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
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005