Matt: Your use of the term 'sex' is used, in Lynn Margulis' words, in the following way: 'Sex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender. Sex is a genetic mixing in organisms that operates at a variety of levels; it occurs in some organisms at more than one level simultaneously'. (Slanted Truths, p.285). Part of your research for the book involved taking part in a study group run by Margulis. What were the practices this group was involved in? How did the working life of biologists intersect with your interests?

Luciana:
First of all, I must say that Margulis’ definition of sex is fascinating as it directly intervenes and cuts across fields of study – the sciences and the humanities. The legacy of the notion of sex as entangled with sexual coupling has been crucial for the definition of gender. The endosymbiotic definition of sex has always struck me due to its potential reopening of what constitutes sex and gender in biological and cultural terms. Indeed, it shows a daring capacity to reinvent the evolutionary history of the human on a vaster time scale traversed by parallel phyla of transmission. In this sense, it enabled Abstract Sex to follow a transversal path to the nature culture, sex and gender dichotomies by investigating the becoming cultural of a non-given nature.

Lynn Margulis’s laboratory introduced me to the parallel world of bacteria. You can’t help but be captured by the complexity of such diverse colonies of the underworld, their collective rhythms of transmission, and their futuristic architectures. People working in the laboratory also participated in the study groups. There were several study groups but those I participated in had scientists from different ages and scientific backgrounds – geologists, oceanographers, molecular biologists etc. These were more like gatherings of people who shared interests in the theory of endosymbiosis and that worked together to sustain it from different angles – the geological research of fossils for example carried out by Mark McMenanim’s through his hypothesis of Hypersea. We also went for small expeditions in the woods, for night viewing of stars with astronomers and so on. It was an amazing experience. You could not help but being excited about this adventure in the unnatural dimensions of the natural world. Indeed, rather than feeling closer to a given nature, you actually felt closer to its capacities to vary across scales, from the molecular world of bacterial aquatic colonies to clusters of fungi and extraterrestrial life. Yet the whole atmosphere of adventure had nothing to do with an attitude of ‘discovering’ nature or ‘revealing’ its secrets. It was much more interesting and new for me compared to what I had been reading about scientists in the main literature of science studies. I mean here the attitude was closer to a passionate fabrication of what constituted nature, and more specifically a daring fabrication that endosymbiosis posed to the entire scientific community.

Although there was a strong sense of sharing a ‘minor’ science, or better a ‘minoritarian’ hypothesis in science, there was also a strong sense that the hypothesis had a fundamental impact on what we take nature to be. And here I would like to make a reference to Stengers, who reminds us of the collective and passionate process that presupposes each innovative scientific proposition that dares to ask “And if?”. Margulis’s hypothesis clearly dares asking: “and if the history of bacteria was going on in the history of multicellulars, and if we should understand ourselves on the basis of symbiotic populations of bacteria?” (See I. Stengers, Power and Invention, Situating Science, University of Minnesota Press, 1997:136.7). Retrospectively, I can say that the study group then was first of all involved in the practice of daring scientific truths, which for me explicitly questioned the Platonic, Aristotelian and Cartesian ontological models and thus pointed to different ethical and political questions. These practices were then an action towards the articulation of a less given natural world. In this sense, the working life of biologists also became relevant to my interest in minor sciences. Yet before being able to see the importance of their practices, I had to twist the critical head that I had inherited from the structuralist and deconstructivist approaches to life sciences. For these approaches scientific truths could not exist outside the text, the binarism of nature and culture, mind and body, power and resistance. Hence, to put it crudely, the object of science is always already inscribed upon, limited from and controlled by the discourse of science, the metaphysical legacy of patriarchy and colonialism – the presupposition of the self to the other, male to female, white to black, sex to gender and so on.

On the other hand, however, I had always been suspicious of the vitalist and existentialist belief in the spontaneity of the body – ultimately free from the mechanics of discourse. From this standpoint, the encounter with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza has been crucial for developing an approach to science and technology that neither starts from an ontology of the given nor from an inherited structure that cannot account from change beyond the mere shifting of positions. For my work these critical approaches that have been dominating academic research for the last 20-30 years – I refer to structuralism and deconstructivism – did not enable an engagement with the process of the modification of a body accounting for an entangled nature-culture continuum. In other words, these approaches did not highlight a way to take seriously a process of becoming cultural of nature. On the contrary, I felt strongly at the time, nature was cornered in the hands of a given ontology or in the discursive disciplinary construction of science. In my work the crucial relation between science and culture is defined by a key access to nature as a process under construction.

My interest in the practices of biologists then became a question of understanding how they were participating closely in the mutating fabric of life. In this sense, I agree with Stengers who argues that before judgement and the establishment of paradigmatic truth, there is a sea of events in which the object of scientific enquiry participates in its own perception and construction as an artefact. Thus, the working practices of biologists are themselves practices of invention each time daring to reconstruct a given. Of course the difference between these practices will lie less in the scientific discipline per se than in the molecular and molar assemblages that characterize them all.

Matt: This is an extremely dense and rich text that works on a number of levels to open up possibilities for thought about life, evolution, politics, gender, and it is one that is also very optimistic. In a sense you achieve this by articulating a new grounds for such optimism in a vividly rendered way that also challenges the usual modalities of human optimism. If optimism is the right word, of what kind of optimism is the book an expression of?

Luciana:
I see your point. Yet I would like to try and define this notion of optimism in a more precise way. First of all I need to say that a radical challenge to the modalities of human optimism involves an engagement with the process of human stratification. I use this word in the Deleuze-Guattari’s sense of collective organizations sedimenting one upon the other across distinct layers, under certain pressures and pointing to singular thresholds. Abstract Sex addresses human stratification on three levels. The biophysical, the biocultural and the biodigital amalgamation of layers composing a constellation of bodies within bodies, each grappled within the previous and the next formation – a sort of positive feedback upon each other cutting across specific time scales. In other words, these levels of stratification constitute for Abstract Sex the endosymbiotic dynamics of organization of matter – a sort of antigenealogical process of becoming that suspends the teleology of evolution and the anthropocentrism of life. From this standpoint, the modalities of human optimism, rooted in the net substantial distinction between the good and the evil and the distinct belief in negative forces, fail to explain the continual collision and coexistence of the distinct layers. Following the law of morality, human optimism would never come to terms with its own paradoxes of construction and destruction. And if it does it is soon turned into an existential crisis giving in to the full force of negating power and thus all becomes intolerable. Once we are forced to engage with the way layers collide in the human species – the way some biophysical and biocultural sedimentations rub against each other under certain pressures and in their turn the way they are rubbed against by the biodigital mutations of sensory perception for example – than the moral stances of optimism and pessimism make no longer sense. Indeed we need to leap towards a plane debunked of ultimate moral judgement. A plane full of practice and contingent activities, where we find ourselves plunged in a field of relation - interdependent ecologies of forces (attractors, pressures, thresholds), which trigger in us modifications that resonate across all scales of organization.

Abstract Sex is not the expression of the continual flow of life where everything is in continual becoming in a world of continual interconnection that ultimately makes everything redundant. It is not even expression of an ultimate raw, bare or spontaneous force of life that is intrinsic to the productive forces of the human and will therefore triumph over the apparatuses of capture – good over evil. I think that to understand the challenge that Abstract Sex poses to human optimism or pessimism it is necessary to leap onto a different ontological plane and deal with the abstract assemblages of desire in matter. This implies a radical move from notions of spontaneity and blindness in nature. Every process has then to be considered as the outcome of relations of forces increasing and decreasing certain tendencies in matter. In this sense, Abstract Sex points to a singular process of collision of strata undergoing the biodigital reengineering of life that forces us to engage with what we take a body, gender, and thus politics to be.

For Abstract Sex to face – rather than remaining dismissive of - the collision of strata implies a cut from the running flow of life demanding taking a line of flight towards destratification – a felt experience of change on a nature-culture continuum. Abstract Sex is then not the expression of a new kind of optimism, but an evolutionary construction of a sentient modality of living attuned with the stratified and stratifying assemblages of desire. This requires no spontaneous force or ultimate optimism but an enormous capacity to engineer a collective striving: a Spinozist task towards the generation of common notions that build up modifications in living. It requires no longer an emotional as opposed to a rational attitude to life, a positive or a negative tone, but, more importantly, an investigation of the affective dimensions of the body (i.e., its capacities to be affected and to affect other bodies). Thus, it is a matter of changing the parameters of what counts as living and death, constructive and destructive, nature and culture, sex and gender, politics and power. It is a matter of not taking for granted the biological and cultural stratification that compose each body of relations insofar as these are not internally given or externally constructed. They are rather in movement, under a metastable process that goes back in time and forward in the future. Of course changing parameters is not a recipe for happiness. For ultimate happiness is the idealistic state for human optimism. On the contrary, joyful passions are the real immanent engineers of new modifications requiring the collective agreement of bodies-minds and their capacities to push the agreement on a newly constituted level.

In this sense, Abstract Sex proposes a schizogenesis: ontology under continual construction ceaselessly intervening in the ontology of giveness and lack. It is not optimism that the book expresses. Abstract Sex only exposes a full warning equipped with key weapons: do not dismiss the daily encounter with black holes, strange attractors, and unexpected changes; cultivate joyful passions and their capacities to become positive actions (the collective intensive building up of new worlds). In particular, the cultivation of joyful passions – i.e., passions that increase a collective power of action – demands an active participation in the mutations of matter.

Matt: You mention affect and joy here as important guiding and productive principles. Abstract Sex however uses the word ‘pleasure’ as something whose logic or present configuration should be disturbed. What is the relationship between, or how can we differentiate, the Spinozist pleasures of potentiality and this other pleasure?

Luciana:
Affect and joy have in common a certain passion or capacity of being affected open to futurity - becoming. For Abstract Sex, affect and joy involve a masochist assemblage of desire that as Deleuze explains is not guided by the principle of pleasure: the economy of genital and reproductive sex. On the contrary, such assemblage exposes the necessity to be affected so as to produce the body anew in total independence from Oedipal pleasure. The capacity of being affected then points to a supersensorial suspension of pleasure, disavowal of sexuality, expectation of pain, which is better understood as a rhythmic combination of velocities: the coexistent tendencies to slow down (waiting) and speed up (expecting) giving way to new bodily vibrations that have nothing to do with climactic pleasure. The masochist assemblage subtracts desire from its capture in the homeostatic circle of pleasure, where the Oedipal order of heterosexuality and sexual reproduction is there only to reinforce the sadistic tendency to eradicate femininity all together as discussed by Klaus Theweleit in Male Fantasies. For Abstract Sex, the capacity to be affected has in germ the masochist potential of becoming woman – the destratification from the biocultural regime of pleasure and the sadist desire to accelerate the death of femininity. The capacity to be affected then tends towards a veritable capacity of desiring assemblages to become: a sort of parthenogenesis giving way to a genitaless sex, a nomadic mutating cold (non-sentimental) affectivity.

The distinction between pleasure and affect concern the differentiation between a climactic organization of assemblages of desire aiming towards equilibrium versus a nonclimactic order tending towards becoming. Indeed pleasure is here understood as singular aggregation of desiring machines that under certain condition, according to certain tendencies and thresholds lend themselves to the production of quick satisfaction, which assumes the characteristics of transgression so as to return to balance. Here desire is not understood in terms of lack, as the Lacannians do, but in terms of full body of potentials tending towards their actualizations. Once captured in a homoestatic circle that repeats itself without differentiation by warding off its outside, then desire lends itself to the state of pleasure. This state more than being disturbed has to be destratified as it becomes the perfect shelter of the organism, the individual, the signifier for the spreading of sadness, paranoia, abolition, lack infecting all kinds of encounters.

Affect and joy on the contrary operate in total autonomy from pleasure as they expose a distinctive assemblage of desire or singular actualization of desiring potentials that emerge from encounters between bodies that agree – i.e. their symbiotic combination enables the production of a new body or a becoming that has pushed these bodies in a new composition. In this sense, the new composition exposes the schizophrenic coexistence of desiring potentials lending themselves to the production of non-climactic or distributive desire fluctuating across regions of intensity rather than enclosing itself in an interior fighting against its outside. It is possible to argue that this fluctuating movement only navigates on an outside of rhizomatically connected regions, slightly changing their rhythm, their vibrations, and thus catalyzing all sorts of microbecomings. In this case the cultivation of joy entails entering in contact with the biophysical dynamics of desire, the metastable ecology of relations that can tend to the parthenogenic diffusion of microfemininity or that can be poisonous and spread sadness – implying a decrease in the capacity to affect and become. For Abstract Sex, the capacity to be affected has already in germs a capacity to experience joyful encounters as an activity of becoming that opens itself up to a futurity entering the present to change a state of affairs.

Matt:
You use the word 'engineering' a number of times, as a process that sorts things out, arranges, modifies and moves materials. But this is done without the figure of the engineer, as something self-organising. When you turn in the chapter on Biodigital Sex the figure of engineering is somehow doubled. It occurs again in the guise of capital-intensive military, pharmaceutical and medical organisations deploying engineers who employ analytical and instrumental techniques in order to ensure that matter does not self-organise but that it operates according to plan, becomes a standard object. How do you see these two forms interacting?

Luciana:
Engineering as you say entails a process of selection, organization and modification, which is not piloted by an ultimate designer. Its self-organization however has not to be attributed to a sort of autopoietic system, where distinct parts sustain the whole. To some extent, I have a conceptual problem with autopoiesis as it still presupposes a certain subjection of the parts to the whole with a limited capacity for them to feedback on it. On the contrary, my use of the word engineering entails a double or mutual process whereby each actualized organization becomes a modifying dimension of the whole. Now a key notion that may help to understand how I discriminate between engineering dynamics and the intensive capitalist investment in the engineering of molecular life is the notion of selection.

In Darwinism and neo-Darwinism the notion of selection has a negative attribute - i.e. it entails elimination or negative force. The function of selection employed by engineers in the manufacturing of genetic drugs, cells and tissues indeed implies that ill-fitted genetic structures will not be able to sustain themselves and will eventually – or naturally in their jargon - die. In other cases, the selective function may also imply that the ill-fitted traits are pre-established and therefore easy to eliminate once they have emerged as it happens in the now acknowledged realm of biocomputing where the recoding of genes, proteins and sequences enables a rematerialization of molecular life in vitro. Indeed this rematerialization together with the preselection of best and ill-fitted traits will lead us to the conclusion that there is an engineer, a designer of life in the world of biotechnologies or, even more so nanotechnology. As I said the key point lies in the notion and real (read virtual) function of selection. From Bergson to Simondon, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari the process of selection has been turned in a dynamics of production of the new. Selection far from eliminating deviances entails a mutual change of ecological relations (between the organism, environment and pressures) unleashing a virtual force impinging on the relation between the organism and its environment whereby their mutual capacity to change remains indeterminate. In other words, selection even when predeterminate cannot escape unleashing its residual effects in the region of relations (at the threshold of critical joint between one phase and the other) in which it has operated. In this sense, the planning and standardization of an object cannot exhaust the capacity of that object to catalyze a change in its proximate environmental relations.

Thus, I see engineering assemblages and their use in the capital-intensive military, pharmaceutical and medical organizations in direct contact as if undergoing a new symbiotic merging. I mean that the use of engineering assemblages cannot occur without ecological consequences on a planetary scale – and without acknowledging the technoscientific capitalist responsibility of accelerating unexpected mutations in an interdependent ecology of relations. The work of engineers therefore is not independent from the consequences of ecological self-organizations. On the contrary, it is as if engineers were directly called in to experiment with the evolutionary capacities of the body. From another point of view however, it is clear that the investment in biotech and even more so in nanotech is linked to a paradigm of control, adjustment and optimization of engineering assemblages. Since the first wave of cybernetics, control remains the most difficult of strategies to manage populations and their environment. Control indeed cannot occur without the unexpected phase of becoming. Its affective power cannot impinge without facing the indeterminate capacities of a body of relations to change – to engineer a new dimension of the whole modifying its conditions with the rest of parts.

Matt:
Following from this, you substantially question the model of capital's subsumption of all life processes (a theoretical moment that defines what might be a bleak telos in critical theory or the moment of a possible total systemic phase-change in accounts such as those of Hardt and Negri in Empire). What are the strata of energy-information that you suggest resist real subsumption, in what manner does this occur, and what are their interfaces to or boundaries against the mechanisms of subsumption?

Luciana:
Again I need to start by slightly changing the parameters of the relation between capital and life. In the first place, I want to point out that capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in the Anti-Oedipus, drawing amongst others from Braudel, is the result of long term contingencies and accidents and that modes of capitalization – exchange, trading, commerce – existed before industrial capitalism. From this standpoint, capitalism is not an end product of the human species. The human species, in other words, cannot be considered as the agent capitalism. It is no longer possible to dismiss the impact that sciences such as endosymbiosis, chaos theory and cybernetics have had on the notion of agency. I am trying to say that this agency is not entirely anthropomorphic, but has to include assemblages of biocultural and biotechnical stratification that feed on a kind of increasing social subjection and machinic enslavement of the human species. Yet this enslavement and subjection are not to be seen in moralist terms. Capital is neither intrinsically good nor evil. In Spinozist terms, capital interests above all seem to clash with those of the human species. Yet, this clash cannot be understood without reference to desire – assemblages of joyful and sad passions. It may be important here to remind ourselves of Deleuze and Guattari’s question: why do humans desire their own enslavement? That is, in Spinozist terms: how do we account for human beings overtaken (read: possessed) by external forces and reduced to servitude? This is why Abstract Sex appreciates the work that Negri and Hardt do in Empire but at the same time distinguishes itself from it. As you also remind us, Hardt and Negri’s emphasis on the phase change of capital importantly points to an ultimate autonomy of the forces of the multitude from the state and from the logic of all-encompassing profit. At the same time however, they assign this autonomy to the forces of life that do not succumb the economy of exchange, alienation and commodity fetishism.

For Abstract Sex, the relation between the autonomy of force and its capitalization is not a dialectic one – which accounts for two substances - but entails a symbiotic process, the mutual coexistence of distinct assemblages of desire on a manyfolded plane. In this sense, we need to reframe the issue. It is not that life can resist capital’s subsumption. Life is not to be confused with organic living energy as opposed to the inorganic energy of death – e.g., the entropic drive of capital. The challenge then is to change our understanding of energy lying at the core of our definitions of life and death, organic and inorganic. This is why endosymbiosis is so important for Abstract Sex as it forces us to wonder: what if all multicellular organic life is instead a dimension of colonies of anaerobic (nonrespiring oxygen) bacteria? This daring hypothesis forces us to question the entire model of the evolution of capital, based on the entropic selection of the most competitive, the elimination of the ill-fitted and the ultimate tendency to death. Similarly, it forces us to change our understanding of the processes of life as indeed at the same time entangled and disentangled from capital.

To say that capital in its contemporary form – i.e., Empire - is a cluster of parasites sucking life from the multitude is to say that parasites are strictly distinguished from life. In other words, I am suggesting that the relation between capital subsumption and life processes is an endosymbiotic one – which points to a mutual host-guest parasiting process accounting for the formation of new worlds, neurocellular modifications of assemblages of desire. It is in this sense that Abstract Sex opposes the capital logic of an all-encompassing subsumption. From this standpoint, I suggest that the term that we are looking for to account for the destratification or becoming of layers of energy-information that are not subsumed is not resistance but lines of flight – a turning towards the collective construction of worlds. This is simply because the notion of resistance presupposes an entropic notion of energy-information. One that has to be fought through negation and warding off. At the same time, this notion may be not useful for Abstract Sex because it presupposes the ontological omnipresence of a given political model that has to be transgressed by exceeding its limits – as in a closed entropic system that can only collapse by running it out of equilibrium. The model of power that I have instead engaged with at an ontological level is a far-from equilibrium cluster of strata of energy-information. Here resistance will be ineffective, it will only increase exponentially the power of that which resistance is directed against insofar as the latter remains blind to vaster causes of metastable changes.

Far-from equilibrium dynamics of organization of energy-information require dealing with a turbulent composition and decomposition of causes and their effects. It then requires a leap – the participation towards changing conditions rather than a resistance to them. Such a leap is not a jump into the void. A change in the conditions of life implies a destratification from sedimented states – biological states, states of mind, economical states, sexual states and so on. To embark in such a passage it is necessary to be equipped with weapons that help to address the causes and changes of the mechanisms of subsumption. For example, as we are confronting an endosymbiotic relation - a double parasitism - between capital’s subsumption and life where all life processes are being modulated, all its potential activated for profit, we need to equip ourselves with practices that decouple the instant satisfactory pleasure for accumulation from the building up of collective joyful passions. The flight from real subsumption entails the continual reengineering of encounters by means of affective contagion – an anticlimactic practice or experiment of change attuned with the hyperhythmic vibrations of matter. Thus the interfaces to the mechanisms of subsumption are the transversal amalgamation of energy-information falling out or in the middle of the strata. It is here that that reengineering of the biophysical and biocultural cluster of strata is happening. It is here that capital by indifferently precipitating a rapid destratification may well encounter its own monstrous and unrecognizable transformation.

Matt: Deleuze and Guattari, and others whose work you use in the book, have rendered visible in certain ways a whole host of compositional dynamics operating through matter, culture, social formations, language, and their own manifold inter-relation. One of their reasons for arguing for such a vast bestiary of patternings is, by way of making a more attentive and suggestive account of the world, to avoid or to supplant Hegelian dialects. However, I wonder whether, once this work is begun and underway, we no longer have the need to reject the possibility of also recognising dialectical dynamics where they occur. Coming after, with all its precedents, this vast supplement to ways of understanding and inventing the ways in which things occur we can also find something to recognise as useful in dialectics in which a non-teleological dialectics can be seen as simply one kind of emergent patterning amongst a myriad others. And, if this were so, in what terms might the movements adopting a direct confrontation with those organisations – largely certain companies and states - attempting to turn specific biological processes (not ‘life’) into directly controllable, restrictively engineered and commodified forms, be considered as part of a wider vocabulary or active reservoir of patternings that can recognised as productive in the terms of the discussion that you make in Abstract Sex?

Luciana:
I think that you are touching some important problematics here. I think you are right about wondering whether once we supplement one mode of analysis of power – and you refer specifically to Hegelian dialectics - does it follow that dialectical dynamics no longer exist? Yet, I wonder to extent to which dialectics – even when it may be considered as a pattern, even when we subtract from it teleological synthesis - is the right way to understand compositional dynamics. One immediate reason may simply be that dialectics presupposes contradiction, negation and opposition (or binary distinction), whilst compositional dynamics only involve differential relations, paradoxes and togetherness: moments or aspects of a process that mutually determine and presuppose each other.

Another problem with dialectics is synthesis: the reduction of two to one in terms of quantifiable addition. Dialectics gives no account of disjunctive connection between terms belonging to distinct scales for example. It is monist in the sense that it reduces heterogeneities to sameness. It erects a whole above the parts by negating their differential con-partecipation. This negation lies at the very core of the moral law: the necessity of erecting good over evil in order to reach a purified subject position – a transcendent power that can justify its own repression. Dialectics gives priority to judgement over contingent experimentation, negating and suppressing all forces of collective production. At the base of such dialectical moral stance lies guilt: the homeostatic pleasure – the climactic satisfaction – of maintaining sameness. For this reason dialectics is an all too human account of the world, which assumes a master/slave hierarchy of categories - a governing and governed force, the perpetuator and the victim - negating all paradoxical dynamics of a relation.

I think that what we need to distinguish is not dialectic patterns from non-dialectic ones, but molecular compositions from molar fascistic assemblages of desire. In this sense, we do not need to reject the possibility of recognising not dialectical patterns but the repressive activity of molar organizations operating by means of binary distinctions separating thought from the body and forbidding thought from feeling itself. Molar organizations are specific layers of the strata that unlike dialectics are always amodally or virtually linked to lines of flights or deterritorialization that define society.

You ask how can movements can be considered as part of an active reservoir of productive patterning – i.e. how they participate actively in a dynamics of production – confronting those organizations – you specifically refer to certain companies and states - attempting to turn biological processes into directly controllable forms of commodification. However, as it may be clear by now, I think we need to locate this relation between movements and organizations away from dialectics, and right into the dynamics of stratification and bifurcation – or double articulation – on the strata. We need to engage with the double pincer of content and expression that has nothing to do with signification and meaning but, on the contrary, entails the process of organization of forms and substances on parallel layers of organization of matter (i.e., content and expression). Yet the double pincer is in no way dialectical as it cannot be isolated from the ecologies of lines of flights and deterritorializations participating in the production of a new order. The double pincer then maps the continual process of splitting intensities in the very process of order and organization.

In this sense, we may understand the movements adopting a direct confrontation with those organizations - such as companies and states – as productive of new dynamics of deterritorialization of biological processes but also of new power (or reterritorialization). However, I may add that I think that we need to be aware that it is not easy to identify companies and states with molar apparatuses of repression, whilst thinking of movements as molecular dynamics. If we do so, we risk reimparting dialectics onto intensive dynamics of compositions. Abstract Sex exposes that each molar organization is composed of and cut across by parallel dynamics of molecular production that define its paradoxical nature. Simultaneously, each molecular dynamics under certain conditions may arrange itself into a microfascist assemblage spreading through all organizations –i.e. given the conditions it may become molar. In this sense, the commodification of biological processes cannot be disentangled from the wider dynamics of desiring assemblages act to deterritorialize and reterritorialize the biological strata. This is what I think we are confronting with biotech and nanotech, the intersection of biodigital technologies with the composition of new assemblages of desire.

Here, it may be relevant to point out that the Spinozist processes of modifications – the asymmetrical conjunction of the planes of stratification and destratification - at the core of Abstract Sex have not to be confused with the evolutionary monism of dialectics. Movements are not something that reacts to a given stability – structure - and sociality is not something that reacts to individualism. Movements as assemblages of desire are primary to the formation of structures, organizations. For Spinoza, movements are modifications acquiring certain dynamics according to certain pressures and under certain conditions that affect – act back – all dynamics of movement itself. A Spinozist monism here entails a belonging together to a process of unpredictable modifications, which implies the necessity of engaging with the very singularity of each compositional dynamics. In order to grasp how movements are not just in dialectical opposition with suppressive apparatuses or are tending towards the final resolution of a conflict, such as erecting a newly born uncontaminated subjectivity, we need to step sideways and try to give a more precise definition of movements, especially social movements.

It may be useful then to search for such definitions in the exciting works of Gabriel Tarde and Alfred N. Whitehead, where, in different ways but according to a common concern, define social movements and relations act as primary to all compositional dynamics encompassing all distinct scales and thus physical, biological, cultural, technical (particles, cells, organisms, technical machines and so on are indeed already social movements: i.e., they do not need to be socialised by human existence). From this standpoint, movements cannot be disentangled from organisations. Productive compositional dynamics do occur at all levels. Yet each composition is extremely specific and will never resemble another. This is the sense of grasping the relevance of continual variation in the open feedback between virtual and actual matter.

Matt: To go back to the way one inherits particular ‘writing heads’, and how they need to be twisted, or decapitated, you stud each chapter with references to science fiction texts such as those from Greg Bear and Octavia Butler, writers who explore related themes of biology, technology and culture. It strikes me however that much of Science Fiction, particularly as it develops to think through alternate perceptual universes (as well as those it more traditionally works on such as the technical and social) might also take on the possibilities of writing in a way which exemplifies and creates the worlds which it otherwise only attempts to represent. How might you take the compositional dynamics of, say bacterial informational behaviours, or the intense morphological impacts described by Elaine Morgan in her work on the Aquatic Ape theory, and use them to influence, or set up resonances with the behaviour of text, of the info-matter of language in a way which exemplifies the processes that Abstract Sex brings attention to. Perhaps links might be made to the occasional parallel work you are involved in with CCRU?

Luciana:
This is the very question that we all need to pose ourselves if we want to build war machines that construct realities and that open up towards the activation of worlds rather than limiting our writing to a representation of what is out there. The encounter with Science Fiction writing with nomadic science (the Aquatic Ape and Symbiogenesis) is indeed a key to access Abstract Sex. Haraway’s famous quote reciting that the distinction between science fiction and science is optical illusion has acquired a life of its own in the compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex. This is not only because science fiction offers a commentary on human anxiety and imagination about technology or a critical understanding on how scientific discourses become is popularized. Both of this view presupposes a binarism between the real world and the one that is represented in science fiction books. On the contrary, in the compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex science fiction is already real; it is indeed a dimension of the real as everything else. One that that produces reality. Like what happens in John Carpenter’s film In The Mouth of Madness (1995) books have the power to leak into the social because they are already part of social reality germinating its affects. My fascination with the works of Greg Bear and – especially – Octavia J.Butler relates precisely to this germination of affective worlds that comes from the future to lay out the sensory perception of edging present. In other words, these books enter not only the actual compositional dynamics of Abstract Sex as a text but also its virtual tendency to assemble a new entity holding together the microdimensions of reality.

Thus the continual intersection between science fiction and science facts in Abstract Sex does not function in terms of content or representation, but enters in the operational dynamics of the writing itself, in the way the text or words become bodies, affects and collective agents setting up a new fabrication of the real. Last year I wrote a little story for Sandwich entitled Abstract Sex: an extract, which has come out this fall (2004). Once the editor received it, he wrote to me straight away asking: what is this? Did what you wrote really happened or is it about to happen? Is this real or is it invented? I thought these were the most exciting questions I had had about my writing in ages.

I think that your question really brings out one of the most schizoelements of my writing that have been intensively cultivated in the CCRU machine. Writing is always a collective enterprise involving the clashes of heads – the ecology of partial machines that connect and disconnect across time and space, historical inheritances and geographical locations, modes of thinking and behaving, feeling and acting. Yet the encounter with the CCRU has most clearly for me catalyzed the production of a collective brain geared towards the activation of abstract yet real thought, training therefore the activity of a certain thought that feels and is felt. All the writings and events engineered by the CCRU entity have always been more than an occasional parallel work for me. Actually I think of them as intensive experimentations of the real and as intrinsically part of the production of Abstract Sex. The CCRU emphasis on the production of concepts-actions indeed is not only a practice of writing but an experimental or affective intervention in the social, plugging itself directly on the body without organs and transversally on the strata (i.e., between the strata and the rest). In this sense, the CCRU thinks of words as living bodies spreading like viruses, exposing the generation of unexpected consequences in the social field. Thus, to each notion its capacity of proliferation-intervention. This is why Abstract Sex cannot be accessed exclusively on the level of philosophical enquiry, scientific theory, feminist politics, technological advancements, science fiction. Abstract Sex is above all an entity under construction. I think that affective contagion is the best way to participate in its productive reality.