THE SPECTACLE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY*
*THE BIOTECHNOLOGY OF THE SPECTACLE*
*Hotel des Etrangers #7, Spring 2005 * (original in Greek)
by Lia Yoka
Hope-producing political hardware looks as rusty as ever, yet rust
never sleeps. From Berlin to Palestine, a wall is built for a wall that
falls, the Third World War faded into the cries declaring the desperate
triumph of the Fourth with the 1991 Iraq invasion. Each expedition brings
home bitter loot. What is it worth?
The language of the media which confuses genocide with crusade, and
bombardment with humanitarian intervention can hardly think up any
convincing answers. The "end of history" and the "clash of civilizations"
were announced in the same breath. In a final flicker of political radiance,
the Spectacle produced the realization that there was nothing to be said
beyond the end of time and the conflict over space. The Spectacle became its
own insurance company.
For what is the "end of history" if not the very description of the
full-scale occupation by Capital of Time. What is the end of history for the
neo-liberal conception of social evolution if not the desired completion of
the process of colonization at once of populations at large and of
individual bodies, turning every day into productive * durations *and every
body into a sum of recyclable parts?
And what is the alleged "conflict of cultures" if not a series of
violent arrangements of space ownership and access? Any effective resistance
to the blind tumult of capital is labelled "cultural" so that it can be
explained away through a deactivated term, so that it can be blunted by the
logic of perpetual war and economic imposition, the logic that goes beyond
all "culture". After all, the commodity relationship itself, and the
processes by which it spreads spatially and temporally, form the ultimate
"culture of cultures". There is controlled access to everything, control of
borders, control of data circulation, control of resources like water, oil,
knowledge or medicine - how "cultural" is resistance to control?
All agree that security is the main ideological commodity which can
still safely reproduce itself, even more so since 9/11. Security preserves
the sperm of fear within its cryogenic womb. But then, *why all this fun*?
The "Western world" still consumes pornography, takes training courses in
management and self-promotion, campaigns for voting at elections where arty
types like Cicciolina or Reagan have been replaced by fundamentalist
Christians and neo-con ecologists, floods history museums (out of a radical
inability to feel nostalgia for any viable future), joins mass
demonstrations advertized on TV for football, for peace, for the pope, for
Orthodox or Muslim minorites and majorities, goes furious over abortions or
drugs, actively supports the barter of human organs and the pharmaceutical
industry…
The subjects of the Antiterrorist Empire do not cease to piously celebrate
the daily rituals of the capitalist calender, whether they derive from the
old world of Enlightenment ideals, or the even older one of submission to
the priesthood. What kind of apocalypse are they expecting? What is keeping
the societies of surplus value from exploding?
The effective propagandas of democracy, consumerism, or socialism in
the last century just about managed to keep the ideology of the "active
citizen" alive. Their credibility would lose vital points with every
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam or Chernobyl. But at least each camp in the
Cold War had its own distinct rhetoric.
Today, two acts after the curtain call of the Cold War, the language
of the spectacle of terrorism, while never boring or exhausted, can
nevertheless hardly keep reproducing the fear that created it in the first
place. Fear might be productive as a parasite, yet it is sterile when it
cannot feed on a counter-feeling like hope, hate, or greed: hence the
conservative turn. Yet capitalism cannot survive forever on its bygone
glories. It cannot restore the political promises of the old world of the
liberals who talked of freedom of transport and consumption, social mobility
and easy trade, or of the communists who preferred to talk of equality
before the law, mass education, and independence of the people and its
productive classes…*For sheer long-term effectivity and intensity,
traditional political illusions cannot compete with plastic surgery and
brain transplants*.
There is only one promise that carries the magic wand of a unifying
ideology. Its twin roots are the deceptive impression that one can
manufacture the human species in an optimal codification of its ingredients
on the one hand, and the twisted desire to overcome all technical limits to
intervening with life on the other. *Sounds like the swan song of culture:
The fear of death is mingled with a guilty drive for self-destruction.*
It seems the only stable and constant 'content', rather than form, of
images, genetically programmed into the Spectacle, is the *biotic discourse*:
From facelifts to diets, from biometrics to iridology, to cloning and
genetic engineering of plants, a new totalitarianism is steadily attacking
and corrupting the Social Question. Three basic ideas inspire the
metaphysical technoscientific propaganda, the research programmes and the
market of biotechnology: the generalization of intelligence, the mass
restoration of health and the ending of poverty. These three ideas
ironically address people who have lost all intelligent hope (otherwise how
would they ever trust those in charge?), people who die of the diseases of
civilization, (like heart disease and cancer, but know there are no research
funds left for older diseases claiming millions of lives in the Third
World), and who see wealth growing at the same rate as the inequality of its
distribution. Yet the hope is born of a fundamental fear of managers and
politicians before the last magical process on earth. How can they actually
control human, animal and plant reproduction, the last vestige of whatever
Nature ever used to be? That is their question.
The reversal of the genitive in the title of this text, the
biotechnology of spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology, offers, we
feel, a precise description of our age, rather than yet another go at
nostalgic wordplay. Biotechnology, the endpoint of technoscientific military
progress and also the only hope for the industrial amelioration of the
species, is the dominant content of the Spectacle and provides its main
ideological justification. Biotechnology is the utopia of the Spectacle.
Reversely, the Spectacle today can unravel* * its entire biopolitical
influence, after it has managed to usurp all aspects of life. Capital fully
classifies and consumes the time and space of all conceivable entities, from
genes to planets, while the logic of the Commodity duplicates and claims the
creative processes of conscience.
The biotic discourse directly aims at the body, separating it from its
voice, its time and its space. Today's emerging type of person listens to
their own voice dubbed on TV through synchronized speaking. Their everyday
time is departmentalized into work time, free time, sleep time - partytime
for biopolitics. Their time produces capital intensively until Time becomes
capital itself. Their space is a measured quantity pending between material
virtuality and virtual materiality: From the nucleus of the universe to the
remotest galaxy, the norm is set by property rights, patents, access codes
and data banks, all with emergency button attached for every violation.
And what are we to do? Does it suffice to merely demystify reality
with the conventional weapon of a crystal historical conscience? If the
Spectacle always determined publicity, was it ever enough to merely talk of
"seeking the Truth" through "exposing lies", in an effort to counter the
effects of propaganda through propaganda? Geneticists believe they can pose
(and solve) the question of conscience in a slightly altered fashion: The
DNA chaingang workers and the gene conspiracy theorists believe they will
soon "demystify" the function of the human brain itself and will thus
explain the mechanics of ideas - and while they're at it, why not also the
historical evolution of human societies… Those who offer their elms for
bioethical reservations are merely dragging their good intentions along with
them on the road to hell. How long until they are convinced too?
How are we to recognize the current dynamics of domination if we too
are blinded by the rays of biotic transparency, today's pseudopublic sphere,
for which all social pathologies are reduced to matters of genetic
correctibility? Biopolitics, more than an echo of postmodernist mottos, is
about the genome, the elementary building unit, as much as it is about the
global family, it is about the Soul as much as it is about the Ecumene, it
cannot distinguish between subject and object, it resides within
institutions and is reproduced by them, you cannot escape it, since there is
no escape from the prison of language or the prison of power-knowledge.
There is no subject, there is only "subjectivity", there are no
relationships between people, there is only a certain substance, capitalist
value, which runs through their blood stream and determines their needs.
Indeed, how can one talk of subjects, when the objectivity against
which the subject is measured (nature and society) is merely the mirror
image of a quantitatively database, a kind of planetary bio-mass? For
bio-ideology, natural selection favours less densely populated areas with
charismatic bio-types. Biotypes on overpopulated territories, consisting of
slums, shantytowns and pure border areas, tend to be fundamentalist, poor
and uneducated, they are useful when they don't do too much noise at work,
and also serve as human spare-parts: that way they are productive even after
they are dead.
A population management based mainly on the collection of data and on
the design and employment of disciplinary methods within existing
institutions, (which often operate on their lower hierarchical levels as
"participatory" and "representative" organizations), has almost established
a new nature. It looks like it has always been there. Resistance looks
impossible, if not irrational. For the first time, the principles of
democracy are cooperating so smoothly with forms of outright totalitarianism
in order to disseminate the feelings of confusion and impotence. War is
named peace, every time a military attack (Iraq, Bosnia, or Afghanistan
lately) is named a humanitarian intervention. But, more to the point, peace
is actual war. The condition of peace is perpetual war against the whole of
society, a society potentially "criminal" and "ill", that can only be saved
by the systems of institutionalization, surveillance and scientific
correction.
In his *Comments to the Society of the Spectacle, * Guy Debord wrote
that "once the running of state involves a permanent and massive shortage of
historical knowledge, that State can no longer be led strategically." Is
there a strategy then? Is the war machine of technoscientific Spectacle,
promising wholesale immortality and mass intelligence and wealth, actually
programmed to lead somewhere? Is there any farreaching plan to clone and
train a new bionic elite alongside indefatigable and obedient
soldier-slaves? Is there any plan as to where to end the vicious circle of
pharmaceuticals that function as antidotes to other pharmaceuticals, where
to set a limit to patents on life? It looks like there isn't one.
We definitely have no excuse whatsoever to rely on the biotic
pseudo-discourse. They want us to decide: Do we or don't we want to know the
percentage of gmos in supermarket products, do we or don't we accept gm
crops next to conventional ones, do we or don't we like cloning, pesticides,
family programming, cosmetic surgery etc etc? The process of dehumanization
cannot be halted through such false dilemmas. Dilemmas phrased that way are
designed to keep us blind to the paranoia of those who manage and monitor
society through their industries and governments, and to condition us into
believing that it is all up to the voter-consumer's momentary choice at the
counter. We should never allow ourselves the comfortable illusion that it's
all a matter of handling our individual consumer guilt. Awareness of the
biotechnology of the spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology refines
our understanding of capitalist domination today and our collective tactics
to resist it.
