Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey, March 8, 2013
What biohistory, biopower and biopolitics, dispositif, crystals and rhizomes have to do
with Mumbai, Caracas and New York City. Will global capitalism deterritorialize and
decode itself to the point of implosion?
For Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari - in their respective books A History of Sexuality,
Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus - capitalism is represented as the culmination of the
state form. Two central questions explored in all three texts, though never addressed directly
by Foucault are how to resist this increasingly omnipotent, all-consuming and infinitely selfreproducing capitalist system and how to create and organize a society that is truly nonhierarchical, i.e. non-capitalist and non- repressive? To these, this paper adds what are the
revolutionary ideas and energies necessary to overthrow or at least severely limit the megamachine of our capitalist world and liberate the singularities now subsumed by the logic of
capital? After reviewing several core concepts most relevant to this discussion, biopower,
biopolitics, repression, decoding and deterritorialization, rhizome, I will argue that our current
socio-political, juridical and economical reality is so far removed from the reality and
Zeitgeist during which Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari published that many if not all their
concepts fall short of providing useful, contemporary attack points for revolutionary action. I
posit that some of their more widely accepted and societally if not exclusively academically
integrated concepts have unwittingly had a hand in creating and perpetuating several of the
problems citizens of the world face today.
In mid-18th century France, state power, embodied and personified by the absolute
ruler, the sovereign king, followed the law of the sword by enforcing the ruler’s “ultimate
dominion” (Foucault, 1976, p.143) over the citizenry’s bodies in order to preserve his own life
and status as ruler. Dissenters were punished in all imaginable (and unimaginable) manner of
ways, which Foucault describes in full lurid detail that the modern reader might viscerally
experience a modicum of what this domination by a centralized, personified top-down force
meant. In The History of Sexuality, a series of books that proceded Discipline and Punish
(1975), Foucault shifts his focus from a history of disciplinary procedures on the body, which
would ultimately lead to the psychological and physical internalization of discipline at the
individual level, to a sort of “biohistory” (Foucault, 1976, p.143) of the regulation of
populations. Foucault develops the notion of “an era of biopower” (Foucault, 1976, p.140), in
which society takes strategic control of the reproductive processes of its citizens via a
dispositif (see discussion bellow) of sexuality. The reproduction and conservation of life
rather than the administration of death become essential to the modern capitalist state form:
biopower takes non-subjective control over its population – a large-scale performative
physical site qua body – to assure the seamless propagation of the modes of production
required by a burgeoning industrial society. The prerequisite for an accumulation of capital
was the building of a docile population that would work in factories and consume, en masse,
every sort of (commercialized) commodity. Together with the citizenry’s internalized selfdiscipline and a sophisticated penal system to keep everything in check, the productive force
of biopower came not only to radiate from within the social body but also to be shaped and
regulated by the logic of (capitalist) economic processes. At this new “threshold of modernity”
(Foucault, 1976, p.143), the Cuban Crisis of 1962 may have been the very first demonstration
of potentially fatal implications of this new biopower, according to which the health and
literal survival of the population and even the entire species is inseparably linked to the health
and survival of the capitalist system.
How does this dispositif of sexuality, this new “biopolitics” (Foucault, 1976, p. 139) of
the social body work? All spheres of society — its administrative institutions, science and
technology, team up in order to organize, quantify, regulate and prime its population via
complex discourses and legal procedures relating to sex. Reproductive technologies and
sexual health technologies, class, race, gender and identity politics, and wars against
supposedly anti-humanistic and anti-life religious extremists (e.g. the Taliban) alike are all
scrutinized and cared for by the ultimate custodial ‘truth seeker’, biopower. And because
biopower emanates from within the social body, not from the top down, it exists and is
productive at the singularity level. According to the biohistory then, the repressive hypothesis
of sex progressively lost its discursive and non-discursive grip: hegemonic power (political,
clerical, institutional or otherwise) was no longer capable of containing the excess of life and
emergent sexual multiplicities. Once life and the propagation of life had become the new
prerogative of societal organization, desire was liberated from need via its transformation into
a discourse: a mandate to talk about sex and sexuality and to speak ‘truth’ was instigated.
This politicization of sex and the resulting affirmations about “the ‘right’ to life, to
one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions
or ‘alienations’, the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be […]” (Foucault,
1976, p. 145), constitute what Foucault might have suggested as a possible path on the road to
capitalist resistance. A biohistorical reading of this argument, indirect and cautious though it
may be in Foucault’s texts, likely grew out of a residual excitement about the 1968 liberation
movements, in which the prospects of a new era defined by individual freedoms and selfrealization still seemed believable and attainable. The realities of a present that is some 40
years removed is dramatically different and therefore necessarily begs for a complete
reevaluation of the work, effects, and workings of biopower.
Indeed, it is worth noting that with the exception of the United States, the postindustrial societies of the West are all suffering an acute decline in their reproductive
performance that has been nominally (somewhat) countered by allowing for permissive
immigration. In fact, populations all across Europe could reasonably be labeled ‘endangered’,
if the timeframe were expanded and interpreted according to evolutionary theory rather than
the micro-politics between electoral cycles. Ironic though it may at first seem, this extreme
has come to pass exclusively as a result of capitalist biopolitics, which brought about the
transition from industrial to so-called cognitive1 or semiocapitalism2, (Berardi, 2007, p. 9;
p.104). That is, the citizenry has rapidly redefined itself as having less time and fewer
resources to dedicate to the task of reproduction. Put another way, the desire for selfrealization and self-expression has led to a more self-absorbed and hedonistic population –
one that is less willing to sacrifice to a common cause like procreation and societal betterment.
Today, biopolitics in these nations consists mostly in trying to convince an increasingly
xenophobic population, which is less and less willing to share its elevated standards of living
with these reproductively strong ‘others’ and of the fundamental need to allow foreigners to
settle on their soil and to grant them access to ‘their’ wealth and resources in order simply to
maintain, to say nothing of increasing population levels. Pair the current reality of capitalist
biopolitics, which departs rather severely from Foucault’s vision, with one of the many
interesting and unintended side-effects of the marginalization-reproductive conundrum that
has grown out of the latter’s biohistory and Deleuze and Guattari’s perfected state and one is
left with a modern day sort of Frankenstein.
In the emergent economies that are less tastefully known as the Third World, the
axiomatic of capital (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, p. 261) promises infinite returns of profit
while suppressing rational biopolitical considerations. In the slums of Mumbai, Sao Paolo,
Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Caracas and even New York City, we face a complete lack of
strategic planning, justice and dignifying social organization.
1 In our post-­‐industrial society intellectual labor has gained primacy over physical labor. 2 Berardi refers to a new stage in capitalisms perpetual transformation that monetizes information and semiotic flows rather than from physical commodities. Mumbai Slums
Slums are de-facto marginal spaces, excluded from their nation’s properly functioning and
officially recognized system of administrative and social organization. Oftentimes lacking
even the most basic provisions such as proper sanitation, legal representation, health care and
acceptable educational programs, today’s slums are the leprosy ghettos of the 21st century. If a
nation’s executive power does penetrate the deterritorialized3 spaces of the slum, it is mostly
to wage war against what they consider a criminal mob—one of the many necessary selforganizing structures that have emerged in the absence of (but must ultimately be controlled
or quashed by) official oversight. Is this what is responsible for the rapid population growth of
slums and Third World countries?
According to Deleuze and Guattari, slums are best considered the ultimate
embodiments of several of their core concepts: they are not only geo-spatially deterritorialized
3 Deleuze and Guattari develop the notion of ‘deterritorialization’ as a replacement of a given territory
(of values) by another one. Although Deleuze and Guattari use the term in many different mostly
neutral ways, their idea of economic deterritorialization has a decidedly negative connotation. and rhizomatic but also in a state of perpetual becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, p.35),
and socially and politically decoded. In Anti Oedipus and later, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and Guattari develop an evolutionary history of the state form that emerges from the
‘primitive’, evolves to the despotic and finally plateaus at the capitalist state form.
Responsible for this are the intensifications of processes of territorialization and coding of
deterritorialization and overcoding and finally reterritorialization and decoding as determining
factors in each stage. In the primitive state form territorialization and coding may be
understood as the inscription of specific processes of social relations on the social body. What
Deleuze and Guattari called the socius4 was truly connected to the earth and to ritualistic
practices immanent to it. The despotic state as the next logical state form, which uprooted the
socius and was the first stage in the gradual process of disconnection was different largely
thanks to rampant deterritorialization by a despotic ruler and his administrative apparatus. In
other words, the despotic state destroyed the direct connectedness that had characterized the
primitive state form and replaced it with a form in which all levels of its working parts
(machinic assemblage), i.e. the people of the socius were made subordinate to the hierarchical
rule of the despot, which itself depended on the overcoding of existing social codes. It was
nevertheless bound to the soil and to a network of social value systems, which included labor,
justice, a moral code, etc. The capitalist state form, by contrast, replaced all of the above
through a process of total decoding and absolute deterritorialization and finally, reterritorialization. The individual and for that matter the entire socius was deterritorialized
from any connection to the land and leaders, from pre-existing labor and loyalty systems for
the purpose of ‘freeing’ their bodies and labor and assimilating them into the capitalist
4 Defined as the site from which desiring machines emerged. machine of production and consumption. In the capitalist state, money is the new decoded
flow - the blood in the veins of a parasitic global organism, if you will.
Moreover, according to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is essentially a mirror image
of schizophrenia, defined for their purposes as a mental condition defined by the utter
deterritorialization of the unconscious and resulting in the loss of a coherent unity, a
ubiquitous symptom, otherwise known as the atomization of society, present throughout the
Western world. The productive machine of the schizophrenic, i.e. his factory of the
unconscious, in capitalist production terms, is exactly the sort of machinic assemblage that has
the potential for resisting or at least escaping the totalizing and dominating effects of a
rampant capitalist machine. After all, was not the deterritorialization of the unconscious
successful at liberating subjectivities from the representative chains cast upon them by
Freud’s psychoanalysis? Is not the production of multiplicities (viz. difference), as described
by Foucault’s biohistory and Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, a way out of the
capitalist bottleneck? According to this construct, schizoanalysis functions like a cure to the
ailments of modern day capitalist society by way of amplifying ‘individual desiring machines’
and destroying—that is, decoding—the so-deemed obsolete mental aggregates, hierarchical
and arborescent structures and representations left over from the past (socio-governmental
forms) that clog up the productive flows of today’s capitalist-coded individuals (desiring
machines).
Lines of flight and the investment (another term taken from established economic
lingo) of desiring machines into the social organization may have been capable of leading to a
new form of non-hierarchical and distributed network (rhizomatic) organization of the social
body by virtue of the fact that deterritorialization and decoding taken to the extreme could
work against capitalism’s mega machine. But the power of the beast has bested its master.
Contrary to the dated logic of Deleuze and Guattarri, the extremely efficient, ubiquitously
effective and deeply ingrained parasitism of capitalism has essentially eradicated the
possibility for resistance through further deterritorialization and decoding. In its most extreme
material manifestation, the capitalist form has created a severe bifurcation between financial
(wealth) centers and the growing slums surrounding them. Slums are rhizomes of uncounted
multiplicities. The slum rhizome spreads like spores, grows from a center outward but without
any formal structure, and forms a network in which all points have the same value—close to
nothing, and all are connected to each other in such proximity that disease spreads like
wildfire.
Caracas slums
Just as the physical network of the rhizome grows uncontrollably, so too do the multiplicities
living within them. Population growth is indirectly proportional to the techno-scientific lack
of biopower, bioethics, biopolitics. Slums are a-political and a-hierarchical, for they have been
completely severed from the dominant body—the operating capitalist biopower. Most often,
slum rhizomes sprout outward around a crystal center—molar aggregates of the financial
centers with their representative high-rises of authority, hierarchy and wealth.
The expansive city-like slums of today occupy a socio-political-economic space akin
to (only with a more extreme degree of marginality) that of what were once known as
‘underdeveloped’ or ‘primitive’ states. The earlier appellation, which belied the primacy of
social stratification, has evolved into one that highlights the primacy of economic
stratification, “Third World” countries, that characterizes today’s world. And slums, of course,
fall outside of this entire system of classification. This semiotic distinction points to the larger
problem of prescriptively applying the ideas, predictions and formulations posited by Foucault,
Deleuze and Guattari to modern-day systems, which are not only some 40 years removed, but
vitally divergent from those about which the former were writing. The Third World of today
has become indispensible, a necessary site of symbiotic, reciprocal exploitation with the First
World, and the main source of First World species augmentation, diversification and
recreational escapism (Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight?). The urban centers of the Third
World have become booming metropolises and have witnessed an unprecedented population
explosion, creating catastrophic consequences on a scale never before seen: pollution, largescale environmental destruction, food shortage and hunger and massive waves of migration.
Further, today’s First World sovereign state form is contested on all levels by the corporate
model of profit maximization. A lack of ethics or morals that once upon a time might have
been attributed to the cruelest of despotic ruler is far more rampant in today’s capitalist
corporate world. The discourse and following diversification of reproductive practices in the
First World may have led to a more pleasure-focused and liberated sexuality, but it is also
responsible for a precipitous decrease in actual (sexual) reproduction. The negative feedback
loop between growing prosperity, specialized and competitive labor markets, lack of
affordable childcare, growing desire of self-realization over sacrificing community spirit has
stifled the practical capacity and effective desire for a growing majority of the First World
socius. These are the consequences of biopower, deterritorialization and decoding gone
haywire, unimagined even by the ambitious visions of Foucault, Guattari and Deleuze –it is
pure lawlessness and absolute negligence for what was conceived of as being a moralistic
Western managerial model.
In a touching interview in which Deleuze is asked about his ideas about resistance, he said
that resistance and above all art as resistance has its deeper meaning in its ability to free life
from the prison of shame (Deleuze, Parnet, & Boutang, 2004). As direct and meaningful as his
response was, it perhaps ironically implies a need to defeat our own human nature, for if it is
Man that has created the beasts of global capitalism, which are responsible for, among other
atrocities, vast networks of slums and ghettos, which are magnificent and expansive prisons of
shame—First World shame, autonomous capitalist biopower seas of shame, the resistance
(and its art), now virtually impossible, would have to be the liberation of Man from prisons of
His own making—the liberation of Man from Himself. To support such resistance is to
encourage the defeat and admit the failure of a perfected system. It is not without a degree of
irony that Marx’s much older, clearer, and arguably unnuanced Das Kapital would seem to
offer a more lasting and reliable way of thinking about resistance. He predicted capitalism’s
eventual fall owing to its own internal contradictions. Indeed, the strength of his assessment
lay in the understanding that the unfolding of a complex system such as capitalism cannot be
predicted or resisted; it can only be observed in its own destruction. Eerily akin is the tragic
collapse of the Aztec, Inca and Mayan empires at the hand of small groups of Spanish
conquistadores. Although their mythology had built in cycles of destruction and regeneration,
which they had figured out according to certain astronomical and mathematical formulae and
which were remarkably accurate during their own times, what they did not foresee was the
final impossibility of regeneration once the ‘threshold of modernity’ had been crossed.
“The circulation of capital is at the same time its becoming, its growth, its vital process. If
anything needed to be compared with the circulation of the blood, it was not the formal
circulation of money, but the content-filled circulation of capital”, ( Marx, 1971, p.517).
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