Biopolitics and the Medical Humanities

1. Biopolitics and the MedicalHumanities

2. OUTLINE • 1. The discourses of biopolitics • 2. Contemporary examples • 3. Theoreticians: Foucault, Agamben, Hardt & Negri • 4. What is the body in the 21st century? • 5. History and gendered bodies • 6. Normality and disease • 7. The uses of biopolitics in reading literature and film

3. I. DISCOURSES • BIO (‘life’, Greek βίος ‘bíos’) -logy, -politics, -power, -ethics, -sociology; medical history & medical humanities • POLITCS: the empirical object and the normative evaluation of rational decision-making and the democratic organization of social life – human being as zoon politikon(Aristotle) • Issues of corporeality, agency, surveillance, gender, power; epistemological, actual and representational violence • Foucault on modern power: disciplinary, pastoral power, bio-power → governmentality

5. The medical humanities: “socially interpretative dimension of modern medicine, where textuality, materiality, and history play equally important roles” • The power over life—“biopower”—is not exclusively a biological power but is also composed of devices (dispositifs) of subjection and exploitation, of captivation and regulation, of control and ordering of life in general— that is, of existence writ large.

6. “the meaning of biopolitics lies in its ability to make visible the always contingent, always precarious difference between politics and life, culture and nature, between the realm of the intangible and unquestioned, on the one hand, and the sphere of moral and legal action, on the other”

7. “On a broader scale, biopolitics is defined as the social practices and institutions established to regulate a population’s quality (and quantity) of life. Disciplinary power and biopower, which together can be understood as biopolitics, operate together to normalize individuals by coercing them, often by subtle mechanisms, to conform to standards and, in so doing, to create self-regulating pliant bodies and populations.” MonicaCasper

8. 1922: the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén may have been the first to use the word biopolitics • Nazi eugenics: authoritarian, hierarchically structured, racially homogeneous social Darwinist ideas in racial hygiene and “hereditary biology”, “the people’s body” (Volkskörper) vs. “racial mixing” and “degeneration” • → medialization of war, militarization of medicine

9. II. CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES • medicine today “turns increasingly to an extracorporeal space – often represented by the notion of lifestyle – to identity the precursors of future illness” (Alison Bashford:Contagion)

10. the Nuremberg Code established the necessity of human consent in medicine • 1997 UNESCO Declaration of the Human Genome and Human Rights Article 2 of the Declaration: • (a) Everyone has the right to respect for their dignity and for their rights regardless of their genetic characteristics.

11. (b) That dignity makes it imperative not to reduce individuals to their genetic characteristics and to respect their uniqueness and diversity. • the Universal Declaration of I-IUITlan Rights (UDHR) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): there is no life that is purely and simply biological, as was the case for Nazi ideology • Agamben: biopolitics is above all “thanatopolitics”

12. DEATH: Euthanasia / Death with dignity / Thanatopolitics / Ageing / Disability • BIRTH: Abortion / Designer babies / Foetal abuse, rights, visualization /prenatal diagnosis / Eugenics • REPRODUCTION: Egg, birth, name, surrogate, gene, bio, adoptive, foster, legal, organ, nurturant mother • HEALING: Xenotransplantation / Transgenic animals / GM food / Harvesting of organs: donation or theft? • WARFARE: Bio-terrorism /Bio-defence industry / Biometric systems / Political asylum policies • IDENTITY: Cyborgs / 21st century trans-human body shop

13. Death of a Cyborg, Shorra, c. 2012 Premier Deuil, William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1888

14. III. THEORETICIANS: MICHEL FOUCAULT • a doctor’s son, interested in questions of normativity, cultural ‘ruptures’, to defamiliarize and expose seemingly natural categories as constructs → methodology: archaeologies and genealogies • the modern subject is constituted by distinguishing her- or himself from negative figures: the insane, the diseased (Madness and Civilisation, The Birth of the Clinic), and, later, in Discipline and Punish—the delinquent

15. Knowledge and power (savoir/pouvoir) created institutions of disciplination – schools, prisons, reformatories, psychiatric facilities – which, though often promoted in the name of ‘improvement’, in reality consolidated administrative authority, bureaucratic regulation and what a quite different sociological tradition called ‘hegemonic social control’ • the technique of the corpse

16. Body techniques: regulate bodies in time and space – body: ultimate site of political and ideological control • Medical encounter: surveillance, investigation, confession “The owner is expected to give up his or her jurisdiction of the body over to the doctor”

17. III. THEORETICIANS: GIORGIO AGAMBEN • „Zōē, on the one hand, is bare life, the life we share with animals, and the horizon of necessity that links human beings to mere survival, to what Aristotle called “the nutritive life,” that is, the power of self-preservation and resistance to death. Bios, on the other hand, refers to life that has form, which is to say, to that form of life which is specifically human and in which politics takes place.” • the concentration camp as the “biopolitical paradigm of the West”

18. archaic Roman law: homo sacer– a person whom one could kill with impunity, since he was banned from the politico-legal community and reduced to the status of his of his physical existence • “Bare life,” which is considered to be marginal and seems to be furthest from the political, proves to be the solid basis of a political body, which makes the life and death of a human being the object of a sovereign decision – asylum seekers, refugees, and the brain dead – biomass • “the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule”

19. IV. THE BODY • “The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” Mary Douglas

20. Bryan Turner’s “somatic society:” how the body in modern social systems has become 'the principal field of political and cultural activity • “At a time when our health is threatened increasingly by global dangers, we are exhorted ever more to take individual responsibility for our bodies by engaging in strict self-care regimes.” • “somatocracy,” according to Foucault, takes the place of a “theocracy (Adorno)

21. phenomenology: Körper – objective view of the corporeal, physiological body; Leib – subjective experience of the physical matter of my body • Foucault: the soul is the body's prison • biological citizenship (Nikolas Rose)

22. V. HISTORY & GENDER • Plato’s polis: organicist concept – the metaphor of the body as a depiction of social and symbolic (dis)order • John Donne, C 16-17: “Her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought.” • C18: feminization of nervous system, masculinization of musculature; woman as natural, man as cultural

23. Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science, Louis-Ernest Barrias, 1899 The Anatomist (Der Anatom), Gabriel von Max, 1869

24. Elisabeth Grosz on the scientific evolution of space in the 18th century (Age of Reason): “women become the living representations of corporeality, of domesticity, of the natural order that men have had to expel from their own self-representation” • C19: Anatomy Act 1832, Contagious Diseases Acts 1870s – social medicine, moral politics • “Pornography and prostitution were the disruptive reverse images of nineteenth-century public culture” Frank Mort: Dangerous Sexualities

25. “Mid-nineteenth-century science and medicine assiduously cultivated the idea of the single creative scientific mind, of the doctor or scientist as hero” malestream medicine • Charcot: medico-scientific gaze vs. academic voyeurism • 1895: x-ray: visual knowledge as corporeal penetration

26. The evolution of the medical gaze Hand mit Ring, 1895 Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

27. VI. HEALTH/NORMALITY VS. DISEASE/PATHOLOGY • “Diseases are new ways of life.” (Georges Canguilhem: The Normal and the Pathological) • ‘illness’ as personal experience, as opposed to ‘disease’ as scientific classification • Disease as cultural symptom • The WHO’s health definition: “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being” • Foucault: “In the extreme, life is what is capable of error.”

28. Gadamer: health means that we can be “forgetful of ourselves” • René Leriche: “health is a life lived in the silence of the organs” • “Illness is not only an individual experience, it is a cultural metaphor. Indeed, next to the ’bomb’ it may be THE primary metaphor of the late 20th century” Cindy Patton (1) disease is a language (2) the body is a representation (3) medicine is political practice

29. “A szenvedés ikonográfiája ősi múltra tekinthet vissza. Leggyakrabban azokat a szenvedéseket tartották ábrázolásra érdemesnek, amelyeket az isteni vagy az emberi harag produktumainak véltek. (A természetes okokból eredő szenvedést, például betegséget vagy gyermekszülést elvétve ábrázolták a művészettörténetben; a baleset miattiakat gyakorlatilag egyáltalán nem” (Susan Sontag: A szenvedés képei)

30. “After the loss of faith in the twentieth century, disease replaced hell and became one of the most horrible punishments imaginable. The modern anti-hero – who experiences a physiological dialectic of suffering, a painful life and early death – is typified and condemned by disease. He is the archetype of the artist, the martyr and the criminal. He is inwardly infected; tormented in body and mind; tested by the endurance of pain; estranged from himself, from his fellow-sufferers, and from healthy men. Disease is a punishment that inspire guilt and shame, fear and self-hatred. Disease is also “biographical disruption.”

31. in the contemporary West “the good citizen is the healthy citizen” • “biological” or “genetic citizenship” Nikolas Rose • purification and protection rituals • civic religion of healthism • econocides • biomedicine and the biosecurity industrial complex • “Illness is not only an individual experience, it is a cultural metaphor. Indeed, next to the ’bomb’ it may be THE primary metaphor of the late 20th century” Cindy Patton

33. national medico-legal border control • public health surveillance • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire • “Previous stages of the industrial revolution introduced machine- made consumer goods and then machine-made machines, but now we find ourselves confronted with machine-made raw materials and foodstuffs—in short, machine-made nature and machine-made culture.”

34. Slavoj Žižek: “no wonder the two strongest industrial complexes today are the military and the medical, that of destroying and that of prolonging life” • “Western modernity, along with its conceptions of sovereignty and biopolitics, is unthinkable without a ‘political culture of danger’, without the permanent endangerment of the normal, without imaginary invasions of constant, everyday threats such as illness, filth, sexuality, criminality or the fear of ‘racial’ impurity, which must be immunized against in various ways” IsabellLorey • “modern security societies”

35. infotainment, health marketing, health advocacy • „a késő modern társadalmakban az egészség és a betegség biológiai adottságból fogyasztói termék lett. Amelyet nem csak az orvostudomány, de egyre inkább a technikai lehetőségek és a legújabb divatok is jelentősen befolyásolnak” • „A média reprezentációinak ezért az egészségügyben is legalább annyi közük van a művészetekhez és a politikához, mint tudományhoz.” Császi Lajos

36. VI. LITERATURE, FILM • Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1931) • Albert Camus: The Plague (1947) • J. M. Coetzee: The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) • Matthew Kneale: Sweet Thames (1992) • Chuck Palahniuk: Lullaby (2002) • Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake (2003) • Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2005) • Clare Clark: The Nature of Monsters (2007) • Tompa Andrea: Fejtől s lábtól: KettőorvosErdélyben (2013) • Ian McEwan: The ChildrenAct(2014)

37. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) • Womb (Fliegauf Benedek, 2010) • Pál Adrienn (Kocsis Ágnes, 2010) • Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) • A nyomozó (Gigor Attila, 2008) • Talk to Her (Pedró Almodóvar, 2002)