Text page
The Nanoengineering of Desire
A Parisi chapter that routes desire through biotech and nanoengineering, showing control operating through the redesign of bodies and relations.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page argues that desire is being engineered at the level of biological and nano-scale process. Control appears not as censorship but as the redesign of affective and reproductive fields.
Biotechnology and nanoengineering are used to describe environments in which sexuality, evolution, and the inorganic are continuously recoded. Desire becomes infrastructural rather than interior.
That matters because it extends virotechnics into the domain of bodily engineering. The section's interest in contagion gains a material and affective granularity here.
How to read this text
Read the opening paradox about biotechnology carefully; it sets up the page's whole argument about control and uncertainty.
Track where the text makes desire and engineering continuous. That is the move that gives the page its force.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 19
THE NANOENGINEERING OF DESIRE 301 together by a ‘dynamics of infection’ as Whitehead names it (Stengers 2002, 182–90), a contagious relationship unable to transcend from variations in nature. Infection here stands for an enduring excitation between concepts and functions, science and nature, nature and culture, culture and science, geared towards the immanent fabrication of ontomolecular changes. Call this enduring excitation in the techno-cultural becomings of nature, affective contagion.
Definition · paragraph 1
Chapter 13 The Nanoengineering of Desire Luciana Parisi Affective Relationality It is difficult not to feel a strange familiarity when hearing about genetically modified food, cloned mammals, and artificially grown cells and tissues.
Definition · paragraph 7
And yet such a vision cannot account for the nonlinear reversibility between cause and effects, where actual intra-actions are not in royal isolation from virtual relationality. Indeed, a machinic nature entails the viral contagion between technology and biology, the cross-pollination between natural genes and genetically engineered genomes, the microaffections between atoms and nanoatomic machines that expose how micro-socialities of invisible relations act on what we perceive-experience a body-sex to be.
Definition · paragraph 13
THE NANOENGINEERING OF DESIRE 295 developed here is more strictly concerned with the way atomic and subatomic sociabilities are affected by nanotechnologies and how these sociabilities are implicated into new experiences of sexuality.
History · paragraph 15
THE NANOENGINEERING OF DESIRE 297 an endangered species’ (2000, 1). The imminent threats of nanorobots to the nature of the human species and, more importantly, to the biotic strata of life often assume the form of dangerous self-replicating devices spreading disastrously beyond control.
Appears in sections
Control, Virotechnics, and Swarm Systems Primary section
Control processes, viral language, swarms, and abstract dynamics as a media-theoretical cluster.