Is There a Right Wing after Postmodernity?
“Euronormativity” & Biopoliticized Resistances to the “Counterhegemonic” Left

Discobolus, a Roman copy of the Greek original from the fifth century BC. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

2,899 words

From a liberal perspective, there exists a logical (and also emotional) resistance to the use of concepts, terminologies, and ideas that are foreign to modernity, since for liberalism, being born detached from the latter, such foreign concepts, terminologies, and ideas would a priori be anti-modern and therefore anti-liberal.

A significant problem that has arisen for liberalism, as well as for the more conservative Right detached from modernity, is that the Left(s) have shifted the political battleground, relocating to new terrains and implementing new rules of engagement, where individuals and social groups are addressed and bombarded on different planes than were imaginable a few decades ago. The language of political dispute and its objectives have changed, and the effort of the liberal Right to render invisible postmodern concepts, terminologies, and ideas as antagonistic to modernity is far from effective, much as Western motivations are far from effective in the realm where Islamic fundamentalism and jihad operate: Saladin cannot be countered with Patton.

While the Left(s) have not feared expanding their battleground to Fifth Gradient Warfare[1] (thus breaking with Cartesianism), confining themselves to political conventions has caused a political and ontological stagnation in mainstream Right-wing thought: hegemony has relocated, so attempting to ignore the new rules of engagement will only further separate current reality from the reality one aspires to conquer. Whether accepted or not, the war/subversion against logocentrism is a fact. And in the metapolitical realm, the advances are more pronounced from the Left.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have shifted politics and its contention to the territory — which, from the perspective of critical geography, would be considered a social construction resulting from the exercise of power relations — where the human body would be located (in coordinates x, y, z). Furthermore, the new century has allowed the Left (or Lefts, to be more precise) to advance based on memes (i.e., minimum units of cultural information), where inconsistency between sector memes may be present and yet not cause great cognitive dissonance among the masses; a sort of Hydra of Lerna or a brainstorm. Thus, it is possible that from the multiple heads of this Hydra, the causes of indigenous peoples and the primacy of their interests (especially regarding their ancestral laws and forms of social communitarian organization) can be simultaneously supported, as well as the individual and group interests of women as a separate identity — an example of the Western approach.

To give an example, both mentioned initiatives are essentially antagonistic, as there is a discussion about what weighs more: the right of the community as a differentiated entity with respect to the Euro-descendant/Western norm, or the individual right of women to decide about their bodies (do bodies belong to women or to the community?). However, these inconsistencies and frontal antagonisms are neither relevant nor impediments to be employed as weapons of political combat. The Lefts did not necessarily introduce these themes out of genuine interest in the categories of the oppressed, but because they can be instrumentalized as a critical mass of the metapolitical, first, and as a critical mass of the political, later.

The body has become a space of political dispute, and moreover, it has been pierced, lacerated, and shaped by political contention. The body is not given by Cartesianism, but is the result of the interweaving of knowledge and power in the apparatus. Although based on Nietzsche, Foucault redirects regarding the object of the former’s genealogy, abandoning Ursprung in favor of Herkunft, provenance, the descent or group identity, which although it could be assimilated to race or social type — politicized today through intersectionality — deals with perceiving all the subtle singular, sub-individual marks that can intertwine in the individual and form a root that is difficult to unravel[2] — this provenance that is rooted in the body,

it inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. (Foucault, 1971)

For Foucault, the body and everything related to it will be the place of the Herkunft, and in the body, the battles of past events, desires, and errors will be fought, unleashing and erasing each other, to continue their endless conflict. In the body[3] is where today the networks of power that in the past passed through the soul will pass (Foucault, 1977a). On this surface of the inscription of events, history and power[4] will impregnate it like a tattoo (of violence, perhaps), and history, which will be “effective” as long as it introduces the discontinuous into the same being, will become a destroyer of the body, as long as it is not detached from the reality shaped by history and its onslaughts. The Left has adopted this — or part of this — interpretation of the body, turning it into a holographic battleground, and dragging all ideologies and philosophies into a discussion for which they were not necessarily prepared, or for which the subject itself was of no interest or comfort to them.

As mentioned earlier, the mainstream Right has not proceeded efficiently in the face of these new postmodern scenarios, not understanding that conventional political battles have been left in another plane, and that the battle of ideas — or cultural struggle, as it may be called — has incorporated new arenas. This new battleground has not been understood, and this ignorance and lack of understanding are dressed in skepticism, mockery, and some morbid fascination, especially in the most scandalous expressions (for example, feminist or sexual dissident demonstrations).

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The body has become a space of political combat because it exists in and through a political system, where political power provides a certain space for the individual: a space to behave, to adopt a particular posture, to sit in a certain way, or to work continuously,[5] with the body not being an ontological pre-existing entity managed by a moral and cognitive consciousness, but a product produced within the historical framework in which a device holds it (Perea, 2013); there is no independence between the body and the political, since the body is imbued with relations of power and domination.

The current Marxist Left, which has long since abandoned the militarism that characterized it for much of the twentieth century, opts for the struggle of categories, where oppressors and oppressed are pitted against each other, and where finally the side of the oppressed would have to triumph (although no one would know which category would become oppressed at that moment). For example, due to the change in methodology following their defeats in the 1960s and ‘70s and after the period of armed resistance during the 1970s and ’80s, Latin American Lefts have opted for the instrumentalization of the subversion of categories against the hegemonic. In this way, the indigenous has been captured (or, better said, appropriated) by the left as a pillar to be positioned either in discourse or in concrete actions.

Regarding giving meaning to its ideological deployment, the left has formed a true dispositif, with elements of both the said and the unsaid, unlike the mainstream right, which, lacking a narrative and experiencing only cultural anorexia without many of its defenders noticing this bleak diagnosis, has dedicated itself to reacting to the propositions and advances of the Left, reducing its axis of action to keeping the market as far away from the pretensions of the Left as possible, watching without doing much while the latter advances in non-economic realms. This is a colossal mistake that some authors warned about years ago; however, since the right is managed by short-termist representatives, sympathetic to crony capitalism and disinterested in culture, it is not surprising that this component was filled with discourses from a more intellectually astute left and with a greater intelligence for the cultural guerrilla warfare, as it has better utilized its limited resources.

The lefts, recognizing and assuming that the ideologies and philosophies underlying the pursuit of equality are not monolithic but decentralized and even chaotic, have been waging a guerrilla war from different fronts (and with different methods) against reality, relying on a shrewd (and, in some cases, morally questionable at least from the previous hegemony) politicization of social bodies, and also on a biopoliticization of them, that is, not only referring to the way in which politics is determined by life, but also, and above all, to the way in which life is penetrated by politics (Esposito, 2006).

More precisely, one should speak of an “anarcobiopoliticization,” since it is no longer only the sovereign (the law) who administers powers (knowledges and institutions) (Foucault, 2000) and biopowers (population regulation policies) (Foucault, 2004), but resistances to these powers and biopowers emerge, because where there is power, there is resistance to it. Power is resisted with power and, consequently, biopower will be resisted with biopower: political practices and economic observations of issues such as birth rates, longevity, public health, housing, migration will adopt diverse and numerous techniques to obtain the subjection of bodies and control of populations. For Foucault, the human body is no longer an insurmountable frontier but the perpetual spiral of power and pleasure (Foucault, 1976), and also a social product inserted in power and domination relations.

Anatomopolitics for the individual human body, biopolitics for the population (composed of myriad human bodies),[6] Foucault (1971) denies that labor is the essence of subjects, although he continues the Marxist denunciation by establishing the mechanisms, devices, and technologies of modernity on bodies (Barrera, 2011). Desires may have no limitations, but if they are equated with will — which seeks to give concrete form to the desired through action — entropy undergoes a positive increase, giving way to the mass, where whoever capitalizes on the discontent (and the power derived from the Dionysian impulses of discontent, which can be exercised through the gradient caused by desire) will shape biopolitically (or anarcobiopolitically, as mentioned earlier) the crowds; at least initially.

At that moment, there is a loss of reason and the establishment of a molecular and holographic tyranny of legitimate desire from bottom-up power (the masses), and the sanctification of democracy as summum bonum reinterpreted as a dispositif for the ultimate satisfaction of desire, where hubris, that is, human excess and punishment from the gods, ends up annihilating — through destabilization — the political power obtained. It is then when the resistance of the oppressed fraction of biopower will be transformed into hegemonic biopower, and will have to crush dissent before the old hegemony becomes the new resistance that will overthrow the new established power — something to consider for the future discussion of the dispute for power to be exercised over the individual and the population.

What, then, would be the impediment for current cultural forces not to seek to promote social proscription — surveillance and punishment through the panopticon[7] — of what they consider to be indicative of oppression toward less privileged groups, including in these latter also the biologically less privileged groups? The destruction of statues, the rise of dissident identities to Euro-descendant and Western hegemony, and the visibility of myths and historical milestones that were previously eclipsed by cultural hegemony are just the radical and concrete manifestation of the cultural forces forged by the Left, where the mainstream Right has played the role of an accomplice by omission, as not only has it done little to stop the tangible (the destruction of public and private property), but it has even professed and repeated the core of the left’s discourse, focusing only on the economic axis and the maintenance of power, starving intellectually and culturally.

Statues are destroyed that are representations of bodies of what it could be called “euronorm,” which would correspond to the set of traits not only cultural, legal, or social, but also phenotypic and even genotypic, where those closer to euronormativity would be privileged, not only culturally and economically, but also biologically. (For example, mention could be made of the ability to better resist alcohol due to the higher presence of alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase enzymes, the greater tolerance to lactose due to an evolutionary resistance to the presence of this disaccharide. Moreover, certain heights, features, and physical contexts related to European ancestry are even pointed out as privileges).

Racialized discourses are elaborated and molded that for the modern perspective would seem anachronistic; however, they arise in response to history and how history and power relations have pierced bodies, the place where battles of past events, desires, and errors have been fought. Thus, in response to euronorm, racialized dissidences are raised since the coloniality of power — especially visible, in Latin America, through the colonial caste system established by the Conquistadores — has racialized affiliation (Castro-Gómez, 2014) where Herkunft, that is, provenance rooted in the body, ends up manifesting itself through multiple traits that become visible in resistance to the norm, as in the case of Milanka, the figure of a Diaguita woman who replaced, through an unofficial intervention, the figure of the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Aguirre in La Serena, Chile.

Due to the depoliticization of intermediate bodies by the mainstream right, the biopoliticization and anatomopolitization of contemporary political debate, born in response and conflict with hegemonic modernity, will continue to dominate the territory where the conflict of the political is waged, obligatorily dragging (and even against its will) the human body into the debate within the framework of postmodernity, deterritorializing the body from modernity (kidnapping it from it) and reterritorializing it in compensation for the lost territory.

The body is crossed by power relations different from those known in the past, so the language in which the individual is understood must also be updated, at least to understand the current political scenario in which hegemony has destabilized and is collapsing.

Inspired by the advance of Foucault’s ideas, Guillaume Faye mentioned in his book Archeofuturism (1998) the weight of words: They are the foundations of the concepts that themselves provoke the semantic impulsion of ideas, and these latter form the engine of actions; the fact of naming and describing is already constructing. For him, it is not enough to say that egalitarianism and modernity are harmful, but it is necessary to imagine, define, and propose what is appropriate, since the critique of a concept is only efficient if there is a new affirmative, alternative concept.

In this way, Faye exhorted (over 20 years ago) today’s thinkers to propose new dramatic, sensational, and challenging concepts to counteract the lack of concrete contents posed by the Left, but which are fertile ground for chaos. This is the same chaos that can be exploited for the advancement of egalitarianism if it is not countered with visions that transcend modernity, humanitarianism, and even the sources of its permissiveness, as new times demand new ways for old ideas to confront the dramaturgical lines of modernity’s catastrophe. Much work therefore remains to be done.

Bibliography

Barrera, O. (2011). “El cuerpo en Marx, Bourdieu y Foucault.” Iberofórum. Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Iberoamericana. Año VI, No. 11: 121-137.

Castro-Gómez, S. (2014). “Cuerpos racializados. Para una genealogía de la colonialidad del poder en Colombia.” En: Cardona, H. & Z. Pedraza (comps.). Al otro lado del cuerpo. Estudios      biopolíticos en América Latina. 53-78. Universidad de los Andes.

Foucault, M. (1971). “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” En: Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. 145-172. Ed. PUF.

Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité, I: La volonté de savoir. Gallimard.

Foucault, M. (1977a). “Enfermement, psychiatrie, prison: Dialogue avec Michel Foucault et David Cooper.” Change 32-33: 76-110.

Foucault, M. (1977b). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Pantheon Books. New York.

Foucault, M. (2000). Power, vol. III. The New Press. New York.

Foucault, M. (2004). The Birth of Biopolitics. Picador-Palgrave-MacMillan. New York.

Garcés, M. (2005). “La vida como concepto político: una lectura de Foucault y Deleuze.” Athenea Digital. 7: 87-104.

Perea, A. (2013). “Miradas sobre lo político: las nociones de cuerpo en Michel Foucault y Gilles Deleuze.” Esfera, 3 (1): 4-13.

Toscano, D. (2016). “El poder en Foucault: ‘Un caleidoscopio magnífico’”. Logos: Revista de     Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura 26 (1), 111-124. DOI: 10.15443/RL2608.

Notes

[1] Fifth Gradient — Contextual Warfare — 5GW. Fifth gradient doctrines are based upon the principle of manipulation of the context of the observations of an opponent in order to achieve a specific effect. (Arherring, 2009)

[2] Foucault, M. (1971). “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” En: Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. 145-172. Ed. PUF.

[3] Power ceases to be a universal a priori and becomes a practice exercised upon bodies. In other words, power, in its kaleidoscopic functioning, is structured by small mechanisms and different vectors that, overlapping in various directions, tension social relations. (Toscano, 2016).

[4] Power relations operate upon him immediately; they surround him, mark him, tame him, subject him to torment, force him into labor, compel him to ceremonies, demand signs from him.

[5] Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” Op. cit.

[6] For this, an individualizing power is necessary, capable of introducing corrections into each of the bodies and organizing their overall ensemble. It is a power that, through disciplines and institutions such as the army or the school, educates, promotes, and extracts the forces of its citizen-bodies (Garcés, 2005).

[7] The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions — to enclose, to deprive of light, and to hide — it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which is ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap (Foucault, 1977b).