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However, targeted health interventions may in effect signal inequitable and endangering forms of biomedical administration.3 We advance this more cautionary view through three foundational claims. First, regardless of the motivations for biomedical targeting—that is, the will to attend to black health—the operation of race-specific biomedical targeting of black subjects is structured through an epistemology of anti-blackness. More than racist actions against blacks, the architecture of racial discrimination, or a paradigm that binds blackness and death together, anti-blackness is a form of knowledge that positions the black subject outside of the category Human.4 This positioning stems from liberal humanist thought and is constitutive of Western modernity (Barrett, 2014). Not only has the epistemology of anti-blackness shaped the racial past in the U.S., but it also curtails the present and future of black life. Such expulsion of black lives from the normative position Human is undeniable, ‘‘[g]iven the histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching’’ and the ongoing daily imperiling of black lives through police brutality and mass incarceration (Weheliye, 2014: 19). That biomedical targeting is structured through antiblackness is evident in the way it reinstitutes racial difference and separation and, as we will show, stages an additional form of violence by actually expelling blacks from the possibility of optimal health. Black lives have been consistently imperiled in and through the biomedical encounter, in the form of lack of access to care and health insurance, inequities in caregiving, and the medical abuse of black bodies, from grave robbing for medical experimentation, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, and the appropriation of the Henrietta Lacks cell line (Duster, 2003a; Institute of Medicine Report, 2002; Nelson, 2011; Roberts, 2012; Van Ryn and Fu, 2003; Washington, 2008). Anti-blackness continues to thwart black life and futurity through biomedical targeting operations that subject African Americans to what Du Bois (1899) named as a ‘‘social atmosphere . . . which differs from that surrounding whites.’’5 Race-based targeting efforts that are aimed at redressing health inequities recursively secure anti-blackness by refusing to acknowledge its structuring logic, thus equating blackness with inevitable vulnerability, risk, threat, and premature death.6

Second, and related to our first point, these biomedical targeting operations extract the conditions of black health and illness from the broader contexts of structural racism. Biomedical targeting generally fails to recognize the social conditions in which poor health emerges and, in the case of black subjects, how poor health, institutional racism, and the epistemology of anti-blackness are ontologically enmeshed. The targeting of black populations—specifically the two cases we explore here—does not simply direct resources to black subjects. Instead, in such operations, race is objectified as that to be targeted, meaning that race itself is not undone: That is, race as a stratifying mechanism that orders the social—a social order characterized by anti-blackness—is not called into question. Both BiDil and medical hot spotting demarcate populations, with supposedly distinct bodies, and name them as a political problem in need of specific health governance; black bodies and racialized spaces are targeted in order to manage the life of the population. Accordingly, BiDil might be seen to ontologize blackness as a corporeal truth for market accumulation, while medical hot spotting can be said to spatially ontologize structural racism in order to secure cost efficiencies of the health care system. BiDil is predicated on financial extraction; medical hot spotting is predicated on threat containment. These biomedical targeting technologies reveal how health interventions do not necessarily support or achieve a better future for African Americans. Instead, they advance the epistemological violence of anti-blackness by concentrating the ‘‘problem’’ of black life in the U.S. at the scales of: (1) the racialized body (BiDil) and (2) space (hot spots), which both become objects of ever more heightened administration, financial exploitation, and securitization. BiDil positions African Americans as ‘‘problem bodies’’ that must take on responsibility for their own racialized embodied risk through the act of buying and consuming race-based medicine; here, anti-blackness operates through the black responsibilization of risk. Medical hot spotting tracks, maps, and fixes high-cost health care users in ‘‘problem spaces’’ that are positioned outside the populace; hot spotting locates and reifies the structural position of anti-blackness in space for the purposes of surveillance, anticipation of risk, and containment.

[Michel, 1/20/84, “the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: an interview with Michel Foucault”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, pp. 112-130]

Q: That means that you consider liberty as a reality already ethical in itself? MF: Liberty is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty. Q: Is ethics then the result of the search or care for self? MF: The care for self was in the greco-roman world the manner in which individual liberty-and civic liberty, up to a certain point-considered itself as ethical. If you take a whole series of texts going from the first Platonic dialogue up to the major texts of the later Stoics-Epictetus, Marcus-Aurelius, etc.- you would see that the theme of care for the self has truly permeated all ethical thought. On the other hand, it seems that in our societies, beginning at a certain moment in time- and it is difficult to say when that happened-the care for self became something somewhat suspect. Caring for self was, at a certain moment, gladly denounced as being a kind of self- love, a kind of egoism or individual interest in contradiction to the care one must show others or to the necessary sacrifice of the self. All that happened during the Christian era, but I would not say that it is exclusively due to Christianity. The situation is much more complex because, in Christianity, achieving salvation is also a caring for self. But in Christianity, salvation is obtained by renunciation of self. There is a paradox of care for self in Christianity, but that is another question. Returning to the question you were asking, I think that both with the Greeks and the Romans-and especially with the Greeks-in order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom properly, it was necessary to care for self, both in order to know one’s self-and there is the familiar gnothi seauton- and to improve one’s self, to surpass one’s self, to master the appetites that risk engulfing you. Individual liberty was very important to the Greeks- notwithstanding the platitude more or less derived from Hegel, according to which the liberty of the individual would have no importance when faced with the noble totality of the city-not to be a slave (of another city, of those who surround you, of those who govern you, of one’s own passions) was an absolutely fundamental theme: the concern for liberty was a basic and constant problem, during eight centuries of ancient culture. We have there an entire ethics which turned about the care for the self and which gave ancient ethics its very particular form. I am not saying that ethics is the care for self, but that in Antiquity, ethics, as a deliberate practice of liberty has turned about this basic imperative: Care for yourself. Q: An imperative that involves the assimilation of logoi, truths? MF: Naturally. One cannot care for self without knowledge. The care for self is of course knowledge of self-that is the Socratic-Platonic aspect- but it is also the knowledge of a certain number of rules of conduct or of principles which are at the same time truths and regulations. To care for self is to fit one’s self out with these truths. That is where ethics is linked to the game of truth. Q: You say that it is a question of making this truth which is learned, memorized, progressively put into action, a sort of quasi-subject which reigns supremely in you. What is the sta- tus of this quasi-subject? MF: In the Platonic current, at least according to the end of the Alcibiades, the problem for the subject or for the individual soul is to turn its gaze on itself in order to recognize itself in what it is and recognizing itself in what it is, to recall the truths to which it is related and on which it could have reflected. On the other hand, in the current that one can call globally Stoic, the problem is to learn by the teaching of a certain number of truths, of doctrines, some of which are fundamental principles and others rules of conduct. It is a question of having these principles tell you in each situation, and in some way spontaneously, how you should behave. It is here that we find a metaphor that does not come from the Stoics but from Plutarch. You must have learned principles so firmly that when your desires, your appetites or your fears awaken like barking dogs, the logos will speak with the voice of a master who silences the dogs by a single command. You have there the idea of a logos who would operate in some way without your doing anything. You will have become the logos or the logos will have become you. Q: We’d like to return to the question of the relationship be- tween freedom and ethics. When you say that ethics is the deliberate part of freedom, does that mean that freedom can be aware of itself as an ethical practice? Is it at the very first and always a moralizing freedom, so to speak, or must there be work on one’s self in order to discover this ethical dimension of liberty? MF: The Greeks, in fact, considered this freedom as a problem and the freedom of the individual as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense that Greeks could understand. Ethos was the deportment and the way to behave. It was the subject’s mode of being and a certain manner of acting visible to others. One’s ethos was seen by his/her dress, by his/her bearing, by his/her gait, by the poise with which he reacts to events, etc. For them, that is the concrete expression of liberty. That is the way they problematized their freedom. The man/woman who has a good ethos, who can be admitted and held up as an example, he/she is a person who practices freedom in a certain manner. I do not think that a conversion is necessary so that freedom be reflected as an ethos that is good, beautiful, honorable, worthy and which can serve as an example, there is need of labor of self on self. Q: And that is where you situate the analysis of power? MF: I think that in the measure liberty signifies for the Greeks non- slavery-a definition which is quite different from ours- the problem is already entirely political. It is political in the measure that non-slavery with respect to others is a condition: a slave has no ethics. Liberty is then in itself political. And then, it has a political model, in the measure where being free means not being a slave to one’s self and to one’s appetites, which supposes that one establishes over one’s self a certain relation of domination, of mastery, which was called arche- power, authority. The care for self, you said, is in a certain fashion the care for others. The care for self is in this sense also always ethical. It is ethical in itself. MF: For the Greeks it is not because it is care for others that it is ethical. Care for self is ethical in itself, but it implies complex relations with others, in the measure where this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others. That is why it is important for a free man/woman, who behaves correctly, to know how to govern his/her husband/wife, his/her children and his/her home. There, too, is the art of governing. Ethos implies also a relation with others to the extent that care for self renders one competent to occupy a place in the city, in the community or in interindividual relationships which are proper-whether it be to exercise a magistracy or to have friendly relationships. And the care for self implies also a relationship to the other to the extent that, in order to really care for self, one must listen to the teachings of a master. One needs a guide, a counsellor, a friend- someone who will tell you the truth. Thus, the problem of relationship with others is present all along this development of care for self. Q: The care for self always aims at the good for others. It aims at a good administering of the area of power which is present in all relationships, i.e., it tends to administer it in the sense of non-domination. In this context, what can be the role of the philosopher, of the one who cares for the care of others? MF: Let us take for example Socrates. He is the one who hails people in the street or young boys in the gymnasium, by saying to them: Are you concerned with yourself? A god has charged him with that. That is his/her mission and he/she will not abandon it, even at the moment when he is threatened by death. He/She is truly the man/woman who cares for others. That is the particular position of the philosopher. But let us say it simply: in the case of the free man/woman, I think that the assumption of all this morality was that the one who cared for himself/herself correctly found him/herself, by that very fact, in a measure to behave correctly in relationship to others and for others. A city in which everyone would be correctly concerned for self would be a city that would be doing well, and it would find therein the ethical principle of its stability. But I don’t think that one can say that the Greek who cares for himself/herself should first of all care for others. This theme will not come into play, it seems to me, until later. One must not have the care for others precede the care for self. The care for self takes moral precedence in the measure that the relationship to self takes ontological precedence. Q: Can the care for self, which possesses a positive ethical 118 sense, be understood as a sort of conversion of power? MF: A conversion, yes. It is in fact a way of controlling and limiting. For, if it is true that slavery is the big risk to which Greek liberty is opposed, there is also another danger, which appears at first glance as the opposite of slavery: the abuse of power. In the abuse of power, one goes beyond what is legitimately the exercise of power and one imposes on others one’s whims, one’s appetites, one’s desires. There we see the image of the tyrant or simply of the powerful and wealthy man/woman who takes advantage of his/her power and his/her wealth to misuse others, to impose on them undue power. But one sees-at least that is what the Greek philosophers say-that this man/woman is in reality a slave to his/her appetites. And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his/her power correctly, i.e., by exercising at the same time his/her power on himself. And it is the power over self which will regulate the power over others. Q: Does not the care for self, released from the care for others, run the risk of absolutizing itself? Could not this absolutization of care for self become a kind of exercise of power on others, in the sense of domination of the other? MF: No, because the risk of dominating others and exercising over them a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not care for one’s self and that one has become a slave to his/her desires. But if you care for yourself correctly, i.e., if you know ontologically what you are, if you also know of what you are capable, if you know what it means for you to be a citizen in a city, to be the head of a household in an oikos, if you know what things you must fear and those that you should not fear, if you know what is suitable to hope for and what are the things on the contrary which should be completely indifferent for you, if you know, finally that you should not fear death, well, then, you cannot abuse your power over others. There is therefore no danger. This idea will appear much later, when love of self will become suspect and will be seen as one of the possible roots of diverse moral faults. In this new con- text, the care for self will have as its primary form, the renunciation of the self. You discover this in a fairly clear fashion in the Treatise on Virginity of Gregory of Nyssa, where you find the notion of care for self epimeleia heauton defined essentially as renunciation of all worldly attachments. It is the renunciation of all that could be love of self, attachment to a worldly self. But I believe that in Greek and Roman thought the care for self cannot in itself tend to this exaggerated love of self which would, in time, come to neglect others or worse still, abuse the power that one can have over them. Q: Then it is a care for self which, thinking of itself, thinks of others? MF: Yes, absolutely. The one who cares for self, to the point of knowing exactly what are his/her duties as head of a household, as husband/wife or father/mother, will find that he/she has relationships with his/her husband/wife and children which are as they should be. Q: But does not the human condition, in the sense of its finiteness, play there a very important role? You have spoken of death. If you are not afraid of death, you cannot abuse your power over others. It seems to us this problem of finiteness is very important: fear of death, fear of finiteness, of being hurt: all these are at the heart of care for self.., MF: Of course. And that is where Christianity, in introducing salvation as salvation beyond this life, will somehow unbalance or at least upset the whole theme of care for self. Although- and I recall it once more-seeking one’s salvation will be precisely renunciation. With the Greeks and the Romans, on the other hand, beginning from the fact that one cares for self in his/her own life and that the reputation which we will have left behind is the only after-death with which we preoccupy our- selves-care for self can then be entirely centered on one’s self, on what one does, on the place one occupies among others. It can be totally centered on the acceptance of death- which will be most evident in later Stoicism-even up to a certain point almost become a desire for death. It can be, at the same time, if not care for others, at least a care for one’s self which will be beneficial to others. It is interesting to note in Seneca, for example, the importance of the theme: let us hasten to grow old, let us hasten to the appointed time which will permit us to rejoin our selves. This sort of moment before death, where nothing more can happen, is different from the desire for death that we find among Christians, who expect salvation from death. It is like a movement to articulate one’s existence to the point where there would be nothing else before it but the possibility of death.

The Coronavirus lockdowns forced people to adapt their community life as travel was restricted and public and leisure services were withdrawn. In Foucault’s (2003) framework, this meant new forms of territorial governmentality and the reshaping of the relationship between individuals and the state as the biopolitics of emergency were imposed. The lack of the usual places of interaction such as cafes, bars, pubs, Extended author information available on the last page of the article 13 C. Wallace et al. Places of worship and community halls meant that horizontal communication with friends, family and neighbours was restricted as the normal fabric of daily life was torn apart (Colombo, 2020). At the same time, vertical forms of communication from above were reinforced through rapidly implemented and perpetually changing instructions and regulations from the state (Bigo, 2021; Pellizzoni & Sena, 2021). Digital communications further reinforced the pervasive power of biopolitics through ubiquitous biosurveillance (Agamben, 2021). Indeed, digital communications became one of the only ways that the horizontal connections of community could be carried on, so that they took on enhanced importance. This paper, drawing upon auto-ethnography by high digital density households from 11 countries, considers how community was defined and redefined through the pandemic. Foucault’s concept of govenmentality is highly relevant to how the pandemic played out for actors at a micro-level of social life (Foucault, 2003). This reinforced the national field of power at one level as countries enacted extraordinary powers within territorialised national boundaries, including night time curfews, requiring permission for leaving home, compulsory mask wearing and restricting social contacts (Bigo et al., 2021). At the transnational level, the field of power included international institutions such as the World Health Organisation or the European Commission, which reinforced the technocracy of control and chivvied deviant lead- ers such as Trump (USA), Orban (Hungary) and Bolsonaro (Brazil) into line. As the pandemic progressed, “liquid surveillance” enabled by mobile digital technology to manage vaccinations, widespread testing, contact tracing and compulsory quarantines expanded. Voluntary cooperation from reflexive individuals through their “subjecti- fication” and “the active engagement of individuals in their own surveillance” (Bigo et al., 2021, p.19) became widespread as an extension of governmentality (Sylvia, 2020). It is not clear where the space for resistance might have appeared in this ubiquitous and repressive paradigm. During COVID lockdowns, " biopolitics " was a technical logic by which government by experts replaced dominated and even overrode even the state’s economic interests. This led to the daily litany of death and infection tallies, illustrative of what Agamben (2021) has called the “thanatopolitics” of the management of the population that distinguished the “making live” from the “letting die” (Foucault, 2003). Politics was reduced to “bare life” (Agamben, 1998). For example, some more vulnerable groups such as residents of care home or elderly isolated people were sacrificed to keep others alive and front-line workers such as nurses, care workers and cleaners were allowed to continue working, even where appropriate safety precautions were not fully available.

Following Smith’s claim about the duty of political economy as to “architect and rationalize politics that aimed at the opulence of the nation and its population” (Citation1976, 428), it is possible to see how classical political economy acquired a normative tone beyond the restrictive analysis of economic information, thus addressing a strategic role to governmental policies. Once economic ideas reached governmental level of action, economic liberalism was adopted as a “technology of government”, transforming the markets, utility and interests as self-limiting principles of governmental reason. This represented the empowerment of the liberal art of government and the provision of the idea of “frugal government” (Foucault Citation2008): the state replaced the establishment of its principles, actions and reasoning through concepts of power, laws, wealth and strength by the restriction of the power of the state based on economic rules, principles and actions. Economic principles now represented a set of mechanisms that allowed the restriction of the state:

The market determines that a good government is no longer quite simply one that is just. The market now means that to be good government, government has to function according to truth. […] Political economy was important, [because] it pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of its own governmental practice. […] The market must tell the truth (‘dire le vrai’); it must tell the truth in relation to governmental practice. (Foucault Citation2008, 32)

To widen this issue as to how racism is perpetuated in medical education, we look to the philosopher Michel Foucault, who asserts that power is everywhere [7]. In his work, he coined the term biopower—literally to have power over others’ bodies—to describe how institutions exert power over the human body in the name of the social good [8, p. 140]. In his work, Foucault examined the numerous ways the human body is manipulated and used in the context of a particular social system. For example, Foucault analyzed how discourse reinforces norms around sexuality, sanity versus insanity, and how the framing of these issues allows individuals to be manipulated and controlled by outside forces. In creating categories of what is “normal” for/in the human body, bodies become docile and are used to exclude individuals who do not fit socially acceptable understandings or categories.

From a Foucauldian perspective, power is not just an interaction occurring at a macro-level whereby governments or institutions exert influence on society. Rather, power is also enforced on the micro-level by individuals between doctors and patient, teachers and students, etc. It is maintained through these dispersed, decentralized networks, which Foucault calls the dispositif [9]. In this conceptualization, power is dissipated throughout institutions by individual actors (i.e., teachers, administrators, and students) who contribute to the creation and maintenance of institutional norms and practices. For example, when medical educators only show photos of white skin when discussing dermatological issues, according to Foucault these preferential acts normalize the presentation of the disease in white skin, which in turn disadvantages patients with a different skin color. In this way, preferences for what is normal are perpetuated throughout the profession in ways that frequently go unaccounted for.

The lives and deaths of vulnerable groups during infectious disease outbreaks like in COVID-19, result from political and structural violence, health and social policies, cultural interpretations, or moral decisions (Larocque & Foth, ). Social policy and public health are among the factors Fassin () considered relevant in biopolitics. He argued that biopolitics is about demography, epidemiology, and psychology on the one side, and family planning, public health, and the policing of the self on the other side. Fassin also noted that although biopolitics defined by Foucault et al. () as regulation of populations through techniques of knowledge and intervention (p. 183) – does relate to inequalities, it is obviously related to interventions and policies, knowledge and information. Fassin () explained that “to make live” – which is how biopower is usually understood–is also “to reject into death,” either practically as a consequence of policymakers' neglect towards certain population groups or intellectually as a result of not measuring the effects of these policies. He also asserted that racist discrimination within social and legal systems profoundly influences every aspect of life, including biological life. Hence, politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing but also about its stakes and its power to de/legitimizing lives (Fassin, ).

COVID-19 unmasked the politics of public health policies through the death ratios of vulnerable populations. The patterns of death during the coronavirus pandemic reveal the biopolitical governmentality of death and the power apparatuses, or dispositifs in Foucault's words, used by governments to let vulnerable people die. By governmentality, I refer to Foucault's link between the governor and the biopolitical control of populations, which he states in his definition of biopower and biopolitics as

[Nikolas, “The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol. 18, No. 6, December 1, 2001, Pg. 20-22]

Biological identity practices do not, as some critics have suggested, lead to passivity in the face of biological fate. Quite the reverse. In advanced liberal democracies, biological identity becomes bound up with more general norms of enterprising, self-actualizing, responsible personhood (Novas and Rose, 2000). As knowledges and beliefs about one's biological and genetic complement become integrated into the complex choices that prudent individuals are obliged to make in their life strategies, biological identity generates biological responsibility (see Rapp, 1999 for a superb study of the enactment of such responsibility in amniocentesis). While many critics see the new biomedicine as individualizing, we can already see new forms of collectivization emerging. Choices about marriage, procreation, financial planning, inheritance, career and much more are made in a web of entanglements involving actual and potential kin, employers, partners and children. And 'at risk' individuals are joining into groups and organizations, not merely demanding public provision and rights, but making their own claims on the deployment of biomedical technologies and the direction of biomedical research — as, for example, in the case of families of those with muscular dystrophy, Huntington's disease or breast cancer (cf. Rabeharisoa and Callon, 1998). Paul Rabinow (1996b) has termed this 'biosociality'. Individuals who identify themselves and their community through their biology challenge the vectors that lead from biological imperfection or abnormality to stigmatization and exclusion. They use their individual and collective lives, the evidence of their own existence and their vital humanity, as antagonistic forces to any attempt to re-assemble strategies of negative eugenics within a new exclusionary biopolitics. They demand civil and human rights for those whose lives, previously, were deemed less worthy of life. They call for recognition, respect, resources, research, control over medical and technical expertise. As somatic individuals engage with vital politics, a new ethics of life itself is taking shape. Within this new ethics, the human vital order has become so thoroughly imbued with artifice that even the natural has to be produced by a labour on the self - natural food, natural childbirth and the like. Even choosing not to intervene in living processes becomes a kind of intervention. This requires us to question the distinction, proposed most clearly by Georges Canguilhem, between vital norms and social norms. Canguilhem (1978) argued that vital norms arose from and manifested the normativity of life itself, of the organism as a living being, of its adaptability to its environment. Social norms, on the other hand, manifested only adaptation to a particular artificial order of society and its requirements for normativity, docility, productivity, harmony and the like. Some suggest that the new politics of life has once more mistaken social norms for vital ones, for example that the molecular politics of psychiatry, with its claims to be able to manipulate and transform personality and emotion, has incorporated the social into the vital, and has taken key features of vitality itself - for example sadness - as errors open to correction in the name of a social, not a vital, norm of health. But, at least as far as human life is concerned, the social and the vital have never been so distinct. Our very ideas of what it is to be a normal human being have been made possible by historically specific institutional and technical developments, not least by biopolitics itself. Thus, new norms of human capacities and longevity were born in the sanitization and hygienization of urban existence in the 19th century; new norms of recovery and cure were born in the clinical hospitals; new ways of posing the relations between fate, life and health were born in the development of epidemiological knowledges of the distributions of disease and their social correlations. Our contemporary vital norms are no less, but no more, shaped by their conditions of formation than those of previous generations. On the one hand, our very personhood is increasingly being defined by others, and by ourselves, in terms of our contemporary understandings of the possibilities and limits of our corporeality. On the other hand, our somatic individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation - and so to a 'vital polities'. Michel Foucault pointed out long ago that, from at least the time of the birth of clinical medicine, 'medical thought [has been] fully engaged in the philosophical status of [wo]man' (Foucault, 1972: 198). Medical thought has also been fully engaged in the ethical question of how we should live — of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the techniques which we can and should use to improve ourselves, and the kinds of persons we should strive to be. I do not think that, today, the most far-reaching ethical innovations concerning our relations to ourselves are being made in the deliberations of the bioethicists and moral philosophers — they are being made within medical and biomedical thought and technique itself. Indeed, the individualized humanism of bioethicists and medical philosophers emerged alongside the 19th-century individualization of the living body within clinical medicine. But this humanism now encounters human life whose very meaning is being altered by biology, biomedicine and biotechnology. 'The philosophical status' - indeed the very ontology - of human beings is being reshaped through the decisions of entrepreneurs as to where to invest their capital and which lines of biomedical research and development to pursue. It is being shaped by geneticists taking all those small decisions about which family lineages to investigate, which markers to choose, which genes to hunt by which methods. It is being refined by clinicians working in alliance with their own patients to test out and explore the new potentials of gene therapy or reproductive technology. And it is being developed and contested by all those individuals and groups who are themselves active participants in the new ethics of normalcy — whether as subjects at risk of illness or early death, consumers governing ourselves though diets, selves reshaping ourselves by sculpting our bodies, potential parents deliberating over screening and genetic counselling, gay couples using artificial reproduction to have children.I have argued that life, today, is not imagined as an unalterable fixed endowment, biology as destiny, where the reproduction of individuals with a defective constitution is to be administered by experts in the interests of the future of the population. No longer are judgements organized in terms of a clear binary of normality and pathology. Of course, there are many practices where identification of high risk plus biological incorrigibility can switch the affected individual — or potential individual — onto the circuits of exclusion: whether that be via therapeutic abortion for a severely damaged foetus or preventive detention - or the death penalty in some states in the United States — for those thought to have a biological propensity to violence or sexual predation. But the dream - of doctors, geneticists, biotech companies and many 'afflicted individuals' and their families - is of that pre-symptomatic diagnosis followed by technical intervention at the biological level to repair or even improve the sub-optimal organism. For the political vocation of the life sciences today is tied to the belief that in most, maybe all cases, if not now then in the future, the biological risky or at risk individual, once identified and assessed, may be treated or transformed by medical intervention at the molecular level. In the process, the familiar distinction between illness and health has become problematic and contested. As claims are made to identify the genetic bases of 'normal' variability in aspects of vitality — from sexuality to longevity — the line of differentiation between interventions targeting susceptibility to illness or frailty on the once hand, and interventions aimed at the enhancement of capacities on the other, is beginning to blur.I have suggested in this article that, in and through such developments, human beings in contemporary Western culture are increasingly coming to understand themselves in somatic terms - corporeality has become one of the most important sites for ethical judgements and techniques. Two modes of such a 'biological ethics' are particularly striking. On the one hand, human rights now have a biological dimension and, partly in consequence, have gained a new kind of 'species universality'. Legal, political and social rights were first linked to the capacities and obligations of individuals who were elements of a political association. But now, it seems, each human being has such rights, simply by virtue of their existence as beings of this human kind. Individuals seem to have acquired a kind of biological citizenship - a universal human right to the protection, at least, of each human person's bare life and the dignity of their living vital body. In the geopolitics of famine, drought, war and ethnic cleansing, in the vociferous anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements, and in the local politics of health, it is now possible for human beings to demand the protection of the lives of themselves and others in no other name than that of their biological existence and the rights and claims it confers. Such arguments suggest that biological ethics ascribes each human life equal worth. But our practices and techniques show us that, on the contrary, the biological lives of individual human beings are recurrently subject to judgements of worth. We do not have to look to the controversies over euthanasia or the rights to life of severely damaged neonates to see this — each session of genetic counselling, each act of amniocentesis, each prescription of an anti-depressant is predicated on the possibility, at least, of such a judgement about the relative and comparative 'quality of life of differently composed human beings and of different ways of being human. As biomedical technique has extended choice to the very fabric of vital existence, we are faced with the inescapable task of deliberating about the worth of different human lives - with controversies over such decisions, with conflicts over who should make such decisions and who cannot, and hence with a novel kind of politics of life itself. In this article, I have argued that this politics is not one in which authorities claim - or are given - the power to make such judgements in the name of the quality of the population or the health of the gene pool. On the one hand, in the new forms of pastoral power that are taking shape in and around our genetics and our biology, these questions about the value of life itself infuse the everyday judgements, vocabularies, techniques and actions of all those professionals of vitality: doctors, genetic counsellors, research scientists and drug companies among them, and entangle them all in ethics and ethopolitics. And, on the other hand, the politics of life itself poses these questions to each of us - in our own lives, in those of our families, and in the new associations that link us to others with whom we share aspects of our biological identity.

More often than not this idea of “public” is deployed to isolate a certain section of society and exclude a whole class of people – namely the non-hardworking British taxpayer – as a non-participant. The best example of this is the Public Order Act of 1986, a set of laws that have long been mobilised to criminalise protest and industrial action. Framing the rioters, the insurrectionists and the dispossessed not as of  the public but as its enemies, it has long served to fabricate a mythological public good whose interests are actually the interests of capital. In the case of public order, it is the dispossessed and workers who are deemed public enemies. However, in the case of public healthcare, this role has fallen to those who are seen to put the most “strain” on the resources of the NHS: smokers, drinkers, addicts and the overweight. We must not reify these two categories of the dispossessed and the undeserving sick, for in reality they are largely the same people. Smoking, drinking, substance abuse and comfort eating are all coping mechanisms of those most impoverished in society. It makes sense therefore to call the NHS public, but it was certainly never ours.

We want to argue instead that the social democratic dream of welfare has in fact never not exerted a punitive and biopolitical power. In using the term “biopolitical” here we mean to refer to the state’s management of a population as a collection of living individuals, whose health and life processes are to be administrated and governed in the interests of a capitalist state. Biopower is a modern form of power that seeks control over life and death in a way that differs from the classical monarchical power to “let live and make die.” Biopower is not merely prohibitive, it is also productive, aiming at creating and enforcing on the population an obligation to conform to certain biological and health norms. In other words, the power to “make live and let die”. Instead of existing for “the health of the nation” the distribution of healthcare in Britain has existed primarily to preserve certain forms of life over others. Under this logic, the health that is mobilised is distinctly functional, simultaneous with the mobilisation of a working, productive population, working well enough only to effectively submit to waged and other forms of labour. What the popular opposition to healthcare reform lacks, therefore, is an agitation for health for its own sake.

Since ‘much of the action of government is language’ (Fairclough, as cited in Ball 2007, 2), the official rhetoric is not just an illustration of policy; it is also a vehicle through which social reality is constructed and maintained. In its classic meaning, the goal of rhetoric is to persuade listeners to accept speakers’ propositions as truths. From a poststructuralist perspective, the truths conveyed through rhetoric are part of the episteme that shapes people’s ideas about themselves and their life. In the Department of Education speeches, accountability operates in these two dimensions: it is used to describe, justify, and promote federal policies in education and it invokes new managerialism, naturalizes self-entrepreneurship of learning and living, and aligns the individual’s exercise of freedom and responsibility with larger political and economic concerns at the federal and state level. A product of neoliberal political rationality, new managerialism conjures up education as an economic issue to be solved through management. In the analyzed speeches, the dominance of that approach is evident in the proliferation of business vocabulary and the emphasis on performance measurement and market forms of accountability. While the sample in this study consisted of discourses from the past G.W. Bush Administration, there is little evidence that the Department of Education will eschew new managerialist approaches under President Barak Obama, despite the new rhetoric about the ‘Barack effect’ and ‘the soft power’ that surrounds ‘the symbolism of an African American president who has made education cool and exciting and infinitely promising’ (US Department of Education 2009, para. 8). As his proposals for reforming the system of student loans attest, some of President Obama’s promises for education are indeed decidedly different from the policies of his predecessor. No immediate reform plans, however, can occur outside of the nation’s neoliberal economic setting or the dominant (new managerialist) paradigm. For more than a decade, that paradigm has proven to be resilient, hybridizing with other conceptualizations of education to produce bi-lingual school principals who are versed in the rhetorics of business and pedagogy (Gewirtz, Ball, and Bowe 1995, 96–109) and tri-lingual academics who, in addition, to the languages of business and teaching, speak the vernacular of their discipline (Deem and Brehony 2005, 227).

Depolitization of the social that Foucault (1978–1979/2008) describes as a key feature of neoliberalism is well manifested in the Department of Education rhetoric on the underachievement of minority- and low-income students. The neoliberal political rationality assumes that the problems of schools and colleges in the marketplace of educational services will be solved by the market. From that perspective, the gaps in the academic achievement and college access for those students are interpreted not as a political problem of social inequality but as an economic issue of the declining US economic pre-eminence, as the accountability codes in this study reveal, or as a personal issue of low expectations on the part of teachers, as the second excerpt suggests. In the neoliberal political regimes of the USA and Europe, the resolution of social disparity through accountability has a mixed record. On the one hand, accountability policies can exacerbate inequality (Daniel 2004) and can be appropriated for politically conservative causes at the expense of social justice (Epstein 1993). On the other hand, there is evidence that accountability can be used to subvert discriminatory practices and advance equal- ity in the workplace (Luke 1997). However, largely because accountability within the dominant new managerialist paradigm seeks to manage rather than erase inequality, it has a limited potential for critical evaluation of and change in the existing praxis of education. Part of the ideology of new managerialism, the unquestionable value of account- ability, or more specifically, market-oriented forms of accountability, is a taken-for- granted assumption in the Department of Education speeches. Backed by legislation such as NCLB and public opinion, accountability is an idea on which educational systems of states within the USA and of nations outside it converge, leading to homogenization, or in the terminology of organization theory, isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) of organizational structures and practices worldwide. While the actual implementation of accountability may render different meanings and approaches in local contexts, the fact that educational organizations adopt accountability measures signals their adherence to proper entrepreneurial behavior in the market of educational services, thereby enhancing their legitimacy among peers and the public, contributing to their competitiveness, and ensuring their survival. In short, as an institutionalized set of practices, accountability follows what March and Olsen (1989) call the logic of appropriateness and aims at conformity for the sake of survival and success.

Based on the logic of appropriateness, the officially promoted goals of account- ability to enhance the quality, efficiency, and opportunity in education are eclipsed, if not diverted, by the roles of accountability in enforcing the openness of educational institutions to market mechanisms and government oversight. Although benevolent in its intent, that oversight imposes a ‘tyranny of transparency’ (Strathern 2000) by insisting on making visible, through measurement, poorly quantifiable aspects of teaching and research. The requirement of transparency therefore may not always be economically and organizationally rational because it diverts the energy of those whose performance is being inspected and made transparent from their work to the task of passing the inspection. This regime of continuous performance assessment and surveillance creates what Perryman (2006) calls panoptic performativity, where schools and teachers make a conscious effort to produce behaviors to be displayed, seen, and accounted for. Yet, no discourse has a totalizing power, and power relations necessarily contain the possibility of resistance (Foucault 1997). As the rhetorical analysis demonstrates, dissident discourses lurk at the periphery of the dominant discourse, marking its boundaries and helping the speaker define her position through what it is not. In this sense, counter-conducts are constitutive parts of governmentality. Secretary Spellings’ understanding of accountability and her critics’ definitions of accountability are enabled by the same episteme that makes it possible to interpret social issues in economic terms and at the same time to contest such interpretation. Furthermore, a counter-conduct is not so much about seeking different ends, as it is about finding different ways to lead (in the Foucaultian meaning of conduire, to conduct) to these ends. In the second excerpt, Spellings’ colorblindness and the silenced discourse that affirms race for causes of social justice seek the same goal: social equality and equity. Where they fundamentally differ is in choosing how to direct society to it: one vision endorses a new managerialist approach, the other suggests a critical social justice stance. Thus, counter-conducts do not seek to dismantle accountability, but to infuse it with new relations of power, e.g., accountability to peers, citizens, bureaucrats, etc.

Maximilian, research associate at the Bonn University Department of Political Science, “Chaotic Climate Change and Security,” International Political Sociology 6, 165–185, 2012

Securitizing Climate Change The specter of chaos and an unpredictable climate also began to haunt national security communities, which have been quick to digest the spectacular insights put forward by a small but growing fraction of climatologists. In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a consultancy study, which artfully employed what the Copenhagen School refers to as the ‘‘rhetoric of survival.’’ Its authors predict the advent of a nuclear war resulting from a fast shutdown of the ocean conveyor belt in the northern Atlantic (Schwartz and Randall 2003). Subsequent populist works such as Lyna’s Six Degrees, Pearce’s The Last Generation, and Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia produced powerful narratives that embraced a similarly existentialist language. John Houghton, who served for the IPCC as cochairman of the first working group, called climate change ‘‘a weapon of mass destruction’’ in contradiction to the linear orthodoxy to which most of his colleagues and the IPCC reports still adhered. He accused the American and British leaders of neglecting their ‘‘duty above all others, (…) to protect the security of their peoples’’ (Brown 2003). Similarly, the vast majority of think tanks, NGOs, and research institutes portrayed climate change first and foremost as a national security issue.10 Since 2003, Western military and strategic communities have started connecting rapid climate shifts with national strategy and power politics. Their scenarios were based on ‘‘a decidedly post-equilibrium world, buffeted by greater or lesser degrees of turbulence’’ with profound implications for the US grand strategy (Cooper 2010:183).11 For the imminent future of the world, climate change is not just a minor threat. Environmentally induced interstate conflicts or societal breakdown must be expected (CNA, 2007). The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU, 2008:1) notes that climate change ‘‘will draw ever-deeper lines of division and conflict in international relations, triggering numerous conflicts between and within countries.’’ The latest forecast by the National Intelligence Council (2008) ranks climate change, with reference to its severe results such as water and resource scarcity, next to international terrorism, while the notoriously skeptic Bush Administration acknowledged the ‘‘significant relevance’’ of climate change for national security in the Arctic region. The new NATO strategy, as well as the 2010 US National Security Strategy, mentions climate as a threat almost identical to the German government and European Commission’s emphasis on climate security (Reiber and Zelli 2011). Another example of the connection between climate and national security can be seen in the Arctic. The rise in regional temperature is as much as twice the global average, rendering the very landscape a matter of concern. The sea ice over the North Pole might vanish completely within the next 30 years, shortening the sea-lanes between Europe and Asia by up to 4,000 nautical miles. The ongoing retraction destabilizes the existing sovereignty practices such as borders, navigation, defense, and extractive policies. It forces ‘‘the state system to confront its accepted suppositions about the relationship among land, state, territory, and nation’’ (Gerhardt, Steinberg, Tasch, Fabiano, and Shields 2010:999). In response, the Canadian government is rapidly extending its military presence at the American continent’s northern rim in order to control its exposed territorial demarcations and the Northwest Passage (Byers 2009). On the opposite side of the Arctic, Russia’s government is trying to secure territorial claims and the interests of its national oil companies by re-establishing its strategic ‘‘bear bombers’’ patrol flights and large-scale military drills (Zysk 2010). ‘‘The bear,’’ Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has declared, ‘‘is the real master of the Arctic,’’ thus emphasizing both Russia’s ‘‘profound strategic interests’’ in the region, as well as the dire consequences of ice shield reduction and sea ice melting for the animal’s living conditions (Harding 2010). In this strategic rivalry, the point of view of indigenous groups—not to mention of flora and fauna—is marginalized, despite the fact that their livelihood is existentially threatened (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008:91–103; Adger, Barnett, Chapin, and Ellemor 2011:9–13).12 Despite their conflicting strategic interests, the governments of Denmark, Russia, and Canada agreed to solve their territorial disputes within international legal frameworks. By 2013, the UN seabed commission will determine ownership rights. Here, scientific practices once again come into play, since geologists and 10This conclusion is based on a systematic reading of over 30 reports, policy papers, and magazine articles that were published in Australia, Northern America, and Europe. For further discussions, see Maas and Ta¨nzler (2009) and Brzoska (2009). 11The military’s interest in climate dates back to the World War II and even before, while climate science and the US military have a history of being strongly interwoven (Weart 2003). 12 Due to its focus on large-scale system components, the research on ‘‘tipping points’’ usually omits a smallscale, human perspective (Liverman 2009). It thus cannot offer sufficient spatial resolution that would allow for meaningful adaptation policies. Maximilian Mayer 173 lawyers map the region’s continental shelves and shall ascertain which nations own exclusive rights to exploit the large gas and oil deposits under International Law (Mayer and Schouten 2011:25). In sum, the rapid ‘‘opening up’’ of the North leads to the evolution of overlapping assemblages, in which the same materials are often enrolled differently, but rapid physical, ecological, and territorial changes are mainly translated into threats to sovereignty and economic interests. The associations that enact state interests are so dominant because they entail multiple practices in a coherent and geographically dispersed way, and easily connect with the existing global assemblages such as transport shipping and fossil resource extraction.

In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault (1990) reminds us that the emergence of biopower inscribed racism (in its modern, statist form) in the mechanisms of the normalizing state (149). Racism, thus, is not an effect but rather a means of creating a ‘biologized’ internal Other against whom society must defend itself (Stoler 2006:59). Because of this, concerns over reproduction are at the core of a biopolitical state (Foucault 1990:139). The reproduction of those deemed undesirable is constructed as problematic or even threatening to the well-being of the dominant majority. In this conception the (literal and social) death of the internal Other (i.e. the inferior, degenerate, abnormal) “will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer” (Foucault 2003:255). This logic warrants the regulation or outright prevention of the Other's reproduction in the eyes of the dominant majority (Foucault 2003:255). Such an idea becomes especially powerful in a settler-colonial state, such as Canada. Indeed a colonial settler society, which can only exist through the dissolution of indigenous peoples and the establishment of a new social body on the expropriated landmass (Wolfe 2006), must have at its core an obsession with indigenous reproduction. For this reason, a colonial settler society is inherently eliminatory in that the dominant culture must “destroy to replace” (Wolfe 2006:390). The mere existence, let alone reproduction, of the indigenous population is counterproductive to the colonial project.

In the Canadian context, such an obsession has historically manifested itself through various tactics of population control. These ranged from outright extermination(Stevenson 1999:2), sexual violence against indigenous women (Weaver 2009), sterilization abuses (Grekul et al. 2004), to oppressive policies of the Indian Act that seek to 'define' indigenous peoples 'out of existence' (Lawrence 2004). One especially detrimental strategy was the wholesale removal of indigenous children from their families and communities. This was achieved through residential schooling and child welfare services during the now infamous “Sixties Scoop” (Walmsley 2005). This latter tactic is especially powerful in a settler-colonial state, for the removal of indigenous children not only constitutes an attempt at cultural genocide (Dubinsky 2010:5; MontureAngus 1995:193), but also forcibly transforms the child into an element that reifies and strengthens the colonial body. This is not only a highly symbolic, but also a very effective method in regulating the reproduction of indigenous communities.

Neurorationalisation, in contrast, is preoccupied with emotions, plas- ticity and their social nature. Focused on affects, the experimental infra- structures and the increasing deployment of neuroscientific arguments in public policy planning open new forms of rationalisation and control. While neuroscientific accounts heavily stress neurons and ‘sprawling net- works’ (Eagleman, 2015: 147), neuroliberalism seeks to solve structural problems by viewing them as behavioural and neural problems within individual irrational subjects and their character flaws, which can be fixed with proper guidance (Pykett, 2013; Mirowski, 2014: 256). These deter- ministic premises inform the writings of behaviouralists, particularly the Behavioural Insight Team (2016), which sees unemployment and poverty as a lack of networks (social capital), self-control (character capital) and bandwidth (cognitive capital).

From this perspective the Finnish experiment is not actually a trial of basic income but a complex constellation of rationalisation, popularised neuroscience, behavioural economics and techniques of modulative bio- power. It, therefore, should be viewed as an experiment that relies on the system of technological rationality for modulating, nudging and optimising the bio-psycho-social capacities of the working population. Built on prom- ises of progress related to rationalisation paradigms (Shenhav, 2005: 187–91), this system has the aura of an ‘objectivity machine’ (Slaby and Gallagher, 2015: 41) that gives laypeople the impression of serious technological and progressive advance. With this constellation of neuro- inspired behavioural and technical rationality, Finland successfully locates itself within the global political-economic geography of neuroli- beralism as an experimental state that tackles unemployment and stabil- ises public finances with the strategic tools and modulative mechanisms of soft control.

Freedom is, however, from this perspective, defined in a very specific sense: it existswithin the spaces granted by political institutions, which precede and favour – or deny – the realization of freedom. In short, subjective freedom exists within a domain determined by institutions, whose configuration exceeds the limits of freedom itself. Rather, the foundation of institutions is located within a principle – the maximization of freedom – hypostatized and imagined beyond the socio-political context in which the institutions themselves operate.

According to Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017, p. 122), the legitimacy of UBI, therefore, derives from the fact that “institutions should be designed in such a way that the distribution of opportunities to which they lead can be regarded as fair and justifiable to all as free and equal persons”. UBI thus serves to distribute real freedom, possibilities and opportunities in the fairest way possible, in line with the conception of justice in that it consists of making freedom effective, rather than equal (Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017, p. 180).

More concretely, this Marxist standpoint stresses that the UBI will perpetuate, mainly, two social forms: money and the state. Regarding money, UBI will not represent a step towards a “post-capitalist society”. The problem with capitalist society and the possible implementation of UBI is not the work itself, which could represent an individual and social component of recognition (Angella, 2016); but the reproduction of historical social struggles and oppression. Moreover, with the aid of state institutions, such social struggles have transformed the recognitive and ethical character work to a continuous social, economic, and existential struggle for workers and non-workers (Santos, 2012: 82).

In this sense, neither money nor the state are socially “neutral” forces. They are representative of concrete “capitalist social relations” (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2018: 477). Moreover, money needs to be envisioned beyond a mere mean of exchange between two or more agents. In this light, money is a mean of subjection of workers to wage labor. As Dinerstein and Pitts argue, “(...) the wage is not a reward for expended labor but a payment to keep workers in the condition that they can and must labor” (Dinerstein & Pitts, 2018: 476).

If such trends continue, UBI may act as a subsidy for platform corporations to extract profits by providing data producers with an income to interact online, to create content for free or engage in collective projects for innovating new open source technologies (Mathers, Citation2020). No wonder Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are amongst the most vocal proponents of UBI (Fouksman & Klein, Citation2019). The tech start-up incubator Y Combinator is funding a $60 million experiment in UBI in two US states; Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes is funding another pilot project; while Google’s Foundation google.org is a major funder of GiveDirectly’s UBI pilots in Western Kenya, where 21,000 adults across hundreds of villages will receive around a third of average income for 12 years – the longest and largest trial ever conducted (Arnold, Citation2018).

The tech giants of Silicon Valley are the epitome of what Wark (Citation2015, Citation2019) theorizes as ‘vectoralists’ in an emergent mode of production structured increasingly around vectors rather than capital per se. Vectoralism is not a direct replacement of capitalism – for it does not abolish the value form – but coexists with it, as a hybrid layer. Just as feudal landlords were subordinated by early capitalists as the dominant class, with landlords continuing to play powerful roles as rentiers in financialized capital accumulation, vectoralists such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are today beginning to subordinate the traditional capitalist class. If feudalism was based on the extraction of rents from tenant farmers and capitalism on the exploitation of surplus value from labour, then vectoralism collects and controls the interest accruing from data through exploiting differentials in unequal information exchanges with ‘hackers’ – Wark’s evocative term for all those engaged in the production of data and information. Although concentrated in the urban centres of the overdeveloped world, hackers are increasingly everyone – that is, anyone who uses the internet and thereby produces new data from which to appropriate value.

My primary purpose is to link this market-driven response, and its specific enactment within higher education, to calls to introduce universal basic income (UBI). These have grown more strident due to the toll that the pandemic is taking on employment across a range of sectors in the capitalist market-guided economies (Green et al., 2020; Prabhakar, 2020). UBI is an inflation-indexed and unconditional monthly payment – neither means-tested nor targeted – received by all citizens throughout their life-course. Of particular importance here is the distinction between emergency and non-emergency UBI (Ståhl and MacEachen, 2020). The former is a short-term measure designed to meet pandemic-induced income shortfalls through income support applied at the level of the entire community. By contrast, non-emergency UBI is explicitly non-contingent and lifelong (Wright, 2004).

As the locus for binaristic trade-offs of a biopolitical nature, I will argue, higher education provides additional reasons to introduce non-emergency UBI – that is, to widen the scope of UBI beyond a short-term response to the external shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The discussion is structured as follows. In the following section, two theories of digital capitalism that provide an explicitly compensatory rationale for introducing non-emergency UBI are outlined. The third section deals with the proletarianization of the academic labour force. Through this social process, I maintain, the use of digital technologies to shift teaching, learning and assessment online dovetails with how value is created and expropriated in a digitalized variety of capitalism that exploits knowledge creation. In the fourth section I circle back to non-emergency UBI as a solution to the binaried choice, at a time of Covid-19, between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond. A brief conclusion rounds out the discussion.

Eduardo Suplicy, a Brazilian basic income ‘champion’ is famous for saying ‘the best way out is through the door’ (cited in Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017, chapter 1). His point is that the most obvious solution is sometimes a very good solution; in the case of lack of income being a restrictive factor for the exercise of freedom, the obvious solution is to distribute money more effectively and fairly so that more people can express their will to a greater extent. For basic income activists this translates as a payment, which is individualised, universal and unconditional. For feminism, there is perhaps a different, also obvious solution (men need to share the unpaid domestic and caring work), and it is not likely to be delivered by a basic income alone.

Basic income seeks to support our ambitions, without dictating what these should be. It makes the assumption that the power differential would be sufficiently shifted by the individualised payment to women for them to negotiate different domestic arrangements, and that norms would be flexible enough to accommodate a greater— and less gendered—range of ‘life options’. The experience of the Belgium time credit scheme does not bode well in this regard. The time credit scheme allowed people a limited amount of paid time away from work, for any purpose. It was a seemingly gender-neutral scheme. However, it has seen extremely gendered use in practice. Mothers (but not fathers) in Belgium have overwhelmingly used their time credit account to care for children, in effect as an extension of parenting leave (Deven & Merla, 2019). Perhaps another example is the completely gender-neutral parental leave in Sweden: despite there being individual parallel rights for two parents, gendered practice endures, with women using the lion’s share of leave. These experiences suggest that for a basic income to have an impact on the gendered practices of parenting, further thought would have to be given to how to achieve that specific goal. Gender equality is not a primary aim of a basic income, but it is a hoped for secondary consequence. Parental leave scholarship suggests that gender equality is most efficiently a consequence when it is an explicit policy aim, but that, as described above, even then it might fail to materialise.

What then is the difference between liberalism and neuroliberalism? As Foucault (2008) states, has not liberal economic theory focused on human behaviour and its strategic programming since the 1930s? Brian Massumi (2015) considers the changes in economic liberalism and argues that during the 1990s, economists started to acknowledge and accept the ambivalences and flaws in individual decision-making. After this turn, neoliberal economic theory drew from experimental setups and theories on intuitive action, the power of gut feelings and other forms of noncon- scious decisions. Although Massumi (2015: 22, 114–15) only briefly refers to nudge theory, these quasi-chaotic flows and the protean node of deci- sional autonomy can be seen in nudge theory and the premises of the basic income trial, which assume that subjects need to be governed with inciting and orienting rather than disciplining and punishing (cf. Massumi, 2015: 41). Whereas nudge units describe this ‘positive’ form of power as soft paternalism, Massumi (2015: 19) labels it as prim- ing, ‘a form of conditioning which modulates behaviour by implanting presuppositions and activating tendencies in an open situation of encoun- ter’. Nevertheless, priming and nudging are theoretically very close; they emerge as paradoxes, connecting freedom and control with the use of hard and soft power, and activate tendencies through modulating.

As the Finnish experiment with basic income also shows, neuroliberal soft power is the freedom to choose, whereas neuroliberal hard power is the demand that choices be made in architectures built on quasi-scientific assumptions about erratic, post-rational individuals. Nudge theory then serves as a strategic tool allowing the neuroliberal state to obscure the relationship between freedom and control. Furthermore, nudge theory validates the use of experimental economics and nudge advisors, whose expertise, in turn, legitimises the exercise of social and political authority (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013). From these premises, nudge theory offers a platform for unique policy experiments combining microeconomic and macroeconomic theories based on vague risk calculations of individual decision-making and gently guiding erratic individuals to improve their well-being and stabilise public finances. In the following sections, I exam- ine these combinations, focusing on the bio-techno-rational optimising strategies used by the neuroliberal state.

In Capital, proposed that biological reproduction remains a fundamental political problem of capitalism: ‘The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power’ (p. 275). Without the biological reproduction of working populations, there can be no social reproduction, which maintains and upholds the legitimacy of the capitalist economic order. Enlightened capitalists, therefore, have a self-interested stake in ensuring that workers are housed, clothed and fed and have a minimal level of satisfaction, so they continue to replenish the human stock capitalism uses in the processes of production and accumulation. More specifically, capitalism requires a biopolitics capable of supplying factories, warehouses, office towers and more with a steady flow of fresh, docile labour. The specifically social-democratic variation of this theory postulates that the welfare state demands replenishment of the population not merely through labour power—though this is included—but also through taxpayers and, more broadly, ‘prosocial’ citizens willing and able to enter into the relationships of mutuality that undergird universalist welfarism.