Precarias
a la Deriva
February,
2005
For
the magazine Diagonal
In
the present context, the logic of security is the principal form of
taking
charge of bodies and organizing them around fear, contention,
control,
and management of unease. This article is a first approach
and
analysis of the concept of the body managed through securitarian
logic,
in order to see forms of regulation that are being used and to
feed
practices that take root in the politically radical character of
care.
The logic of care that we propose recognizes interdependence,
wagers
upon cooperation, and articulates itself as a social ecology.
The
modern conception of the body is founded on the division and
hierarchization
of mind/body and on the construction of the body as an
individual
self-regulating machine.[1] This schema, though still in
force,
is not enought for us in order to understand how our bodies
function
nowadays, many of them urban bodies, rapid, and rather
stressed.
Today the slogan 'biology is not destiny' functions, the
body
has become a place of construction where one can intervene, to
make
the body and negotiate with materiality itself.
We
want to note two ideas that network within the mechanisms of
regulation
of bodies today. First off, the hypervisibility of the body
within
the securitary regime and secondly the pendular movement that
takes
place between the obsession for the self-cared-for (autocuidado)
and
(self)exploitation. The regime of security is the regime of
vision,
the videovigilance is a good example of this, a secure place
has
security cameras, those strategically situated cameras send a
continuous
image of the guarded place, a fixed image with variations
over
the long term, that only make sense in the speed of a rewind. The
same
thing happens with the image that the media offers of bodies and
of
feminine presence, we find a fixed, stereotyped scene, in which the
velocity
of the autumn-winter-spring-summer fashions permits us to see
the
argumental futility of supposedly transgressive or feminist
attitudes
(look at the case of Nikewomen) and how finally there only
remains
the fixed and homogeneous frame, white and heteronormative[2],
disposible
and disposed toward the consumer.
In
second place, we can say that in Western societies there is a
growing
interest, along with the investment of time
and
money, in care for oneself. If this phenonemon is related to processes of
medicalization of populations that began in the
second
half of the 18th century, now it is no longer only the medical
institution
that inspects the body but rather this function has been
interiorized
by each individual. This desplacement is accompanied by
another
important fact: obtaining care has passed to the
consumer,
far from any social conception of health and illness. Care,
to
the degree that it appears in the media, is a demand to maintain
presence.
In order to be healthy one must go to the gym, take
riboflavin
and turn to private medicine. But we simultaneously receive
messages
on how to profit from and improve the body,
that
is, how to yield more, how to overcome age, how to avoid catching a cold
each
winter, how to be more efficient on the job and in the
home.
That is to say, first we hypervitamin ourselves in order to
later
be able to put out extra hours, race across the city
in
order to collect the kids from school and be the
coolest
at the office party. Anxiety and unease arise when one
insistently
crosses the limits of the body.
If the body struggles, with the help of
a whole gamut of products and
specialists,
against "free radicals" that make it grow old, the
social
body struggles in the same way against that other threat that
debilitates
and frightens it: terrorism. That the social body can age
and
sicken, that enemy remains hidden and lying in wait in the very
center
of the social, is something that no one is inclined to
tolerate,
something that merits aesthetic treatments, armored borders
and
all kinds of social liposuctions (progressive privatizations and
shortages
of public space or the trimming of rights and liberties),
all
this in order to permit normalized bodies to continue their
bittersweet
movement toward the commercial center. In the course of
the
derives [3], we heard accounts of many bodies, authentic places of
resistance,
that are confronted everyday with new forms of regulation:
the
body as a uniformed presence, in that the uniform marks the border
that
separates the domestic employee from the family in domestic work,
the
body of the prostitute as exotic and a tourist attraction, the
body
as a source of fatigue for the nurse, the body as voice, as a
physical
and tangible interface for the client-firm relationship in
its
supposedly "most human" side in the case of the telephone
operator,
the nearly adolescent body, necessarially easy-going in the
fast
food chain, the body exposed to work twenty four hours per day,
all
of them fragmented, with superimposed identities, always
changing,
in continuous learning and transformation through
experience,
through love, through age, through life definitively. The
body
is presence, but it is not only that, it is also a vehicle and a
depository
of all vital information, to normalize the body can
so
we are all the same size 36, or what is worse, that we all think and act in a
manner
foreseeable by the globalized market. But we already know that
the
forms of domination do not consist only in the exercise of
violence
but also in the active production of submission, and with our
bodily
uprisings we do not fit into these confining spaces, right?
Notes
1.
The body that capitalism produced in its beginnings was
a
closed and finite circuit of energy whose econmy was sustained
thanks
to self-control, which assured the equilibrium of fluids. It
was
a body destined to produce in the factory and in reproductive
heterosexual
exchange. In this schema the living body was a commodity
that
functioned inside a restrictive economy, in respect to market
exchanges
as much as to the corporeal fluids. In the dawn of
colonialism,
the same economy of energetic regulation was entrusted
with
the conservation of the body as much as with the conservation of
the
European nation-states. In these configurations of the body and of
the
social, health was understood as a virtue cultivated to the degree that
one
participated in the circuits of normality.
2.
When we speak of heteronormativity, heterosexuality is considered,
not
so much as as a sexual practice but rather as a political regime.
As
a biopolitical technology aimed at the production of heteo bodies
and
'unifamiliar' models of life, with their gendered distribution of
tasks
and assignments, fundamental to the sustainibility of the
capitalist
system up to now.
3.
For more information on the derives[4], consult the book by
Precarias
a la Deriva, A la deriva (por los circuitos de la
precariedad
femenina), Traficantes de sueños, Madrid, 2004, or the
webpage
www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm.
4. The phrase 'a la deriva' in the name
Precarias a la deriva means
'adrift'.
The noun 'deriva' is translated in this artcile as 'derive'
in
order to preserve a common heritage with the reference to the
theory
and practice of the derive used by the Situationist
International.
Precarias a la Deriva take up the practice of the
derive
in a transformed fasion, as noted in "First Stutterings of
Precarias
a la Deriva", where the Precarias write, "[i]n the
Situationist
version of the drift, the investigators wander without
any
particular destination through the city, permitting that
conversations,
interactions and urban micro-events guide them. This
permits
them to establish a psycho-cartography based on the
coincidences
and correspondences of physical and subjective flows:
exposing
themselves to the gravitation and repulsion of certain
spaces,
to the conversations that come up along the way, and, in
general,
to the way in which the urban and social environments
influence
exchanges and attitudes. This
means wandering attentive to
the
billboard that assaults you, the bench which attracts, the
building
which suffocates, the people who come and go. In our
particular
version, we opt to exchange the arbitrary wandering of the
flaneur,
so particular to the bourgeois male subject with nothing
pressing
to do, for a situated drift which would move through the
daily
spaces of each one of us, while maintaining the tactic's
multisensorial
and open character. Thus the drift is converted into
a
moving interview, crossed through by the collective perception of
the
environment." For more information on the Situationist International
and
their version of the derive see Debord's "Theory of the Derive",
available
online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314.
For
more texts in English by the Precarias a la Deriva see the following texts:
"First
Stutterings of Precarias a la Deriva", at
http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/balbuceos-english.htm
"Introduction
to Precarias a la Deriva", at
http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/femrev.htm
and
"Close encounters in the second phase - the communication
continuum:
care-sex-attention ", at
http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias/close_encounters.htm
**