Choose Your Pill

I

In his book Testo Junkie , Paul B. Preciado provides us with a provocative, original reading of contemporary capitalism, conceived as a pharmacopornographic regime. This term refers to “the processes of biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity” that, although possibly rooted in the nineteenth century, became visible as a new paradigm only after World War II. Relying on the growing importance of pharmaceutical technologies and pornographic imaginaries in the formation of neoliberal subjects, Preciado borrows from Foucault in claiming that this kind of capitalism does non produce things, but subjects. He also adds, echoing at the same time Spinoza, Reich, Deleuze and Guattari, that pharmacopornographic capitalism no longer relies on the exploitation of work, but of potentia gaudendi, a sort of primordial “orgasmic force” existing before and beyond any further characterization (neither human nor animal, neither female nor male, neither animate nor inanimate). This potentiality cannot be reduced to private property, but always exists “as an event, a relation, a practice, or an evolutionary process.” However, capital’s biopolitical control tries to convert such an orgasmic force “into merchandise, into an object of economic exchange, into work” – and, according to Preciado, femininity is the quality expressed by the conversion, referring to both female and male bodies. The very invention, starting in mid-20 ^thcentury, of the specific category of gender, assumes in Preciado’s framework a fundamental role, allowing for a final paradigm shift in the continuum from sovereign power to disciplinary power to pharmacopornography — the last being a reformulation of Deleuze’s control societies expanded by “notions inspired by both Burroughs and Bukowski.” While he recognizes that the third regime has not completely eradicated the previous ones (and that pharmacopornographic production is not the most quantitatively significant in today’s world econom), Preciado claims that it has become “the model of all other forms of production.”

This interpretative framework is as intriguing as it is puzzling — and the very structure of Testo Junkie, part counter-cultural autobiography and part philosophical provocation, seems conceived precisely to discourage an analytical understanding of it: the book appears as designed to be deeply loved or deeply hated by the reader, and its iconoclastic posture may well discourage anything in between. In what follows, I will try to explicitly refute these narrow options, by demonstrating on the one hand the text’s lack of theoretical stability and, on the other, the validity of some of its intuitions even beyond Preciado’s own view.

To begin with, it is not exactly clear why pharmaceutical and pornographic industries should be taken as the key elements of the contemporary capitalist system. Preciado’s claim that the sex market is the most profitable market on the internet, already dubious when the Spanish edition of Testo Junkie came out in 2008, is all the more questionable nowadays. As shown by authors such as Nick Srnicek , the so called digital economy is dominated by platforms — that is, by material and immaterial infrastructures devoted to monopolize, extract, analyze and use increasingly large amounts of data. The wide galaxy of porn websites now available is just one of the many instantiations of this wider phenomenon: the most important pornography providers, indeed, do not sell sex (as their contents are ‘for free’), but they sell advertising space and huge amounts of customers’ data.

Preciado’s thesis that pharmacopornographic production shapes all the other kinds of production seems also fragile: why should we prefer his proposal to, for example, those locating the most pervasive capitalist tendencies in financialization and indebtedness or the Capitalocene [1]? More generally, the idea that post-Fordist capitalism could be defined by a unique tendency – as industrialization was to Fordism – appears intrinsically questionable. Nancy Fraser, among others, describes capitalism as an institutionalized social order based on a variety of forms of expropriation and exploitation, and relying on a number of background conditions of possibility , ranging from (gendered) unpaid reproductive labor to the extraction of natural resources, to evolving modalities of racialization.

In a similar vein, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have developed the notion of operations of capital “to multiply empirical points of entry and to complexify the conceptual framework for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism.” Regarding operation as a moment of connection and capture that exhibits the materiality of even the most ethereal forms of capital, they put it to work in linking together recent changes in the fields of finance, logistics and extraction — yet leaving open the possibility of different operations intersecting with them. In this connection, I would like to argue that pharmacopornography does indeed point to two other relevant operations of capital within a wider context. In particular, I claim that there is an especially influential operation that, although not explicitly addressed by Preciado, makes pharmacopower a key element of the post-Fordist scenario. [2]

II

Although he offers a long and powerful chapter on pharmacopower in Testo Junkie — developing, among other things, an impressive criticism of the contraceptive pill and its violently colonial and sexist origins — Preciado does not devote a particular attention to psychiatric drugs or treatments nor to their role in the production of a kind of subjectivity in line with the needs of contemporary capitalist accumulation. [3] However, during the timespan of what he labels pharmacopornographic regime, such a role has become exponentially important — and in a way that directly calls into question the topic of gender identity.

After World War II, psychiatry in the US (the main context of Preciado’s investigation of pharmacopower) was articulated into two branches: professionals working in universities and private practices, and psychiatrists working in state hospitals. While the former relied on a mainly psychanalytical methodology, the latter mostly recurred to the prescription of drugs or shock treatments, as Jonathan Metzl details in Prozac on the Couch . Both categories were composed almost exclusively by men, and both were deeply imbricated in patriarchal stereotypes and behaviors — sexual relations with and harassment against the women engaged in psychoanalysis were quite frequent practices, while the (largely female) population of psychiatric hospitals was most of the time hospitalized against their will, often at a husband’s request . These phenomena were inextricably related to the then current state in capitalist accumulation: the development of the first psychotropic wonder-drug, Miltodown, in the second half of the 1950s, went hand in hand with a pathologizing of women’s desire to work outside the home, as well as their purported ‘frigidity.’ The spectacular diffusion of products such as Miltdown contributed to a sexual policing of the boundaries of the family-wage model on which Fordism was based (boundaries not challenged, but reinforced, by the almost contemporary development of family assistance programs at the federal level , which in a way secured the foundations of a system based upon a huge amount of unpaid social reproductive labor).

In the seventies, US psychiatry experienced what is usually called a biological revolution: psychoanalytic methodology was overturned in favor of ‘organic’ explanations of identity grounded on neurochemistry, genetics, and psychopharmacology. While the mainstream narrative of this shift assumes that it also implied a complete discarding of the patriarchally charged sexual politics of psychoanalysis, that was not the case — as Metzl’s detailed study of the gendered (psycho)dynamics of pharmaceutical adverting during the period 1964-1997 has compellingly shown. In particular, the politics of advertisement and prescription over that timespan (with its obsessive and performative focus on married white women as the ideal type of psychiatric patient and its pathologization of radical feminism) contributed to sustaining the ideological role of the nuclear family in a period when the latter was at the center of both neoliberal and neoconservative anxieties.

What would change over the thirty years analyzed by Metzl and the two following decades, were the kinds of wonder drugs dominating the political economy of pharmacopower — in line with the concurrent modifications in capitalism. Indeed, if Valium, which registered a boom in the 1970s, was mainly an anxiolytic drug, Prozac, which through its heirs is still dominating the pharmaceutical market, is the anti-depressant par excellence. The last three decades have seen an unprecedented (and, on diagnostic terms, hardly justifiable) broadening of the category of pathological depression, [4] in line with the progressive neoliberalization asking individuals to find “ biographical solutions to systemic contradictions .” This is why depression becomes perfectly functional to capitalism in its neoliberal variant: on the one hand, it allows huge profit margins to be obtained precisely from the treatment of the psychological repercussions of its structural dynamics; on the other, by pathologizing social malaise, it stimulates further introjection of a dynamic of individualized guilt . An integral part of this entanglement between depression and contemporary capitalism is its gender imbalance: the nearly double percentage of women being diagnosed with this condition (as opposed to men) is most likely connected not only to endocrinal reasons, but also to environmental and social factors. Precarious forms of employment, particularly frequent among women, seem to be correlated with higher levels of depression . Racialization should be taken into account here, too, since the discourse of strength usually developed around black women contributes to normalizing even high levels of depression in their case.

Preciado’s claim that pharmacopornography is the main tendency of contemporary capitalism seems not particularly convincing – as post-Fordism is characterized by a plurality of operations, some of which also appear to be more pervasive than the ones analyzed by him. However, as I have tried to show, pharmacopower may well be a particularly important operation in the building of neoliberal subjectivity, to an extent that Preciado himself has not fully acknowledged. Specifically, the evidence briefly reviewed here points to the fact that psychotropic medications, and especially anxiolytics and antidepressants, are fundamental to understand the intertwining of capitalism, gender identities, and racialization. Far from being a work that could only be enthusiastically endorsed or harshly refuted, Testo Junkie offers, in my view, some important – though incomplete – intuitions for an analysis of post-Fordism.

Franco Palazzi is a graduate student in Philosophy at NSSR. His latest published work is “Reflections on Little Rock and Reflective Judgment”, in Philosophical Papers 46(3), 2017.