WHO AM I?
IDENTITY IN THE PHARMACOPORNAGRAPHIC ERA
I have attempted to write an autotheoretical text that flows between autobiography, philosophy, art theory, fiction and poetry to explore my identity. “Autotheory” is a term coined by Stacey Young in her book Changing the Wor(l)d, describing a type of writing that combines autobiography with social criticism. She argues that this type of writing sets itself apart by placing personal experience within political contexts, which are seen as fluid and multiple. It challenges standard academic writing and “investigate(s) the ways in which what gets encoded as “personal experience” is always constructed through these multiple and shifting contexts.”[1] This puts into question our notions of public vs private, political vs personal, leading us to wonder if these distinctions exist in the first place.
Writing autotheory is a method of using the body’s experience to develop knowledge. Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era falls into this category. I would even consider works of literature such as the diaries of Anais Nin, Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in Highschool works of autotheory, in the sense that these authors touch on universal truths through the subjective/fictional, but to argue this properly I’d have to write a separate essay. Nevertheless, I deem it necessary to at least mention these texts as they have certainly influenced the way I write and my views on language, though I cannot pinpoint where or how their influence comes through. I hope it’ll be more obvious to you than it is to me.
All theories are hypothetical. Nothing written by humans is ever fact. Everything is constantly changing. Our brains cannot even begin to understand what’s going on. Why do we convince ourselves otherwise? Fictions can feel more true than objective histories, and isn’t that something in itself? Reading theory is a confirmation of what I know on a biological/intuitive/experiential level. Experience is understanding, and it is far too complex to be reduced to language. For these reasons, I use autotheory to come to an understanding. Autotheory pushes the boundaries of language through playing with meaning, and reflects the complexities of human experience through its form. Our personal experiences are fiction rooted in a subjective reality, infused with fantasy through memory, imagination, dreams. We all have our truths, our views, our beliefs. It’s not about finding an answer to my questions, it’s about narrowing them down, the process of exploring and uncovering, fusing my experiences with those of the artists and authors I resonate with.
Who am I? A question that runs across time and space. Across time we locate the process of becoming – the only constant, the eternal state of being. Across space we locate the body through its location, the space it occupies and its composition, which are all also in constant flux. The body can be seen as a hub of experience, a set of coordinates on which performance happens, which can be altered and rewritten, as can a text. Paul Preciado exemplifies the state of being as transitioning, through modifying their body through the administration of testosterone. It is not about being something fixed, it is about the turning into – the end goal is the process.[2] Because if you think about it, there is no end of the body, no state of completion. Perhaps only death. But even death is a part of the turning, of the becoming.
Lets travel back in time to understand where I’m coming from.
30/01/17
I always feel like I need a pause in time
a break from myself
just to breathe
time stops for everyone else
so I can smoothly transition back into
reality again.
Swallowed by circumstance
I’m lost in a sea of symbols, feelings…
Whats the point anyway
I can’t convince of what you can’t perceive yourself
I know my truth
you know yours
I’ll have to wait and see if I can
prove it to you without
trying
that would mean it’s really working.
I transformed into a shapeshifter
I was ready to take on any role you wanted
And seeking confirmation,
in thoughts that haven’t quite solidified yet,
I realise I have not got the answer
I’m where I always was – confused
I have not moved on
even though I back-up my claims with proof of my whereabouts
non-action =/= non-feeling
you don’t have to act
to feel
not acting
doesn’t take away the feeling
Then what does?
–
Now that everything had happened,
I knew anything could
still,
A paralysing restlessness creeps over
I cannot make, I cannot speak
I don’t know where to place myself
within a room, within a crowd
between individuals
couples
myself
where does the world end and I begin?
(A reworking of texts used in my films.[3] I understand it is a risk to use my own artwork as examples for an essay that ultimately lies in an academic context, however, if my aim is to write a piece of autotheory, then what stops me from seeing my artwork as an extension of my writing? So much of it begins by a process of thinking and writing. My art is just another form of autotheory.)
05/04/17
I look back on my life to figure out who I am now. I begin by writing about writing, with a focus on my intentions.
Writing about someone reduces them to a specific image. Who it’s written by, how it’s written and the experiences the text focuses on (the what) all influence your perception of the person. Mixed with the reader’s personal experiences and prejudices (which we all have, an inevitable reality of living in this society) it seems to me that it’s always going to be biased by the person who writes it. Perhaps then the only reliable author would be the person in question themselves – autobiography.
But then there’s a heavy conflict of interest, the most biased = the most capable of twisting the truth. Furthermore, don’t people live on in the memories and impressions of others? A single individual is capable of affecting every single human, living thing, outside of them, whereas your impression of yourself is only looking within. Only affecting you. But what’s wrong with that? Just as much as there is the whole universe outside you, there is a universe within you – you experience life both on Earth and inside your body.
Perhaps a collection of reflections by various authors would provide a wider, more ‘truthful’ perspective. In order to trust the narrators, you would want to know a bit about them too. Their relationship to the individual in question would influence their reliability. The way they choose to talk about the person would also give you an idea of who they are. So maybe you’d want something they wrote about themselves to read. Seems like a lot of effort to just figure a person out. Maybe you should sit down and put in that much effort into looking at yourself.
(This part is an edited version of a few pieces of automatic writing, a practice I began earlier on in the year. It has been a useful exercise in expressing/releasing, through which I come to understanding. My mind is occupied by many thought processes throughout the day. When I sit to write, I go through the list and add new elements that come to me in the moment, weaving previous trains of thought with new ones.)
Keeping this in mind, it seems we can come to an understanding of the self through our relationships with others. We each take on social roles which sometimes conflict. Roles assigned to women are especially complex, because they are subjects of contradictory desires. Mother and daughter (adult and child), lover and mistress. Who’s calling who what, and why? Some roles are allowed, others are stigmatised. All are forced to exist in one space through a series of performances. Woman – the other – the all. There’s the world behind my eyes, inside, and there’s the world the world can see. [4]
Between all the duties, where does the self lie? How much of this self is fixed, considering the performance demanded depends on the context. For example, at work, you’re expected to give yourself up. For these next 8 hours, all you care about is WORK, forget about what you want. We slip between these roles just to live. Context becomes important once more when we come home from work, when its time to work on personal relationships. If you get into the habit of bouncing ideas off other individuals, what happens when they aren’t there? Do you carry them with you somehow? Can we even divide the self into separate bodies, when you can’t pinpoint which ideas belong to who?
My context can be described as England, or Europe, or university. Temporally, I can be located in the pharmacopornographic era. This term was coined by author and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, used to describe the post-Fordist society we live in today, defined by the biomolecular and semiotic-technical methods of governing sexual subjectivity.[5] In Testo Junkie, they explain how these mechanisms became materialised in the fields of psychology, sexology and endocrinology. They weave extensive research with personal narrative, contextualising theory by using their own life as an example.
The defining aspects of identity are essentially sold to us, especially products that define femininity – femininity as a commercial fiction. The concepts of sexuality, femininity, masculinity, the psyche etc. have become our reality through the dominance of the technoscientific industry, which has transformed “our depression into Prozac, our masculinity into testosterone…our fertility/sterility into the Pill…without knowing which comes first: our depression or Prozac…”.[6] Preciado recognises sex, sexuality and race as powerful somatic fictions that have defined contemporary human activity. Their reality is constituted upon “the performative repetition of processes of political construction”, therefore making them somatic fictions.[7] It’s easy to accept these as truths when it’s what’s advertised to us through media, sold to us through commodities, taught to us at schools and exhibited in human behaviour. We are not taught to question these concepts because it threatens their status as truth. By dismantling these values, we can change the makeup of society, at least on a person to person level.
17/09/16
there’s a sense of freedom i’ve felt here that’s new to me. when i introduce myself, and as people get to know me, they know the valeria i am now. they meet the latest version of myself, my stories unfold in reverse. we have made few memories.
the people i miss have seen me grow into this, they still remember a different me. as i turn into this, my past moulds recede from their memory of me, but they still know her. i don’t know if they can separate her. it’s not a bad thing, it’s just refreshing to start again with new people on such an open note. i’m unafraid of judgement, because i haven’t formed deep connections yet. we are living in moments. i’m sure this will change soon though.
18/09/16
this is an exercise
in learning myself
who i am outside my regular context?
how much of who i am is set in me without my surroundings?
this is a break from being engrossed
in the people i love
this is my time for me
i need to focus on that –
i can grow here.
just remember how lucky you are to be here –
geographically
physically, in your body
able, free
(Blogposts from when I was on my exchange in America.)
everyday is a battle
of contradictions within myself
i seek stability
i mimick the only safety i remember –
assuming the role of the housewife –
it was assured.
isn’t this how my fathers would expect me to deal?
the messy person with ocd tendencies.
the anxious extrovert is a more recent discovery.
Who am I? The big question of identity. Well, there’s a body, and there’s a mind. There are the actions we perform, the things we feel. What about a soul? Maybe something like that exists too. And what happens to everything, our concept of the self, when the body is deceased? The idea of the self will persist, through the memories in the minds of others, or the physical outcomes (children, works of art, selfies). But how do we reduce a whole life’s worth of experience into the idea of a singular self?
How much of the self is fixed? The same way you can’t just forget love, the longer something is repeated, the harder it is to get out of. You wake up every morning and fall straight into the habit of ego, where and how can we leave this identity?
Adrien Piper discusses the potential harm of ideology as a form of habitual thought in her essay Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness. She describes doubt as a starting point for self-examination, which entails self-awareness. However, “self-awareness is largely a matter of degree”, meaning it depends on your experiences.[8] Discordant experiences, ones that put your beliefs into question, ultimately help solidify your perspectives and thus need to be confronted. Disregarding perspectives of others can lead to acting blindly/cruelly, which is an issue in our systems of governments. Piper believes this can be cured by questioning your beliefs and understanding how you deflect. Confrontations need to use examples that the person in question can relate to in order for it to be successful.
Piper created the conditions for these lines of questioning to take place through her series of performances aptly titled Catalysis. In the 1970s, she performed in public places unannounced, with actions ranging from odd to annoying to disgusting (see photos).
Reminiscent of the Situationist tactics of detournement and derives, Piper sought to disrupt the norms of public behaviour to interrogate the construction of identity, and in a broader sense, question the boundaries between art and life. Furthermore, these performances highlight the fact that our bodies have always been subject to cultural inscriptions.[9] By challenging the status quo, Piper causes situations in which the public have no choice but to confront their own beliefs, as her actions put the accepted performances of the self into question. If encounters like this are possible, what then of my code of conduct? And how do I respond?
Even though almost half a century has passed since these performances, considering the current state of the world, it seems clear to me that the road Piper pioneered needs to be rediscovered and continued today to fit specific contexts. Arca, a musician and DJ, subverts ideas of gender expression through expressing vulnerability in his songs and music videos. In his new eponymous album, Arca displays a softness that is usually associated with femininity, especially in the music world. To borrow a term from the drag community, the character he assumes in the video for Anoche is one of the biggest “genderfuck” I have seen in a while.[10] A new kind of unapologetic expression of sexuality, unrestricted by the gender binary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YW94Psk0Jg
So where do I situate myself in all this?
The concept of gender has confused me in the past, because the obviousness of it being a construct made it hard for me to understand its relevance today. I have previously identified as ‘post-gender’, but have come to understand the implications such a phrase entails. I do not wish to invalidate existing genders. This stance can fall into a similar category as the “I don’t see race” – one that assumes a position of privilege. If you don’t see race, chances are it’s because you don’t experience racism. It’s because you can afford not to.
The way I express my gender identity fits in with what is ‘allowed’ for the ‘female body’, as it’s less of a big deal for a woman to wear trousers than it is for a man to wear a skirt, for example. I don’t need to figure out what exactly to call my gender, because it does not affect my survival. I do not mind being perceived as a woman, understanding that most people still see the world through a lens that separates, because my perception of myself ultimately affects me more. My grandma used to say “you have the mind of a man and the beauty of a woman”, as if the two cannot exist in one gender, as if these qualities are inherently gendered. Two possible realities of identity, the way I see myself and the way I’m seen by others, do not have to contradict, because they happen on two sides of the looking-glass – external and internal subjectivities.
I end this essay not with an answer, but with a narrowing of questions. In the real world, there are no answers, at least not in the now, perhaps only in retrospect.
Who am I? This question can mean, what defines me? Focus on the “am”, the time, who am I today?
I am called Valeria Radchenko. I am also defined by my body – white, female, overweight, ‘alternative style’. My body is located in a place, Vienna currently. It never stays in one place too long. I emerged from my mother’s womb in Nizhny Novgorod, but only lived there for a few months, before moving to London. My location has generally been defined by the decisions of my father. When I was 10, we moved to Rotterdam, in father’s pursuit of a career, with the hope of a better quality of life. I entered the international education system. Now I live in Reading, though I spent 4 months of the academic year in Kingston, Rhode Island.
What motivates all of this? A desire to be more than just a body, which is ultimately mortal. The who am I lies in the brain – my experiences, which are simplified into memories, which are replayed and rewritten by me. Our habits. It happens in the body, in how I feel, how I perform.
Inside of me, there are several selves, in different ways. In terms of time, we live from day to day, and even over the course of one day, the idea of the self shifts as the night falls. What does it mean to be asleep? Am I still myself?
A life inside the world of my mind
something beyond the prescribed
laws of nature and existence.
“I don’t speak to anyone, just write. As if writing were the only accurate witness of the process. All the others are going to betray me.”
Testo Junkie, P43
And then there’s the question of language. My mind thinks thoughts that are beyond the verbal language, and I don’t understand language enough to translate them. When I try to explain things, I search for words that explain around the thought itself because I lack the precision. My thoughts come across in a scattered, incomprehensible manner. I continue to write, in various forms, in an attempt to find a method of communication that feels native to me. This puts the reliability of my narration into question, but can language ever convey objective meanings?
“I travel among three languages that I think of neither as mine nor as foreign to me”
Testo Junkie, P69
The one thing that unifies my various experiences is the site of performance – my body. All points converge in this space. I am not myself without my ancestry, my family, the family I have built here, on a practical level. Every second is a point of influence, what sticks isn’t even a choice, it just happens. We don’t need to understand to be.
So who am I today?
And now that the curtains are closing
and I can’t get backstage
I won’t watch you from afar
I’ll redirect that energy
back home, to me.
I withdraw who I was
my final resignation.
Goodbye
I’m waking up.
[1] P14 of Young, Stacey. Changing the Wor(l)d
[2] P13 of Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
[3] February https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzfdxcqV1ds
Test 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAka5mbuHdc
[4] Irigaray, Luce. The Looking Glass, from the Other Side. “This Sex Which Is Not One”.
[5] Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie … P25
[6] Ibid.
[7] Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie … P52
[8] Adrien Piper, Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness
[9] http://www.global-activism.de/directory/adrian-piper + source of photographs
[10] https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/rupaul-talks-gender-fuck-and-drag-genre
Additional texts:
The Diary of Anais Nin, vols 1 and 2, by Anais Nin
4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane’s
Blood and Guts in Highschool by Kathy Acker
Between the East and the West by Luce Irigaray
Bodies of Difference 