Biopolitics and Resistance
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So yeah, I stopped reading "Black Sun" because of the glaring oversights of psychoanalysis. But I did start reading the less-theoretical "Genderqueer". It's a compilation of essays edited by some people. It's OK. However, I couldn't help but read Deleuze into it. The creation of gender binaries is so linked to the fixing of signs and the creation of the sovereign. Just like Foucault describes in "Discipline and Punish," when we create knowable bodies, we not only establish categories but construct traits which fulfill them. This is applicable to just about everything: Deleuze says that the Freudian Oedipus complex (and the oedipalization that follows) has essentially become fixed and no longer allows for the shifting of signification, just like gender has become fixed. However, in the case of the former, we have a once revolutionary idea becoming a "thing". I guess once anything becomes so static that it impossible to think outside of it, we need to deconstruct it. I guess that relates to the idea of anarchist affinity groups: once a group exists solely for the perpetuation of the group, it is disbanded. Essentially, once it becomes a "thing" that is no longer responsive and fluid, it becomes a stagnating force. I don't know what else to say really, because the rest seems a bit obvious.
OK so I started "Black Sun" by Julia Kristeva, and while I conceptually want to like this book, its employment of psychoanalysis seems a bit off to me. It seems like her entire theory of melancholia (up to this point, at least) is built around language as a LACK. If I'm interpreting this correctly, she means that a formulation exists, an idea, and the signifier (and, therefore, a sign) is created to fulfill the lack, the hole in language, essentially. I think this is a particularly modern way of looking at things. I'm more in agreement with Deleuze's theories of sovereignty and establishment of the subject as a function of DEBT. In other words, particularly in postmodernism, the signifier is established first and the idea is then constructed to fulfill the debt established by the semiotic void. This is another way of the expressing Baudrillard's idea of the representation overtaking and determining the original. This formulation is found everywhere; the father/son case is more relevant for me (i.e. only after the son is born can the idea of a father come about, you can't have a father until there is a son, you can't have a signified until there is a signifer). Therefore, the parts of the sign are created either created simultaneously or the signifier preceeds the signified, which is completely contrary to the idea of lack. Another good formulation is Hardt and Negri's discussion of community and population in the book "Empire". Essentially, they claim that before the nation could come about, a distinct and singular "American" community had to be establish to legitimate a single ruling body. Such a community was constructed begining with the signifier; in fact there was nothing unified about the people within these arbitrary borders. The idea of "American-ness", then, followed the creation of the signifier for said concept. And in such a way the sovereign establishes reign, the god declares its status as a deity (Jesus dying on a cross?! What bigger debt is there?!), and the limits are established over the body. The problem I have with Kristeva's premise is that to ignore the creation of language as debt is to essentially recognize the necessity of the State and write off all symbolic violence required to establish such a thing. But maybe I'm being a bit dramatic... All I know is that reading all of this psychoanalysis makes me feel like I'm losing my mind. But maybe I'm better of for it.
OK I'm reading "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" right now, and I'm a bit overwhelmed by its greatness, but I want to write some things anyway. I guess I'll start by laying this out: fascism (or at least the micro-fascism that Deleuze speaks of, but which carries over into the establishment of States, despots, etc.) is fixity, rigidity. I suspect that Deleuze would agree to this, but if not, then that's my definition. It is what Foucault speaks of when he posits that discourse creates "knowable" bodies; chains of signification become fixed and impossible to change/move within, thus "knowable" and calculable, dividing our bodies into little bits that are completely governable. This is what Deleuze covers with his theories of desire and flows. As he claims, on the body with organs, there is no conception of the body as it is conceived within capitalism/despotism; there is nothing but as vast network of flows that are capped of at various points, and thus our world (and our bodies) are delineated. The flow of food, which is governed by the production-machine, the mouth-machine, the intestine-machine and the anus-machine. But even to speak of it in these terms assumes a border between the anus and the mouth, a distinction which many people do not make (the bulemic, for instance). In other words, the various limits on the body (where I end and you begin, etc.) are established in the incestuous manner of the despot. The sovereign is the one who decodes flows. The Oedipus represents both the incest of the sister and mother, or the marriage of the "phallus" to the tribe and to the law. In other words, it folds over upon both the history (the chain of signification) and the present law (the sovereign). It creates fixity where there was once fluidity by both maintaining law over the present and securing itself within the infitite debt, or the very history and origin of society. What made this possible was the elimination of the body without organs; in order for the sovereign to "marry" himself to the tribe, a fixed tribe must first be constructed (as Hardt/Negri say in "Empire", a unified and singular "people" must be created for the nation-state to be established). Therefore, Deleuze claims, the incest of the despot became possible. He proceeds to explain how despotism and the nation-state, and therefore both the small and large bits of fascism came into being. Because fixity was established, and the chain of signification came to be no longer arbitrary (in the specific sense, perhaps through the rendering of language into speech*), bodies are now born into the infinite debt to the sovereign, and now without the sovereign even lending anything. Ours is now a debt without a principle. Then his ties this formulation in to everything: language, psychoanalysis, etc. My guess, though I haven't read this far, is that the schizo will prove to be the plain on which all is fluid. The body without organs. You cannot rule the schizo becausae you cannot establish rigidity or fixity; there is no "tribe", as the very basic level of signification is completely fluid and unresolvable. That leads me to the discussion on schizophrenia. It is unclear whether the schizo slips into its autistic state because of some internal cause related to the disorder (if it is a symptom of the disorder), or if it is a response of the body without organs to Oedipalization. This seems to me tantamount to the discussion of whether or not anarchy as a state (of being, not law) "works", whether it is inherently flawed and destined for collapse or if it is the capitalization of anarchy that forces it into catharsis. It seems like, just as with the schizo, in order for us to create fluid space, there needs to be the absence of fascism (maybe that's obvious). Where does that leave us? Well, I haven't finished the book, so maybe there's more to come. But it seems like the root of the problem is in language, the fundamental building-block of both the Oedipus and society at large. As it is impossible to return to a state of pre-signification, all we are left with is free movement among the different planes of signification, like the schizo, who ties and unties, flows and employs various machines to govern flows at whim, and signifies without a master signifier (ego). In other words, we must all become the sovereign, capable of delineating and capping flows at any time. More later... *This is an interesting debate, which has certainly cleared up a lot of Derrida's idea for me. Claiming the primacy of writing over speech follows the establishment of the ego. In other words, if you have speech, that means you have other people to speak to, and at that point you have already constituted a fixed society and are governed by the proper rules of language. Whereas the graphism Deleuze speaks of, in which the eye sees but does not read doesn't presuppose anything; it is the originary state of the body without organs, completely fluid and without a solitary ego.
Biopolitics…
Most usages of “biopolitics” seem to be based on two areas of research identified by Foucault:
- control of singles bodies (discipline)
- control of population, the social body
The historical emergence of control of the body is traced by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In this text, he claims that bodies were disciplined in order to shape an elusive ‘essence’ or ‘soul.’ This was a break with the purpose of earlier applications of force to the body, which were aimed at simply demonstrating the integrity of the sovereign’s body over that of the criminal. The sovereign existed outside and above the people. In the emerging liberal society of the 18th and 19th centuries, the sovereign was re-conceptualized as a Leviathan. Because of this, rather than punishing bodies for attacks on a more-or-less alien sovereign, they were disciplined to conform to the social and legal codes of the social body. Sovereignty was presented as immanent to society. In Society Must Be Defended Foucault begins to explore the liberal redefinition of sovereignty in terms of a pragmatic exercise of power to attain predetermined ends: higher productivity. This, in turn, relates to what Zizek calls the “University Discourse,” a pursuit of knowledge- or, in the case of biopolitics, of life- from a supposedly objective and apolitical standpoint.
Although Foucault avoids viewing power in terms of juridical categories, I think that his shift to viewing biopolitics in terms of the social body provides a good segue to Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the state of exception. According to Agamben, the state of exception is the suspension of constitutional patterns of the exercise of power, and the shift to almost arbitrary applications of violence. Agamben defines the status those subject to exceptional violence as ‘homo sacer,’ one who can be killed with impunity by anyone, one is included only by exclusion from the law. Agamben claims that this is the new paradigm of governmentality. It is a reassertion of boundaries to the leviathan body politic (which we can see in the new struggles over migration and freedom of movement), and is closely tied to the rise of neoliberalism.
…and Resistance
When we speak of domination at the level of life and unmediated state violence, the most urgent theoretical priority must be to understand how this domination is constructed in response to and challenged by resistance. For this kind of analysis, I think it might be helpful to turn to the Autonomist Marxists, who have rewritten Marx with this sort of perspective. Biopolitics is in many ways an extension of their analysis of the social factory and molecular resistance of the 1970s.
I think that the Autonomist strategies might also contain the embryo of an appropriate response to our current political situation. It seems to me that one way of reacting to the exclusion of larger and larger segments of our society from juridical structures would be to abandon these structures entirely- to construct new autonomous zones which would not feed into the circuits of biopolitical production. This kind of resistance would be outside of all means of representation- both in the legislative sense and also in terms of the communications industries. It would be a rejection of “democracy” as forced membership to a leviathan community and respect for its laws.
hmmm...I need to keep thinking about this. more to come later....
This is how I’ve come to think of biopower and the governance thereof, biopolitics. It might be a simple and sort of inane metaphor, but I like it. Biopower, first of all, is the power of humanity to produce, regulate, govern, and create. I suppose it’s the friction created by the interacting of people. Think of a hamster running on a wheel—I said it was simplistic, but hear me out—the power generated by our “running on the wheel” (i.e. working, paying taxes, etc.) is what keeps this system running. However, it was learned at some point that our labor isn’t the only thing necessary for the maintenance of a capitalist system, but that our compliance to enforcing the norms of the system was also integral. This is the biopolitical twist. If the hamster can ultimately be convinced to run on the wheel by its own accord, production and governance both become more efficient. Therefore, as Foucault points out, the development of a society of control, in which each person is both self-policing and an agent of the systemic norms, was absolutely necessary for maintaining the efficiency of capitalist production. As Hardt and Negri point out in Empire, the resistance and creative power of the multitude are ultimately what push capitalism forward; they are essentially what make capitalism more efficient. In a post-Fordist production environment, it was discovered that production is more efficient and domination is more fully realized when people are not whipped and forced, but rather anesthetized and convinced. Instead of turning simply our bodies into machines of capitalism, they colonize our minds as well. In fact, this is what Foucault elicits in his description of the shifts from the punishment of the body to the disciplining of the self. Ultimately, we are at our most productive when our limitations are at their most “free” (read: casual Fridays, Ben and Jerry’s, Google, etc.). Biopolitics, as I conceive of it, is the redirection of the people’s creative energies, the forces which naturally happen due to our interactions (I suppose), into the flow of capital. I believe that Harraway’s manifesto addresses just this; at this point, they have colonized our bodies, but the internet and the notion of the cyborg attempt to reclaim the body by way of allowing free flow of our creative energies. In other words, by totally embracing the limitations and norms which the system has imposed upon us, our liberation is then sought in the free movement on this plane (though I find it intriguing that mechanization has become so passé as a form of capitalist domination that it is now revolutionary to become a machine). A perfect example of biopolitics in action is Foucault’s study of sexuality and the rendering thereof into discourse. By convincing people to participate in the discourse about sex, in which every last detail is drawn out into the open to be judged, scrutinized, and ultimately normalized, the once-liberating force of sexuality has now become a key node of advertisement. The system essentially steals our sex, which otherwise is something most people can do and which is perhaps the most organic thing that we have, and sells it back to us in a perfume bottle or a sleek new BMW. I guess it was Foucault that said something to the effect of this: in the U.S., there is no sex in the bedrooms, but there is sex on the billboards. He says that if one we’re simply to come into American culture having never seen it before, that person would think that Americans have a ton of sex because it so constantly talked about and referred to in advertisements. I guess that’s about all I have to say for now. Most of all, this study helped me sort of narrow down and be able to know precisely what I was referring to when I talk about biopower and biopolitics. I think I’ll be adding more to this entry tonight when I think over it some more.
Noam DeGuerra and Unravelme1 are writing this entry collaboratively. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault outlines the passage from a spectacular and corporal form of punishment to a new economy of control based on the implications of discreet punishment, proliferation of norms, and intensified and constant reform of the mind. In this text Foucault marks the transition from corporal repression to ideological hegemony. According to Foucault, this transition occurred over the course of many centuries, as a result of mass revolt against violent, arbitrary, and wanton punishment. However, rather than being an assertion of human dignity against the brutal coercion of the sovereign, this transition was rather called for by the modernization of domination. This transition was part of a broader shift in the means of production, juridicial apparatus, and other symptoms of the rise of the commodity system. In fact, we believe that passage into a modern system of discipline and surveillance parallels Marx's use value/exchange value structure, Lacan's Real and Symbolic, and also the relationship between Sex and its discursive representation as discussed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Taken together, all of these structures are part of the emergence of a new epoch: Modernity. [ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<discipline [...] punish</u>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Noam DeGuerra and Unravelme1 are writing this entry collaboratively.
In <u>Discipline and Punish</u>, Michel Foucault outlines the passage from a spectacular and corporal form of punishment to a new economy of control based on the implications of discreet punishment, proliferation of norms, and intensified and constant reform of the mind. In this text Foucault marks the transition from corporal repression to ideological hegemony.
According to Foucault, this transition occurred over the course of many centuries, as a result of mass revolt against violent, arbitrary, and wanton punishment. However, rather than being an assertion of human dignity against the brutal coercion of the sovereign, this transition was rather called for by the modernization of domination. This transition was part of a broader shift in the means of production, juridicial apparatus, and other symptoms of the rise of the commodity system.
In fact, we believe that passage into a modern system of discipline and surveillance parallels Marx's use value/exchange value structure, Lacan's Real and Symbolic, and also the relationship between Sex and its discursive representation as discussed by Foucault in <u>The History of Sexuality</u>. Taken together, all of these structures are part of the emergence of a new epoch: Modernity.
<Discipline and Punish</u> concerns the local manifestation of modernization in the domain of Punishment. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and the universal commodity system, it became possible to render the individual into discourse. It turned criminality into a disease. Rather than address what criminality was, this move created a class of people DEFINED as criminals, in their very essence deviant from bourgeois norms.
Rather than defend power by punishing the act, the modern state maintains discipline by separating criminality from the actual act of crime. Criminality, like a sexual identity, becomes a category of humans (‘delinquents’), and becomes autonomous from any particular act. Furthermore, criminal acts are not an aberration, outside of the system, but exist as parts of a coherent regime of power that operates at the level of the mind. This regime incorporates the sciences, which are connected to the prison, sanatorium, clinic, court, and virtually every other institution that enforces norms.
Noam De Guerra adds:
This grid of institutions and norms create the “striated space” of capital that Deleuze and Guattari write about in “A Thousand Plateaus.” To this grid of knowledge and power, D & G oppose the “War Machine,” which uses knowledge in a completely different way. Instead of establishing norms and fixed points, the war machine circulates knowledge through relays without leaving behind rational laws and norms.
In this way, the war machine is the opposite of the Panoptic.
I think that one way we can bring Foucault’s critique into the present is to look at the transition from striated to non-striated space. In Foucault’s Panoptic, individuals are controlled by a single central gaze. Since the 1970s, there has been an extreme proliferation of gazes as surveillance cameras are placed everywhere, along with new technologies including biometric identification, cell phones, infra-red cameras, the list is endless. Hardt & Negri write about the breakdown of modern institutions leading to the crossbreeding of tactics of control between school, prison, military, police, family, church, etc. There is less and less distinction between the tactics used in each of these institutions, just as there is less and less difference between “peace” and “war” in the global “war on terror” or “New World Order.”
Because of the willy-nilly spread of different tactics, we can speak of a proliferation of gazes. As the market, state, and society merge, control becomes embedded. Rather than a single, controlling gaze, power now comes from all sides. We can imagine a sheet of paper covered with dots. At first, they are all linked to one central point, forming a grid. Then, we begin connecting each dot to every other dot. Soon enough, the paper is completely covered in ink. It takes on the appearance of smooth space. The state’s war machine now moves across this space, killing with impunity.
The nomadic war machine was first confined to the parts of the page that were unmarked. It was given reservations, or allowed to operate in parts of the globe that were not developed by capitalism. Now, it is in the process of being finally destroyed.
However, global capitalism provides the conditions for the re-emergence of the war machine. Al-Quaeda uses commercial jet-liners and the global justice movement uses the Internet. Rioters in France and students in LA use cell phones. Because it is forced to capitalize on the very creative impulses of the multitude, Capital is forced to put tools into our hands that we can use to bring about its destruction.
Capital is unable to prevent the reappropriation of its technologies by dissident elements. Capital is forced to attempt to prevent this by creating borders, enforcing intellectual property rights, and reverting to more-or-less outmoded forms of control (like the wall being built in Arizona to prevent migration, or the torture techniques used by the US across the world). Capital is currently engaged in a project to prevent the emergence of new nomadic war machines in the smooth space of global capital. Hardt and Negri call the construction of this system “Empire.” It is the fitful development of a new system of control suitable for global capitalism.
There is a conflict between the deterritorializing flow of capital and the measures necessary to protect the national consciousness developed by capitalism in earlier phases. A good example of this is the scandal surrounding the sale of a US port to a Dubai-based company.
Maybe we can speculate that the newest economy of control is based not at the level of the mind (as in Foucault’s <u>Discipline and Punish</u>, but at the level of libido, or life and creativity itself.
OK so Erik and I read "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault recently, and have yet to prepare any sort of statement about it. But there is one on the way, I promise. We may do a collaborative entry on Tuesday. We'll see.
So, after having read roughly the first half of History of Sexuality: Volume 1, these are my thoughts: I'm trying to relate it to what we read by Freud last week. I think Foucault's argument in the first few sections regarding the Church as an institution which controls sexual desires has a lot to do with the restructuring of the mind according to Freud's analyses; Foucault claims that the Church attempted not only to control the desires of its subjects, but rather to bring into discourse every single aspect of human sexuality, from the very conceptions of thoughts to their realizations. This means an attempt to fundamentally reconstruct all three parts of the psyche (the ego, id, and superego) in the form of reconstituting the unconscious desires, the realization of self through these desires, and their existence in the social framework. It is, moreover, an attempt to remove the libido from all actions and thoughts. Take a look at how this currently plays out: the current leftist position of passivity and human rights. All resistance has been subsumed into this form which is ultimately unthreatening, as those who wish to challenge the current structures and institutions are encouraged to do so "non-violently" and "passively". Essentially, what better way to ensure domination than to suck all the drive for action out of people? I'll have more to say (perhaps more directly on Foucault) at a later time. *EDIT* Erik makes the wonderful point that what I'm referring to is the "postmodern malaise". It's really unfortunate... -Jake
Mon, Feb. 27th, 2006, 04:26 pm
 unravelme1: Test
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bewildered at the Mac Weekly