About the technological forms of life and biopolitical practices

About the technological forms of life and biopolitical practices1 By Flavia Costa2 Abstract In Critique of information (2002), the sociologist Scott Lash stated that our time matches the trending development of “technological forms of life”. Talking about “forms of life”, Lash suggests, implies positioning oneself on the crossroads between natural-biological and socio-cultural realities (Lash, 2002: 40). And referring to “technological forms of life” implies including a third term in that scene, technique, which enters a composite regimen with the other two and points toward a movement of action “at a distance”, beyond the anthropomorphic limits of the own body. In that book, Lash put that term in the scene, but did not develop it further than a few paragraphs. I intend to deepen that notion sketched out by Lash succinctly, since I consider it particularly fruitful due to various reasons. Mainly because it allows to highlight the intimate connection between two processes that have been frequently analyzed separately: on one side, the progressive politicization of biological life (or biologization of politics; that is, the biopolitical thesis developed from certain writings, courses and conferences dictated by Michel Foucault in the decade of 1970) and, on the other side, the growing technification of productive processes, of human capacities and even of the modes of life. Synthetically, the process of technification in its restricted aspect appears, in our age, bound to the extension over the human life and body of principles regarding autonomization, improvement, optimization and individual responsibilization regarding the caretaking of the psycho-physical endowment (of inherited or acquired “human capital”), characteristic of a particular combination of the technical industrial-capitalist code (Feenberg, 2002) and the emerging modes of neoliberal governmentality. 1 Originally published in Spanish: "Sobre las formas de vida tecnológicas y las prácticas biopolíticas", in Observaciones filosóficas. Revista de Filosofía Nro.13, Santiago de Chile; 2012 p. 11 - 33 An earlier version of this text was previously published in the magazine Sociedad Nº29/30, spring 2011, Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, pp. 67-81, ISSN 0327-7712 2 CONICET-IDAES Researcher. Doctor in Social Sciences, UBA. Works at the Social Sciences Faculty since 1995. What do actress Bibiana Fernández –registered after her birth in Tangier as Manuel Fernández and popularly known as Bibi Andersen, who managed to legally change her name in 1994–, the South African track runner Oscar Pistorius -who had both his legs amputated and runs in the paralympic games with carbon fiber prostheses-, and the Argentinian plastic artist Nicola Constantino, who in 2004 presented in Malba an artwork consisting of 100 pieces of soap containing 3 per cent of her own body’s fat, extracted through liposuction, have in common? What connects the 12.000 embryos frozen as a result of in vitro fertilization that remained in the year 2007 “in waiting” in the city of Buenos Aires3 with the 2011 court ruling that declares the unconstitutionality of the Incucai’s 69/09 resolution4 -according to which stem cells extracted from a newborn's umbilical cord are of public use- and allowed for the Defensoría de la Nación (National Public Defender) to present an appeal, which based some of its arguments on the property rights granted by the Constitution's 17th article?5 I will hold here that the connection between these persons and events is the emergence of that which, following Scott Lash, I propose to call “technological forms of life”. The choice of terms is, in that sense, decisive. Speaking about “forms of life”, as Lash suggests, implies placing oneself at the crossroads between natural-biological and socio-cultural realities (Lash, 2005: 40). And referring to the current moment as the developing trend of “technological forms of life” includes a third term within that scenario, technique, which enters a composite regimen with the other two and points toward an expansive movement beyond the anthropomorphic limits of the own body. In Critique of information Lash develops this concept in a succinct fashion, which nonetheless allows for a first approach to the matter. In the age of technological forms of life, says Lash, we act “human and machine interfaces [...] conjunctions of organic and technological systems”; or also, as “technological forms of natural life” (Lash 2005: 42). And, as such, we must necessarily transit the technological forms of life in social life; meaning that we must traverse and inhabit “technological culture”, which constitutes in itself the form of sociability that requires the development of a machine interface: basically, transportation and communication machines (for the transportation of objects and signs). They are culture, or society, “at a distance”. But the same occurs with nature: in the age of the technological forms of life, nature can also be “at a distance”. Effectively, during our 3 Data from the partial census carried out by the Sociedad Argentina de Medicina Reproductiva (Argentine Society for Reproductive Medicine) (source: Pizzi, 2007) 4 “Instituto Nacional Central Único Coordinador de Ablación e Implante” or Central National Coordination Institute for Ablations and Implants. 5 “The girl’s blood and the cells contained in it are her ownership and property and she may dispose of them, use them and enjoy them according to regular exercise” (quoted by Vallejos, 2011). time, human life forms that exist and survive outside a bodily anchorage have proliferated, requiring permanent and intensive technological intervention, such is the case of stem cells, frozen embryos, cell and tissue cultures, sperm banks and even human DNA databanks. “What was previously internal and proximal to the organism is stored in an external and distant database as genetic information” (idem). More specifically, however, I have chosen the notion of “technological forms of life” to describe the contemporary age because it allows to highlight the intimate connection between two processes that have been usually analyzed separately: on one side, the progressive politicization of biological life (or biologization of politics; this is, the biopolitical thesis developed from certain writings, courses and conferences dictated by Michel Foucault in the 1970s)6 and, on the other, the growing technification of productive processes, human capacities and even ways of life. Incidentally, the link between these new forms of life and the process of technification from the previously quoted cases is notoriously drawn out from the cases mentioned above. The development of techniques for psycho-physical modelling, reproduction (or generation understood as production), administration, work, communication, control and vigilance are examples of the important contribution of new technologies when it comes to modelling political, economic, social and cultural institutions. At the limit, technique becomes body and flesh: it “incarnates” and “incorporates” itself into man through implants, transplants, chirurgical interventions, genetic therapies. The political element (more precisely: biopolitical) is not as clear, but just as operative, it traverses and links these problems together, putting them in the orbit of the question about the new devices for the capture and/or the government of life, as well as the contemporary modes of the government of self and of others. Synthetically: the process of technification, in its restricted aspect, appears bound to the extension of automatization principles, improvement, optimization and individual responsibilization for the caretaking of the psycho-physical endowment (of acquired or inherent “human capital”) over the human life and body, characteristic of a particular combination 6 I am referring particularly to Foucault, 1976, 1977, 1992, 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2007. Just as Giorgio Agamben (1998) pointed out, the thesis of modernity as a conversion process of life on the gravitational axis of politics had been enunciated, some twenty years before Foucault, by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. The transit toward modernity implied, according to Arendt’s thesis, the progressive shift of the animal laborans –the living being who does not produce or fabricate things but fundamentally (re)produces itself, because it is bound to survival– to the center of politics. Years later, Foucault called out modernity as the moment of emergence of the “biopower”: that process through which, during the formation of nation States in Europe, the individual’s and the population’s life and bodies enter into the calculations of power, which results in the (apparently paradoxical) conversion of the body, as the support of biological life, into the central object of political order and at the same time the subject of every claim and every resistance. between the technical industrial-capitalist code (Feenberg, 2002)7 and emerging modes of neoliberal governance. 2. First of all, the idea of form of life –as opposed to other possibilities that could succeed the adjective “technological”, such as civilization, culture or society– highlights a composite structure (and not a mutual exclusion) between two unsplittable poles: life and form. As a symptom of the vitalist matrix that has branded a not insignificant portion of European twentieth century thought, 8 the notion of form of life does not appear any longer, however, internally elaborated by a negativity that refuses or rejects it, as it would be the case with the negation of nature or biology for the notions of culture or civilization. It is exposed, on the contrary, as a field of forces crossed by polar tensions (those of life and those of form) which are present at every point in the field without allowing for the tracing of clear lines of demarcation. This way, the concept allows to circumvent the old dichotomies that structured, at least during early modernity, the analysis of the human condition. It shows most clearly the decline of the opposition (not necessarily the difference) between nature and culture: the opposition between a naturalbiological “support” and an “investment” that both surrounds it (culture in the sense of civilization, as the process of acquiring habits, customs, illustration, erudition) as well as dwells inside of it and models it from within (culture in the spiritual sense, as the existence of a “not merely animal” zone within the biological body, where the learned contents can resound that which comes from outside: conscience, soul, reason, or even linguistic capacities or abilities). Already in Wittgenstein,9 and later other authors who recovered the biopolitical reading –as is the case of Nikolas Rose among the anglophones; Roberto Esposito, and especially Agamben among the Italian–, its formulation implies additionally that none of the two poles can be reduced entirely to the other one, that there is no such thing as a biological destiny for the species that could or 7 According to Feenberg, the “technical code” is the materialization of an interest in a technologically coherent solution for a general kind of problem, where the solution serves as a paradigm or example for the whole domain of technical activity. The definition of technical code allows this author to specify that which is proper of capitalist organization: ensuring the operational autonomy, the “control from outside” of the consumption and reproduction processes. 8 The concept of “form of life”, Lebensform, which Wittgenstein uses mostly in his later works, was not only common in the German historical tradition (Herder, Hegel, von Humboldt), but it was also very usual in the Viennese context in which the author of the Tractatus studied. The “forms of life”, as contexts of the games of language within which linguistic expressions acquire meaning, is in fact a frequent notion, for example, in the Austrian architect Adolf Loos. As Janik and Toulmin (1998:291) point out, Loos had frequently used a similar motive, when he insisted that the design of any meaningful artifact had to be determined by the “forms of culture” into which it was inserted. 9 In spite of being considered a technical term of the so-called “second Wittgenstein”, the concept of “form (or forms) of life” appears few times in his writings: in six occasions in his whole published works, five of them in the Philosophical investigations and another one in the Notebooks. Its importance stems from them, the forms of life, constituting a contextual correlation, the “emplacement” or, in Scotto’s words, “the practical foundation of the games of language, and consequently, the basis of our vital edifice.” (Scoto, 2009:214) would necessarily guide social and cultural forms, nor is there any formal model for life to follow or be required to follow. Forms of life are, for Wittgenstein, “the given” (Wittgenstein, 1988:226), shared activity patterns that express certainties of a practical character; they include natural, biological components, not acquired, and cultural, linguistic, ritual and expressive components, which were transmitted and learned. Nonetheless, that “given” composition does not point to an ascending path from one pole to the other: from the “mere life” towards its “taking shape”. So called primitive forms of life, even non-human forms of life (animals, for example), are not “lesser” forms of life, but estranged, different forms of life (which, to be understood without being forced, can only be described, not explained).10 One of the consequences of this perspective is that, at the level of human forms of life, it is not possible to conceive something as a mere life, biological life or naked life. Human life is always already a form of life.11 Only at the level of political relationships –not at that of “nature”– can something such as a homo sacer12 exist, his own, as well as those of political prisoners in concentration camps, or in comatose states, are still forms of life. The key in this sense is to remember that, just as Agamben (1998, 2001) analyzed, in that demarcation, in that gap between mere life and a politically considered life, is where the biothanato-political operation (simultaneously metaphysical and ontological) carried out by the sovereign power precisely consists. And it effects that separation, precisely, as full-fledged exercise of its right to kill.13 10 Even if we acknowledge the discussion about this point among Wittgenstein’s interpreters, we agree with Carolina Scotto about the fact that the unitarian and exclusively human conception of the forms of life (which stems from, among others, the fragment 206 of the Investigations) do not fundamentally exclude the possibility of other forms of nonhuman life nor the cultural differences within the broad universe of the “human” common. (cf. Scotto 2009) 11 That is also how Esposito expressed it in a recent interview: “even naked life, when it appears, is –even negatively– a form of life” (Esposito, 2005:12) 12 A key protagonist in Agamben’s later works, from 1995 to date, the homo sacer is an “enigmatic figure in archaic roman right” that designated that individual who, after having committed a crime, was completely exposed to death, since it couldn’t be sacrificed to the gods and, if it was killed, that death would not be considered homicide. For this author, the homo sacer gathers, in a paradigmatic fashion, the characteristics of life bound to sovereign power, to its power to dispense death. Agamben says: “sovereign is he regarding whom all men are potentially hominis sacri and homo sacer is he regarding whom every man acts as his sovereign.” (1998:110) 13 The origin of that sovereign right over “life and death”, which Foucault also refers to in the final chapter of the first volume of History of sexuality (Foucault, 1992), is found –says Agamben– in the expression vitae necisque potestas, that designates the power of life and death of the pater over the male child. “That way, life appears originally in the law only as the counterpart of a power that threatens with death. But what is true for the right over life and death of the pater is even more so for the sovereign power (imperium), for whom it is its original cell. So, the hobbesian foundation of sovereignty, life in the nature state is defined only by the fact of being unconditionally exposed to this deadly threat” (Agamben, 1998: 14-15) The idea that we have begun our existence (as a species or as individuals) as a biological life is usually acceptable to us, and that little by little that life is “invested” with attributes and forms: through evolutive development, through the acquisition of language, through education, a certain bodily discipline and modelling of customs. In the interview that precedes the Argentinian edition of State of exception, Agamben explains, that the naked life is not a natural a priori but the result of an elemental operation of the sovereign power, which consists in artificially producing the starting conditions from which it is possible to separate something like a naked life from its context. That which I call naked life is a specific production of power and not a natural fact. When we move in space and go back in time, we will never find -not even in the most primitive conditions- a man without language and without culture. [...] We may, on the contrary, artificially produce conditions in which something like a naked life is separated from its context: the muselmann in Auschwitz, the comatose, etc. (Agamben, 2004:18). 3. Accordingly, the form may not be isolated from life. And in two different ways at that. On one side, it is not possible to isolate something like a mere form, a completely modelled culture, a pure ornamentation or ceremonial. Except in theoretical imagination, something like pure snobbery, absolute stylization or formalization without any relationship to human animalitas never exists. Even in Alexandre Kojève description of “japanese snobbery”, referencing what he interpreted as an integrally formalized society,14 it was unavoidable to acknowledge the “animal” in man at least as a “natural support” for the ritual practices of Nô theater, the tea ceremony, the ikebana (floral arrangements) art form or the gratuitous suicide, which are the four examples that the famous introducer of Hegel saw as the most efficient “disciplines negating the ‘natural’ or ‘animal’ given” (Kojève, 1979:437). For Kojève, paradoxically, such an efficiency at negating the animal in man would imply –in spite of the pessimistic forecasts, and his own earlier idea regarding them–, the survival of both figures in the time after the “end of History”. In the post-historic age –so wrote Kojève in 1968, the same year 14 According to Kojève, who travelled to the country in 1959, japanese society –where “in spite of persistent economic and social inequality, every Japanese without exception is capable of living according to totally formalized values, that is, completely devoid of any ‘human’ content”–, it constituted the most complete example of a post-historical (and, in a certain sense, post-human) scenario. The argument about post-history that Kojève develops following a reading of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (in the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, originally published in 1947), could be synthetically summarized as follows: if what defines man is the negating action of the given in order to satisfy the desire for recognition, in the universal and homogeneous State, where everybody is satisfied and has obtained the recognition of citizenship, there is no further sense in putting one’s life at risk through Struggle (in order to become the other’s Master) nor submitting oneself to Work (to be the Master of nature). In the introduction to the second edition of this work, dated in 1968, Kojève adds that, nevertheless, in post-history the negating action persists; only in the shape of a negativity without an object that is realized as snobbery through art, play, ritual fighting and eroticism. of his death– there will not be “a ‘definitive annihilation of man as such’, while animals of the Homo sapiens species can serve as a ‘natural’ support for what is human in men” (ídem).15 On the other side, and in a more specific fashion, the notion of form of life is distinguished from that of lifestyle. As Tim O’Sullivan (1995) summarizes, the notion of lifestyles is generally used to characterize “the particular models and distinctive features that constitute a ‘mode of life’ of any group or individual”. That is why they are conceived as “fragments of any social formation” and indicate “the degree of choice, difference and the creative or resisting cultural possibilities” that exist in that formation (O’Sullivan, 1995:134-135, the italization is mine). The form of life, on the contrary, does not signal an election, an option or alternative among other more or less available ones, but is located at the level of political-social-cultural-biological formation. Interpellated, as we are doing here, from a non-historical, non-biological, non-teleological perspective, such a formation can be apprehended as a contingency, as a potentiality. 16 From that non-being-potentiality what one is gets nourished by the expectation of distancing oneself reflexively from the own form of life, of resisting it, of transforming it. From there on, the possibility emerges of knowing and, if it were possible, of experiencing other forms. But signalling the contingency of that form of life that appears, to us, as “the given” is very different from saying that it is itself a selectable “style”. 4. What does it mean to say, then, that the current forms of life have turned (or are turning) “technological”? Firstly, following Lash in his Critique of information, they constitute a stadium of deepening of the modern forms of life; in which, at the level of our way of comprehending and signifying, “we understand the world through technological systems” (Lash, 2005: 42), and in which, at an ontological level,17 technological systems have, in a fair measure, overlapped –and in some cases even fused– with sociocultural systems, in such a way that people inhabit and face the world not only out of habitus incorporated through accumulated and learned experiences (Bourdieu, 1992:88) but also through an interface, that in many cases implies an incorporation, into technological systems. Like we said a moment ago, this implies pointing out that the “nature-culture” (or nature-politics) composite now gets a third term added, “technique”, questioning another one of the known 15 For a survey of this topic, see Agamben, 2005, as well as –in a sense that limits the reach of the comparison– the distinction made by Manuel Mauer between Kojève’s and Foucault’s thesis regarding the sense of “biologization” of politics (Mauer, 2010). 16 That is precisely what is at play in the foucauldian project of a “critical ontology of ourselves”: the possibility of extracting “from the contingency that which has made us what we are, the possibility of not being, doing or thinking any more what we are, do or think” (Foucault, 1996:88) 17 Here we distance ourselves from Lash, who explicitly points out that “we do not fuse with them, but face our environment in an interface with technological systems” (Lash, 2005: 42). For my part, I hold that we may speak of relationships of incorporation at least since the existence of certain technical instruments that are introduced into the body and allow it to carry on living (as is the case of vital prostheses or implants, such as permanent pacemakers). dichotomies that traverse nineteenth and twentieth century thought: the “nature-artifice” tension (on the pole that goes from “life” to “technique”) and the tension “technique-culture” or “techniquecivilization” (on the pole that goes from “technique” to “form”), tensions that modern thought always understood as dichotomies, and not as aspects or polarities of the same vector, as they appear in the light of this new composition. Pertaining to the line that goes from “nature” to “artifice”, the special situation that technological forms of life point out is related to the possibility of incorporating mechanisms for the controlled intervention, control and participation in the generation / production of life and even the generation / production of a certain type of “survival” or, consequently, of “death”, such as encephalic death. That is what technologies that enable the control of human reproduction without referring to the population’s sexual practices are all about –combined methods of efficient contraception and assisted fertilization–; keeping a body breathing through technological assistance and even so diagnosing its “encephalic death”, which precedes cardio-respiratory arrest and allows to turn that body into “human anatomical material” (just as the law 24.193 from 1993 read, before being modified)18 available for transplants and ablations; or dissociating (human) “life” from (human) “body”, which are operated on separately –I am referring to the growing biomass of living cells and tissues dissociated from their bodies of origin that require intensive technological intervention to keep them from transforming into a non-living state, like stem cells, frozen embryos, tissue and cell cultures, etc–. On the other side, pertaining to the polar tension that goes from “technique” to “culture”, 19 the increasing dilution of the opposition between those instances points out, not as much, or not only, the “artificialization” of social and cultural relationships,20 but a complex process derived from the particular incorporation of technologies (info-communicational as well as “life” technologies, from 18 The Argentinian law 24.193, referring to human organ and tissue transplants, dictated in 1993 and regimented in 1995, was titled Law for the Transplant of Organs and Human Anatomical Material. This title was modified in 2005, and changed to Law for the Transplant of Organs and Tissues. Law 26.066, B.O. Nº30.807: december 22th, 2005. 19 It is not possible to historicize this relationship here, but it is important to remember that the reading of the “modern technological civilization” in opposition to values such as Culture, Life (particularly contemplative life as opposed to active life, but also spiritual life as a space of freedom and self-realization opposed to the mere life of necessity, efficiency and instrumentality), Art or Spirit, harkens back to, at least, nineteenth century English romanticism; and, throughout the twentieth century, it traverses the European intellectual climate –the German most of all, but not exclusively–, well described by Tomás Maldonado in Técnica y cultura (2002). 20 In the human and social sciences, speaking about a “nature” of socio-cultural relationships does not make much sense (except for the sociobiological models). It is true that –since Tönnies and Weber– the conceptual polarity communitysociety, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, points toward two models of social relationships, where the first implies a certain subjective feeling of common belonging, an original unity and shared aspirations, bonds of kinship, while the second involves the prevalence of bonds marked by their instrumental character, their impersonality and the mechanism of the “contract” (De Marinis, 2005:4). But beyond whether it is an analytical characterization or an ontological one, what was at play in the construction of those concepts was much less the consideration of the natural or artificial character of these forms of relationships, than the question about the capacity of associative forms (understood as different from the communitarian forms) to create stable, durable, secure bonds, able to warrant its members an identity. biotechnology up to genetic engineering, molecular biology and genetic medicine) in the midst of social, political and cultural relationships. Consequently, the events we usually relate to modernization –the secularization of customs, the demographic growth, urbanization, the consolidation of nation-states, the bureaucratization of institutions– had already implied, starting in the seventeenth century, a battery of “socio-technical” theories and practices21 for diagnostic, reform, regulation and social control that, like De Marinis held (2005), developed and articulated themselves –in a not always pacific or coherent fashion– into fragmented initiatives, as a response to the needs imposed by conjuncture, and which were subsequently assumed as their duty by the States (in what Foucault precisely named the governmentalization of the State; Foucault, 2001). But the development and recent expansion of the previously mentioned technologies (the infocommunicational and the “life” technologies) carry along a transformation of the experiences of that which is “common”, as well as the deployment of new behavioral and subjectivization matrixes, that allow to glimpse at the conditions of a renewed socio-technical cycle. These technologies traverse the environments of work, public administration, exploitation of nature, leisure, entertainment, search for partners, capacity to procreate, etc., etc. and participate in new constructions of the “common” and “the given” not anchored in the territory nor in the organic rhythms and conditions (night-day, cold-warm, dry-wet, biological inheritance), nor in kinship or proximity, while they also overflow the social technologies of liberal rationalities and, later, of the welfare State: the confinement institutions, the nuclear family, the city-factory model, the modes of solidarity offered by the State, panoptic vigilance. More to the point, new forms of social-communicative links are developed (“interfaces”, in Vargas Cetina’s (2004) terms) which depend exclusively on technological supports. This includes from “communities” of tele-spectators that participate through the telephone or informatic networks before, during and after the shows “air”, promoting political action, demands, requests or action campaigns in different topics and scales (local, national, regional, planetary) up to the so-called “social networks” such as facebook, twitter, etc., where the “former classmates of X school” converge with those endeavoring to initiate or deepen their affective, recreational and professional relationships; from the communities of users (of banks, credit cards, sports clubs, newspaper readers, but also companies created ad hoc, such as the “private shopping clubs” Geeble or Groupon, into which one is inducted through another user’s recommendation) who are benefited with discounts in very diverse categories, under the condition of being always communicated21 From the public school up to the compulsory military service, from the pension systems up to the institutionalization of trade unions, from the nuclear family up to social medicine, from prisons up to mental asylums. connected to receive the “offer of the day”, up to the community of those suffering from a particular sickness, ailment or syndrome, who exchange on the web cooking recipes, political proposals, life stories and recommendations on how to better endure their situation. These associativecommunicative forms originate in diverse areas (not necessarily nor mainly in the State), and constitute spaces of action marked by their “fluidity and ephemeral but simultaneously significant character” (Vargas Cetina, 2004:12), of relatively voluntary membership, with changing aims and composition where people are assembled (or self-assemble) to carry out duties that may be characterized as “government” –of themselves or others–. Dealing with and through these technologies implies, additionally, a bodily and perceptual adjustment, 22 and the development of the ability to carry out different activities within the same environment, where professional work, friendship and family bonds, occasional relationships, banking transactions, entertainment (music, film, radio, TV), news and shopping alternate and where the demarcation line between them tends to blur. People have to be capable of effectively allocating their time, modes of appearance and performance in each contact situation. On the other side, a whole new set of expert knowledge, technologies and practices of evaluation and intervention (from the prenatal genetic screening, presymptomatic diagnostic tests and brain scans up to assisted fertilization with sperm obtained through purchase) exert pressure on the subject’s modes of self-comprehension, leading it to think about itself in terms of a “somatic individual” (Rose, 2007), in which man and body or person and body overlap. This indicates an superposition of the subjective and bodily dimensions, to such an extent that –in certain contexts– the “embodiment” has ceased being identified as “effect”, “result” or “symptom” of a “deeper” level (that of the self, the mind, the unconscious) and started being identified, in exchange, with its “cause” or its “motive”. In the age of the technological forms of life, the subject starts to be interpellated, and to interpellate itself, as an “extended body” (Catts and Zurr, 2006, Costa, 2010), that is, a body whose limits do not coincide with the anthropomorphic body, and expands encompassing fragments of pre-corporal or infra-corporal human life (embryos, organs, tissues; stem, sperm, organ banks, up to the molecular level) as well as supra-corporal (both in the sense of networks of genetic relations that unite a family and places its members in the position of “responding” for the care and precautions that were held or ceased to be held regarding their offspring, as well as the sense of care for the species and the environment). As Lash says: In technological forms of life, what were more or less closed systems, my body, the social body, becomes more or less open constellations. My body cannot interface with 22 The connection with one or several of these devices also requires, along with the development of a new gestuality, the disconnection –at least momentarily– from other devices and/or from other everyday scenes previously considered “uninterruptable”: the lesson, the family meal, the meeting with friends, the work or business meeting. technological systems unless it is more or less open. Social bodies cannot interface with one another unless they are to a certain degree open .When individual social bodies open up, their organs are often externalized at a distance. This is true of the institutions of nation states. [...] As they open, they externalize their organs and open up to flows of information and communication (Lash, 2005: 43). 5. This technological openness of the body implies also, in the field of “life” technologies that we exemplified at the beginning, a shift in the attitude of medical doctors and their eventual patients, who do not aspire only to recovering a state of health and wellbeing lost due to illness (to recover the body’s “natural” normativity), but endeavor to transform its capacities, to modify them, increment them: surpassing the limitations of age or infertility to procreate, incorporating hormones to delay its dysfunctions (sexual, of the memory, of the skin), to “reprogram” the mind to erase painful memories. From this perspective, as Rose says, many of the normativities once conceived of as “inscribed in organic laws of life itself, have been displaced [...] to the field of choice” (Rose, 2007: 81), with all the demands that choice imposes: being efficient, precise, economic, responsible for the self-administration of somatic-biological existence. On this level, we stand in the presence of a coupling between these “new” technologies and the shift from a welfare rationality to the neoliberal rationality, understood as the adjourned and intensified liberal rationality that was born toward the end of the 1930s and strengthened in the decades of 1980 and 1990, limiting the social policies of the Welfare State and inaugurating a new form of individuation that requires each and every one to constitute themselves as an “entrepreneur of the self” in a framework of generalized competition, considered as a norm and regulation in itself. This shift has involved at least three different but interrelated instances. Firstly, the economization of the means of State government (De Marinis, 2005), or in Foucault’s terms, “an apparent retraction of power”, where it is not about “less power” nor even “less State”, but a new model of power and State which complicates the network of relationships between the public and private realm and implies for the State to deal in such a way as to avoid responsibility for economic and social conflicts that will have to be resolved among the agents themselves. On another side, on the same line, the development of what Foucault glimpses as a “new generalized system of information” that does not have as its fundamental aim the vigilance of each individual but, more precisely, the creation of the possibility of intervening; which “drives to the necessity of extending all over society, and through itself, a system of information that, in a certain way, is virtual; that will not be actualized” unless it becomes necessary: “a type of permanent mobilization of the knowledge of the State about the individuals” (Foucault, 1991: 165-166). A process that has among its conditions of possibility –precisely– the deployment of infocommunicational technologies, and is accompanied, additionally, by the whole series of controls, coercions and incitations that pass through the mass media, and that, in a certain way, and without power having to intervene for itself, without it having to pay for the very steep cost of exerting power, will come to signify a certain spontaneous regulation that will force order to self-engender, to perpetuate, to selfcontrol through the same agents in such a way that power (idem:166) Thirdly, the deployment of governance technologies that lean on technologies of the self, and particularly of an “active” self, who –following the leading figure of the “entrepreneur of the self”– pays attention to the obtention of the greatest performance. The kind of action that is expected from this somatic individual, and that it aims to develop, is the optimization of its inherited or acquired “human capital”, rather than the acknowledgement of its limitations, illnesses or syndromes and possible cures. In a scenario of generalized competition, where the “social and economic agents are required to resolve the conflicts and contradictions, the hostilities and struggles that the economic situation may cause, under the control of a State that appears at once disengaged and acquiescent” (ídem), the individuals see themselves thrown into a struggle to identify the possible risks, prevent them, conjure them; and that also –most of all– at a somatic level. For that, a mode of selfcomprehension and self-observation is promoted that calls on them to search for themselves the means to control, to diagnose their “potential illness” and to optimize themselves. From then on, the media discourse, advertisement, “programs” and “campaigns” do not aim to propose general regulatory guidelines for each and every one, but instead offer increasingly more options amongst which people have to choose from, and for which they have to train and put in practice their capacity of translating their needs, desires and interests into concrete products. While disciplinary institutions offered a few options that should be useful to the vast majority of people, today they propose unaccountable menus, where nobody is nor can be satisfied because there always is, unavoidably, “something else” to try out, and where the State does not constitute the best option (in health, education, security), but just another option. “Freedom” is then required: a kind of freedom that leans alternatively on the obligation to “choose well” (this is, to constitute oneself into a rational agent that chooses at its convenience) and of “expressing oneself as one is”; this is, the obligation of being “oneself”, if necessary, transforming into “oneself” by technological means. References Agamben, Giorgio (2001). Medios sin fin. Notas sobre la política, Pre-textos, Valencia. -------- (1998) Homo sacer I. El poder soberano y la nuda vida, Valencia, Pre-Textos. -------- (2004) Homo sacer II, 1. Estado de excepción, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo. -------- (2005). Lo abierto, Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo. Arendt, Hannah (1996). La condición humana, Barcelona, Paidós. Bourdieu, Pierre (1992). El sentido práctico. Madrid, Taurus. Catts, Oron y Zurr, Ionat (2006). “Hacia una nueva clase de ser. El cuerpo extendido”. En: Artnodes: revista de arte, ciencia y tecnología, nº 6. Costa, Flavia: Biopolíticas y biotécnicas. El ‘cuerpo productivo’ en la era de las formas de vida tecnológicas, tesis doctoral, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA. 2010. De Marinis, Pablo (2005). “16 comentarios sobre la(s) sociología(s) y la(s) comunidad(es)”. En: Papeles del CEIC 15, marzo de 2005. En Internet: www.ehu.es/CEIC/papeles/15.pdf. Esposito, Roberto (2005). “Toda filosofía es en sí política”, entrevista. En revista Ñ, Buenos Aires, 12 de marzo de 2005, pp. 12-13. Feenberg, Andrew. Transforming Technology. Nueva Cork, Oxford University Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel (1977). “El nacimiento de la medicina social”. En: Revista Centroamericana de ciencias de la salud, nº 6, abril de 1977, pp. 89-108. -------- (1991) Saber y Verdad, La Piqueta, Madrid. -------- (1976). Vigilar y castigar, Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1976. -------- (1992). Historia de la sexualidad I. La voluntad de saber, México, Siglo XXI. -------- (1994). “La société disciplinaire en crise”. En: revista Asahi Jaanaru, año 20, nº 19, mayo de 1978 (conferencia en el Instituto Franco-Japonés del 18/04/1978).Dits et écrits, vol. 3, Gallimard, París. -------- (1996) ¿Qué es la Ilustración? Madrid, Ediciones de la Piqueta. -------- (2000). “Las redes del poder”. En: Ferrer, Christian (comp.): El lenguaje libertario. Buenos Aires, Utopía Libertaria. -------- (2001). Defender la sociedad. Buenos Aires, FCE. -------- (2006). Seguridad, Territorio, Población. Buenos Aires, FCE. -------- (2007). Nacimiento de la biopolítica. Buenos Aires, FCE. Janik, Allan y Toulmin, Stephen (1974). La Viena de Wittgenstein, Madrid, Taurus. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Gallimard, Paris, 1979. Lash, Scott (2005). Crítica de la información. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu. Maldonado, Tomás (comp.) (2002). Técnica y cultura. El debate alemán entre Bismarck y Weimar. Buenos Aires, Infinito. Mauer, Manuel (2010). “Foucault y Kojève: Post-historia e hiper-historicidad”. En: Rev. latinoam. filos.[online]. 2010, vol.36, n.2, pp. 265-284. O'Sullivan, Tim et al (1995). Conceptos clave sobre comunicación y estudios culturales, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu. Pizzi, Nicolás (2007). “Embriones congelados: por primera vez se realizó un censo y se comprobó que en Capital hay más de 12.000”. En: diario Clarín, 11 de julio de 2007. Rose, Nikolas (2007). The Politics of Life Itself. New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Scotto, Carolina (2009). “Formas de vida extrañas”. En: Rivera, Silvia y Tomasini Bassols, Alejandro (comp.). Wittgenstein en español. Lanús, Ediciones de la UNLa, pp. 205-236. Vallejos, Soledad (2011). “Es inconstitucional la donación obligatoria de células madre”. En diario La Nación, Buenos Aires, 17 de marzo. Vargas Cetina, Gabriela (2004). “La asociación efímera. Repensando el concepto de comunidad desde la literatura cyberpunk”. En: Cuadernos de Bioética # 11. En Internet: http://uady.academia.edu/GabrielaVargasCetina/Papers/81669/La_Asociacion_Efimera_Repensand o_el_concepto_de_comunidad_desde_la_literatura_cyberpunk Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1988). Investigaciones filosóficas. Barcelona, Crítica. -------- (1976). Cuadernos azul y marrón. Madrid, Tecnos.