Neoliberalism, reflexivity, and biopolitics

Here is an excerpt from the draft of paper on neoliberalism and biopolitics. The longer version (although still very much draft, proto-paper, or narrative outline) is available here: Download Neoliberalism and drive wpsa

Neoliberalism, reflexivity, and biopolitics

Global capitalism threatens human continuation and planetary stability. The economic calamity of the past three years has forced even staunch neoliberals to acknowledge the excesses and instabilities wrought by privatization, financialization, and speculation. The meltdown of the financial system, with its cascade of effects on employment, pension funds, housing, education, social services, and infrastructure, with its bankrupting of entire countries and production of public debt at a scale heretofore associated with world war, has brought home the inequality and destruction previously (but not completely) displaced onto so-called developing and third worlds and into some first-world post-industrial (really, post-apocalyptic) cities and suburbs. What, if anything, does the concept of biopolitics contribute to our ability to analyze this conjuncture?

On the one hand, as Mick Dillon points out, Foucault’s account of biopolitics provides an account of a specific modality of power, one that aims to ‘make life live.’Biopolitics does not designate a general theory but rather a set of processes, operations, and apparatuses that coexist among other discourses and operations producing and circulating power. Viewed from this angle, the question of biopolitics and the financial crisis that brought on the great recession may be the wrong question. Biopolitics doesn’t encompass everything. Analyses of biopolitics that focus on the life sciences, on bio-tech as an industry, are important on their own and as components of the capitalist economy. The concept of biopolitics, however, does not do the work of explaining neoliberal crisis.

On the other hand, insofar as biopolitics turns on life itself, it seems as if there is nothing that is not within its purview. Rather than a modality of power, biopolitics is the modality of the present, the ‘order of things’ in which we find ourselves. What exactly this means is a matter of debate as biopolitics appears as the essence of sovereignty, the name of resistance, the ground of struggle. From this angle, the financial meltdown of the past three years is too specific, a field of contingencies within a larger, dynamic, setting of ever-changing and interconnected life and matter.  So here again, biopolitics doesn’t contribute to a critical theory of neoliberal crisis.

A first pass thus suggests that the financial meltdown only appears outside the biopolitical radar. Biopolitics encompasses either too little or too much. Anyone concerned with the effects of neoliberalism would need a different critical vocabulary. As too little, the objects of biopolitical scrutiny are not those of finance capital. Biopolitics attends to genes and health, populations, sex, birth, race, ethnicity, food, plants, animals, organic, living substance. Dead capital, financial abstraction, electronic markets, and subprime mortgages appear as so many artificial constructs and fetters, foreign to and other than vital, generative substance. As too much, biopolitics is ontology. Analyses of neoliberal financial practices and systems rely on brackets and divisions that do a certain violence to the process of ‘biopolitical exceeding’ (a term from Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 317).

Reflexivity provides a way through this dilemma. The primary conceptual innovation of biopolitics concerns not life per se but the turn to life, ‘making life live.’ Biopolitics is useful insofar as it designates a process, reflexivization, or a form, reflexivity.  Mark C. Taylor provides a helpful definition: “Reflexivity is a nonlinear relation in which cause and effect are interdependent: the thoughts and actions of agents influence the operation of the system, which, in turn, influences the thoughts and actions of agents.” With respect to biopolitics, the careful, attentive work on the tactics and operations of a power centered on the population, on the changes in apparatuses of security, on the unimaginable intrusions and amplifications associated with biotechnologies is immensely valuable. Yet we should not presume that these investigations of life and living matter, of the bios of political objects, constitute the primary analytical purchase of biopolitics as a concept. Bluntly put, the term ‘bio’ is misleading. What’s at stake is reflexivization, the turning of life to life or of the population toward itself.

Whereas ‘biopolitics’ as a term misleadingly displaces attention from processes to objects, the psychoanalytic concept of drive expresses the dynamics of reflexivity. To be clear, I am not saying that drive is without object. As Zizek explains, the difference between desire and drive is that desire is for a lost object and in drive loss itself is an object. My point is that the concept of drive accounts for the dynamic feature of biopolitics where enjoyment emerges through a repetitive process, even through failure, rather than as the process’s end result or target. As with so much in contemporary culture, the Daily Show expressed the idea best. In a segment on Congressional maneuvering prior to the vote on health insurance reform, senior political correspondent Wyatt Cenac explained: no one wants to win an argument; they just want to have an argument (March 18, 2010).

Comments

[Jocelyn Atkins]

jodi, how did you dwnld file? cannot open from a mac. wondering if anyone else had this problem.

[Jodi]

it's a word document--but they should be compatible, right?

[Jocelyn Atkins]

yeah, for some reason can't access it. ok, thanks, will keep trying.

[renaissance costume]

I can't open it too.. :(

[Jocelyn Atkins]

hey rc, you prob have to download more software from microsoft. that is what i had to do and i got it to "convert".

jodi--This paper was a real pleasure to read. I only wonder what you think about the following. I realize you do make a distinction btn Biopolitics and Drive but as I was reading Homo Sacer recently, I kept feeling like I was reading an account of drive.

What i mean is, isn't Agamben's Homo Sacer an image of drive, the exemplar, in all it excess, bare life, is more alive than all life living or dead? it is what persists despite everything else. If what Agamben says about Biopolitics always having been, is true, ("Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning..." Agamben, HS, 181)--then couldn't biopolitics be a mirror image of drive? or if not then why.

If biopolitics is a result of the constitutive gap (the negative subject of Hegel, the subject of lack in Lacan-->desire/drive) this seems to me it makes it strictly, a question of ontology, of the foundation. so i am curious about your distinction of biopolitics as ontology and biopolitics as your designation as "too little" (attending to life processes) and which one you identify as the prevailing biopolitics useful for analyzing this relationship of drive to biopolitics, or if you prefer/privilege one over the other.

so i guess i am inclined to make the argument that biopolitics is drive (at work) and I take it you would take issue with this? I understand you make the distinction btn biopolitics reigning over organic life (albeit for good reason, using biopolitics to analyze neoliberalism is really not entirely appropriate) but isn't the dead life of capital also part of life? in other words, as i see it, drive enables/makes possible biopolitics, and this is because i see it as a problem of the ontological- negative constitution of the subject (of lack).

thanks again, i appreciate your comments.

[Jodi]

thanks for your comment; sorry for the delayed response. Your read of Homo Sacer is really interesting. I hadn't really thought of bare life as an image/figure for drive because it seems so much a remnant/remainder. In Agamben's account it's almost inert. But maybe I'm looking at bare life too much in terms of the Musselmann or overcomatose patient rather than as the wolfman. Also, if drive is the repercussion of a blocked/failed/captured demand, then this starts to make sense in terms of sovereignty.

Biopolitics as mirror image--I'm a bit less keen on this metaphor (probably because of lacanian mirror stage but also because of limits of idea of reflection). What about drive as structure of biopolitics? My hesitation, though, could be because I prefer Foucault's more historical version of biopolitics--I don't agree that sovereignty has essence that is the same throughout all of history. So, this is where we likely diverge in our approaches--you are interested in thinking through this qua ontology. So, I think that it has a history and that the history can be read via drive/reflexivity. So too little and too much are not just right!

So I'd say that drive structures biopolitics; I'm not sure if this is the same as your 'make possible'. I take the subject of lack to be a product of language but am not willing to make an ontological statement here because I take ontology to refer to the Real and nothing is lacking in the Real.