Six.
1. Introduction
In the past chapters I have posited the hyper-rationalization of the body politic as a key component in the disciplinary development of the Norplant® Condition. Rationalization has hinged, not always on the tools of oppressive coercion, but also on the subjectivist ideology of choice, responsibility, autonomy. With the modern era, autonomization doubled back upon man and the institution of the anthropomorphic automaton commenced. It is not that man has disappeared, but that man has reappeared with a grim vengeance, giving a new and perverse meaning to the very notion of autonomy. This reproduction of the ideology of choice, born of a radical subjectivity, functions as the heart and soul of disciplinary liberalism. In this regime, “man” is an anthropomorphic technological apparatus, a choosing machine. The notion of man as anthropomorphic technology is hardly new. Thinkers as diverse as Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and Haraway (to name a few) have approached this topic. However, within this transformation, by what means is egalitarian action possible?
In order to get at these questions, it is first necessary to return briefly to the thematics of liberalism, that I first developed in the context of Foucault’s and Dumm’s work. From here, I turn to feminist contributions in thematizing the Norplant® Condition as a problem of patriarchy. Within my analysis of the Norplant® Condition I suggest that it is complex and expansive enough to require a synoptic theoretical approach, combining elements of feminist theory, with the works of Foucault and Arendt.
My account of the Norplant® Condition serves as a context for an inquiry into the nature of natality, action, and resistance. Arendt’s concept of natality is typically (and understandably) presented in the context of its Augustinian roots. Her account of Kant serves, on one level, to schematize and publicize the creative act of new beginnings within decisive limits – limits that acknowledge the destructive danger inherent in bringing the new into being. These limits mark the distinction between creative acts born of natality and creative acts born of pure introspection. For Arendt, action “proceeds from nowhere,” from a “mute” and “despondent” night of being, but when held in check by plurality, promising, and memory the potential for making this night of being politically manifest is reduced dramatically. Conversely, the infinitized and lonely (infinite because progress posits no end-point and lonely because progress works from the notion of Man, not people or “men”) logic of progress that haunts contemporary disciplinary liberalism is also born of creative acts, but they are acts without intersubjectivity. The Norplant® Condition emerges from a hyper-subjective problematic of progress – a progress without a past or a future.
Both Foucault and Arendt were profoundly aware of the dangers of freedom as liberty without boundaries. Neither Foucault nor Arendt sought Liberty through Revolution. Both Foucault and Arendt provided provisional accounts of the possibilities of action and resistance. While Arendt’s account of natality and plurality grounds Foucault’s resistance further, feminist insights that we are of woman born (as opposed to Augustine’s “before whom there was no one”), articulate the corporeal dimensions of existence and action.
2. Disciplinary Liberalism
Following Foucault’s account of the early history of liberalism provided in Chapter Three, early liberalism is premised on the idea that “one always governs too much.” In contrast to Marx’s emphasis on the close relationship between the emergence of capitalism and liberalism, Foucault presents classic liberalism (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) as a form of “critical reflection on governmental practice.” While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation, a point of emphasis on the discourse of liberalism may still be connected to historic changes in political-economic relations. The emergence of private property, for example, necessitates and is necessitated by such a “critical reflection.” Still, Foucault’s contribution is highly significant in that liberalism in any period cannot be construed strictly as an “economic” or “juridical” phenomenon. It is a mode of understanding the world and in what form do we exist within that world. Whether caused by (or a result of) privatization of property, classic liberalism is marked by a profound skepticism towards the State and more generally, towards governance.
In its early formations, classic liberalism is defined by the notion that “one always governs too much” (Chapter Three). This stands in stark contrast to the practice of Polizeiwissenschaft – which is born of the notion that there is always more governing to do. Liberalism, in contradistinction to classic liberalism, emerged in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of the Nightwatchman State of classic liberalism and the hypervigilant State and civil society of Polizeiwissenshaft. As I noted in Chapter Three, the birth of biopolitics and the emergence of the politics of population mark the impact of Polizeiwissenschaft on classic liberal ideology. The rationality of the marketplace, reproduced and reified by the State, extends its invisible hand outward into the social realm as population – the literal “body politic” – is constructed under the purview of political economy.
In both cases (the Nightwatchman State of classic liberalism and the emergence of Polizeiwissenschaft in liberalism), the concept of tolerance plays a crucial role. Liberty, the treasured concept of individualists who hearken back to the imaginary of classic liberalism functions not only as a means of individual “freedom” but also as a legitimation for the expansion of corporate and state power in the social realm. The discourses of liberty and tolerance legitimate every liberal regime, providing a source for consent (or silence) during the articulations of governmentality as police science. These articulations are marked by the “modernist” trends toward rationalization, bureaucratization, and differentiation.
In short, liberal hegemony operates through a discourse of tolerance. Tolerance found in the “marketplace of ideas” fits hand in glove with the marketplace of capitalist development. Tolerance is grounded in the cherished concepts of choice, autonomy, and privacy. Despite barriers that circumscribe the parameters of “free” choice (gender, race, class, (dis)ability, education are a few), the myth of the free agent continues to haunt liberal “democracy.” The grounding legal framework for highly creative and challenging artistic creation also serves as the touchstone for corporate “individual” “free” expression. Tolerance introduces a “geography of legitimated exclusion,” while appealing to a rhetoric of inclusivity simultaneously does the work of exclusion. Inclusivity, however open, can never be (and perhaps should never be) absolute. The contours and surfaces of that exclusion are articulated politically, economically, and socially. This articulation of exclusion takes place primarily in the realm of the political. If politics is defined by the quest for hegemony, it is important to note with Fontana that “hegemony necessarily implies the creation of a particular structure of knowledge and a particular system of values” (Fontana 1993, 140). Structures of knowledge and value systems are defined against and through a differentiating background or Other. Even the inclusive, “Universal” process-oriented framework of the neutral liberal State defines itself against constructions of positive liberty or for that matter, constructions of freedom that confound and refuse the naturalized disembodied framework of liberalism altogether, as found in contemporary feminist political theories, and the works of Arendt and Foucault.
Differentiation of society is neither the cause nor the effect of the “multiplicity of force relations” that characterize relationships of power in liberal and “advanced” or disciplinary liberal discourses (Foucault 1990a, 72). Rather, differentiation is the localization and diffusion of those power relations. Whereas characters such as Luhmann see this as a cause for celebration (or at least, no cause for concern), there is a radical disjuncture between the language of differentiation and the material reality of gender, race, and class divisions – to name a few. Liberalism operates under an assumption of endless differentiation (a perpetual diffusion and differentiation of “traditional,” ossified premodern socio-political structures) carried out through the promise of the disembodied holder of democratic rights. Under the liberal tradition, universal rights produce and enable social, economic and political freedom. Such rights are maximized administratively by the State through a process of incorporation (Einverleibung). The construction of the subject as the bearer of universal rights and the State as the “Nightwatchman” of those rights, this particular notion of freedom, has been incorporated by the State. While the notion that the free-choosing individual relies heavily upon the idea of the Liberal State, the construction of the self as autonomous is necessary for the propagation of liberalism. In Liberal discourse, tolerance of each free, universal individual enables and produces a landscape for the production and subjugation of subaltern groups.
While political incorporation is not a novel political phenomenon, it emerges as a crucial means in the development of disciplinary liberalism. One salient example is American abortion rights advocacy. The activism often works within the rhetoric of liberalism (e.g. Planned Parenthood), through appeals to a “right to privacy.” While there can be tremendous value to working strategically within the “transcript of the hegemons,” it functions less as a form of resistance to Liberalism and more as a means of reaffirming it. Blanket appeals through liberal neutrality to a “right to privacy” by subordinate groups demanding social justice may have unintended consequences, including the reification of the systemically embedded relations of power that cause the need for social justice in the first instance. The private realm may be and often is a site for autonomy and freedom, but in the context of liberal discourse has the “right to privacy” served women and minorities well? The private realm is also a space that one “owns” and often serves as the very space for patriarchal domination. Privacy is the space for the subject to objectify, a space for domestic violence and enslavement (Schneider 1994, 36-59). Privacy is the white hood of the Nightwatchman. In the end, rights-based discourse may jeopardize human difference, sacrificing plurality on the altar of Universality. Rights-based discourse frequently reifies the foundations of the very patriarchal system that abortion rights advocates seek to challenge. A struggle for reproductive freedom is subsumed and incorporated into a debate over whose interpretation of rights is more compelling. At the end of the day, the geographies of exclusion that shape purportedly neutral rights discourses are left unquestioned. Is it possible to engage in a form of political resistance (or action) that renegotiates these grounds?
In Chapter Three, I articulated Foucault’s argument on disciplinary power as the threefold process of producing, analyzing, and manipulating the subject. Disciplinary liberalism is the emergence of this threefold process within the field of liberalism. The Norplant® Condition embodies a process of producing, analyzing and manipulating a calculable, normalized subject. Having “turned the assertion of guilt into a strange scientifico-juridical complex,” contemporary liberalism offers criminals such as Darlene Johnson, the “choice” of prison or surgical contraception (Foucault 1979, 19). In conjunction with the production of the criminal, of the “abject” Other, the normal citizen is produced through the incorporation of power in the rhetoric of choice. On a broader level, within disciplinary liberalism, women have such “choices” too. Women have a vast array of “choices.” Before proceeding, I want to examine some of the more common contraceptive “choices” that women have and follow with an important question.
1. Surgical sterilization is the most common form of contraception in the United States. A major side effect of sterilization is its permanency. Unfortunately, the line between voluntary and involuntary sterilization is not clear. Informed consent is very difficult to define and determine. Moreover, the same twentieth century societies that have produced a practice of widespread voluntary sterilization (before the twentieth century, sterilization as a form of contraception was extremely rare) have also produced an ideology of “more children for the fit, less for the unfit,” as Sanger described it. Eugenics and the emergence of biopower are lasting and foundational moments in the disciplining of reproductivity. Other potential side effects include loss of sex drive and “poststerilization syndrome that includes menstrual pain and irregular bleeding patterns” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 147).
2. Abortion: When discussing the side effects of abortion, the development of the notion of fetal personhood must be considered. Being “pro-choice” does not mean being pro-abortion – and given the political and cultural climate of the procedure – it is not surprising that depression has commonly been reported. There are a wide variety of techniques, documented meticulously by Knight and Callahan, with potential side effects including severe cramping, bleeding, hemorrhaging, and infection. “Back alley” abortions, utilizing coat hangers, “knitting needles, goose quills dipped in turpentine, celery stalks, drenching the cervix with detergent…drinking purgatives or mercury, applying hot coals to the body” – all of these methods have a whole host of side effects including all of the above and death (Rich 1986, 267). Pregnant poor women and pregnant women living in areas where abortion is illegal or highly regulated are forced to choose between these dangerous methods and birthing. In some cases, they may have the “choice” of a safer procedure, provided they prove they were victims of rape or incest.
3. Oral contraceptives: Among the many side effects are: “weight gain, gum inflammation, nausea, headaches, breast tenderness, increased urinary tract infections, vaginitis, chloasma (facial skin pigmentation or “giant freckles”) menstrual spotting, and libido changes….Irritability, anxiety, depression, changes in libido, and headaches…increased difficulty in achieving orgasm, decreased sensation of the vulva” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 113). Oral contraceptives are also associated with “vascular problems…clotting factors in the blood…alterations in blood vessel walls, creating an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, cerebral thrombotic stroke, cerebral hemorrhagic stroke…(along with) hypertension, chances of a fatal myocardial infarction (heart attack) and high blood pressure” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 114-115). However, oral contraceptives are contraindicated for women with “a history of blood clotting disorders, coronary artery disease, estrogen-dependent malignancies, or liver damage” or for women who smoke (Knight and Callahan 1989, 112).
4. Depo-Provera and other injectables: Side effects include changes in menstrual cycle (very heavy, infrequent, no cycle), irreversibility for the duration of the injection, “weight gain, abdominal bloating, headaches, mood changes, nervousness, and fatigue” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 125). Although “anecdotal,” one physician has reported to me that menstrual cycles often take some time to occur regularly up to a year after Depo-Provera is effective for birth control. Depo-Provera is also linked with the loss of bone mineral content, lack of return to fertility, breast cancer and cervical cancer.
5. Norplant®: reported side effects include migration of the device after insertion, irregular menstrual cycles (very heavy, infrequent, or none) visual disturbances (including partial blindness), convulsions, acute depression, lethargy, weight changes, scarring at implant site upon removal, vaginitis, and migraines). Other reported side effects include “breast discharge, inflammation of the cervix, inflammation of the vagina, vaginal discharge, abdominal discomfort, and musculoskeletal pain.” Should the device fail, “there is a greater chance that the pregnancy will be in the tube” (Planned Parenthood of East Central Illinois, October 14, 1997). Norplant® users are also provided with the same warnings that are given to women using oral contraceptives.
6. IUDs: There are a wide range of IUDs and clearly some are safer (Copper-7) than others (Dalkon Shield). In general, IUDs are associated with pain and bleeding (Knight and Callahan, 1989: p. 155). Having spent two years compiling summaries of medical records for over 350 women who used Dalkon Shield, some of the common side effects of this device are perforation of the uterine wall, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy. PID can also cause sterility. Additionally, PID and ectopic pregnancy can be fatal conditions. Should the device become detached and then discharged, one potential effect is pregnancy.
7. Vaginal Ring: Like Depo-Provera and Norplant®, vaginal rings release long-lasting steroids. However, unlike Norplant® and Depo-Provera, the contraceptive is user-controlled. Menstrual irregularity is reduced or eliminated by removal of the device for a week (Knight and Callahan 1989, 135). Pregnancy (if placed incorrectly), irregular bleeding, “vaginal irritation…objectionable odor,” and potential for infection remain as side effects (Knight and Callahan 1989, 136-137).
Why then, are contraceptive choices predominantly “for women?” While some research and marketing has focused on contraception for men, current choices mainly include condoms, vasectomy, and coitus interruptus (Knight and Callahan 1989, 285-312). While early critics of new reproductive technologies (e.g. Corea, Rowland, Raymond, Dworkin, Daly) have been taken to task for their essentialism (e.g. blaming the male doctors and developers), the patriarchal components of disciplinary liberalism - particularly in the field of reproduction (i.e. the ground of human existence) – are historically, “empirically,” and anecdotally grounded. Women are presented with a wide array of “choices” (some with irreversible effects, some entirely provider-dependent, and many with effects that can dramatically impact and change a woman’s life). Condoms are men’s only widely available, non-surgical, mildly effective choice. But, given the condom’s lack of effectivity, there are no commonly distributed highly effective forms of contraception for men.
The sphere of reproduction is reified through political socialization and technological development as a woman’s sphere, when it comes to preventing birth. Being responsible for, what Arendt called (always derisively), the “realm of necessity,” is one facet of power working to produce a certain type of citizen. Disciplinary power works through the sphere of reproduction not through force or coercion (though that is common enough too, as in the case of involuntary sterilizations or regulation of abortion), but through the construction of the choosing subject. For the choosing (disciplinary liberal) subject, freedom is coextensive with choice. Recalling Dumm’s framing of freedom in spatial terms from Chapter Five: “In presenting space as neutral, Berlin makes it the ground of freedom. To establish this space as the ground is to render it outside of contestation or struggle…But when one remembers that space itself is produced, or, more provocatively, insists upon investigating the ways in which it is produced, one is better able to see the manner in which the neutrality of space operates as an architectural metaphor for grounding” (Dumm 1996, 48). The grounding of reproductive choices is presented as a neutral space (for women) to decide which potentially deadly device to use. Emphatically, my point is not to criticize contraception. It seems there are dangers that accompany any effective contraception. But, rather to problematize the relegation of that danger to women. Choice is a matter of subject-production and to the extent that a person (man or woman) accepts the grounding of choice as neutral, the politics of reproduction have been naturalized through and through.
Manipulation also takes place through the production of the analyzable subject. The insertion of Norplant® into the U.S. judicial system and its proposed use in the welfare system evince a medicalization of the political realm. Another common instance of overlapping medical and political power in the realm of reproduction include abortion and the primacy of fetal personhood. Literally, the way in which a subject is analyzed fixes that person within a field of power relations. Power is not only a matter of power over, but how I know you. In Darlene Johnson’s case, she was known to be a criminal, a child-abuser, accountable, and likely to have more children. In the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer incident, black women were known to be poor and give birth to too many children.
In these cases, the notion of the productive subject emerges. Power, in this light is not only about analyzing and manipulating subjects. It is also a matter of making those subjects productive. It is here that the Norplant® Condition as it is expressed in the field of disciplinary liberalism can be understood best as a form of humanware (Reid and Yanarella 1996, 181-219). As punishment, Norplant® is a flexible disciplinary measure. Its proposed compulsory use by mothers on welfare, Kimmelman’s proposal that black women in poverty use the device, measures such as these in conjunction with its uses in judicial settings point to a politics of surveillance. In its most excessive formation, the politics of surveillance criminalizes the citizenry.
But what operates in the background of the disciplinary subject? What drives disciplinary power to productivity? Within Foucault’s discourse of the prison and Dumm’s account of the “disciplinary origins of American democracy,” there is a trajectory in keeping with Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity – disciplinary power is oriented around not only making a predictable and productive subject, but a better subject, a good subject. While American disciplinary power is influenced by the discursive regime of the “good subject,” (at least within the American context) the good subject is coextensive with the productive subject. And the productive subject cannot, at the end of the day, be separated from the “straitjacket of logic”: instrumental rationality (Reid, 1978). Predictability, calculability, and productivity are bound up with the instrumental rationality of capitalist incorporation. American and European political theory sides with what Derrida calls the manic positivity of liberalism (referring to Fukuyama’s right-leaning Hegelian accounts of the victory of liberalism in The End of History and the Last Man) in bypassing the political economies of domination that lie at the center of liberal “tolerance.”
Weber writes in “The Origins of Discipline in War,” that the discourse that permeates capitalist development is found in the increasing rationalization of the workforce – a discourse that is rooted in military discipline:
The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines – in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is shorn of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism …Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized (Weber 1978, 1156).
The emergence of lean production, flexibility, and the workforce as humanware signifies an internalization of discipline (flexibility read as “freedom” doing the work of hegemony), born of the instrumental rationalization extending its way through the economic realm and into the political and cultural fields of everyday life (Reid and Yanarella 1996; Reid 1978; Arendt 1958; Arendt 1994; Laclau and Mouffe 1993). The reification of a logic that is “independent of the human condition” is found in the emergence of new reproductive technologies, whose political effects are found in the “coercive link with the apparatus of production” (Foucault 1979, 153).
Like Weber, Foucault introduces the formulation of disciplinary power by way of military development. Foucault writes on the workings of power in the “body-machine complex”:
Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-machine weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex…The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of constitution of the operation. Thus disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of deduction but of synthesis, no so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of production (ibid.).
While exploitation is possible (and practiced) in the case of Norplant® and Depo-Provera, these devices function as disciplinary apparatuses, often chosen freely (see select list of birth control options above). Depo-Provera and Norplant® are characterized in advertisements as, “Birth control I only have to think about 4 times a year? Terrific.” Leaving aside the question of whether a woman thinks of Norplant® or Depo-Provera if she experiences any of the above listed side effects, there is something to think about in provider-dependent contraceptive technologies, and perhaps more than once every five years.
Is Planned Parenthood’s advocacy of population control disconnected from its distribution of these technologies? I am not presenting a discourse of conspiracy, but rather a discourse of power dwelling in the body-machine complex of disciplinary liberalism. Such devices are articulated “ready-made” for ideological insertion: Provider-dependency puts the politics of meaning in the hands of the provider. The Norplant® Condition is a “flexible” condition – ready-made for uses in authoritarian and liberal settings alike.
In the case of the United States, approval by the FDA touched off a series of discussions, legislative proposals, articles and debates on controlling black poverty and welfare “accountability” measures. As Betsy Hartmann has noted, the device took a decidedly different (and grimmer) turn in developing nations. Women in impoverished villages of Bangladesh and Egypt, no matter how often they think about the device, often do not have the “luxury” of removal on request (Hartmann 1995, 211). As I have discussed in Chapter Two, the methods of Norplant® insertion (in conjunction with population control policy) are also exploitative in Lombok, Indonesia (Hartmann 1995, 73-83).
Thus, it seems there is a tension between the coercive “subtle” forms of power that take form in liberal “democracies” and the more exploitative forms of power in developing nations. Disciplinary liberalism is hardly characterized by a unilateral disappearance of coercive power. There is a coercive component to the Norplant® Condition, as documented throughout this dissertation. Involuntary insertion of the device in Indonesia and lack of informed consent in trial phases are but two examples where coercive power works within the Norplant® Condition. While the full range of the politics of uneven development is well beyond the scope of this work, I present the limited choices (however problematic) that citizens have in the realm of necessity in “developed” nations as being built on and through relations of dependency, now referred to as “global capitalism.” Disciplinary liberalism then, constructs its internal relations of power through hegemony, which are in turn, dependent on relations of domination with and within “third world” nations.
Foucault’s and Arendt’s contributions to an understanding of the power dynamics of new reproductive technologies are substantial. But, neither spoke adequately on the topic of gender in power. I arrive at a reconfiguration of the power dynamics of the Norplant® Condition by way of a critique of Arendt’s concept of natality. While Arendt makes a crucial contribution to the formulation of a theory of action and resistance by grounding her political philosophy in new beginnings, there is a problematic component to her Augustinian influence. This influence is rooted in the masculinist notion that man gives birth to himself. In the context of the Norplant® Condition, disciplinary power, instrumental rationality, and the “straitjacket of logic,” are shot through with the masculinist mythos of autogenesis.
Before I turn to consider the contributions by feminists such as Mary O’Brien, Sarah Ruddick, and Adrienne Rich, I must speak to this rather untimely meditation. After all, I have spent many pages questioning the foundations of the idea of the abstract (liberal) self and trying to expose the ideological grounding of neutrality. Why on earth, a good poststructuralist might ask, would I close with thinkers who romanticize the category of Woman? Will I not end by essentializing and romanticizing birth and birthing, thus reifying (rather than destabilizing) the constructedness of gender identity? Following Bordo on this point (and in my attempts to perform a critique, another forbidden zone for some poststructuralists), that in deconstructing gender we may “cut ourselves off from the source of feminism’s transformative capabilities” (Bordo 1993, 243). Contemporary postmodern theory runs the risk of exhausting the fragile political potential of political theory and does so when it fails to acknowledge the strategic, pragmatic and historical conditions under which we speak. Bordo writes, in a particularly pertinent passage:
Most of our institutions have barely begun to absorb the message of modernist social criticism; surely it is too soon to let them off the hook via postmodern heterogeneity and instability. This is not to say that the struggle for institutional transformation will be served by univocal, fixed conceptions of social identity and location. Rather, we need to reserve practical spaces both for generalist critique (suitable when gross points need to be made) and for attention to complexity and nuance (Bordo 1993, 242-243 emphasis mine).
While there are dangers to positing radical female difference (and as Foucault and Bordo have noted, “everything is dangerous”), there is something to the fact that women, not men, tend to give birth – for example (Bordo, citing Foucault 1993, 223). I believe there is something practical and beneficial in attempting to re-cover and reconstruct the institutionally inscribed meanings of birthing and motherhood. The contributions of Rich, Ruddick, O’Brien and others highlight the gender power relations in the social relations of reproduction and in so doing, they provide “complexity and nuance” to Arendt’s gender-neutral concept of natality in a way that postmodern thinkers seem unwilling.
