Brodey’s interesting theoretical attempt — no relation to Foucault! — to articulate a theory of bio-politics, which is a kind of politics informed by the understanding of biological life in all its complexity. Original is in the Brodey archives in Vienna.
When I think of Nixon and Watergate, the CIA the I.I.T type corporations and their lawlessness, napalm in Vietnam, the junta in Chile, the puppet states we control and their leaders I get sick to my stomach. The Russian lying and cheating an ‘big brother’ secret police does not make me feel better. The USSR once representing a noble experiment now is the single biggest monopolistic corporation in the business. Prices are rising, ideals are betrayed, unemployment robs us of our productive vitality!
Aha! But as individuals we are developing ourselves! We are making progress in escaping the moralism of last year’s church. We are breaking down traditions. We are building freedom to go without a haircut. We are escaping the deadening force of programmed education. Who are? The many, or the few? We are beginning in the middle of our crisis to discover the soul of mankind – a brotherhood and sisterhood built on a foundation of liberation. Who are? The white or the black. We are aware that women and children have been slaves and the slavekeeper has been slave to his slaves. Who is aware? Are we aware as individuals or groups. We have begun to create a way of summarizing where we stand and of predicting the way our social system will evolve. Who has? How many? We know that very specialized [something] must no longer capture individuals so that they are imprisoned as if the total person must exist completely in the space the larger system frames.
Who is making individual progress? Is there a large enough number to effect (sic) the whole? Are they banded together to organic change? Or does their enhanced freedom as individuals deny the freedom that comes when groups fight to change the frame that the individuals regards as his necessity! Within the frame of possibility – of likely odds of success the person struggles and copes.
Band together! Take group action. Form political groups! Who me! Christ no! Thats the old form, and its dangerous. Doing nothing is also dangerous, and inevitably leads to more danger – unless the decision to do nothing is an active decision. It is my belief that there are many people who earlier made the active decision to do nothing – but have not considered what level of activity is correct now in 1977.
Active? What action? Where? Treating the symptoms of disorder, as we did in Anti-Vietnam War action is of value. But now we need to act with deeper understanding. Is there a relatively clean place to act, where our action will be entirely active. No! The problem is finding the free [minds?] in a huge interwoven gelatinous tangle of fibriles (?) and junk and very living tissue. And the whole mess is alive. And we, you and I and us, are ourselves cells in that alive gelatinous mass and must pulsate with it. We cannot live without being parts of larger communal creatures within the total social life they form.
We are inside, and part of our society and much of its habits and rules are quite beyond awareness – but we can glimpse the total now and then. Just as from our seat in a train we see one side of the total train as it rounds a bend. A society under pressure and in crisis also must round the bend.
I said I was sick to my stomach. I am also allergic to my own metaphors when they replace old names with new but do not do more. Likening our situation to a train has limited value.
That we are a part of a living pulsating creature made up of all humans including those dead and to be born – that is to my mind a fact. Or we can consider ourself in terms of a still larger creature made up of all humans and all other living creatures plants animals bacteria whatever. This Eco Creature exists. It is a fact.
Our species creature is a part of our Eco Creature which is a part of Earth. And we must begin to consider such larger living entities as creatures, as alive and as existing in health and in sickness, and as going through cycles of fast development and slow – seasons you might say. And remember one aspect of all living things is their continuous dying – a process that when well regulated is called health.
These larger living creatures are neither wild nor entirely ruled by scientific laws. They have rules of behaviour. They are evolutionary. They have specialized organs determined by their historic evolutionary development. The larger the creature, the more slowly it changes. The slowness of change may be to a small creature as imperceptible as are the changes in our universe to us. Parts can die dead! The large creature can be wounded! It can change its life style suddenly – just as a baby slowly formed – is rapidly born. Or a revolution, slowly evolved, suddenly is involving to the whole of mankind – at every size level.
And if the larger creature – our social system is sick and vomiting super powerfull (sic) bonds and waste and oil slick to cover molecule thick all the oceans – there is no escape for the individual cells.
What can we do! The U.S.A is a living creature.
First we must realize that all living creatures when considered as entities have behaviours that are more than the sum of their parts. They are not like simple machines. They are living. The United States of America is a living creature. Now if we talk of ‘the system’ – we begin to understand the biopolitical meaning of that statement. The ‘system’ does exist quite separate from those who make it up; and yet it is not separate from them. This contradiction must be examined and not discarded! A human is more than the sum of its cells and yet is not separate, for the behaviour of the cells set the milieu for the person – if we look exhausted other people react to us differently; the person sets the environment for his stomach or hands. Such living systems are not organized in the manner of computers, or our present tools – which create the metaphor we usually use in our thinking. Intertwining interpenetrating interdependence with individuality – a mixture of contradictions and potentials for change while maintaining stability – there is no need here to describe the characteristics of living things. Change Presidents. What [does?] that mean if we are considering our nation as a living creature. We did change presidents. There is a slight twist in the path of the system – but not much. The whole system is so heavy so huge, so much is determined by habits and (hard wired) concrete institutions – the bones of the creature grown solid from its historical need. New behaviour has at first so little to support it, the presidents’ orders by the time they have travelled through the beaurocracy (sic) and interwoven with the practical necessities of financial politics – how one can earn a living and affected each [citizens?] life – are forgotten or used as symbols of psychological encouragement. In The Little Prince by Anton Ste Exhuteré (sic), the king was proud that he could order even the sun to rise. He commented, however, every king must know only to give the order after consulting the almanach (sic) and knowing when the time is right for the order to be followed. Leadership of the large creature requires following the orders given by the small creatures who provide the larger one with material existence.
You begin to see the importance of the contradiction between part and whole in a living system, and the union that is made necessary by their very existence. Government and people are by the law of life itself in contradiction and inseparable.
[...] dependent on each other. Both government and people, the ‘system’ and its cells, and all the balanced parts in various relations to each other and the whole, are metabolizing breathing and creating separately and in union. I wish I were expert at dialectic thinking I could make this clearer, and simpler.
As environmentalists you by now will ask what about the relation of the living creature to the changes in the environment its life creates. Each creature changes its environment this is an aspect of being alive! What is the profoundest change we have created. The Eco creature is sick. The species creature has created the potential for a world of abundance. The species creature is now in the pangs of labour – it has morning sickness. Morning sickness comes when a new form is being created inside the old – a new order. The new order must be on that in its healthy growth restores the health as well of the Ecosystem.
What is the history of the species creature. It has long evolved in a fixed environment of scarcity, of material scarcity in terms of low level chemical physical requirements – food clothes warmth etc. through the development [of?] technical tools, machines, knowledge, transport etc an abundance of what was scarce before is now possible. Scarcity is now artificially maintained, because we have not developed or set to use the large creature life style that fits the period of abundance. It requires not just new players, new captains of the teams, new repairs, No, none of these will meet the change in environment super beast has created for itself. What is required is a different game – a new life style.
Our social creature, through the invention of money, capital and classes of lower and higher living standard people; through the invention of the means for the rich to get richer and more powerfull (sic) by improving production, so more can be created by fewer and fewer people – has developed a productive power such has never been known before. That this power exists, is confused now by the very need to maintain the scarcity that built the power, that maintained the profit, that organized the system that now is made unstable by its own success! No. It means after the energy and growth potential is stored for a time held back, a ripening occurs – and a new life form emerges. Or if the sun and warmth and cellular changes don’t occur – no flower and death.
Perhaps it is wrong to use a plant analogy when describing a creature with mammalian cells. The super creatures may use the tools they have created to create a super war, that returns us to the new level of scarcity that radioactivity and like anti- [rest of line is indecipherable] can produce. This is not to say I am against war as a necessary means of changing life style. Wars are a form for producing rapid evolution.
The majority of humans decide to flower instead – to give birth to their new form of super creature.
We can say evolution is passing through a new time of speed up. This occurs whenever quantitative change in the organism has out run – gone beyond, that which can be contained in the previous unification. There is splitting and reforming. To illustrate. Let us say black and white are traditionally in a slave and master relation; and this is regarded as stable. But for such reasons as for example the need for educated black people to run the machinery that the white profit from, the black perceive themselves as blacker. And the white by contrast get whiter. The slave owner [something] more subtle and less obvious (to the white) tools of slavery and the contrast increases; and the white becomes aware and is forced to increase his whiteness – each black and white in positive feedback sucking up resources, removing the buffers making the conflict harder & harder. A new order breaks! But it is important to realize a turning of white into black and black to white is not the level of new order I speak of. That is a quantitative shift. I will reserve the term revolutionary evolution for evolution that goes through a qualitative change. Such leaps occur in living creatures large and small. The shift in which opposites turn into each other is often a phase of such a revolutionary period, but need not be. That quantitative change is violent can be perceived as unavoidable given that a whole system is exploded. Whether such violence is with guns or other tools depends on the tools for violence available. Revolution in the sense I am using this term is the only way of restoring a new quality of equilibrium and getting on with a long period of evolutionary development that being relevantly organized builds quantitatively again. How would you consider the events in Rhodesia and South Africa; in Russia; in China and in America 200 years ago – given this criteria. What about the standard coup d’etat in earlier South America style.
If larger creatures go through periods of revolution when they re integrate themselves with the changes in their internal and external environment their metabolism has produced – what does this mean for the parts of the creature. The creature is more than the sum of its parts, but it does not exist without also being the sum of its parts. Can the cells of a creature modify the method and degree of violence that qualitative change for example from one form of government to another implies. Is ignorance likely to increase or reduce violence. Did ignoring the injustices of vietnam till we were forced with using atomic weapons or getting out reduce the violence. Facing the Super beast with united groups of cells, singing and planning and marching together did have an effect in reducing the violence. It was a beginning. That beginning brought super creature violence home – for many to experience. And sharpened the contradictions between those for and against our countries foreign policy and financial control of the third world countries.
The behaviour of the living creature U.S.A. is determined by its sense of necessity, its wish to recreate itself, and to make the leap to a new way of being… but now our creature divides, even while it is whole. The union is weakened and weakening. How? Our strength to take a dominant world position comes from the Industrial Revolution – and the technological and social changes that revolution created. Qualitative changes. Many people died, families and land structure changed, government structure changed fundamentally. It was a violent revolution, the birth of American Indepdence from the Divine Right of George III was an aspect of the change from Feudal agriculture and handcraft to industrialization and machines. Capital development was made possible by railways and such, by people working to day by day producing valuable wares for sale in the market, but recieving (sic) a small portion of the value they created in return. And the owners grew in power as the produced more cheaply, got raw materials cheaper and controlled the raw material sources and sources of cheap labour and there developed the class who worked for pay. And those who worked by using the capacity for growth that ownership of capital implies. That classes exist is important to our story. Supercreature has one attribute that creates abundance, another that creates scarcity. The abundance has in the past been available for the few who own the tools that are decisive in deciding who has wealth. Scarcity and demand for scarce goods is the organizer among those who are in many sense owned – no longer as in the days of open slavery; but more in the sense that one has to work for a small percentage of the value one creates because there is no other choice in our community. These patterns are easier to see in the third world. We have it better in some ways for our creature fattens itself generally – and not only the top types – by living off more open profiteering in the less developed lands. The Russians are becoming expert now at that – and Americans learned their tricks from the British and other colonial powers.
Why speak of classes in discussing superbeast? We must carefully assess who might want to deal with the problem of qualitative change. Those who are privileged now. A few? Those who live in artificial scarcity and yet labour at producing plenty, and know the comradeship of labouring together with so little choice as compared to the experts and intellectuals and professionals and wealthier people
But who is preventing the qualitative change. Who? Who would one attack to change Super Beasts life style. And what is the nature and relation of these one would attach to the whole. Are they themselves victims. Are the leaders of industry victims of Super Creatures necessity. This question is usually thought of in the question: Is there a big conspiracy – an organization at the top a Brain Trust – which for example alters the news we receive from commercial sources, selecting it to program us to believe what top management feeds us. Or is the system formed by top people just making local necessary decisions to keep themselves from going bankrupt for example. Should we blame the president of I.T.T. for the Chilean junta. Or the C.I.A. Or ourselves as intellectuals and technicians serving the requirements of earning a living. Or should we blame the mass of people for not organizing, or the lack of leadership, or the C.I.A. for destroying the leadership or, or… or.
One experiment with selling blame was the Nuremberg Trials. Who was responsible for the War that devestated (sic) so many! And destroyed so much! And created a new balance of power.