What is Pharmakofiction?

a lecture in context of PHARMAKOS/N: EIN APPARAT
by Georg Dickmann

From Leif Randt’s collective drugs in “Planet Magnon” (2015), Neill Blomkamp’s dystopian phantasmagoria on viral infections and immune responses in “District 9” (2009) to Dietmar Dath’s transgenic microorganisms in „The Abolition of Species“ (2008), contemporary science fiction is seething with genetically modified materials, barely visible, non-human agents and poisonous, precarious substances. We are constantly made aware that the ’pharmakeia’ in contemporary science fiction are not marginal, but minoritarian. They occupy a strategically important place and help to generate the fantastic worlds and subjects in which they circulate. They infect and control both singular and collective bodies and, in doing so, inevitably set the stage for far-reaching bio-political and, more important, pharmaco-political questions: How do potent and non-potent substances govern today’s bodies? How are poisons and remedies being used? What are their effects and side-effects that in turn constitute or devastate the world? What forces and opposing become mobilized?

The presentation’s launching pad is the inference that our bio-technological circumstances are reflected or impregnated in these and many other fictions of the future. Contemporary science fiction describes trans or even post-human bodies that no longer function as self-contained and fixed entities, but instead as sensitive and flexible codes with permeable borders, able to be programmed and reprogrammed through biotechnology and moreover pharmacology, and to which we can prescribe value.

As a result, literary, filmic and artistic expression takes on both a symptomatic as well as a diagnostic quality. As part of the social sphere – that is to say, as that, which Castoriadis classifies as the ”collective imaginary“ –, the aesthetic expression of this ”collective imaginary“ is not only representative, but can only be dealt with or rendered discursive through artistic means and anticipated or conceptualized with in the light of a still unknown future.

In this sense, the lecture attempts to trace two perspectives inherent to ”pharmakos.” The first perspective touches on the topoi of the bio-political. Particularly in light of Foucault, the question then arises as to how the governance of life is organized, produced and lead by precarious substances. The second perspective has a bearing on the field of fiction, imagination, and aesthetic practice. It asks how we respond to the bio-technological developments of the present and to the ensuing power effect through a different, poetic practice, that like an aesthetic anti-laboratory can serve to create matter and bodies. In the works of Paul B. Preciado – the Spanish philosopher and queer-theorist who connects pharmaco-political analysis with the practices of intoxicating himself with testosterone for one year –, these two perspectives become interwoven.