[-empyre-] Week 4 - Bio/Nano/Materialisms

[rrdominguez2]

    Hola all,

Thanks for the invitation to share work and thoughts - on the question 
of nano materialism(s), minor gestures and queer disturbances.
I have enjoyed the deep ecology of thinking during this gathering and I 
am not sure to what degree our work will unlace the questions at play.

At least for me(me) the question of queering the nano-scale condition 
via the frame of particle capitalism(s) means diagramming the
process of /withdrawal /and/ aphanisis via the neo-liberal the 
enclosures the nano-scale materialism(s) is demanding. So it strike me that
seeking the exploit of exodus as the queering affect/effect should 
instead call forth tactical translucent spacings that unmask the constant
calling forth of / opacities and the transparent by the "market".

For us, for me(me), the tales of particle capitalism(s) have been and 
are an core method of investigation via paraliterary forms between
concrete poetry, trans_patent tales and installation of the invisible.

Perhaps "Nanosférica" will be a good place to start our tale:

Nanosférica


          Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll

“Nanofabric is the new black in fashion apparel and accessories.”
—Hugo Boss, 2005

“Patenting particles makes everyone smile around here.”
/—Harris & Harris Group (Nasdaq:TINY), 21 September 2005/

"Think small, think really small and then think even smaller" and you 
almost will hit the miniscule trans-/b.a.n.g/.s (bits, atoms, neurons, 
and genes) at the core of today's particle transvergence. There's a rush 
to patent and fabricate particles, currently found in cosmetics, baby 
lotions, sunscreen, fabrics, paints, and inkjet paper. Industries now 
claim to control the vertical and horizontal axes of structures far 
smaller than "angels' dancing on the head of a pin." The sliding scale 
of the nano-world is one nanometer, a billionth of a meter, or about one 
twenty-fifth-millionth of an inch (far smaller than the world of 
everyday objects described by Newton's laws of motion, but bigger than 
an atom or a simple molecule).

Reality raincheck: these tiny trans-/b.a.n.g./s are rapidly transforming 
what constitutes the everyday. *particle group* seeks to data-mine 
trans/per/versal tales of the global Matter Market, to re-tell and 
re-own them in ways that unhinge the vested interests of venture 
sciences' speculative fictions. To this end, we privilege the poetic 
(/paratactic/ally speaking) in an attempt to slip the false binary qua 
dialectic of database/narrative aesthetics. Drawing upon varied 
traditions of performance art and poetry (including concrete poetries, 
visual poetry, flarf, e-poetry, more generally speaking, experimental 
film, Zapatista communiqués, the artivist gesture), dance, movement 
studies, critical theory, we think small, really small, even smaller 
(the pharmakon), "reason[ing] deeply to forcibly feel," /it takes one to 
know one/ profane illumination (to another).

Read: every aesthetic has its politics, too. Recalling Denise Ferreira 
da Silva's rejoinder to Paul Gilroy's interpretation of "the tragic 
story of Henrietta Lacks," what Gilroy characterizes as "the passage 
from the 'biopolitics of race' to 'nano-politics,'"^1 we understand "the 
new black" of "nano-fabric" as itself a discursively loaded gun, where, 
to quote Ferreira da Silva once again, "That cancer cells do not 
indicate dark brown skin or flat noses can be conceived of as 
emancipatory only if one forgets, or minimizes, the political context 
within which lab materials will be collected and the benefits of 
biotechnological research will be distributed."^2

Contagion, indeed! The endlessly proliferating constitution of 
"disposability," writ large (one cannot not inhale) and /small, smaller, 
even smaller/ on the bodies of the most vulnerable (women, people of 
color, the poor, children, so-called sexual minorities, the 
disenfranchised, /The Spook/s/Who Sat By the Door/), adds fuel to the 
fire of the counter-core of *particle group*'s transpatentry.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

^1 Paul Gilroy, /Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the 
Color Line/ (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, 2000) 20.

^2 Denise Ferreira da Silva, /Toward a Global Idea of Race/. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 8-9.

*particle group* (Artists: Amy Sara Carroll Ricardo Dominguez Diane 
Ludin, and Nina Waisman)
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