The operation of biopolitics and its relation to race can be observed in Alfonso Cuarns Children of Men. The film represents the production of racialized subjects and the materialization of race through structuring visibility

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Elif Binici

Chandan Reddy

Engl 308

16 December 2011

                        Fertile Contradiction within the womb of Modernity

        Modernity, following the advent of capitalist mode of production, emerges as a fundamental concept changing the way humanity begins to see all aspects of the world from a remarkably different perspective. As the historical materialism argues the mode of production, that is the way people produces objects and lead their life, influences their understanding of the world and causes it to change. Apart from the material conditions that determine the history by affecting the people’s ideas, there is one more crucial force driving history. That force is contradiction prevailing within the nature of everything including the world and being one of the main determinants of the history. The concept of contradiction as a driving force of history is highly evident in capitalism. The contradictory nature of the capitalism echoes the contradiction existing in modernity. The discourse of modernity that promises the wholeness within a society, or generally humanity, contradicts the very discourse of the modernity that assumes the fragmentation of the humanity creating diversity among human beings. These two contradictory poles of modernity give rise to the new discourses produced by the material conditions of modernity. Another outcome of the politics of modernity is the biopolitics that serves for the control over bodies. Race emerges as a very fertile function of biopolitics in modern era and it becomes the most important basis of the fascist arguments. It is possible to observe how biopolitics works to make human beings understand “the body” and how it materializes the race, its correlation with race, in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

Walter Benjamin opens his great essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by touching upon the contradictory nature of the capitalism. “Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist production, he [Marx] presented them in a way which showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. What could be expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself” (Benjamin 19). The emphasis here is on the dialectical nature of capitalism, that is to say, it first emerges and develops extraordinarily through a series of justifications and extreme exploitation, and then it dissolves itself through the conditions set up by capitalism itself. What is striking in this assumption is that contradiction drives history and always creates and will create history. Following this assumption, it is possible to argue that modernity which may be said to operate in relation to capitalism has the same dialectical structure. How modernity encompasses a contradictory nature is evident in its discourses on wholeness and fragmentation of the humanity.

In modernity, human beings are considered to be separate individuals rather than having a collective identity. The emphasis on the individuality and the importance of being an individual in the modern world causes the humanity to break into pieces and brings about diversity. The perception and the reception of the self are also highly fragmented through various means of modernity. Capitalism creates this fragmented mode of humanity and contributes to it through the lifestyle it dictates. The organizations in various realms of life such as working life, social, and political life dictated by the operation of capitalism contribute a lot to the fragmentation of the humanity and the individual’s own self. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault draws a picture of the modern institutions that serve for the fragmentation. Through this picture, one has the opportunity to observe how these modern institutions like factories, jails, and hospitals, are organized to fragment the individuals. Accordingly, modernity organizes human beings through fragmenting them into separate individuals in a way that would facilitate the operation of capitalism. Furthermore, artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction is another major contributor to this fragmentation, which is most visible at the individual level. The work of art fragments the masses and individuals by means of changing their perception regarding the artwork. The major concept stimulating the fragmentation is the self-alienation both at the level of masses and individuals. One of the arguments in Benjamin’s essay is that the film, as a work of art, addresses unconscious and the masses going to cinema see their ‘other’ self through the actor and gets alienated at first. This alienation is not used in a negative sense, inversely; it provides the masses, composed of individuals, with an insight of their “reality”. On the moment alienation is accomplished, the fragmentation of the individual’s self is realized: the other and the self.

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        Fragmentation is not the only mode modernity operates; unification is another concept when modernity is concerned. In this respect, modernity can be said to fragment and unify the humanity. The promise of wholeness emerges as a counter-argument against the fragmentation. The discourse of wholeness is profoundly observable within the discourse of fascism because fascism itself supports unification and sets the conditions for it. In the fascist arguments given by Hitler, the main assertion is that modernity breaks German nation apart and the time for German nation to unify comes. To articulate this as a general fascist argument, modernity sets the ...

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