Biopolitics

by Stefano Vaj

  In fact, the manner in which the Second Man reacts to the history that is opening up to him, and to what arises from this, has lead to further taxonomic distinctions, more specifically:

  - cultures that are true “agents of history,” coinciding in substance with those generated by the Indo-European revolution[41]. These completely take on the historical dimension, and express themselves through the heroic and tragic project of collective forms and destinies that they deliberately and consciously assume;

  - cultures that are “preys of history” (for instance, the great Far-Eastern cultures, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, the pre-Colombians, etc.); it is so hard, however, to unravel the various contacts, exchanges and influences that these cultures underwent with the first, that some authors have speculated that, in general, Indo-European influence and groups played a “triggering” role in terms of imitation, rivalry or original re-interpretation.[42]

  - “cold” cultures, that is, the post-Neolithic cultures that refuse the historical dimension, and retreat into a cultural context assumed once and for all (this is the case of the majority of original sub-Saharan and Amazonian cultures); these are cultures that end up as the “objects of history,” especially of others’ history, when they come into contact with it.

  It should be added that these distinctions are taken up in identical terms by important currents of mainstream anthropology. This is well represented for example by Claude Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues, who extol the merits of “cold cultures,” as well as by large sectors of political environmentalism, which in this respect adheres to traditional right-wing nostalgia of the “never-changing.”

  In the words of Locchi:

  Lévi-Strauss presents the “cold” cultures, often defined as primitive cultures, as a radiant example – or at least one to be viewed with nostalgia – of faithfulness to traditions, to permanence and to Being.[43] Taking up the description Theodor G.H. Strehlow gives us of the daily habits of northern Arandic people, he draws this conclusion: “The Arandic Aborigine blindly respects tradition, remains faithful to the primitive weapons used by his remote ancestors, and the idea of meliorating them does not even cross his mind.” Yet this seductive homily rests on most superficial appearances: it implies a mystified definition of “tradition.” Lévi-Strauss skillfully mixes up the letter and the spirit, the act and the fact, the gesture and its effect. In continuing to use their “primitive weapons”, the Arandic people betray more than respect their “remote ancestors.” In fact they repeat where their ancestors had improvised or invented; mark the step where their ancestors had been advancing; seek shelter in a world made secure, while their ancestors, challenging the unknown, opened up the door to a new world. The Arandic people, “faithful to tradition,” are but the residual fossils of the history of their ancestors.[44] […] The “cold cultures” well deserve to be called the petrified cultural branches, which no longer evolve unless made to do so by external and random “events,” under the pressure of factors foreign to them. They are therefore at the mercy of any variation of their environment that their “program” has not foreseen. In short, they cannot subsist as such except on condition that they no longer encounter the history they have exited. It is for this reason that contact with the Western world is catastrophic to the “cold cultures.” Because still today the white man represents history.

  History, which it would seem the West currently wants to bring to an end, and this at a planetary level.[45]

  In this picture, in fact, a very specific role is represented by the birth in the Middle East of a historical tendency – mythically represented by the scission of Abraham and the foundation of Israel, and prolonged by other monotheistic religions connected in, it must be said, very complex ways to their respective host cultures. This culture, while immersed in history, morally refuses its implications (the “Tower of Babel”) and finds its reason to be in the promise of an eschatological ending thereof, and in an on-going demystification of its works, particularly through an inversion of the concept of the “divine” that goes from being an instrument and projection of human pride and creativity, within the process by which the “second man” takes possession of himself and the world, to a “transcendent” condemnation and relativisation of just that.[46]

  Such a tendency is obviously the one which today, in its secularised and most radical form, enjoys a planetary hegemony, in the guise of the global and mechanistic system of precisely the end of history.[47]

  To its current hegemony, however, the recent opening has taken place that responds with an entirely opposite point of view: that of the impending transition from “historical awareness” to the self-awareness of a “third man.” A transition, in other words, from a merely transformative action of one’s own cultural and natural environment to the full responsibility of a direct self-determination of an environmental context, and of an identity that is also biological, which henceforth can only be through and through artificial – exactly like a park is as artificial as a palace and, just like a palace, can nowadays come to be and to endure only on condition that a human and political will provides for its existence.

  Maria Teresa Pansera writes: “Gehlen compares this profound mutation with the transition experienced by man during the passage from nomadic civilisation to the sedentary civilisation of agriculture. None of this could have taken place without feelings of crisis and insecurity endured by those who found themselves part of a ‘culture in decline’. The historical period in which we are living [similarly] appears to him as a ‘time of transition’ and not as an age henceforth doomed to disappear.”[48]

  The fact that the “Interregnum,” the Zwischenreich, in which we find ourselves completely transcends the sphere of the European political and cultural crisis, is stressed also by a writer far from cultural anthropology like Ernst Jünger: “We find ourselves today at a turning point between two ages, the importance of which is roughly similar to that of the passage between the stone age and the bronze age.”[49]

  A key feature of such a transition is of course the issues we have grouped under the term of “biopolitics,” and which postmodern and overhumanist thinking in Europe have been anticipating for over a century, within the framework of a more general perspective.

  In fact, from the moment in which nature itself tends to be transformed into a purely cultural product, and in which simultaneously “God is dead,” a primordial and Faustian response – that at once revives and transcends the Indo-European attitude to problems posed by the transition to the “second man” – represents (perhaps) the only choice able to steer us toward a more human (meaning, “more-than-human,” that is: overhuman) and not less human or dehumanising outcome.[50]

  Indeed, what is inevitably dehumanising is the outcome of a refusal of the political, aesthetic and existential challenge to which we are exposed, in favour of impersonal mechanisms such as the “Market,” a henceforth totally imaginary “Nature,” or the flimsy prohibitionism of those who, particularly at the extreme right and the extreme left, would prefer to continue burying their head in the sand.

  As Gehlen remarks,

  the industrial revolution, which today is drawing to a close, marks in fact the end of the so-called “advanced cultures,” that prevailed between 3500 BCE until after 1800 CE, and fosters the emergence of a new kind of culture, as yet not well defined. Thinking along these lines, one could indeed come to believe that the “civilised age” as an historical period is about to pass away, if one understands the word “civilisation” in the sense that has been exemplified by the history of the advanced cultures of humanity until today.[51]

  This is immediately understood in terms of a break also at a purely biological level, however little a distinction between “biological” and “cultural” might mean for our species. So Zarathustra preaches: “Each being until now has created something above itself: and you want to travel upstream on this great river and become animals again, instead of surpassing man? What indeed is ape to m
an? A farce, a painful ignominy. Such should man be to the Overman: a laugh, a grievous shame. Until now you have travelled on the path that goes from worm to man, and much of you is still worm.”[52]

  Moreover, this is particularly noticeable in the case of the ecological issue, which can be confronted only via a visionary approach, that in turn implies the recourse to a greater, and not a lesser, degree of technology, and of mastery by man over himself and his environment.[53] If the Gaia hypothesis[54] so dear to “deep ecology” zealots usefully describes the reality of the earth’s ecosystem, it is only Gaia’s/Gea’s grandchild, Zeus, the “electric” god of lightning, who can now manage its legacy.

  Heidegger writes:

  Nietzsche is the first thinker, who, in view of the world history emerging for the first time, asks the decisive question and thinks through its metaphysical implications. The question is: Is man, as man in his nature til now, prepared to assume dominion over the whole earth? If not, what must happen to man as he is so that he may be able to “subject” the earth and thereby fulfill the world of an old testament? Must man, as he is, then, not be brought beyond himself if he is to fulfill this task? […] One thing, however, we ought soon to notice: this thinking that aims at the figure of a teacher who will teach the Superman concerns us, concerns Europe, concerns the whole Earth – not just today, but tomorrow even more. It does so whether we accept it or oppose it, ignore it or imitate it in a false accent.[55]

  Yet all this is reflected in each issue concerning our future, and in particular those pertaining to the knowledge and direct manipulation by man of himself and of the other living species, and consequently of the planetary landscape altogether.

  3 .The Voice of Reaction

  In 1978, at the height of the media success of the movement that will later be called Nouvelle Droite, then keenly interested in subjects such as human ethology, the connection between race and intelligence, evolution, sociobiology, demography, etc. and the noticeable repression, censorship and disinformation of these topics then in place,[56] Albert Jacquard wrote in reaction a booklet with the paradoxical title In Praise of Difference;[57] this text is of great interest, because, although it was written a while ago, it raises many crucial questions and, without actually falsifying the – abundantly quoted – relevant facts, wants them to support a position diametrically opposed to the one presented here.

  We read in the introduction:

  Man is denoted by his will to transform everything around him; his nature is to live artificially. He manipulates the environment in which he lives according to his own ends, to the point of modifying the vegetal and animal species that are useful to him. Founded on ever more accurate knowledge of the mechanisms of the inanimate and the organic worlds, his action has become more and more efficient. This new power, why not use it to reach the most fascinating of all goals: the betterment of Man himself?

  And the author goes on:

  This is a very ancient idea. Mankind is responsible not only for his own moral and spiritual transformation, for his own progress towards a better society, but also for his own biological evolvement. Already the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Greek were anxious to defend their “race” against potential degeneration, to better, if not the whole, at least part of the group, and to arrive at a new Man, endowed with superior powers. The abandonment in the 19th century of “fixist” theories that viewed every species as created separately, once and for all, by God, and the discovery of the process of transmission of biological features from one generation to the next, the gradually refined knowledge of the connection between genetic make and individual traits, have nourished new hopes: could we at last become “new Pygmalions,” able to mould our own species? Beyond these hazy hopes and fears, it is necessary to take stock of what we know, and above all of what we want: what is this really all about?

  It is all too easy here to point out a series of platitudes. To those for whom “Mankind” is a purely abstract concept, and only human beings and the concrete societies which they create have a positive existence, it is hard to imagine that Mankind be responsible for anything, least of all for a “progress” which belongs exclusively to the linearist and providentialist mythology of secularised monotheism, and which today is called into question also in those quarters. The generalisation “Egyptians, Hebrews, Greek” appears as well coarse and arbitrary: as if the reflection of each of these three cultures on their own respective “ethnicity” had ever followed convergent paths! Lastly, it is precisely he who claims the “Greek” and Indo-European legacy as his own roots, and views it as an exemplary origin, who is well aware that the idea of the “New Man” is a… postmodern, not a pre-modern one.

  Having said that, it is hard not to subscribe to such a program, possibly to arrive at conclusions opposite to those of the author.

  A year before another book had come out in the United States, authored by Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, with the title Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human Race.[58] It intended to denounce the threats of a new technology that had begun to be called “genetic engineering.” Among other things, the book predicted that transgenic species, chimeras, clones, test-tube babies, surrogate uteri, human-organ manufacturing and genetic surgery would all be in place before the end of the century; and lent respectability to ideas already circulated by movements such as Science for the People, which, in addition to preaching that intelligence tests and psychometrics in general[59] should be banned from the academic world, proposed in not-too-metaphorical terms to simply blow up the genetics labs.

  The first Italian reflections on these matters expressed rather similar orientations, especially in catholic circles (that set the pace with the issues of birth control, artificial insemination and abortion) and above all among environmentalists, who were about to emerge as a political movement also in that country, with two branches, one represented by associations devoted to protection of the environment, and the other by left-wing militants disappointed in their wait for the revolution. If the “green” parties have mostly remained smallish components of the political left of their respective countries, they nevertheless managed to do away once and for all, especially in Western Europe, with Leninist industrialist enthusiasms of a “Soviet plus electricity” variety and exerted a deep influence as much on communist and socialist parties as on more radical groups.[60]

  At this time, intellectuals with these convictions began to lend an ear to Club of Rome[61] style neo-Malthusianism: millenarism quickly replaced “progressist” optimism in view of a generalised opposition to the supposed threat of “electronuclear fascism,” and the idea that “man should not go beyond certain limits, that he has already done this and that he should therefore take a step back.” This was carried also by the wave of environmental dislocation, the fruit of the “economic miracle” of earlier years and of the energy crisis of the early seventies, which some looked upon as a first sign of an impending dark age.[62]

  This new order of ideas was dubbed “ecologism” in many European languages. Now, the term and concept of “ecology” is of course much older, and was first introduced in everyday language by Ernst Haeckel. In 1968, in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, (English: The History of Creation), Haeckel defined ecology as “the study of the relationship between the living being and the environment that surrounds it”; this definition can still be considered valid if one takes into account the subsequent evolution of the concept of environment.[63] Ecology thus represents a “spatialisation” of biology, that is, the application of methods of interdisciplinary analysis of a given situation, a given place, precise and well-defined, partly physico-chemical (which has come to be called biotope), partly biological (which has come to be called biocenosis).

  This ecological here-and-now, to which has been given the name ecosystem, is not only examined for its characteristics, morphology and components, but also for its evolutionary tendencies, its conditions of equilibrium and non
-equilibrium, its past, how it reacts to changes in some factors, etc.

  This highlights the enormous number of disciplines involved in the study of ecology, from chemistry to climatology, to geology, to meteorology, to paleontology, to all the branches of biology itself, among which genetics, ethology, histology, nutrition, biochemistry, botanic, zoology, agriculture. The data that these disciplines provide are subsequently treated and extrapolated on the basis of a typical systematic analysis. So we recognise in the field of ecology a series of concepts frequently used in all fields that can be described in terms of cybernetics: model, state, history of states, open and closed system, self-regulation, positive and negative feedback, equilibrium, level of abstraction, simulation, etc.