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May 15, 2022Liked by The Evolved Psyche

I disagree with your take that poststructuralism needs to be integrated in order to stave off technocratic social engineering commonly associated with scientific biopolitics. I'm coming to believe postmodernism and poststructuralism are philosophical dead ends that inhibit ratiocination. You have said yourself that the great myth enabling managerial liberalism is the notion of popular sovereignty. Why can't we just attack the philosophical foundation of popular sovereignty, or even sovereignty in general? Doesn't sovereignty as a concept violate our nature rooted in "meat egalitarianism"? Can we then attack this using scientific biopolitics? If successful, neutralizing sovereignty would nullify the rationale for social engineering as a violation of natural rights, would it not? What am I missing?

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To be clear, I didn't mean to imply we needed poststructuralism. I do believe though that a scientific biopolitics does need some kind of reflexivity, or critical introspection. It's very easy to stumble down the path of understanding how humans work as organisms to thinking of those organisms as hackable systems. Of course, as I mentioned in the intro, that article was written for a prospective journal that was going to be about biopolitics, so you need to put the proposed synthesis in that context. Having said that, I did spend most of the 90s deeply immersed in poststructuralist thought, and did learn a great deal from it. Contemporary criticisms I'm seeing really fail miserably at distinguishing between the original poststructuralists and the recent cooptation of the language of poststructuralism into a new form of aggressive managerialism. I do think there's much of value to recover there.

As to neutralizing sovereignty in general, I'm not sure how realistic a project that would be. I think probably human nature is wired in such a way that some kind of sovereign governance is inevitable -- though who really knows? As you note, in my book I explore the idea of transcending the myth of popular sovereignty and returning to an accountable personal sovereignty (in governance) as a means of undermining managerial class rule. That idea too may be utopian, but certainly the logic of the argument in the book suggests it could work. But the spirit of this substack of course is to resist utopian idealization.

What I was hoping to suggest with that last post is that as I turn to a more biologically-grounded analysis, I'm well aware of the dangers in such an approach. Anyone pursuing such work needs to be aware of having in their theoretical took kit analytical frameworks that will help them resist the lapse into the kind of biological managerialism which that article identifies as biopolitics. How, that manifest in practice, of course, may remain an open question. And, as I said, poststructuralist analysis can provide such frameworks. But necessary, no, other such tools I'm sure can be used.

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> A potential strength in poststructuralist biopolitics, that inoculates it against the kind of instrumentalization observed as possible with scientific biopolitics and its flirtation with bio-policy, is its radical historicism. It refuses to accept any power position as being transhistorical, but rather deconstructs all such positions into their historically and socially constructing context.

Looking forward to future posts which translate this paper into plain English

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Me too. But thanks for reading it.

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