Biopolitics
Page 2
Thus ecology, the planning of the land, the production and the exploitation of natural resources, drainage, demography, eugenics, sustainable development, hygiene, health and athletic programs for the masses, anthropology, population genetics, human biology, past and above all future natural history, are issues that in the twenties and thirties of last century suddenly rose to the political forefront, ignored as much by traditional liberal regimes as by the Ancien Régime, but which the Communist (for as long as they lasted) and pro-American postwar regimes however had to confront. This they effectively did, but according to just that moralistic, short-term, vulgarly propagandistic, economically interested, impracticably neoprimitivistic and ideologically biased logic that continues to this day.
Today’s positions on these questions have become a litmus paper to identify each and everyone’s “true” ideological affiliation. All personal choices are not equally meaningful. That two town councillors or two journalists agree on the colour that should cover the manholes in the commune of Orgonzuolo does not say much about each man’s fundamental ideological position. On the contrary, biopolitical questions have this in common with the great questions of international politics that they sharply divide, for instance, those who genuinely adopt alternative positions to those of the prevailing ideology, and those who have finally surrendered to the same, especially in its “rightwing” variety.
However almost everyone agrees that the “biopolitical revolution” that is impending, or rather that is already underway, therefore represents the emergence of a new paradigm which we are all some way or other forced to face.[13]
The postmodern, or, to use the language of Guillaume Faye, archeofuturistic[14] vision, which in its embryonic stages already served as the basic inspiration of overhumanism in the beginning of the 20th century and of its diverse progeny, does not automatically yield definitive, readymade solutions or answers to the questions dealt with in this book. They represent above all a different approach, a position that goes beyond and contradicts the still prevailing “humanist” biases, and wholly accepts the challenges posed in order to integrate them into a possible collective fate. This instead of denying them in the totally starry-eyed hope of turning back the clock or shifting the responsibility onto impersonal mechanisms (the sacred logic of the market, individualistic micro-hedonism, abstract legalistic rules, entropic trends) one hopes sufficiently benevolent to consent to our survival as a species inside a more or less tolerable context.
Naturally all this relates to a more general reflection on technology as the characterising element of our species, and this especially within the particular perspective our culture projects upon it, above all in its present phase.[15]
Such considerations underline how the essence of technology has nothing technical: it is for man a “mode of unveiling” in the Heideggerian sense, a relation-to-Being. In this perspective, precisely today, when man perceives and realises the alienating and reifying dimension of our technological society and experiences the “fulfilment of metaphysics,” that is of the oblivion of Being, man is already under the influence of an “other” dimension, that takes him to the threshold of the ontological mystery. “Heidegger, for example, from the beginning of his reflection highlights how the Dasein, the being-in-the-world, means for man to ‘take care of things’, to manipulate and transform them according to his needs. Relating to other living beings and to the environment that surrounds him means for man having the possibility to understand and act upon the fundamental rules of natural processes. And technology is a ‘project’ which ‘disposes’ of the entities and transforms them into objects of calculation and manipulation.”[16]
Thus, according to Heidegger, “that which at the dawn of Ancient Greece was thought or poeticised is still present today, so much so that its essence, still closed to itself, is before us and approaches us from all sides, above all where we least expect it, meaning within the reign of modern technology, which is totally foreign to antiquity and yet finds therein its essential origin.”[17]
“From this perspective,” admits Maria Paola Fimiani, “the neo-ancient undertones of contemporary thought show a momentous uprooting.”[18]
The Form (Gestalt) of the Worker of Ernst Jünger typically represents the historical avatar of this renewed rupture.[19] On this, Alain de Benoist, after having mentioned the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, remarks:
To mobilise means to “to be ready, to make ready,” in the sense in which a soldier makes himself ready for war. But it also means to render mobile, to put in motion. How then will the Worker mobilise the world and confront “antiquated” modes of existence? He will mobilise the world by means of technology, the technology that is of itself the cause of “total mobilisation.” And, through being used this way, technology receives at once its full meaning…According to Jünger, only the Worker entertains a “real” relation with technology: he alone is capable of an authentic relationship with “the total character of Work,” which is identical to existing in the sense of the will to power. Technology is not only “the symbol of the Figure of the Worker,” but represents moreover the manner (Art und Weise) in which this Figure mobilises the world. Technology’s true reason does not reside in “the acceleration of progress,” but in the intensification of power: technology constitutes “the most powerful and least discussible instrument of total revolution.[20]
In addition, this kind of idea had already permeated European artistic and intellectual circles with the great “manifestos” of Marinetti’s Futurist movement.[21] The currents themselves of Italian Actual Idealism,[22] with their insistence on the idea of autoctisis, “self-constitution” – and on the interpretation of man’s presence in the world as a (self-)creating act of the mind that asserts itself through positing an object, which is the necessary condition of its actions but cannot be separated from it, with the consequent coincidence of thought with action that moulds and organises – outlining journeys whose convergence in the Faustian and “activist” sense is not very hard to recognise.[23]
Similarly,
for Gehlen, man is naturally social, but also naturally technical, since the cultural world which constitutes the house in which he is at ease is a world that can evolve and be built only by means of technological intervention. […] Man, who is biologically deficient in his struggle against animals that are better adapted and specialised, is nevertheless capable of unexpected performances and unsuspected activity, although Gehlen refuses to ascribe these aptitudes to a divine sparkle, an immortal soul imprinted by God on his favourite creature. In elementary anthropology there is not more place for divinity, and hence it is technological man who, with his sole force, is capable of overcoming necessity and projecting himself into the reign of freedom. Gehlen’s anthropological thinking comes near to the teaching that wants to make of man the being capable of construing his own future. It is the freedom to determine his own destiny that compensates man for all his organic shortcomings, actualising everything that all the other beings, that are not limited by “inadaptation,” “non-specialisation” and “primitivism,” would never be able to build: a “cultural world,” an “artificial environment,” apt to guarantee existence and to satisfy the demands of this most peculiar being that is man. From the manufacturing of the coarsest tools to the elaboration of today’s most sophisticated devices, technology has always aided man to open up to the world, to conquer and rule all of Earth…[24]
Thus, Gehlen concludes, “without a specific environment to which the species is adapted, without an innate scheme of movement and behaviour (and this in animals means “instinct”), through lack then of specific organs and instincts, poor in senses, deprived of weapons, naked, embryonic in his habitus, naturally lacking in confidence, out of his very feelings summoned to act, to the intelligent modification of any natural conditions he may encounter.”[25]
Oswald Spengler adds: “[Inside such a perspective] the struggle between man’s inner nature and the nature outside is no long
er experienced as painful (this is how Schopenhauer and Darwin imagined the struggle for life), but as life’s deep meaning, which ennobles it; thus Nietzsche thought: amor fati. And man belongs to this species.”[26]
On the biopolitical level as well as on other levels, the essence of such a new and different approach, during the last century as well as the one that has barely begun, it is much more often a logic denying the tertium non datur principle, whose bearing can be understood in full especially today.
This means in practice, when debates today appear highly polarised on contrary positions presenting themselves as the two terms of an insuperable alternative, to radically deny these dichotomies; to go beyond the contradiction which appears to sum up a problem’s all possible standpoints; in other words: to cut the Gordian knot, which only exists within the limited perspective of the vision of the world that prevails today. The clashes between “productivists” and ecologists, between believers in alternative healing methods and the worshippers of standard Western medicine, between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists, between abortionists and anti-abortionists, from this perspective often become shallow, foolish, or founded on outdated values, exactly like the 19th century idea that politics should be limited to clashes between “liberalism” and “socialism,” or “secular” and “clerical,” or “conservative” and “progressive.”
From a postmodern point of view, such outdated dialectics are replaced by different analyses, which in practice are inevitably founded on our current knowledge, on contingent positions and on options that are to a certain extent arbitrary, but that reflect a constant break with the logic of modernity and its humanist-egalitarian roots.
These analyses can of course be expressed in political stands, the concrete applications of which may still today appear to many people, if not downright intolerable, at least incomprehensible.
From such a perspective, the “major moral issue” raised by IVF, for instance, which stirred one of the greatest “ideological clefts” ever to be witnessed inside the Italian Parliament, could legitimately be seen as a typical non-problem, since generally speaking anything that contributes even minimally to the number and quality of babies born in the community is welcome. Beyond monotheistic biases (but also beyond the more or less individualistic and narcissistic wishes of “aspiring mothers,” who find their supporters among the indiscriminate defenders of these practices[27]) it is this balance alone that matters, and not the number of “souls” expected to ascend to the Heavenly Realms.[28] Hence, what really matters is not IVF or cloning, but how reproduction techniques are used in practice; and today it is this area that, if anything, witnesses an “ethical Wild West,” and certainly not the perspective that a radical referendum could ever entirely abolish the scandalous, tartuffian and Christian-democratic legislation that was introduced in 2002 through the influence of “bioethical” lobbying[29] and the massive mobilisation of the Catholic church against the indifference and disinformation of the majority.
Similarly, the real question in matters of abortion could be considered the one of if and when abortion might be a duty, rather than exclusively concentrating on its consideration as a right, having essential regards to choices that are mainly economic and hedonistic, and only for the biological mother at that.[30]
Furthermore, from this perspective, the problem of protecting and valuing the environment reveals itself inseparable from the problem already mentioned about the significance of technology, and of the technological control of the environment by a political will relative to the collective project of a given fate, but certainly not with irenic neo-luddisms or flights into a primitivism both unrealistic and suicidal, nor with a minimalist “upkeep” of appearances required for the development of the Market and of Universal Progress.
Conversely, the terms in which all such questions are discussed today often do not even make sense for someone who stands neither “here” nor “there” in the field of humanist philosophy, but who with respect to the latter simply finds himself elsewhere.
2 .Overhumanism and the “third man”
Biopolitical developments compel contemporary civilisation to face “inhuman” challenges on its way to becoming global. Refusing to confront them by passing on the responsibility to impersonal market mechanisms, or trying to deny them through typical reflexes of repression, prohibition and suppression, is precisely what leads, as we shall see, to “dehumanising” scenarios. Only consciously tragic and overhuman choices can oppose such prospectives: the qualitative leap of a new beginning through which we take control of our own destiny “for a thousand years,” indeed for entire eras.
The turning point that the biopolitical revolution, among other things, represents has been anticipated in several reflections from the beginning of the 20th century, and expanded on by authors like Arnold Gehlen or Giorgio Locchi,[31] who outline a “practical anthropology” of human types, with corresponding different cultural models, that refer both different to historical phases and to different civilisations which, until recently, still coexisted to some extent.[32]
In this vision we find above all the “first man,” the immediate product of primary hominisation, of the advent of language, of hunting-gathering societies, of shamanic magic that allow him to identify with models borrowed from the environment in which he is immersed and so to compensate for his natural deficiencies and to take advantage of his ethological plasticity. Such aspects socially survive successive changes and continue to be embodied to this day, for example in Australian aborigines or in the “non-negroid” indigenous populations of equatorial and eastern Africa (Pygmies, Koi-san).
Always along these lines, the emersion would have taken place for the first time, after hundreds of thousands of years, some time after the last ice age, and in yet another grandiose stage of the project of self-domestication that describes the adventure of our species, the “second man.” This Second Man is the man of the Neolithic revolution, of agriculture, of politics, of religion, of the division of labour, of what has come to be called the “pyric technology,” of great Spenglerian cultures. At the time of the second man, the “natural environment” has now become a cultural environment for good. In fact, not only is the natural environment from now on shaped and influenced by man’s presence but the specifically human factor has become inextricably woven into the purely biological data in a combined action, which affects single individuals as much as it affects the selective pressures forging their genetic lineages.
In parallel, as Gehlen remarks, “in this world, the fact that matters of survival become increasingly independent from the random and unpredictable nature of what happens to make itself immediately available, as well as the liberation from endless quest and hunt for food, must have brought with them a new sense of existential security and disclosed entirely new spiritual horizons.”[33]
Already Spengler wrote:
History’s pace dramatically accelerates. First, the millennia barely counted, now every century matters. What has happened? If we examine more in depth this new universe of human activities, we shall see before long very intricate and complicated connections. All these techniques mutually imply one another. The breeding of domestic animals demands cultivation of fodder; the sowing and harvest of edible plants require the presence of animal transportation that in turn necessitates the building of covers and enclosures for the animals; every kind of construction requires the manufacturing and handling of building materials, roads, animal and water transportation. What in all this is spiritually transforming? Answer: the systematic collective action. […] The new processes demand a long time, sometimes even years – it suffices to think of the long interval between the moment the trees are felled and the moment the wooden ship sails off – and also require large spaces. The new procedures break down into a precisely ordinated series of single acts, and sets of activities that take place one next to the other. These collective procedures presuppose, as an indispensable tool, language.”[34]
O
n the other hand, as we have seen, the “first man,” at both an individual and a social level, entirely survives in the Second Man, who does not per se represent a “hierarchical stage” with respect to the other. On the contrary, the ways of the ruling classes inside societies of the Second Man often mirror “archaic” lifestyles, artificially reproduced or maintained in more or less idealised forms, precisely because of, and thanks to, excess resources generated by changes in how the rest of the population lives: the king’s park does not consist of cultivated fields and densely scattered farms, but of basically uninhabited game preserves and gardens[35]. The Second Man’s mastery over the world does not in fact belong to whoever “invents” agriculture[36] for example, but to those who know how to master and culturally integrate the new modes of living into a superior synthesis.[37]
“The verbally conducted enterprise,” Spengler remarks, “is correlated with a huge loss of ‘freedom’, of the ancient freedom of predators, both for the rulers and for those who are ruled. The one and the other become, spiritually and morally, body and soul, members of a greater unit. This is what we call organisation. It is the solidification of active life into solid forms, the very condition of any kind of enterprise. With collective action one takes the decisive step from organic existence to organised existence, from life in natural groups to life in artificial groups, from horde and herd to people, race, class and State.”[38]
Giorgio Locchi writes:
Having learned [with the “first man”] what “runs” him, man now seeks to ‘run’ animals and plants according to his needs and wishes. With social animals, he would assume a directing role and substitute himself for the leader of the herd. In the same way, those who have reached a superior level of awareness, because they correctly understand “magical connections,” become an aristocracy in their own society, which then asserts its own sovereignty. Afterwards, religion represents the ideological system that will make it possible to “bind together” [re-ligere] society, and to subject the masses to a given influence. […] In parallel to the “domestication of the living world” by man, taken as a whole, the “domestication” of the masses by an élite is taking place, that of the magic man by the religious man. […] This “transition” in which the Neolithic revolution consists, and of which today we are seeing the closure,[39] has a fundamental importance. It is not too hard to recognise here what the Bible calls “the expulsion from earthly paradise,” Karl Marx “the end of the primitive communist society,” Sigmund Freud “the killing of the father” and finally Lévi-Strauss “the separation of Nature from Culture.”[40]