The Healthy Body

This will all be wildly off topic, so apologies for those expecting commie kitsch, thoughts on Tacheles closing or a devastating analysis of the rise and rise of Die Linke! There are some nice ironic pictures about halfway through, so they're worth sticking around for....

I'm currently doing some research work for an academic looking at the water bottle as a modern thing, what it represents -- there's Latour, biopolitics, risk, neoliberal privatisation and many other theoretical bits floating around in the framing of the project. I don't get to touch most of that. I am just researching one specific campaign. I have managed, though, to spend a day or two reading Feher and Heller's 1994 slim book on biopolitics. (If you can't turn academic research jobs into explorations of pet topics/ideas/authors, what's the goddamn point?)

There's a clear sense in which this is a book written by people spooked by a far-reaching state. Presumably if you were in communist Hungary, saw 1956, had hopes crushed, academic positings withdrawn etc etc, this is something you'd be fairly careful about.

Nevertheless, they do a good job here of taking their longer view -- a fairly worked-through set of ideas about modernity's genesis and meanings (for them, in this context, it's an ongoing debate of life versus liberty) -- and marrying it to some contemporary analysis. So you get your Kant with some Rodney King race riots, your Hegel with some Andrea Dworkin and your Weber with anti-smoking campaigns.

It's this last point where we start to get crossover with the marketing of water bottles. I don't always fully agree with their positions, but they get in some cracking lines, paragraphs and, well, whole pages of analysis. Below is one of my favourites.

Since health politics demands that we force our sense of mortality into oblivion and continually remain fit labour machines, an odd version of the age-old dream of eternal youth also becomes one of ‘health’s’ metaphoric meanings. The politics of health runs a desperate race with time. It wants to bring time to a halt in order to raise the bodily state of the adolescent boy and girl to the pedestal of the ideal. The alliance of health politics with health industry makes this feature even more explicit.… Theoretically, one could expect at least an aesthetic yield from this exaggerated cult of youth, a new adoration of beauty. But the standards of youthfulness are technologically set; they aim at mass production. In the pursuit of health, biopolitics becomes unfaithful to the spirit of the post-modern. Instead of promoting ‘difference’—beauty as the mark of individuality—it promotes the production of ‘the healthy body’ en masse.

And just before this passage, they make a nice series of linkages between the stigma of being unhealthy, utilitarianism and the Protestant ethic.

He who commits ‘health crimes’ is ‘unreconstructed’ (a term of the re-education camps) and ‘contaminated’. Above all, he causes public expenditure (by the implied crime of eventually falling ill, being hospitalised, and perhaps even buried at public expense). Those who waste too much time discussing ‘progress,’ should rather compare the stone-hearted utilitarianism of health politics with medieval caritas. But the reference to ‘public expenditure,’ more than anything else, betrays that one of the major objectives of health politics is to restore the shattered Protestant work ethic to its abandoned central position, by reviving its neurotic self-discipline; its imperative to subject the individual to ‘public goals’ and the world of labour, as well as to Protestant work ethic’s inherent miserliness.

So the body -- our 'health' -- must be disciplined and punished. Health as a political metaphor can be seen, for them, in the various exhortations for the individual. Health, in such a setting

cannot be pursued without the binary of ‘friend and foe’. It is for this reason that the concept of ‘secondary smoking’ was created. It is not the general pollution of cities and the industrial environment, not AIDS, drugs, alcohol, the creeping back of tuberculosis (as well as other diseases which have never been mastered) that will cause our premature deaths but the results of Secondary Smoking. It is useless to waste time considering the ‘scientific basis’ of this inquisitorial concept. More important is to recognise its function. Our needs and habits no longer have a private character; we are directly responsible from them in front of the ‘public eye’. ‘Science’ has to be mobilised to ‘prove’ that in indulging in our particular health crime we endanger our fellow citizens, pollute (and thus abuse) our children, upset the mental peace of our neighbours, and contaminate the moral atmosphere. The conclusion is self-evident: either submit to the norm, or pay the penalty, perhaps la mort civile. This is what justifies sniffing the ‘secret smoker’ out of the toilet booth (as once the secret masturbator was sniffed out) and denouncing him without further delay or calling the guard to remove the perpetrator from the premises.…By and large the politics of health is successful insofar as it transplants a massive guilt feeling, the prerequisite for the victory of the course of ‘discipline and punish’, into the psyche of the individual. One sees on the same TV-set a host of young men and women who tell you that because they lost x pounds or kilos in their last diet, they no longer feel guilty.

In matters of water bottles and marketing, these healthy bodies are linked to healthy Nature. Drinking from those bottles, we undertake an ethic of care for the self/body -- health politics -- and for Nature -- environmental politics. We forego the less healthy choice -- sugary soft drinks, fattening milk, stimulant coffee -- in order to move closer to nature and purity, away from contamination and stigma/shame/guilt.

Following a kind of Weberian line, I wonder if this didn't represent re-enchantment of the water bottle: its messages and attachments are to connect [re-connect?] the consumer-as-body to nature, purity, clarity, a kind of singularity of nature, both universal (nature, the earth, the body) and particular (my body, my environment, my world). The tap is non-unique, anonymous, tracked by bureaucracy and water bills, immobile because owned by all. The bottle is unique, specific, instantly locatable and mobile.

(Pics via Flickr and Healthy Living Tip [?])

A Bureaucratic Clarification

A friend questioned me the other day on the distinction between Heller's and Badiou's account of bureaucracy -- or at least the versions I fumbled out in my earlier post. As Badiou's reference is a passing one and Heller's a more systematic engagement, it is perhaps unfair to pin Badiou down to a mere phrase. But I get the feeling that he is positing precisely what Heller is arguing against.

In the lead-up to the section I quoted, Heller points out that: "All Soviet leaders, from Lenin on, regularly blamed the inefficiency of the system on bureaucracy; they launched campaigns against it, against the dimensions of paper-production, against the lack of initiative and the narrow-mindedness." (p175) Which is to say that they were the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for the endemic problems of the system itself. The centralisation of power cannot avoid bureaucracy. "The totalisation of the whole society (economy included)," she writes, "cannot function without a hierachic administation of immense dimensions.... [I]n order to realise its set aims, it needs bureaucracy." To blame bureaucracy, as I think Badiou may have been doing, is to engage in the game of the party leaders. "These charges cannot be taken seriously," Heller writes, "not because they were not true, but because they localised the source of the decay in the wrong spot."

Did Somebody Say Communism?

Alain Badiou is always worth reading. Some Badiou is more worth reading, though. Less interesting are the borderline fascist tendencies. But for a part-time fascist, I like the guy. His piece in the first New Left Review for 2008 is certainly worth reading.

What interests me here is the way "communism" is used as a term. It seems a deliberate provocation -- something like Zizek's circulation of Mao and Lenin tracts, not to say his ironic invocation of himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist." (With Zizek, I wonder too if it's not becoming manifest, though -- like an owner and his pet morphing into similar visages.) With Badiou, "communism" is a willfully ambivalent and ambiguous term. The lack of capitalisation (!) by Badiou is telling, for this is no proper noun. It names something but not the Soviet Union, per se. Perhaps it just describes something; it's either a noun or an adjective -- not always one or the other.

Badiou ventriloquises Sarkozy: "It is not enough that empirical communism
has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become unmentionable." Generic name of our defeat. This reveals something of Badiou's tactic. Why this word? He sees the provocation of the term, its very banishment, as its most useful property. Its use for him, then, is the ability of the term to corral a set of banished ideas. Badiou goes on to say, Sarkozy dummy put aside and now back in his straight-man role, that: "'Communism' as such denotes only [a] very general set of intellectual representations." These are Ideas, in the Kantian sense, of (in)equality, collectivity, class analysis. Shards of this vision are notable in every truly mass action opposing state coercion, Badiou writes. His final call is one for the communist hypothesis triumphant.

This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

Local action, international thought processes. Does this amount to anything other than the old slogan: think global, act local? It is different because Badiou recognises the seriousness of turning this ship around, so to speak. The conditions are, in one sense, unfavourable (Communism is largely dismissed, if not laughed at) and yet in others the problems are clear (market troubles, recessions etc). They are unfavourable because of the absolute marginality of alternatives.

This seems to reflect the dynamic of legitimation, as Weber has it. I have been working through Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies by Hungarian émigrés Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller and György Márkus. In there, Heller writes of the legitimation of Soviet societies.

According to one formulation of Max Weber, a social order is legitimated if at least one part of the population acknowledges it as exemplary and binding and the other part does not confront the existing social order with the image of an alternative one as equally exemplary. Thus the relative number of those legitimating a system may be irrelevant if the non-legitimating masses are merely dissatisfied. (p137)

She goes on to note that while the Russian centre was more or less legitimate -- albeit differently legitimised at its various points of existence -- the Eastern European satellites were never far from, or were actually otherwise embroiled in, an ongoing legitimation crisis. (A legitimation crisis does not inevitably lead to collapse or downfall of a given social order.) This was particularly the case in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. An important point follows from this.

That is as true of Hungary as it is of Poland or Czechoslovakia despite the popular support lent to the present government in Hungary. Legitimation means not so much the legitimation of government as of a form of domination, and relative popular support is given to the Hungarian government precisely because it practises the otherwise rejected form of domination in a more tolerable fashion than is the case in other countries. (p138, emphasis mine)

For Badiou, then, the question is one of bringing about a legitimation crisis. It's the task of making a compelling alternative vision of a social order, one that doesn't just circulate in the same-old cliques but tips over, escaping the circuits of Brown's/Benjamin's leftist melancholy. No doubt Badiou would speak of an Act or an Event to do this. But I prefer Heller's and Weber's terms. They carry less of the metaphysical romanticism loaded on to the capitalised Badiouian terms. In essence Badiou, Heller and Weber draw towards the same realisation -- the political necessity for a vision of something outside present conditions, for a rupture from current orthodoxies. This, then, is precisely what "communism" is for Badiou -- a set of co-ordinates for an ethic and a politics outside of our current conjuncture. A provocation, a (re-)activation of the defeated, the disappeared.

And before I let you go... Dictatorship Over Needs points to some problems with Badiou's historical analysis. He writes that "police coercion could not save the 'socialist' state from internal bureaucratic inertia....The last great convulsions[--]the Cultural revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense--can be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party." Our dear Hungarians suggest otherwise. "Bureaucratic inertia" is precisely what the moguls wanted, as Heller tells us in a masterly sequence of argument (p177-8): "[Bureaucracy's] function is primarily to practise dictatorship over needs, and this is being done thoroughly. The system of directives (orders) is a corrective one (or at least is meant as such): it clears the way for the break-through of ideological, doctrinal priorities." So food shortages are purposely inefficiently handled, while housing applicants in an accommodation shortage are systematically disheartened. Regarding the party -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland attest to numerous early attempts to reform the Muscovite party from the outside. Its inadequacy was fundamental, arguably apparent from the time of the first rash of Terror. May 68 is perhaps one of the last great convulsions, but is a peculiarly Western way of accessing this history. (And precisely the type of thing addressed by Márkus in the first section of Dictatorship Over Needs -- the chapter titled "Eastern European Societies and the Western Left")

But, y'know, I like the guy...