Culture e Studi del Sociale (Oct 2020)
The Biopolitical Quest for Individuality as a Reactionary Device
Abstract
With the advent of digitization and the affirmation of a symbolic value on social exchange within capital, public demonstrations of discontent are nowadays being performed along an aesthetic canon, thus losing their possible revolutionary potential. Once we internalized that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, our struggles become individually symbolic and turn to aestheticism. Rather than stopping discontent, the power chooses to allow it because its performative content has already been neutralized. These demonstrations happen within a democratic culture – they play within the rules of the game. This is the imperial domination: to guarantee a resemblance of global peace for capital to develop, at the price of local omni-crisis. If Empire is born and shows itself as crisis, this crisis is felt at every peripheral point of the Empire. Solutions of governmentality have worked until now, but at a cost: even though there still are cathartic events, they don't manage release social tension completely – they always leave a mimetic residual. It's on those physical and psychological spaces of individual recognition that the Empire exercises its domination. And it’s there that forms of resistance can be tested.
