limit experience

Real bodies in real spaces?

After years of abject rejection (possibly a unfortunate combination of submitting crap abstracts and dissing everyone else’s books on Foucault), it looks like I am going to finally be allowed to present at the Foucault Circle in 2012. This is especially cool because it will be in Buffalo, NY where Foucault carried out some of his work on prisons as part of the GIP. A few people have toyed with the documents produced by the GIP and related articles and interviews by Foucault in the past but these seem to be taking a more prominent role of late given the excessive incarceration, arrests and police brutality occurring in the UK and elsewhere.

Here is the abstract of what I plan to talk about:

Real bodies in real spaces? Rethinking anatomo-politics for the twenty-first century

In his 1974 essay, ‘The Eye of Power’, Foucault makes the claim that since Kant, philosophy has concerned itself primarily with matters of time at the expense of those pertaining to space. This is clearly something Foucault himself sought to redress in both his account of the production of the deviant, criminal and docile ‘bodies’ located within the institutional spaces of the hospital, prison, school and workplace in Discipline and Punish and his discussion of the spatial configuration of populations in his 1978 lecture series Security, Territory, Population. But what happens to the individual and collective body within a globalised, neo-liberal, post-Fordist context? Populations are no longer organised into nation-states but come to constitute deterritorialised flows of labour, subjects are no longer defined in terms of their ability to produce but, rather, consume. Transgression rather than conformity becomes a form of normalisation. Within this context, it becomes easy to dispense with notion of a physical body occupying a given, physical space. Much recent scholarship has focused on individual subjectivity as embodying the movement towards what Gilles Deleuze has referred to as a society of control. Individuals become ‘dividuals’ defined in terms of the computational data produced about them in the form of barcodes, passwords and usernames. At the same time, notions of citizenship perceived in terms of inhabiting or belonging to a certain geographical space, have been replaced with citizenship as forms of forced or voluntary migration – that which Paul Virilio has termed ‘trajectivity.’ Identity is defined not as where we come from but, rather, in terms of our ability to move freely across borders.

‘Whose streets?’ Michel Foucault hits the pavement alongside a dishevelled looking Sartre

However, just as Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that the impetus for a genealogy of the penal system lay in the riots which were taking place within the prisons during the early 1970s, the driving force behind this paper are the events of the past 12 months. The occupation of public spaces like Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, the taking to the streets of youths in the United Kingdom during the summer and the recent Occupy Wall Street movement all attest to the continuing role and importance of real bodies in real physical spaces in bringing about political and social change. Moreover, the excessive incarceration meted out to those arrested following the UK riots, demonstrates the ongoing use of disciplinary techniques operating on and through the body that one might have assumed, following Deleuze and others, to have been replaced by the all-pervasive techniques of self-policing and surveillance via online mediums such as facebook and twitter.

Consequently, the focus of this paper will be a return both to the body but also the real, physical spaces it occupies. To what extent does the maxim, ‘a place for everyone and everyone in their place’ still very much apply? What are the dangers in focusing too much on virtual forms of identity formation and how do these nevertheless demonstrate the persistent role of the body as marker of identity? Here, sustained engagement with the recent work of Bernard Stiegler provides a useful point of entry. In considering his claim made in Taking Care that psychopouvoir is the apotheosis of biopower, specific attention will be paid to his primary focus on time in contradistinction to Foucault’s interest in the spatial organisation of strategies and technologies of power. How might returning once more to the spatial dimension of power provide a richer account of the contemporary technologies Stiegler claims belong to a regime of psychopouvoir at the same time as highlighting the limitations of such technologies in their definition, management and control of the individual?

But I still contend that it should be a spiral not a circle…