When I free-associate the term ‘parasite,’ my youth comes to my mind and with it punk music. In the early 2000s, punk had already been absorbed and mainly transformed into a style, but still it was a way for me to express my dissatisfaction with a diffuse outside world. In German, a common derogatory term for a punk is a tick [Zecke], a parasitic creature, describing someone who is not worthy of being part of the collective we call society. Yet using the term tick is not only used by right-wingers and conservatives to defame punks; it has also become a self-description, a common ‘punk name’ embracing all those who are seen as ‘scum.’ The parasite becomes a figure of the anti-establishment, a celebration of the dark and disgusting, the angry and disappointed working-class youth.
Punk, understood as a way of refusal, an expression of collective anger and the rejection of those in power, can be understood as an intervention into the day to day. But it is also associated with a certain habitus, an identification with negativity and “death, and the equation of death with the inhuman future”1. The parasite evokes similar images. Both terms raise the same question: do they transpose progressive leftist politics, to then become stuck in a metaphorical romanticisation as border figures who not only do not manage to push past capitalism’s co-optation, but even become neoliberal dreamlands? I ask this question because punk, as well as other countercultures, have been appropriated by capitalism and this happened precisely because some of its aspects were quite compatible with its doctrine. The no-future-attitude implied a “’cancellation of the long term’”2 which sounded disturbingly similar to Thatcher’s ‘There is no alternative’ and evoked images of being stuck in and accepting an inhuman capitalist future. Its innovative parts, such as creating a music style made out of three chords, its do-it-yourself aesthetics and styles, have been appropriated by a consumerist machinery and turned into products. Punk was no longer able to question and critique social inequalities. This becomes particularly and absurdly obvious in the German magazine Business Punk, which presents start-ups and ‘unconventional’ managers between Excel and Excess.
Elisa T. Bertuzzo reminds us in Parasite Art 1 that the terminology “mediation, transformation, creation, innovation,”3 attributed to the parasite, are the myths of neoliberalism as described in detail in Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism.4 No longer so new, this new spirit is well known by artists and cultural workers who find themselves trapped in the same dilemma: there is no way out of the neoliberal capitalist system; and, depending on your luck, your own work gets eaten up or, for better or for worse, celebrated by it. But rather than dwell on a dystopian fuck-it-all-attitude, I’d describe the parasite as a possibility of imagination and provocation. The parasite may not outline an all-encompassing approach to imagine other futures, but rather functions as an intervention into the current. A state of anger, interrupting rather than creating, and mocking rather than presenting a solution, as it is still tied to its host. The salient question surrounding parasitic artistic strategies, then, is whether the parasite functions as a temporal figure, or one that creates long-term mutation due to its intervention.
The artist Mary Maggic works on the intersection of bioengineering, queer activism and artistic research. Their practices and aesthetics are informed by punk and DIY strategies and try to subvert current restrictions concerning the usage of hormones, especially estrogen. In their Estrofem! Lab Maggic constructs an apparatus and experiments with different substances to extract hormones from urine. Their video Housewives making drugs (2017) is a fictional cooking show where two trans femmes explain humorously how to synthesize hormones while talking about gender politics and criticizing the difficulties of accessing hormone treatment. Hormones function parasitically as they slowly transform the body and its markers of gender, thereby subverting the disciplining order that defines who is seen as masculine or feminine. Not just hormones can be described as parasites, but also Maggic’s artistic strategy to invent methods to undermine governmental as well as pharmaceutical regulations and controls. In this case, they arguably do present a solution – free hormone treatment – but the open source estrogen remains fictitious – the recipe does not work. Their work confronts us with the materiality of gender and the fact that the two states of being male and female only exist, as Paul B. Preciado points out, as “‘political fictions’”. For Preciado, it’s not a “matter of going from woman to man, from man to woman, but of contaminating the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference”, aiming towards a body that is neither nor but a “new sexual and affective platform”5. Hormones can be used in a ‘contaminating’ sense but at the same time, they function as a reinscription of gender. I owe it to my students to point out that it is questionable if legalization and improved access to hormones would override the disciplining heteronormative system. And wouldn‘t an open source strategy run the risk of being immediately bought out by a company? Could it even be implemented in our current system? And doesn‘t the free availability of hormones run the risk of being ‚misused‘? Yes, hormone treatment should definitely be more accessible to trans folks, but the question remains if molecules can be a long-term solution when the complex strategies that have produced this misery in the first place stay the same. Maggic’s work points to the ambivalences, the dangers and possibilities of DIY-productions as well as posing questions concerning total autonomy of the body.
Parasitic artistic strategies are tied in a wider context to political/activist art and the question of what to expect from them in general. I sometimes question if art is able to subvert bigger structures and if it should be expected to do so, for it is still art and not social or activist work. Maggic’s work to me is a successful questioning of structural conditions with a solution approach that falls short in the long term, but could still contribute to change, at least in the minds of those engaging with it.
Looking again at the history of punk for comparison, I ask myself how the concept of parasitic strategies is tied to the current political and economic crisis, and more specifically, the inequality produced by neoliberal politics. The development of punk is particularly connected to its social and historical context. The end of the 70s were a dystopian time; the revolution of the 60s had ended, a restructuring of industry in European countries took place, and globalization and post-fordism led to a fragmentation of production processes as well as of the working-class. For a long time, it seemed that an intervention into the present and imagining a different future were out of sight. Capitalist realism had taken over. Covid-19 and the ecological crisis have altered that panorama. At this moment, this is easy to see in the amount of calls in the art world referring to utopias or different futures. It seems no big surprise, then, that different ways of changing the present will emerge when the future becomes unbearably uncertain and crisis a permanent state.
The parasite might not be the expected answer to those calls, as it is no shimmering, heroine-like, but rather an uncertain figure embracing ambiguities as it penetrates and decomposes its host from the inside and, in that, initiates a process of questioning the current state of things.
The parasitic way of acting transforms into danger at the moment when its undermining faculties turn from productive decomposition into destruction, mainly through an appropriation and incorporation into the current. Both punk and parasite can become reactionary figures depending on how they are used. Parasitic strategies work with ambivalences, it is what constitutes their productivity, but at the same time it makes them vulnerable for a decomposition of their own. Do the molecules hack the gender regime or does the gender regime use the hormones to stabilize itself? Within these contradictions – who is the host, who the parasite – lies the potential of questioning and criticizing the bigger structures surrounding the outlined issues.
References
1 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Hampshire: Zero Books, 2013), 31.
2 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is there no alternative? (Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009), 76 [emphasis i. orig.].
3 Elisa T. Bertuzzo, “From parasites to holobionts”, Parasite Art – The Exploration of the Edge 1(2020): 32.
4 Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London/New York: Verso, 2018/2005).
5 Paul. B. Preciado, Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 142-143.