Biopolitical Media

Catastrophe, Immunity and Bare Life

Allen Meek

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317500896
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Film e video

This book presents an historical account of media and catastrophe that engages with theories of biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and others. It explains how responses to catastrophe in media and cultural criticism over the past 150 years are embedded in biological conceptions of life and death, contamination and immunity, race and species. Mediated catastrophe is often understood today in terms of collective memory and according to therapeutic or redemptive accounts of trauma. In contrast to these approaches this book emphasizes the use of media to record, archive and analyze physical appearance and movement; to capture viewer attention through shock; to monitor and control bodies in economies of production and consumption; to enmesh social relations in information networks; and situate subjects in discourses of victimhood, immunity, survival and resilience. Chapters are focused on historical case studies of early photography, Nazi propaganda, colonial stereotypes, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the Cold War and the war on terror.

1 The Biotype and the Anthropological Machine

The media image assumes a biopolitical function by transforming independent human agents into biometric information; by isolating physical features or actions and using them to generate statistical norms; by understanding individuals as representatives of racial types, as samples of large populations, as symptoms of pathological tendencies, or as specimens of biological species; and by defining human communities in terms of immunity, resilience, and the threat of viral contamination. Media images function in economies of production and consumption that define individuals and groups in terms of social, political, and biological inclusion and exclusion, health and sickness, productivity and waste. They are also used to identify human populations that should be confined, killed or disposed of.

This chapter explains how the early development of photography and film forms part of what Foucault, Agamben and others see as the incorporation of biological life into systems of surveillance, intervention and control. Agamben has stressed the catastrophic consequences of this form of power, particularly with regard to Nazi biopolitics, but in Foucault’s account of modern medical science, criminology, and anthropology we can also discern the origins of new forms of mass destruction. The recording and analysis of visual information was framed by discourses about class and race that were, in turn, used to justify genocide, first in the colonies and later in Europe itself. These discourses that classified different groups on the basis of visual evidence were also driven by what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (Open 37), which defined hierarchies of race, gender and class with reference to a more fundamental opposition between human and animal. The early photographic and cinematic capture of life included the comparative study of the expressions and movements of humans and animals. As Nicole Shukin has shown, there were also a number of intersections between the development of motion pictures and animal slaughter. The killing of animals is a form of mass destruction, production and consumption that served as a prototype for Fordism but also for the Nazi Final Solution.

Questions of surveillance and visibility are at the center of Foucault’s thought. His conceptions of the clinical gaze and panoptical power have influenced important research on photography by Allan Sekula, John Tagg, Jonathan Crary and others. In the following discussion I use Sekula’s term “biotype” to describe the ways that photographic documentation was used to visually display the differences between normal and deviant individuals and groups. The physical particularities of the individual were subordinated to a statistical aggregate based on images accumulated in the photographic archive. Thus photography served what Foucault identified as the shift in the nineteenth century to demographic analysis as a form of social control. In the later sections of the chapter I explain how Agamben extends this analysis to the moving image, which by recording and framing human gesture has destroyed the autonomy of self-expression and eroded the sovereignty of the private individual.

The production of the biotype was driven by the anthropological machine. The classification of different social types only made sense in terms of the biological caesura that divided the human from the less-than-human. Photographic evidence of physical characteristics and the capture of movement on film made life subject to new regimes of knowledge and power. Separating and classifying individuals into types was ultimately about deciding which types threatened the life that was worth living. This chapter considers some of the direct historical links between the emergence of modern visual media, the slaughter of animals and the Nazi exterminations. The later sections of the chapter discuss the role of the biotype and the anthropological machine in the notorious propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940) and the importance of gesture in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah (1985). The chapter closes with a discussion of how the human/animal distinction operates in contemporary decapitation videos released on the Internet.

Mediated Life and Death

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century photography and film specifically focused on recording the details of physiognomy and gesture and encoding these physical manifestations of human life with new scientific and political significance. Criminality, mental disease, racial inferiority, and other forms of social deviance were detected through close analysis of visual evidence recorded by the new media. Photography served the accumulation of medical, biological, sociological and anthropological knowledge, providing evidence of physical degeneration, psychic disorders, criminal deviance and cultural inferiority. The establishment of photographic archives was directly related to the increased power of the police and the medical establishment in the nineteenth century. The rapid growth of urban centers and the emergence of the industrial proletariat required new technologies of surveillance and control. Photography was used to record the identity of criminals and the symptoms of the mentally ill. Physical characteristics were visually isolated and separated from the individual person. When gathered together this visual evidence allowed for statistical analysis. The individual became the representative example of tendencies in the larger population: the norm.

Pioneers in these areas of photography and the moving image, such as Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, Étienne-Jules Marey and Jean-Martin Charcot, were all members of scientific communities and saw their research on new media as similar to genetic analysis or medical diagnosis. Just as the microscope revealed how disease was transmitted by bacteria, photography could reveal social and psychological disorders inscribed in the details of physiognomy and gesture. Visual evidence served the biopolitical governance of populations conceived in terms of normality and deviance, health and disease, sanitation and infection, survival and degeneration. Much of this research using the new visual media was based in the paradigms of biological evolution and Social Darwinism. With the use of photography by Charcot to document hysteria we can also see the relation of the biopolitical image to psychiatry and trauma. Just as the clinical gaze in medicine and psychiatry separated the symptom from the person in order to classify the individual in terms of the disease, populations began to be monitored and analyzed in terms of collective pathologies. These forms of social control were reinforced by technologies of the self in which the individual assumed responsibility for personal hygiene, economic independence, and psychological adjustment.

The increasing importance of surveillance for medicine and public health facilitated the direct intervention of the state into the reproduction and survival of the human species. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, produced a theory of hereditary transmission and formulated the new science of eugenics. He also did experimental research on photography and the biotype. By overlaying photographs of different individuals, Galton produced a new composite image that he believed could show a general tendency of the larger population. Recognizing criminality, deviance and mental disease through visual evidence also became part of the medico-scientific discourse about race, which in turn served as the theoretical justification for murderous wars conducted against enemy populations (Nadesan 186). The superior health, intelligence and fitness-to-live of some racial groups over others was demonstrated in order to justify the colonial adventures of the European nations. Racial difference was recorded in photographs and collected in archives, analyzed by anthropologists, and published in comparative studies. Physiognomy became evidence for racial hierarchies. In order to preserve this physical health and beauty of superior racial types, inferior elements needed to be excluded and, if necessary, eliminated.

Once humanity was defined as a biological species it became logical to justify the killing of those who did not qualify as human or whose deaths were deemed necessary for the health and survival of the species. The anthropological machine that distinguishes human from nonhuman forms part of a larger assemblage of power that also includes the slaughter of animals. Industrial slaughter removed killing from the everyday lives of modern consumers. The invisibility of the mass slaughter of animals also has strong resonances with the ways that many Germans were apparently able to ignore or accept the mass murder of the Jews. One of the implicit justifications for the Nazi genocide, strangely enough, was the supposed barbarism of the Jewish method of killing animals. The closing sequence of The Eternal Jew showed the “horrifying” realities of Kosher slaughter. The audience who were supposed to be shocked by this spectacle were also intended to accept the necessities of exterminating “subhumans.” This convergence of cinema, animal slaughter and genocide makes more sense if we see it as part of the new logic of shock and anesthetization in modern mediated experience. Media images of violence and destruction have proliferated, whereas actual death has become a less visible feature of Western societies. The removal of actual killing from public view, along with the media transmission of shock, together produce the immunity of the consumer subject.

The media apparatus seeks to record and monitor human life and to control and direct the attention of the user/viewer. Agamben argues that in early cinema we witness a “catastrophe in the realm of gestures” (Means 50): the physical movements and postures of the body were recorded by the new medium and separated from his/her autonomy as a private individual. They now belonged to the increasingly commodified sphere of the moving image. This chapter considers this convergence of Agamben’s theories of politics and media with a discussion of his essay “Notes on Gesture” in the context of Shoah. Shoah has often been interpreted in terms of Lanzmann’s insistence that the film’s primary aim is the transmission of the survivor’s experience to the audience. This conception of the film has seemed to fit the interpretive paradigms of trauma studies, with its emphasis on testimony and witnessing. Agamben’s discussion of gesture reveals how Lanzmann’s film belongs to a longer history in which human movement is separated from the autonomy of the individual. One gesture in particular—the gesture of throat cutting—assumes a complex significance when placed in the larger context of animal slaughter and industrial genocide. The final section of this chapter discusses the decapitation videos produced in the Middle East and made available on the Internet. Here too we see a convergence of propaganda, shock and slaughter. But we can see that these videos also participate in a larger history in which the visibility or invisibility of death forms an intrinsic part of the media immune system.

Foucault and Biopolitics

The early use of photography to classify social, psychological and racial types is illuminated by Foucault’s account of the changing meanings of life and death in relation to sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower. In Discipline and Punish Foucault explained how torture and execution began to disappear from public spectacle at the end of the eighteenth century. During the French Revolution the use of the guillotine at first retained this spectacular quality, presenting revolutionary justice as high drama for the masses. But the use of the guillotine subsequently became less public and was eventually confined within the prison walls. Enzo Traverso notes an important aspect of this historical shift not explored by Foucault: that the guillotine replaced the executioner, who embodied the power of the king, with a machine. Under the new sovereignty of the secular state the guillotine administered death with speed and efficiency rather than spectacle and ritual. Traverso thus sees a direct line from the guillotine to the industrialization of death in the Nazi genocide. Now “men began to be slaughtered as though they were animals” (Traverso 24). Because it eliminated prolonged torture as a feature of public execution, the guillotine was deemed more “humane.”

Foucault’s neglect of the machinic aspect of this historical transformation reminds us to include the camera in his account of power. In an earlier series of lectures collected in the volume Psychiatric Power (1973–74), Foucault explained the changing forms of power that emerged as part of these historical developments. He proposed that sovereign power was founded on divine right or conquest and maintained through the threat and exercise of violence. It was embodied in ceremonies, gestures, and symbols rather than in individual bodies, excepting that of the sovereign himself. This is the basis of Foucault’s distinction between sovereignty and the disciplinary power that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sovereign demanded specific services from his subjects but disciplinary power (for example, the army, religious orders, or schooling) sought the “exhaustive capture of the individual’s body, actions, time, and behavior” (Psychiatric Power 46). Disciplinary power was no longer constituted through occasional rituals, contests and ceremonies but was a constant form of panoptical surveillance internalized through habit, physical exercise and punishment and externalized through record keeping and assessment. It operated through practices, techniques, conduct and applied knowledge and expertise, including the self-regulating behavior of the individual. Through observation, examination and classification it produced homogeneity and conformity.

Disciplinary power confronted a new kind of problem: those who could not be classified by or assimilated into the system. This produced, in turn, new systems of classification for deviants and delinquents. Disciplinary power attempted to take control of the individual subject in every feature of his/her life. The modern individual emerged through disciplinary power. Therefor it is not a question of “liberating” the subject from disciplinary power, as the individual did not exist, in the terms that we now conceive of individuals, in a state prior to discipline. Taking his model of modern surveillance from Bentham’s Panopticon (1787), Foucault emphasized that as opposed to sovereign power, panoptical power is “only ever an optical effect” and is “without materiality” (77). It is a regime of visibility that produces knowledge about individual subjects. Photography was able to capture the distinctive physical characteristics of the individual as an example of trends in the larger society. In this way the optics of disciplinary power were extended to the biopolitical surveillance of entire populations.

Foucault identified biopower as emerging in the late eighteenth century. Sovereign power is premised on the right to decide over the life and death of the subject but is actually exercised through the right to kill. Biopower, however, introduced a new right to the state “to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (“Society” 241). This new technology of power did not exclude disciplinary power but was embedded in it, modifying it toward new ends. Whereas disciplinary power was centered on the body, biopower is applied to “man-as-living-being” or “man-as-species” (242). Biopower is based in demographic analysis of entire populations: birth rate, mortality rates, life expectancy, public hygiene, old age. It uses statistical aggregates to regulate and standardize mass behavior, to manage social and economic risks such as poverty and unemployment, and to maximize “genetic capital.”

Biopolitics is the monitoring, analysis, and management of the behavior of populations. As Michael Dillon explains, the modern concept of population departs from both the Christian notion of redemptive community and the liberal notion of civil community (“Security” 181). A population has no political agency in the sense of collective struggle but rather internalizes power through practices of self-regulation and governance. Statistical data about populations were first gathered and used for improving health and controlling deviance. When race emerged in the nineteenth century as a biological category, along with the revolutionary discourse of class struggle, it allowed for the division of society into those who deserved to live and those who deserved to die. In the early twentieth century political scientists, anthropologists and geneticists began to explain the state as an organic entity, the nation as an ethnic entity and society in terms of biological struggles. These formulations achieved their extreme form in the Nazi state but were also promulgated in Soviet Russia and the United States (Lemke 9–14).

Photography and the Biotype

The governing of populations on the basis of biological knowledge found an important tool in the new medium of photography. In the nineteenth century experts in medical science, anthropology, and criminology elaborated systems of visual evidence for physical and psychological health that were applied to entire populations and used to justify the elimination of specific groups. Before the invention of photography the classification of races in eighteenth century anthropology had fostered a preoccupation with physical appearance. Different ethnicities were ranked according to the Western ideal of classical beauty. Johann Kaspar Lavatar’s Essai sur la Physiogonomie (1781) applied the Greek ideal in the “scientific” study of facial features and attempted to classify national character types through physiognomy. Nobility of soul was revealed in physical beauty while criminal tendencies were manifest in ugliness. In the early nineteenth century the German physiologist Franz Joseph Gall developed the science of phrenology which read character through the shape of the head. This approach became universally used to support racial theories and racist caricatures, particularly of Jews and Negroes (Mosse 24–29). Cesare Lombroso’s phrenology of the criminal served in a similar way the policing of the urban masses in Western industrialized nations. Englishman Francis Galton’s photographic studies also used the face as physical evidence of predefined types. Galton wanted to intervene d...