Penelope Deutscher: "Biopolitics'" - Response by Michael Uhall
Thursday, October 6, 2016
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by Roman Friedman
[On October 4, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted the lecture "Biopolitics’" as part of the Fall Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. The speaker was Penelope Deutscher, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern U. Below is a response to the lecture from Michael Uhall, Political Science.]
Foucault and the Necropolitics of Reproduction
Written by Michael Uhall (Political Science)
Typically speaking, the concept of biopolitics gets
invoked in the context of its largely negative usage in Foucault’s theorization
of the term. For Foucault, the term refers to the manifold ways in which
political power affects, and is affected by, the bodily and material conditions
that inform and subtend the political, but especially insofar as politics takes
the alteration, management, or production of those conditions to be its
specific objective. Foucault describes a shift in the mode of political power, then,
or, rather, the emergence of a new kind of political power – called biopower –
that largely overtakes and transforms political power conceived as mere
sovereignty. On Foucault’s analysis, politics today is largely biopolitics –
sometimes called the politics of life itself . Biopolitics takes its object to be the
administration or regulation of the body and the body politic alike, precisely
as bodies to be disciplined and populations to be managed and securitized.
(Fig. 1)
As Penelope Deutscher argues in her talk, however, it is very important
to avoid disaggregating and reducing the terms and possibilities of Foucault’s analytical
framework into overly periodized categories. In other words, it is far too
simplistic to sketch the historical trajectory that Foucault recreates in terms
of a fundamental discontinuity between an epoch in which sovereignty functions
as the dominant form of political power and the epoch in which biopower
dominates. To the contrary, as Deutscher notes, quoting from Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population (8): “There is not the legal age, the
disciplinary age, and then the age of security. Mechanisms of security do not
replace disciplinary mechanisms, which would have replaced juridico-legal
mechanisms. In reality you have a series
of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques themselves change and
are perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in
which what above all changes is the
dominant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation
between juridico-legal mechanisms,
disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security.”
(Fig. 2)
For Deutscher,
then, Foucault’s refusal to periodize overly in his work lets us see the
various ways in which both biopower and sovereign power not only inform and
interpenetrate each other, but also how these conflicting modes of power
inflect and produce cultural formations or functional structures (i.e., dispositifs) in all their actual complexity,
difficulty, and irresolution.
It is precisely
here that Deutscher effects an intervention in the discourse of reproductive
politics. On the one hand, she identifies the degree to which much of the post-Foucauldian
theorization of biopolitics tends to foreground necropolitics, or thanatopolitics
– that is, the tendency for biopolitics, ostensibly committed to the
maximization of vitality in a population, to become its opposite, effecting
broadly eugenicist programs intended to extirpate all life conceived as sick,
undesirable, or weak. Even a cursory overview of the literature shows how prominent
this emphasis is (e.g., in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer or in Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”).
On the other hand, given the many ways in which reproductive politics appear to
fall well within the purview of the biopolitical, why, Deutscher asks, is there
not more critical attention given to how the biopolitics of reproduction
becomes imbricated with the “powers of death” Foucault so often foregrounds in
his analyses?
(Fig. 3)
Deutscher
employs an illuminating example of precisely such a place in which
necropolitics, reproductive rights, and various figurations of sovereignty
become entangled together – namely, in the visual rhetorics of anti-abortion
billboards and roadside displays (see Figure 1). Here we can start to see the
degree to which challenged, fantasmatic, multiple, and waning sovereignties get
articulated and imputed to various subjects in various ways, as well as how
discourses and dispositifs of affect,
animality, criminality, motherhood, racialization, responsibility, and
statistical enumeration traverse the contested political site: a site that is
ostensibly coextensive with the body of the mother as such.
Particularly in
the context of how abortion gets racialized in many of these billboards, it
seems that Deutscher has put her finger on a very important and prescient example
of just how biopolitics and necropolitics intertwine so as to inform, and be
informed by, parallel and related discourses. In Figures 2-4, we can see how falsely
affected concern for the black subject gets performed visually by means of deploying
remarkably racist and storied rhetorics of animality (“Black Children Are An
Endangered Species”), aggressive challenges to the legitimacy of black motherhood
as such (“The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American Is in the Womb”),
and implicit appeals to violence as stereotypically imputed to predominantly
black communities (“End the Violence”). It is as if the only concern for people
of color is when they are not yet born, as if white supremacy vocalizes itself
quite explicitly in the following dictum: We care for you as long as you are
not yet born, while you can still be used as a weapon against your communities
and parents. After birth, you simply become our enemy again, no longer a weapon
to be used in the slow-motion genocide being visited upon communities of color,
but, now, only a target for systematic police brutality and harassment, subject
to degraded and discontinued social services.
(Fig. 4)
Perhaps
perversely, this brings to mind a nightmarish illustration by the Swiss artist
H. R. Giger – “Birth Machine Babies” (Figure 5) – in which the fetal form,
environed in the firing chamber of some monstrous firearm, gets represented as
a bullet, simultaneously an instrument for killing and a rather strange sort of
subject whose brief existence gets figured entirely in terms of its
weaponization.
(Fig. 5)
More generally,
Deutscher also draws our attention to some methodological principles or
suggestions drawn from how Foucault, in fact, articulates his analyses. First,
she argues, it is possible not only to read Foucault better by means of
attending more carefully and closely to the historical and theoretical contradictions
he emphasizes, but also to employ the categories and terms he provides us with
to more provocative ends. In other words, the Foucauldian frame functions not
just to show us how our subject positions are invalidated by their implication in
various states of affairs (e.g., structural injustices). Perhaps more
importantly, however, it enables us to articulate and examine the complexity of
the world in which we are acting and reacting.
As Deutscher emphasizes, all modes of power are always
already multimodal. A hand raised to another person in care can be read not
only as a gesture of care, but also as a gesture of the assumption of right, or
of appropriation. Indeed, such a gesture might well be both of these things at
the same time – both care and appropriation, equally and incommensurably. This
is because any given mode of power traverses multiple registers, just as it is
traversed by multiple temporalities. As Deutscher notes, we all-too-often
expect a phenomenon we encounter to be one thing. We expect this from our
objects of study, but we also expect it from our theorists (such as Foucault).
To the contrary, she suggests, awareness of the multiple modes of power that
transect any given site of interest makes possible modes of productive
disruption that otherwise might remain inaccessible to us. This is as equally
true for our objects of study as it is for the theorists we employ.
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