argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Biopolitics vs. Psychopolitics
Jexux Larrañaga Arriola 2021eko martxoaren 03a

Foucault described biopolitics as a set of technologies, practices, strategies and political rationalities whose objective is the governance of life, the way to exercise power over the lives of individuals and population. In the relations that power establishes with the social body is, therefore, the policy of strategies that are usually used to govern life and death. When life forms, the system of organization of protection, borders, threats, pests, the governance of life, in short, becomes a governable form of regulation, it places the population at the crossroads of a whole set of technologies derived from the pathways of medicine, biology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, statistics and scientific mediation. In the ways of life, whether in the ways of governing, these political strategies are materialized in specific scales of human bodies, forming bio-psycho-sociocultural bodies for their integration and expansion in the population.

If it is a question of power strategies (including necropolitics) that are deployed in society as power networks until they are incorporated into individual bodies, there is only to look at how the management of the pandemic has become the main indicator for the administration of life and death, since power relations over human bodies and political decisions are the ones that best synthesize the biopolitics procedure. The management of the epidemic, the fight against immunity, the race for vaccines won and the fight is taking place on the battlefield, which becomes the reflection of an omnipotent humanity that would have wished to conquer nature once and for all.

The planetary expansion of globalisation shows that today’s body and subjectivity are not only regulated (as Foucault has shown) by institutional relations, but, above all, regulated through the hegemony of the market economy based on digital technologies and data. The market economy of Big Data is today the new way to regulate and govern the social body. The widespread use of data that has increased worldwide, the development of global satellite computer surveillance devices, have become characteristics of the digital management of the social body and subjects. Artificial intelligence and algorithm are the hallmarks of the age of the digital subject. These routes of homogenization and digital care of individuals enter into us without realizing, but as if they were the essential receipts of a society of consumption without rest. The individual, now more than ever an “individual”, makes it a simple datum of the Big-Brother’s controlled and calculable pleasure.

"In a society that is moving towards the devaluation of unprofitable human values, the system of decoupling from land is being imposed on the hyperconnected beehive of unlimited growth"

Today, the subject of the neoliberal regime has become untouchable, as it appears on the screens in most cases. It is not you who speak directly to you, but on the other side of the thread, by the protected enclosure of the team. Little collectivized, socially remote, totally individual. His body hides behind the digital technical instrumentation, with an increasingly widespread cybernetic proesis, without ignoring the desire of the cyborg attributes, which is related to the supply of multinational networks (GAFAM), whose life is regulated by the passion of the tireless digital consumer, who can synthesize his activity in an identifiable code, possibly in the order of a bank account number.

See how digital markets based on big data have made the data-driven economy based on the efficiency of algorithms prevail. We already live in the capitalism of mutated platforms, some have called cognitive capitalism; in contemporary reality, the individual reduced to one datum has become the new raw material of the global economy. With Microsoft and Apple in the lead, the profits of Silicon Valley corporations, which are measured by billions of euros, show the face of the data economy that best reflects the success of digital capitalism.

This new data economy summit can potentially be close to digital authorship. The collapse of the civilizing pattern caused by the age in which we live makes the change of the anthropological framework that can make bodily subjectivities jump a transformation of media and contemporary philosophers. Overcome Foucault’s old biopolitics, we considered that we were in the era of psychopolitics, from the crossing of data and information that are being collected in the clouds big data, to offer each of us as merchandise: data of the merchandise of the user profile.

Shoshana Zuboff has defined the sociologist as "custody capitalism," a global architecture to change human behavior, which threatens to distort character. That would be the social organization implied by the capitalism of surveillance, towards a world that feeds the desire to obtain absolute certainties in the monitored hyperconnected hive, in exchange for obtaining the greatest possible benefit, dismissing what is not profitable in the economy and conditioning the future we have human beings on the planet.

In a society that is losing unprofitable human values, the system of the neoliberal system is imposing, in a hyperconnected hive of unlimited growth, an individual, reduced in algorithms of the supervised robot. Thus, the ownership of our lives, which comes only from sovereignty to conquer, the exaltation of individual values or the renunciation of politics, only increases the dependence of the neoliberal system. However, the resilient path of the active attitude of human groups is the most urgent path that we must travel collectively and collectively.