Biopower, Psychopower, Neuropower

Extract from “Introduction”, Biopower, Psychopower, Neuropower: Control Beyond Guttari, Deleuze, and Foucault by Khushaan Ghosh (Verso Press: 2015)

In a world of injustice and oppression what we desire is change. To make change in the world is to assert your agency, your ability to choose a different future. Max Weber tells us that agency is the ability to achieve what an actor desires in the face of resistance. To overcome resistance, whether overtly or covertly, requires exploiting an advantage—social, economic, intellectual, physical. To have an advantage over your opposition is to have power over them in some way. Therefore, change requires power.

But what is power? Foucault, writing deep in the hell of the 20th century, produced the idea of biopower: if you control the people’s means of living, you control the people. It is an instrument of control which applies to all populations of the world, shapes all decisions and guides all steering hands in times of plenty and times of famine. It is also entirely unconcerned with the emotions or thoughts of those it controls beyond our most primal instincts of hunger and satiety, fear and gratitude, rendering it less than effective as anything more than a blunt instrument of organisation. While it operates on a superior level to raw negative incentives like threats of violence, its promises of confinement and biological regulation are not far off. Yet there are other forms of control that also exist outside the realm of “rational” political discourse, though they are by their nature more subtle and more specific: By these I mean psychopower and neuropower.

Psychopower, too, came to fruition in the 20th century, though its roots lie much earlier. Just as biopower addresses the biological needs of the population, psychopower addresses the psychological needs of the population: community, acceptance, purpose. In older times this was called religion and creed, but in the 19th and 20th centuries it was refined first into the most virulent forms of political propaganda and then into the quasi-scientific art of the commercial advertisement, marking its emergence with the birth of the contemporary nation-state. In its development we can draw an unbroken line from Marx to Hitler, from Riefenstahl to Disney—The great answers to life and the solution to our existential solitude, we are told, can be found by reading little books or by purchasing certain products. Considering their propinquity for offering ultimate answers, the collective term for the effects of such techniques might well be an associated Weltanschauung. Of course, the psychological needs of the population vary by organisation and by environment, and so the message must be, on some level, tailored to its audience: where biopower is universal, psychopower is cultural. In chapters two and three I will examine particular worked examples of psychopower, by which entire populations may be subjugated and moved to acts of irrational hatred as well supreme resilience.

And what of neuropower? Neuropower is more specific still. If the practitioner of psychopower manipulates the group psychology of the masses, the practicer of neuropower manipulates the mind of a single individual: his needs, wants, and irrational desires, all on a personal and immediate level. It is the most time-consuming and energy-intensive of the arts of control, because it must be tailored to each individual, yet if it is done properly its grip is the firmest of them all. Those who practise neuropower are called conmen, cult leaders, doomsday preachers, and conspiracy theorists. They largely inhabit the fringes of society, because their influence is by definition limited to the number of personal connections they can cultivate. But where they do cultivate these personal connections, the effects can be tremendous: from bankruptcies to mass shootings, it is the zealots who create the most outsized impacts through their extreme acts. The most successful of these organisations create tiers of personal influence, with those at the top manipulating their subordinates, who in turn manipulate a small circle of subordinates of their own, making the “connection” personal all the way down; this is then combined with psychopower-based techniques to create an internal culture of submission and blind obsesiance.

Still, because of the effort required and its limited impact neuropower has remained relatively poorly utilised and niche—until now. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is now possible to practice automated neuropower by utilising algorithms that tailor their content output to the individual, shaping themselves to their needs exactly. This mass-scale optimisation of “engagement” means that individuals can receive tailored messages in formats that suit their particular neurological tendencies and mental profile, making each journey to control unique and personalised. This is the radicalising power of Youtube and Facebook, and we will examine it in more detail in chapters four and five.

Fig 1.1: Comparison of Biopower, Psychopower, and Neuropower.

But for now, we return to our first question, the question of change. Against such well-understood, pervasive, and thoroughly effective means of control that are already employed by the powers that be with their near-infinite resources, how can one achieve change? This is the concern of the final chapter, but there are several broad pathways: You might seek asymmetry, some limited area by which you might employ one of the methods of control more effectively than the existing authorities, using their tools against them. You might seek neutralisation, and reduce the grip of these methods of control by public education or by open resistance. Or you might seek organisation, to create alternative power structures that are not reliant on such barbaric methods of manipulation. Most likely, you’ll need to employ some variant of these three methods. One thing is for certain, however: it will not be easy.

Read on to find out why.