Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:43:40 +1100
Subject: AUT: Bio-Politics
From: Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine-AT-yahoo.com.br>


Reading The New Age, the periodical of the Guild Socialist (reactionary,
anti-suffrage but also anti-state, 'councilist' Fabian split) I came across
this article which was surprisingly titled "Bio-Politics".  The reference is
G.W. Harris "Bio-Politics" The New Age volume 10, number 9, December 28,
1911. You can read it here, if the Packet Gods let you -

 http://www.modjourn.brown.edu/NAVall/nav10/nav1009.pdf

Obviously, Harris is not exactly on the same wavelength as Foucault or
Agambem. Bio-politics here mean biology and biography (there was a surge of
interest in 'scientific' biography at this time). Bio-politics would (a)
deal with population as such and (b) select the proper individuals to work
the state. 

Curiously, Harris argues that only through this can the iron  cage of
bureaucracy be broken out of; his Bio-Politics is oriented, I think, towards
vitalism (and virility).

The entire first series of New Age is online courtesy of Brown's Modernist
Journals Project: 

http://www.modjourn.brown.edu/

Does anyone know of other early uses of this term? Any ideas of whether this
occurrence of the term was just what statisticians call an 'outlier'? It
does not appear to have been taken up by The New Age, though the biological
and biographical double concern persisted. More generally: There was
obviously a bio-political discourse at the time - but how self-conscious was
this elaboration?

Thiago




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