THE SPECTACLE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY*
*THE BIOTECHNOLOGY OF THE SPECTACLE*
*Hotel des Etrangers #7, Spring 2005 * (original in Greek)by Lia Yoka

Hope-producing political hardware looks as rusty as ever, yet rustnever sleeps. From Berlin to Palestine, a wall is built for a wall thatfalls, the Third World War faded into the cries declaring the desperatetriumph of the Fourth with the 1991 Iraq invasion. Each expedition bringshome bitter loot. What is it worth? The language of the media which confuses genocide with crusade, andbombardment with humanitarian intervention can hardly think up anyconvincing answers. The "end of history" and the "clash of civilizations"were announced in the same breath. In a final flicker of political radiance,the Spectacle produced the realization that there was nothing to be saidbeyond the end of time and the conflict over space. The Spectacle became itsown insurance company. For what is the "end of history" if not the very description of thefull-scale occupation by Capital of Time. What is the end of history for theneo-liberal conception of social evolution if not the desired completion ofthe process of colonization at once of populations at large and ofindividual bodies, turning every day into productive * durations *and everybody into a sum of recyclable parts? And what is the alleged "conflict of cultures" if not a series ofviolent arrangements of space ownership and access? Any effective resistanceto the blind tumult of capital is labelled "cultural" so that it can beexplained away through a deactivated term, so that it can be blunted by thelogic of perpetual war and economic imposition, the logic that goes beyondall "culture". After all, the commodity relationship itself, and theprocesses by which it spreads spatially and temporally, form the ultimate"culture of cultures". There is controlled access to everything, control ofborders, control of data circulation, control of resources like water, oil,knowledge or medicine - how "cultural" is resistance to control? All agree that security is the main ideological commodity which canstill safely reproduce itself, even more so since 9/11. Security preservesthe sperm of fear within its cryogenic womb. But then, *why all this fun*?The "Western world" still consumes pornography, takes training courses inmanagement and self-promotion, campaigns for voting at elections where artytypes like Cicciolina or Reagan have been replaced by fundamentalistChristians and neo-con ecologists, floods history museums (out of a radicalinability to feel nostalgia for any viable future), joins massdemonstrations advertized on TV for football, for peace, for the pope, forOrthodox or Muslim minorites and majorities, goes furious over abortions ordrugs, actively supports the barter of human organs and the pharmaceuticalindustry…The subjects of the Antiterrorist Empire do not cease to piously celebratethe daily rituals of the capitalist calender, whether they derive from theold world of Enlightenment ideals, or the even older one of submission tothe priesthood. What kind of apocalypse are they expecting? What is keepingthe societies of surplus value from exploding? The effective propagandas of democracy, consumerism, or socialism inthe last century just about managed to keep the ideology of the "activecitizen" alive. Their credibility would lose vital points with everyAuschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam or Chernobyl. But at least each camp in theCold War had its own distinct rhetoric. Today, two acts after the curtain call of the Cold War, the languageof the spectacle of terrorism, while never boring or exhausted, cannevertheless hardly keep reproducing the fear that created it in the firstplace. Fear might be productive as a parasite, yet it is sterile when itcannot feed on a counter-feeling like hope, hate, or greed: hence theconservative turn. Yet capitalism cannot survive forever on its bygoneglories. It cannot restore the political promises of the old world of theliberals who talked of freedom of transport and consumption, social mobilityand easy trade, or of the communists who preferred to talk of equalitybefore the law, mass education, and independence of the people and itsproductive classes…*For sheer long-term effectivity and intensity,traditional political illusions cannot compete with plastic surgery andbrain transplants*. There is only one promise that carries the magic wand of a unifyingideology. Its twin roots are the deceptive impression that one canmanufacture the human species in an optimal codification of its ingredientson the one hand, and the twisted desire to overcome all technical limits tointervening with life on the other. *Sounds like the swan song of culture:The fear of death is mingled with a guilty drive for self-destruction.* It seems the only stable and constant 'content', rather than form, ofimages, genetically programmed into the Spectacle, is the *biotic discourse*:From facelifts to diets, from biometrics to iridology, to cloning andgenetic engineering of plants, a new totalitarianism is steadily attackingand corrupting the Social Question. Three basic ideas inspire themetaphysical technoscientific propaganda, the research programmes and themarket of biotechnology: the generalization of intelligence, the massrestoration of health and the ending of poverty. These three ideasironically address people who have lost all intelligent hope (otherwise howwould they ever trust those in charge?), people who die of the diseases ofcivilization, (like heart disease and cancer, but know there are no researchfunds left for older diseases claiming millions of lives in the ThirdWorld), and who see wealth growing at the same rate as the inequality of itsdistribution. Yet the hope is born of a fundamental fear of managers andpoliticians before the last magical process on earth. How can they actuallycontrol human, animal and plant reproduction, the last vestige of whateverNature ever used to be? That is their question. The reversal of the genitive in the title of this text, thebiotechnology of spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology, offers, wefeel, a precise description of our age, rather than yet another go atnostalgic wordplay. Biotechnology, the endpoint of technoscientific militaryprogress and also the only hope for the industrial amelioration of thespecies, is the dominant content of the Spectacle and provides its mainideological justification. Biotechnology is the utopia of the Spectacle.Reversely, the Spectacle today can unravel* * its entire biopoliticalinfluence, after it has managed to usurp all aspects of life. Capital fullyclassifies and consumes the time and space of all conceivable entities, fromgenes to planets, while the logic of the Commodity duplicates and claims thecreative processes of conscience. The biotic discourse directly aims at the body, separating it from itsvoice, its time and its space. Today's emerging type of person listens totheir own voice dubbed on TV through synchronized speaking. Their everydaytime is departmentalized into work time, free time, sleep time - partytimefor biopolitics. Their time produces capital intensively until Time becomescapital itself. Their space is a measured quantity pending between materialvirtuality and virtual materiality: From the nucleus of the universe to theremotest galaxy, the norm is set by property rights, patents, access codesand data banks, all with emergency button attached for every violation. And what are we to do? Does it suffice to merely demystify realitywith the conventional weapon of a crystal historical conscience? If theSpectacle always determined publicity, was it ever enough to merely talk of"seeking the Truth" through "exposing lies", in an effort to counter theeffects of propaganda through propaganda? Geneticists believe they can pose(and solve) the question of conscience in a slightly altered fashion: TheDNA chaingang workers and the gene conspiracy theorists believe they willsoon "demystify" the function of the human brain itself and will thusexplain the mechanics of ideas - and while they're at it, why not also thehistorical evolution of human societies… Those who offer their elms forbioethical reservations are merely dragging their good intentions along withthem on the road to hell. How long until they are convinced too? How are we to recognize the current dynamics of domination if we tooare blinded by the rays of biotic transparency, today's pseudopublic sphere,for which all social pathologies are reduced to matters of geneticcorrectibility? Biopolitics, more than an echo of postmodernist mottos, isabout the genome, the elementary building unit, as much as it is about theglobal family, it is about the Soul as much as it is about the Ecumene, itcannot distinguish between subject and object, it resides withininstitutions and is reproduced by them, you cannot escape it, since there isno escape from the prison of language or the prison of power-knowledge.There is no subject, there is only "subjectivity", there are norelationships between people, there is only a certain substance, capitalistvalue, which runs through their blood stream and determines their needs. Indeed, how can one talk of subjects, when the objectivity againstwhich the subject is measured (nature and society) is merely the mirrorimage of a quantitatively database, a kind of planetary bio-mass? Forbio-ideology, natural selection favours less densely populated areas withcharismatic bio-types. Biotypes on overpopulated territories, consisting ofslums, shantytowns and pure border areas, tend to be fundamentalist, poorand uneducated, they are useful when they don't do too much noise at work,and also serve as human spare-parts: that way they are productive even afterthey are dead. A population management based mainly on the collection of data and onthe design and employment of disciplinary methods within existinginstitutions, (which often operate on their lower hierarchical levels as"participatory" and "representative" organizations), has almost establisheda new nature. It looks like it has always been there. Resistance looksimpossible, if not irrational. For the first time, the principles ofdemocracy are cooperating so smoothly with forms of outright totalitarianismin order to disseminate the feelings of confusion and impotence. War isnamed peace, every time a military attack (Iraq, Bosnia, or Afghanistanlately) is named a humanitarian intervention. But, more to the point, peaceis actual war. The condition of peace is perpetual war against the whole ofsociety, a society potentially "criminal" and "ill", that can only be savedby the systems of institutionalization, surveillance and scientificcorrection. In his *Comments to the Society of the Spectacle, * Guy Debord wrotethat "once the running of state involves a permanent and massive shortage ofhistorical knowledge, that State can no longer be led strategically." Isthere a strategy then? Is the war machine of technoscientific Spectacle,promising wholesale immortality and mass intelligence and wealth, actuallyprogrammed to lead somewhere? Is there any farreaching plan to clone andtrain a new bionic elite alongside indefatigable and obedientsoldier-slaves? Is there any plan as to where to end the vicious circle ofpharmaceuticals that function as antidotes to other pharmaceuticals, whereto set a limit to patents on life? It looks like there isn't one. We definitely have no excuse whatsoever to rely on the bioticpseudo-discourse. They want us to decide: Do we or don't we want to know thepercentage of gmos in supermarket products, do we or don't we accept gmcrops next to conventional ones, do we or don't we like cloning, pesticides,family programming, cosmetic surgery etc etc? The process of dehumanizationcannot be halted through such false dilemmas. Dilemmas phrased that way aredesigned to keep us blind to the paranoia of those who manage and monitorsociety through their industries and governments, and to condition us intobelieving that it is all up to the voter-consumer's momentary choice at thecounter. We should never allow ourselves the comfortable illusion that it'sall a matter of handling our individual consumer guilt. Awareness of thebiotechnology of the spectacle and the spectacle of biotechnology refinesour understanding of capitalist domination today and our collective tacticsto resist it.