bodily resources and corporeal equiptment: biopolitics and heidegger’s question concerning technology
december 2017
In this paper I inquire the extent to which the relationship between the master and slave, the subjugating and subjectivated, or the dominant and the dominated may be a technological relationship. I analyze how the objectification of bodies is often also a technologization of bodies —how bodies and subjects are shaped into entities which can be mastered, ordered, standardized, and made productive in the interest of power. I look at where and how the technological presents itself in the work of Page Dubois, Gregoire Chamayou, Franz Fanon, and Frank Wilderson III. Conversely I look at how certain kinds of subjects and bodies are made—or make themselves—resistant to this kind of technological mastery and technological representation. Bodies which are unwieldy, unproductive, and disordered or reordered in ways which resist the interests of power. For this I turn to the work of Allen Feldman, as well as Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of the monster. In my analysis of each of these texts I consider the technological in a broad sense but also invoke Martin Heidegger’s vocabulary surrounding “equipment”, and what he calls the “essence of technology”. Heidegger’s theories and terminology are useful in identifying the themes and mechanisms of the technological in the work of the aforementioned theorists. Additionally, their work helps to contextualize and revise some of the specificities of Heidegger’s theory of the essence of technology. But in order to best understand the potentially technological relationship between power and subjects we must first briefly review Heidegger’s terms.
The word Heidegger uses to characterize the essence of modern technology is “Ge-stell”, which translates to Enframing (Heidegger 1977, 19). Crucial to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Enframing is that it should be understood as a verb. It is a challenging claim, a calling forth, or a revealing. Enframing is a specific kind of revealing which Heidegger claims is unique to the essence of modern technology, beginning roughly with industrialization. It is this novelty related to Enframing’s association with “modern technology” which many of the theories discussed below call into question. Enframing’s status as a verb denotes that it is an action. The term’s invocation of framing—analogous to the practice of framing a photo, or shot with a camera— denotes that there is a visual or mediatic component to Heidegger’s theory of the essence of technology. Like the photographer framing a shot, something is always left out of the frame— indeed the contents of the image contained within the frame is nothing more than product of what is excluded. The essence of modern technology for Heidegger is therefore a revealing which places a narrow and specific frame upon “nature”, but more then representational it is also a transformative act.
Enframing both acts upon “nature” and frames or represents it as what he calls a “standing- reserve” [Bestand]. Heidegger writes, “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand.” (Heidegger 1977, 17). Once Enframed as standing-reserve, all of nature presents itself as something to be exploited, stored, extracted, and ordered for specific instrumental and productive purposes. Heidegger again, “The Earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.” (Heidegger 1977, 14). This relationship between Enframing and instrumentality is echoed in Heidegger’s discussion of equipment in Being and Time. Equipment, translated from “das Zeug”, can also imply an “implement, instrument or tool” (Heidegger 1962, 97). Heidegger writes that equipment “is essentially ‘something in-order-to...[‘etwas um-zu...’]. A totality of equipment is constituted by various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, useability, manipulability.” (Heidegger 1962, 97). He claims that the kind of “Being” which belongs to equipment is characterized as a “readiness- to-hand” [zuhandenheit] through which objects present themselves as “manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal.” (Heidegger 1962, 98). To use his example, the hammer already presents itself as hammering—to be used and manipulated for specific instrumental ends.
But Heidegger’s theorization of the essence of modern technology is conceptualized in opposition to what he calls a “free relationship” to technology (Heidegger 1977, 5). In characterizing this “free relationship” he turns to a rather romantic representation both of ancient Greek philosophy and of ancient Greek artisanal methods of craftsmanship. In these examples he characterizes the essence of technology as a “bringing-fourth” of truth, or “aletheia” (Heidegger, 8). He identifies the instrumental, exploitative, and narrowly framed relationship to technology as being unique to modern, industrialized technology in its ability to store up and order endless standing-reserves, and transform nature into various sites of energy extraction and production. But as Avital Ronell has pointed out, Heidegger is naive in his belief that there could be some “safety zone” from the dangers of technology’s essence (Ronell, 5). His political alliance with, and participation in a state dedicated to both the technological extermination and merciless exploitation of groups deemed to be inferior also seems to indicate a refusal to fully reckon with his own conceptualization of technology, and how it might relate to functions of power and subjugation. Though he does acknowledge that “man” must be most originally called forth as standing-reserve, for Heidegger this is presented as a universal and neutral process, unaffected by relations of power (Heidegger, 18). We may very well live—as Ronell has put it—“in the sway of Gestell”, but that sway is not distributed evenly or arbitrarily, it sways in very particular directions. And as Page Dubois’s Torture and Truth indicates, Heidegger’s romanticization of ancient Greece and his conception of truth may have blinded him to the presence of what could be characterized as the Enframing of bodies and subjects, namely the body of the slave.
In Torture and Truth Page duBois argues that the established beliefs and traditions regarding truth, “leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the body of the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to using violence if necessary to extract that truth.” (duBois, 6). In order to make this point, duBois provides a detailed analysis of the role of the slave in the ancient Greek judicial system. She explains how the slave’s body was considered a prosthetic extension of the body of the master, and that through the torture of the slave, the courts could access the master’s truth. DuBois quotes Aristotle’s assertion that the slave is “a part of the master”, “yet separated” from the body of the master (duBois, 66). Already the language here becomes somewhat technological. The notion of the body of the slave as an extension of the body of the master, as a part of the body which remains separate, invokes Marshall McLuhan’s conceptualization of technology as “extensions of man”. It relates the body of the slave to a tool, to be wielded by the master in the slave’s daily servitude, and to be wielded by the courts in the case of the master’s trial.
By the logic of Greek courts, the slave’s relation to truth only exists in relation to the master, and can only be accessed through the body. Because they do not posses logos, or reason like the citizen—for the slave, truth can only be materialized by interfacing with the body (duBois, 52). But a method is needed in order to “verify” the truth produced or accessed from the body of the slave. DuBois observes that the word used to describe this method in the Greek courts is “basanos” or touchstone (duBois, 9). She traces the use of this word throughout Greet thought and literature, originating as a stone used as a tool to scratch precious minerals and verify their authenticity (duBois, 9). In the courts, torture was established as the basanos, revealing truth though its imposition upon the slave’s body. DuBois writes,
“The basanos assumes first that the slave always lies, then that torture makes him or her always tell the truth, then that the truth produced through torture will always expose the truth or falsehood of the free man’s evidence.” (duBois, 36)
Torture is the touchstone for the production of truth via the body of the slave, and the truth produced through the slave’s body is the touchstone for the authenticity of the master’s testimony. As such, the body of the slave is framed as “the site of torture and of the production of truth” under the ancient Greek judicial order (duBois, 50).
This formulation relates to the technological in various ways. First, the figurative language of the touchstone is the language of tools. In its material origin it describes the literal process of using a tool in order to verify the authenticity of a mineral. If we are to extend this observation to the metaphorical figuration of torture as the touchstone for truth, then torture itself can be thought of as a technological process, a tool used to interface with the body of the slave in order to produce truth. In this sense both the body of the slave and the process of torture can be thought of as technological. In the space of the court and during the temporal duration of the trial, the body of the slave carries with it an inherent instrumentality, its status as other signalling that it exists “in-order-to” produce and access truth. To this extent aspects of the Greek state’s relationship to the body of the slave, and the Enframing relationship between “man” and modern technology that Heidegger describes, seem to overlap. The language duBois uses to describe the slave’s relationship to truth is a language of extraction and production. Reduced to its materiality, the slave’s body is subject to the challenging claim that it produce and supply the Greek courts with truth—a truth that for the slave can only be produced through torture. In this sense the slave may be Enframed as “standing-reserve”. Like the river which when dammed up, ceases to be a river and becomes a site for the production of hydroelectric power—through the process of torture the slave’s body is transformed into a site for the production of truth. DuBois argues that the philosophical tradition which locates truth as being concealed within the other and which must therefore be violently extracted, endorses the use of torture. She writes,
“that truth will continue to beckon the torturer, the sexual abuser, who will find in the other— slave, woman, revolutionary—silent or not, secret or not, the receding phantasm of a truth that must be hunted down, extracted, torn out in torture.” (Dubois, 147)
The language of beckoning the torturer to extract something from the body of the slave resembles Heidegger’s notion of the “calling forth” which characterizes the essence of modern technology. But while this conceptualization of truth frames the body of the other as the site of the production of truth, the process of torture also produces the very distinction between the citizen and the slave.
As duBois points out, the logic that truth resides within the other necessitates the creation of that other. She writes that, “in the case of the Greek city, the democracy itself used torture to establish this boundary, to mark the line between slave and free, and to locate truth
outside.” (Dubois, 125). Torture simultaneously represents a tool for accessing truth as well as a process which produces the very circumstances which make that extraction of truth possible. The very act of torture upon the body is a productive act, producing the delineation between the citizen and the other. In this sense the body of the slave represents an indispensable resource for the constitution and continual renewal of the state. The act of torture functions simultaneously as a processing of bodies which produces the other—as duBois writes, “All those tortured are “othered”, made slaves to the torturer-master.”—and a production of the legitimacy of the state through the negation of the other (duBois, 153). Torture produces bodies which are “ready-at-hand” for the use, exploitation, and extraction by the state. These bodies are Enframed as productive resources for the renewal of “civil society”. While it is unlikely Heidegger would have had this kind resource in mind in his theorization of the essence of technology, it is crucial to fuelling the ontological legitimacy of the state. And as duBois notes, Heidegger’s own conception of the truth is deeply tied up in the very philosophical tradition which positions truth as something concealed in the realm of the other, and which must be violently extracted (duBois, 134). Like the torture of enslaved bodies, the techniques of cynegetic power also function as a productive process, utilizing the body of the other as a resource for the renewal of the state.
In his book Manhunts, Gregoire Chamayou describes how the hunting of humans functions as a technology of power. Chamayou writes,
“The dynamics of cynegetic power is oriented by these two vectors: centralization through the annexation of external resources, and verticalization through the accumulation of captives in the internal territory.” (Chamayou, 16)
Here we can identify three terms which resemble Heidegger’s formulation of Enframing and the standing-reserve within Chamayou’s description of cynegetic power: “centralization”, “resources”, and “accumulation”. The cynegetic regime treats the bodies of the other, and those perceived to be external to the state, as resources. Through the process of manhunting, bodies that are deemed huntable are Enframed as a standing-reserve, or resources at the disposal of the state. Compatible with the characterization of standing-reserve, these corporeal resources are then subject to an ordering through their centralization and accumulation within the state, as well as through their low status among the vertical hierarchy within the city. Chamayou writes, “Cynegetic power accumulates; it does not individualize.” (Chamayou, 17). As standing-reserve, the hunted bodies are “orderable” and “substitutable” (Heidegger 1977, 17). But huntable bodies are not only resources to the cynegetic state in the form of slave labour, and manhunting is not only a technology of external accumulation, it is also a technology of production.
Like the act of torture in duBois, the act of manhunting is described as a process which must be continually carried out in order to maintain the legitimacy of the hunter—and by extension the cynegetic state. Chamayou writes,
“the manhunt appears as a means of ontological policing, a violence whose aim is to maintain the dominated in correspondence with their concept, that is with the concept that the dominant have imposed on them.” (Chamayou, 10)
The process of manhunting therefore does not only gather subjects as external resources, it produces and maintains the delineation between the dominated and the dominant. This statement seems to be somewhat contradictory to Chamayou’s earlier claim that the manhunt “is a technology not of production but of acquisition.” (Chamayou, 5). Because while manhunting does consist of the apprehension of those considered outside of civil society for the appropriation of slave labour, the very act of manhunting produces the distinction—the boarder—between the huntable and non-huntable subject. Manhunting is then simultaneously a technology of the accumulation, and of the production of a bodily resource which the cynegetic state needs in order to sustain itself as such. But as Chamayou points out, in ancient Greek cynegetic and slavocratic states, the determination of the huntable and non-huntable body is often complicated and contradictory.
Unlike American chattel slavery, where the classification of an individual as a slave was tied to constructed racial categories, in ancient Greece any citizen could be reduced to a slave (Chamayou, 6). This means that there must be some way for the state to identify those who are considered “slaves by nature” and those who are not. Chamayou notes that one solution to this dilemma was the assertion that slaves were less than human, and closer to objects or tools. Chamayou writes,
“The fact that they are constantly designated by oxymoronic formulas—“bipedal cattle”, “living tools”—that simultaneously deny and concede their humanity—seems to make them appear more as humanoids: beings in human form whose humanity is reduced to that of their bodies.” (Chamayou, 7)
The invocation of “living tools”, and “humanoids” (reminiscent of the artificial or cyborgian bodies of science-fiction which are so often depicted as slaves) denote the slave’s association with technological objects. They are reduced not just to their materiality but to their instrumentality as tools for whatever purpose the dominant order decides. Their humanity must be tamped down in order to make the slave’s body wieldable as a kind of semiautonomous tool. The perceived inability of the slave to exercise reason is again invoked here as justification for why they must follow the orders of those who are perceived to possess logos. Chamayou writes that these alleged natural and inherent ontological qualities present the slave to the master as a “being-for- domination”—but he is careful to clarify that these qualities are only a projection of the master’s will to power (Chamayou, 7). Like Heidegger’s conceptualization of equipment or tools as objects which present themselves as “something in-order-to” or as ready-at-hand, the slave’s body is perceived by the master as a “being-for-domination”. The master’s relation to the slave mirrors our relation to technology as a specific and narrow revealing which crops out the understanding of any broader ontology.
In duBois and Chamayou, the practice of torture and manhunting respectively function as forms of processing bodies, of producing bodies which can accommodate the needs and desires of power—and on which the very legitimacy of that power relies. If we are to think from the perspective of power—to think of the bodies of the subjugated as technologized bodies, made ready-at-hand to the interests of power, then it may be useful to think about what characteristics make literal technologies accommodating to users, and how power may attempt to shape bodies in order to incorporate these characteristics. One of the characteristics of a “user-friendly” technology—to use language which is quite crude—is a balance between standardization and flexibility. They must be malleable enough to adapt to the various needs and desires of the user, and yet standardized to the extent that they are recognizable as an object “in-order-to” achieve a particular ends. In a way the process of justifying bodies as tortureable or huntable based on certain characteristics is an attempt to achieve a degree of standardization which renders these bodies recognizable as such. Franz Fanon’s account of encountering the white gaze in a French train station is also somewhat indicative of this process.
In Fanon’s description of his encounter with a white child upon arriving in Europe in The Fact of Blackness, he is quite literally called forth as the other. In naming him as the other in her cries to her mother, the white child puts forth a challenging claim. Fanon is accused of his blackness, which only exists as defined against whiteness. And as a response to this accusatory and challenging claim, Fanon finds that he is “an object in the midst of other objects”, “Sealed into crushing objecthood” (Fanon, 2). This feeling of being “sealed” is reiterated in his observation that “the glances of the [white] other fixed me there” (Fanon, 2). But Fanon is not fixed as he was when he was on the train, before being accused by the child. Instead, he has been “burst apart” into fragments, and “put together again by another self.” (Fanon, 2). The child’s challenging claim calls on Fanon to perform a reordering of the self in relation to the white gaze. The fixity he experiences is of a self which has been moulded to the parameters of whiteness and which is set in that standardized form. But like any “user-friendly” tool, Fanon’s ontological form is not completely fixed or standardized, at least not for the privileged white “user”. Fanon writes, “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (Fanon, 2). In the eyes of the white man, the black man is malleable, his ontology is near instantly shaped for the white gaze, at the command of a look or verbal identification. But unlike the more ambivalent status of the slave in ancient Greece, who could have once been a citizen, in the case of blackness the white oppressor provides himself with a recognizable epidermal indicator of the body’s proximity to objecthood. Fanon, “The corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.” (Fanon, 3). The body is reduced to the colour of its skin, too its blackness. The body is reduced to the parts which are useful for the constitution and renewal of whiteness, because witness can only exist in its relation to blackness. It is Fanon’s visible blackness that allows the child to identify and hail him as an object. His skin presents himself to the white gaze as a body which is “ready-at-hand”, it presents the body as a tool, wieldable by whiteness. As such structures and practices of anti-blackness function to produce and maintain a standing-reserve of bodies which are ordered—both in terms of an arrangement and a command—and challenged forth to supply the energy that fuels whiteness. The body is technologized both in its presentation as “ready-at-hand” to whiteness, and its transformation into standing-reserve. The way Frank Wilderson describes the “libidinal economies” which fuel anti-blackness mirror this conceptualization of the oppression of black bodies as an essential resource.
On the particularity of anti-blackness in relation to other modes of oppression Wilderson argues that anti-blackness cannot be defined by the “spatial and temporal coordinates” of a loss of land or rights (Wilderson, 22). He argues that the violence which is specific to blackness has no easily identifiable “psychological grounding wire” akin to the colonial project in the case of Native Americans, or patriarchal project in the case of white women. Wilderson says that instead, anti-blackness functions as “the ongoing tactic of a strategy of human renewal.” (Wilderson, 8). Anti-blackness is constitutional to the maintenance and renewal of the Human category. Wilderson again,
“Policing—policing Blackness—is what keeps everyone else sane. And if we can start to see the policing and the mutilation and the aggressivity towards Blackness not as a form of discrimination, but as being a form of psychic health and well-being for the rest of the world, then we can begin to re-formulate the problem and begin to take a much more iconoclastic response to it.” (Wilderson, 7)
Anti-black violence and oppression then cannot be understood only as a way to put down black subjects, but as an essential resource in propping up the subjectivity of non-black people. And Wilderson is clear that for him this is not only a dynamic of blackness in relation to whiteness, but of blackness in relation to the broader category of the human which black people have been fundamentally excluded from. This is why he says that any allyship with similarly oppressed groups will always be provisional, because their humanity too is based in anti-blackness. In Heidegger’s terms we may be able to say that black bodies are Enframed as a fundamental resource for the renewal, and at the disposal of Humanity. This is why Wilderson says, “we are trying to destroy the world.” (Wilderson, 20). To eradicate the root of anti-black oppression, the world as we know it would have to come to an end. The category of Humanity as we know it would have to be be obliterated.
In Wilderson’s call to “destroy the world”, and Heidegger’s claim that the essence of modern technology is a specific mode of revealing, we may be able to identity a relation between the mechanisms of anti-blackness, and Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. Wilderson is in a
sense, calling for the apocalypse. The word apocalypse, originates from the Greek word apokalutein where “apo” translates to un-, and kaluptein translates to “to cover” (Feldman, 2017). The destruction of the world may then be rooted in an uncovering, a revealing. We can recall that Heidegger claims that the essence of technology “is a way of revealing”, and that he contrasts a romanticized concept of ancient Greek artistry’s mode of revealing as a bringing forth of “truth”, with modern technology’s more narrow, “challenging” revealing (Heidegger, 12). Like the category of Human which is based in anti-blackness, this “challenging revealing” characterizes our relationship to the Earth and to each other. To bring an end to this technological relationship would be to bring an end to the world as we have come to know it—as standing-reserve. This broader revealing would mean the apocalypse. It would be the destruction of a version of humanity which is fuelled and maintained through anti-blackness, which views the other as standing-reserve for the constitution of one’s own subjectivity.
Before concluding, it is useful to discuss the possibility of bodies which resist technologization—which resist being Enframed as standing-reserve. How might bodies be, or make themselves to be, neither standing—adhering to the desired posture and attentiveness of power—nor reservable? One such example may be found in Michel Foucault’s description of the monster of form, or monster of nature. For Foucault, the monster of form exists as both criminal and unconvictable. He claims that this version of monstrosity was prominent until the mid eighteenth century, when the monster of form begins to become medicalized, and the monster of behaviour becomes the primary concern of the law (Foucault, 74). But it is the monster of form that is most interesting here, and it should be noted that Foucault’s genealogy of the monster can be viewed as more complicated than discrete historical stages. It could be argued that versions of these figures can be found in various historical periods and spaces, including today.
According to Foucault, in its very existence and form, this kind of monster violates both judicial law and the laws of nature (Foucault, 55). He writes that, “the monster’s power and its capacity to create anxiety are due to the fact that it violates the law while leaving it with nothing to say.” (Foucault, 56). This monster breaks the law in its very existence, but the law cannot grasp this violation, it cannot handle it. Foucault also writes that the monster is often a “mixture”, possibly of species, or of genders (Foucault, 63). There is an inherent multiplicity or heterogeneity to the monster of form. Because the monster often brings with it a “blurring of limits and characteristics”, its form exists contrary to the kind of standardization of bodies which is ideal for technological mastery (Foucault, 65). It resists exploitation because the very confusion of its form does not signal any specific use. In Heidegger’s terms it could be said that the monster of form resists representation as “equipment”, it resists being presented as “ready- at-hand”. Unlike the hammer, which presents itself in a sense as already “hammering”, the monster of form implies no such action or utility. The law recognizes a transgression, but is unable to act upon it coherently. This somatic resistance is illustrated in Foucault’s example of hermaphrodites.
Foucault writes, “The monster was also someone with two sexes whom one didn’t know whether to treat as a boy or a girl” (Foucault, 65). Gendered bodies present themselves with certain exploitable characteristics, and specific hierarchical positions based on established constellations of power. One could say that “rape culture”—the social acceptance and perpetuation of the use of women’s bodies regardless of consent—is in part the result of a technological relation. Women’s bodies are Enframed under existing power structures as being at the disposal of men, both for their sexual gratification, the production of children, and the reinforcement of their own masculinity. A body which seems to contain two sexes—or even none —frustrates this gendered Enframing. The physical characteristics of the body become unmastrrable, unweildable to those in power. As Foucault notes, the response of the law was to make these bodies appear to adhere to a standardized categorization, “Individuals recognized as hermaphrodites were asked to choose their sex, their dominant sex, and to conduct themselves accordingly, especially by wearing appropriate clothes.” (Foucault, 67). We should remember that the term Enframing puts the essence of technology in visual terms. As such the outward appearance of bodies, and their visibility and identifiability are crucial to their ability to be Enframed as standing-reserve for the interests of power. The law’s response to what it considered to be monstrous was an attempt to make the body appear categorizable, so that established modes of gender regulation and oppression could at least be superficially applied. This does not mean that those who do not fall neatly and immediately into established gender categories escape gendered oppression—the reality is far from it. It does mean that the motivations and specific relations of this oppression may be different. If we can liberally extend the technological metaphor, it may be that bodies which adhere to gender categories are viewed as functioning and useable technologies—to be used, abused, exploited, and extracted from in accordance with the specific power relations within which they exist. While bodies that would have been categorized as monstrous in their mixture of sexual or gendered features present themselves as malfunctioning or unintuitive technologies—the frustration they cause to established hierarchies often resulting in violence. While Foucault’s description of monsters of form provides examples of bodies which resist incorporation, use, and exploitation in their very existence, Allen Feldman’s ethnography of Irish Republican prisoners provides an example of active resistance to the state’s efforts of bodily mastery as well as a more complicated depiction of bodies as technology.
In the chapter The Breaker’s Yard from his book Formations of Violence, Feldman describes the process of struggle between IRA prisoners and the British colonial state. Through their induction into the H-Block prison cells, the state attempts to render the prisoners’ bodies orderable, manipulable, and politically impotent. Much like the prescription of gendered clothing described by Foucault, the prisoners’ uniforms were crucial to the imposition of a subjectivity which was recognizable and desirable to the state and to the power dynamics of the prison. Feldman writes,
“Both the uniform and the collective violence of the guards were perceived as initially reducing the prisoners to an undifferentiated mass in order to isolate, individualize, and segment the prisoner as a divisible penal unit.” (Feldman, 157)
The initiation practices of the prison were explicitly designed to organize the prisoners in accordance with the interests of the state, and to deny them the self-organization and self- constitution of their political status. The series of protests and penal responses which took place following their induction into the H-blocks represents a struggle for the appropriation of the prisoners’ bodies either in accordance with the prison hierarchy or as part of a legitimate paramilitary political resistance. At issue here is not a conflict in which the prisoners simply resist the state’s technological mastery over their bodies, but in which they attempt to re- appropriate their own bodies as technologies for their own collective and political ends. As Feldman notes, much of this struggle takes place at the level of visibility which takes on dire material consequences in the context of the prison.
The prisoners resisted their visual standardization and subjectivation as ordinary criminals through the imposition of the prison uniform in what came to be known as The Blanket Protest. Refusing to dawn the clothes they were provided, the prisoners chose to go naked—wearing only blankets—in what would become their own kind of collective political uniform. But the prison regime then,
“turned to new arenas of regulation that extended the logic of compulsory visibility for the surface to the interior of the prisoner’s body. The interior body of the Blanketman was unfolded and exposed by the colonization of body functions—of the digestive and elimination tracts of the imprisoned.” (Feldman, 173)
The prisoners were subject to “mirror searches” and rectal exams when they went to the bathroom or shower. Feldman describes these searches as a “reorganizing ritual” which were intended to render the body splayed and visible in accordance with compulsory visibility (Feldman, 174). Parallels can be drawn between this “reorganizing” and the feeling of being fragmented and “put back together by another self” which Fanon describes (Fanon, 2). Fanon too describes a feeling of being “sprawled out” by the white gaze. Feldman notes that the visual representation these searches provided to the guards presented a “purified specular double of the inmate”, an “idealized and desired effigy of interiority.” (Feldman, 175). The images these mirror searches presented were technologize images—representing the body as at the disposal of the prison regime—the body as an accommodating tool. But the prisoners avoided these searches—and further beatings—by refusing to shower and then by smearing their own feces on the walls of their cells. This “reclothed their naked bodies with a new and repellant surface of resistance” while the foulness of their “fecal cell” discouraged unnecessary interaction with the guards (Feldman, 175). The prisoners mobilized their own bodies in order to disrupt the hierarchal visibility of the prisons, and render their bodies unwieldy. Their own fecal matter is turned into a technology of obfuscation and part of a process of corporeal re-mastery.
This kind of resistance through the body is made possible by the state’s investment of alterity. Feldman writes,
“The state reproduces itself by transcribing alterity. In this situation the Other (of the state) is always the detached part of the state that has been invested with alterity. The state recuperates itself in the Other by techniques of violent extraction and ideological consumption.” (Feldman, 178)
The body of the Other is formulated as a kind of prosthetic extension of the state. But the body of the Other is also the site of extraction through which the state renews itself. The body of the Other is again described a kind of resource for the constitution of the state—recalling the conceptualization of the body as a standing-reserve. But it is this reliance on the body of the Other for the state’s constitution which allows the prisoners to re-appropriate their bodies as technologies of resistance. Feldman again, “in revolt, the prisoner also bifurcates and objectifies the body as an instrument of violence.” (Feldman, 178). The prisoners recognize that the body is the site upon which power takes place. They recognizes the utility of their body and must make a mental split between the self, and their body as a technology of resistance. This could possibly be understood as a kind of self Enframing, and is perhaps the closest thing to the subversion or re-appropriation of what Heidegger deems to be the danger of modern technology.
By invoking Heidegger’s theory of technology we can gain different perspective on the mechanisms of power a play between masters and slaves, between the dominating and the dominated. Bodies are rendered orderable, exploitable, and manipulable through various technologies of power. The subjugation of the body of the Other often functioning as an indispensable essential resource for the constitution and renewal of power. In the context of power and the history of biopolitics we can also identify limitations in Heidegger’s thinking, as it would seem that the the technological essence of Enframing predates industrialized societies, appearing first in slavocratic and cynegetic states. We can also identify bodies like Foucault’s monster which resist technological instrumentality and exploitation in their very existence. And subjects like the IRA prisoners who re-appropriated their bodies as weapons of resistance in the face of constant efforts of penal incorporation. But if this technological Enframing does dominate our relationship to “the world” and to each other, perhaps a more broad revealing—an apocalypse—is necessary.
Works Cited
Chamayou, Gregoire. Manhunts: a Philosophical History. Princeton University Press, 2012.
DuBois, Page. Torture and Truth. Routledge, 1991.
Fanon, Frantz. The Fact of Blackness. Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African
American Themes, 1952.
Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in
Northern Ireland. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
Feldman, Allen. Animal Misarrivals. Mediating the Biopolitical Body. November 6, 2017. Lecture
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College De France, 1974-1975. Verso, 2016.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 2013.
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