ABSTRACT
Spanish architectural theorist and transdisciplinary sexuality scholar Paul B. Preciado coins a new term—farmacopornigrafico (pharmaco-pornographic)—to describe the post-World War II confluence of drugs, surgery, biotechnology, mass media, social media, cybernetics, and hypersexuality that now governs human lives. He extends and transforms Michel Foucault’s influential arguments about power, discipline, and the formation of subjectivity to argue that disciplinary power is no longer “ortho-architectural,” applied to the body by apparatuses beyond it. Contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the substance that supply their metabolism, by the cybernetic prostheses and various types of pharmaco-pornographic desires that feed the subject’s actions and through which they turn into agents. Whereas in the disciplinary society, technologies of subjectivation control the body from the outside as an ortho-architectonic exterior device, in the pharmaco-pornographic society of control, technologies enter the body to form part of it: they dissolve in the body; they become the body.
