ARTicles
May 01, 2005
Nettime — Sovereignty and Biology
| By Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacke Sovereignty and Biology I Political thought has long used the body as a metaphor for political organization. Plato analogizes the political order of the polis with the biological order of the body, and in doing so medicalizes politics. After having spent the majority of the work discussing the constitution of a just political order, the Republic turns to the forces of dissolution or decomposition which threaten the body politic. Primary among these are the descent from concerns of justice, to concerns of wealth (oligarchy) and concerns of appetites (democracy). Though economic health and basic necessities are central to the proper functioning of the polis, it is their excess which creates the “illness of a city” [1]. For Plato, if oligarchy represents the excessive rule of wealth for its own sake, then “democracy,” in his terms, represents the imbalance between desire and freedom, in which the latter is always the legitimation for the former. The combination of the two result in the diseased body politic: “When [oligarchy and democracy] come into being in any regime, they cause trouble, like phlegm and bile in a body. And it’s against them that the good doctor and lawgiver of a city, no less than a wise beekeeper, must take long-range precautions, preferably that they not come into being, but if they do come into being, that they be cut out as quickly as possible, cells and all” [2]. This same logic–a kind of medical sovereignty–is played out in mechanistic terms in Hobbes’ De Corpore Politico, and in organicist terms in chapters XIII-X of Rousseau’s The Social Contract. It is tempting to suggest that our current era of genetics and informatics has influenced in some way the view of a globalized body politic. Thus, our question: if the understanding of the body changes, does this is also require a change in the understanding of the body politic? Sovereignty and Biology II In one of his lectures at the Coll=E8ge de France, Foucault suggests = that contemporary analyses of power need to develop alternative models to the tradition of juridical sovereignty: “In short, we have to abandon the model of Leviathan, that model of an artificial man who is at once an automaton, a fabricated man, but also a unitary man who contains all real individuals, whose body is made up of citizens but whose soul is sovereignty” [3]. Foucault himself acknowledges the imbrication of sovereignty with the more bottom-up paradigm of discipline. At the same time that disciplinary measures are developed within institutions, a “democratization of sovereignty” takes place, in which the people hold the right to auto-discipline, to accept and in fact demand modes of auto-surveillance in the name of a biological security. But the reference to Hobbes that Foucault makes is significant, for it raises a fundamental issue of contemporary political thought: Is it possible to conceive of a body politic, without resort to the paradigm of absolute sovereignty? In other words, can a political collectivity exist without having to transfer its rights over to a transcendent body politic? One of the ways that sovereignty maintains its political power is continually to identify a biological threat. Giorgio Agamben points to the “state of exception” created around what he calls “bare life.” Bare life, life itself, the health of the population, the health of the nation–these are the terms of modern biopolitics. By grounding political sovereignty in biology, threats against the biological body politic, in the form of threats against the health of the population, can be leveraged as ammunition for building a stronger sovereign power. Foucault is just as explicit. Medicine, or a medicalization of politics, comes to mediate between the “right of death” and the “power over life”: “The development of medicine, the general medicalization of behavior, modes of conduct, discourses, desires, and so on, is taking place on the front where the heterogeneous layers of discipline and sovereignty meet” [4]. Abandoning the Body Politic There are two states of the body politic. One is the constitutive state, where the body politic is assembled, as Hobbes notes, through “acquisition or institution.” This kind of body politic is built upon a supposed social contract, or at the very least a legitimatized basis of authority in order to ensure the “security of life.” The other state of the body politic is the body politic of dissolution, the source of fear in virtually every treatise on modern political thought: Machiavelli’s plebs or Hobbes’ mob rule. Even Locke and Rousseau, who authorize revolution under special conditions when the contract is violated, still express an ambivalence towards this dissolutive state of the body politic. Every political treatise which expresses the first state of body politic thus also devotes some furtive, discomforting sections to the second state of body politic. In some cases this dissolutive body politic is simply chaos, a return to the “state of nature.” In other cases, it is a force that is synonymous with the sovereignty of the people, as it is in Spinoza. Whatever the case, each expression of a constitutive and constituted body politic also posits a dissolutive body politic as its dark side. But there is a problem: the two types of body politic feed into each other through the mechanism of war. We can reiterate Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz: politics is war by other means. Whether the ideal war of the state of nature, or the actual war that continually threatens the civil state, war seems to be the driving force of the two body politics. “In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war,” wrote Foucault [5]. In this light, perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “abandoned being” can be read as a call to abandon the body politic. For Nancy, abandoned being is both the leaving-behind of the being/non-being distinction, as well as an assertion of a new fullness, the fullness of desertion: “If from now on being is not, if it has begun to be only its own abandonment, it is because this speaking in multiple ways is abandoned, is in abandonment, and it is abandon (which also to say openness). It so happens that ‘abandon’ can evoke ‘abundance'” [6]. Abandoning the body politic not only means leaving behind–or deserting–the military foundations of politics, but it also means a radical opening of the body politic to its own abandon. When the body politic is in abandon, it opens onto notions of the common, the open, the distributed. “What is left is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks” [7]. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker + + + [1] Plato, Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 222 (VIII, 544c-d). [2] Ibid., p. 243 (VIII, 564b-c). [3] Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended” (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 34. [4] Ibid., p. 39. [5] Ibid., p. 50. [6] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1993), p. 36. [7] Ibid., p. 39 |
