Biopolitics Kritik - Michigan 2024 CGO

K – Biopower – W1 D4
Notes
notes
Thank you so much to Abby, Sofia, Avinn, Sophia, Michael, Kairo, Tim, Lauren, and Layton for all the hard work they put into this file!
Two main authors to this K, Foucault and Agamben:
Agamben tried to make his theory of biopower really distinct from Foucault but they are in the end still quite similar
General Idea (Foucault):
- Biopower is the shaping of people through disciplinary power, excluding the alien, and shaping what is "acceptable". (Link because what law is acceptabe?)
- Biopower deals with a population as a whole, rather than an individual, it deals with humans as a species. It does this seperately from notions of society.
- Humans qualify and appraise people to create hierarchies that split society into different populations.
Power is exerted by the state.
Essentially, control is split into two halves, biopower and disciplinary power. Biopower is like soft power in IR, it’s the influence of people’s lives by the government through excluding what they determine to be alien. Disciplinary power on the other hand is the enforcement of laws which is very similar to court cases, and is often referred to as juridical power, or the way through which a sovereign state expresses laws as its own power.
Foucault and Agamben diverge in two ways. Foucault believes that biopower and disciplinary power is exerted on a population of people in the entirety, and also excludes entire populations of people. Agamben believes that biopower is exerted on individuals, and so it nitpicks every individual to discipline and exclude, which is much more totalizing. Agamben’s idea of biopower is to drive people towards a world where their political life, or their life controlled by the government and politics, becomes their ENTIRE life, and so the State exudes total control over the lives of each individual.
DISCLAIMER: be prepared to defend indicts…
[State of exception/monopoly on violence stuff here]
Neg
1NC – Shells
1NC – Generic
Intellectual Property is a form of Neoliberal biopolitical power.
Hull 19, Gordon Hull is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has published numerous articles on contemporary philosophical and political theory, intellectual property, privacy, and the history of philosophy. He is also the author of Hobbes and the Making of Modem Political Thought (2009). “The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property REGULATING INNOVATION AND PERSONHOOD IN THE INFORMATION AGE”, HP JLB, Cambridge University Press, Scanned Copy of Pages 185-186.
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.
Biopolitical management culminates in neoimperialism and state-sanctioned targeting – the demarcation of the “other” undergirds necropolitical violence.
Quinan & Thiele 19 – [Dr Christine Quinan (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University. (Christine and Katherine. ‘Biopolitics, necropolitics, cosmopolitics – feminist and queer interventions: an introduction’) Taylor and Francis Online group, December 15 2019, file:///Users/kairoballard/Downloads/Biopolitics_necropolitics_cosmopolitics_-_feminist.pdf)// [King K]
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).
The alt is to dismantle regimes of control through direct action, allowing for open resistance allowing true liberation.
Lilja & Vinthagen 14 (Mona Lilja & Stellan Vinthagen, Mona Lilja currently serves as a Professor of Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden & Dr. Stellan Vinthagen is the Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance, Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, “Sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower: resisting what power with what resistance?”, 24 March 2014 , https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.889403) GGA
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

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.