing and isolating certain parts from the living being in order to make them sexual signifiers. Men and women are metonymic constructions of the heterosexual production–reproduction system that permits the subjugation of women as a sexual workforce and means of reproduction. This is structural exploitation, and the sexual and political profits that heterosexual men and women thereby gain necessarily reduce the erotic surface of the world to the sexual reproductive organs and privilege the biopenis as the one and only mechanical center of sex-drive production.

The sex/gender system is a biowriting system. It writes with blood, sperm, milk, water, sound, ink, oil, coil, uranium, capital, light, electricity, and radiation. The body is a living, constructed text, an organic archive of human history as the history of sexual production–reproduction, in which certain codes are naturalized, others remain elliptical, and still others are systematically deleted or scratched out. (Hetero)sexuality, far from spontaneously springing forth from every newborn body, must reregister and reestablish itself...