File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0308, message 8


Date: Thu,  7 Aug 2003 20:26:00 +1000
From: "dr.woooo" <dr.woooo-AT-nomasters.org>
Subject: [postanarchism] fwd: biopolitics, was party form/leninism




AUT: RE: biopolitics, was party form/leninism
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 17:07:26 +1000

Crudely, for Foucault, the term specifies the moment when
"living human beings" are constituted as a population by
governmental practices around sanitation, health care,
demographics (including racial classifications and national
typologies for example), and so on.  In that sense, it's not
exactly commensurate with the concept of the labour of
reproduction, but is related -- though more in the sense of
discerning an historical point where the management of
populations and specifically *the politicisation of life* by
governments emerges as a 'problem', locus of conflict,
statements, assertions, a range of techniques for its
management, etc.  Maybe think about the emergence of social
capital, and the parallel/indistinguishable emergence of a
terrain of social policy, rather than 'labour of reprodn'.

For Agamben, the interest in biopolitics is more
specifically about the emergence of the sovereignty of the
nation-state, a citizenship constituted by birth, and the
assertion of rights granted by birth (birthright).
Agamben's big idea is that certain people are excluded from
the terrain of rights by being included (categorised) within
the terrain of biopolitics as non-citizens.  Without that
formulation, Agamben would be just another left-liberal
calling for the expansion of rights, inclusion, etc.  With
that formulation, which is to say, staying close to
Foucault, he rather insists that the denial of rights -- the
concentration camp, the state of being an 'unlawful
non-citizen' -- is inherent to the construction of
sovereignty.

As for representational politics, I guess the link would
have much to do with the connection between demographics and
the nation-state; but I don't see that a critique of
representational politics is entirely dependant upon the
adoption of a crit of biopolitics, even if it is related.
I'm not sure what prior posts were getting at tho.

Angela
_____________
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive1.pl?list=aut-op-
sy.archive/aut-op-sy.0308

__
-- 
sig/
http://www.infoshop.org
http://www.reclaimthestreets.org
http://www.ainfos.ca
http://slash.autonomedia.org
http://www.agp.org

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005