Seven Red

On the lighter side…

Several years ago, Picador kicked off the translation series of Foucault’s lectures at the College de France with what I think is the strongest of the series to date, the remarkable Society Must be Defended. The following releases, Abnormal, Psychiatric Power, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject have been interesting, in the way that all Foucault is interesting, but not particularly groundbreaking or surprising, at least in my reading. Not so the latest installment of the CdF series, The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered January to March, 1979, and just out from Palgrave. A teaser by the same title appears in Rabinow and Rose’s The Essential Foucault, but that’s a 6-page mini-essay.

The Birth of Biopolitics is worth the cost of admission for several reasons. First, it’s Foucault’s most comprehensive analysis of contemporary economics. In his recent Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984, Jeffrey Nealon argues that the key to understanding (and, of course, using) Foucault’s later works isn’t the supposed return to subjectivity seen by so many commentators. Or rather, the return to the Self and technologies of the self in Foucault’s later works can only be understood (and made to work) within the larger context of Foucault’s “thoroughgoing confrontation with questions of economics, in both the broad and more narrowly defined senses of the word” (Nealon 17). For Nealon, “Foucaultian economics” is tied up in an expanded notion of efficiency: not just efficiency of production in the narrow sense, but efficiencies of concepts and practices. The question would always be, says Nealon, what does it cost? (I’ll have to admit that I’m sort of stealing/modifying my post title from Nealon as well; he cites Ted Nugent’s album Intensities in Ten Cities as a heading in one of his chapters.)

In light of Nealon’s shift toward a Foucaultian economics, The Birth of Biopower provides an extraordinary supplement: a detailed genealogical account of economic neoliberalism and its diffusion into traditionally “non-economic” domains.  This account requires two moves that might seem startling to those familiar with Foucault’s work. First, Foucault addresses distinctly American thought. While he cycles through the usual 18th and 19th century European works, The Birth of Biopolitics closes with an analysis of American neoliberal discourse (of the Chicago School variety) more specifically. Second, it’s the first time I’ve really seen the genealogical method trace a transformation so far into the twentieth century. Indeed, the portions on American thought cover post-war neoliberalism, such as the work of Gary Becker (there’s a name you wouldn’t expect to see in Foucault’s work!) well into the late 1960′s. For those more accustomed to extended analysis of the Physiocrats (though you get that as well), these passages are both jarring and illuminating.

This current focus leads to the book’s most important feature: it is Foucault’s clearest statement on the forms of power he sees arising after the waning of the disciplinary societies. Foucault’s description of the “carceral archipelago” at the end of Discipline and Punish makes the strong claim for the disciplinary society: the generalization of the penal model or form, the “great carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques in to the most innocent disciplines.” Famously, Deleuze heralds the end of disciplinary societies in his short essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” and at more length, though less explicitly in his book on Foucault. What, then, comes after disciplinary power? Those seeking an answer to this question have been hard pressed to nail it down in Foucault’s work itself, which is why Deleuze’s little comparative essay on control has acquired so much currency.

The difference between disciplinary and control societies can be summed up in the role of partition and the function of the subject relative to energy. Disciplinary societies operate through detailed partition, splitting continuums into discrete units which are then analyzed and normalized. Foucault’s famous example of the way authorities handled leprosy relative to plague is a good example. Whereas lepers were merely excluded en masse, the residents of the plague city were sub-divided and transformed into information machines: each is confined to a specific location, and each must account for his or her condition at regular intervals. The prison combined these techniques, integrating the detailed surveillance of individual units within a place of exclusion. The result is a series of discrete institutions, themselves partitioned and divided and specific (the school, the hospital, the prison, the army, the factory), but all operating through the general principles of partition and surveillance. In control societies, the strict partition of these institutions breaks down, as does the practices of partition that organize and produce the discrete units (that is, individuals) within the institutions (the student, the patient, the convict, the soldier, the worker). In such a society, you’d expect to see not the school as closed site, but distance learning, part time education, and continuing education; instead of the hospital, home health care; instead of the prison, techniques of probation and house arrest; instead of the soldier, the reservist; instead of the worker, the temp, the contract worker, the famous “prosumer” of Internet lore (is there any more radical a leak between institutional roles than that which melds the producer and consumer?). As Deleuze puts it, in “disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexistent metastable states of single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” (179).

Second, disciplinary societies viewed the individual as the “font” of energy, so to speak, while in control societies, what Deleuze calls “dividuals” enter into preexisting flows of energy. This is clearly the correlate to the institutional analysis. If you are not “starting all over again” each time in discrete institutions, it is because the flows of energy have already breached the old partitions, producing continuous practices that you adjust and respond to: not partition, but a “single modulation.” He notes that “[d]isciplinary man produced energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits” (180). Think of the ROTC student taking a class while also working on an internship. When she graduates, she’ll be a reservist with a job, but will also be required to take continuing education classes in her field for certifications and promotions. Deleuze most comical aphorism for this state of affairs concerns sports: “Surfing has everywhere taken over from all the old sports” (180). This is a strange statement indeed, and worth a slower reading. What does Deleuze mean when he says that surfing has taken over the other sports? Consider the way baseball works. Nothing happens until an individual acts: everything is still, with only an abstract set of rules to enter into. Moreover, each player has a specific and rule-based role within the field of energy. Shifts of direction and energy only occur when another individual with a clearly defined role acts. Every action begins with the subject: there’s no middle voice in baseball. These are the disciplinary characteristics of the “old sports.” The “level playing field” is precisely the field devoid of its own energy, direction, or momentum. It is “level” precisely so that only the subject can begin  or redirect the action. (Brian Massumi runs his own comedy act on this, trying to rescue soccer by claiming that the ball itself functions as a virtual “quasi-subject” or source of energy: everything arrays itself in various actual formations around the movements of the ball, etc. – a funny if unconvincing argument). Surfing, on the other hand, requires the “player” to enter into an already existing energy system (the tides); it is environmental or ecological: the surfer doesn’t and cannot “begin” the action on a blank energy field, but responds to already existing and variable flows. Skiing operates similarly, as would mountain biking and the “extreme sports” more generally.

The skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys is really an excellent example of the transformation from disciplinary to control societies. It demonstrates the continuum between surfing and skateboarding ( a fascinating mutation, really), while at the same time contrasting the lame old style skateboarding that the Dogtown skateboarders displaced, which was itself primarily disciplinary in terms of its rules and conceptualization of energy. I think the rather chance mutations that produced contemporary skate culture would please Foucault, as well: if you didn’t have a drought in Southern California, you wouldn’t have had empty pools that served as the “preexisting energy sources” (gravity) for the development of the sport. It is important to note that skateboarding could then be seen as a control sport. The documentary presents it as “resistance” to the forms of disciplinary society—a rebellious act that “shocked” the 1950’s-style skateboarding judges, etc. This may be so, but Deleuze is adamant that control cannot be “compared” with disciplinary societies in this way. While the Z-Boys appear as rebels in terms of disciplinarity, they are precisely models for forms of power in control societies. (Foucault would argue that they are not even “rebels” in a disciplinary society, since it is precisely the function of disciplinarity to produce its own “outlaws,” and a “lyricism of marginality” (D&P 301)).

The stakes, in other words, are very clear. It’s easy enough to view the activities of the control societies as a new birth of ‘freedom” if your only model is the disciplinary society, but this is a conceptual and historical mistake. Control societies must be considered in their own terms. That doesn’t mean that everything that appears as “freedom” is really oppression, or anything so sophomoric. Rather, it means that everything must be examined anew, not relative to a power that divides, partitions, and organizes, but inside a power that connects, diffuses, and modulates or selects. We might notice, for example, that the “writer” in what composition scholars call “current traditional rhetoric” looks much more like a baseball player than a surfer. The “writer” contributing to an online collaborative project, on the other hand, looks very much like a surfer, if we consider something like Wikipedia to be a continuous flow of energy that one merely hooks into in a responsive manner. One could say the same about “remixing,” and other current fetishes of writing instruction. To draw the analogy, however, we should be careful to consider that the latter might be, like skateboarding, not merely a mode of resistance to disciplinary power (which produces the solitary writer seeking to master rule-based textual forms), but rather a form of power all its own. Ecology is not salvation.

So, if The Birth of Biopolitics provides Foucault’s answer to “what comes after disciplinary societies,” how does that measure up to or compare with Deleuze’s account? We’ll have to get into that next time, but the answer draws its greatest strength from Foucault’s analysis of American neoliberalism. What’s remarkable about The Birth of Biopolitics is Foucault’s explicit contrast, much like what we see in “Postscript on Control Societies,” between disciplinary power and the discourse of neoliberal economics.

In that last post, I freely copped to being totally wrong about US electoral politics most of the time. In other words, I can’t make heads or tails of how people vote in this country. It simply makes no sense to me, likely because of my snooty Eastern elitist upbringing and continued devotion to an urban elitist arugula-laden lifestyle. Case in point, of course, would be Governor Palin, who strikes me as a finger-wagging knucklehead at best. she and I were laughing this morning at her scoldiferous outtakes on NPR; I didn’t watch her speech, but the whole thing seems just preposterous. Needless to say, she greatly impressed everyone, including the pundit braintrust in the supposedly “liberal media” who fell all over themselves to mention how fantastical she was after the McCain campaign spent the better part of two days kicking them in  their collective balls. Maybe it’s my Eastern elitist roots cultivated in the snooty confines of outer borough New York City public schools, but where I come from, if somebody calls you a worthless asshole, the appropriate response is generally not made up of compliment and praise. Like I said, I don’t understand how the thing works.

So the unemployment numbers come out today, and it’s pretty brutal: 6.1% unemployment, and eight straight months of job losses, now over 600,000. In another stunning stat, 9.2% of all homeowners are either behind or in foreclosure on their mortgages. The overall numbers are just as bloody: 3.7 million manufacturing jobs up and vanished under the Republican presidency; real wages, as Obama likes to remind listeners, are down $2200 since Bush took office. All of this has much less direct effect on places where the effete urban elite live, of course. The effete urban elite are generally trained in precisely the sort of symbolic analytic work that prepares them well for a variety of positions in the global economy: lawyers, doctors, marketers, teachers, software project managers, derivative traders, and so on (to name the positions of just a few of my friends from college, some of whom are even rabid Bushites). Of these friends, nearly all live either in New York City itself, or in the immediate suburbs, or in major metropolitan areas in New York state . What’s more, none of these people would last two weeks in Wasilla, Alaska – and especially not the Bush fans. I am the only one of them with even an inkling of having lived in something less than a city/suburb for more than a weeklong summer vacation, and that was in Giant State University College Town, not exactly Wasilla, culturally speaking.

But no worries, Ohio! That Sarah Palin’s spunky, and she’s gonna show those city folk how to field dress a ten point buck! Hooo-aahh! I don’t usually go in for the Thomas Frank argument, that these “merely” cultural issues cause people to vote against their economic self-interest. First, I think people usually vote a certain way for good reasons: good reasons for them. Unlike my cohort in the Eastern elitist squad, I don’t buy that people are duped or even stupid. Everyone locks into some affective attachments; it just happens that the liberal affective attachments come with this scientistic mythology about “economic self-interest” being somehow different and superior to all the other  “interests” in life. This is a strange sort of prediliction indeed, since the same people will usually argue against mere social or economic efficiency criteria for, say, the arts. Aren’t the arts “wasteful” in the same way voting merely on abortion issues is “wasteful” for the poor family in Kansas? One would do well to read Bataille on restricted and general economy, and the various functions of wasteful expenditure. Instead, the solution has been to reduce everything to restricted economies, and to thereby import social and economic efficiency into the analysis. The arts are – so this story goes – really efficient after all, first, because they are crucial industries themselves (the culture industry), and second, because they produce positive externalities, etc.

All true, I guess, but ultimately lame. The struggling musician who could do much better writing stupid little commercial jingles “votes” against her economic self-interest everytime she refuses to “sell out,” just as surely as does the struggling mechanic obsessed with semi-automatic rifles. But you don’t see a lot of people writing books about how these people are “duped,” or, if you do (No Logo), it is only because their very “resistance” to efficiency has itself been cycled into production. To take it from a completely opposite direction, nearly everyone who votes at all really votes against economic self-interest if you posit the exploitation of labor as a given. As my three readers know, I do. This leads to the ironic condition whereby voting for your “self-interest” continually ratifies the exploitation of your labor. Of course, self-interest must be laid out on a continuum of possibility. It would always seem better to vote for the pro-union candidate than it is to vote for the anti-union candidate, the pro-choice candidate rather than the anti-choice candidate. But let’s not pretend that economic self-interest is a transparent category. So these arguments don’t really work for me, either way you slice it.

The question would not be “Is this congruent with self-interest?” Rather, we’d have to ask what affective attachments operate in either case. It also doesn’t seem as simple as prattling about “resentment,” as Krugman does in the NY Times today, unless you want to take a stronger Nietzschean version of ressentiment right to the heart of the Subject. Why the left isn’t better at asking these questions remains a mystery to me, since it is much better at managing collective affects in nearly every domain outside of electoral politics. They seem to think that if only people could see through the “cultural” screen to the real effects of economy, the scales would drop, and ta da! That the right has gotten so good at parsing out these attachments is similarly mysterious, since their devotion to the most stupid and reductionary neo-liberal economism generally dominates their analysis of all social life, full stop. But that might be how it works. Once you give up on the silly base-superstructure version of economism, you start to get a better sense of how these affects circulate. The right has completely given up on the distinction: everything is economics for them; it’s the night in which all self-interest is gray, so to speak. Hockey-mommery is as important as job creation: this is what you get when base-superstructure falls by the wayside. Obama, on the other hand, keeps up with this “They’re not talking about economy. They’re not talking about issues” stuff. Will it work with 6.1 % unemployment and a collapsing economic “base.” Maybe, maybe not. What irritates me about Palin, in any case, is not the premise, but the specific affects she promotes and hooks into. Again, I’m usually wrong.

In perhaps the greatest punditry to go out over the air like, ever, professional liar Chuck Todd and GOP fluffers Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy are recorded here in a tender and private moment discussing McCain’s cynicism, Palin’s lack of qualifications, and a sad clown tear trickling down the face of Kay Bailey Hutchinson. There’s been no open mic disaster this delicious since that episode of MTV’s Made where the kid tries to freestyle. Whichever one; it doesn’t matter.

The scrumdiddily-umcious transcript can be found where I got the video, here. Oh, and Noonan notes that the election is…wait for it…”over.” Guess which shit-peddling speech writer won’t be getting free chicken wings and margaritas at the oil lobbyist hodown tonight?

There was a time when I would actually watch the GOP convention just to see what they were saying. Not so much anymore. Seven Red Crew stopped listening to Bush years ago. I literally turn the channel as soon as he starts talking, radio or teevee. I can’t take it. Ditto Cheney, Rice, and the rest of the wrecking crew. I have zero interest in listening to anything these people have to say. The last eight years says enough.

Just to qualify, I will admit to being thoroughly flummoxed by US electoral politics. Everyone is about 1000 degrees to the right of me, so I observe it as a strange spectacle, but I’m usually wrong. I have still never voted for a winning presidential candidate, though that will surely change this year. That said, the GOP Convention this year is so completely thrown into chaos by the unpopularity of Bush and the bizarre, back-firing VP nod that it is almost tempting. Almost. McCain is such a pitiful, self-serving liar that I cannot even stand to contemplate his possible speech. Giuliani would be amusing only as a “9/11″ drinking game, and I’m too busy to get that drunk this time of year. The real fun, naturally, will be the acceptance speech of this half-baked Alaska governor they’ve nominated for VP, a candidate so thoroughly unqualified for the office that any GOP moderate should be fuming mad. It’s almost enough to watch. That the real nutbags in the ultra-right managed to get this lightweight even on radar is a shocking testament to their power within the party. It’s also reason number one that anybody who isn’t a loopy fundamentalist should run in terror from the whole organization. The woman is against contraception, for God’s sake. (With rather predictable results, moreover…) But what do I know, right?

So, rather than watch and comment on the Mavericky Maverickness of their very own Presidential candidate, I thought I’d offer instead, in an homage to the fucking weirdos in the religious right who apparently run the whole show, the most supremely homoerotic moment in 1980′s cinema. I think it says it all: