Good morning y’all.
Thank you for your incredible reception to collaboration that I put out the call for last week. If you missed it, please check back and consider whether this space can be a place for you to share yourself, to participate in the co-creation of ideas and inspiration, to cross-post something you’re already sharing and widen the web of support for your work, to offer your song to this chorus, to fill this well together.
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I’ve been hungry to write a piece like this for a while. I’m stirred so deeply by Foucault’s work and am curious to hear what it activates in you. Please share in the comments. :)
Til next time, keep the fire burning.
Rach
p.s. I took the photos in this essay in 2017, in Anapra New Mexico, just outside of El Paso. Anapra is a colonia in the city of Ciudad Juárez, west of the Rio Grande. It is one of the poorest communities in Juárez.
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p.p.s. If you’re looking for a one-time way to support this space instead of a recurring subscription, a contribution via Venmo is nourishing and appreciated.
The border wall snakes through the sand, rising up along the mesa, then sliding down into the dehydrated valley on the other side of the dwindling Rio Grande and stretches off into the dusty distance. As a Mercedes Bens pulls into the 6-car garage of a sun-soaked mountainside mansion in El Paso, western-facing windows gaze out upon the most spectacular sunset sinking behind the cardboard-and-metal hillside shacks of Juárez. Tire-fires keep hearths warm, tired trucks labor up unpaved roads, and people work for pennies at maquiladores making products for duty-free, tariff-free corporate profits.
My stomach twists in knots on drives along the I-10 highway that traces a trail of disparity. To my left, wealth and privilege shimmer in the sunlight. To my right, poverty and struggle shudder in the shadows.
This was my initiation into the human experience, the landscape that raised me. No matter what I learned in textbooks, no matter what was presented in the already white-washed Texan school system back then (which has only gotten worse), I saw the truth unfold before me in extremes and I agonized.
Why?
Why would humans do this to one another? Why would humans spend their days architecting depravity, caging each other in prisons we call nations, hoarding wellbeing and manufacturing suffering? Why was I born here, and she there?
Despite the pressure to “go on and get along”, I refused to make these questions naive.
I’ve described how alien I felt to this Earth for this reason. I’ve found refuge in people I consider “chosen ancestors”. Michel Foucault is one of them.
In 1977, the text “Anti-Oedipus” – written by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in 1971 – was translated and released in English with a preface written by Foucault. I have read his words over and over again for years feeling both frustrated and enamored. Why don’t these ideas scale when they’re so simple, alluring, alleviating, transformative? Why do we as a species spin in spirals of devastation and destruction, when countless visionaries like Foucault have offered distilled blueprints for evolution?
Let me offer a little background, then share specifically what I’m referring to…
If you’re unfamiliar, Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who advanced critical conversations on the perverse impacts of modernity, namely the unregulated power of societal institutions and their invasion into increasingly more intimate aspects of our lives through surveillance, social control, subjugation, incarceration and other technologies of domination, conjuring countless illuminating concepts that scrutinized state apparatus, like “biopower1” and “carceral archipelago2”.
He is perhaps most famous for his theorization on the panopticon (“all seeing”) which refers to prison design in which a central observation tower is encircled by prison cells. The guard in the tower can see every cell, but the inmates can’t see into the tower, thus never knowing when/whether they are being watched. Due to this asymmetrical surveillance, prisoners are indoctrinated into constant self-monitoring, never knowing whether they are being monitored by the external authority, thus the state gains ever greater control over and enforcement of individuals: through both actual surveillance and fear of supervision which internalizes the panoptic tower. Prisoners end up policing themselves. Prisoners are subjugated and self-subjugating.
This was first originated by philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, but Foucault expanded on this notion by suggesting that the panopticon does not merely exist in prisons, but is a feature of daily life for all citizens. We are all being “watched”.
“He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.” - Michel Foucault
We are surveilled by institutionalized, systemic, and structural mechanisms of control, but we amplify this impact by internalizing this authority and then shaping culture around it. Social norms, prejudice, judgment, tribalism… all technologies that reinforce self-policing and self-surveillance to secure one’s place in society by precisely following social rules and protecting oneself from punishment.
“[The Panopticon] is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power… which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used.” - Michel Foucault
Social media is an acute expression of panopticonism. The central control tower constantly surveils us: persistently mining us for data, intrusively listening to and tracking our every move to sell us a fix, exposing our subconscious behaviors for exceedingly manipulative means. Technically this is a consensual exchange, but once again the socialization and indoctrination of social media into culture turns each of us into an (unpaid) regulator/officer/agent of the regime through subtle or overt social coercion, making the gravity grip that much stronger. As social media gains monopolistic control over nearly every aspect of life, exile, lost economic opportunities, lack of community, fear of missing out become legitimate concerns and rational fears, despite being totally constructed.
For any system to function, collective buy-in is required and general consensus is needed. And we see that happen beautifully in plenty of collectivist manifestations like cooperatives. What we must wrench ourselves from is perpetuating asymmetrical power. This is actually at the root of abolitionism. Foucault argues that true abolition requires removing the cop in your own head.
So why is that so hard?
“How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” - Wilhelm Reich
Desire.
This is at the heart of it all. The perversion of it. And the reclamation of it. The foundational pillar of Anti-Oedipus is that we are called to reckon with the way we are made, as Reich describes, to desire fascism.
The full title of Anti-Oedipus is Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari theorize about the role of psychoanalysis as a political project – a “materialist psychiatry” – where the production of desire and the transmutation of humans into “desiring-machines” is conducted purely for the pursuit of power which orchestrates a schizophrenic society.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the eroticism of authoritarianism — to be submissive, to be saved, to be rescued, to be the “good one”, to gain the patriarch’s approval – these are all deeply entrenched yearnings easily leveraged by the state. Oppressive systems are sophisticated, strategic, reductive… and ultimately they are seductive. As uncomfortable as it can be to admit, the subversive expression of the erotic in the far right is part of its intoxication, which is why we see so many sexually repressed individuals and entities (like The Church) entagled into fascist political agendas.
“Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused." – Deleuze and Guattari
And we are all coerced into versions of this, which we see play out seamlessly on social media through a seemingly inescapable obsession with the perversion of desire. Social media is addictive in its endless machination of social programming — can you ever be “good”, “attractive”, “likeable” enough?
We must claw ourselves out of internalized fascism with a fierce commitment to personal and collective liberation.
“The major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. – Michel Foucault
To unpack the way desire is manipulated is an essay of its own. Or it’s actually the book, Anti-Oedipus, which I recommend if you’re feeling nerdy and/or motivated.
But here’s the punchline. Foucault concludes his preface with seven principles on “non-fascist living” as an “art of living counter to all forms of fascism” in which he invites us into the practice of living rather than the mere object of life as an antidote to fascism. Here is Foucault’s guide to liberated life:
Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
Do not become enamored of power.
I read these seven principles and I yearn for a world in which they are encoded into our ethics and lived with the passion they deserve. If you’ve read any of adrienne maree brown’s work, you can hear Foucault’s influence, particularly in Emergent Strategy. Maybe these textbooks for living are emerging, at the time we need them most. Maybe, finally, these ideas planted like seeds by our elders are taking root at this most desperate hour.
I’ll close with two beautiful expressions which remind us to live with eros for what is true and lasting and rich and so deserving of our lust, our passion, our adoration, our devotion.
This excerpt from a film called “Forest Law” by Ursula Biemann of Geobodies.
And these words from Audre Lorde’s exquisite essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power –
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.
For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
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“[A] power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.” Read more here: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/
A set of interconnected carceral spaces and practices, including prisons, police, detention centers, segregated cities, reservations, and enclosures.
The eros of living
Deeply appreciated this piece. Resounds heavily. Thank you.
Oops, silly me, the source for Forest Law is embedded right into the video ;) I updated the post to reflect this.