Yuppies, Junkies, and Mules

“Argentina and cocaine converge in their whiteness. The former, silvery by name, tends to be imagined as a white nation, an almost European one. Buenos Aires flirts with being Paris, and many cities in the interior such as Córdoba or Salta reinforce its colonial façade.”

“The latter––the powder trafficked on a planetary scale––looks like talcum or has tiny multicolored sparkles like the wings of a fly, depending on its snowy purity.”

“In addition to their phonetic connection (in Spanish, Argentina and cocaína), both words also intersect in silver: the metal as well as money, which is termed plata (silver) in the colloquial speech of the Río de la Plata region.”

“Córdoba, Argentina, cocaine, and plata (silver/money) are intertwined realities in a web that connects them time and again.”

“Plata (silver/money), along with gold and cocaine, as Michael Taussig (2004: 314) has posited, are interwoven within a “transgressive dynamic” that inspires greed and violence on a scale far beyond their contributions to human existence.”

“Plata, gold, and cocaine emerge as authentic fetishes, insofar as their true substance is located far beyond the mineral and vegetable realms, becoming personified substances capable of subtle trickery, the undermining of human comprehension, and the clouding of the senses.”

“Visual artist Adriana Busto’s recent work powerfully reveals the secret connection between the colonial period in Cordoba and its new, postcolonial realities. The meaningful historical association between biomules and narcomules that Bustos develops enables her to intervene—from the art world—in that machine of narcotic subjectification that, citing the call for papers for this issue of e-misférica, we call the narco-machine.”

“The narco-machine has proven to be a highly productive notion, as it gives shape to a set of observations regarding the “chemical technologies of the self” (Blázquez 2009), and allows us to extend our analysis beyond consumption, and into the production and distribution of the molecules that fuel these technologies.”

“the narco-machine as one of the subjectivizing technologies that is active in the present”

“The narco-machine: toward a transfeminist schizoanalysis”

“nothing and no one appear to escape the presence of illegal chemicals being distributed throughout the entire social fabric”

“In order to conceptualize this situation, we can imagine ourselves faced with the development of a new abstract machine (Deleuze and Guattari 2004), the narco-machine.”

“In each of its incarnations, this machine would act by conjugating—as Deleuze (1987) explains in his reading of Michel Foucault’s work—curves of visibilization and curves of enunciation, lines of strength/power, and lines of subjectification.”

“As a practical realization of determined relations of Power/Knowledge/Subject, the narcotic machine makes us see and makes us speak; it contributes to the sedimentation and fracturing of discourses and practices, it articulates experiences, creates subjects, and enables agency.”

“A schizoanalysis of this narco-machine requires, in the first place, a qualitative examination of the creation of different modes of agency. Who uses the machine and how? Who makes and is made by this machine? What are the grammars inscribed on bodies and moralities? Which lives turn out to be (in)significant and (un)livable? What are the raw materials, the products and residues processed by the narco-machine?”

“This narco-machine would include mechanisms of normalization such as the training camps of narcosoldiers, or raves where the body functions as the medium and the final product of a set of disciplinary practices. Discursive tropes (“drugs as an epidemic”) and cultural genres like the narcocorridos and the cumbia cabeza of Buenos Aires (Miguéz and Semán 2006) are among the mechanisms that would stabilize the poetics of representation. Practices of inscription—tattoos, linguistic, gestural, or dress codes, reflexes for detecting dangerous situations, visual, audio, and bodily representations, states of consciousness—also form part of the machine.”

“The production of subjectivities, a dimension irreducible to the relations of power and knowledge, offers a set of privileged practices for observing abstract machines in action.”

“What subjectivities are produced by the narco-machine, so active in the capitalism of the first decade of the twenty-first century? What are the mechanisms by which narcosubjectivity is produced and what are the “chemical” technologies of the self that are set into motion? What happens when the molecules of drug trafficking dissolve in the body, in the humors that constitute the internal medium of subjects?”

“We can find clues to think about these questions in transfeminist thinking, particularly in the work of Beatriz Preciado (2008) and Sayak Valencia (2010). These authors analyze new forms of capitalist development: pharmaco-pornographic capitalism and gore capitalism, associated respectively with toxico-pornographic subjectivity and the monstrous subject.”

“In Testo Yonqui, Beatriz Preciado analyzes the current postindustrial, global, and media regime of production and consumption.”

“In accordance with its developments, the excitable body—an object of state control since the end of the nineteenth century—became the fundamental raw material of capitalism. Arousal, erection, ejaculation, pleasure, the feeling of self-satisfaction, and of omnipotent control would bcomee the privileged materials of the new regime of pharmaco-pornographic production.”

“This new capitalist avatar would take as a point of departure orgasmic power or potentia gaudendi, that is, “the (actual or virtual) power to (totally) arouse a body” (38).”

“Arousing and controlling this orgasmic power would be the basic operations of pharmaco-pornographic capitalism, made up of contraceptives, Playboy, Viagra, the pornography industry as the motor behind the information economy, cocaine, human trafficking, money laundering, tax havens, etc.”

“For Preciado, any current regime of production would be molded within this pharmaco-pornographic matrix that exploits and produces a molecular intensification of bodily desire, especially of narcotic-sexual desire.”

“This mold would also organize consumption, in such a way as to produce a virtual and hallucinogenic aestheticization of the living subject (the Photoshop effect), the transformation of interior subjective space into an exterior on public display (the Facebook effect), the increase in techniques of self-monitoring (diets and self-help books) and the ultrafast diffusion of information (the Twitter effect) that would end in a “masturbatory temporalization of life” (37).”

“The objective of this “Hilton-Weber” regime, named by the author in honor of millionaire (porn)star Paris Hilton and the German sociologist Max Weber, is not the production of pleasure but rather its control through the production of the circuit of arousal-frustration.”

“the task of sex-politics and narco-politics would be none other than the production of subjectivities through the techno-biological control of the body, “of its capacity to desire, to come, to arouse and be aroused (208).”

“The processes of bio-molecular (pharmaco) governance and semiotic-technical (porn) governance, organized in accordance with the Hilton-Weber principle, would give way to toxico-pornographic subjectivities that would be defined by “the substances that dominate their metabolisms, by cybernetic prostheses through which they become agents, by the types of pharmaco-pornographic desires that orient their actions” (33).”

“it was possible to describe two different modes of narcoexperiences associated with differing forms of consumption.”

“On the one hand we find the experience that I term yuppie, which aims to increase the subject’s productivity and the power of his or her actions. Not stopping, keeping on, going full speed were the ways in which the interviewees defined their experience of consumption.”

“We use the term junkie to describe another experience characterized by the quest for the bodily state of hardness. Through a continuous and abundant consumption of cocaine, some subjects acquired a particular state of muscular rigidity where their jaws locked, sometimes breaking teeth as a result of the pressure. Situated in a static position, with their arms and legs stuck in place and gazing at a fixed point, these hard subjects appeared to stop, and be stopped in, time and space—the space of the club.”

“Following the trail blazed by Preciado, Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism proposes a less global description and puts forth a specific execution of the narco-machine in the localized space of the border.”

“Gore capitalism is made, like the film genre from which it takes its name, out of human entrails, exposed cadavers, murdered women, explicit and spectacular spilling of blood mixed with high doses of organized crime, predatory uses of bodies, gender difference, and eroticism. In gore capitalism, the body, provided that is a dead body, is merchandise, a resource. Death and its necro-politics become the most profitable business in the contemporary gore moment, when accumulation is carried out through the accounting of the number of the dead.”

“Within the framework of this form of capitalism, the author sees new discursive figures emerge, figures that constitute an episteme of violence, along with the reconfiguration of the concept of work through a perverse granting of agency built upon the necropolitical commercialization of murder.”

“As part of these transformations, shown in series such as The Sopranos, Weeds, or Breaking Bad, videogames and films, Valencia also proposes the emergence of a new subjectivity that she terms the “monstrous subject” (84–93).”

“Monstrous subjectivities seek to establish themselves, and those who embody them, as valid subjects, with possibilities of social belonging and ascent.”

“Their formation includes both logics of scarcity (poverty, frustration, dissatisfaction) and of excess (waste, opulence, fortune). In a practical sense, the subjects reinterpret themselves according to a the logic of consumption and create economic fields that are dystopic in relation to those that are supposedly legitimate within the capitalist double standard.”

“In these spaces––like drug trafficking––subjects become entrepreneurs who influence political, public, official, social, and cultural processes.”

“Considered within the logic of the market, and no longer from the perspective of media spectacle or the law, monstrous subjects “would be perfectly valid, and not only valid but also legitimate entrepreneurs who strengthen the pillars of the economy” (45).”

“the pharmaco-pornographic capitalism that we observe in the electronic music club becomes gore in the cocaine “kitchen” staffed by undocumented foreigners in a shantytown.”

“This schizoanalytic transfeminist outline of the narco-machine, which I began with a qualitative examination of different modes of agency, also requires their quantitative study in relation to a supposedly pure machine, following Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 522).”

“In this sense, the authors analyze two great engines of agency: the war machine and the State apparatus, which confront one another and constitute themselves in difference.”

“What type of war machine does drug trafficking constitute? What state apparatus is formed and empowered in the war on drug trafficking?”

“Does the current organization of drug trafficking, and of other forms such as human trafficking, entail this war machine being subsumed by a (para)state apparatus?”

“Far from being able to answer such difficult questions, the remainder of this essay focuses on a much smaller issue. What is the place in this situation of another war machine, “contemporary art?” What are the poetic and political tools deployed specific artistic practices interested in making critical interventions in the era of the narco-machine?”

“Within this dynamic, ultra-specialized, theatricalized, and spectral violence inserts itself into the everyday life of populations located in strategic geopolitical points on a map organized by drug trafficking (and other forms of organized crime) and nation states.”

“In these spaces––like drug trafficking––subjects become entrepreneurs who influence political, public, official, social, and cultural processes. Considered within the logic of the market, and no longer from the perspective of media spectacle or the law, monstrous subjects “would be perfectly valid, and not only valid but also legitimate entrepreneurs who strengthen the pillars of the economy” (45).”

“What type of war machine does drug trafficking constitute? What state apparatus is formed and empowered in the war on drug trafficking? Does the current organization of drug trafficking, and of other forms such as human trafficking, entail this war machine being subsumed by a (para)state apparatus?”

“What is the place in this situation of another war machine, “contemporary art?” What are the poetic and political tools deployed specific artistic practices interested in making critical interventions in the era of the narco-machine?”

“A key component of the arousal–frustration–arousal circuit is the toxicological nature of sexual pleasure, its addictive quality. “Pleasure is frustrating satisfaction. This is the currency of the post-Fordist pharmaco-pornographic economy, its latest source of wealth production” (213).”

“Amid these dreams of consumption, exhibited through fossilized goods from a primordial pharmaco-pornographic capitalism, the artist introduces the gore world of crime, police, and espionage.”

“These dialectical images make significant the fact that traffic has found in Córdoba a stopping point for colonial silver and postcolonial cocaine, by showing that language found the same word for those who carried them. Memory, space, and time coagulate in the fragment of historical knowledge that the works produce, in the discovery that these routes are not random, making way for a third alchemical dimension where image and material substance become one and the same.”

“According to our ethnographic observations in the city of Córdoba’s nightlife, the term rescue designates a last remnant of cocaine that is saved or magically found in a pants pocket, when the supply has run out. The rescue is that which remains in order to stay in motion and thus be able to finish the party.”

“It would appear that small bourgeois dreams––a little tourism, being a homeowner or working for oneself, or securing healthcare for the family that the state does not guarantee––guided the actions of these women who acted radically and illegally in becoming narcomules.”

“In a social world resulting from the implantation of narcoconsumerism as a logic that organizes relationships with others and with goods, certain subjects take certain risks and defy an established order that denied them social mobility, the enjoyment of a good life or health.”

“Through the contraband of illegal molecules, Bustos’s narcomules affirm themselves as desiring subjects by behaving like authentic businessmen or brave capitalist entrepreneurs.”

“But in doing so, they from a subaltern position and as subjects of consumption, they become entangled in the meanders of capitalist production.”

“Human mules are the weakest link in the chain of exchanges that make up drug trafficking, in that their pay is not very high and the possibilities of death or detention by the police are always high.”

“The dangerous and ambivalent (Bhabha 1998) self-affirmation that becoming a narcomule implies requires, in a very concrete way, emptying oneself of oneself to fill or cover oneself with cocaine.”

“The body itself or some of its extensions––like clothing, suitcases, shoes, etc.––become mobile warehouses, instruments of cargo and transport.”

“If pharmaco-pornographic capitalism produces the yuppie and junkie subjectivities that we saw in our ethnography, and gore capitalism engenders monstrous subjects, personified by hit men, then the narcocapitalism that Bustos’s art explores produces mule subjects.”

“Although dissimilar, and not necessarily contradictory, these different contemporary subjectivities account for the commodification of the body and the hypercorporalization of narcoconsumer society, which can be observed from recreational, medical, and aesthetic technologies to kidnapping, torture, and contract killings.”

“The old Aristotelian distinction between zoe and bios, between animal life lacking intentionality and worthy life endowed with meaning, appears, as Bustos’s work shows, to have become blurred.”

“The body that the narcomules offer is a disposable container, a mere vehicle or means of transport. Hybrid and sterile, the new human mules, neither bios nor zoe, are transport platforms, a corpus on the inside of the narco-machine.”

“Translated by Sarah Thomas”

“Gustavo Blásquez earned his PhD in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro. Currently, he is Professor of the Problematic of Artistic Production at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. A researcher for CONICET, his work explores urban youth cultures and cultural consumption in the Cordoban nightlife. He recently published the book Músicos, mujeres y algo para tomar: Los mundos de los cuartetos en Córdoba, with Editorial Recovecos. He is also currently working independently in artistic production and criticism. As an artist, he has participated in performances and installations in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Salta, and Germany.”

“4 Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 520) hold that abstract machines are “singular and creative, here and now, real though not concrete, current but not executed.” Therefore, “there do not exist abstract machines that would be like Platonic ideals, transcendent and universal, eternal” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 519). These machines, like Foucauldian devices, only exist in concrete, singular, and immanent agentifications. “Abstract machines are dated and they have a name” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 520).”

“5 In several texts, Foucault analyzed the modes of subjectification through the study of the subject’s constitution in discourse, through classifying practices and by means of “technologies of the self,” which allow individuals to carry out “a transformation of themselves with the goal of reaching a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, or immortality (Foucault, 1996:48). Becoming a subject would be part of the subjectification of the individual, of the subjection to a structure or institution, a network of power that produces the individual and produces certain knowledge about him or her.”

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