Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain

By Pasi Valiaho

In a remarkably succinct manner, Pasi Valiaho's Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, draws together from myriad sources (ranging from art history and film theory to neuroscience, neoliberal economics, anthropology, video gaming, virtual reality technology, and counterinsurgency/military strategy) an increasing convergence in description of our "neoliberal" social and media environment. Valiaho also proposes, remaining within the purview of screen culture, artists' video installations as counter-examples to the reigning types of "biopolitics." Part of the broader scaffolding to this analysis is Michel Foucault's definition of "biopolitics" as the attempt, beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century, "to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living be ings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race" (qtd. 18). Allied to this is Cilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "apparatus of capture" (qtd. 13)--the process of bringing bodies/ individuals in line with the requirements needed for the accumulation of capital at different points in its history. Key to Valiaho's work of synthesis is the fusion of these notions with the current vogue for foregrounding the study and mapping of the brain. Deleuze, for one, had already drawn attention to the neurology of the brain as a new, crucial ground of contestation before his death in 1995; its contemporary versions can constitute forms of self-validation, a kind of circular, self-fulfilling prophecy essential to the neoliberal system of domination. As philosopher Catherine Malabou has written, the brain is "the essential thing, the biological, the sensible, and critical locus of our time, through which pass, one way or another, the political evolutions and revolutions that began in the eighties and opened the twenty-first century" (qtd. 21). Just as the brain is understood to function in a nonlinear, nonhierarchical manner perpetually open to "self-modification," neoliberalism as a socioeconomic system "rests on a redistribution of centers and a major relaxation of hierarchies" (qtd. 21).