Science over Bodies

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.

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