When arguing that “the medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan (1964) criticises the idea that “the products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value” (p.3).
“The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value,” sneers McLuhan in response. “If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse” (pp.3-4).
Pity.
Fundamentally, I think that McLuhan is right to observe that it is “somnambulism” (p.3) to suggest that media don’t do more than find new ways to express “what we already are” (p.4) – to see this you need only remember the last time you heard somebody say a phrase made popular through TikTok algorithms. McLuhan’s definition of media as “extensions of ourselves” (p.1) is therefore certainly appropriate. I see, too, that different media extend us in different ways, according to their forms, and that this shouldn’t be neglected in their analysis.
Nevertheless, I find it cruel of McLuhan to dangle a carrot of perversity and snatch it away. His idea that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (p.1) depresses me with the echo chamber it proposes: are we really unable to find or create new ways to relate to each other through the media at our disposal?
Paul B. Preciado’s 2023 film Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique is a dreamlike, perverse antidote to McLuhan’s supercilious wakefulness. Preciado doesn’t shy away from McLuhan’s echo chamber: the film is a retelling of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography by 26 narrators who repeatedly weave their own autobiographies into their relating of the story, so it very ostentatiously refracts and translates various other media forms. There is therefore a central farce to the way the film exposes and explores medium, which I will argue is what makes it so refreshing and powerful.
Certainly, exposing the darkness beyond medium is Preciado’s MO. « Je ne suis pas un homme je ne suis pas une femme je ne suis pas hétérosexuel je ne suis pas homosexuel je ne suis pas bisexuel », he wrote in his book Un Appartement Sur Uranus (2019, p.26) which denounces the “regime” of binarism. In his forceful repetition of « ne…pas », Preciado throws himself repeatedly at the boundaries of the medium of a language which, according to him, is both limited and limiting.
« Que signifie parler pour ceux à qui l’on a refusé l’accès à la raison et au savoir, pour nous qui avons été considérés comme malades mentaux ? Avec quelle voix pouvons-nous parler ? Le jaguar ou le cyborg peuvent-ils nous prêter leur voix ? Parler, c’est inventer la langue de la traversée » (p.23), he says elsewhere.
Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique attempts such a speech, such a crossing.
This extract exemplifies what I think Preciado understands by his « traversée ».
As Preciado’s disembodied voice explains the difficulties of trying to « raconter [sa] bibliographie […] au milieu d’une société binaire et normative », the camera pans around what looks like the film’s set. The integration of these auditory and visual examinations of the film’s construction would seem harmonious enough – if slightly self-indulgent on Preciado’s behalf, halting the narrative as he does to pontificate about his methodology – except the soundtrack contains another, fainter, auditory modality: the muffled soundtrack of the film’s previous scene, suggesting a continuation of the party in an adjacent room. This, of course, complicates the idea that the film here is pausing its narrative to give a candid tour of its backstage. To borrow a binary from Michael Fried (1976), absorption and theatricality are thus intertwined: it becomes difficult to separate candid testimony from fiction as the film both exposes and conceals its own construction.
This puzzling amalgamation of method and madness is, I think, at least somewhat elucidated by Preciado, as his voice concludes with the idea that « la fiction ne s’oppose pas à la vérité ».
Preciado suggests that destabilising the binary between fact and fiction will allow him to construct a « vie de poète de genre » while his film shows him doing exactly that. The medium of film lends itself to such simultaneity. This subsequently diminishes Preciado’s authority as the film’s creator, collapsing the binary between narration and testimony, and, further, explanation and effectuation.It is useful to pause here and note that Preciado was mentored by Jacques Derrida. Derrida built on the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who revolutionised early 20th-century linguistics by arguing that the link between word (signifiant) and that which it signifies (signifié) is arbitrary (Saussure, 2005, p.75): meaning is e(/a)ffected diachronically, through time and convention, and synchronically, through the differences between words (p.89).
For Derrida, then, meaning isn’t something generated by a word, but by the gaps between them, i.e. their spatiotemporal location (Derrida, 1967, pp.92-93). He insisted on breaking down the idea that speech communicates meaning better than written language, because both are bounded by the same spatiotemporal limitations of language, and this binaristic form of thinking covers up the capriciousness of meaning (pp.17-18). There is never a neat binary opposition between Saussure’s « signifié » and « signifiant » if speaking words instantiates the convention which generates meaning. For Derrida, it is important to acknowledge the way meaning is constructed by deconstructing the binaries between real and not real, signifier and signified, explanation and effectuation.
Indeed, Derrida’s own film-biography (2002) also includes numerous audiovisual references to its own construction. Orlando does this not only in the scene I am examining, but throughout:
I have chosen moments which expose the film’s construction through images of the actors’ transformations into the characters. Here, Preciado illustrates how few signifiers are required to transform the way we see somebody. This recalls Butler (1990)’s work on Derridean deconstruction, which examines the construction of gender identities through convention and spacing. The film also depicts Preciado pharmacologically constructing gender through hormone treatment, which seems to assimilate physical anti-binarism with the anti-binarism allowed for by the film’s form, thereby deconstructing the binary between the film and the body, theory and practice, signifier and signified.
Using a 20th-century fiction novel to recount a modern-day biography allows Preciado to make recourse to, beyond polysemy, nonsense.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) argued that recourse to a narrator allowed novelists the freedom of “[refracted intention]” (p.315). For him, speaking through the voice of a posited other liberates a writer from the constraints of “a unitary and singular language” and thereby opens up “the possibility of never having to define oneself in language, the possibility of translating one’s own intentions from one linguistic system to another” (p.315). This is only possible through a not-speech, a polysemy of intention left murky behind the voice of another. Preciado’s employment of the Orlando text highlights the polysemy of Woolf’s authorial voice.
In this extract, the medium again affords Preciado a seamless blurring between fact and fiction. The close-up shots of the two speakers combine with the very testimonial form of their dialogue to symbolically (through “habit and convention”, as per Bruhnn and Schirrmacher, 2022, p.23) signify documentary. The message-medium here is so powerful that it blurs the line between the testimonies of the speakers and that of Woolf’s Orlando. Both speakers have introduced themselves by name and by the name of their character which furthers this effect, again through calling attention to the film’s construction. Preciado’s irreverent intermeshing of the voices of the two speakers and those of their two characters recalls his earlier invocation that « toute histoire est une histoire collective ». Indeed, even the word histoire disregards a fact/fiction, narration/relation binary.
Preciado exposes the histoire of Orlando as empty signifier and then relates it through the voices of present-day trans people. As such, Orlando’s histoire becomes theirs through its spatiotemporal location.
Further, Preciado is using polysemy itself, an elucidation of the iterability of Woolf’s ‘voice’, combined with 26 intertwined trans voices, as his narrator. Therefore, he reverses Bakhtin’s binary between narrator and authorial intention. This is perhaps unsurprising considering that the piece aims to explore and expose the specific spatiotemporal confines in which it was produced. The reversal allows him to construct his biography through assimilating with the histoire collective he narrates.
So, the idea of the histoire collective deconstructs the binaries between self and other, narrator and narrated, intention and expression. In this way the biography manages to escape the “colonising” binarism of language of the body. Indeed, the film is incredibly multilingual and multinational: although it is in French, Preciado is actually Spanish, and the film features a song in English (about Freud, an Austrian!). The specificities of the noun histoire are as such highlighted, and, consequently, more broadly, so are the limitations of language.
But I don’t think the effect of this clamouring, multifaceted, saturated narrative is what McLuhan observes as that of cubism: “by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, [cubism] drops the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness of the whole” (p.5).
Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique does draw attention to its medium, first through its repeated visual reference to its own construction and second through its very noticeable heteroglossia which concedes and exposes the reliance of the medium on other media, as per McLuhan’s theory. However, the film’s heteroglossia is so noticeable because Preciado uses the medium of film to irreverently assimilate and intertwine these media voices, thus warping and confusing them, by dumping them all on top of each other in the same spatiotemporal zone.
In so doing, Preciado effects a sensory awareness not of the whole, but of space, and the way it confers meaning.
It is impossible to articulate an anti-binary biography in a binaristic language, but, at the same time, if words can come to signify anything in the right position, why not those of Woolf’s Orlando, when placed in the right chain of signification? Granted, the Woolf text does contain a gender transition, so is well-primed for the task, but I think that Preciado’s Orlando suggests that in the right context even Fast and Furious could be used as prosthesis in articulating his biography, because it is precisely the visible shortcomings of Woolf’s Orlando which grant it the elasticity of polysemy, through drawing attention to its edges and the empty space outside it.
To conclude, in 1962 anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that there is a human instinct to understand and explain the world around us, even when we don’t have the tools to do so. Mythology, he suggests, is « loin d’être [..] l’œuvre d’une ‘fonction fabulatrice’ » but a form of « science du concret » (p.25), which uses « les ‘moyens du bord’ » (p.26) to express a phenomenon which is not yet categorizable or comprehensible through its own terms. The borrowed terms must always be « hétéroclites au surplus, parce que la composition de l’ensemble n’est pas en rapport avec le projet du moment » (p.27) but manage to patch together an articulation of a phenomenon long before scientific classification does. This process of borrowing he calls bricolage. Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique is a work of garish bricolagewhich cobbles together numerous historical, current, fictional, factual, narrational and testimonial voices. This homemade amalgamation evidences the shortcomings of the current mediatic tools at Preciado’s disposal, proposes a solution and effects it.
In other words: Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique’s message is of a perverse and perverted medium.
Bibliography:
Bakhtin, M. (1981). ‘Discourse in the Novel’. Translated by Emerson, C. in Holquist, M. (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination.
Austin: University of Texas Press, pp.259-422
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1967). De La Grammatologie. Paris: Editions de minuit.
Derrida (2002). Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman.
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn1PwtcJfwE. (Accessed: 5 November 2025)
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Librairie Plon.
McLuhan, M (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.
Preciado, P. (2023). Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique
Preciado, P (2019). Un Appartement Sur Uranus. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle.
Saussure, F. (2005). Cours de Linguistique Générale. 3rd edn. Edited by Sechehaye, A. and Bally, C. Geneva: Arbre d’Or.
Zoppé, T. (2024). ‘Paul B. Preciado: Les Orlandos ont tourjours été là mais avant, iels était endormis, iels ne pouvaient pas exister’, Trois Couleurs, 4 June. Available at:
https://www.troiscouleurs.fr/must-read/must-read-queer-gaze/paul-b-preciado-les-orlandos-ont-toujours-ete-la-mais-avant-iels-etaient-endormis-iels-ne-pouvaient-pas-exister/ (Accessed: 5 November 2025)
Further Reading:
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bradley, A. (2008). Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech. New York: Routledge.
Preciado, P. (2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Benderson, B. New York: The Feminist Press.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1993). ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of The Novel’, GLQ, 1(1), pp.1-16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-1-1
Intellectuals and the Media in France 