The Digital Coloniality of Power by Stingl Alexander I.;

Author:Stingl, Alexander I.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 4

Implifications

Biomedical Relevance, Digital Cultural Health Capital, and Governance 3.0

CUSTOMER: You know, people have to understand this,

in all their hatred for the State and government,

and their love of free market utopia.

Corporations, insurance companies, banks, they are like states.

Don’t be fooled,

just because they call it fees, which they keep rising,

doesn’t mean these are not their version of taxes.

BAKER: Yeah. I call it the Golden Rule, who has the gold makes the rules.

—Exchange between a customer and a baker in New York State in early 2015

In this chapter, I make an attempt to better understand present and future tensions in the political ontology of biomedical and health care practice that are largely occluded from the view of most sociologists. This has sparked discursive chatter, of course, on many causal reasons and on a number of possible remedies.

In a particularly insightful way, interdisciplinary art theorist Anna Munster accounts for the historical transition involved in the becoming salient of the trope of biopower/biopowers in the dialectic relation between the discourse on “bio(s)” and the discourse on “digitality” in terms of an aesthetic rather than merely a poetic:

Looking back at the period, it seems no coincidence that this digital bioaesthetics aligns culturally and socially with the extensive thickening of biopower: that is, the extension of regimes of political and economic control to every area of “the living,” including the choices made in how one lives, managing one’s life, urban planning, the management of population movement and so on (. . .). Research into the rise and dominance of the molecular within the life sciences and the development of techniques for managing the vast flows of subsequent data (. . .), and the increase in techniques for managing the life of the self (. . .), especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, has articulated this biopolitical, bioethical hold and spread and its imbrication with digital technologies of information. Digital aesthetics, too, seemed in the grip of a fascination with the molecular level of programming and generating code—witness the rise of evolutionary and genetic algorithms in artistic practice. Equally, it was obsessed with interactivity as a defining feature of digital media and art (. . .) and with the audience/users exercising a kind of management of choice, via interaction. (Munster 2009: 72)

Of course, the problem with understanding this relation in terms of a dialectics is that it must be supposed that “bio(s)” and “digitality” are separate and can become “merely” hybrids. I am of the opinion that this is an unsatisfactory account, that the distinction is merely an analytical one, whereas the actual informational infrastructural state has been biodigital to begin with. Biodigitality, precisely because it is not a hybrid, is the “becoming related”-ness that enables the relations that count as what Marilyn Strathern has called partial connections.

But the hegemony of the dialectical, synthetic, and hybridizing account, for example within the social sciences, rests also on a number of unreflected premises of the epistemic authority in play, premises such as the sociological aesthetic behind the sociological imagination.

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