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.