Capitalism is the root cause of biopower- the father of biopolitics himself agrees its employment is a cultural heuristic to create divisive individuality. Even if biopower can be taken down, capitalism will just create another system to replace it.

Todd Dufresne- Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario; Clara Sacchetti- PhD York University, Social Anthropology; 2013; The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, and Crisis; ; [TMS—GK]

The emergence of biopower and individuality Hal Niedzviecki (2004) has written extensively about the recent shift in capitalism toward the active production of individuality. He argues that the requirement to express our uniqueness has become so intense that individuality is, ironically, now the new conformity, a kind of inescapable commandment (see p. xvi). He points to the rise of the internet (and now social media), do-it-yourself culture, reality television, the use of rebellion in advertising as well as a whole host of celebrity chefs, bartenders, hairstylists, bloggers, and other self-styled experts who have achieved fame through their own “special” talents as part of a general cultural trend to recognize everyone’s uniqueness. This expectation of nonconformity and uniqueness highlights the intensification of previous instantiations of biopower that worked to produce individuals in specific homogenizing ways. Foucault (1978) argues, for instance, that since the eighteenth century, capitalism has employed biopower to direct “the performances of the body ... with attention to the processes of life” (Foucault 1978, 139). The emergence of biopower is tied to capitalism and its requirement for a productive, efficient, healthy, and sane population by and through its continuous and routine management of the human body. This corresponds to capitalism’s deep-going concern to generate a vast, efficient, controllable, and productive workforce that is indispensible to its overall success (see Kingwell, chapter 7). The history of capitalism’s reliance on biopower is bound up with a corresponding history of capitalism’s seemingly never-ending expansion that results from its need to increase profits, control natural, and human resources, and promote continuous growth. Expansion is necessary to capitalism because it is only by extending its limits (i.e. the places that it operates, the nature that it uses, and the people that it exploits) that it can absorb additional resources and grow profits year after year. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) point out, capitalism’s quest for expansionism is evident in its relationship to a colonial project that sought vast material and financial wealth through the “superexploitation” of colonial territories and the indigenous peoples who inhabit them (Hardt and Negri 2000, 122). Capitalism must, in other words, push against its limits in order to grow and this has historically been achieved through territorial expansion that requires an engagement with the people who live in those territories. To manage this colonial situation, biopower was put into play to hierarchically order colonized populations and organize indigenous peoples in opposition to a supposedly superior colonializing power (see Morgensen 2011). Biopower was fundamental to capitalism here because it functioned to produce specific kinds of individuals that facilitated the management and hierarchization of large and diverse populations (what Foucault refers to as to as the process of individualization i.e. the creation of one’s gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality as well as workers, bosses, doctors, patients, students, teachers, etc.). Unsurprisingly, as capitalism today continues to extend its limits, its use of biopower has similarly expanded and intensified. Unlike the earliest forms of biopower that “fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization,” the contemporary version of biopower effectively transforms all facets of human life and experience into resources for capitalist exchange (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24). Biopower under contemporary capitalism seeks to manage individuals in increasingly subtle and commonplace ways by engaging each person as a unique individual. Whereas previous forms of capitalism employed biopower to produce fixed, homogeneous identities, biopower under a “postmodern” form of capitalism helps produce “hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii–xiii). The focus here is on one’s unique and special individuality, an expansion that Foucault calls “the Californian cult of the self,” that now permeates our lives (1983a, 245). Biopower today infiltrates the most mundane, and the most profound, aspects of human life. This is illustrated, for example, in an interest in memoirs as a literary form which gives preference to the personal; the fact that “home is the new work and play space of our time” (Nealon 2008, 86); the popularity of grunge in the 1990s which “was absolutely dedicated to some notion of subjective authenticity and the revelation of personal experience” (Nealon 2008, 87); and “the triumph of student-centred process pedagogies” that, among other things, make “education personally ‘relevant’ to the students” (Nealon 2008, 88). More recently, social media such as Facebook and Twitter amplify such individuality by allowing and encouraging users to widely broadcast their unique preferences and accomplishments. The shift to the production of a multiplicity, and fluidity, of unique identity does not, however, mean that biopower no longer orders, manages, and hierarchically arranges individuals. Instead the spread of biopower coincides with the increased flexibility and adaptability of capitalist regimes of management and hierarchization. And yet, even though biopower may instigate the production of individuality and difference (or uniqueness), it is not necessarily a liberatory practice. For, as Chicchi (2010) points out, biopower seeks to incorporate all facets of human life (such as relationships, emotions, interaction, creativity, cooperation, languages, and communication) into capitalist economics to better control and regulate them. Biopower is thus no longer simply about the creation of a healthy, controllable, sane body; it seeks to manage what could be viewed as mundane aspects of human life, such as relationships, communication, creativity, and problem solving (see Lazzarato 2002; Lucarelli 2010; Marazzi 2008; Virno 2004). More specifically, biopower is integral to the shifting requirements of capitalism that have moved toward what Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) terms “immaterial labour” and the emergence of financialized capitalism. For these reasons, biopower no longer seeks to produce homogeneous conformity but seeks to produce uniqueness, diversity, and difference.