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Architecture readings and a 300-word comment

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Mark Wasiuta,
Marcos Sánchez

Environmental Communications o l’euforia del contatto

Environmental Communications è il nome di un collettivo
formato da architetti, operatori nel campo dei media e
imprenditori in ambito ambientale che, dai tardi anni Sessanta
ai primi anni Ottanta, dalla loro base di Venice, California,
hanno affinato una forma di rappresentazione visiva da loro
stessi definita “fotografia ambientale”. La loro tecnica consisteva
in un lavoro di sensibilizzazione nei confronti dell’ambiente
losangeleno che consentisse d’individuare, nel contesto urbano,
trasformazioni normalmente impercettibili e penetrare la
resistenza dell’ambiente alla traduzione in immagini. Il progetto
ambientale era generalmente identificato con l’asciutto formato
visuale delle mappe comportamentali, con i diagrammi dei
movimenti urbani, con le osservazioni statistiche. ec ha invece

Environmental Communications ha presto allargato la
sua pratica di classificazione alla produzione di film in 16
mm e riprese video Portapak realizzate da aerei, elicotteri e
dirigibili, ampliando la gamma delle attività dei suoi studi di
Windward Avenue con proiezioni, festival di media elettronici
e happening ambientati sulla spiaggia di Venice. I diversi
aspetti del processo di rilevazione attuato da Environmental
Communications—dalle viste aeree alle immagini catturate
da veicoli in corsa—rivelano i differenti attributi delle
tassonomie create dal gruppo. Mentre la fotografia aerea
identifica modelli urbani e atmosferici, quella seriale di
soggetti in movimento—persone e oggetti al suolo—fa
affidamento su dense accumulazioni d’immagini separate
da minute differenziazioni per produrre una documentazione
ambientale totale.

Venice, CA, 10:00

puntato sul fatto che una nuova sintassi visuale, adeguata alla
complessità della città del xx secolo, potesse essere attivata
attraverso una nuova pratica mediatica, capace di mostrarsi al
tempo stesso analitica e sperimentale.
Nel corso della sua attività, il gruppo ha scattato e organizzato
migliaia di diapositive, dando origine a un’immensa
tassonomia e a una registrazione capillare della geografia
ambientale e urbana della California meridionale. Seriali e
psichedeliche—con il loro debito nei confronti della fotografia
concettuale di Los Angeles e della sua controcultura
elettronicamente mediata—le immagini di ec erano
organizzate in dozzine di serie tematiche, vendute ai musei,
alle istituzioni culturali e a una rete internazionale di scuole
di architettura che ruotavano intorno al fulcro della loro sede
di Venice.

Gli stretti legami con i gruppi sperimentali, come Ant Farm
di San Francisco, oltre ai contatti stabiliti all’interno di una
rete di studi di architettura e di artisti che valica i confini
della California meridionale, collocano Environmental
Communications in una posizione di apertura verso le nuove
ricerche. Il costante lavoro di ridefinizione dell’identità del
collettivo nei confronti della rete del progetto alternativo e
della scena artistica lo porta a descriversi come una ‘matrice’,
come “un gruppo, un sistema, un’esperienza, che documenta,
ricerca e comunica il rapporto tra l’uomo e il suo ambiente”.
Tentando di risolvere il conflitto tra il lavoro di fotografia
dell’ambiente e il ruolo commerciale di catalogazione,
descrizione e distribuzione, ec ha unito queste attività
attraverso la formulazione del collettivo quale “sistema di
percezione e comunicazione”.

Nel corso della sua attività, Environmental
Communications ha scattato e organizzato
migliaia di diapositive, dando origine a
un’immensa tassonomia e a una registrazione
capillare della geografia ambientale e urbana
della California meridionale

Tutte le immagini presentate
in questo articolo provengono
dalla collezione di David
Greenberg, uno dei fondatori
di EC • All the images
featured in this article
belong to the collection
of David Greenberg, one
of the founders of EC

112 113

Membri di Environmental
Communications a bordo
del dirigibile Goodyear, 1970.
Le riprese dall’alto della città,
girate al rallentatore utilizzando
apparecchiature Shibaden
e Sony Portapak, avrebbero
formato la base dell’“Aerial
Environmental Survey of
Los Angeles”
• Members of Environmental
Communications in the
Goodyear Blimp, 1970. The
group’s time-lapse aerial studies
of the city, shot with Shibaden
and Sony Portapak equipment,
would form the basis for the
“Aerial Environmental Survey
of Los Angeles”

•

Environmental Communications Venice (CA), US

114

domus 971

July—August 2013

115

Questo profilo in perpetua evoluzione è un sintomo significativo
dell’ambizione del gruppo a integrare la distribuzione
d’immagini all’interno dell’armatura concettuale della sua
pratica. Il catalogo e le attività di distribuzione di ec sono stati
insieme un meccanismo di vendita e un’importante operazione
teoretica. Le loro premesse speculative erano associate tanto
all’emergere del progetto ambientale quanto all’aridità della
sua veste grafica. ec ha cercato di sfruttare l’ansia e l’ambiguità
del rapporto tra architettura e ambiente e anche gli incerti
tentativi di descrivere la città da parte del design ambientale. Le
sue collezioni di diapositive s’infiltravano nelle scuole, portando
immagini capaci di raffigurare e definire le qualità elusive
dell’ambiente architettonico. Ancora più sovversiva è stata
la loro scelta di far saltare la convenzionale categorizzazione
dell’architettura in periodi, movimenti, monumenti e artefatti
attraverso la distribuzione d’immagini apparentemente aliene,
sprovviste della convenzionale distinzione architettonica.
L’ambiente e la comunicazione avrebbero dislocato il canone
degli oggetti architettonici. A questo scopo, le loro serie di
diapositive affrontavano questioni ecologiche e altri soggetti
esclusi dalla pedagogia architettonica. I titoli delle diverse

serie trasmettono una parte della sensibilità del gruppo:
basti pensare a “Eccentric Folk Environments”, ”Urban Crowd
Behavior” e, nel 1979, in collaborazione con Marshall McLuhan,
“The City as Classroom”.
La collaborazione con McLuhan, in particolare, segnala un
aspetto critico del progetto di Environmental Communications.
Lasciando penetrare le sue tassonomie dell’ambiente in
collezioni di diapositive e nuove pedagogie audio-video, ec ha
cercato di mirare al sapere istituzionale formando un’omologia
tra il terreno della città e gli spazi interni delle istituzioni
architettoniche. In questo senso, il collettivo ha indirizzato le
sue fotografie, i film e i video verso l’erosione dei confini tra i siti
della pratica architettonica. In uno scarto alla McLuhan, ec ha
postulato la collezione di diapositive quale centro emergente
del potere istituzionale e pedagogico; alterare questa corteccia
visiva avrebbe trasformato la pedagogia e attivato una
rivoluzione nella coscienza degli studenti.
Eppure, anche se le diapositive seriali di ec hanno proliferato
fino a diventare una vasta collezione di fotografia ambientale,
le immagini rimangono curiosamente enigmatiche.
È spesso difficile discernere con precisione quello che i singoli

scatti comunicano e come l’ambiente sia codificato nelle
serie di diapositive. Queste ultime trattengono e usano
l’indeterminatezza dei loro soggetti ambientali, anche se
affermano di ovviare alla loro invisibilità. Ne risulta che il
progetto di fotografia ambientale oscilla tra le flebili qualità del
soggetto e le richieste di una definizione più nitida.
A dire il vero, l’intero progetto Environmental Communications
si è strutturato intorno a questo tipo di ambiguità. ec si è formato
come collettivo, puntando a fondere il progetto con la fotografia,
con il video e l’installazione multimediale. Se il concetto di
autore veniva intenzionalmente messo in ombra attraverso
una pratica collettiva, allo stesso modo anche l’obiettivo del
progetto ec si è fatto via via meno nitido. Il design andava
a coprire il loro modello di attività commerciale, la loro rete
distributiva, ma anche il loro infiltrare, occupare e sovvertire
la pratica accademica. Proponendo, insieme con la sua banca
d’immagini e con i cataloghi di diapositive, anche la sua visione
e il suo nome, ec mirava segretamente a coinvolgere istituzioni,
scuole e biblioteche quali partner nel suo progetto d’infiltrazione,
facendone i complici della sua visione trasgressiva.
Su questa stratificazione indeterminata incombeva, tuttavia,
un costante pericolo. Se Environmental Communications può
essere inteso come una strategia per segnalare il coinvolgimento
di reti mediatiche, sistemi di distribuzione e potere istituzionale
quali componenti attivi del piano d’infiltrazione e sovversione,
anche il contrario è possibile. Il collettivo, infatti, si è ritrovato
progressivamente avviluppato nelle linee di forza che
emanavano dalle scuole di architettura, diventando soggetto
al loro meccanismo di controllo. Anziché emergere come agenti
di un’architettura sovversiva e mediatizzata, i suoi componenti
hanno rischiato di diventare semplici commercianti d’immagini,
grigi funzionari in abiti psichedelici.
Quasi a voler controbilanciare quest’ambiguità e
l’indeterminatezza ambientale delle loro immagini, le serie
di diapositive erano corredate da opuscoli che completavano
le fotografie con testi introduttivi, bibliografie e note a piè di
pagina intese a costruire una collocazione sul piano teoretico,
sociale e architettonico. Gli opuscoli offrono descrizioni
dettagliate di ciascuna immagine, con ampie interpretazioni del
loro contenuto. I fascicoli della serie “Urban Crowd Behaviour”,
per esempio, spiegano che essa “elabora le impressioni e le
idee dietro l’immagine”. Gli scritti forniscono informazioni
dettagliate sul luogo in cui ciascuna immagine è stata scattata,
descrivendo la tipologia degli assembramenti umani e le
sfumature comportamentali che la diapositiva cerca d’illustrare.
Come i testi argomentano con verbosità, la disarmante
semplicità delle diapositive di Environmental Communications
apre una prospettiva su una complessa matrice di rapporti
urbani e condizioni ambientali, ma anche sul sistema di
percezione e comunicazione del collettivo stesso. In tal
senso, gli opuscoli funzionano come un sintetico manuale
del pensiero ambientale dell’architettura e, al tempo stesso,
dei diversi aspetti dello stesso progetto ec. Sono guide che
illustrano l’insinuarsi nelle scuole di architettura di una forma
d’immagine piatta e consapevolmente ripetitiva, e le procedure
di archiviazione della fotografia ambientale, la cui identità
amorfa e indistinta può esser fatta apparire articolata e leggibile.
L’ambiente di ec era, allo stesso tempo, lo spazio circostante e lo
studio di Venice, a cui va aggiunta tuttavia un’ecologia urbana
strutturata, sistematizzata, mediatizzata e densa d’informazioni.
Attraverso la fotografia ambientale e la sua rete di circolazione
e distribuzione, ec formulava i temi visuali del suo ambiente,
producendo al contempo le prove della sua esistenza. Il collettivo
è diventato inoltre il catalizzatore della sua proliferazione,
osservando e commentando insieme l’ambiente mediatico e la
sua saturazione, nonostante fosse il gruppo stesso a contribuire
a una sua ulteriore elaborazione e saturazione. Esso ha delineato
e descritto un percorso per la circolazione d’immagini, ponendo
enfasi sul contatto tra le biblioteche, le scuole di architettura e
l’ambiente stesso di Environmental Communications.
—
mArk wASiUtA, mArCoS SánChez

Mark Wasiuta e Marcos
Sánchez sono soci,
insieme con Adam Bandler,
dell’International House
of Architecture (IHA).
Il testo qui pubblicato
fa parte di un più ampio
progetto, che comprende
un libro su Environmental
Communications e una
mostra alla Arthur Ross
Architecture Gallery della
Columbia University.
La ricerca per questo
progetto è stata
generosamente sostenuta
dalla Graham Foundation
arthurrossarchtecturegallery.org

Alcune diapositive di EC
dalla serie “People Female”,
1969-1979
• Samples from the EC
slide set “People Female”,
1969-1979

•

In alto: ordine di acquisto
della Princeton University’s
School of Architecture and
Urban Planning, 1970. Sopra:
la scatola con cui venivano
inviati i set di diapositive
• Top: purchase order from
Princeton University’s School
of Architecture and Urban
Planning, 1970. Above: the
box in which slide sets were
packaged when ready for
dispatch

Terza di copertina del
catalogo di Environmental
Communications del 1970.
Ad ampliare lo spettro della
“comunicazione sociale
attraverso l’espansione
ambientale e mediatica”,
nel 1973 il numero delle
istituzioni partecipanti era
passato da 36 a oltre 250

• Environmental
Communications, inside back
cover of the 1970 catalogue.
Extending the range
of the group’s “social
communication through
environmental and media
expansion”, the number of
participating institutions
would grow from three dozen
to over 250 by 1973

••

Environmental
Communications shot and
organised thousands of
slides, forming an immense
taxonomy and atomised
registration of Southern
California’s urban and
environmental geography.

Environmental Communications Venice (CA), US

116

domus 971

117

July—August 2013

With close ties to experimental groups such as San Francisco’s
Ant Farm and enmeshed in a network of architectural offices
and artists’ groups in Southern California and beyond,
ec positioned themselves as a similar type of exploratory
collective. Constantly testing new definitions of their identity
against this countercultural design and art network, they
described themselves in their catalogues as a “matrix” and as
“a group, a system, an experience, that documents, researches
and communicates the relationship between man and his
environment”. Attempting to resolve the conflict between their
status as environmental photographers and their business roles
as cataloguers, chroniclers and distributors, ec finally united
these activities through their formulation of the collective as
a “system for perception and communication”.
Their evolving self-fashioning is a telling symptom of the
group’s ambition to integrate image distribution within the
conceptual armature of their practice. ec’s catalogue and
distribution practices were both a mechanism for sales and a
central theoretical operation. Their speculative premise was
coupled to both the emergence of environmental design and to
the aridity of its imagery. ec sought to exploit the anxiety and
ambiguity of architecture’s relation to environment as well as
environmental design’s uncertain attempts to represent the
complexity of the postwar city. The group calculated that their
slide sets would infiltrate schools with images that would figure
and define the elusive qualities of architecture’s environment.
More subversively, ec intended to disturb the conventional
categorisation of architecture into periods, movements, discrete
monuments and artefacts through the distribution of seemingly
alien or featureless images, bereft of conventional architectural
distinction. Environment and communications would displace
the canon of architectural objects. To this end, their slide series
addressed ecological issues and other topics excluded from
architectural pedagogy. Series titles convey a measure of the

Environmental Communications and the contact high

Working in Venice, California, from the late 1960s to the early
1980s, Environmental Communications, a collective of architects,
media operators and environmental entrepreneurs, honed an
image practice they described as “environmental photography”.
This technique consisted of sensitising oneself to the Los Angeles
“environment” to trace normally imperceptible environmental
transformations and to penetrate an environmental resistance
to imaging. Environmental design had notoriously been
identified with the dry visual format of behavioural maps, urban
movement diagrams and statistical observations. ec wagered
that a new visual syntax adequate to the complexity of the late-
20th-century city could be activated by a novel media practice
that was at once analytical and experimental.
The group eventually shot and organised thousands of slides,
forming an immense taxonomy and atomised registration of
Southern California’s urban and environmental geography.
Both serial and psychedelic—with debts to LA’s conceptual
photography and its electronically mediated counterculture—
the slides were assembled into dozens of thematic series and
sold via the Environmental Communications catalogue to
museums, cultural institutions and to an international network
of architecture schools with ec as its eccentric Venice hub.
Environmental Communications soon expanded its recording
practices to encompass photographic, 16mm film and Portapak
video shoots from airplanes, helicopters and blimps, and
extended the scope of action at their Windward Avenue studio
to include film screenings, electronic media festivals and Venice
Beach happenings. Various strata of the ec recording process from
aerial surveys to drive-by imagery reveal different attributes
of the group’s image taxonomies. While airborne photography
identified urban and atmospheric patterns, serial photographs
of movement, people and objects on the ground relied on dense
accumulations of images separated by minute differentiations
to produce ec’s total environmental documentation.

In alto: ingresso alla sede di
EC, al 62 Windward Avenue
di Venice, California, 1969,
e, in basso, gli interni, 1969
circa. Qui erano ospitati
l’archivio, l’ufficio e lo studio
di produzione, ma i locali
erano anche il set per gli
spettacoli multimediali del
collettivo, per gli happening
e per il ciclo settimanale di
proiezioni video
• Top: entrance to the EC
premises at 62 Windward
Avenue in Venice, California,
1969. Bottom: interior of the
Windward Avenue studio,
circa 1969. The site was the
archive, office and production
space for Environmental
Communications, as well as
a staging space for the
group’s multimedia shows,
Venice happenings and
weekly video programmes

•

group’s sensibility, including “Eccentric Folk Environments”,
“Urban Crowd Behavior”, and, in their 1979 collaboration with
Marshall McLuhan, “The City as Classroom”.
The McLuhan collaboration in particular signals a critical
aspect of the ec project. Infiltrating slide libraries and new
audio-visual pedagogies with their environmental taxonomies,
ec sought to target institutional knowledge while forming a
homology between the terrain of the city and interior spaces
of architectural institutions. In this sense ec directed its
photographs, films and video reels at the erosion of boundaries
among sites of architectural practice. In a McLuhanian shift,
ec postulated that the slide library was the emerging centre of
institutional, pedagogical power; altering this image cortex
would transform pedagogy and spark a revolution in student
consciousness.
Yet, although ec’s serial photographs proliferated into a
vast collection of environmental photography, the photos
remained curiously enigmatic. It is often a challenge to discern
precisely what individual images communicate and how the
“environment” is encoded in the slide series. The slides both
retain and rely on the indeterminacy of their environmental
object even as they aim to remedy its invisibility. As a result,
the environmental photography project oscillates between the
demands of sharper definition and the fugitive qualities of its
subject.
Indeed, the entire Environmental Communications venture
was structured around similar ambiguities. ec was formed as
a collective that merged design with photography, video and
multimedia installation. If authorship was purposefully eroded
through their collective practice, the object of ec’s design project
became equally hazy. Design encompassed their business
model, their network of distribution, as well as their infiltration,
occupation and subversion of schools. By distributing design and
authorship along with their image banks and slide catalogues,
ec slyly hoped to involve institutions, schools and slide libraries
as partners in the design of their infiltration and as party to their
own contravention.
A perpetual danger, however, lurked within these overlapping
indeterminacies. If ec implicated media networks, systems of
distribution and institutional power as participants in their
own subversion or infiltration, a reversal of this effect was
also possible. ec became increasingly inscribed within the
lines of force emanating from the schools and subject to their
mechanisms of control. Instead of emerging as agents of a
subversive, mediatised architecture, they risked becoming mere
salesmen, grey men in psychedelic suits.
As if to counter these uncertainties and their images’
environmental ambiguity, the slide sets were anchored by
booklets that supplemented the photographs with introductory

texts, bibliographies and footnotes that positioned the series
theoretically, socially and architecturally. The booklets
offered detailed descriptions of each slide with extensive
interpretations of their content. The booklet for the series “Urban
Crowd Behavior”, for example, explains that it “elaborates the
impressions and ideas behind the image”. Entries detail the
location at which each slide was shot while describing the form
of crowding and the nuances of human behaviour the slide seeks
to illustrate.
As the prolixity of the booklets attests, the disarming simplicity
of the ec slide box opens onto a complex matrix of urban
relations and environmental conditions, as well as onto ec’s

own system of perception and communication. In this sense,
the booklets serve as condensed primers on architecture’s
environmental thought as well as on aspects of ec’s own project.
They are guides to the infiltration of architecture schools by
a form of self-consciously repetitive and flat imagery, and to
the archival processes of environmental photography, whose
amorphous, indistinct identity could be made to appear
articulate and legible.
The ec environment was at once the space around them
and their Venice studio, but also a notion of a structured,
systematised, mediatised and informationally dense urban
ecology. Through environmental photography and its network

of distribution and circulation, ec organised the visual patterns
of this environment even as they produced evidence of its
existence. They also became the engine of its proliferation,
simultaneously observing and commenting on the media
environment and its saturation, even as they increased its
elaboration and saturated it further. By the time the group
dissolved they had described and formed a circulation
path for images that placed the university slide library and
schools of architecture emphatically in contact with ec’s own
environmental classroom.
—
mArk wASiUtA, mArCoS SánChez

Environmental Communications Venice (CA), US

118

domus 971 July—August 2013

119

Mark Wasiuta and Marcos
Sánchez are partners in
the International House of
Architecture (IHA) with
Adam Bandler. This text
forms part of a larger
project that includes a
book on Environmental
Communications and an
exhibition at the Arthur
Ross Architecture Gallery
at Columbia University.
Research for this project
was generously supported
by the Graham Foundation
arthurrossarchtecturegallery.org

Environmental
Communications, 1969.
Da sinistra a destra: Roger
Webster, Bernard Perloff,
Ted Tanaka Smith, David
Greenberg (Gary Greenberg
non è visibile). Nel 1973,
il gruppo avrebbe incluso
anche Sheri Tanibata,
Douglas White e altre
dozzine di partecipanti
• Environmental
Communications, 1969.
Left to right: Roger Webster,
Bernard Perloff, Ted Tanaka
Smith, David Greenberg (not
shown: Gary Greenberg). By
1973 the group would include
Sheri Tanibata, Douglas
White and dozens of other
participants

•

Da sinistra: i fascicoli a
corredo delle serie di
diapositive “Chrysalis
Inflatables”, 1971; “Ultimate
Crisis Part 2: Solutions”,

• From left: pamphlets for the
slide sets titled “Chrysalis
Inflatables”, 1971; “Ultimate
Crisis Part 2: Solutions”,
1973; “Los Angeles: 20th

•

Prima e quarta di copertina
del catalogo di Environmental
Communications del 1971.
La prima di copertina è
composta da una serie di
fotogrammi di un film in
Super 8, trasferiti su video
per manipolarne colore e
risoluzione. Le immagini
risultanti, fotografie di treni
superveloci alla stazione
Shimbashi di Tokyo,
sarebbero entrate a far parte
di una serie intitolata “Tokyo:
Environmental Supercity”,
nella quale una sequenza di
80 diapositive documentava
i movimenti della folla nella
città giapponese
• Environmental
Communications, front and
back covers of the 1971
catalogue. The cover featured
stills from a Super-8 film
that had been transferred
to video to manipulate
colour and resolution. The
resulting images of bullet
trains at Tokyo’s Shimbashi
Station would become part
of the set titled “Tokyo:
Environmental Supercity”,
in which an 80-slide
sequence documented crowd
movement through the city

•

Century American City”, 1970;
“Communes of the Southwest
U.S.A.”, 1971

1973; “Los Angeles: 20th
Century American City”,
1970; “Communes of the
Southwest U.S.A.”, 1971

•

“Inquinamento”, dalla serie di
diapositive “Los Angeles: 20th
Century American City”, 1970
• “Pollution”, from the “Los
Angeles: 20th Century American
City” slide set pamphlet, 1970

INTRODUCTION

This book is not a memoir

This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol, which concerns
the body and affects of BP. A body-essay. Fiction, actually.
If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-
political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory. During
the time period covered by this essay, two external transfor-
mations follow on each other in the context of the experi-
mental body, the impact of which couldn’t be calculated
beforehand and cannot be taken into account as a function
of the study; but it created the limits around which writing
was incorporated. First of all, there is the death of GD, the
human distillation of a vanishing epoch, an icon, and the
ultimate French representative of a form of written sexual
insurrection; almost simultaneously, there is the tropism
of BP’s body in the direction of VD’s body, an opportunity
for perfection—and for ruin. This is a record of physiologi-
cal and political micromutations provoked in BP’s body
by testosterone, as well as the theoretical and physical
changes incited in that body by loss, desire, elation, failure,
or renouncement. I’m not interested in my emotions inso-
much as their being mine, belonging only, uniquely, to me.
I’m not interested in their individual aspects, only in how
they are traversed by what isn’t mine. In what emanates

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from our planet’s history, the evolution of living species,
the flux of economics, remnants of technological innova-
tions, preparation for wars, the trafficking of organic slaves
and commodities, the creation of hierarchies, institutions
of punishment and repression, networks of communica-
tion and surveillance, the random overlapping of market
research groups, techniques and blocs of opinion, the bio-
chemical transformation of feeling, the production and
distribution of pornographic images. Some will read this
text as a manual for a kind of gender bioterrorism on a
molecular scale. Others will see in it a single point in a car-
tography of extinction. In this text, the reader won’t come
to any definitive conclusion about the truth of my sex, or
predictions about the world to come. I present these pages
as an account of theoretical junctions, molecules, affects, in
order to leave a trace of a political experiment that lasted
236 days and nights and that continues today under other
forms. If the reader sees this text as an uninterrupted series
of philosophical reflections, accounts of hormone admin-
istration, and detailed records of sexual practices without
the solutions provided by continuity, it is simply because
this is the mode on which subjectivity is constructed and
deconstructed.

12 Introduction

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Question: If you could see
a documentary on a philosopher,

on Heidegger, Kant, or Hegel,
what would you like to see in it?

Jacques Derrida’s answer:
For them to talk about their sex life.

. . . You want a quick answer?
Their sex life.†

† Jacques Derrida. Derrida, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Koffman. (New York:
Zeitgeist Video, 2003), DVD.

I was born in 1970. The automobile industry, which had reached its peak, was beginning to decline. My father had
the first and most prominent garage in Burgos, a Gothic
city full of parish priests and members of the military,
where Franco had set up the new symbolic capital of fas-
cist Spain. If Hitler had won the war, the new Europe would
have been established around two obviously unequal poles,
Burgos and Berlin. At least, that was the little Galician gen-
eral’s dream.

Garage Central was located on rue du General Mola,
named after the soldier who in 1936 led the uprising
against the Republican regime. The most expensive cars
in the city, belonging to the rich and to dignitaries of the
Franco regime, were kept there. In my house there were no
books, just cars. Some Chrysler Motor Slant Sixes; several
Renault Gordinis, Dauphines, and Ondines (nicknamed
“widows’ cars,” because they had the reputation of skidding
on curves and killing husbands at the wheel); some Citroën
DSs (which the Spanish called “sharks”); and several Stan-
dards brought back from England and reserved for doctors.
I should add the collection of antique cars that my father
had put together little by little: a black “Lola Flores” Mer-

2. THE PHARMACOPORNOGRAPHIC ERA

Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, The Feminist
Press at CUNY, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=1321800.
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cedes, a gray, pre-1930s Citroën with a traction engine, a
seventeen-horsepower Ford, a Dodge Dart Swinger, a 1928
Citroën with its “frog’s ass,” and a Cadillac with eight cyl-
inders. At the time, my father was investing in brickyard
industries, which (like the dictatorship, coincidentally)
would begin to decline in 1975 with the gas crisis. In the
end, he had to sell his car collection to make up for the col-
lapse of the factory. I cried about it. Meanwhile, I was grow-
ing up like a tomboy. My father cried about it.

During that bygone yet not-so-long-ago era that we
today call Fordism, the automobile and mass-produced
suburban housing industries synthesized and perfected
a specific mode of production and consumption, a Tay-
lorist temporal organization of life characterized by a sleek
polychrome aesthetic of the inanimate object, a way of
conceiving of inner space and urban living, a conflictual
arrangement of the body and the machine, a discontinu-
ous flow of desire and resistance. In the years following the
energy crisis and the decline of the assembly line, people
sought to identify new growth sectors in a transformed
global economy. That is when “experts” began talking about
biochemical, electronic, computing, or communications
industries as new industrial props of capitalism . . . But
these discourses won’t be enough to explain the production
of added value and the metamorphosis of life in contempo-
rary society.

It is, however, possible to sketch out a new cartography
of the transformations in industrial production during the
previous century, using as an axis the political and technical
management of the body, sex, and identity. In other words,

24 The Pharmacopornographic Era

it is philosophically relevant today to undertake a somato-
political1 analysis of “world-economy.”2

From an economic perspective, the transition toward
a third form of capitalism, after the slave-dependent and
industrial systems, is generally situated somewhere in the
1970s; but the establishment of a new type of “government
of the living”3 had already emerged from the urban, physi-
cal, psychological, and ecological ruins of World War II—or,
in the case of Spain, from the Civil War.

How did sex and sexuality become the main objects of
political and economic activity?

Follow me: The changes in capitalism that we are wit-
nessing are characterized not only by the transformation of
“gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “sexual identity,” and “pleasure”
into objects of the political management of living (just as
Foucault had suspected in his biopolitical description of
new systems of social control), but also by the fact that this
management itself is carried out through the new dynam-
ics of advanced technocapitalism, global media, and bio-
technologies. During the Cold War, the United States put
more money into scientific research about sex and sexual-
ity than any other country in history. The application of
surveillance and biotechnologies for governing civil society

1. I refer here to Foucault’s notion “somato-pouvoir” and “technologie politique du corps.”
See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975),
33–36; see also Michel Foucault, “Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur du corps,” in La
Quinzaine Littéraire, 247 (1er–15 janvier 1977): 4–6.

2. Here I draw on the well-known expression used by Immanuel Wallerstein in World-
Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

3. Michel Foucault, “Du gouvernement des vivants (1979–1980),” Leçons du Collège de
France, 1979–1980, in Dits et Ecrits. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 4: 641–42.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 25

started during the late 1930s: the war was the best labo-
ratory for molding the body, sex, and sexuality. The nec-
ropolitical techniques of the war will progressively become
biopolitical industries for producing and controlling sexual
subjectivities. Let us remember that the period between
the beginning of World War II and the first years of the Cold
War constitutes a moment without precedent for women’s
visibility in public space as well as the emergence of visible
and politicized forms of homosexuality in such unexpected
places as, for example, the American army.4 Alongside this
social development, American McCarthyism—rampant
throughout the 1950s—added to the patriotic fight against
communism the persecution of homosexuality as a form of
antinationalism while at the same time exalting the family
values of masculine labor and domestic maternity.5 Mean-
while, architects Ray and Charles Eames collaborated with
the American army to manufacture small boards of molded
plywood to use as splints for mutilated appendages. A few
years later, the same material was used to build furniture
that came to exemplify the light design of modern American
disposable architecture.6 During the twentieth century, the
“invention” of the biochemical notion of the hormone and
the pharmaceutical development of synthetic molecules for
commercial uses radically modified traditional definitions
of normal and pathological sexual identities. In 1941, the
first natural molecules of progesterone and estrogens were

4. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War
Two (New York: The Free Press, 1990).

5. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority
in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

6. See Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 29.

26 The Pharmacopornographic Era

obtained from the urine of pregnant mares (Premarin) and
soon after synthetic hormones (Norethindrone) were com-
mercialized. The same year, George Henry carried out the
first demographic study of “sexual deviation,” a quantita-
tive study of masses known as Sex Variants.7 The Kinsey
Reports on human sexual behavior (1948 and 1953) and
Robert Stoller’s protocols for “femininity” and “masculin-
ity” (1968) followed in sexological suit. In 1957, the North
American pedo-psychiatrist John Money coined the term
“gender,” differentiating it from the traditional term “sex,”
to define an individual’s inclusion in a culturally recognized
group of “masculine” or “feminine” behavior and physi-
cal expression. Money famously affirms that it is possible
(using surgical, endocrinological, and cultural techniques)
to “change the gender of any baby up to 18 months.”8
Between 1946 and 1949 Harod Gillies was performing the
first phalloplastic surgeries in the UK, including work on
Michael Dillon, the first female-to-male transsexual to have
taken testosterone as part of the masculinization protocol.9
In 1952, US soldier George W. Jorgensen was transformed
into Christine, the first transsexual person discussed widely
in the popular press. During the early 50s and into the 60s,
physician Harry Benjamin systematized the clinical use of
hormonal molecules in the treatment of “sex change” and

7. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern
Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 178–218.

8. John Money, Joan Hampson, and John Hampson, “Imprinting and the Establishiment
of Gender Role,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 77 (1957): 333-36.

9. Harold Gillies and Raph Millard J., The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery (Boston:
Little Brown, 1957), 385-88; Michael Dillon, Self. A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology
(London: Heinemann, 1946); for a larger historical survey see also: Berenice L. Hausman,
Changing Sex, Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 1995), 67.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 27

defined “transsexualism,” a term first introduced in 1954,
as a curable condition.10

The invention of the contraceptive pill, the first bio-
chemical technique enabling the separation between het-
erosexual practice and reproduction, was a direct result of
the expansion of endocrinological experimentation, and
triggered a process of development of what could be called,
twisting the Eisenhower term, “the sex-gender industrial
complex.”11 In 1957, Searle & Co. commercialized Enovid,
the first contraceptive pill (“the Pill”) made of a combina-
tion of mestranol and norethynodrei. First promoted for
the treatment of menstrual disorders, the Pill was approved
for contraceptive use four years later. The chemical compo-
nents of the Pill would soon become the most used pharma-
ceutical molecules in the whole of human history.12

The Cold War was also a period of transformation of
the governmental and economic regulations concerning
pornography and prostitution. In 1946, elderly sex worker
and spy Martha Richard convinced the French govern-
ment to declare the “maison closes” illegal, which ended the
nineteenth-century governmental system of brothels in
France. In 1953, Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, the first
North American “porn” magazine to be sold at newspaper
stands, with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe naked as the

10. Whereas homosexuality was withdrawn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, in 1983, gender identity disorder (clinical form of
transsexuality) was included in the DSM with diagnostic criteria for this new pathology.

11. President Eisenhower used the term “military-industrial complex” in his Farewell to
the Nation speech of 1961.

12. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires. A History of Contraceptives in America (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2001), 203–31; Lara V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive
Pill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

28 The Pharmacopornographic Era

centerfold of the first publication. In 1959, Hefner trans-
formed an old Chicago house into the Playboy Mansion,
which was promoted within the magazine and on television
as a “love palace” with thirty-two rooms, becoming soon
the most popular American erotic utopia. In 1972, Gerard
Damiano produced Deep Throat. The film, starring Linda
Lovelace, was widely commercialized in the US and became
one of the most watched movies of all times, grossing more
than $600 million. From this time on, porn film production
boomed, from thirty clandestine film producers in 1950 to
over 2,500 films in 1970.

If for years pornography was the dominant visual tech-
nology addressed to the male body for controlling his sex-
ual reaction, during the 1950s the pharmaceutical industry
looked for ways of triggering erection and sexual response
using surgical and chemical prostheses. In 1974, Soviet
Victor Konstantinovich Kalnberz patented the first penis
implant using polyethylene plastic rods as a treatment for
impotency, resulting in a permanently erect penis. These
implants were abandoned for chemical variants because
they were found to be “physically uncomfortable and
emotionally disconcerting.” In 1984 Tom F. Lue, Emil A.
Tanaghoy, and Richard A. Schmidt implanted a “sexual
pacemaker” in the penis of a patient. The contraption was
a system of electrodes inserted close to the prostate that
permited an erection by remote control. The molecule of
sildenafil (commercialized as Viagra© by Pfizer laboratories
in 1988) will later become the chemical treatment for “erec-
tile dysfunction.”

The Pharmacopornographic Era 29

During the Cold War years psychotropic techniques first
developed within the military were extended to medical
and recreational uses for the civil population. In the 1950s,
the United States Central Intelligence Agency performed a
series of experiments involving electroshock techniques as
well as psychedelic and hallucinogen drugs as part of a pro-
gram of “brainwashing,” military interrogation, and psy-
chological torture. The aim of the experimental program
of the CIA was to identify the chemical techniques able to
directly modify the prisoner’s subjectivity, inflecting levels
of anxiety, dizziness, agitation, irritability, sexual excite-
ment, or fear.13 At the same time, the laboratories Eli Lilly
(Indiana) commercialized the molecule called Methadone
(the most simple opiate) as an analgesic and Secobarbital, a
barbiturate with anaesthetic, sedative, and hypnotic prop-
erties conceived for the treatment of epilepsy, insomnia,
and as an anaesthetic for short surgery. Secobarbital, better
known as “the red pill” or “doll,” became one of the drugs
of the rock underground culture of the 1960s.14 In 1977,
the state of Oklahoma introduced the first lethal injection
composed of barbiturates similar to “the red pill” to be used
for the death penalty.15

The Cold War military space race was also the site of
production of a new form of technological embodiment.

13. On the use of chemicals for military purposes during the Cold War years see: Naomi
Klein, “The Torture Lab,” in The Schock Doctrine (New York: Penguin, 2007), 25-48.

14. Methadone became in the 70s the basic substitution treatment for heroine addiction.
See: Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith, Heroin Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40–42.

15. The same method had already been applied in a Nazi German program called “Action
T4” for “racial hygiene” that euthanatized between 75,000 and 100,000 people with physical
or psychic disabilities. It was abandoned because of the high pharmacological cost; instead it
was substituted by gas chambers or simply death caused by inanition.

30 The Pharmacopornographic Era

At the start of the 60s, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S.
Kline used the term “cyborg” for the first time to refer to
an organism technologically supplemented to live in an
extraterrestrial environment where it could operate as an
“integrated homeostatic system.”16 They experimented
with a laboratory rat, which received an osmotic prosthe-
sis implant that it dragged along—a cyber tail. Beyond the
rat, the cyborg named a new techno-organic condition, a
sort of “soft machine”17 (to use a Burroughs term) or a body
with “electric skin” (to put it in Haus-Rucker & Co. terms)
subjected to new forms of political control but also able to
develop new forms of resistance. During the 1960s, as part
of a military investigation program, Arpanet was created; it
was the predecessor of the global Internet, the first “net of
nets” of interconnected computers capable of transmitting
information.

On the other hand, the surgical techniques developed for
the treatment of “les geules cassées” of the First World War
and the skin reconstruction techniques specially invented
for the handling of the victims of the nuclear bomb will
be transformed during the 1950s and 1960s into cosmetic
and sexual surgeries.18 In response to the threat inferred
by Nazism and racist rhetoric, which claims that racial or
religious differences can be detected in anatomical signs,
“de-circumcision,” the artificial reconstruction of foreskin,
was one of the most practiced cosmetic surgery operations

16. M. E. Clynes and N. S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” in Astronautics (September, 1960).
17. William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine (New York: Olympia Press, 1961).
18. Martin Monestier, Les geules cassées, Les médecins de l’impossible 1914-18 (Paris:

Cherche Midi, 2009).

The Pharmacopornographic Era 31

in the United States.19 At the same time, facelifts, as well as
various other cosmetic surgery operations, became mass-
market techniques for a new middle-class body consumer.
Andy Warhol had himself photographed during a facelift,
transforming his own body into a bio-pop object.

Meanwhile, the use of a viscous, semi-rigid material
that is waterproof, thermally and electrically resistant,
produced by artificial propagation of carbon atoms in long
chains of molecules of organic compounds derived from
petroleum, and whose burning is highly polluting, became
generalized in manufacturing the objects of daily life.
DuPont, who pioneered the development of plastics from
the 1930s on, was also implicated in nuclear research for
the Manhattan project.20 Together with plastics, we saw the
exponential multiplication of the production of transura-
nic elements (the chemical elements with atomic numbers
greater than 92—the atomic number of Uranium), which
became the material to be used in the civil sector, includ-
ing plutonium, that had, before, been used as nuclear fuel
in military operations.21 The level of toxicity of transuranic
elements exceeds that of any other element on earth, cre-
ating a new form of vulnerability for life. Cellulosic, poly-
nosic, polyamide, polyester, acrylic, polypylene, spandex,
etc., became materials used equally for body consumption
and architecture. The mass consumption of plastic defined

19. Sander L. Gilman, “Decircumcision: The First Aesthetic Surgery,” Modern Judaism 17,
3 (1997): 201–10. Maxell Matz, Evolution of Plastic Surgery (New York: Froben Press, 1946),
287–89.

20. Pap A. Ndiaye, Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University, 2006).

21. See: Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©Meets_
OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 54.

32 The Pharmacopornographic Era

the material conditions of a large-scale ecological transfor-
mation that resulted in destruction of other (mostly lower)
energy resources, rapid consumption, and high pollution.
The Trash Vortex, a floating mass the size of Texas in the
North Pacific made of plastic garbage, was to become the
largest water architecture of the twenty-first century.22

We are being confronted with a new kind of hot, psy-
chotropic, punk capitalism. Such recent transformations
are imposing an ensemble of new microprosthetic mecha-
nisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular
and multimedia technical protocols. Our world economy is
dependent on the production and circulation of hundreds
of tons of synthetic steroids and technically transformed
organs, fluids, cells (techno-blood, techno-sperm, techno-
ovum, etc.), on the global diffusion of a flood of porno-
graphic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new
varieties of legal and illegal synthetic psychotropic drugs
(e.g., bromazepam, Special K, Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac,
ecstasy, poppers, heroin), on the flood of signs and circuits
of the digital transmission of information, on the exten-
sion of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire
planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high
concentrations of sex-capital.23

These are just some snapshots of a postindustrial,
global, and mediatic regime that, from here on, I will call
pharmacopornographic. The term refers to the processes of
a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (porno-

22. Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
23. See Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review 26 (April–March 2004).

The Pharmacopornographic Era 33

graphic) government of sexual subjectivity—of which “the
Pill” and Playboy are two paradigmatic offspring. Although
their lines of force may be rooted in the scientific and colo-
nial society of the nineteenth century, their economic vec-
tors become visible only at the end of World War II. Hidden
at first under the guise of a Fordist economy, they reveal
themselves in the 1970s with the gradual collapse of this
phenomenon.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the
mechanisms of the pharmacopornographic regime are
materialized in the fields of psychology, sexology, and endo-
crinology. If science has reached the hegemonic place that it
occupies as a discourse and as a practice in our culture, it is
because, as Ian Hacking, Steve Woolgar, and Bruno Latour
have noticed, it works as a material-discoursive appara-
tus of bodily production.24 Technoscience has established
its material authority by transforming the concepts of the
psyche, libido, consciousness, femininity and masculin-
ity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, intersexuality and
transsexuality into tangible realities. They are manifest in
commercial chemical substances and molecules, biotype
bodies, and fungible technological goods managed by mul-
tinationals. The success of contemporary technoscientific
industry consists in transforming our depression into
Prozac, our masculinity into testosterone, our erection
into Viagra, our fertility/sterility into the Pill, our AIDS
into tritherapy, without knowing which comes first: our

24. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
Natural Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Bruno Latour and
Steve Woolgar, La vie de laboratoire: La production des faits scientifiques (Paris: La Découverte,
1979).

34 The Pharmacopornographic Era

depression or Prozac, Viagra or an erection, testosterone
or masculinity, the Pill or maternity, tritherapy or AIDS.
This performative feedback is one of the mechanisms of the
pharmacopornographic regime.

Contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-porno-
graphic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the sub-
stance (or substances) that supply their metabolism, by
the cybernetic prostheses and various types of pharma-
copornographic desires that feed the subject’s actions and
through which they turn into agents. So we will speak of
Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol
subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, silicone sub-
jects, heterovaginal subjects, double-penetration subjects,
Viagra subjects, $ subjects . . .

There is nothing to discover in nature; there is no hidden
secret. We live in a punk hypermodernity: it is no longer
about discovering the hidden truth in nature; it is about the
necessity to specify the cultural, political, and technologi-
cal processes through which the body as artifact acquires
natural status. The oncomouse,25 the laboratory mouse bio-
technologically designed to carry a carcinogenic gene, eats
Heidegger. Buffy kills the vampire of Simone de Beauvoir.
The dildo, a synthetic extension of sex to produce pleasure
and identity, eats Rocco Siffredi’s cock. There is nothing
to discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside.
The truth about sex is not a disclosure; it is sexdesign. Phar-
macopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things.

25. See Donna J. Haraway, “When Man™ is on the Menu,” in Incorporations(Zone 6), eds.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford K. Winter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 38–43.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 35

It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires,
chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul. In biotech-
nology and in pornocommunication there is no object to
be produced. The pharmacopornographic business is the
invention of a subject and then its global reproduction.

MASTURBATORY COOPERATION

The theoreticians of post-Fordism (Virno, Hardt, Negri,
Corsani, Marazzi, Moulier-Boutang, etc.) have made it clear
that the productive process of contemporary capitalism
takes its raw material from knowledge, information, com-
munication, and social relationships.26 According to the
most recent economic theory, the mainspring of produc-
tion is no longer situated in companies but is “in society
as a whole, the quality of the population, cooperation, con-
ventions, training, forms of organization that hybridize the
market, the firm and society.” 27 Negri and Hardt refer to
“biopolitic production,” using Foucault’s cult notion, or to
“cognitive capitalism” to enumerate today’s complex forms
of capitalist production that mask the “production of sym-
bols, language, information,” as well as the “production of

26. Some of the most influential analyses of the current transformations of industrial
society and capitalism relevant to my own work are the following: Maurizio Lazzarato,
“Le concept de travail immaterial: la grande enterprise,” Futur Antérieur 10 (1992); Antonella
Corsani, “Vers un renouveau de l’économie politique: anciens concepts et innovation théorique,”
Multitudes 2 (printemps 2000); Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: guerre et
démocratie à l’âge de l’empire (Paris: La Decouverté, 2006); Yann Moulier-Boutang, Le
capitalisme cognitive: La nouvelle grande transformation (Paris: Editions Ámsterdam, 2007).

27. Yann Moulier-Boutang, “Eclats d’économie et bruits de lutte,” Multitudes 2 (Mai 200): 7.
See also Antonella Corsani, “Vers un renouveau de l’économie politique.”

36 The Pharmacopornographic Era

affects.”28 They call “biopolitical work” the forms of produc-
tion that are linked to aids provided to the body, to care, to
the protection of the other and to the creation of human
relations, to the “feminine” work of reproduction,29 to rela-
tionships of communication and exchange of knowledge
and affects. But most often, analysis and description of this
new form of production stops biopolitically at the belt.30

What if, in reality, the insatiable bodies of the multi-
tude—their cocks, clitorises, anuses, hormones, and neu-
rosexual synapses—what if desire, excitement, sexuality,
seduction, and the pleasure of the multitude were all the
mainsprings of the creation of value added to the contem-
porary economy? And what if cooperation were a masturba-
tory cooperation and not the simple cooperation of brains?

The pornographic industry is currently the great main-
spring of our cybereconomy; there are more than a mil-
lion and a half sites available to adults at any point on the
planet. Sixteen billion dollars is generated annually by the
sex industry, a large part of it belonging to the porn por-
tals of the Internet. Each day, 350 new portals allow virtual
access to an exponentially increasing number of users. If

28. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude: guerre et démocratie à l’âge de l’empire
(Paris: Editions 10–18, DL, 2006), 135.

29. Ibid., 137. Cristian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina
Lebedeva and Jason Francis McGimsey (New York: Semiotext(e), 2011), op. cit.

30. Several trajectories in this direction come from the reflections in Precarias a la Deriva,
by Anne Querrien and Antonella Corsani. See Precarias a la Deriva, A la deriva por los circuitos
de la precariedad feminina (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004); Antonella Corsani, “Quelles
sont les conditions nécessaires pour l’émergence de multiples récits du monde? Penser le revenu
garanti à travers l’histoire des luttes des femmes et de la théorie feminist,” Multitudes 27 (hiver
2007); Antonella Corsani, “Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of
(Post-)Marxism,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, SubStance #112: Italian Post-Workerist Thought
36, no. 1, (2007): 106–38; and Linda McDowell, “Life without Father and Ford: The New
Gender Order of Post-Fordism,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, no. 4
(1991): 400–19.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 37

it’s true that the majority of these sites belong to the mul-
tinationals (Playboy, Hotvideo, Dorcel, Hustler . . . ), the
amateur portals are what constitute the truly emerging
market for Internet porn. When Jennifer Kaye Ringley had
the initiative in 1996 to install several webcams through-
out her home that broadcast real-time videos of her daily
life through her Internet portal, the model of the single
transmitter was supplanted. In documentary style, Jen-
niCams produce an audiovisual chronicle of sex lives and
are paid for by subscription, similar to the way some TV
stations operate. Today, any user of the Internet who has a
body, a computer, a video camera, or a webcam, as well as an
Internet connection and a bank account, can create a porn
site and have access to the cybermarket of the sex indus-
try. The autopornographic body has suddenly emerged as a
new force in the world economy. The recent access of rela-
tively impoverished populations all over the planet to the
technical means of producing cyberpornography has, for
the first time, sabotaged a monopoly that was until now
controlled by the big multinationals of porn. After the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the first people able to make use of this
market were sex workers from the former Soviet bloc, then
those in China, Africa, and India. Confronted with such
autonomous strategies on the part of sex workers, the mul-
tinationals of porn have gradually united with advertising
companies, hoping to attract cybervisitors by offering free
access to their pages.

The sex industry is not only the most profitable mar-
ket on the Internet; it’s also the model of maximum profit-
ability for the global cybernetic market (comparable only

38 The Pharmacopornographic Era

to financial speculation): minimum investment, direct
sales of the product in real time in a unique fashion, the
production of instant satisfaction for the consumer. Every
Internet portal is modeled on and organized according to
this masturbatory logic of pornographic consumption. If
the financial analysts who direct Google, eBay, or Facebook
are attentively following the fluctuations of the cyberporn
market, it’s because the sex industry furnishes an economic
model of the cybernetic market as a whole.

If we consider that the pharmaceutical industry (which
includes the legal extension of the scientific, medical, and
cosmetic industries, as well as the trafficking of drugs
declared illegal), the pornography industry, and the indus-
try of war are the load-bearing sectors of post-Fordist
capitalism, we ought to be able to give a cruder name to
immaterial labor. Let us dare, then, to make the following
hypothesis: the raw materials of today’s production pro-
cess are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and
feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total
destruction. The real stake of capitalism today is the phar-
macopornographic control of subjectivity, whose products
are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, testoster-
one, antacids, cortisone, techno-sperm, antibiotics, estra-
diol, techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin,
cocaine, living human eggs, citrate of sildenafil (Viagra),
and the entire material and virtual complex participating in
the production of mental and psychosomatic states of exci-
tation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omni-
potence and total control. In these conditions, money itself
becomes an abstract, signifying psychotropic substance.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 39

Sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of
production. The dependent and sexual body and sex and all
its semiotechnical derivations are henceforth the principal
resource of post-Fordist capitalism.

Although the era dominated by the economy of the
automobile has been named “Fordism,” let us call this new
economy pharmacopornism, dominated as it is by the indus-
try of the pill, the masturbatory logic of pornography, and
the chain of excitation-frustration on which it is based. The
pharmacopornographic industry is white and viscous gold,
the crystalline powder of biopolitical capitalism.

Negri and Hardt, in rereading Marx, have shown that
“in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the global economy is characterized by the hegemony of
industrial labor, even if, in quantitative terms, the latter
remains minor in comparison to other forms of production
such as agriculture.”31 Industrial labor was hegemonic by
virtue of the powers of transformation it exerted over any
other form of production.

Pharmacopornographic production is characteristic
today of a new age of political world economy, not by its
quantitative supremacy, but because the control, produc-
tion, and intensification of narcosexual affects have become
the model of all other forms of production. In this way,
pharmacopornographic control infiltrates and dominates
the entire flow of capital, from agrarian biotechnology to
high-tech industries of communication.

In this period of the body’s technomanagement, the

31. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude (Paris: Editions 10–18, DL, 2006),
133–34.

40 The Pharmacopornographic Era

pharmacopornographic industry synthesizes and defines a
specific mode of production and consumption, a masturba-
tory temporization of life, a virtual and hallucinogenic aes-
thetic of the living object, an architecture that transforms
inner space into exteriority and the city into interiority and
“junkspace”32 by means of mechanisms of immediate auto-
surveillance and ultrarapid diffusion of information, a con-
tinuous mode of desiring and resisting, of consuming and
destroying, of evolution and self-destruction.

POTENTIA GAUDENDI

To understand how and why sexuality and the body, the
excitable body, at the end of the nineteenth century raided
the heart of political action and became the objects of a
minute governmental and industrial management, we
must first elaborate a new philosophical concept in the
pharmacopornographic domain that is equivalent to the
force of work in the domain of classical economics. I call
potentia gaudendi, or “orgasmic force,” the (real or virtual)
strength of a body’s (total) excitation.33 This strength is of
indeterminate capacity; it has no gender; it is neither male
nor female, neither human nor animal, neither animated
nor inanimate. Its orientation emphasizes neither the fem-

32. For an elaboration of this idea, see Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring,
2002): 175–90.

33. My work here begins with the notion of “power of action or force of existing”
elaborated by Spinoza and derived from the Greek idea of dynamis and its correlations in
scholastic metaphysics; cf. Baruch Spinoza, Éthique, trans. Bernard Pautrat (Paris: Le Seuil,
1988); Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza” (lecture, Université de Vincennes à Saint Denis, Université
Paris 8, Paris, February 2, 1980).

The Pharmacopornographic Era 41

inine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between
heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and
subject; neither does it know the difference between being
excited, being exciting, or being-excited-with. It favors
no organ over any other, so that the penis possesses no
more orgasmic force than the vagina, the eye, or the toe.
Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation
inherent in every material molecule. Orgasmic force is not
seeking any immediate resolution, and it aspires only to its
own extension in space and time, toward everything and
everyone, in every place and at every moment. It is a force
of transformation for the world in pleasure—“in pleasure
with.” Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and
psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all
the structures of the mind.

In pharmacopornographic capitalism, the force of work
reveals its actual substratum: orgasmic force, or potentia
gaudendi. Current capitalism tries to put to work the poten-
tia gaudendi in whatever form in which it exists, whether
this be in its pharmacological form (a consumable molecule
and material agency that will operate within the body of
the person who is digesting it), as a pornographic repre-
sentation (a semiotechnical sign that can be converted
into numeric data or transferred into digital, televisual, or
telephonic media), or as a sexual service (a live pharmaco-
pornographic entity whose orgasmic force and emotional
volume are put in service to a consumer during a specified
time, according to a more or less formal contract of sale of
sexual services).

42 The Pharmacopornographic Era

Potentia gaudendi is characterized not only by its imper-
manence and great malleability, but also and above all by
the impossibility of possessing and retaining it. Potentia
gaudendi, as the fundamental energetics of pharmacoporn-
ism, does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into
private property. I can neither possess nor retain another’s
potentia gaudendi, but neither can one possess or retain
what seems to be one’s own. Potentia gaudendi exists exclu-
sively as an event, a relation, a practice, or an evolutionary
process.

Orgasmic force is both the most abstract and the most
material of all workforces. It is inextricably carnal and
digital, viscous yet representational by numerical values, a
phantasmatic or molecular wonder that can be transformed
into capital.

The living pansexual body is the bioport of the orgasmic
force. Thus, it cannot be reduced to a prediscursive organ-
ism; its limits do not coincide with the skin capsule that
surrounds it. This life cannot be understood as a biologi-
cal given; it does not exist outside the interlacing of pro-
duction and culture that belongs to technoscience. This
body is a technoliving, multiconnected entity incorporat-
ing technology.34 Neither an organism nor a machine, but
“the fluid, dispersed, networking techno-organic-textual-
mythic system.”35 This new condition of the body blurs the
traditional modern distinction between art, performance,

34. Haraway, Modest_Witness.
35. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:

Routledge, 1990), 219.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 43

media, design, and architecture. The new pharmacological
and surgical techniques set in motion tectonic construction
processes that combine figurative representations derived
from cinema and from architecture (editing, 3-D modeling,
3-D printing, etc.), according to which the organs, the ves-
sels, the fluids (techno-blood, techno-sperm, etc.), and the
molecules are converted into the prime material from which
our pharmacopornographic corporality is manufactured.
Technobodies are either not-yet-alive or already-dead: we
are half fetuses, half zombies. Thus, every politics of resis-
tance is a monster politics. Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster
Fuller, and Norbert Wiener had an intuition about it in the
1950s: the technologies of communication function like an
extension of the body. Today, the situation seems a lot more
complex—the individual body functions like an extension
of global technologies of communication. “Embodiment is
significant prosthesis.”36 To borrow the terms of the Ameri-
can feminist Donna J. Haraway, the twenty-first-century
body is a technoliving system, the result of an irrevers-
ible implosion of modern binaries (female/male, animal/
human, nature/culture). Even the term life has become
archaic for identifying the actors in this new technology.
For Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” Donna J. Haraway has
substituted “techno-biopower.” It’s no longer a question of
power over life, of the power to manage and maximize life,
as Foucault wanted, but of power and control exerted over
a technoliving and connected whole.37

36. Ibid., 195.
37. Ibid., 204–30.

44 The Pharmacopornographic Era

In the circuit in which excitation is technoproduced,
there are neither living bodies nor dead bodies, but present
or missing, actual or virtual connectors. Images, viruses,
computer programs, techno-organic fluids, Net surfers,
electronic voices that answer phone sex lines, drugs and
living dead animals in the laboratory on which they are
tested, frozen embryos, mother cells, active alkaloid mol-
ecules . . . display no value in the current global economy
as being “alive” or “dead,” but only to the extent that they
can or can’t be integrated into a bioelectronics of global
excitation. Haraway reminds us that “cyborg figures—such
as the end-of-the-millennium seed, chip gene, database,
bomb, fetus, race, brain, and ecosystem—are the offspring
of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural and
artificial.”38 Every technobody, including a dead techno-
body, can unleash orgasmic force, thus becoming a carrier
of the power of production of sexual capital. The force that
lets itself be converted into capital lies neither in bios nor in
soma, in the way that they have been conceived from Aristo-
tle to Darwin, but in techno-eros, the technoliving enchanted
body and its potentia gaudendi. And from this it follows that
biopolitics (the politics of the control and production of
life) as well as necropolitics (the politics of the control and
production of death) function as pharmaco porno politics,
as planetary managements of potentia gaudendi.

Sex, the so-called sexual organs, pleasure and impo-
tence, joy and horror are moved to the center of technopo-
litical management as soon as the possibility of drawing

38. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 12.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 45

profit from orgasmic force comes into play. If the theorists
of post-Fordism were interested in immaterial work, in
cognitive work, in “non-objectifiable work,”39 in “affective
work,”40 we theorists of pharmacopornographic capitalism
are interested in sexual work as a process of subjectiviza-
tion, in the possibility of making the subject an inexhaust-
ible supply of planetary ejaculation that can be transformed
into abstraction and digital data—into capital.

This theory of “orgasmic force” should not be read
through a Hegelian paranoid or Rousseauist utopian/dys-
topian prism; the market isn’t an outside power coming to
expropriate, repress, or control the sexual instincts of the
individual. On the other hand, we are being confronted by
the most depraved of political situations: the body isn’t
aware of its potentia gaudendi as long as it does not put it
to work.

Orgasmic force in its role as the workforce finds itself
progressively regulated by a strict technobiopolitical con-
trol. The sexual body is the product of a sexual division of
flesh according to which each organ is defined by its func-
tion. A sexuality always implies a precise governing of the
mouth, hand, anus, vagina. Until recently, the relation-
ship between buying/selling and dependence that united
the capitalist to the worker also governed the relationship
between the genders, which was conceived as a relation-
ship between the ejaculator and the facilitator of ejacula-
tion. Femininity, far from being nature, is the quality of the

39. Paolo Virno, “La multitude comme subjectivite,” in Grammaire de la multitude: pour
une analyse des formes de vie contemporaines (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2002), 78–121.

40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitudes, 134.

46 The Pharmacopornographic Era

orgasmic force when it can be converted into merchandise,
into an object of economic exchange, into work. Obviously,
a male body can occupy (and in fact already does occupy) a
position of female gender in the market of sex work and,
as a result, see its orgasmic power reduced to a capacity for
work.

The control of orgasmic power (puissance) not only
defines the difference between genders, the female/male
dichotomy, it also governs, in a more general way, the
technobiopolitical difference between heterosexuality and
homosexuality. The technical restriction of masturbation
and the invention of homosexuality as a pathology are of
a pair with the composition of a disciplinary regime at the
heart of which the collective orgasmic force is put to work
as a function of the heterosexual reproduction of the spe-
cies. Heterosexuality must be understood as a politically
assisted procreation technology. But after the 1940s, the
moleculized sexual body was introduced into the machin-
ery of capital and forced to mutate its forms of production.
Biopolitical conditions change drastically when it becomes
possible to derive benefits from masturbation through the
mechanism of pornography and the employment of tech-
niques for the control of sexual reproduction by means of
contraceptives and artificial insemination.

If we agree with Marx that “workforce is not actual
work carried out but the simple potential or ability for
work,” then it must be said that every human or animal,
real or virtual, female or male body possesses this mastur-
batory potentiality, a potentia gaudendi, the power to pro-
duce molecular joy, and therefore also possesses productive

The Pharmacopornographic Era 47

power without being consumed and depleted in the pro-
cess. Until now, we’ve been aware of the direct relation-
ship between the pornification of the body and the level of
oppression. Throughout history, the most pornified bodies
have been those of non-human animals, women and chil-
dren, the racialized bodies of the slave, the bodies of young
workers and the homosexual body. But there is no ontologi-
cal relationship between anatomy and potentia gaudendi.
The credit goes to the French writer Michel Houellebecq
for having understood how to build a dystopian fable about
this new capacity of global capitalism, which has manufac-
tured the megaslut and the megaletch. The new hegemonic
subject is a body (often codified as male, white, and het-
erosexual) supplemented pharmacopornographically (by
Viagra, coke, pornography) and a consumer of pauperized
sexual services (often in bodies codified as female, childlike,
or racialized):

“When he can, a westerner works; he often finds his work
frustrating or boring, but he pretends to find it inter-
esting: this much is obvious. At the age of fifty, weary
of teaching, of math, of everything, I decided to see the
world. I had just been divorced for the third time; as far
as sex was concerned, I wasn’t expecting much. My first
trip was to Thailand, and immediately after that I left for
Madagascar. I haven’t fucked a white woman since. I’ve
never even felt the desire to do so. Believe me,” he added,
placing a firm hand on Lionel’s forearm, “you won’t find
a white woman with a soft, submissive, supple, muscular
pussy anymore. That’s all gone now.”41

41. Michel Houellebecq, Platform, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Random House, 2002),
80.

48 The Pharmacopornographic Era

Power is located not only in the (“female,” “childlike,” or
“nonwhite”) body as a space traditionally imagined as pre-
discursive and natural, but also in the collection of repre-
sentations that render it sexual and desirable. In every case
it remains a body that is always pharmacopornographic, a
technoliving system that is the effect of a widespread cul-
tural mechanism of representation and production.

The goal of contemporary critical theory would be to
unravel our condition as pharmacopornographic work-
ers/consumers. If the current theory of the feminization
of labor omits the cum shot, conceals videographic ejacula-
tion behind the screen of cooperative communication, it’s
because, unlike Houellebecq, the philosophers of biopoli-
tics prefer not to reveal their position as customers of the
global pharmacopornomarket.

In the first volume of Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben
reclaims Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “naked life” in
order to define the biopolitical status of the subject after
Auschwitz, a subject whose paradigm would be the con-
centration camp prisoner or the illegal immigrant held in a
temporary detention center, reduced to existing only physi-
cally and stripped of all legal status or citizenship. To such
a notion of the “naked life,” we could add that of the phar-
macopornographic life, or naked technolife; the distinctive
feature of a body stripped of all legal or political status is
that its use is intended as a source of production of poten-
tia gaudendi. The distinctive feature of a body reduced to
naked technolife, in both democratic societies and fascist
regimes, is precisely the power to be the object of maxi-
mum pharmacopornographic exploitation. Identical codes

The Pharmacopornographic Era 49

of pornographic representation function in the images
of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib,42 the eroticized images of
Thai adolescents, advertisements for L’Oréal and McDon-
ald’s, and the pages of Hot magazine. All these bodies are
already functioning, in an inexhaustible manner, as carnal
and digital sources of ejaculatory capital. For the Aristote-
lian distinction between zōē and bios, between animal life
deprived of any intentionality and “exalted” life, that is, life
gifted with meaning and self-determination that is a sub-
strate of biopolitical government, we must today substitute
the distinction between raw and biotech (biotechnocultur-
ally produced); and the latter term refers to the condition
of life in the pharmacopornographic era. Biotechnologi-
cal reality deprived of all civic context (the body of the
migrant, the deported, the colonized, the porn actress/
actor, the sex worker, the laboratory animal, etc.) becomes
that of the corpus (and no longer that of homo) pornographi-
cus whose life (a technical condition rather than a purely
biological one), lacking any right to citizenship, author-
ship, and right to work, is composed by and subject to self-
surveillance and global mediatization. No need to resort to
the dystopian model of the concentration or extermination
camp—which are easy to denounce as mechanisms of con-
trol—in order to discover naked technolife, because it’s at
the center of postindustrial democracies, forming part of
a global, integrated multimedia laboratory-brothel, where
the control of the flow of affect begins under the pop form
of excitation-frustration.

42. See Judith Butler, “Torture and Ethics fo Photography,” in Environment and Planning
D: Society and Space. 25, no. 6 (April 19, 2007): 951–66.

50 The Pharmacopornographic Era

EXCITE AND CONTROL

The gradual transformation of sexual cooperation into a
principal productive force cannot be accomplished without
the technical control of reproduction. There’s no porn with-
out the Pill or without Viagra. Inversely, there is no Viagra
or Pill without porn. The new kind of sexual production
implies a detailed and strict control of the forces of repro-
duction of the species. There is no pornography without a
parallel surveillance and control of the body’s affects and
fluids. Acting on this pharmacoporno body are the forces
of the reproduction industry, entailing control of the pro-
duction of eggs, techniques of programming relationships,
straw collections of sperm, in vitro fertilization, artificial
insemination, the monitoring of pregnancy, the technical
planning of childbirth, and so on. Consequently, the sexual
division of traditional work gradually disintegrates. Phar-
macopornographic capitalism is ushering in a new era in
which the most interesting kind of commerce is the pro-
duction of the species as species, the production of its
mind and its body, its desires and its affects. Contemporary
biocapitalism at the same time produces and destroys the
species. Although we’re accustomed to speaking of a soci-
ety of consumption, the objects of consumption are only
the scintilla of a psychotoxic virtual production. We are
consumers of air, dreams, identity, relation, things of the
mind. This pharmacopornographic capitalism functions in
reality thanks to the biomediatic management of subjectiv-
ity, through molecular control and the production of virtual
audiovisual connections.

The Pharmacopornographic Era 51

The pharmaceutical and audiovisual digital industry
are the two pillars on which contemporary biocapitalism
relies; they are the two tentacles of a gigantic, viscous built-
in circuit. The pharmacoporno program of the second half
of the twentieth century is this: control the sexuality of
those bodies codified as woman and cause the ejaculation
of those bodies codified as men. The Pill, Prozac, and Viagra
are to the pharmaceutical industry what pornography, with
its grammar of blowjobs, penetrations, and cum shots, is
to the industry of culture: the jackpot of postindustrial
biocapitalism.

Within the context of biocapitalism, an illness is the con-
clusion of a medical and pharmaceutical model, the result
of a technical and institutional medium that is capable of
explaining it discursively, of realizing it and of treating it in
a manner that is more or less operational. From a pharma-
copornopolitical point of view, a third of the African popu-
lation infected with HIV isn’t really sick. The thousands of
seropositive people who die each day on the continent of
Africa are precarious bodies whose survival has not yet been
capitalized as bioconsumers/producers by the Western
pharmaceutical industry. For the pharmacopornographic
system, these bodies are neither dead nor living. They are
in a prepharmacopornographic state or their life isn’t likely
to produce an ejaculatory benefit, which amounts to the
same thing. They are bodies excluded from the technobio-
political regime. The emerging pharmaceutical industries of
India, Brazil, or Thailand are fiercely fighting for the right
to distribute their antiretrovirus therapies. Similarly, if we
are still waiting for the commercialization of a vaccine for

52 The Pharmacopornographic Era

malaria (a disease that was causing five million deaths a year
on the continent of Africa), it is partly because the coun-
tries that need it can’t pay for it. The same Western multi-
national companies that are launching costly programs for
the production of Viagra or new treatments for prostate
cancer would never invest in malaria. If we do not take into
account calculations about pharmacopornographic profit-
ability, it becomes obvious that erectile dysfunction and
prostate cancer are not at all priorities in countries where
life expectancies for human bodies stricken by tuberculosis,
malaria, and AIDS don’t exceed the age of fifty-five.43

In the context of pharmacopornographic capitalism,
sexual desire and illness are produced and cultivated on
the same basis: without the technical, pharmaceutical,
and mediatic supports capable of materializing them, they
don’t exist.

We are living in a toxopornographic era. The postmodern
body is becoming collectively desirable through its pharma-
cological management and audiovisual advancement: two
sectors in which the United States holds—for the moment
but, perhaps not for long—worldwide hegemony. These
two forces for the creation of capital are dependent not on
an economy of production, but on an economy of invention.
As Philippe Pignare has pointed out, “The pharmaceutical
industry is one of the economic sectors where the cost of
research and development is very high, whereas the manu-
facturing costs are extremely low. Unlike in the automobile
industry, nothing is easier than reproducing a drug and

43. Michael Kremer and Christopher M. Snyder, “Why Is There No AIDS Vaccine?”
(Research Paper, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, June 2006).

The Pharmacopornographic Era 53

guaranteeing its chemical synthesis on a massive scale, but
nothing is more difficult or more costly than inventing it.”44
In the same way, nothing costs less, materially speaking,
than filming a blowjob or vaginal or anal penetration with a
video camera. Drugs, like orgasms and books, are relatively
easy and inexpensive to fabricate. The difficulty resides in
their conception and political dissemination.45 Pharma-
copornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It
produces movable ideas, living organs, symbols, desires,
chemical reactions, and affects. In the fields of biotechnol-
ogy and pornocommunication, there are no objects to pro-
duce; it’s a matter of inventing a subject and producing it on
a global scale.

44. Philippe Pignarre, Le grand secret de l’industrie pharmaceutique (Paris: La Découverte,
2004), 18.

45. Maurizio Lazzarato, Puissance de l’invention: La Psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde
contre l’économie politique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2002).

54 The Pharmacopornographic Era

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