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There are at least four kinds of reasons that morally perfect people might have disagreements with each other about practical matters.8 The first and most obvious of these is their cognitive limitations. Given human beings' finite, limited, and differing intellectual capacities, and their differing experiences and information, different morally perfect people would have different factual beliefs about the world and the causal processes characterizing it. These factual disagreements would inevitably lead to serious practical disputes, even among those who qualify as angels according to the same moral theory.

This is most evident in the case of utilitarian or other consequentialist moral theories. Where lightness or wrongness is determined in a straightforward way by the value of the consequences of alternative courses of action, disagreement on what those consequences would be leads directly to disagreement about what it is right and wrong to do.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii64/articles/michael-hardt-militant-life.pdf)// [King K]

In the third and final period of the genealogy Foucault focuses on the Cynics, the Socratic philosophical movement particularly active roughly from the first century bc to the fourth century ad that counted Diogenes, Antisthenes and Crates among its founders. Few philosophical texts from the Cynics survive, but we do have numerous accounts of their lives, many of which are at least in part apocryphal. These lives are what interest Foucault most, because they extend and transform the Socratic mandate to make one’s life an expression of parrhesia: that is, they turn the injunction to live a ‘true life’ into a militant, political project.

Over the course of its modernity the ways in which the Western philosophical imagination understands the human has undergone dramatic shifts. From its Cartesian investment in an understanding of the human as that divinely endowed animal that, with the exercise of its unique capacity for reason, could one day achieve security from nature, to the contemporary diagnosis of the sickness of reason, the ‘illusion’ of security, and the vulnerability of the human to the catastrophic capacities of the biosphere on which it depends, the philosophical imaginary of Western modernity has changed significantly. Liberalism has not been an exception to or victim of this shift. In actuality it has been constitutive of it. Liberal modernity originated as a kind of challenge to the Cartesian modern by foregrounding the biological life of the human subject. As Michel Foucault explained in numerous analyses, the birth and development of liberalism was inseparable from the birth and development of the age of biopolitics, enabled as the latter was by the birth and development of biology and its allied life sciences. Tasked with the problem of how to rule in accordance with the needs and interests of the human defined in terms of its species existence, so it was not liberal political theory, political science, or international relations that has contributed most to teaching liberal regimes how to rule biopolitically. It is instead the life sciences themselves, broadly conceived, that have taught liberalism most about how to deal with the problem of human governance. It is in the emergence of the life sciences, most especially the life science of biology, that the search to understand the conditions for species development and security was most earnestly conducted from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. In turn it was in these sciences that the possibility arose of being able to distinguish between forms of life productive of life and those inimical to life; process and organisms that threatened life, rendered life vulnerable and insecure, warring against life and the realization of its potential. Here liberalism would learn how to pursue and realize the full emancipatory possibilities of species existence, and the material prospering of species life. The impact of these same life sciences can, for example, be traced directly in the thinking of liberal philosophers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as much as to the twentieth century (Dillon and Reid 2009).

The trouble with life, biologically understood, of course, is that it can never actually be secured. By definition biological life is a phenomenon of vulnerability, because to live is to be a thing that can and must die— a thing that can only ever struggle to survive in competition with other living systems for the finite time of which it is capable of lasting. At best, prospering resiliently, amid its vulnerabilities to decay, by adapting innovatively to the environmental conditions it is exposed to and simultaneously dependent on. Conceiving the human this way has meant that liberalism has always been committed, unwittingly at least, to divesting the human of any belief in its abilities to transcend its mere biology and achieve security. This is precisely the point that Foucault makes concerning the origins of the liberal subject historically (2008). The liberal subject ‘is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater or lesser degree by the Fall or sin’ (2008: 271– 72) but by an irreducible and nontransferable choice-making capacity not referring ‘to any judgement, reasoning, or calculation’ (2008: 272) but grounded irreducibly in the subject’s preference for whatever brings it pleasure in denial of pain and the potential for suffering (2008: 271– 73). That which is irreducible to the liberal subject is its preference for security from whatever may be found to threaten or reduce its capacity to live out its life in a condition of relative security from pain and suffering.

Perhaps due to its successful discursive dissemination, there are few thinkers –the less judicious or the most reactionary ones– who have questioned Michel Foucault’s late ideas. These disputes about the “truth” of biopolitics culminate in such paroxysm that critique has become a continuous theological diatribe. Everyone is engaged in an amendment or a commentary on the grand biopolitical text: Paul B. Preciado disputes Roberto Esposito; Esposito corrects Jean-Luc Nancy; Nancy revises Giorgio Agamben; Agamben adjusts Foucualt, and so on, until any of us –any average reader– finds oneself accepting that the virus is a product of biopower. However, if we pause the time of the event, if we take a step back from the totalizing demand of biopolitics, we may envisage that the biopolitical vocabulary disables any outside and all exits. As a good compensatory theory, biopolitics is an anthropological diagnosis. As a good theology, biopolitics substantiates life and kidnaps its own subject matter: life, whether it is one’s own, the life of others, or life in its constitutive fragility.

I am probably exaggerating and not all biopolitics amounts to confinement. The demand for confinement is probably compatible with ungovernable life. Indeed, maybe the intensification of absolute control over life is just beginning to constitute a new world order. Every crisis has its own doubts, exaggerations, and prophecies. But crises are also measures of time, indicators, and thresholds. The pandemic is undoubtedly a threshold. A threshold that doesn’t open up a future because the future is the mode of time currently in jeopardy, so we have no options or decisions to make about it. Therefore, the problem is that if biopolitics is defined as the sovereign administration of life, it is precisely because, ultimately, life cannot be administered. The sovereignty of the body is a liberal illusion. Life is always ungovernable. As Ariadne’s thread, biopolitics weaves its sovereign arguments to construct the garment of confinement.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii64/articles/michael-hardt-militant-life.pdf)// [King K]

In the third and final period of the genealogy Foucault focuses on the Cynics, the Socratic philosophical movement particularly active roughly from the first century bc to the fourth century ad that counted Diogenes, Antisthenes and Crates among its founders. Few philosophical texts from the Cynics survive, but we do have numerous accounts of their lives, many of which are at least in part apocryphal. These lives are what interest Foucault most, because they extend and transform the Socratic mandate to make one’s life an expression of parrhesia: that is, they turn the injunction to live a ‘true life’ into a militant, political project.

Our reading of Agamben leads to a surprising result. Following a binary code and a logic of subsumption that does not allow for differ-entiations, his argument remains committed to exactly the juridical perspective that he so vividly criticizes. He reduces the “ambiguous terrain” (1998: 143) of biopolitics by operating with a notion of politics that is at once too broad in its explanatory scope and too narrow in empirical complexity. On the one hand Agamben conceptualises the political as a sovereign instance that does not allow for an outside that would be more than an “inner outside” and an “exception”. On the other hand his presentation of sovereignty is completely limited to the decision on the state of exeption and the killing of bare life.

As a consequence, Agamben presents a distorted picture. The main danger today may not be that the body or its organs are targets of a distinctive state politics (1998: 164-5), but – quite the contrary – that we are witnessing an important transformation of the state under the sign of deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation. It is more and more the scientific consultants, economic interest groups, and civil societal mediators that define the beginning, the end, and the value of life, in consensus conferences, expert commissions, and ethical counsels. This “withdrawal of the state” could itself be analysed as a political strategy, though one that does not necessar-ily refuse individuals legal rights. In a more moderate account of exceptionality the suspension of legal rights might remain important in determining who is allowed to become part of a community, who is eligible to legal rights at all. The political strategy, however, that shifts legal and regulatory competencies from the public and legal domain to the private sphere, will probably pose a much greater threat in the future. This tendency is already visible; for ex-ample, it is possible for private companies to own and exploit human body substances (see Andrews/Nelkin 2001). Moreover, this tendency can already be traced in examples that Agamben mentions, namely the admissibility of euthanasia and transplantation medicine. Here we can expect that a patient’s legal will and contract relations will take the place of explicit state prohibitions and regulation. We note that in some countries there is already a public discussion to provide financial com-pensations for individuals who donate organs, and there is a growing consensus in the legal community to accept the will of the patient not to prolong life under certain conditions.8

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii64/articles/michael-hardt-militant-life.pdf)// [King K]

Fiat (in general :P)

This is where democracy comes in. Democracy is a form of government and, like all forms of government, it is not necessary and must justify its own existence. As we have argued in this book, it does so by acknowledging and affirming its own non-necessity: that is, its necessary contingency. It is only democracy that makes of its non-necessity its sole principle. And yet, in contrast to the more familiar image of anarchism, this non-necessity of government is not to be confused with proclaiming the necessity of the absence of government. On the contrary, since our lives are governed by a myriad of agents, including ourselves, we will never be entirely rid of some form of government. The question is then how to adapt government to its own non-necessity or, better, bring this non-necessity into the praxis of government itself. As we have argued, the democratic affirmation of contingency enables free circulation of forms of life while disabling any claim to epistemic, ethical or other privilege of any of these forms. Thus, not every form of life in a democracy is in accordance with democracy: the range of legitimate forms is infi nite but not unlimited. Just as democracy delegitimizes attempts to force the form that captivates us into the lives of others, it legitimizes and affirms what we have called a freeform life, a life that does not sim- ply give itself over to a certain form once and for all, but rather experi- ments with its own living by combining captivation and boredom in an open disposition to the world and all the forms that surge into being within it. In this manner, democracy enables us to govern and possibly change our own lives while to some degree protecting both others and ourselves from the excesses of our captivation. It invites us to hesitate in our very captivation, so as not to exhaust all of our formative force in any present form of life but to retain the potentiality of being otherwise in whatever form we dwell.

This is why we conclude this book by offering a different perspective on the question of the universality of democracy, whose apparent impossibility is often held to disqualify every effort at democracy promotion internationally and weaken support for it domestically. It appears that we can no longer enjoy our democracy if its principle cannot be shown to have universal validity, as if such validity could ever be established for tyrannical or totalitarian regimes. Yet, the very idea of universal validity would apparently contradict the idea of the ontological void at the heart of democracy, whose ontic consequence is precisely the delegiti- mization of any discourse, doctrine or form of life that claims universal validity. Democracy makes legitimate the virtually unrestricted pursuit of incommensurable forms of life on the condition that none of them elevates itself above others by claiming to be essential, proper, necessary or universal. If democracy were then itself a form of life, it could not have universal validity by its own definition. However, as we have shown, democracy does not prescribe any determinate form of life but rather affirms the freedom, equality and community of the most diverse forms. For this reason, democracy need not get embroiled in the aporia of asserting its own universal validity at the same time as it rejects the very idea of it. It is universally practicable not because of the privileged content it prescribes but precisely because it does not prescribe any. From the standpoint of the non-necessity of government, all regimes that found themselves on claims to necessity are illegitimate. It is only democracy that can avoid this illegitimacy by making its non-necessity its sole ground and renouncing all aspirations to give life a proper form

In an interview, Guy Sorman said he found out about Foucault's behaviour after visiting the late philosopher in Tunisia where he was living in 1969. "Young children were running after Foucault saying 'what about me? take me, take me'," he said to The Sunday Times. "They were eight, nine, ten years old. He was throwing money at them and would say 'let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place'. He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised." Sorman argued that Foucault was able to get away with this because of the racial element of his affairs. "Foucault would not have dared to do it in France… There is a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism," Sorman said. In the interview Sorman said he "regrets" not reporting this "extremely morally ugly" behaviour to the police. He added that the press had been aware of Foucault’s conduct but were reluctant to publish stories due to his status as France’s "philosopher king" alike to that of a "god". The philosopher who died in 1984 signed a petition in 1977, which sought to legalise sexual relations with children aged 13 or above. He is famous for his analysis of the prison system, mental health and sexuality, and is often associated with the contemporary discourse around identity politics.

But it is not simply the “rabble” who make this sad mess, but also some voices from the upper echelons of the academy. During the pandemic, when society desperately needed to make sense of the big picture, Philosophy failed the moment, sometimes through ignorance or incoherence, sometimes outright intellectual fraud. The lesson of Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, in part tells us why.

Famous for critiques of “biopolitics” that have helped to shape the Humanities’ perspectives on biology, society, science and politics, Agamben spent the pandemic publishing over a dozen editorials denouncing the situation in ways that closely parallel right-wing (and left-wing) conspiracy theories.

Learning, in this respect, represents a form of (bio)power, the organisation of a studious life’s force or potentiality, through its pseudo-instrumental inscrip-tion into the social function of ‘lifelong learning’. The latter is thus to be firmly distinguished from study as a ‘permanent condition’ in which, according to Agamben, the desire for knowledge is so intense to become a ‘form of life’.35While the student (permanently) questions the functional logic of instrumen-tality which commands (also permanently) the learner’s self-production and, therefore, has always already found what they need in, precisely, the medium of this questioning, the learner constitutes and preserves themself and their sociality through the external finality of learning, an endless deferral of what they need to achieve.

In a similar fashion, Lewis questioned ‘the instrumentalization of poten-tiality’ in education arguing, specifically, that the generic potentiality of the student is ‘subjected to relentless actualization according to the necessities of market control and institutional capture’.37 Following Agamben’s account of study, Lewis opposes this (learning) logic of a ‘not yet that must be’38—a potentiality that must be actualised so as to fulfil a particular function—so that, in governmental terms, the (studious) subject is endlessly ‘commanded to self-actualise its latent potentiality’39—to the experience of im-potentiality, namely, of the ‘capability not to be’ which is also the capability ‘to be otherwise, to think otherwise, to live otherwise’.

This tripping-up of a syntactical order becomes an important counter-measure to an impulse of administering and managing information that Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari underlined in 1975. In a 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze notes that new weapons were needed to combat new forms of power under the “control society.” These new weapons, he tells Negri, will involve “hijacking speech” and creating “vacuoles of noncommunication [and] circuit breakers” (Negotiations 175). Donna Haraway reached a similar conclusion earlier in 1985 with “A Cyborg Manifesto.” If power in the control era relies on information that remains quantifiable and universal, then “the biggest threat to such power is [the] interruption of communication” (Haraway 34). Deleuze acknowledges that while Foucault is often “taken as a theorist on discipline” and confinement, he was also one of the first to notice that we were “moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” (Negotiations 174). Deleuze also credits Burroughs as “the first to address” and “characterize this new [control] monster” (Negotiations 178).

Burroughs delivered a lecture on this very subject at the Schizo-Culture conference. After Foucault introduced him, Burroughs described how institutions must disperse and regulate control over individuals to ensure that their power remains effective. “Successful control,” he posited, “means achieving a balance” (Schizo-Culture 40). For Burroughs, “modern control systems depend on a universal literacy since they operate through mass media” (Schizo-Culture 39). The cut-ups that Burroughs developed in the 1960s with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville were an attempt to short-circuit communication networks. With the cut-up method, “the writing arm is paralyzed” and there are “No more junk scripts—No more word scripts” (Nova Express 189). Burroughs and Cage were two artists who made the interruption of communication central to their compositional methods. Burroughs even associated Cage with the cut-ups on more than one occasion. In a response to a question on the novelty of the method, Burroughs acknowledged the “cut-ups have been in use for many years now. People like John Cage have been using them in music” (Burroughs Live 432). He noted elsewhere that “Cage and Earle Brown have carried [cut-ups] further in music than it’s ever been carried in writing” (Burroughs Live 119). Three years before the Schizo-Culture event, Deleuze and Guattari identified both Cage and Burroughs as experimenters in Anti-Oedipus. In their section that describes the “schizorevolutionary,” Deleuze and Guattari refer the reader to all of Cage’s music and his book Silence. The schizorevolutionary writes or composes with no intention or goal in mind. Deleuze and Guattari find that it is with this non-intentional writing where The experimentation Deleuze and Guattari associate with Cage and Burroughs concern a compositional method that has no intended object. As Cage explains, “the goal is / not to have a goal” (M 57). A writer without a goal or intention has “nothing to say.” Even while Cage speaks or writes, his words lack any goal or intention. This method of writing through a text, as Jackson Mac Low notes, similarly “involve[s] a large degree of non-intentionality” (226). The schizorevolutionary methods of the cut-ups and writings through are not intention in communicating anything, even if they are saying something. As Deleuze tells Negri: “Creating has always been something different than communication” (Negotiations 175).

In his Writing Through The Cantos, Cage frees the poem from Pound’s authorial intention by ironically invoking the author’s name in the mesostic. These Pound mesostics appeared in the 1984 Unmuzzled Ox issue with Jackson Mac Low’s writings through the poem. And while their methods might differ slightly, Craig Dworkin notes that both Mac Low and Cage “perform an ideological hijacking of sorts” when they submit Pound’s poem to the non-intentional rules of the mesostic (101). Cage’s own anarchic politics align more with Thoreau than Pound. In his diary, Cage cites the sentence in Civil Disobedience where Thoreau argues that the best government is one that does not govern at all. Yet for Cage, this also applies to language: “Syntax, like / government, can only be obeyed” (M 215). Thoreau, then, still maintains a syntactical arrangement in his Journal. He might envision a politics with no government in his writing, but if governments administer and order populations through an “incitement to discourse,” Cage demands that such a politics must also break with communication.

In the opening to Empty Words, Cage cites Norman O. Brown’s comment that “syntax” is the “arrangement of the army” (Empty Words 11). A “language free from syntax,” then, results in a “demilitarization of language” (Empty Words 11). This demilitarization, as cited in the epigraph above, was a serious musical concern for Cage. Yet it was also a serious political concern for the speakers at the Schizo-Culture conference.1 Guattari’s lecture in particular called attention to the arrangement of power within certain “linguistic castes” (Schizo-Culture: The Event 192). For Guattari (and Deleuze), “what is at issue is what type of politics is pursued with regard to different linguistic arrangements that exist” (SchizoCulture 193). The university, medical, and state institutions subjugate aberrant signs to a homogeneous linguistic order in order to effectively communicate the goals of the capital.

Since sovereign power is about claiming the monopoly to violently or forcefully repress certain behaviour and/or command other behaviour, resistance becomes a matter of breaking such commands or repressions; that is, doing what is illegal or doing things for deviant interests and circumventing, undermining the sovereignty of power centres. Individuals, smaller groups or larger collectives in the form of organizations or popular movements can do this as a peaceful and disobedient challenge or with competing violence, as in, e.g., Tunisia and Syria, 2011. Sovereign power is a form of power that demands absolute obedience and therefore the resistance that develops is undermining these values, institutions and representatives. Resistance is, in a corresponding way, typically openly defiant and challenges through rebellions, strikes, boycotts, disobedience and political revolutions, by overthrowing kings, governments and regimes, with the attempt of ever more clever applications of violence, counter-power and strategies of power play. This might, however, not only be an open challenge of laws or rules of the sovereign, but it can also be done in hidden or disguised ways in which the laws or rules do not, in practice, influence behaviour – or only influence behaviour when costly and intensive surveillance and control is possible. This kind of hidden resistance has been studied by Scott (1989, 1990), and among the examples are the thousands of soldiers that silently and individually deserted from the Confederation army, and as such, according to Scott, contributed to the defeat of the Southern states in the US Civil War. Thus, sovereign power will be countered by resistance that is claiming a different sovereignty that undermines the monopoly of the king, or that defies the pressure to obey and to subordinate to the sword. This resistance needs to transform, manage, undermine or in other ways challenge key mechanisms of power: commands, prohibitions, punishments, monopoly of violence, fear, obedience habits, status symbols, claims of legitimacy or legality or sovereignty. Resistance will succeed when this sovereign power is either: (I) publicly challenged in a sustained way by key sectors/groups in society of which the de facto sovereignty depend; or (II) so effectively undermined in real behaviour that sovereignty becomes non-effective due to widespread hidden/disguised non-compliance with the rules; or (III) the capacity for and monopoly of violence is effectively under- mined by challenging and competing armed groups that at least in certain geographic areas limits the control of sovereign power centres. These forms of resistance have already been extensively explored and discussed within studies of revolution, social movements and terrorism. Therefore, we will not go into the details of resistance against sovereign power in this article. However, the same cannot be said of biopower or disciplinary power; here resistance is not so clear and there has been a lack of academic research in this area. Resistance to disciplinary power The power of discipline trains and controls individuals through institutions and scientific discourses while simultaneously punishing, pedagogically, in proportion to the violations, and it mainly builds up, trains and forms. Here we are given a programme of how to do things, and people are then monitored, trained and exam- ined, in order to make improvement, self-control and more effective use of force possible. Power is interested in the small details: the description of every movement of the body, the scientific study of behaviour and reconstruction of bodies, and ways to do things. Here technique and new improvements of organisation and skills are at the centre. And, importantly, improvement is rewarded. Here the carrot-and-stick approach is used in a measured and predictable way. The goal is to get individuals to keep themselves under surveillance, discipline themselves and train themselves; but this is done through the values and goals that reflect the inter- ests of other and not the individual. Power transforms a person into a tool for other interests, and a tool that is increasing its productivity and effectiveness. It creates new subjects. Since disciplinary power is about training, examination, functional organisation of space, time tables, detailed surveillance and study – resistance to discipline will be about either openly refusing to participate in the construction of new subjectiv- ity/capacities/skills/organisations, or the de facto transformation of such social con- struction into something else – something not useful for power interests. The power of discipline is met by forms of resistance that challenge through avoiding, rearticu- lating discourses and by destabilising the institutional control of behaviour. Here we find other types of more ‘everyday resistance’ and discursive forms of chal- lenges, which might be hidden or disguised and are not typically open. As Scott (1989, 1990) has outlined, resistance might then take on practices such as, e.g., foot-dragging, escape, sarcasm, passivity, misunderstandings, disloyalty, slander, avoidance or theft. The open method of challenge is hard to sustain once discipline is a dominant feature of society and when institutional correction systems are in place for those who do not conform. Some individuals will sometimes deviate from the standards and norms of disci- pline, but will simultaneously contribute to the accumulation of knowledge about deviance, and thus contribute to the development of new disciplinary techniques. Sometimes such deviant persons are collected in certain institutions such as mental Journal of Political Power 115 hospitals, poverty service centres, prisons or similar behavioural correction facilities. Escape from discipline might still be possible through other means, such as the following: retreating into one’s own mental world; by showing outward compliance while maintaining inner aggression towards the values and norms of discipline; and by relocating to a physical retreat or some kind of non-society wilderness area or refuge, where a different life is possible (such as the ‘mocambo’ or ‘quilombo’ societies created by escaped slaves in Brazil). However, all of us will grow up within these ‘truth regimes’, and most people will have to, in most of their life and activities, participate in the disciplinary project in a society that is organ- ised according to the techniques of discipline. When people do this, discipline will constantly reconstruct their behaviour and discursive practices along with their sub- jectivity, which makes them what they are throughout the processes in which they participate. Thus, resistance will be possible throughout the whole process, in the application of each training moment and in each new behavioural rule or discursive norm. For example, negotiating one’s relationship to allocated punishments and rewards might undermine the function of discipline (Lilja 2008). Parts of the non- violent peace movement, for instance, assign high status and rewards to those who go to jail for what is perceived as emancipatory activism (Nepstad and Vinthagen 2008). Thus, to be punished by the state suddenly turns out as a reward. To change the punishment–reward relations, which we are under the authority of, can be seen as one way of resisting disciplinary power, as outlined by Foucault. A key way in which resistance towards discipline is possible in a Foucaultian perspective, according to Butler, is through reiteration, rearticulation or repetition of the dominant discourse with a slightly different meaning. Foucault speaks about this as reversed discourses (Foucault 1981, p. 101; Foucault in Butler 1995, p. 236), which are used to describe how subalterns involve the categories and vocabularies of the dominating force or superior norm, precisely in order to contest it (Butler 1995 p. 236). The idea is to use the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin (Butler 1997, p. 93). Foucault writes about the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse, stating that: ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (Foucault 1981, p. 101). This reverse discourse is then parasitic on the ‘dominant discourse’ and resistance appears as the effect of power, as a part of power itself (Butler 1995, p. 237). The above exemplifies resistance against disciplinary power, by negotiating the very norm that composes the optimum for the subjectification. The fact that meaning can never be fixed becomes a powerful instrument to chal- lenge, change or contest dominant delimiting discourses, even if the effects of such resistance are conditioned on historical and discursive circumstances (Mills 2003). However, there are also other ways in which disciplinary power and its different ‘truths’ can be contested. For example, resistance against disciplinary power can be explored through Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, which refers to how the colonised becomes like the coloniser, but not yet the same. The coloniser experiences menace as Otherness slides into sameness, and the coloniser sees traces of himself in the colonised. This challenges the ‘fixed’ knowledge about who is the coloniser and who is the colonised. Authority’s near duplication composes a powerful representa- tion, and mimicry becomes a strategy to disturb the constructed differences on which authority is based. As the Other disciplines him/herself towards the norm, the dichotomy of Otherness and Selfness, us and them, becomes dissolved (Bhabha 1984, pp. 125–133, Bhabha in Childs and Williams 1997, pp. 129–133, Lilja 2008) Mimicry becomes interesting from a resistance perspective as mimicry of domi- nant behaviour, values, discourse or other normative rules will necessarily always be done with some slight difference – even when one tries hard to directly copy the dominant behaviour in the exact same manner. In real social life at least, the copy is always different to some degree, yet possibly very similar to the original. This means that behaviours enacted in line with the dominant logic of existing soci- ety will be slightly or fundamentally different than the original logic. This can be due to mistakes, misunderstandings and differences in circumstances of its applica- tion, or simply the impossibility of being able to repeat it perfectly. Therefore, change of discourse happens through the same process that reproduces it, by (different) rearticulation or (changed) meaning reproduction. As in the above example of mimicry, resisting disciplinary processes is often connected to the rewriting of one’s self. This topic was brought up by Foucault at Berkeley University in 1980: If one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western societies, one has to take into account not only the techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let’s say one has to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques, the point where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. (Foucault in Habermas 1994, p. 86) In his later work, Foucault (1988a, 1988b), therefore, reconsidered his theorising by making reference to what he called ‘techniques of the self’ or ‘care of the self’. Foucault analyses – from a historical investigation of practices developed from Greece, Rome and onwards in the western tradition – how people, especially the higher strata in society, try to modify themselves according to standards, values and norms in society. In brief, the techniques of the self involve the practices through which individuals inhabit subject positions and transform existing subjec- tivities. According to Foucault, these practices consist of such things as diaries or other ‘narratives of the self’ (Foucault 1988b, Foucault in Nixon 1997 p. 322). It is a matter of applying diaries, confessions, therapy, diet, daily training schedules, etc. in a personalised way that gives another story of who you are and that attempts to reconstruct habits and abilities (Foucault 1988b, Burkitt 2002). Foucault was paying special interest to the Stoic techniques, among them the askèsis, a ‘training in thought and training in reality’ (1988b, p. 37), or a ‘kind of permanent self-exami- nation ... [with the] meditation on death [as] the culmination of all these exercises’ (p. 38). Thus, the technologies of self are in this sense an example of how individ- uals try to transform themselves and can be understood as a resistance to the kind of subjectivity they are given by power relations (Burkitt 2002, Thompson 2003, Lloyd 2012). In this care of themselves the technologies are the same as applied by discipline, but they are reappropriated and utilised for other ends in striving towards ‘autonomy’ (Allen 2011). To Amy Allen ‘autonomy’ is ‘the twin capacities to reflect critically upon the power-knowledge relations that have constituted one’s subjectivity and to engage in practices of self-transformation’ (2011, p. 44). And ‘since there is no outside to power, freedom always involves strategically reworking the power relations to which we are subjected’ (p. 51). Many researchers argue that self-reflection, the individual portraying of an image of oneself, proceeds through narratives in a process of making connections, developing a plot and giving meaning to different events. I may, for example, string events together where I can be seen as independent. By telling only these indepen- dent stories, I construct myself as an independent individual. Yet, perhaps there are other stories that can also be told about the same events and stories, which I leave out since they indicate a conflicting plot – not one in line with the one I wish to promote (Stern 2001, Lenz Taguchi 2004, p. 209). We construct ourselves through the selection of different subject positions and the knitting together of certain mem- ories, which are given meaning by the discourses of society. Medina (2011) suggests that ‘counter-memory’ or ‘counter-history’ is a Foucaultian resistance form that ‘puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and for- gotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects’ (p. 9). Such resistance makes ‘epistemic insurrection’ possible, in which subjugated knowledge communities uti- lise their marginalisation and made invisibility ‘to destabilize the epistemic status quo’ (p. 11). Its technique is to resist ‘the “omissions” and distortions of official histories, returning to lost voices and forgotten experiences, relating to the past from the perspective of the present in an alternative (out-of-the-mainstream) way’ (p. 13). If such resistance is able to create ‘disunity effects’, it might ‘destabilize a normative order by introducing a counter-perspective that resists and invalidates the normative expectations of the imposed dominant ideology’ (p. 15). It then ‘requires a “return to the origin” ... revisiting the texts ... “the primary points of reference” of the practice, and developing a new way of reading them’ (p. 16). As such, coun- ter-history or epistemic insurrection involves ‘the constant epistemic friction of knowledges from below ... in the mutual contestation of differently normatively structured knowledges which interrogates epistemic exclusions, disqualifications, and hegemonies’ (p. 21). However, even though the narrator, in this view, becomes more of an agent and is involved in the making of her or his ‘self’, the subject is still formed by the dis- courses of their surroundings. Since power not only develops in relation to resis- tance, but resistance utilises power techniques, it sometimes becomes difficult to determine what is what. Lois McNay (2009) analyses the neoliberal focus on ‘self as enterprise’ and argues that ‘the experimental process of self-formation that this idea revolves around is uncomfortably close in structure to governance through individualization’ (p. 57). Sean Nixon writes: This represents a shift from an attention to the regulating and disciplining of the sub- ject to a more expanded formulation of agency. ‘Techniques of the self’ are still – it is important to underline – conducted within fields of power-knowledge and within the domains of a discrete number of discourses. They suggest, though, the putting into practice of discursive subject-positions in ways, which emphasize the dynamic nature of this process. (Nixon 1997, p. 322) The question then becomes how it becomes possible to see what is what, if a cer- tain ‘technology of self’ is creating power and/or resistance. Thompson (2003) argues that Foucault outlines a practice of self-constitution (formation, governance, knowledge and rule), not self-regulation (administration and ‘infatuation’). Self-formation is not self-fabrication. To produce something is to impose static form upon recalcitrant matter, to stamp being upon becoming. To be cared for rather than to care for one’s self is to live simply under the sway of programs and procedures defined by this logic. (Thompson 2003, p. 130) Thus, although prevailing interpretations maintain self-techniques are power mecha- nisms (e.g. McKinlay and Starkey 1998, Rose 1999), we suggest that people also are able to modify themselves differently and/or resist the processes of internalising power through alternative modes of self-making. Mohandas Gandhi’s ‘ascetic activ- ism’ is one such example (Howard 2013). Since the independence of India was understood by Gandhi as ‘self-rule’, there was a close connection made between the power of asceticism and the power of the independence movement: ‘Gandhi rit- ualized every aspect of his life, which became a testament of his commitment to the cause; it was his personal performance of ritual that was to be imitated’ in a way in which he ‘embodied symbols that communicated his political strategy – a strategy based on simplicity, self-sacrifice, and self-reliance’ (Howard 2013, pp. 77, 219). In his unique way of reinterpreting and applying the disciplines of asceticism as instruments for the goals of politics, he utilised the traditionally religious, inner- worldly and individual tradition of asceticism and expanded its scope to political, outer-worldly and collective activism (Howard 2013, p. 215). Without clearly belonging to any one of these traditional categories he transformed both traditions into his original kind of ‘ascetic activism’. There are different conditions under which alternative processes of self-making are made possible. For example, Wimal Dissanayake views the human agent as the locus from which action can be initiated to either reconfirm or resist discursive bur- den. The term agent thus ‘marks out a form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subject-positions, the possibility of resistance to the ideological (that is, discursive) pressure is allowed for’ (Dissanayake 1996, p. x). In addition, it is more likely that more people would adopt other variations of identity if the passing of punishments and rewards would work differently or disappear. The hegemonic status of ranked or stereotyped images of identity could thus be negotiated through changing an individual relation to the grading systems (Lilja 2008). Moreover, there are different practices, which make possible alternative modes of self-making. For example, different strategies of hybridity are often applied to resist hegemonic identity positions. Resistance to biopower As stated above, biopower, or the governance of life/society, is not focusing on individuals and their training in institutions of control. Biopower is interested in the body of a population (a nation, members of an organisation, etc.) and its ‘health’ and ‘effectiveness’ as a totality. Biopower is interested in steering the general behaviour, stimulating the tendencies and governing of how life is reproduced, and how productive society is. It is a power that is trying to improve the quality of life of its members, their cooperative ability as well as other qualities of the population. The biopolitical form of power is about regulation of social life, social engineering, management or governmentality in which health, longevity, energy or vitality, sta- bility and growth of social life is in focus. Rabinow and Rose (2006) claim that biopower must include three elements: (1) truth discourses about the vital character of human beings (e.g. health science), (2) specific strategies for intervention upon the health and life of a population (e.g. health politics), (3) conditions of subjectifi- cation that facilitate individuals’ work on themselves according to the truth dis- course on health and life (e.g. health movements). A clear example in history of this kind of power is the welfare state – a state that puts its energy and focus on keeping the welfare of its citizens as its priority. Biopower uses statistics, predict- ability calculations and surveillance of patterns within the social body in order to assess how to act and manage the different changes in an optimal way. The goal is to increase evolutionary processes, and to build on biology and medicine in order to maximise the output and abilities of the population. This became a form of power of the modern state during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but was later optimised in the welfare state. Biopower is a gardening and cultivating form of power; one that uses surveil- lance, but is able to only react when some behaviour gets out of hand. It is a form of power that will be able to accept limited deviant behaviour, as risk management, if it is possible to use it for its own purpose; for example, making dissent a sign of a ‘free’ society. It is not concerned with the details of individual behaviour but the overall productivity, the effectiveness of combinations and use of tendencies, and of statistics. It is a power that creates, as Deleuze says, a ‘society of control’ and where ‘total information awareness’ makes it possible to predict behaviour, count on statistical probability and make certain concerted investments and assemblage of creative interventions possible even before things are getting bad, but only when that is necessary. What then are the characteristics, techniques, means, sites and illustrating exam- ples of resistance to biopower? Resistance to biopower and governance of life/soci- ety engages with the main techniques of biopower: the managing of large populations, of life and society, and the managing of huge information databases, surveillance techniques and statistical management. Since biopower is about creat- ing the infrastructure of population growth, increased production effectiveness through training and education of a population – resistance has to be about under- mining this exercise of power. However, biopower is an advanced form of power and poses particular challenges upon resistance. Building on Foucault, Dean (2010) has developed an ‘analytics of government’ and their ‘governmentality’ (rationalities, technologies, etc.), in which ‘government’ is understood as ‘conduct of conduct’ (pp. 17–18). This is, like biopower, some- thing applied in the whole fabric of society, by the state, as well as by corporations and civil society actors. Thus, a subset is the ‘government of the self, as a form of action of the “self on self”’ (p. 20). This approach opens up space for resistance, according to Dean, basically as ‘counter-conducts’ (p. 21). Foucault explains that ‘counter-conduct’ is a matter of conducts done differently, by other leaders (conducteurs), with other objectives, or procedures/methods (Foucault 2009, pp. 194–195). Examples of such ‘counter-conduct’ which Foucault analyses are Protestantism and peasant revolts at the time of reformation. Biopower is ‘pastoral’ in the sense that is seems positive and constructive; it even might feel like love and care. This is seen in the modern state, which in some senses, governs individuals and organises them as members of a population in the same way as a shepherd who cares for his flock. This power, Foucault argues, can be related to the Christian ideas, which relate Christ both to the notion of a ‘good shepherd’ and the ‘pastoral responsibilities’ of priests (Sharp et al. 2000, p. 17). Here, we have the social engineer that takes care of the subordinate population as a gardener takes care of the garden or the farmer takes care of the cattle, with knowl- edge, planning and nurturing, all in order to make increased exploitation possible and all within the purpose of power interests. Still, there is no sovereign gardener/ priest/farmer, but multiple techniques that are spread throughout society and exist in state institutions, corporations or cultural institutions that care for the nation or its population. The techniques of biopower might also be cultivated within groups and organisations normally associated with resistance, as for example in populist and anti-immigration movements that cultivate certain new or radical ideals and standards of how to strengthen and ‘develop’ the ‘nation’. Thus, biopower not only seems positive, it mobilises the whole society. Biopower is, therefore, a high stage of power production, but we also see a corresponding biopolitical production of resistance, a gathering of the strengths, abilities and practices of the masses, of a population in resistance to this biopower. The creation of a resistance culture is parallel to biopower and governmentality. Resistance cultures are without central coordination or planning. Nevertheless, they have certain logics, forms and orientations that evolve from the communication and mutual knowledge of, or experiences from, similar power conditions. It is, similarly to biopower, not coordinated by a (would-be sovereign) resistance leader/centre, but is a multitudinous and heterogeneous diffusion of resistance techniques. These are spread from the pragmatic experience of necessary self-defence, creation of new space, cultivation of an ‘other’ and different ideals and values among individuals, subcultures and groups that do not subscribe to (all of) the ideals of dominant discourse. The beginning of full-blown resistance culture that undermines biopower might be all the kind of biopolitical practices in which people question certain aspects of control over their lives and the conduct of their conduct. Here, we see how the administration technology of a population’s everyday life is challenged, undermined or replaced by a large segment of society which instead uses alternative and self- governed practices. Many different forms of resistance techniques are utilised although, to our knowledge, no systematic investigation from a biopolitical perspective has been done so far; we want to indicate some of the resistance going on. To begin with, we find the individual self-modification technologies discussed in connection with resistance to discipline, which might spread and become part of a larger popular mobilization, as e.g. the exercises adopted by the millions within Falun Gong in China. As argued earlier, sometimes these technologies become part of an exercise of power, as when the cultivation of the self becomes a part of a neoliberal ‘enterprise’. However, some resistance communities try to avoid integration with biopower through the creation of autonomous conditions for alternative self-making projects: by fighting for the option to ‘leave’ society (e.g. the World Freeman Society which promotes the ‘Freeman on the land’), creating radically other forms of societies (e.g. ‘utopian’ or ‘intentional’ communities and Gandhian Ashrams) or developing alternative institutions that nurture life differently (e.g. home schooling and alternative medicine). In the ‘Freetown Christiania’ (1971) in the middle of Copenhagen ‘Christianites’ have successfully refused to provide statistics to the Danish state and maintained their collective property form despite years of attempts to privatise (Thörn et al. 2011, p. 7, 81). A different example is the knowledge commons in which subjugated knowledge is freely shared in an attempt to undermine corporate dominance through intellectual property rights, e.g. the free software of the GNU project or the ‘seed-banks’ that promote biodiversity. In these areas there are obviously many examples of initiatives and ongoing ‘counter-con- duct’, but it is less clear in what sense there are any options or ongoing practices that undermine biopower technologies and their effective application, especially since a key feature of contemporary neoliberal governance is (market structured) self-activities. Among the examples are perhaps those who refuse to participate in national surveys or parents who for religious or health reasons refuse to allow their children to participate in vaccination programmes (as e.g. some Anthroposophists in Järna, Sweden), or those who sabotage genetically modified organisms (GMO), such as activists in the UK acting in protection suites and digging up test fields. Resistance against biopower is then resistance that tries to avoid the managing of population policies and institutions by acting differently, in subcultures, and by cultivating a different set of values, practices and institutions. Also, this resistance will take on the challenge and develop non-productive forms of life and biological existence – forms of life that are not useful for the power regime. Furthermore, it will try to undermine social engineering of the population. Since biopower is not interested in the individual or detail per se and is not interested in complete subordination or everyone’s compliance – but general subordination, and increased tendencies and productivity of larger numbers – what individuals do may appear of little interest. If a few people opt out, move to the countryside, make their own life and refuse to cooperate with the dominant dis- course or biopower regime, it is not threatening the production of biopower. A few differing ‘others’ might even strengthen the effects of various biopolitical strategies. It is, however, threatening for biopower if its total information awareness is under- mined (e.g. through whistle-blowers such as Wikileaks or Snowden), or its ability to direct, organise and cultivate population behaviour in general is threatened.

This chapter reflects upon our experiences teaching Cultural Legal Studies as an elective subject in the context of a legal education that generally inculcates hierarchy, orients students towards formalistic reasoning that privileges one answer rather than many, and indoctrinates students into the ways of reading texts that are linear and rational.1 In Cultural Legal Studies, students encounter diverse representational forms—films, comics, images and other cultural artefacts—and analyse them according to the tools of interpretation derived from the humanities. In doing so, they see how legal narratives of rights, responsibility, and subjectivity are bound up in stories of justice, revenge, and culpability. They witness how cultural forms both embody and challenge the tenets of liberal legalism, ‘making strange’ law’s narratives of neutrality, certainty, and reliability.2 The process of developing their own readings of cultural legal texts empowers students to reflect upon their own complicity in, and responsibility for, the legal forms through which they engage and exert agency.

Unlike traditional law and literature courses, Cultural Legal Studies as we have taught it has been built around the particular encounter (filmic, televisual, ludic, graphic) with a jurisprudence of popular culture.3 This is not limited to literature or films dealing explicitly with law and justice. Rather it is a practice of reading texts jurisprudentially and is grounded in a jurisprudential tradition—a way of teaching theory. Cultural Legal Studies is thus a course in legal theory. But it is law as stories, reflecting upon the way that, in law school, we both inhabit and inculcate legal imaginaries which are intelligible to us through images, symbols, and narratives. By starting with the imaginary, Cultural Legal Studies provides ways to visualise the biopolitical frames that govern our teaching of sovereignty, justice, rights, authority, violence, and the modern legal subject.4 Such an approach foregrounds the ways in which legality is constituted through the cultural narratives in which we imagine our lives. This enables students to analyse their investments in, and imaginative attachments to, particular kinds of thinking about law, legality, and justice. It also provides them with training that is particularly apposite for legal education—learning how to speak and write the language of the law.5 In its blend of cinematic texts and legal theory, and its emphasis on the creative act of making arguments, teaching Cultural Legal Studies becomes a way of pursuing legal pluralism that empowers students to think about their own positionality, power, and privilege as normative agents.6

Protective Public Domain Responding to the emphasis on an open public domain, critical intellectual property scholarship also offers an alternative conception of a protective public domain. 46 Such scholarship is aligned with the theorizing of an open public domain. It similarly advocates the expansion of the public domain by limiting intellectual property (IP) rights, enlarging fair use, and requiring compulsory licensing.47 In contrast, however, scholarship promoting a protective public domain insists upon exceptions for indigenous individuals and groups who have been traditionally excluded from asserting authorial rights over their knowledge, resources, and culture. It is therefore critical of the expansion of a public domain based upon values of sharing and openness, which can produce harm to indigenous peoples. Theorizing of a protective public domain takes into account histories of colonialism and imperialism, while seeking to expand notions of authorship beyond its individualism to fully consider indigenous forms of collective knowledge production and creativity.48 It stresses the need to consider how, given social hierarchies, information within the public domain is not equally accessible and open to all, thus the need for some elements of protection.49 In contrast to an open public domain, a protective public domain challenges articulations of indigenous peoples’ knowledge as raw material and recognizes the inventiveness and dynamism of indigenous traditional knowledge.50 It is also a flexible concept of the public domain. Conceptions of a protective public domain require flexibility in order to provide an adequate balance of protection and access to different forms of indigenous traditional knowledge (e.g., artworks versus medicines) in a variety of geopolitical contexts.51 Coombe thus suggests an “ethics of contingency” recognizing that protection might mean different things to different marginalized groups.52 A protective public domain therefore recognizes inequalities and works to protect indigenous peoples’ knowledge from being exploited as raw material.

In contrast to an open public domain model, conceptions of a protective public domain challenge neoliberal, biopolitical modes of governing by placing value upon indigenous peoples’ forms of knowledge and creativity. Normative conditions and discursive framings of free trade and privatization are contested by shifting some control over to indigenous communities. Scholarship in this area argues that free and open sharing of indigenous peoples’ knowledge can be responsible for continuing a legacy of colonial exploitation of their traditional resources.53 Giving indigenous peoples some control over their own knowledge practices is one way to counter this history.54 By granting indigenous communities more control through a protective public domain, neoliberal values of freedom become disrupted.

Such narrative tropes of endurance – putting up with, working through – construct characters that are ground down but also, and crucially, sympathetic and heroic. They are figured as contemporary parables of morality, where the bleaker the context, the starker the highlighting of the good, the kind, the purity of the human condition. They are, in short, ‘getting by’69 and their suffering is occluded by narratives that augment the kernel of interior humanity that is hiding behind the layers of biopolitical and economic exhaustion. Yet this is too easy: these figures are painted too simply; their innocence and quiet ‘ploughing on’ assuages the guilt of metropolitan privilege through their moral redemption. These narratives work for the scholar and critic through a double confessional: by making visible the violence through which their lives are shaped, and at the same time reassuring us (the reader, the liberal elite), that this violence, of which we are part (and upon which our good life rests), is not for nothing. As a basis for politics, we find the implicit morality of the concept of endurance in the academy problematic. This moral framework elevates dignity, and keeping it together in the face of the unliveable. Figures of endurance are wretched, dogged and unflinching in their living on. They do not cry out, nor do they complain; they find hope and solace in each other, in the small things, in the ashes of their ruined worlds. The politics inscribed here are ultimately conservative rather than revolutionary. As Berlant asks, in the context of the neoliberal United States, in such a situation, ‘is the best one can hope for realistically a stubborn collective refusal to give out, wear out or admit defeat’?.70 While we do not want to dismiss a politics of salvage and making do, we refuse to elevate this through the invocation of the otherwise; the ontological indeterminacy of becoming in ruined worlds should not be framed as redemption, or even consolation.

Spectres of progress

In light of this, this text is an invitation to analyze some of the mutations of contemporary capitalism, its current forms of control and the processes of subjectivation derived from it, as well as the strategies that can be invested against them. A double movement, therefore. However, it is not intended here to exhaust the theme, or to approach it in a totalizing or definitive way. Neither was it sought to make a repertory of resistance practices in order to facilitate their control or to shut down their potential in manuals and other forms of reproduction. The purpose of this text is to try to interrogate the present time, seeking to achieve this through analysis instruments that allow stressing the practices instituted in the field of education, as well as putting in motion the subjectivation processes created and experienced there. In this sense, it is important not only to diagnose a certain condition (of the school, of education, of the contemporary world), but above all to cross it with problematizations that may open new possibilities for the construction

Finally, it is a matter of finding – and even inventing – in the interstices of contemporary forms of biopower, their carelessness, small interruptions, gaps, in short, their fleeting openings, where the capitalist machine decides to doze, ways of believing again in the world, breaths, blows that allow us to increase our power to act and affirm life – even in procedural forms. Because, as Pelbart said (2013, p. 13), “[…] there is a biopolitical strangulation that calls for gaps, however small they may be, to reactivate our political, theoretical, affective, bodily, territorial, existential imagination”. Biopolitics and Education

Sharp 23 Cassandra Sharp is a Professor of Law. Her research is based in cultural legal studies, and focuses on interdisciplinary explorations of law as it is constructed in the public imagination through popular texts. Cassandra has interdisciplinary qualitative expertise in the field of law, popular culture and public perception, with a particular interest in the interaction between individuals, communities, and governments. Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, Chapter 13, Law as Relation and the Co-emergence of Beings: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Legal Education. 6-29-2023 https://www.dubraybooks.ie/product/biopolitics-and-resistance-in-legal-education-9780367775247 sb<3

To be educated is to invite the continuous ‘self-learning that involves the mind, spirit and body of the whole person’.19 Education is inexorably ‘interwoven with living and with the possibility of retelling our life stories’,20 and contributes to the construction of self-narratives with which we identify.21 This operative concept of self-identity is understood as a reflexive and discursive construction of self22 that concerns a culturally contingent production that is specific to particular times and places.23 One’s identity is a continual rehearsal of narration and practice of re-narration.24 The enduring narration of self is ‘always held in context, shaped by contextual factors’ that frame and mediate it.25 It is within the ongoing transformative stage of studying law that students can experience this surge of understanding about their self-identity. Following Anthony Giddens,26 a connection between identity construction and transformation can be explored within the context of the ‘identity project’.27 An identity project builds on what we think we are now in the light of our past and present circumstances together with what we think we would like to be, to form a trajectory of our hoped-for-future.28 By reflecting on what it is they value, and ‘about how matters of value are shared and disputed in the world we inhabit with others’,29 students will be pushed to evaluate, defend, and sometimes reconstruct their self-identity in relation to the way they view the world of law. The identity project is therefore inextricably linked with the transforming work of law school, which should be seen not simply as a place where a legal curriculum is offered, but as a very powerful social environment in which transformation takes place. As Pommersheim argued many years ago, law schools should be places where ‘students not only learn but also change. Change not only their ways of thinking but also their understanding of their values, their sense of what is meaningful, and the social obstacles that limit what is possible’.30

In this chapter I suggest that stories have significant power in legal education for helping students to do just that—to develop critical awareness, be self-reflective and construct identity. I argue that not only do first year law students deploy stories to understand the world of law, but that they also use stories as a form of self reflection, and as a way of challenging their own (and others’) perspectives on the social world. Legal educators have a privilege and responsibility to harness and explore these perspectives with the students as they actively deploy stories towards their developing identity construction.

My aim in this chapter is to commend a legal pedagogy that appreciates the unique position of law students by harnessing their capacity for biopolitically reflective and critical analysis. As such, the chapter first urges for the recognition that developing biopolitical awareness as an indispensable aspect of a student’s identity construction within law school. Having demonstrated that law schools are in a unique place to catalyse biopolitical awareness, the chapter next considers stories and conversation as a critical aspect to the student experience of transformation. In the final section, the article seeks to commend possibilities for capitalising on the process of student identity towards biopolitical engagement.