Peter Valente
New Aesthetics of Dissident Sexualities: A review of
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing by Paul B. Preciado
Paul B. Preciado’s series of short columns, originally published in the French newspaper Le Libération, and other European media outlets, and collected in An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (Semiotext(e), 2019), contain some of the most though-provoking and radical ideas from this leading thinker in the study of gender and sexual politics. As a trans-man, Preciado talks about his transition or crossing (in the sense of being borderless, migratory), from Beatriz to Paul, to a body he views as neither male nor female, but existing in a space between the genders; he writes, “in this sense, these columns have at least two authors: this dissonance makes exaggeratedly visible the division of the author into a multiplicity of voices that undergo the crossing – a phenomenon that exists in any written work, but that is usually erased under the unicity of the author’s name.” It is a Pessoan gesture, where multiplicity rather than unity, fluidity rather than rigidity, desire instead of anatomically determined gender, territory instead of map, unisexuality instead of heterosexuality or homosexuality, become the strategic means of re-ordering thought to bring about a revolution that overthrows the established norms concerning gesture, language, and the body.
In An Apartment on Uranus, Preciado’s body becomes a political analogy: “The trip to Athens, and my life there made me realize that it wasn’t just me undergoing change, but that we are all plunged in a worldwide transition. Science, technology, the market, are today redrawing the limits of what is now and what will be a living human body.” And this change is not only in relation to those who have been considered sub-human such as the working class, the non-white, the disabled, the immigrant, but in relation to digital technology, the machine, AI, and the “automation of the processes of production and reproduction.” Preciado continues:
The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or the Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly into our cognitive apparatus…the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.
But Preciado writes: “humanist modernity as a whole has done nothing but multiply the technologies of death.” Thus a the new conception of animalism should be understood as a kind of techno-shamanism that embraces mourning, a counter-technology that marks the end of the world as we know it.
The way we live now is a matter of speed and productivity; we have internalized the over worked production scheme at the basis of capitalism, and become willing subjects. Preciado envisions a time when we will enter a new phase of the body that involves anatomy and the digital: printing “our sexual organs with a 3D bio-printer.” This is well within the conception of our medical communities in terms of its uses for the heart or the lungs; but when it comes to the “sexual organs” they invoke an ethical problem. The sexual organs seem always to be abstracted from the body, a source of shame, generating an ethical or moral problem. But it here, precisely, that Preciado, as a trans-man, locates a point of revolution. In this sense, the body becomes the site for experimentation.
He envisions a new era where biology, the digital, and language will work together to break down the “regimes of masculine hegemony and sexual difference”: we can choose our sexuality rather than accept the one we were born with, and make our anatomy as monstrous as we want: “It would be possible to implant a multitude of sexual organs onto the body; Preciado mentions “an eroticized ear devoted to sexo-auditory pleasure.” This is a form of what he calls techno-shamanism. As Deleuze writes: “ Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics.” Preciado conceives this new world of the techno-animal/shaman in the following way: “A cooperation [between people] like photosynthesis. A molecular orgasm. Animalism is the wind blowing. The way the spirit of the forest of atoms still holds sway over thieves. Humans, those masked incarnations of the forest, should unmask themselves of the human and mask themselves gain with the knowledge of the bees.”
The epistemology of heterosexuality and homosexuality have been largely determined whereas the trans-body still exists in a kind of imaginary space, without medical or legal precedent because it denies the duality that is inherent in the foundation of western philosophy, the binary sexuality that constitutes a rational indicator for the medico-legal world. Without such designation as male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, desire and sexuality cannot be said to conform with any bodily law. Preciado’s body becomes the sign of a stateless, borderless, nomadic sexuality; a sexuality that is undetermined, undocumented, unrecognized by the medical and psychiatric communities; his body is a cipher, ungovernable, without identity, unrealized, unknown, invisible. The “genitally different body was declared ‘monstrous,’ ‘unviable,’ ‘handicapped’; it was subjected to an array of surgical and hormonal procedures seeking to reproduce dominant masculine or feminine genital morphology,” without which society is unable to enforce “the laws of sexual reproduction or political regulation.” Instead, we should live by principles of complexity, singularity, intensity and affect.
As Preciado voice becomes deeper, as a result of using testosterone, there is a fissure in the voice, and it is as though it becomes alien; so to be trans is to “speak a language that is not your own and to make it vibrate with another accent, to make your words be grammatically correct, but phonetically deviant.” For Preciado, “A word is not the representation of a thing…learning a language in childhood induces a process of naturalization of language that makes it so that it becomes impossible for us to hear the sound of history when it resounds through our own language.” The longer we use a language the less the word vibrate it’s history. Thus, one is unaware of the “political domination or social repetition that have forged their significations.” An interesting example of this is the English word, empathy. It was borrowed, in the twentieth-century, from Ancient Greek, ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, which literally means “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), and our use in English is the result of the word coined by Edward Bradford Titchener to translate the German the word Einfühlung. But the word in modern Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning that signifies strong negative feelings or prejudices against someone. Furthermore, “Childhood, art, political activism, madness…can be envisaged as modes of intensity or perception and intervention in language.” Here I am reminded of Artaud’s creative use of his madness; his rupture of the French language, especially in his use of glossolalia.
Preciado talks of the real strategy for cognitive revolution that precedes actual change: “They say representation; we say experimentation. They say identity; we say multitude. They say control the poor neighborhoods; let’s invent the city of hybrids. They say debt; we say sexual cooperation and somatic interdependence.” Identity politics is just the residue of colonialism, and simply another form of political subjugation. Instead we should not identify but be multiple, move out of the box of repetition; expand our strategies. As a writer, I have never been comfortable with any identification of my practice. I have translated books, written essays and poems, made films; my practice is hybrid, heterodox. Furthermore, Preciado speaks of the cognitive revolution in terms of sexuality and gender:
To talk about sex, gender and sexuality, we have to begin with an act of epistemological rupture, a disavowal of category, a cracking of the conceptual vertebrae to allow for the premises of cognitive emancipation: we must completely abandon the language of sexual difference and sexual identity (even the language of strategic essentialism, as Spivak proposes, or nomadic subjectivity, as Rosi Braidotti proposes). Sex and sexuality now are not the essential property of the subject, but rather the product of various social, discursive technologies, political practices of controlling truth and live…And don’t bother getting out your newly-minted transcendental card: maternity as essential difference. Maternity is just one possible use of the body, among others, it’s not a guarantee of sexual difference, or femininity.
For Preciado, dreams are also an “integral part of life.” It is said that if we don’t dream we die. He calls upon us to continue to dream of an alternate future, one where the immigrant or Muslim is not demonized, where racism does not exist nor homophobia, or xenophobia, where men and woman and trans people have the right to exist in a free and democratic world. Preciado wants us to get away from the use of the words “heterosexual” or “homosexual” or “transsexual.” These are medical terms used to codify a body in order to naturalize it so that it conforms to the legal-medical foundation for its existence in a social-political space. But the forest is ungovernable, has no sovereign, does not distinguish between sexualities, has no politics, no free market, doesn’t know what capitalism is, or racism, or male or female. When it is mapped and defined, sectioned off as a territory, through war, through the subjugation of indigenous peoples, there is the creation of nation states, laws, customs, and the nationalistic pride of the victors, who write the history books.
Preciado’s body exists in a kind of perpetual dream state, a transitional, borderless territory; he is neither male nor female, despite the sexual reassignment the legal-political-medical apparatus has given him; according to them, his body does not exist; it is off the radar, secretive, nomadic, creative, imaginative, not bound by walls, codes, laws. It is a singularity, a rupture in the medical system, that creates, according to Deleuze, a “map of creative imagination, aesthetics, values…animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises.”
In this “new supra-state techno-patriarchal governmentality managed by the financial Mafia proliferates, experimental practices of collectivization of knowledge and production are emerging.” Such an example of this in the book is the creation of the Silent University, an improvised school made up of refugees who convened in an occupied house in Exarcheia in Athens, with the philosophy that “everyone has the right to teach.” The languages spoken were Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Kurdish, English, Spanish, Greek. Preciado writes:
Thought of as an autonomous platform for exchange of knowledge between migrants, this university allows those who know something and those who want to learn it to meet, regardless of academic accreditation or institutional recognition of titles, language spoken, or processes of acquisition of residence or nationality…By acknowledging the migrant as subject of knowledge, the Silent University seeks to activate a new global citizenship.
Here in the United States accreditation is everything, no matter how much one knows; furthermore, universities are now corporate entities who value profit over education. And we see with the various MFA programs a kind of standardization of writing practices which enforces a kind of uniformity rather than radical difference.
Transitioning does not “designate the passage from femininity to masculinity (these two genders do not have an ontological entity, just a biopolitical and performative one) but rather the passage from one way of producing truth to another.” Furthermore, Preciado writes, “
To use Althusser’s terms, we could state that trans and migrant people are placed in the parodic situation of asking to be recognized as subjects by those same State apparatuses that exclude and violently threaten them. We ask to be recognized (and thus even subjected) in order to reach a social platform from which it would be able to invent new practices of freedom.
What is threatened in the present world is precisely these systems of truth, and of “political citizenship, and the technologies of the nation-state, as well as the epistemology of binary sex-gender.” Think of the immigrants fleeing a country at war and seeking asylum in the United States, and the way they are treated at the border in the US under Trump, where children are unfed and unbathed, where men and women live in unsanitary spaces or rather, prisons. As long as they are not American citizens, naturalized, they are at risk of infection or death. They do not exist and are unable to “construct themselves as living political fictions,” are unable to mobilize.
There has also been a rise in violence against trans people in recent years. Preciado realized that he had to accept reassignment as a male because without it his life was in danger. But, he writes, “First Spinoza, then Nietzsche saw the problem: we refuse to acknowledge that we are the ones who write (and act in) the script.” If we accept that no one’s role in life is any different from the other, and that no one is special, then there is a possibility to change the script in this “calamitous stage production” we call life. We are able to change, to alter the script, skip an act. For Preciado, “the revolution does not begin with a march in the sun, but with a hiatus, a pause, a tiny shift, a deviation in the game of improvisations and appearances.” Forget social determinism or human nature or a divine plan or the neoliberal faith in the free market “as if it were a meteorological given.” Following Foucault, what we assume is fixed and organic about the law and human nature and sexuality is only arbitrary, the result of legal-medical choices, often invoking the divine to substantiate its claims.
In the political/legal/medical system as it is constituted, if one wants to live, one has to adopt and accept its codes; the medical and legal systems cannot accept the unknown, what deviates from their conception of the truth. What is transitional, borderless, migrant, not clearly defined in terms of sexuality and anatomy and language, must be codified, documented, made recognizable, reproducible, predictable, linguistically consistent; that produces a good citizen. Preciado realizes that as a trans person becoming visible to the medical and legal world, requires both a destruction of the original birth certificate, the creation of a new one, and the reassignment of his sex; thus the trans body does not exist: “In a show of politico-scientific idealism, the doctors and judges deny the reality of my trans body in order to be able to continue to affirm the validity of the binary sexual system. And so the nation exists. And so the judges exist…And so the map exists. And so the document exists. The family exists. The law exists. The Book exists…Psychiatry exists…Even God exists. But my trans body does not exist.”
The order of things is maintained by erasure, destruction, induced lack of memory, detention, punishment; the visible, as the State, is given priority over the invisible, the silent university, the migrant, the trans person, and asserts its dominance by the use of “techniques of violence (against women, against children, against non-white men and women, against animals, against the planet as a whole)” and surveillance i.e. against those who’s gestures and appearance are not socially accepted and considered inferior. Remember that the Nazis destroyed modern art in order to produce images that conformed to their ideology; paintings of bucolic scenes, with healthy and strong heterosexual women and men maintained their idea of the all-powerful state apparatus while the others were being tortured and killed in concentration camps. Preciado writes, “We could say, reading Weber with Butler, that masculinity is to society what the State is to the nation: the holder and legitimate user of violence. This violence is expressed socially in the form of domination, economically in the form of privilege, sexually in the form of aggression and rape.” Instead of viewing the world as unified, singular, and bounded by walls it is more imaginitive and revolutionary to view it as multiple, borderless, stateless, and changeable; because the territory is not the map.
But the fictional reality of a North and South on this map is maintained for political reasons; this reasoning is less about geography and more about seeing the North as superior and the South as inferior. Preciado writes:
As the anti-colonialist critics Anibal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cuscanqui, and Walter Mignolo teach us, the South does not exist. The South is a political fiction constructed by colonial prejudice. The South is an invention of modern colonial cartography: the combined effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the growth of industrial capitalism, still in quest of new territories to use for the extraction of raw material.”
In the present time, the far-right makes use of this invented geography and chronology, which is actually the result of colonialism, power, knowledge and space; the argument for the far-right goes like this: “The South is primitive and past. The North is progress and future. The South is the result of a racial and sexual system of social classification, a binary epistemology that opposes high and low, mind and body, head and feet, rationality and emotion, theory and practice”; the South is poor, its inhabitants are lazy, ignorant, filthy, sexually obsessed; the south “is an animal, feminine, infantile, a fag. On the other end of this spectrum, the argument goes like this: the North is “human, masculine, adult, heterosexual, white…healthier, stronger, more intelligent, cleaner. The North is the soul and the phallus. Sperm and currency. Machine and software. It’s the place of memory and profit. The North is the museum, the archive, the bank.” But “at the same time, the South is the place where capitalist extraction is taking place: the place where the North captures energy, meaning, enjoyment and added value. The South is the skin and the uterus. Oil and Coffee. Meat and Gold.” On the one hand, cleanness, intelligence, health, heterosexuality, the phallus, and on the other, the cesspool, the mine, the rubbish, the anus; but the South is also feared because it is the seat of revolutionary power. We must collapse these vertical distinctions which enforce a duality of inferior and superior, and hack the power grid; imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps, to arrive at a new language.
In “Homage to the Unknown Nanny,” Preciado talks of how the definition of the social figure of the “biological-domestic mother in the nineteenth century as the sole, legitimately constitutive bond” has forced us to “erase the importance of other relationships.” When the nanny is visited many years later by the child who had been in her care, she says, “My little one, you are my little one, my doll, I washed you, fed you, put you to sleep. I did everything except bring you into the world.” But because in the medical and legal world reproductive rights trump all others, often these nannies who had such a crucial role in a child’s early life remain unknown. Preciado writes: “The time has come to decolonize our mothers, to honor multiple, heterogenous bonds that we have constructed and that keep us alive.” At times, when growing up, friends may assume more importance to a young person’s intellectual and social development than one’s own parents. Often, sons and daughters leave home in their teens and don’t have relations with parents for numerous reasons. In sexual relationships, there are certain lovers, with whom one spent only one night, and whom one remembers years later, realizing what an important influence they had upon one. Preciado reminds us to respect and honor the multiple influences in one’s life. In concluding the essay, Preciado writes that “the fiction of the stability of racial or national identity can only be constructed by eliminating the emotional and political strength of this bastard, mixed-race filiation.” He concludes: the “social body welcomes us with many arms, without which we would not be able to survive.”
The essays in Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (in a wonderful translation by Charlotte Mandell) outline radical strategies for coping with our chaotic times; it challenges us to rethink the very foundation of those accepted ideas about politics, sexuality, and gender. And for this reason, it should be required reading for anyone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is. And I imagine that includes many of you who are reading this essay. The story of Preciado’s crossing from a feminist lesbian to a trans person, provides the basis for his writing on many subjects concerning gender and sexual politics, and in doing so, he asks us to participate in the cultural revolution that is to come. This is not about “marching towards the sun” but about a cognitive revolution. This is where change begins. We must become “techno-shamans” and stretch our thinking to the farthest regions of what is thinkable. We must become nomadic navigators of the inner/outer cosmos. Preciado writes: “I have no soul and no body. I have an apartment on Uranus, which certainly places me far from most Earthlings, but not so far that you can’t come to see me. Even if only in dream…” This book is a ticket to that planet, one of the farthest from the earth, but it won’t tell you how to get there; there are many possible roads you could take. But you’ll know when you arrive. They’ll be signs. And so, finally, I have to thank Preciado for taking me on that ride.
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing by Paul B. Preciado
Paul B. Preciado’s series of short columns, originally published in the French newspaper Le Libération, and other European media outlets, and collected in An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (Semiotext(e), 2019), contain some of the most though-provoking and radical ideas from this leading thinker in the study of gender and sexual politics. As a trans-man, Preciado talks about his transition or crossing (in the sense of being borderless, migratory), from Beatriz to Paul, to a body he views as neither male nor female, but existing in a space between the genders; he writes, “in this sense, these columns have at least two authors: this dissonance makes exaggeratedly visible the division of the author into a multiplicity of voices that undergo the crossing – a phenomenon that exists in any written work, but that is usually erased under the unicity of the author’s name.” It is a Pessoan gesture, where multiplicity rather than unity, fluidity rather than rigidity, desire instead of anatomically determined gender, territory instead of map, unisexuality instead of heterosexuality or homosexuality, become the strategic means of re-ordering thought to bring about a revolution that overthrows the established norms concerning gesture, language, and the body.
In An Apartment on Uranus, Preciado’s body becomes a political analogy: “The trip to Athens, and my life there made me realize that it wasn’t just me undergoing change, but that we are all plunged in a worldwide transition. Science, technology, the market, are today redrawing the limits of what is now and what will be a living human body.” And this change is not only in relation to those who have been considered sub-human such as the working class, the non-white, the disabled, the immigrant, but in relation to digital technology, the machine, AI, and the “automation of the processes of production and reproduction.” Preciado continues:
The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or the Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly into our cognitive apparatus…the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.
But Preciado writes: “humanist modernity as a whole has done nothing but multiply the technologies of death.” Thus a the new conception of animalism should be understood as a kind of techno-shamanism that embraces mourning, a counter-technology that marks the end of the world as we know it.
The way we live now is a matter of speed and productivity; we have internalized the over worked production scheme at the basis of capitalism, and become willing subjects. Preciado envisions a time when we will enter a new phase of the body that involves anatomy and the digital: printing “our sexual organs with a 3D bio-printer.” This is well within the conception of our medical communities in terms of its uses for the heart or the lungs; but when it comes to the “sexual organs” they invoke an ethical problem. The sexual organs seem always to be abstracted from the body, a source of shame, generating an ethical or moral problem. But it here, precisely, that Preciado, as a trans-man, locates a point of revolution. In this sense, the body becomes the site for experimentation.
He envisions a new era where biology, the digital, and language will work together to break down the “regimes of masculine hegemony and sexual difference”: we can choose our sexuality rather than accept the one we were born with, and make our anatomy as monstrous as we want: “It would be possible to implant a multitude of sexual organs onto the body; Preciado mentions “an eroticized ear devoted to sexo-auditory pleasure.” This is a form of what he calls techno-shamanism. As Deleuze writes: “ Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics.” Preciado conceives this new world of the techno-animal/shaman in the following way: “A cooperation [between people] like photosynthesis. A molecular orgasm. Animalism is the wind blowing. The way the spirit of the forest of atoms still holds sway over thieves. Humans, those masked incarnations of the forest, should unmask themselves of the human and mask themselves gain with the knowledge of the bees.”
The epistemology of heterosexuality and homosexuality have been largely determined whereas the trans-body still exists in a kind of imaginary space, without medical or legal precedent because it denies the duality that is inherent in the foundation of western philosophy, the binary sexuality that constitutes a rational indicator for the medico-legal world. Without such designation as male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, desire and sexuality cannot be said to conform with any bodily law. Preciado’s body becomes the sign of a stateless, borderless, nomadic sexuality; a sexuality that is undetermined, undocumented, unrecognized by the medical and psychiatric communities; his body is a cipher, ungovernable, without identity, unrealized, unknown, invisible. The “genitally different body was declared ‘monstrous,’ ‘unviable,’ ‘handicapped’; it was subjected to an array of surgical and hormonal procedures seeking to reproduce dominant masculine or feminine genital morphology,” without which society is unable to enforce “the laws of sexual reproduction or political regulation.” Instead, we should live by principles of complexity, singularity, intensity and affect.
As Preciado voice becomes deeper, as a result of using testosterone, there is a fissure in the voice, and it is as though it becomes alien; so to be trans is to “speak a language that is not your own and to make it vibrate with another accent, to make your words be grammatically correct, but phonetically deviant.” For Preciado, “A word is not the representation of a thing…learning a language in childhood induces a process of naturalization of language that makes it so that it becomes impossible for us to hear the sound of history when it resounds through our own language.” The longer we use a language the less the word vibrate it’s history. Thus, one is unaware of the “political domination or social repetition that have forged their significations.” An interesting example of this is the English word, empathy. It was borrowed, in the twentieth-century, from Ancient Greek, ἐμπάθεια (empátheia, which literally means “passion”) (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”)), and our use in English is the result of the word coined by Edward Bradford Titchener to translate the German the word Einfühlung. But the word in modern Greek εμπάθεια (empátheia) has an opposite meaning that signifies strong negative feelings or prejudices against someone. Furthermore, “Childhood, art, political activism, madness…can be envisaged as modes of intensity or perception and intervention in language.” Here I am reminded of Artaud’s creative use of his madness; his rupture of the French language, especially in his use of glossolalia.
Preciado talks of the real strategy for cognitive revolution that precedes actual change: “They say representation; we say experimentation. They say identity; we say multitude. They say control the poor neighborhoods; let’s invent the city of hybrids. They say debt; we say sexual cooperation and somatic interdependence.” Identity politics is just the residue of colonialism, and simply another form of political subjugation. Instead we should not identify but be multiple, move out of the box of repetition; expand our strategies. As a writer, I have never been comfortable with any identification of my practice. I have translated books, written essays and poems, made films; my practice is hybrid, heterodox. Furthermore, Preciado speaks of the cognitive revolution in terms of sexuality and gender:
To talk about sex, gender and sexuality, we have to begin with an act of epistemological rupture, a disavowal of category, a cracking of the conceptual vertebrae to allow for the premises of cognitive emancipation: we must completely abandon the language of sexual difference and sexual identity (even the language of strategic essentialism, as Spivak proposes, or nomadic subjectivity, as Rosi Braidotti proposes). Sex and sexuality now are not the essential property of the subject, but rather the product of various social, discursive technologies, political practices of controlling truth and live…And don’t bother getting out your newly-minted transcendental card: maternity as essential difference. Maternity is just one possible use of the body, among others, it’s not a guarantee of sexual difference, or femininity.
For Preciado, dreams are also an “integral part of life.” It is said that if we don’t dream we die. He calls upon us to continue to dream of an alternate future, one where the immigrant or Muslim is not demonized, where racism does not exist nor homophobia, or xenophobia, where men and woman and trans people have the right to exist in a free and democratic world. Preciado wants us to get away from the use of the words “heterosexual” or “homosexual” or “transsexual.” These are medical terms used to codify a body in order to naturalize it so that it conforms to the legal-medical foundation for its existence in a social-political space. But the forest is ungovernable, has no sovereign, does not distinguish between sexualities, has no politics, no free market, doesn’t know what capitalism is, or racism, or male or female. When it is mapped and defined, sectioned off as a territory, through war, through the subjugation of indigenous peoples, there is the creation of nation states, laws, customs, and the nationalistic pride of the victors, who write the history books.
Preciado’s body exists in a kind of perpetual dream state, a transitional, borderless territory; he is neither male nor female, despite the sexual reassignment the legal-political-medical apparatus has given him; according to them, his body does not exist; it is off the radar, secretive, nomadic, creative, imaginative, not bound by walls, codes, laws. It is a singularity, a rupture in the medical system, that creates, according to Deleuze, a “map of creative imagination, aesthetics, values…animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises.”
In this “new supra-state techno-patriarchal governmentality managed by the financial Mafia proliferates, experimental practices of collectivization of knowledge and production are emerging.” Such an example of this in the book is the creation of the Silent University, an improvised school made up of refugees who convened in an occupied house in Exarcheia in Athens, with the philosophy that “everyone has the right to teach.” The languages spoken were Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Kurdish, English, Spanish, Greek. Preciado writes:
Thought of as an autonomous platform for exchange of knowledge between migrants, this university allows those who know something and those who want to learn it to meet, regardless of academic accreditation or institutional recognition of titles, language spoken, or processes of acquisition of residence or nationality…By acknowledging the migrant as subject of knowledge, the Silent University seeks to activate a new global citizenship.
Here in the United States accreditation is everything, no matter how much one knows; furthermore, universities are now corporate entities who value profit over education. And we see with the various MFA programs a kind of standardization of writing practices which enforces a kind of uniformity rather than radical difference.
Transitioning does not “designate the passage from femininity to masculinity (these two genders do not have an ontological entity, just a biopolitical and performative one) but rather the passage from one way of producing truth to another.” Furthermore, Preciado writes, “
To use Althusser’s terms, we could state that trans and migrant people are placed in the parodic situation of asking to be recognized as subjects by those same State apparatuses that exclude and violently threaten them. We ask to be recognized (and thus even subjected) in order to reach a social platform from which it would be able to invent new practices of freedom.
What is threatened in the present world is precisely these systems of truth, and of “political citizenship, and the technologies of the nation-state, as well as the epistemology of binary sex-gender.” Think of the immigrants fleeing a country at war and seeking asylum in the United States, and the way they are treated at the border in the US under Trump, where children are unfed and unbathed, where men and women live in unsanitary spaces or rather, prisons. As long as they are not American citizens, naturalized, they are at risk of infection or death. They do not exist and are unable to “construct themselves as living political fictions,” are unable to mobilize.
There has also been a rise in violence against trans people in recent years. Preciado realized that he had to accept reassignment as a male because without it his life was in danger. But, he writes, “First Spinoza, then Nietzsche saw the problem: we refuse to acknowledge that we are the ones who write (and act in) the script.” If we accept that no one’s role in life is any different from the other, and that no one is special, then there is a possibility to change the script in this “calamitous stage production” we call life. We are able to change, to alter the script, skip an act. For Preciado, “the revolution does not begin with a march in the sun, but with a hiatus, a pause, a tiny shift, a deviation in the game of improvisations and appearances.” Forget social determinism or human nature or a divine plan or the neoliberal faith in the free market “as if it were a meteorological given.” Following Foucault, what we assume is fixed and organic about the law and human nature and sexuality is only arbitrary, the result of legal-medical choices, often invoking the divine to substantiate its claims.
In the political/legal/medical system as it is constituted, if one wants to live, one has to adopt and accept its codes; the medical and legal systems cannot accept the unknown, what deviates from their conception of the truth. What is transitional, borderless, migrant, not clearly defined in terms of sexuality and anatomy and language, must be codified, documented, made recognizable, reproducible, predictable, linguistically consistent; that produces a good citizen. Preciado realizes that as a trans person becoming visible to the medical and legal world, requires both a destruction of the original birth certificate, the creation of a new one, and the reassignment of his sex; thus the trans body does not exist: “In a show of politico-scientific idealism, the doctors and judges deny the reality of my trans body in order to be able to continue to affirm the validity of the binary sexual system. And so the nation exists. And so the judges exist…And so the map exists. And so the document exists. The family exists. The law exists. The Book exists…Psychiatry exists…Even God exists. But my trans body does not exist.”
The order of things is maintained by erasure, destruction, induced lack of memory, detention, punishment; the visible, as the State, is given priority over the invisible, the silent university, the migrant, the trans person, and asserts its dominance by the use of “techniques of violence (against women, against children, against non-white men and women, against animals, against the planet as a whole)” and surveillance i.e. against those who’s gestures and appearance are not socially accepted and considered inferior. Remember that the Nazis destroyed modern art in order to produce images that conformed to their ideology; paintings of bucolic scenes, with healthy and strong heterosexual women and men maintained their idea of the all-powerful state apparatus while the others were being tortured and killed in concentration camps. Preciado writes, “We could say, reading Weber with Butler, that masculinity is to society what the State is to the nation: the holder and legitimate user of violence. This violence is expressed socially in the form of domination, economically in the form of privilege, sexually in the form of aggression and rape.” Instead of viewing the world as unified, singular, and bounded by walls it is more imaginitive and revolutionary to view it as multiple, borderless, stateless, and changeable; because the territory is not the map.
But the fictional reality of a North and South on this map is maintained for political reasons; this reasoning is less about geography and more about seeing the North as superior and the South as inferior. Preciado writes:
As the anti-colonialist critics Anibal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cuscanqui, and Walter Mignolo teach us, the South does not exist. The South is a political fiction constructed by colonial prejudice. The South is an invention of modern colonial cartography: the combined effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the growth of industrial capitalism, still in quest of new territories to use for the extraction of raw material.”
In the present time, the far-right makes use of this invented geography and chronology, which is actually the result of colonialism, power, knowledge and space; the argument for the far-right goes like this: “The South is primitive and past. The North is progress and future. The South is the result of a racial and sexual system of social classification, a binary epistemology that opposes high and low, mind and body, head and feet, rationality and emotion, theory and practice”; the South is poor, its inhabitants are lazy, ignorant, filthy, sexually obsessed; the south “is an animal, feminine, infantile, a fag. On the other end of this spectrum, the argument goes like this: the North is “human, masculine, adult, heterosexual, white…healthier, stronger, more intelligent, cleaner. The North is the soul and the phallus. Sperm and currency. Machine and software. It’s the place of memory and profit. The North is the museum, the archive, the bank.” But “at the same time, the South is the place where capitalist extraction is taking place: the place where the North captures energy, meaning, enjoyment and added value. The South is the skin and the uterus. Oil and Coffee. Meat and Gold.” On the one hand, cleanness, intelligence, health, heterosexuality, the phallus, and on the other, the cesspool, the mine, the rubbish, the anus; but the South is also feared because it is the seat of revolutionary power. We must collapse these vertical distinctions which enforce a duality of inferior and superior, and hack the power grid; imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps, to arrive at a new language.
In “Homage to the Unknown Nanny,” Preciado talks of how the definition of the social figure of the “biological-domestic mother in the nineteenth century as the sole, legitimately constitutive bond” has forced us to “erase the importance of other relationships.” When the nanny is visited many years later by the child who had been in her care, she says, “My little one, you are my little one, my doll, I washed you, fed you, put you to sleep. I did everything except bring you into the world.” But because in the medical and legal world reproductive rights trump all others, often these nannies who had such a crucial role in a child’s early life remain unknown. Preciado writes: “The time has come to decolonize our mothers, to honor multiple, heterogenous bonds that we have constructed and that keep us alive.” At times, when growing up, friends may assume more importance to a young person’s intellectual and social development than one’s own parents. Often, sons and daughters leave home in their teens and don’t have relations with parents for numerous reasons. In sexual relationships, there are certain lovers, with whom one spent only one night, and whom one remembers years later, realizing what an important influence they had upon one. Preciado reminds us to respect and honor the multiple influences in one’s life. In concluding the essay, Preciado writes that “the fiction of the stability of racial or national identity can only be constructed by eliminating the emotional and political strength of this bastard, mixed-race filiation.” He concludes: the “social body welcomes us with many arms, without which we would not be able to survive.”
The essays in Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (in a wonderful translation by Charlotte Mandell) outline radical strategies for coping with our chaotic times; it challenges us to rethink the very foundation of those accepted ideas about politics, sexuality, and gender. And for this reason, it should be required reading for anyone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is. And I imagine that includes many of you who are reading this essay. The story of Preciado’s crossing from a feminist lesbian to a trans person, provides the basis for his writing on many subjects concerning gender and sexual politics, and in doing so, he asks us to participate in the cultural revolution that is to come. This is not about “marching towards the sun” but about a cognitive revolution. This is where change begins. We must become “techno-shamans” and stretch our thinking to the farthest regions of what is thinkable. We must become nomadic navigators of the inner/outer cosmos. Preciado writes: “I have no soul and no body. I have an apartment on Uranus, which certainly places me far from most Earthlings, but not so far that you can’t come to see me. Even if only in dream…” This book is a ticket to that planet, one of the farthest from the earth, but it won’t tell you how to get there; there are many possible roads you could take. But you’ll know when you arrive. They’ll be signs. And so, finally, I have to thank Preciado for taking me on that ride.