BIO-POWER AND NECRO-POLITICS
Rosi Braidotti
Published as : ‘Biomacht und nekro-Politik. Uberlegungen zu einer Ethik der
Nachhaltigkeit’, in: Springerin, Hefte fur Gegenwartskunst, Band XIII Heft 2,
Fruhjahr 2007, pp 18-23
The context
Contemporary debates in the fields of social theory and cultural
analysis have been concentrating on the politics of life itself, with special
emphasis on the shifting boundaries between life and death. Bio-power,
as Foucault argued (1976, 1984a; 1984b), refers not only to the
government of the living, but also to multiple practices of dying. ‘The
politics of life itself’ designates the extent to which the notion of biopower has emerged as an organizing principle for the proliferating
discourses that make technologically mediated ‘life’ into a contested
political field (Rose, 2001). Living matter itself becomes the subject and
not the object of enquiry and this shift towards a bio-centred perspective
affects the very structure and the interaction of social relations.
One of the manifestations of this historical context is what has been
called the genetic social imaginary (Franklin, Lury and Stacey, 2000).
This is manifested in the market economy through a tendency to use a
terminology borrowed from genetics and evolutionary theory for the
purpose of commercial and political discourses. An instance of this is the
emphasis on the ‘next generation’of gadgets, cars and consumers’
electronics. Contemporary media and culture also spreads a sort of
genetic citizenship as a form of spectatorship by promoting the
visualization of the life of genes in medical practices, popular culture,
cinema and advertising. Another aspect to this phenomenon is the uses of
genetics in political debates on race, ethnicity and immigration, as well as
public debates ranging from abortion and stem-cell research to new
kinship and family structures. Discourses about vitalism (Fraser, Lury
and Kember, 2005) and vital politics are also circulating.
Issues of power and power relations are central to this project. The
notion of ‘life itself’ lies at the heart of bio-genetic capitalism ( Parisi,
2004) as a site of financial investments and potential profit.
Technological interventions neither suspend nor do they automatically
improve the social relations of exclusion and inclusion that historically
had been predicated along the axes of class and socio-economics, as well
as along the sexualized and racialized lines of demarcation of ‘otherness’.
Also denounced as ‘bio-piracy’ (Shiva,1997), the on-going technological
revolution often intensifies patterns of traditional discrimination and
exploitation. We have all become the subjects of bio-power, but we differ
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considerably in the degrees and modes of actualisation of that very
power.
This explosion of discursive interest in the politics of life itself
affects also the question of death and new ways of dying. Bio-power and
necro-politics are two sides of the same coin ( Mbembe, 2003).
‘Life’ can be a threatening force, as evidenced by new epidemics and
environmental catastrophes that blur the distinction between the natural
and the cultural dimensions. Another obvious example of the politics of
death is the new forms of industrial-scale warfare, the privatization of the
army and the global reach of conflicts, specifically the case of suicide
bombers in the war on terror. Equally significant are the changes that
have occurred in the political practice of bearing witness to the dead as a
form of activism, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to humanitarian
aid. From a post-human perspective comes the proliferation of viruses,
from computers to humans, animals and back.
Relevant cultural practices that reflect this changing status of death
can be traced in the success of forensic detectives in contemporary
popular culture. The corpse is a daily presence in global media and
journalistic news, while it is also an object of entertainment. The
dislocation of gender roles in relation to death and killing is reflected in
the image of women who kill, from the revival of classical figures like
Medea and Hecuba to Lara Croft.
A rather complex relationship to death has emerged in the
technologically mediated universe we inhabit: one in which the link
between the flesh and the machine is symbiotic and therefore establishes
a bond of mutual dependence. This engenders some significant
paradoxes: the human body is simultaneously denied, in a fantasy of
escape, and strengthened or re-enforced. Balsamo (1996) stresses the
paradoxical concomitance of effects surrounding the new posthuman
bodies as enabling both a fear of dispossession and a fantasy of
immortality and total control: “And yet, such beliefs about the
technological future 'life' of the body are complemented by a palpable
fear of death and annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular bodythreats: antibiotic-resistant viruses, random contamination, flesh-eating
bacteria" (Balsamo 1996: 1-2). In other words, the new practices of ‘life’
mobilize not only generative forces, but also new and subtler degrees of
extinction
These concerns have both the neo-liberal ( Fukuyama,20020) and
the neo-kantian thinkers struck by high levels of anxiety about the sheer
thinkability of human future ( Habermas, 2003). In opposition to this, I
would like to defend the politics of ‘life itself’ and approach these
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phenomena in a non normative manner. They are the social
manifestations of the shifting relation between living and dying in the era
of the politics of ‘life itself’.
In opposition to the nostalgic trend that is so dominant in
contemporary politics and also to a tendency to melancholia on the part of
the progressive Left (Butler, 2004), I want to argue that the emphasis on
life itself can engender affirmative politics. For one thing it produces a
more adequate cartography of our real-life conditions: it focuses with
greater accuracy on the complexities of contemporary technologically
mediated bodies and on social practices of human embodiment.
Furthermore, this type of vitality, unconcerned by clear-cut distinctions
between living and dying, composes the notion of ‘zoe’as a non-human
yet affirmative life-force. This vitalist materialism, inspired by Deleuze’s
philosophy, has nothing in common with the postmodern emphasis on the
inorganic and the aesthetics of fake, pastiche and camp simulation. It also
moves beyond ‘high’ cyber studies (Hayles, 1999), into post-cyber
materialism (Haraway, 2003). More on this in my conclusion.
The theoretical debates
The theoretical context for these debates rotates round the legacy of
Focault’s unfinished project on contemporary governamentality in an era
that marks the official end of postmodernist deconstructions. The
unfinished nature of Foucault’s project has been complicated by two
elements in the reception of his work: the first is the split that has
occurred between the so-called ‘second’ Foucault – who through the
history of sexuality defined as technologies of self-styling, posits a new
model of ethical inter-relation – and the earlier Foucault, who
concentrated on the analysis of power formations and patterns of
exclusion.
This split reception institutionalises a new division of labour
between power analyses on the one hand and ethical discourses on the
other. This allows for a residual type of Kantianism to emerge on
Foucault’s back, to so speak. It is therefore urgent to assess the state of
the theoretical debates on bio-power after Foucault, especially in terms of
its legal, political and ethical implications. Some thinkers, for instance,
stress the role of moral accountability as a form of bio-political
citizenship, thus inserting into the ethical debates the notion of ‘bio
power’ as an instance of governmentality that is as empowering as it is
confining (Rose 2001; Rabinow, 2003; Esposito, 2004). This school of
thought locates the political moment in the relational and self-regulating
accountability of a bio-ethical subject that takes full responsibility for
his/her genetic existence. The advantage of this position is that it calls for
a higher degree of lucidity about one’s bio-organic existence – which
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means that the naturalist paradigm is definitely abandoned. The
disadvantaged of this position, however, in a political context of
dismantling the welfare state and increasing privatisation, is that it allows
a neo-liberal perversion of this notion. Bio-ethical citizenship indexes
access to and the cost of basic social services like health care to an
individual’s manifest ability to act responsibly by reducing the risks and
exertions linked to the wrong life style. In other words here bio-ethical
agency means taking adequate care of one’s own genetic capital. The
recent campaigns against smoking, excessive drinking and overweight
constitute evidence of this neo-liberal normative trend that supports
hyper-individualism. Other social examples of neo-liberal bio-citizenship
are the social drive towards eternal youth, which is linked to the
suspension of time in globally mediated societies (Castells, 1996) and can
be juxtaposed to euthanasia and other social practices of assisted death.
The second problematic element in the reception of Foucault’s biopower is the fast rate of progress and change undergone by contemporary
bio-technologies and the challenges they throw to the human and social
sciences. Here Foucault’s work has been criticized, notably by Donna
Haraway (1997), for relying on an outdated vision of how technology
functions. It is argued that Foucault’s bio-power provides a cartography
of a world that no longer exists. Haraway suggests that we have now
entered instead the age of the informatics of domination. In feminist
theory – a very relevant area of scholarship that I find missing from far
too much of the
scholarship on bio-politics, globalization and technology studies – this
point has been taken very seriously (Barad, 2003). Feminist,
environmentalist and race theorists who have addressed the shifting status
of ‘difference’ in advanced capitalism in a manner that respects the
complexity of social relations and critiques liberalism, while highlighting
the specificity of a gender and race approach (Gilroy, 2000; Butler, 2004;
Braidotti, 2002; Grosz, 2004).
The central piece of the discrepancy between Foucault’s bio-power
and the contemporary structure of scientific thought concerns the issue of
anthropocentrism. Contemporary technologies are not man-centred but
have shifted away, towards a new emphasis on the mutual
interdependence of material, bio-cultural and symbolic forces in the
making of social and political practices. The focus on life itself may
encourage a sort of bio-centred egalitarianism (Ansell-Pearson, 1997),
forcing a reconsideration of the concept of subjectivity in terms of ‘lifeforces’. It dislocates but also redefines the relationship between self and
other by shifting the traditional axes of difference - genderization,
racialization and naturalization - away from a binary opposition into a
more complex and less oppositional mode of interaction.
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Bio-politics thus opens up an eco-philosophical dimension of
reflection (Braidotti, 2006) and inaugurates alternative ecologies of
belonging both in kinship systems and in forms of social and political
participation. I would like to suggest that these ‘hybrid’ social identities
and the new modes of multiple belonging they enact may constitute the
starting point for mutual and respective accountability, and pave the way
for an ethical re-grounding of social participation and community
building.
Bio-power revisited
This has consequences for the status of social and political theory itself.
Thinkers that take their lead from Heidegger and are best exemplified by
Agamben (1998). It defines ‘bios’ as the result of the intervention of
sovereign power as that which is capable of reducing the subject to ‘bare
life’, that is to say ‘zoe’. The being-alive-ness of the subject (zoe) is
identified with its perishability, its propensity and vulnerability to death
and extinction. Bio-power here means Thanatos-politics and results,
among others, in the indictment of the project of modernity.
My understanding of ‘life’ as bios-zoe ethics of sustainable
transformations differs considerably from what Giorgio Agamben (1998)
calls ‘bare life’ or ‘the rest’ after the humanized ‘bio-logical’ wrapping is
taken over. ‘Bare life’ is that in you which sovereign power can kill: it is
the body as disposable matter in the hands of the despotic force of power
(potestas). Included as necessarily excluded, ‘bare life’ inscribes fluid
vitality at the heart of the mechanisms of capture of the state system.
Agamben stresses that this vitality, or ‘aliveness’, however, is all the
more mortal for it. This is linked to Heidegger’s theory of Being as
deriving its force from the annihilation of animal life.
The position of zoe in Agamben’s system is analogous to the role
and the location of language in psychoanalytic theory: it is the site of
constitution or ‘capture’ of the subject. This ‘capture functions by
positing – as an a posteriori construction, a pre-linguistic dimension of
subjectivity which is apprehended as ‘always already’ lost and out of
reach. Zoe – like the pre-discursive in Lacan, the chora of Kristeva and
the maternal feminine of Irigaray – becomes for Agamben the everreceding horizon of an alterity which has to be included as necessarily
excluded in order to sustain the framing of the subject in the first place.
This introduces finitude as a constitutive element within the framework of
subjectivity, which also fuels an affective political economy of loss and
melancholia at the heart of the subject (Braidotti, 2002).
In his important work on the totalitarian edge of regimes of ‘biopower’ Agamben perpetuates the philosophical habit, which consists in
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taking mortality, or finitude as the trans-historical horizon for discussions
of ‘life’. This fixation on Thanatos – which Nietzsche criticized over a
century ago – is still very present in critical debates today. It often
produces a gloomy and pessimistic vision not only of power, but also of
the technological developments that propel the regimes of bio-power. I
beg to differ from the habit that favours the deployment of the problem of
bios-zoe on the horizon of death, or of liminal state of not-life.
I find this over-emphasis on the horizons of mortality and perishability
inadequate to the vital politics`of our era. I therefore turn to another
significant community of scholars works within a Spinozist framework,
and includes Deleuze and Guattari(1972, 1980); Guattari (1995); Glissant
(1990); Balibar (2002), Hardt and Negri (2000). The emphasis falls on
the politics of life itself as a relentlessly generative force. This requires an
interrogation of the shifting inter-relations between human and nonhuman forces. The latter are defined both as in-human and as posthuman.
Speaking from the position of an embodied and embedded female
subject I find the metaphysics of finitude to be a myopic way of putting
the question of the limits of what we call ‘life’. It is not because Thanatos
always wins out in the end that it should enjoy such conceptual high
status. Death is overrated. The ultimate subtraction is after all only
another phase in a generative process. Too bad that the relentless
generative powers of death require the suppression of that which is the
nearest and dearest to me, namely myself, my own vital being-there. For
the narcissistic human subject, as psychoanalysis teaches us, it is
unthinkable that Life should go on without my being there. The process
of confronting the thinkability of a Life that may not have ‘me’ or any
‘human’ at the centre is actually a sobering and instructive process. I see
this post-anthropocentric shift as the start for an ethics of sustainability
that aims at shifting the focus towards the positivity of zoe.
This project aims to elaborate sets of criteria for a new social and
political theory that steers a course between humanistic nostalgia and
neo-liberal euphoria about the bio-capitalism. Social and political
practices that take life itself as the point of reference need not aim at the
restoration of unitary norms, or the celebration of the master-narrative of
global profit, but rather at social cohesion, the respect for diversity and
sustainable growth. At the heart of my research project lays an ethics that
respects vulnerability while actively constructing social horizons of hope.
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