Otherwise, Revolution! by Rebecca Tillett

Author:Rebecca Tillett [Tillett, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623567873
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2017-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Necropolitics and violent bodily control

Sawday has argued that the brutal dissection of people, things and ideas emerges from the development of an ‘autoptic vision’ (1995: 1), an emphasis that is evident in the dissective focus of the Cartesian method. The definition of the autoptic points to criticality and objectivity; its origins in the Greek autopsia emphasizes the ‘act of seeing with one’s own eyes’ that suggests a desire to act as a ‘witness’ to the ‘truth’ of things. And this is certainly the way in which we interpret the autoptic in the early twenty-first century, as a striving for ‘truth’ and ‘fact’. Yet these very definitions conceal the violent nature of the autoptic, concealing likewise the violent nature of any culture built upon dissective principles. And this can be seen in the dissective and autoptic nature of Almanac’s cultures: in Beaufrey’s videos of bodies that are broken and taken to pieces and their ever-growing market; in the enthusiastic reception of David’s images of Eric’s violent suicide; and in the harvesting and sale of human blood and organs by Trigg’s Bio-Materials Inc. If we accept that Almanac’s cultures – and by extension, our own extra-textual cultures – are indeed dissective and autoptic, then we engage directly with what Michel Foucault termed ‘biopower’: ‘the privilege [of the elites] to seize hold of life in order to suppress it’ (1998: 136). Foucault’s notion of biopower traces and reflects the developments and ideologies of science, emulating the ways that the newly mechanized science interpreted ‘the body as a machine’ and subsequently disciplined that body via a series of ‘regulatory controls’ drawn from the observed ‘biological processes’ such as reproduction, mortality, health and longevity (1998: 139). Biopower therefore traced ‘how … modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species’, as outlined in Linnaeus’s taxonomies, to create a ‘set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy … of power’ or biopolitics (2007: 1). As Foucault persuasively argued, the ideologies of biopolitics enabled, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ that was ‘without question an indispensable element’ in the creation of the kinds of the obedient human bodies required by ‘the development of capitalism’ (1998: 140, 141). Here, one inevitably thinks back to Almanac’s ‘deformed’ bodies that were discussed in Chapter 2, which were purposefully broken ‘to fit inside factory machinery’ (1991: 312). As these broken textual bodies were subsequently ‘worked to death’ to ‘make a rich man richer’ (1991: 312), more recent developments in biopolitical thinking that introduce the notion of ‘necropolitics’ as a ‘politics of death’ are even more pertinent to my analysis here. Achille Mbembe’s theorization of ‘necropolitics’ moves beyond the Foucauldian notion of the sovereign’s or state’s ‘right to kill’ those citizens who transgress laws or pose a threat, arguing that ‘the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (2003: 39–40).

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