The body no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them. The biomolecular and organic structure of the body is the last hiding place of these biopolitical systems of control. This moment contains all the horror and exaltation of the body’s political potential.
Paul Preciado – Testo Junkie
TESTOGEL 50mg is a transparent or slightly opalescent and colorless gel packaged in 5-gram sachets. It contains testosterone, a naturally secreted male hormone. This drug is recommended for illnesses related to a deficiency of testosterone. Before beginning a treatment with TESTOGEL, a definiceny in testosterone must be established by a series of clinical signs (decline of secondary sexual characteristics, changes in physical constitution, asthenia, a decrease in libido, erectile dysfunction, etc.) This drug has been prescribed to you for your own use and must not be given to others.
Attention: TESTOGEL should not be used by women.
In his article ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Gilles Deleuze reconfigures Foucault’s notion of disciplinary societies. Written in 1990, Deleuze had seen a change in the structures of power that Foucault had spent a career analysing within the framework of the nation-state. Deleuze’s analysis of these changes is far from sympathetic – a charge that is frequently levied against Foucault after his series of lectures in 1979, titled The Birth of Biopolitics. Borrowing his terminology from the schizophrenic worlds of writer William S. Burroughs, Michael Hardt observes how in Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’, “the structured tunnels of the mole are replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake.”2 Everywhere he looked, Deleuze had seen the historical enclosures of discipline in flux. The walls that had previously partitioned the social body were dissolved; the institutions that had hitherto regulated its control and surveillance, embodied.
Looking to the recent work of Paul B. Preciado – in particular, the seminal work of auto- theory, Testo Junkie – I will elaborate on ideas concerning the contemporary formulation of societies of control with regards to Foucault’s analysis of state biopower. As we shall see, this manoeuvre will first require an appropriation of Foucauldian biopower through a bio- politicisation of gender. Further, following Preciado, we will analyse the molecularisation of biopower within the bio-politicisation of gender that emerged in the new post-war sexual apparatus. Finally, I will consider the implications of a molecular form of biopower for the agency of micro-political warfare. For this, I will turn to the work of Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, paying particular attention to their conception of a Body without Organs and the molecular, intensive nature of different subject-becomings and the (non)production of identity.
Anatomo-politics: the historical emergence of biopower
According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of the nation-state in the ruins of Medieval Europe came with an ironic twist. The death of the Machiavellian prince ushered the way for a new governmentality of bureaucratic control. Enlightenment-born social sciences saw a rapid proliferation of disciplines, institutions and architectures across every aspect of the social body. And as the world’s newly formed nations entered into a nascent world economy, the new technologies of social organisation entered parturition. The forgoing charge of despotic rule – the “right to take life or let live”3 – was inverted, reappropriated and injected into the new modifications of power integral to emergent disciplinary societies. In this movement, the legislative and absolute power of the sovereign was superseded by technologies of power engendered through disciplinary enclosures: “The code they come to define is not that of law but that of normalization.”4 And for Foucault, this normalisation enacted a total codification of the human body – a Gestell, or Bergsonian ‘mechanisation’ of the body’s corporeality. So much so, that not even Borges could have envisioned such an enveloping cartography: a mapping and machination of entire populations, soldering each of their joints to the machine of social organisation, extracting a surplus from each of its individual units; an “anatomo-politics of the human body”,5 engineered in each case to limit the body’s novelty and affect, localising and standardising its specific potentialities.
By registering and correcting the social body, not only were the population utilised and made productive, but a segregation and social stratification was instrumentalised for an efficiency of power present at every level of social relation. This was articulated through a multiplicity of “minor processes [which] gradually produce the blueprint for a more general method”6 of subjective interpellation and surveillance. 
A self-regulation of the body – through the body. However, the refrain and consignment of disciplinary societies did not exist alone as the new form of governing power in capitalist relations. Alongside the emergence of disciplinary enclosures Foucault distinguished a more general principle of modern regulatory control, one that was necessary for the accumulation of resources and wealth at the nation- state level: the management and production of the labour of labour-power per se: life.
Like disciplinary mechanisms, these mechanisms are designed to maximize and extract forces, but they work in very different ways. Unlike disciplines, they no longer train individuals by working at the level of the body itself. [...] It is therefore not a matter of taking the individual at the level of individuality but, on the contrary, of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity; it is, in a word, a matter of taking control of life and the biological processes of man- as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized.7
The emergence of ‘biopolitics’ – or the intervention of state power into the processes and functions of life itself – has multiple genealogies. For Foucault, biopolitical mechanisms assert themselves under the new “specificity and plurality of the state”8 particular to the political philosophy of Raison d’État.9 For later, post-Foucauldian political theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, the logic of biopower and the notion of ‘bare life’ has existed ever since the dawn of antiquity.10 Whilst for the Autonomist feminist historian Silvia Federici, biopower emerges in the radically gendered context of the Witch hunts, of which occurred simultaneously “with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [and] the beginning of the slave trade.”11 What is agreed, is that the emergence and sustainability of capitalist nations relies fundamentally on a formulation of power structures rooted in the biopolitical management of the population. This bio-economy of power relations – de-individuated, yet entirely personal – sublated previous epistemologies of political subjectivity with a system of aggregation, patterns and probability. The bio- politicization of politics, or for Foucault, political economy tout court, transformed the subject of right within the theory of sovereignty into the ‘man’ of the art of governance of population. The extent to which we can say, there is no political economy without population. No capitalism, without biopolitics.
1 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013): 79.
2 Micheal Hardt, ‘The Global Society of Control’, in Discourse Vol.20 No.3 (Fall 1998): 139.
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1990): 136.
4 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures,’ in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 44.
5 History of Sexuality, 139.
6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991): 138- 9.
7 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin Books, 2004): 246-7.
8 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 5.
9 As Foucault observes, the prosperity and consolidation of European nations depended on an “external self-limitation”i of state-power. Superseding the theology of imperialism was a mutually constituted assurance of inter-state competition; nation-states aimed to protect themselves from the dialectical tension of empire and death typified in the Roman quest for global hegemony. However, the population crises of the Medieval Ages and the early 17th Century posed a significant threat to the early development of nation-states. A combination of war, famine and plague had decimated European populations, hindering the necessary processes of accumulation integral to Raison d’État (reason of State). The progress of the embryonic capitalist states therefore depended on what Eli Hecksher called “an almost fanatical desire to increase population.”ii This power, which in contrast to the ‘subtractive’ regimes of power that had previously existed under the rule of sanguinity, now emerged as a generative force. It took an active interest in the lives of its people, their biological and psychological processes. Replacing the absolute power of the monarch, was according to Foucault, a new technicity of power: exerting control not through bloody repression, but through the production, regulation and engineering of the socio-biological body of the population.
i Birth of Biopolitics, 6.10 Such as in the demarcations between politically recognised (bios) and bare forms of life (zoe); ‘the camp’ is Agamben’s most vivid contemporary example of this.
ii Eli Hecksher quoted in Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2009): 88.
Read on ... here!
