Pharmacopornographic Capital and the Erotic Remainder
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Abduction of Psyche, 1895. (Wikimedia Commons)
Introduction: From Critique to Reconsideration
In my earlier essay, Exteriorizing Subjectivity (July 2021), I argued that Snapchat exemplifies the contemporary regime of pharmacopornographic biocapitalism. I contended that the platform does not simply mediate communication but actively produces subjectivity. The disappearing image, the reward of the “streak,” the nudge of the notification—all were described as elements of a dispositif through which capital orchestrates desire, intimacy, and affect. My intention was to highlight the ways in which digital technologies render interiority itself an object of governance. Yet in retrospect, that argument exhibited two deficiencies. First, it relied on a dizzying array of theorists—Foucault, Preciado, Steyerl, Elsaesser, Mbembe, Lorde—without integrating them into a sufficiently coherent analytic. Second, it risked determinism by portraying users as passive products of technological systems. While there is value in mapping structures of control, an analysis that neglects the ways in which subjects inhabit, resist, and reconfigure those structures is incomplete.
The present essay represents a sustained effort to address those deficiencies. I retain the central claim that Snapchat functions as a prosthesis of biocapitalism, yet I also emphasize the ambivalence of its use. I consider how subjects appropriate, subvert, and reimagine the platform’s architectures. In doing so, I narrow the theoretical lens to Foucault and Preciado, supplement their insights with Audre Lorde’s meditation on the erotic, and turn to recent ethnographic studies that document the practices of queer youth, diasporic communities, and women in restrictive societies. This reframing allows for a more balanced account of digital subjectivity. Biocapitalism is powerful, but it is not seamless. Its dispositifs are riddled with contradictions, and those contradictions create spaces of agency, however fragile. By exploring these dynamics, I seek not only to refine my earlier analysis but also to contribute to a broader conversation about intimacy, power, and resistance in the digital age.
Scholarship on digital subjectivity has grown enormously over the past two decades. A first strand, exemplified by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, emphasizes the extractive logic of platforms. For Zuboff, the central innovation of the digital economy is the appropriation of human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction and control. [1] In this view, users are less agents than resources to be harvested. A second strand, rooted in feminist and queer theory, examines the ways digital platforms shape intimacy and desire. Scholars such as Lauren Berlant and José Esteban Muñoz have underscored the affective economies that circulate through media, while more recent work in queer digital ethnography has highlighted how marginalized communities employ platforms tactically. Here, intimacy is neither simply commodified nor purely authentic but negotiated within structures of power. A third strand emerges from media studies and critical theory. Hito Steyerl’s writings on the poor image and Thomas Elsaesser’s analyses of visual regimes interrogate how technologies of representation reconfigure the gaze. Their insights into the instability of perspective, the disembodied observer, and the illusion of stability remain essential for understanding how platforms like Snapchat mediate subjectivity.
Finally, one must acknowledge the influence of Foucault and Preciado. Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, governmentality, and counter-conduct provide the conceptual scaffolding for analyzing power as productive and ambivalent. Preciado’s Testo Junkie extends this genealogy by describing the pharmacopornographic regime in which hormones, pornography, and digital media converge. Together, they establish the terms in which contemporary debates about digital subjectivity unfold. My contribution lies at the intersection of these strands. By combining the structural critique of surveillance capitalism with the insights of feminist, queer, and Foucauldian theory, I argue for an account of digital subjectivity that is both critical and attentive to agency.
Returning to Foucault and Preciado allows us to proceed with greater clarity. Foucault’s notion of counter-conduct reminds us that power is always met with resistance, often in subtle or unexpected forms. His insistence that the subject is constituted by power yet capable of deviation challenges both liberal notions of autonomous agency and deterministic accounts of structural domination. Preciado, by contrast, insists upon the novelty of the present. The pharmacopornographic regime operates not through repression but through stimulation, circulation, and biochemical engineering. Capital manages bodies and desires by distributing hormones, proliferating pornography, and integrating media into the most intimate aspects of life. In this sense, Snapchat is not merely a tool of communication but an apparatus of subjectification.
The tension between Foucault and Preciado is instructive. Foucault’s framework risks abstraction, while Preciado’s account risks totalization. By holding them together, we can attend to both structure and practice. Snapchat is indeed a prosthesis of biocapitalism, but it is also inhabited by subjects whose conduct is not entirely predictable. The contradiction between structural power and lived improvisation is the very site of analysis. [2]
The Question of Agency
If Snapchat is designed to monetize attention and affect, how do users inhabit this design? Ethnographic studies provide valuable insight. Queer youth, for example, have used Snapchat to perform identities that would be unsafe in offline contexts. The ephemerality of stories allows for fleeting visibility without permanent record. These practices exemplify what Foucault would call counter-conduct: ways of living otherwise within existing structures of governance. Diasporic communities provide another example. For individuals separated by borders, Snapchat stories offer a means of sustaining connection. The immediacy of an image, the knowledge that it will vanish, creates a sense of intimacy that resists the permanence of archived communication. Here, disappearance becomes a tactic of solidarity.
Women in restrictive societies have also employed Snapchat to negotiate visibility. A selfie posted for a few seconds can provide an experience of presence without the risks of permanence. Such practices do not dismantle patriarchy, but they create micro-spaces of agency. They are fragile, precarious, and easily surveilled, yet they matter precisely because they represent tactics of survival. Agency, then, is not absolute autonomy. It is tactical, negotiated, and always embedded in structures of power. To recognize this is to avoid both determinism and romanticization. Subjects are not free in any pure sense, but neither are they wholly determined. Their practices are ambivalent, contradictory, and historically situated.
The contrast between Lorde’s erotic and Preciado’s pornographic remains illuminating, but it must be understood in terms of entanglement rather than opposition. Sexting on Snapchat, for instance, may be at once commodified and meaningful. It may reproduce the logic of spectacle while also creating intimacy, vulnerability, and recognition. Lorde’s insistence that the erotic is a resource for transformation complicates the claim that digital intimacy is always already commodified. Even within circuits of capital, affective investments can exceed the logic of profit. Preciado, conversely, reminds us that these investments are never pure. They are shaped by pharmacological, pornographic, and digital regimes that commodify desire.
The task is not to resolve this contradiction but to analyze it. Digital erotic practices must be understood as lived within ambivalence. They are simultaneously authentic and alienated, meaningful and commodified. To deny either dimension is to miss the complexity of the phenomenon. [3]
Attention to lived practices complicates deterministic accounts. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that Snapchat is used in ways its designers did not anticipate. Queer youth employ it for identity experimentation, diasporic communities for solidarity, women for tactical visibility. These practices show that the platform is not merely a tool of domination but a site of contestation. Of course, these practices are precarious. Screenshots can betray ephemerality. Algorithms can co-opt tactical uses. State surveillance can intercept disappearing messages. Yet the fragility of these practices does not negate their significance. On the contrary, it underscores the stakes of digital subjectivity. What emerges is a picture of Snapchat as a field of struggle. Structures of control and practices of resistance coexist, intersect, and contradict one another. To analyze the platform is to analyze this struggle. It is not enough to map structures of power; one must also attend to the practices that inhabit them. This requires interdisciplinary engagement. Media studies, anthropology, feminist theory, and critical theory each illuminate different dimensions. Only by bringing them together can we grasp the complexity of digital subjectivity.
Resistance on Snapchat does not appear in grand or revolutionary form. It appears in the mundane, the tactical, the fleeting. A parody of a filter, a disappearing political message, a moment of intimacy—these are not insignificant. They are precisely the forms of counter-conduct that Foucault taught us to recognize. To dismiss them as trivial is to overlook the ways in which subjects inhabit power differently. To romanticize them is equally misguided. They are fragile, precarious, and often reabsorbed into the circuits of capital. Yet they matter because they demonstrate that power is never total. Preciado themself provides a model of such reappropriation. In Testo Junkie, his self-administration of testosterone becomes an experiment in living otherwise within the pharmacopornographic regime. It does not dismantle the regime, but it demonstrates that agency persists. Snapchat users, in their own ways, engage in similar experiments. [4]
The stakes of this analysis are both theoretical and political. Theoretically, it challenges the temptation to treat biocapitalism as seamless. Capital is powerful, but it is not absolute. Its dispositifs are contradictory, and those contradictions generate spaces of possibility. Politically, it insists that digital practices are significant even when they are fragile. For queer youth, diasporic communities, and women in restrictive societies, these practices are not trivial. They are means of survival, experimentation, and connection. To ignore them is to ignore the ways in which subjects live under and against capital. The task of critique, then, is to hold together structure and agency, domination and resistance. To emphasize only one dimension is to distort the phenomenon. Only by attending to their interplay can we grasp the complexity of digital subjectivity. This has implications beyond Snapchat. It suggests a way of analyzing digital platforms more broadly. Rather than asking whether they are liberating or oppressive, we should ask how they are both, in different ways, for different subjects, in different contexts.
Conclusion: Toward a Politics of Digital Intimacy
To reclaim the erotic is not to purify it of the pornographic but to insist that even within commodified circuits of capital, desire remains irreducible. The erotic slips through, stubborn and unruly, refusing to be captured entirely. It is here, in these slippages and refusals, that we find the beginnings of resistance. This is not a call for naïve optimism. The structures of digital capitalism are powerful, and their capacity to commodify intimacy is immense. But to deny the possibility of resistance is to deny the very condition of power. As Foucault reminds us, there is no power without resistance. Future research must continue to combine theoretical rigor with empirical attention. Ethnography, media studies, and queer theory all have a role to play. Only through such interdisciplinary engagement can we grasp the complexity of digital subjectivity. In the meantime, the task of critique is to remain attentive to ambivalence. Digital intimacy is neither fully commodified nor fully free. It is lived in contradiction, and it is precisely this contradiction that gives it political significance.
Notes
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
A digression may be useful here. Preciado’s work has often been criticized for its sweeping generalizations. Yet one might argue that this is precisely its strength: it captures something of the totalizing feel of contemporary capitalism, the sense that intimacy itself has been colonized. Foucault, with his insistence on historical specificity and micro-practices, tempers this tendency. The analytic task is not to choose between them but to navigate the productive tension.
A digressive comparison is again useful. Consider religious ritual in the context of global tourism. A ritual can be commodified for tourists while remaining meaningful for practitioners. The contradiction does not negate its significance; it constitutes it. So too with digital intimacy. Its ambivalence is not a defect of analysis but its very object.
Perhaps the very fragility of these practices is their strength. What cannot be captured permanently cannot be fully commodified. What vanishes may escape, however briefly, the archive of capital. This is not liberation, but it is a form of resistance.
