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/203/ Positive Biopolitics? ft. Benjamin Bratton (Patreon)

Published:
2021-07-13 06:01:00
Imported:
2026-06
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  • 203-Biopol-Bratton.mp3

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Content

On pandemic & post-pandemic politics.

We talk to Benjamin Bratton about his new book, The Revenge of the Real, and its argument for a "positive biopolitics". What does an "epidemiological view of society" look like, and why should we let go of the idea that unmediated social relations are the most authentic kind? We touch on the work of Foucault and Agamben and why they are or aren't relevant to our conditions and critique "boomer theorists". Come to our book launch in London.

Running order:

(00:30) - Intro chat

(05:40) - Interview with Bratton

(01:01:30) - 'After Party'

Readings:

The Revenge of the Real, Verso Books

The 7th Function of Language, Laurent Binet, Penguin

Files

Comments

Nicholas Kiersey

Christ on a stick, guys. Yet again with the hot takes on Foucault when you clearly haven’t read him. The theory of positive (read: democratic) biopolitics is already inherent in Foucault. He calls it socialist biopolitics/socialist governmentality, but whatever. Secondly, you can’t just fold Agamben into Foucault, when Agamben is clearly a radlib idiot who hates Foucault (precisely because he sees in Foucault the potential for a positive biopolitics).

Blake

Loved the part where he mentioned how constrained the current left is by the 60's anti-authoritarian strand. Like Marx said, the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Sensible Captain

The real trouble with leftists publishing on Verso and having the "correct views" on the pandemic is that they frame their blatantly authoritarian ideas in an evasive, superficially elegant way, so that anyone would intuitively agree with them. I find this elusiveness genuinely fascinating. Bratton of course represents everything I fight against in my writings, he in fact epitomises what I call the fetishistic approach to the virus as an "objective constraint". His whole argument hinges on disavowing the social and political dimensions of the pandemic, and substituting it with the material-technical form. His 'epidemiological view' of society is astutely anti-Marxist; he neither has a concept of capital, nor class. He thus has no concept of capitalist society at all. To the contrary: his weird acceleratonism explicitly shuns even putting any emancipatory agenda on the table - and this is quite in contrast to his lamentation of postmodernist 'boomer'-theory (a cognitive dissonance symptomatic for the Verso left). Just a few examples: his advocacy for the surveillance state and a 'positive bio-politics' to serve the interests of the 'marginalised' (for they would otherwise not enter the scales of "epidemiological prophylaxis") is quite openly cynical - just yesterday, the marginalised in South Africa's Durban have made their own comment to 'positive bio-politics' public by looting supermarkets in search for food. How could a sociologist linked to a leftist environment single-handedly dismiss this crisis? His vain effort to overturn the reservations against remote human encounter, the sheer exhaustion of Zoom meetings, online teaching, masking, and social distancing we have been tortured with for over 18 months into something positive are signs of a degenerate mind - or simply, an authoritarian personality. To this scenario, Bretton's pre-Kantian metaphysics of the wearing of masks not as a "subjective ethics", it but an "objective" one - it is not my will to infect others, so I have to oblige to the supra-ordinate will of the "immunological commons" (Jesus fucking Christ) - fits seamlessly. This is pre-critical moral philosophy. Refusing to wear a mask, say, after one is immune, or vaccinations are well under way, or incidents are low, or if you are a school child, is just as much an expression of an objective "ethos" as wearing one - namely the refusal to be - in the precise Hegelian sense - irrational (think that for the whole tradition Bratton implicitly refers to, the rejection of freedom for humans is pure irrationality). Bratton shreds any concept of emancipation from a state of affairs where the subordination of humans to the technical-material would be something to overcome. His 'positive bio-politics' ("Medicare for All, state vaccination programs") embraces the world as it is. We are not supposed to believe Agamben who for whatever reason has a seismic sensor for the authoritarian logic of the new normal, but him. I cannot imagine a more apt desciption of the coming regressive new era than 'positive bio-politics'. I hope for the sake of everyone that neither the concept nor the word will prevail.

Jeffrey Martin

I cannot improve upon Sensible Captain's comment, so I'll just state that slagging of Agamben, after his project and suspicions about liberalism morphing into a regime of biosecurity, is a tell - a tell that much of the Left can no longer perceive that what it is doing, objectively, is advancing the political program of the most authoritarian and retrograde elements of Capital, all the while hallucinating that it is doing something different, merely because it thinks that it is doing something other than this, by imagining another form of the very thing Capital is doing. Capital is trying to lay the foundations of monetizing every quanta of data that can be mined from your social interactions, and from your very biological processes. There is no decommodified version of this, no socialist version of it. The only purpose of the technology is precisely this, because, as with the move for GND financialization of nature, and all interactions with nature, Capital is fucking failing, has a massive overhang of dead debt, and needs to create tens of trillions in fictitious capital to keep the goddamn game going a little longer - and if coercing everyone into a glorified, geofenced veal pen is what is required to conjure the trillions, they'll fucking do it. Medical intervention after medical intervention, NPIs without limit, constant surveillance of every biological process. And the fucking Left, the supposed bearers of the philosophy of liberation, of human freedom, will be there cheering it on, hallucinating that because they endorse the same thing, but for a different reason, that the thing will become some other thing. It's like the naive and malignantly stupid enthusiasm for the EU, the belief that there is some other EU in the realm of possibility, one that is both continental and socialist, so the Left battens on to every establishment politics that batters populists and entrenches austerity, if only the fucking EU can be preserved and expanded. Heaven forbid some nation break away, and allow a national electorate to consider some reforms against neoliberalism! It is the worst sort of idealism: merely thinking different thoughts than neoliberals as you do and endorse the same policies magically makes them different. This accelerationism will not bring about revolution. It will summon monsters, the destruction of every human good that cannot be quantified on a balance sheet, and bring about collapse. FFS. We are not feedlot cattle.

Scott Kirkland

If I can defend him for a moment, I get Agamben made a couple of weird claims early on. But, this way of reading his project, as if it begins after 9/11 is a huge part of why he's not understood. Agamben's so-called political "turn" comes in the early '90s with The Coming Community, Means without Ends, etc. These are ordered directly at the EoH, Tiananmen, and, *crucially* Maastricht. After the collapse of the PCI and after Berlusconi emerges he embarks upon the Homo Sacer project, which is in turn bracketed by the Eurozone crisis. Agamben's project has been deeply shaped by early arrival of the end in Italy well before he was picked up in Anglo-American theory after 9/11. To read him as some kind of vitalist alternative to the biopolitical is to totally ignore the way that he understands the European project itself as the ultimate victory of capital over any alternate form of life. He's living in fucking Venice, after all. Watching any shred of what was a form of life eviscerated by touring cosmopolitans in their cruise ships and AirBnBs.

Paul Brewer

I don’t really have the background to comment on the topic of this episode but I wanted to say I welcome the return of the after-party.

skipmur

This fella is very painful to listen to and doesn't sound like a bloke who's very confident in himself or his views on the Covid pandemic. I can't help but see all these pro lockdown middle class leftist professors who attempt to hide their totalitarian agenda behind deceitful stuttering jargon as deep down just simply being incredibly thankful that the proles have finally been locked up in their homes, their business destroyed, and that the tech oligarchs are monitoring them to ensure they're saying all the right things and are being sufficiently woke... They can't make sense of a world where the working class across the western world have rejected the popularist Left, largely in favour of the popularist Right. They'd rather see a spanner thrown into the works and bring society to a complete stand still than lose anymore. The lockdown upper middle PMC left are essentially supporting a state of siege warfare being declared on the working class, after the defeat of Corbyn and Sanders and with Brexit and a Trump second term looming around the corner Covid was a life line for them to cling onto some kind of political relevance.

Daniel L

I thought this was a great episode! I appreciate when you get people on that you don't necessarily agree with.

Tim

Did this guest sincerely use the phrase 'bodily fluids'? Was this an interview with Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove? Does anyone else old enough to remember have a feeling of bad deja vu occurring at present societally with respect to the post-9/11 years in which the institutionally-entrenched intelligentsia (Thomas Friedman? David Brooks? etc. etc.) submitted to a collective hallucination/Bogeyman paranoia resulting in the invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act, interminable and perverted TSA security lines at airports and the like? My hunch is this guest's private utopian fantasy would involve being locked inside an armored self-driving electric vehicle while cruising through San Diego, CA's pharmaceutical industry's parking lots, wearing a respirator and a VR headset, with a slow-drip IV of estrogen hooked to his arm, alone, forever. Remember when Verso used to publish cool books like 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'? Yeah...those days are over. Hard pass. Wing Attack Plan R, plz.