In this essay, I conjoin various elements previously explored by Foucault and W Churchill. I make suggestions concerning our conceptualization of the current social and political reality and the dynamics that shape it. I also wish to bring transparency to the disciplines in the Human Sciences and the role they play in the production of productive citizens for purposes of exploitation by American Empire.

Introduction to Bio-power and its Little Eichmann Engineers

There is an obvious association between the ‘Little Eichmann Mentality’ (Ward Churchill) and the practitioners of the Human Sciences that are responsible for the generation of technologies necessary to deploy ‘Bio-power’ (Foucault) in society.

Bio-power is the productive use of power in society to manufacture types of social identities that not only define the ‘normal,’ productive members of society, but also the abnormal, ‘problematic’ identities in society. Medical practitioners and social scientists seek out technologies in order to correct the ‘pathological’ behaviors of these undesirable identities in society, a process referred to, by Foucault, as ‘normalization.’

Practitioners of the Human Sciences are typically under the impression that they are performing value-neutral science, or, as I like to call it, the value of practicing science with no values. They believe that they are simply correcting ailments of individuals and aggregates in society. After all, they belong to institutions in civil society and have no conscious recognition of the political ramifications of their ’scientific’ endeavors.

Nevertheless, the Human Sciences provide the necessary regulatory mechanisms within the systemic structure of society in order to maintain the ongoing replication of elements - social identities - required for the system to persist.  These sciences ensure that the elements of society remain in their correct composition and systemic alignment—what is tantamount to the normalization of bodies—in order for the imposed structure of society to remain in tact. The bodies that revolt from the disciplinary constraints and incentives resume, through the implementation of the regulatory mechanisms, their status as ‘productive’ members working within the processes that configure the social system. In the following I will give some historical elucidation to ‘Bio- power.’

A History of the Present: The Ramifications of Bio-power

Bio-power is an umbrella term that refers to the practitioners of the human sciences whose disciplines proliferated during the Victorian era. Some examples of these disciplines are psychology, psychiatry, demography, and criminology.  They are referred to as Bio-power because they play a restrictive, yet productive, role in society. By normalizing the behaviors of individuals and aggregates of individuals within society, they generate social identities, which are expected to conform to certain behavioral patterns.

This is a productive endeavor on the part of disciplinarians because it gives meaning and purpose to the lives, or subjectivities, of these social identities, through the mechanism of implanting desires, such as living a normal, productive live: entering into a heterosexual union; and having children, whom they raise to embody the same values, such as a good work ethic and a disposition to respect and abide by the normative regulations imposed by society.  The parents are not the only agents in the socialization process.  Additionally, educators and other disciplinarians train, through pedagogy and discipline, the objects of their disciplinarian control to instantiate behavioral dispositions, which make them ‘productive members of Empire.’  In this case, ‘productive’ is intended to signify a willingness on the part of the human body to perform the repetitive tasks involved in assuming the position of a cog in the various modalities of production within American Empire, which allow it to proliferate. 

What is important to remember is that the disciplinarians, to which I originally referred, highly influence the patterns of parenting and teaching that are deployed by the lower-level disciplinarians such as parents and grammar school instructors.  The researchers at Universities, for instance, engender the development of technologies designed to modify the behavioral habits of those who are subjected to the process of socialization consisting of “Discipline and Punishment,” as well as, incentives, which serve as the desires that drive bodies to promulgate their ascribed or assumed identity within the societal matrix.  Bodies, in short, are forged, molded, and pounded into shape by disciplinarians in society, which allows for the social system to replicate the elements involved in its many processes.  

These disciplinarian practices are not disassociated from one another and lacking in any general pattern of actions and consequences.  There is a purpose behind these political practices.  Bio- power permits society to exist in a form that is in accord with the interests - although, perhaps, not the conscious interests - of particular groups in society. This is not to say that there is an reflexive collaboration among the individuals belonging to the groups that benefit from power and discipline in society, but there is most definitely a logic embedded in the unintended consequences of the agents who promote disciplinarian praxis in society.  In the case of American Empire, I would argue that Bio-power serves the purpose of the corporate elites and their henchman politicians, who need a disciplined and technically skilled work force in order to profit from their investments.  To sum, there is a relation between economic interests - a rubric which I use quite broadly to include the accumulation, transfer, and production of any commodity or source of stimulus that incites pleasure or satisfaction - and the implementation of Bio-power in American society.  The corporate elites could not amass the absurd amount of resources that they do without having at their disposal highly disciplined and trained bodies for the purposes of providing labor capacities for the exploitation of the corporate elite’s industrial niche.  With the out-sourcing of jobs, however, this dynamic is probably currently under alteration, but, for the time being, I believe that this description is an apt one. 

I hope one can already see the political implications of these Human Scientific disciplines in civil society. The fact that they are in civil society makes them appear innocuous and politically inert. However, this is an illusory impression, because these Bio-power disciplines serve as the regulatory mechanism for the current configuration of society, which is dominated by political and corporate elites.

The Little Eichmann Component to Bio-power

The Little Eichmann mentality defines the subjectivities of the engineers social reality; the disciplinarians, described in the preceding paragraphs.  Human Science is not a mere recording of ‘objective’ reality. It is more an attempt to manipulate and control the ontological domain that has been delimited by a discipline’s observational activities. The objects that appear present-at- hand were originally given an ontological status by scientists carving out entities from the monist world to use as instruments in the actualization of the objectives that define the teleology of their projects.

Consequently, science should be understood less as a form of an objective rendering of reality than a manifestation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power—the drive or impetus to control and manipulate one’s surroundings. According to Nietzsche, the external environment is far too complex to for humans to ever conceive of a complete, ‘objective’ description of its elements and properties as well as knowledge of its relationships and its processes.  Humans, through the device of language, simplify the world and reduce its complexity, and invent operations, devised by the mechanism of if-then-statements - allowing for causal analysis - and render the world exploitable for their interests.

The language, or the vocabulary, of the disciplines—the jargon—is the repository for the ontological creations of the discipline. To increase its power, its ability to manipulate and control, those who are indoctrinated into the discipline are taught, by exposure to exemplars, the language of the discipline and its habits for problematizing the discipline’s phenomenal domain. Heidegger, through one of his aphorisms, which goes something like this, “Being resides in the House of Language, ” communicated that language, and its lexicon, along with all of the culturally distinct varieties of language and lexicon, shape our perceptions and understandings of the objects and properties that exist within the domain that is defined by our activities in particular modes of Being-in-the-World; or, in other words, the types of projects in which we are engaged.

Indeed, the little worlds that are projected by human sciences are defined by the language that is peculiar to their tribal activities.  The unfortunate thing, however, is that these forms of vocabulary enter into the sphere of bureaucratic and popular culture; thus, creating social identities that become objectified and quite real with respect to social-ontology of social reality.  Identities, such as homosexual and other marginalized identities are the products of the Human Sciences, and have created subspecies of humanity, which are often mistreated or subjected to the corrective medical practices referred to by Foucault as ‘normalization;’ the regulatory technologies produced by disciplinarians. 

Although the deleterious effects of the practices of the preponderance of social-scientists are quite evident to anyone who considers historical research a valid form of knowledge production, the subjectivities of practitioners of the Human Sciences are such that they only tune in to their narrowly defined projection of professional possibilities. It is as if they are race horses wearing blinders, so not to be distracted by any unintended social consequences they might glimpse in their periphery vision. They are driven forward as they jockey for the lead position among their academic competitors in the specialized field that they find themselves….publish…publish… publish…because their only measure of success is in criteria created within the discipline itself, leading to an obsession with performitivity and productivity. They possess the “Little Eichmann” mentality.

They epitomize the administrative role of the compliant yet the partially ignorant. Are they to blame in a personal respect, perhaps.  However, they are most definitely professionally culpable for every technological insight they create to help make the processes and systems of the social structure function more efficiently under the American Empire.  Therefore, the individuals who comprise these disciplines belonging to the social sciences are not really scientists, at all; at least not in a traditional sense.  Rather they are extensions of polity’s bureaucratic apparatus, and they serve as effective agents of those who possess a disproportionate control upon American Polity, such as the corporate elites, by disciplining the population to possess the necessary dispositions rendering them docile, conformitive, and skilled.

Conclusion

The disciplines in society are a necessary component to the continuation of American Empire and its expansion, because they regulate the processes needed to produce the type of person who can contribute to Empire. I have often heard the slogan, ‘think globally but act locally.’ This is all fine and good, but to understand the effects of your efforts when you situate yourself in the larger picture of things, acting nationally as well locally seems quite tempting.

It is time to bring recognition to the functional properties of the disciplinarian Human Sciences and to take a stance on their impact upon the society that we are trying to reform. Populists, they are not necessarily our allies; they are often part of the problem.

Tags: american empire, bio power, democracy, education, empire, Energy, foucault, human sciences, power, russell cole, society, ward churchill
Categories: Commentary, Society, Democracy, Education, foucault, Energy, Empire
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The new-Left in America is the product of the standpoint politics emerging in the 60’s, which sought to develop strong cultural identities, demanding autonomy from the oppression posed by white-male-European cultural conventions. The rebellion against the hegemony of the dominant culture in American society was certainly a worth-while and nobel endeavor.

However, the current condition of identity politics is one where the groups who fall under the extension of this rubric are dominated by individuals who are not only members of the identities for which they speak, they are also members of an economic class in society that does not feel the effects of the policies they advocate with respect to illegal immigration.

As far as neo-Liberalism is concerned, I agree that people of this particular ideology are also proned to support an opne-border. However, neo-Liberalism and the new-Left are not mutually exclusive categories.

The new-Left, due to its own absorption by its ethnocentricity, has failed to adequately target globalization and free-market ideology as a salient social-concern. The great neo-Liberal apologist, Bill Clinton, who also advocated the interests of the Gay community, with which I, of course, have absolutely no problem, is indicative of the failure of those who embody the values of the new-Left to fight for the interests of the American worker by directing some their energy in opposition to globalization.

Tags: politics, Russell Coles Blog, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Third Parties
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Midwest Americans,

Your inclusion in this Party in no way prevents you from remaining affiliated with your current party.  This is so, because the Midwest Alliance and The Populist Party, have a limited platform that consists of simply creating a democracy in the United States.  Please read bellow for a quick summation of the general principles that guide that party in its grass-roots efforts and, hopefully, you well see the pressing need for actualizing the basic elements embodied in the Party’s platform.  Since you will be involved in the party from its very inception, you will have the opportunity to influence the party’s structure as well as its platform.  Therefore, if you ever feel left out by the politics of the two business parties in America, then this is your chance to help dictate how you want your new political party to operate.  I shall, just briefly, describe some of the guidelines for the Party’s agenda that are provided by the national organization, which serve only as loose provisions for the grass-roots efforts that we will be conducting in The Midwest. 

The Populist Party is concerned with creating a democracy in the United States.  You might think, don’t we already live in a democracy?  Certainly not.  A democracy includes the populace’s participation in all of the various public policy initiatives that are formed through polity.  Consequently, the mere fact that decisions are often rendered by elites in the various, over-grown agencies associated with government, or the elitist intellectuals in academia, indicates that America, and The Midwest, suffer from a top-to-bottom political structure that cares little for the input of the average citizen.  The reform of this process is the primary objective of The Populist Party of America.

The Midwest Alliance of Populist America

Tags: grassroots, midwest populist party, populist party, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Midwest, Populist Party, Democracy
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I feel compelled to continue to plead for a dialog concerning illegal immigration that extends beyond the bombastic PC oratory that is projected, oftentimes, by members of American society that do not suffer from the economic impact that the constant influx of cheap labor manifests.

Economists, as they always do in respect to contentious issues, have taken a manifold of positions regarding the benefits or detriments of illegal immigration.  However, I can state that the economists who support the opening of the border with Mexico appear to deploy justifications, such as, immigrant labor forces those without highschool degrees to further their education, so to ascend to employment niches that require technical skills, and, accordingly, pay better.

This type of rationalization on the part of those who advocate an open-border with Mexico seems to me, at least, to be as callous, if not more so, than those who want to establish legislation, making illegal immigration a felony.  To compound the effects of this rhetoric upon popular-opinion, media sources are parading small to middle sized business owners, who claim that they would not have a work force without a stream of temporary labor.

Never do the interviewers query the petite capitalists as to the amount of income that they extract from their operations on a yearly basis, in order to assess whether a rather severe reduction of the profiteering conducted by the owners of the modes of production might provide for the opportunity to attract American citizens to assume these labor capacities by offering a living-wage.  Therefore, from the failure to disclose such pertinent information, the population is proferred a tilted narration, including only limited content, in regards to the multiplicity of aspects that demand consideration, when externalizing the experiences of the people who stand to either profit from an open-border or descend deeper into financial distitude.

Further, not once have I observed an interview with a member of the African-American urban communities, in order to reveal the negative effects that this constant injection of bodies into the unskilled labor-market has upon their earning potential as well as their ability to even procure a job.  I, over the years, have worked in various warehouses, as a teamster, and I can testify, from my own experiences, that the individuals who take these jobs have families consisting of dependents, and so forth.

This is why I become infuriated when I read yet another inflamatory essay by a member of the New-left establishment who claims that any opposition to illegal immigration is an embodiment of a racist, white-supremist ideology.  What do these people know about the effects of illegal immigration?  They exist outside the deplorable conditions in which the people, who must compete with this continuous exportation of another country’s underclass, live.

Additionally, the rhetoric, consisting of platitudes and hyberbole, expoused by these brave defenders of illegal immigration, who have nothing personally to lose, are conspicuously absent of empirical content.  Rather, this discourse consists of ridiculous generalizations that reduce the complexity of this issue into a dichotonomy between those who embrace multi-culturalism and diversity and those who are reactionary in the sense that they are endeavoring to preserve some crystalized conceptualization of American culture, which, as most of us who side with the American wage-earner, know not to exist in the first place.

This issue should have nothing to do with cultural or ethnic considerations.  Quite simply - and it would be ostensible, as well, if not for the obfuscating discourse emanating from brave, white-middle-class activists who triumphently blow their horns of self-righteousness - this social-problem is comprised of multiple concers; one of which is the plight of the American wage-earner and his or her further exploitation resulting from the strange marriage between the New-left and the neo-conservatives,  who chime in harmony as they advocate a policy that will further saturate the American labor market, allowing both the Mexican elites and the American corporate-elites to continue to fill their pockets.

Russell Cole

Tags: economics, economists, establishment, immigration, labor, living wage, National, neo cons, pc, politics, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, National, Economics, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Labor
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