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 members of each nation apart and distorts their national and racial identity, thus it is compulsory for these members of each nation to unify as a whole nation and to gain a national identity. Modernity gives birth to this statement which is composed against the fragmentation created by the modernity itself. At this point, it is highly visible that modernity is inherently contradictory. It creates all the discourses and counter-discourses as well as the produces the political and cultural tools to manage them.
Benjamin in his essay demonstrates how fascism slyly manages the art to unify and organize the masses through the aestheticization of politics. “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relation which they strive to abolish” (Benjamin 41). At the end of his essay, he claims that fascism transforms the benign nature of alienation he formerly represents. In the hands of fascism, the self-alienation reaches a point where the humanity experiences its own destruction as a great aesthetic pleasure (42). At this point, the aestheticizing of the politics by fascism operates and human being’s reception of the artwork completely destroyed. Fascism aestheticizes politics in order to ‘unify’ the reception of the masses, especially the proletariat, and to hinder the process of their understanding of the reality through self-alienation. This unification tool can be regarded as a confirmation of the modernity’s promise of wholeness.
Modernity does not only deploy the aestheticizing of politics through fascism to realize the wholeness of humankind, but it creates the concept of race and deploys sexuality as well. Deployment of sexuality brings about the control over the bodies, hence biopolitics as Foucault maintains in his work History of Sexuality. Foucault argues that the concept of power, in modernity, is based upon two schemes. The first one takes the body as the central object and works on the body by means of disciplining it, increasing its usefulness and docility, and integrating it to the systems of economies. The power centralizing the body constitutes the anatomo-politics of the human body as Foucault puts it (Foucault 139). Developing at later stages, the second kind of power emerges as one of the basic productions of modernity. It mainly focuses on body serving as a template for the biological processes. The subject matters of this power are birth and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy, and propagation. To supervise these biological processes, it put a series of regulatory controls into operation, which means biopolitics of the population. The transformation of the old power symbolizing the sovereignty into the power that is assigned with the administration of the bodies and calculation of life may mark the endeavors of modernity to organize the human life with the aim of making a servant for capitalism and to create a unified human kind. There has been an immense range of techniques to serve for the administration of bodies and control of populations.
Foucault asserts that the bio-power undoubtedly is an essential element for the development of capitalism. “The latter [capitalism] would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (Foucault 141). He explicitly shows the relation between the development of biopolitics and that of capitalism. “The adjustment of accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application” he writes (141). The aim of the power exercised on human bodies is to facilitate the development and operation of capitalism. From Foucault’s statements, it can be inferred that modernity, its institutions, and capitalism are all correlated and feeds back each other. Upon how biopolitics transformed the human being’s nature, Foucault changes Aristotle’s argument. For Foucault, “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (143). After aestheticizing of the politics, the human body, the biological form, gets politicized for the first time in the history.
For the operation of biopolitics, sex has become a remarkably crucial concept. Sex enables both anatomo-politics and biopolitics of the human body as it has been an access to the life of the body and to that of species. “…sex was a whole series of tactics that combined on varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations” (Foucault 146). Sex is deployed as a standard to establish a basis both for disciplining and regulating the bodies. To put this in other way, sex is the essential focus of a power operating for the purpose of managing life.
Being a much contested term in modernity, race is stimulated by the implementation of the power exercised on human bodies through biopolitics. Foucault writes of racism as a biologizing statist form, which implies the relation between bio-politics and race.
It [racism] was then a whole politics of settlement, family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of blood and ensuring the triumph of race (149).
Biopolitics, implementing the techniques for the control over the body and populations, gives rise to the concept of race and its maintenance. These two terms, biopolitics and race, support each other and are supported by the deployment of sexuality. This kind of deployment enables the power to establish dominance over sex that is the main realm of control where these two operate collectively. Nazism constitutes the most concrete example for the operation of both biopolitics and race with the deployment of sexuality. It is the most efficient form where the fantasies of a unified race and disciplined bodies are combined together. In this respect, it can be argued that Hitler attempts to realize his fantasies of creating a wholly unified and eugenic order of German nation with the politics of sex, which has been cunningly managed by Nazism.
The operation of biopolitics and its relation to race can be observed in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. The film represents the production of racialized subjects and the materialization of race through “structuring visibility” of the race as Zahid Chaudhary argues in his article “Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”. Infertility that is the main concept of the film functions as a constituent element of the contemporary biopolitics. In addition to infertility, race, in the film, serves as an inseparable part of the biopolitics in which it gains visibility. The process of structuring visibility in the film is realized through a series of scenes where the background becomes the foreground. The scene where Kee, Theo and Miriam are going to Bexhill refugee camp by bus the camera makes them marginal to the frame as it shifts the focus to the bus windows at the scene of a refugee camp. The lights are turned off and the camera again focuses on the subjects outside the bus. This scene echoes the iconic image in the Abu Gharib, which means that formerly being the background Abu Gharib becomes the foreground. All the other representations that become the foreground reference a certain history, Chaudhary writes. He asserts that all of these images imply a reality in which the historical referent seems to have disappeared. This is the nihilistic aspect of film’s argumentation as it replaces the authentic meaning with the images.
How power put biopolitics into operation may be observed in the film. On billboards, there reads “AVOIDING FERTILITY TESTS IS A CRIME.” Biopolitical order does not only regulate the lives of immigrants but also those of infertile women. Since the film situates women’s bodies as the center of infertility, these billboards address the female individuals who are under strict control of the modern biopolitical order. Following that, it may be suggested that the film makes a gesture regarding gender by centralizing the women’s bodies as the site of infertility. However, gender is not the only issue that films takes into account as it is also racialize the women’s body through casting a black woman’s body. Chaudhary states that Kee’s body, the pregnant black woman’s body, is the fetishized object in the film and it serves for the liberal discourse on freedom (95). The fetishizing of Kee’s body is recognized in the revelation scene where Kee shows her pregnant body to Theo and where her body and race gets materialized. Through gender and race, the audience is able to see and understand the body, which reveals our history of meaning making and political contestation (97). That issue of meaning making creates the diversity in history, which is against the very discourse of capitalism because capitalism promises universality and promises a world with one meaning.
Modernity separates the individuals from one another by means of the discourses, lifestyle, institutions, artworks and all the other means it uses. It even breaks the individual’s self apart creating a gap between self and other. However, it realizes that this setting apart everything does not work well for the capitalism. Then it starts to give the promise of universality and one universal meaning for everything. In order to achieve its goal of unification, it creates biopolitics which is an outcome of deployment of sexuality because biopolitics means politicizing bodies and sex is the central issue for the politics of body. Lastly, modernity creates the concept of race which it situates as a function of biopolitics. During the operation of biopolitics, it can be seen that race functions in accordance with sex as both are interrelated and serve for the function of biopolitics. However, race becomes a site where the diversity can be read as a relational category and meaning making mechanism rather than being sum of biological differences. This is the point again modernity creates its own discourse and counter-discourse. From all the discourses and counter-discourses modernity creates, its fertile contradictory nature can be read.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Tr: Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008 17-55.
Chaudhary, Zahid. “Humanity Adrift: Race, Materiality, and Allegory in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.” Camera Obscura 72, Volume 24, Number 3
Children Of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Pictures. 2006.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Tr: Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1990.