”matter is ‘characterized by self-touch—by the interaction of the particle with the surrounding electromagnetic field or virtual particles, which it itself generates and destroys—and in which it “comes into contact with the infinite alterity that it itself is.”15’ Touching and experiencing are thus regarded as the essence of what constitutes matter. This concept of matter always includes alterities—the virtual, the unpredictable—and requires ‘recognition of our responsibility towards the infinity of the other.’”

Johanna Bruckner’s text is a speculative proposal for new types of interspecies sexuality and subjectivity that could take us beyond oppressive binaries, based on her work Molecular Sex which is featured in the transmediale 2020 group exhibition The Eternal Network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Just as quantum computing promises a world of networks in which ones and zeroes simultaneously coexist with one another, Bruckner’s artwork describes a fictive future sexbot that is seemingly able to freely mutate from one state of being to another. Taking its cue from a sea creature called the “brittle star,” this bot is a portrait of social, technological, and bio-chemical entanglements, as they exist in (non)human networks, after the impact of phenomena such as micro-plastics. Following the writings of Karen Barad, the project asks how the molecularization and indeterminacy of being, today, might inform queer and hybrid futures better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes.

Paleontologists would perhaps understand the present time as the outcome of a failed experiment with sex.1 This text presents a number of propositions as to how recent conceptions of the molecularization of the body might crystallize in a redistribution of the sensible. The mobility of pleasure and knowledge as capital, the expansion of global supply chains, logistical computing, planetary sharing economies, and transformations in ecological systems all have implications for human relations within the world’s political configurations. These new economic and social orders have largely benefited from advances in molecular research, hormonal and libidinal biology, virology, and sex/design. They enhance the human body, the molecular body, and employ it as biochemical and geopolitical material. Algorithms increasingly penetrate the micro- and nanostructures of our physical, artificial, and sexual bodies, to provide data sets for further economic and political applications. For example, biological material is used to explore the genetic engineering of sex and citizenship. Gene discovery software and research allow biological materials to be encoded, forming a basis for the invention of new physical and artificial bodies, and notions of how their sexualities might perform. The imagination of sex is one of sex/design. Furthermore, nanotechnologies and artificial intelligence shape the human experience of pleasure through technical and biomedical interventions, such as robots acting as erotic partners, or through pharmaceutical experimentation, where feeling is converted into a techno-sensory product. Biological substance, then, is translated into fluid networks of information, opening up new spheres of intellectual and molecular property. The chemical industries have situated the desires of bodies within an ensemble of social relations, in which the libidinal economy serves the sex/design of biocapitalism. In the ‘pharmacopornographic era’, capitalism, pornography, and the pharmaceutical industry merge to form a control society that infiltrates, penetrates, and mutates, engineering our desires from the level of hormones to pervasive media images and risk technology.2 In contemporary aesthetic economies, pleasure is increasingly experienced as a fragile and virtual realm. Given this techno-sensual modification of human feeling, the body is continuously subjected to speculative alteration. How might these scenarios, in which the body is thrown into a chaotic and unpredictable molecular world, enact particular situations of molecular revolutionary potential, situations that might allow for the reordering of contemporary sex/design regimes to make way for a micropolitics of the sensible? Which affectively diffracted temporalities are needed for bodies to align beyond the boundaries of representation? Within which bodily conceptions can sensual and energetic forces coexist in interrelation? Research into the molecularization of human and artificial existence clearly becomes a matter of ethical and political concern. Advances in molecular research offer a framework for recalibrating our entangled relations with the sensible world around us. Through the perpetual bending of and movement among and between human, animal, technology, sex, and atmosphere, the molecular shapes a world beyond the tangible. It pushes at the limits of the human sensorium and invents technological prostheses that now have the capacity to disorganize, reconfigure, and redistribute sensible relations and the patterns with which subjects comprehend the world. I. To begin I will briefly reflect on the molecular from a labor perspective, since in the dialectic between accumulation and destitution, the molecular constitutes specific autonomies, which I will later consider in greater detail in light of Karen Barad’s work. In the final third of the 20th century, work moved away from the Fordist ethos of production and toward global networks of information and finance and the realms of desire. The subsequent economic reorganization of work valued the intellectual, cognitive worker through the semiotic production of meaning, and the workplace became flexible, no longer confined to the factory. Stimulated by the dissolution of labor, life and leisure, neoliberal victories over aesthetic value led to the valorization of desire as semiotics. Today’s post-Fordist regimes of cognitive labor depend on technologies as machines of desire, producing affective experiences as systems of labor.3 Considering these machines of desire in their molecular operational processes—as a ‘microphysics of the unconscious’4 —they seem to exist as affective molecular aggregates. Dependent on their cognitive laborer, their viral host, they stimulate the constitution of social formations and abstract connectivities. So, if we view the process of affection/being affected by technology not as an appropriative strategy but rather as a metamorphic virus, the machine, as well as our relationship to it, may be a catalyzing motor to break away from capital’s extraction and exploitation of our desires through affect’s potential indeterminacy. II. Against this background of the transformation of the world via molecular bodies and their intimacies, my video installation Molecular Sex (2020) proposes a sex robot aimed at liberating normative technology-led worldviews of intimate relations. I chose to feature a sexbot because of the uncanny parallels between modalities of queerness and the performance of plastic. I am interested in the links between sex, plastic, and non-reproduction. Objects of sexual pleasure are chemically linked to the very plastics that, in their molecular texture, make sexual indifferences possible. Plastics carry their queerness into sex, inhibiting sexual reproduction. Sexual difference may not even turn out to have a future, as plastic mirrors a form of becoming based on technological and bacterial merging, rather than the reproductive ability of organic creatures.5 Plastic is actualizing a queer techno-bacterial future, since the texture of plastic functions according to the logic of dispersion and polymorphic accumulation. It is less a substance than the antithesis of a substance; a paradigm in which substance is transformed into a way of being without stable presence or meaning.

>"A speculative proposal for new types of interspecies sexuality and subjectivity"