7 - Durable Consumers
from Contagion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
With all his tools man improves on his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning.
(Freud 2002: 28)If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict.
(Fisher 2009: 25)daisy went to sleep at 15 and woke up many years later. she, being perfectly sensible, decided she ought to die, since she had literally slept her entire productive life. the medical profession had, in her absence, decided that all life must be preserved, regardless of its worth to its owner, and prevented her from performing the only noble act she was capable of. in general, someone is a thing of value if and only if he or she is willing to submit to whatever degradation and abuse is required to preserve that position. anything less betrays a lack of commitment.
(Big Black, 1987)Foucault describes the power over life that is biopower as a ‘great bipolar technology’. He calls the first pole anatomo-politics of the human body, ‘centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’. The second he calls biopolitics of the population, regulatory controls ‘focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis for the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’ (1978: 139). Together, they constitute both biopower and one another, but we can consider them separately to describe two different aspects of biocapitalism. In the next chapter, we will see what biopolitics of the population means. In this chapter, we will look at anatomo-politics, which shares the economic and mechanical impetus of the second-order simulacrum.
To do so, we will examine Eric Garcia's biopunk novel The Repossession Mambo (2009) and Miguel Sapochnik's film Repo Men (2010). The two texts illuminate different aspects of biocapitalistic consumption and biopolitical existence, describing a complex system of circulating biocapital, and the social life of biocommodities – artiforgs (artificial organs). Together and against each other, they grasp Foucault's anatomo-politics, and understand what Baudrillard means when he suggests that consumption has emerged as a form of control.
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- Deleuze and BaudrillardFrom Cyberpunk to Biopunk, pp. 173 - 195Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016