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Can psychoanalysis think biopolitics?
What might a psychoanalytic approach to biopolitics look like?
In her contribution to Reading Seminar XX, Suzanne Barnard considers the way that an object missing from its proper position appears outs of place, as an enjoying substance or organ without boundaries, that is with no internal relation to its organism. This organ without a body, then, contrasts with the disciplined Oedipal body, the body produced through the inscription of proper zones for libidinal pleasure, the body capable of work and pleasure, the restricted, desiring body. In contemporary communicative capitalism, this bodiless organ can become a site of enjoyment, can take the form of objet petite a, circulating and swarming and providing little sites of enjoyment that take the place of and remind us of enjoyment's lack. Sure, they are fun! But, they aren't the Real Thing. At any rate, it is against this background of teaming organs, of excessive little a's floating around, that our efforts at community, alliance, and, yes, violence, segregation, and elimination take place.
What psychoanalysis contributes, then, to biopolitics, is a sense of unproductive, undisciplined bodies spotted by enjoyment. It suggests a biopolitics counter to the productive, desiring biopolitical multitude of Hardt and Negri. The roving (Rove-ing) organs are opportunities of attachment to waste and spectacle, to moments of enjoyment that extend not to productive, loving, new, contestatory or alternative community but to subjected, consumerist, hate-filled confirmations of fear.
But at least they feel good.
By Jodi | July 11, 2005 in Psychoanalysis | Permalink
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Comments
But isn't this necessarily a dialectical contribution (not productive, but instead its other!)? To me, and I'm thinking through your characterization only, without the benefit of Barnard's work, but the idea of a "biopolitics counter to the productive, desiring biopolitical multitude" could just as well be thought as a biopolitics "constitutive" of productivity through the provision of its theoretical outside.
Either way, it seems like a fetishization of productivity, and in that way, the dialectic seems to push towards the same biopolitical regimentation that one might be trying to avoid (alright, at least that I wouldn't mind thinking differently). This is, more or less, Baudrillard's argument re: Marxism and its fetishization of labor value during the 70s, and subsequently his argument against Foucault and Psychoanalysis, each of which have similar fetishes at work during the "writing" of that which they would overcome.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2005 6:32:57 PM
Thanks for your comment, Kenneth. My idea was to counter H&N's productive, desiring multitude by pointing out failures of productivity and emphasizing consumption and waste. If this biopolitics is constitutive of a kind of productivity (say, of gas guzzling SUVs, plastic water bottles, and trendy clothes) then it doesn't seem to be the kind of productivity H&N have in mind, that is, it isn't one, say, that the multitude can embrace and live in, it isn't sustainable or productive of ways of being together or of becoming that one might link to challenging empire or bringing into being something better.
I'm not convinced that to speak of productivity is to fetishize it--that seems too quickly and easily reductive.
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 11, 2005 8:08:29 PM
Yep, let me think about the reduction some. I certainly don't mean to imply that simply speaking of it is to fetishize it, though I can't blame you for reading me that way. I mean rather that productivity is fetishized when it is intricately tied to "Empire" or biopolitics in a way that requires a dialectical opposition between productivity and its others, which are, in this particular case, the (hints of Bataille) appreciation of waste and expenditure in contrast to the values of productivity. This dialectical relation doesn't seem to me to offer an actual negation, but actually works to bolster those "systems" - like biopolitics and/or Empire, however much those can be differentiated - in that productivity requires waste, if only to provide a metric by which to measure either.
Why I wonder, is biopolitics presumed to be productive? Why is productivity assumed within Empire? What if productivity is a lie, and the system is never productive of anything other than its others, which is to say, never productive of anything but its own systematicity. Zizek defines the fetish as the "embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth," and in it's in this sense that I see productivity sometimes being offered up for fetisihization.
But I don't know. Biopolitics is a tricky concept, and an awkward conceit. So much seems to be represented by the term, from Agamben's Muselmann to Hardt and Negri's Empire, and it's difficult to figure out if the obsession with biopolitics, from Foucault on, isn't symptomatic of some profound cultural condition, or if there really is some sort of shift in treating human being underway. Regardless, the above two paragraphs are my before-bed thoughts, and I'll see if my dreams give me any more insight into the possibility that I'm suffering from a too-quick reduction.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2005 10:33:37 PM
in dreams begin responsibilities....
(remember Eichmann)
Posted by: Troll of Sorrow | Jul 11, 2005 11:36:58 PM
Jodi, I really appreciate this post. Strangely enough, it's helping me to think about Haruki Murakami.
Posted by: Matt | Jul 12, 2005 11:33:18 AM
Thanks, Matt!
Kenneth: well put--I have a better sense of your point now. And, it makes me wonder, too, whether the link between biopolitics and productivity is a good one. Foucault is clear on how disciplined bodies become useful. Yet, for him, biopolitics is a way of arranging and governing bodies, we might say of making them classifiable, surveillable, governable, but not necessarily productive (as in discipline). It's as if H & N eliminate the politics in biopolitics--and, actually, maybe I was sloppy here and they are more likely to speak of biopower (?). I'm not sure if this helps at all: it may well be that the issue remains one of productivity and how it is fetishized. If so, then is it possible that my little psychoanalytic gesture still helps explore its limits, but that these need to be understood in the ways you suggest, namely, more dialectical in terms of the limits of fetishized production?
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 12, 2005 1:13:53 PM
Weber of course (psycho)analysed this in his study of the spirit of capitalism, qua Calvinist Protestantism. The more successful one is, the better one is predestined by God for a happy afterlife, and so, the paradox goes, the more one works hard to be successful. One's good measure of one's predestination is one's very productivity here-and-now. Capitalism is born, through this ridiculous Lie.
But now, as Zizek notes, a new book must be written, on Zen and the new capitalism. Not only must one be productive, one must be peaceful. One's measure of predestination is not only measured by one's productivity, but by one's vacantness. It's not one vs. the other, but Zen as supplement to Protestant predestination, to a predestination-fetish gone off its rails.
Posted by: RIPope | Jul 12, 2005 10:42:10 PM
But isn't the "productivity" of H & N one that includes waste, such as in the refusal of labor, etc?
Posted by: discard the name | Jul 13, 2005 10:18:43 AM
Refusal--I'm not sure that this is the same as waste; it seems instead like a refusal to cooperate or conform and potentially a refusal to produce; but then this seems to me to conflict with the emphasis on the producing, desiring multitude; it seems more simply like a relation to empire that can then potentially pivot (or is a kind of potential) to something else;
but, maybe there is a better way to capture your insight: like, refusal to recycle, to clean up, refusal to move garbage, refusal to do work (like make clothes or cook dinner) when one can get take away and cheap nearly disposable clothing; and here refusal seems to produce lots of waste, but, again, this wouldn't seem to be the kind of productivity they want to celebrate within the multitude
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 13, 2005 2:58:29 PM
Bataille might be instructive here. Waste is what cannot be sutured into an exchange, an expenditure without a proper anticipation of the return (a return will happen, but it isn't a return already forecast by the transaction itself, and so the transaction cannot properly be termed an exchange). It's not necessarily as easy as refuse and refusal, but it might be as easy as seduction in lieu of production. I doubt it, but it's a possibility.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 13, 2005 4:17:36 PM
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