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There is much more at stake than just the symbolic construction and natu-ralisation of gender and religion through political regulation. Speaking more broadly, the issue is how sovereign power intervenes into the lives of all individuals in order “to decide [on] life and death”. 18 Today, life in and beyond the configurations of the state is bound to a sovereign biopower that offers people possibilities for empowerment even as it threatens them with destruction. People are thereby bound to an ambivalent form of power that produces both sovereign subjects and social outcasts. The processes by which those marginalised become empowered are complex, however, and do not just disappear once equal legal footing is achieved. Instead, margin-alised groups and individuals continue to be associated with marginalised knowledge and forced into interdependent, essentialised categories such as “gender”, “sexuality”, “race”, “religion”, “class”, “nation” and so forth. As power, sovereignty becomes both violent and effective time and again when-ever the right structures are in place and allow it to have an impact.19

The establishment of and debate over the notion of “biological citizenship” underscores how national as well as transnational regulations increasingly reinforce access to or even exclusion from life-sustaining commodities.20 For that matter, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ability to secure certain rights and even basic liberties is always reliant upon citizenship. The legal constructs of a given polity, however, are connected primarily to hegemonic, religious, and hierarchical constructs organised on the basis of gender.

Consisting of four parts, the syntax in Empty Words increasingly breaks down until, by its conclusion, there are no discernable words: “eeeaeh geirrds sn iendtngtch – h t” (66). Such a total break with communication makes Empty Words difficult to interpret to say the least, as Cage presents the reader with an unreadable text. This question of how to read Empty Words likewise presents a question for biopolitics. How can one manage and administer a text that remains illegible and fails to communicate?

Cage, then, seems to offer an alternative to the biopolitical use of language, and such alternatives were the subject of more than one lecture at the SchizoCulture conference. On the first day of the conference, Lyotard delivered a lecture in French while two graduate students translated. His talk addressed the strategies of a “weaker language.” According to Lyotard, countercultural and political groups since the 60s attempted to attack or resist a major or national language from the outside. Yet, as one graduate student translated, such an exterior approach “is what the masterly position asks for,” since “it is a complement the masterly discourse must and intends to conquer.” (Schizo-Culture: The Event 83). Lyotard instead suggests that “one should imagine a strategy without exteriority,” which will “use the rule of that discourse itself by including meta-statements inside its own” discourse (84).

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) is form of Critical Discourse Analysis interested in unveiling the power relations through the analysis of discourses and power apparatuses (dispositifs). There is no handbook or a single way of doing FDA, but rather an assemblage of theoretical and methodological 23 I use "community" to name their collectivity, as it is the noun that they themselves have designated to name it. tools for discourse analysis, inspired by the contributions of Michel Foucault (Jäger 2007). In this project, I use a loose version of FDA to analyze the discourse and practices of inclusion in the city of San José. From a decolonial perspective, I do not seek to apply the categories created in the North to explain what happens in Costa Rica, but to take FDA as a method to approach this complex reality.

Discourses must not be understood as simple texts or oral expressions, but rather in wider perspective. Echoing Foucault’s robust theory of power, Michael Arribas-Allyon and Valerie Walkerdine affirm:

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.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

Although law and the judicial system can impose limits on the extent and power of branding culture, I will argue here that those limits are not without cost to those who might seek to impose them, or who might be seen as most obviously to benefit from them. Brands directly affect the bios of different communities insofar as they necessarily interact with local geographies, with effects on producers, consumers, and regulatory processes; in essence, as Andrew Pike notes, “branding seeks to destabilize existing markets and reinstitutionalize them around new, strategically calculated produce and service brand definitions” (Pike, 2009, p. 633). Geographical associations are an integral part of branding strategies. As Pike argues, brand owners engage in a strategy of selectively “playing up certain desirable and valued meanings – such as the heritage, quality and reputation connoted by particular places (e.g., Milanese design or Thai silks)” while downplaying negative associations (2013, p. 323). As Pike emphasizes, this process necessarily has distributive effects, as for example, geographies that are perceived as high value are able to monetize that consumer perception.

Consumers assign value to products based on their place of origin, and Western companies frequently attempt to profit by association with the “traditional” products and methods of non-Western cultures and places. In Western countries, IP law – particularly trademark, since it is concerned with the naming and branding of goods – has traditionally been invoked to keep freeloaders away from the goodwill accreted to a brand. Could a similar strategy help the producers of traditional products? The logic is clear enough. Global consumers demand “Coke,” and they are rewarded with the product of one, specific corporation. If global consumers are going to demand “Darjeeling” tea, then it only seems just that they should get something from India, and not from Benetton. Indeed, such global standards seem to be needed to stop Western companies exploiting indigenous products for their own profit. In one famous example of such “biopiracy,” the Texas company RiceTec imported basmati rice from India and sought patent protection for it; it took a lengthy battle and global pushback to prevent RiceTec from calling its products “basmati” (Boyle, 1997; Shiva, 1999).

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.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

Online settings illustrate sharply our passing into the information age in the truest manner, with the development of culture and social relationships being mediated exclusively via ‘palpable’ digital information artefacts, like texts, images, videos, webpage links and social networking accounts. Suspended between its intangible nature and its various ‘tangible’ expressions, and according to Drahos constituting ‘the daily lifeblood of human agents as communicating beings’, information regulated under familiar legal conceptions of property suggests arguably ‘biopolitical’ developments: the hold, which one exerts on information items, extends to administering essentially life in its social and cultural aspects. The propertisation of information in copyright laws authorises long-term exercises of power that, in future, computer-mediated societies, could both undercut circulation of vital knowledge and structure the public’s participation in culture, thus interfering effectively with the development of personal, social and political identities. Such concerns appear more plausible in view of the increase of corporate power across online settings, contested between concentrations of copyright-intensive industries and web hosting giants, and following debates over the impacts of laws like the recently introduced EU Directive 2019/790 (Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market). By reviewing copyright law developments, this paper reflects on Foucauldian understandings of biopolitics and media ecology theoretical interpretations, to comment critically on the regulation of information and online public interaction spaces.

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.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

In the previous chapter, I argue that patent law functions as a technology of power, utilizing the molecularization of life described by Rose as its means: advances in biotechnology enabling human societies to alter the cellular and subcellular processes of life allow living material to enter the marketplace and be governed by legal policy. More profoundly, molecularization enables policy to influence how we view our relationship to those processes of life—that is, the power of our public policy to influence our moral sentiments arises not merely from the incremental introduction of new laws and regulations, but rather from a new view of biology produced by molecularization. In closing by revisiting this point, I consider Foucault's ​The Birth of the Clinic​ , particularly as it relates historically to the development of a political biomedical consciousness from the advancement of biotechnology and the sciences. In detailing his notion of biopower, Foucault historically traces the state's conditional provision of legal status to the medical profession as it began operating at the level of the home and family. Initially serving state interests by providing its own form of surveillance, the field of biomedicine soon intensified its connection to the state: the epidemic as a phenomenon soon became a threat to the essential economic interests of the state, meriting its consideration as a national medical issue. This in turn allowed for "the definition of a political status for medicine and the constitution, at state level, of a medical consciousness whose constant task would be to provide information, supervision, and constraint, all of which 'relate as much to the police as to the field of medicine proper'" (26).173 This state interest in medicine as a means to preserve control over production occurred simultaneously with the technological advancements necessary for the development of a systematic, scientific field of inquiry. Stated differently, advancements in medical technology and the discipline's maturation as a knowledge-generating apparatus began to allow for human bodies to become the targets of power as the raw materials from which that knowledge is manufactured. According to Foucault, the establishment of the clinic permits this phenomenon, enabled by the epistemic shift previously discussed. That power is secured, reified, and reinforced through legal policy, inexorably linking the goals of science with those of the state. In turn, the content of our policy influences moral discourse subtly and incrementally, a point worth noting in the context of Rose’s proposal that modern political power takes the form of governing a genetic body: modern policy is no longer limited by a grossly anatomic or physiologic view of the body as biotechnology’s advancement permits life science institutions to envision life at a cellular or molecular level. This epistemic shift functions within a broader framework of power relations that are capable of influencing and even determining our ethical evaluations. In this section, I propose that reframing moral discourse by acknowledging a reciprocal power relationship (in which the interests and beliefs of a state’s citizens have the power to determine policy) is valuable in approaching resolution of the issues discussed to this point. My intention in providing this brief overview of Foucault's political biomedical consciousness is twofold: first, to close this project by alluding to Foucault's claim that the "medical gaze" as a product of and instrument in the knowledge-generating apparatus of biomedicine provides a foundational power asymmetry—one that takes its more modern form in Rose's molecularization; and second to propose that the very development of biomedicine as a field even prior to its industrialization occurred via the powers of the state. In these ways, our current economic frameworks, ideologies, and practices afford distinctive forms of public control. More specifically, emphasizing "privatization and free trade as privileged modes of governance" allows for "the control and management of knowledge through patent law," thereby situating "patent law as a juridical tool and mechanism of neoliberalism where biological and genetic material are privatized for the development of capitalist production"

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.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/ dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neoimperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others. As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society . . . nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly selfimplements the basic rules of Law Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today. This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenthcentury US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, notquite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017). But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.4 Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/ exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of postEnlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so. . .,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims . . .. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

Put most briefly, this book has argued three things. First, intellectual property (IP) is a form of power. By that I mean that it exists in and through specific institutional, political, and social contexts, and influences the behavior of people in various ways with varying degrees of coercion attached. Second, the nature of this power has been shifting, particularly in the last thirty years or so. If one divides modem forms of power into an admittedly rough schema, it is possible to adumbrate juridical, public biopolitical, and neoliberal biopolitical variants. Although no form of power as socially diffuse and culturally fundamental as IP will monolithically transition from univocally expressing one form of power to another, it is possible to observe a marked shift in IP law in the direction of neoliberal biopower. This shift is evident in the increasing adoption of individualizing, market-driven provisions grounded in a Demsetzian understanding of property driven by the internalization of (publicfacing) externalities. From the attempt to patent isolated genetic fragments to efforts to protect brands as themselves commodities, IP law has increasingly insinuated itself into the everyday lives of individuals, nudging them to understand themselves as market actors at all times, rewarding producers who produce for market exploitation and consumers who interact with cultural products as though they were so produced. Third, we can see that IP law, as other forms of power, is also legible as a process of subjectification, which is to say that it is in the business of making people. The blockhead model of creativity and correlative passive consumer, the brand-conscious individual envisioned by regimes like trademark dilution, and the actuarial agent of contemporary biomedicine are all examples of the kinds of individuals imagined by neoliberal biopower and encouraged by its expression in intellectual property policy. These are contingent forms, as the contrast with the Mertonian scientist, drew sampling artist who sees appropriation as creation, and the artist who secs in a Louis Vuitton bag a powerful symbol for cultural critique indicate. So too, individuals do not naturally approach music as consumers and resist being forced to do so by technologies. It takes effort to persuade scientists that they should treat their research process as governed by the standards of homo economicus and artists that they should pay for access to culturally important symbols.

The intelligence and law enforcement communities have articulated publicly the threat posed by domestic terrorism today. That articulation draws on the comprehensive assessment of the threat that President Biden requested on his first full day in office. That assessment was conducted by appropriate elements of the U.S. Government and provided to the President. It was also released publicly in summary form on March 17, 2021 (see page 10). Today’s domestic terrorists espouse a range of violent ideological motivations, including racial or ethnic bigotry domestic terrorism and hatred as well as anti–government or anti–authority sentiment. They also take on a variety of forms, from lone actors and small groups of informally aligned individuals, to networks exhorting and targeting violence toward specific communities, to violent self–proclaimed “militias” who, despite legal prohibitions in all fifty states against certain private militia activity, assert a baseless right to take the law into their own hands. Across violent ideologies, individuals and small groups – both formal and informal – have been galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States to carry out violent attacks. Among that wide range of animating ideologies, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (principally those who promote the superiority of the white race) and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.

To sketch a more complete picture and offer lessons to guide institutional development into the future, Part III builds on the leading accounts by analyzing vertical intergovernmental relations regarding national security intelligence in some familiar federalism terms, including the ways allocation of government responsibility affects accountability and the economics of national security as a form of regulation. Examining accountability mechanisms in the national security context highlights the risk that state and local participation in federal programs will undermine the public's ability to influence government policy at those levels. However, this Part suggests ways that any such deficit should be offset by improvements in other types of accountability-reasoned decisionmaking and compliance oversight-by structuring cooperation to bolster joint federal-local policymaking and by creating a mix of centralized and localized monitoring. Examination of national security intelligence in terms of regulation economics helps distinguish which national security intelligence policies (such as information sharing) are probably best dictated at the federal level, because uniformity is important or because states and localities might otherwise externalize too many costs, and which policies (such as information gathering) are probably best set or heavily influenced at more local levels, because of the need to tailor intelligence policy to local contexts and to learn from processes of innovation and adaptation.

How can the new Biden administration address the threat of domestic terrorism, most vividly illustrated by the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6? Last week, 20,000 members of the National Guard were deployed for the inauguration to protect the new administration from far-right extremist violence, but a more serious threat looms. Nuclear and radiological terrorism has prominently appeared in “apocalyptically minded” white-supremacist ideology for decades.

The policy community perceives the threat of nuclear terrorism as almost uniquely emanating from outside of U.S. borders, specifically from Islamist terrorism networks such as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and their splinter groups. But in fact, U.S. far-right extremist groups have a history of attempted procurement of nuclear weapons and radiological materials to use against the federal government. Members of neo-Nazi groups such as Atomwaffen Division, which literally means “atomic weapons” in German, and the National Socialist Movement have attempted in the past to access nuclear materials with the intent to cause harm.

RWE attitudes among sheriffs represent a core threat to the functioning of federalism in the United States, particularly during a time of crisis and tension. RWE primes sheriffs’ resistance by ordaining the office as the ultimate authority under the Constitution. Federalism relies on the cooperation of units of government. The COVID-19 crisis revealed the extent of the dysfunction of uncooperative federalism (Bulman-Pozen and Gerken 2008). During COVID-19, sheriffs turned uncooperative federalism into a highly contentious relationship in county-level politics. Following the course of radicalization among sheriffs over the last half-century, we document current RWE attitudes and demonstrate a robust relationship between RWE and sheriffs’ unwillingness to enforce mandates. We find consistent evidence that sheriffs’ RWE is associated with the sheriff reporting that they refused to enforce mask mandates, even controlling for the political characteristics of the county and the sheriff. Future research might consider the ways that electoral pressures during this time might push sheriffs to change their stance. While Sheriff Adam Fortney (Snohomish County, Washington) faced two separate recall efforts because of his refusal to enforce COVID-related restrictions in his county (Pailthrop 2021), it is possible that many sheriffs’ constituents largely ignored this behavior, making it relatively cost-free to engage in these stances. When we examine if RWE is associated with releasing individuals from jail during COVID (a far less politicized measure and one that involved fewer mandates from other governments), we found no relationship. Other research might consider whether the source of the mandate (local, state, or national) matters in shaping sheriffs' resistance. When local governments passed eviction bans during the COVID-19 crisis (Farris, Holman, and Sullivan 2022), did sheriffs resist these efforts as well?

Yet greater say for states in national policy implementation is not usually proposed to promote innovation or effective cooperation. Rather, groups with unpopular policy preferences push fragmentation in order to extend policy struggles past the point of a law’s enactment. Early anti-pollution laws thus allowed regulated industries to re-fight battles at the state level, with decades passing before successful cleanups could be done. Citizens were left wondering which level of government to blame for delays. Indeed, laws written to permit state and local interests to dispute and delay implementation frustrate democratic accountability and leave citizens thinking that government cannot accomplish what it sets out to do. Too often, as the West Virginia water crisis shows, government cannot cope with pressing threats and crises at all. Toxic waste does not wait for disputes to be resolved before it wreaks harm on people and the environment.