On Not Using Adobe
A reflection on the biopolitics and technicity of creative and queer life
What couldn’t be fully explored in this written reflection turned into a sci-fi story which you can read here: Red-Smudged Wood: On Craft Beyond Affirmation
One evening I decided not to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the following year. Although I didn’t need much reasoning for this withdrawal, I want to retrospectively explore what that decision actually meant and what potentiality it implies.
In this written reflection, I’m not trying to repeat the “master’s tool and master’s house” argument, nor to insist that all corporate tech products have their transformative potentials absolutely foreclosed. I will always (have to) drift from one tool to another, between institutions of various sorts, practicing refusal or tactical complicity. What is under question is the extent to which even the most “critical use” of such tools we can imagine is structurally conditioned by the tool’s own regime of individuation. In other words, I’m proposing a personal experiment to understand how a technical object proactively generates its own associated milieu, captures potentia into potestas, and organizes users’ technical capacities. I will approach this loaded question through the following fragments as well as some excerpts I find useful.
“Thus, the ideologeme of ‘human capital’ comes to embody a truth: the biopolitical harnessing of human survival to capital’s valorisation, with most institutions of mediation and compensation increasingly on the wane.”
“If it is possibility that is the subject of exchange, then this possibility is inseparable from living labour, and, specifically, from life as the site of all production and exchange – the axis where Virno locates the relationship between the labour theory of value and Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.”
“This can be compared to Marx’s argument: ‘The use of labour-power is labour itself…’ The same potentiality that is bought and sold as labour-power… is also the potentiality for other social and productive forms… This seems like an articulation between potentiality as capacity to labour and potentiality as species-being… the relationship here could also evoke the necessary reliance of autonomy on heteronomy, insofar as the autonomy of species-being is predicated on its engagement with a heteronomously determined social world.”
“The consolidation of a model of personhood based on the entrepreneur… traced through a reading of Michel Foucault’s lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics… The reversal entailed by the notion of the capitalist as worker and the worker as proprietor of her ‘human capital’… cancels the political subjectivity of work as alienation.”
“Rather than the ‘social factory’ thesis… this is the eradication of antagonism in the diffusion of capitalism… Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of ‘capitalism without capitalism’… extending capitalism’s symbols, terms, and logic to all of society.”
Excerpts from Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (2019).
There’s something lucrative about the “infinite possibilities” that such tools give. As Adobe states on their website, it “empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life.” Rather than denying how sweet this affirmation might taste, I will diagram what that affective dispositif—a branded emergent property of its technical capacity—conditions within life and its environment. From their slogans, it appears clear that what such tools are made to liquefy and recast is not only digital images but life itself. With it, one can “turn a selfie into a work of art,” “make a movie while you wait in line,” or “design a logo for your business or your life.” Life here has to be represented by a logo. The body has to be photographed and turned into art. And all this creative labor has to be performed ceaselessly as long as one is alive, even when standing in line. Biopolitics—a power that manages life itself and regulates populations for their productivity—doesn’t mobilize itself but relies on such technological means to seamlessly mediate every fragment of the unruly real world to appear immediate.
Adobe’s interest in making life and creative labor indistinguishable echoes what I have been writing about institutions. Is Adobe a cultural institution of its own? Despite their different modalities, institutions are biopolitical dispositifs working adjacent to such tools—it’s not a coincidence that the majority of their precarious workers use Adobe. They “empower” artists to turn embodied narratives into works of art, eliminating the gap between living and becoming an artistic subject-object. The space for critically and socially engaged art they offer sounds just as affirmative as the “infinite possibilities” offered by Adobe. Yet this “infinity” resembles what Spinoza would call a false infinity—an indefinite expansion under potestas rather than an increase in potentia. As I expressed in previous essays, I intuit that such optimism is cruel, since the image of emancipation it motivates creative workers to strive for often only consumes their libidinal energy while keeping transformative potentials systemically away from them. Likewise, the creative freedom that Adobe tools offer might be just as liberating as the flexible work hours facilitated by gig-work platforms. Not unlike a progressive institution open to diverse practices, tools that empower one to imagine anything preemptively condition the cultural life that can be imagined as possible.
“The technical object is distinguishable from the natural being in the sense that it is not part of the world. It intervenes as mediator between man and the world; it is, therefore, the first detached object, for the world is a unity, a milieu rather than an ensemble of objects; there are in fact three types of reality: the world, the subject and the object, which is an intermediary between the world and the subject, the primary form of which is the technical object.”
“Technical thinking conceives the operation of an ensemble as a chain of elementary processes working point by point and step by step; it localises and multiplies the schemas of mediation, always remaining lesser than the unity.”
Excerpts from Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2011 edition).
“The fundamental alienation resides in the rupture that is produced between the ontogenesis of the technical object and the existence of this technical object.”
“Technical objects are detached from their producers and therefore have to wait for the arrival of a buyer or a user. This waiting constitutes the source of alienation of technical objects.”
“This indefinite period of waiting constitutes what Simondon calls ‘overhistoricity,’ a kind of temporality that depends mostly on the psychosocial aspects of the technical objects rather than their technicity and functionality.”
“In a certain way, we can say that the technical objects are proletarianized, in the sense that they are totally dependent on the market, and that their functionality and capacity could be lost.”
“Mass industrialization has brought about a huge transformation in the mode of existence of technical objects, in such a way that, like the workers, they are alienated.”
“Simondon didn’t simply depreciate industrial technical objects; instead, he found that industrialization is also the ‘opening condition’ of technical objects, because standardization has rendered the artisanal organismic model obsolete.”
Excerpts from Yuk Hui, “On the Soul of Technical Objects,” Theory, Culture & Society (2018).
But why don’t I use the crack?
A cracked version may break the economic relation between Adobe and creative labor while keeping the technical individuation of the object itself intact. A crack interrupts its commodity status but leaves intact the tool’s associated milieu—the co-evolving attentional assemblage, the images it circulates, and the value-form of design that Adobe sustains and is sustained by. In this sense, cracked Adobe is still entirely within the same transductive chain of individuation that is bound to official Adobe.
This resembles the undercommons, the notion of being “in but not of,” but only superficially: although accessing the object without entering its economic circuit appears fugitive, it does not alter the rest of the tool’s sociality. Undercommons is not a private bunker but maroonage, a collective individuation. It is not merely a refusal of official access but a reconfiguration of relations, a new technical becoming. A cracked tool—unless furthered into an ecosystem like Anna’s Archive—only re-enters the existing milieu through an improvised doorway, “in” but hardly “not of.” Its use is still mediated by the same technical object, the same process of individuation. Even if Adobe were collectivized tomorrow and became a publicly owned platform, its overhistoricité would still operate: its mode of existence would continue to be defined by the same psychosocial halo that governs its circulation, obsolescence, and anticipatory “waiting”. Ownership changes the economic enclosure but not the overhistorical regime that structures its technical becoming. There is therefore no qualitative difference between the technical capacity of official and cracked versions. Posters made with either tool belong to the same social relations and reproduce the same aesthetic and labor regimes, especially when such tools are already real-subsumed, when capital has reorganized the entire mode of creation rather than merely appropriated its results.
Thus, this self-inflicted challenge of not even using the crack version is an open experiment probing how cultural production might individuate differently through different tools—as already being explored by many brilliant fellow designers such as Hackers & Designers and Loraine Furter. Refusing the technical object that has co-evolved with the media culture of racial (genocidal) capitalism is not abstention but an attempt to attend to a new transductive sequence. Prefiguration of the very possibility of “transformative” use by the tool can only be resisted through this ontogenetic gesture. What new and old tools (re)emerge from this reciprocity?
“If synthetic testosterone is treated as a technical object, however, we can ask different questions of it: what dynamism inheres in the actual molecule? How and at what scales does its circulation increase or decrease the capacities of various bodies to affect and be affected?”
“The hormone molecule never quite strikes each of its homes in the same way, and both the technical object and its milieu are continuously transformed by each iteration of its travels.”
“To say that the testosterone molecule circulates in an ecology is to take notice of its dynamism as a technology rather than treat it as a domesticated tool synthesized and used by humans for rational or irrational ends.”
“The hormone is what the French thinker of technics Gilbert Simondon calls ‘a technical object,’ the threshold between the human and the machine as well as between race and trans.”
“Technics and its specific technologies, rather than subordinate to the rational subject, can be thought of expansively, as life touching itself.”
“Originary technicity is an account of how living beings differ from themselves—a definition of how it is to be alive.”
“Technology is not added to living beings. Life reaches beyond itself and returns to itself, touches itself and the world around it, in order to grow and change, to differ from itself over time, through an impure and yet necessary technical disposition.”
“If forms of trans embodiment are expressions of the originary technicity of the body, then body modification cannot be transphobically exceptionalized as a betrayal of the human’s integrity.”
“Hormone therapy, likewise, is a participation in the technical capacity of the endocrine system.”
“The artisan works on the wood, but the wood also works on itself and on the artisan, affecting the final object.”
“The body is not a passive substrate ruled by a transgendered consciousness but an open technical system with its own implicit forms, its own affects that enable and restrict the capacity of the subject to change the body with hormones.”
“The molecule contributes a technical and therefore political dynamism.”
“The tools enter into relation with living beings—are their mode of self-elaboration—but also preserve a partial, irreducible autonomy of their own, available for different political becomings.”
Excerpts from Julian Gill-Peterson, “The Technical Capacities of the Body” (2014).
A bit of autobiography here.
