Biopolitical Apparatuses Research Articles

Manifeste conspirationniste, Parti imaginaire, Comité invisible: a genealogy of radical critique in twenty-first-century France

ABSTRACT When the Manifeste conspirationniste was published in January 2022 it was widely assumed in France that the manifesto was the work of the same anonymous authors responsible for the radical leftist (or, for some, ‘terrorist’) pamphlets attributed variously to Tiqqun, the Parti imaginaire or the Comité invisible. This article explores this authorial hypothesis through a comparative close reading of the Manifeste conspirationniste and key works by the radical collective. The manifesto interprets the Covid pandemic as marking the logical culmination of a biopolitical apparatus that has weaponised everything from consumer electronics to the pharmaceutical industry in paranoid pursuit of the indefinite reproduction of capitalist oligarchy. Likewise, the essays of Tiqqun diagnose the thorough imbrication of military technologies, police and surveillance powers, as well as the entertainment and consumer industries in the development of what they call ‘cybernetic capitalism’. Tiqqun and the Comité invisible argue that, in a system that is dedicated to ever greater transparency (in the interests of the biopolitical disciplining of citizens), any resistance must deliberately seek out ‘zones of opacity’ by cultivating the kind of noise that won’t be recuperated as carnival, or the kind of slowness that can’t simply be rebranded as luxury. This looks forward to the Manifeste conspirationniste’s strategy of conspiracy, subterfuge and insubordination as the necessary response to an ideological apparatus that is unavoidably conspiratorial in its effects, however theoretically benign it may be in intention.

The Work of Man

This publication is the first translation into Russian of an article by Giorgio Agamben, originally published as “The Work of Man: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics” in the first issue of Forme di vita in 2004. This text builds upon and expands upon the main ideas presented in “The Potency of Thought.” The work raises the question of human capacity, which is always accompanied by inherent incapacity, in connection with the problem of defining human nature in terms of activity and inactivity. The clarification of these concepts aims to reopen the inquiry into the essence and nature of man in relation to the experience of political life. Agamben begins by asking how we can understand the experience of man’s essential inactivity if man inherently possesses a vocation. By linking the experience of human life to the experience of pure potency, Agamben hypothesizes that man’s essence is not confined to any identity or cause, thus requiring a reevaluation of notions within the Western tradition of thought rooted in the constitutive relation of man to his action (activity). By suggesting an alternative interpretation of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, dynamis/ energeia and zoē tis (“a certain kind of life”) and raising the question of a form-of-life that is not encompassed by the biopolitical apparatus, Agamben turns to Dante and his work Monarchy. Through Dante’s experiences, Agamben demonstrates that human thought, by its very structure, is open to the possibility of its own absence and inactivity. Consequently, this raises a question that further research aims to address: Is it possible today to conceive of a politics that corresponds to the absence of work of man without succumbing to the biopolitical imperative of assuming it?

Numbering and Boat IDs: The Dehumanizing Use of ID Numbers in Australia’s Border Regime

The practice of identifying people by ID numbers rather than their names, which the authors term here “numbering,” has been extensively recorded in carceral and bordering institutions. While the argument for using identification numbers (ID numbers) is that they enable the reliable mapping between a person and designated institutional artifacts, according to people who have been subjected to numbering, its effect is to dehumanize, erasing individuals’ identities so that they might be more effectively abused as objects. To explore these logics, our article provides a critical reading of Boat IDs in Australia’s notorious border regime based on the first-hand accounts of people subjected to numbering. We apply a ‘technology-in-practice’ lens to analyze ID numbers as biopolitical apparatuses of carceral recognition and erasure that work to materialize power relations of domination and subjugation.

(De)territorializing Madness

Throughout the twentieth century, the traditional South Korean folktale “Janghwa Hongryeon jeon” (The Story of Janghwa and Hongryeon) has been reiterated and reinterpreted in several textual narratives and filmic adaptations (Kim Kyu Hyun; Leung 173). The article examines two recent film reimaginings of this story—Kim Jee-woon’s 2002 South Korean A Tale of Two Sisters, and The Guard Brothers’ 2009 American remake, The Uninvited. Using poststructuralist and feminist disability theory, the argument is that Su-mi in Sisters and Anna in Uninvited are both subjected to the biopolitical apparatuses of control imposed by the societal norms of compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer 8). Su-mi and Anna seek deterritorialization from the diagnosis of mental illness by engaging in creative acts of multiplicity, or what Gilles Deleuze describes as becoming-other (44). Anna uses her hybridity to engage in transgressive acts which paradoxically stabilize the social order of the nuclear family. Although Anna’s madness challenges the stability of normativity, her actions demonstrate that protecting the symbolic heteronormativity of the family trumps her emancipation. Conversely, Su-mi deterritorializes from subservience and resists the medicalization of her mind and body. Su-mi lacks the ethical response from those around her and thus fails to receive the care she requires. The lack of recognition or care from others ultimately leads to her re-institutionalization and the perpetuation of surveillance.

The Surplus of Death

Abstract This article focuses on the temporal and spatial proximity mediating the lives of those who have been institutionalized in distinctive (albeit similar) ways on the Greek island of Leros, like asylum seekers and the mentally ill—and those working in asylum institutions—who appear co-implicated in the circuit of crisis capitalism and the biopolitical/necropolitical effects of managing populations deemed disposable in the name of care and protection. Drawing closely on the double meaning of the term asylum, this article explores the gendered and racialized biopolitical apparatus of vulnerability management in asylum contexts, especially the deadness and livingness they produce. It argues that complicity arises within the dense atmosphere of the surplus of death and the unattainable accumulation produced by multiple crises. It approaches the associated “surplus of death” as essential to the political economy of asylum management, which operates on a logic of “slow death” and the wearing out of populations struggling to endure its unbearable affects. This affective atmosphere is imbued with ethico-political questions that are neither owned by particular subjects nor disavowed in their universal reach but sustained (in their unsustainability) through norms and morals reiterated in their articulation, sense-making trouble, and measurement of worth.

Religion, Gender, and Bodies: Women’s Polyvalent Roles and Experiences in the Biopolitics of Taiwan’s Presbyterian Missions

The Presbyterian missions and medical missions in 19th-century Taiwan were successful enterprises that over time developed into the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, which stands today as the largest Christian minority church in this country. Through a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, this paper analyzes the roles of female missionaries in the management of bodies and the subjective experiences of both foreign and Native women in the missions. Going beyond descriptive narratives and control-versus-agency reductionist frames, the paper points the polyvalent semantics of such roles and experiences. It also explores the complex relations between the women’s biopolitical functions, the PCT’s industrial type of biopolitical apparatus, and the biopolitical regimes of the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government in the early 20th century. The conclusions remark on the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of gender and body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies.

Prescribed Performances: Fluxus and Disability

Abstract In 1961, George Maciunas first met the artists and composers whom he would organize into the neo-avant-garde movement known as Fluxus. That same year, he acquired a persistent cough that was later diagnosed as asthma. Drawing from disability-studies scholars including Alison Kafer, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jasbir K. Puar, and Ellen Samuels, “Prescribed Performances” considers the historical dimensions of this coincidence. Maciunas belonged to a new class of medical subject, the patient of chronic illness who depended on postwar medical innovations (such as steroids) and integrated a regime of self-management into their everyday life. To chart where and how the subject presented in neo-avant-garde performance intersected with the one produced by an emerging biopolitical apparatus for regulating public health, this article turns to the first Fluxus concerts, held in Europe in 1962–63, and then moves forward into the 1970s, asking how event scores, multiples, happenings, and body art were all inflected by their authors' experiences of debility, gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and precarity. Maciunas's Solo for Sick Man (1962), FluxClinic (1966), One Year (1973–74), Hospital Event (1975–76), and Flux Wedding (1978) will be discussed in relation to works by George Brecht, John Cage, Hi Red Center, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Shigeko Kubota, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and La Monte Young.

After Sexology

AbstractIs sexology over? What does one do with its history, at once a seemingly remote relic and a persistent logic of biopolitics today? “Sexology and Its Afterlives” begins from the premise that the history of sexology lives in the infrastructures of the present. Locating the afterlives of sexology in material and aesthetic form, this introduction to the special issue engages the largely unmarked detritus of a disaggregated sexological project, whose components have found renewed life in the biopolitical apparatus. The contributors to this issue identify not only familiar sites of sexological persistence (the sex-segregated public toilet) but also less immediately obvious ones (the Moynihan report, redlining, the army base) as executing the unfinished business of the sexological project. This breadth of sexological diffusion makes its analysis a necessarily interdisciplinary prospect, and the contributors call on disability studies, trans studies, Black studies, women-of-color feminism, visual culture, and the history of sexuality, generating emergent concepts, including crip-of-color critique (Kim), binary-abolitionist praxis (Stryker), a “trans-mad” aesthetic (Crawford), and a shift toward expressivity as a framework (Musser). Across the issue, newly imagined sites of collective politics come into view as a payoff for working through the stalled-out imaginaries of sexological binarisms.

‘The very best generation of teachers ever’: teachers in post-2010 ministerial speeches

ABSTRACT This article explores how teachers were discursively positioned in England following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, using a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 363 speeches produced by government ministers. Findings show that young teachers were privileged in post-2010 government discourse, constructed as valued and active social agents. Experienced teachers, however, were constructed as passive and deficient, albeit useful for training new teachers. The findings indicate the deployment of a biopolitical apparatus which sought to hierarchically distinguish between different groups of teachers in order to facilitate system reform.

Notas sobre o Hospital como Dispositivo Biopolítico em Foucault

Na obra de Michel Foucault, a instituição hospital constitui-se como um dispositivo biopolítico exemplar do nexo entre saber e poder. Esta comunicação abordará o laço entre medicalização do hospital e a hospitalização da medicina. No final do séc. XVIII, ao mesmo tempo que o hospital passa de morredouro a máquina de curar, a medicina deixa de ser uma técnica geral de saúde para se assumir como prática clínica. O devir-ciência da medicina tem como correlato uma organização do espaço hospitalar caracterizada por uma distribuição espacial dos elementos, desde a arquitectura ao interior hospitalar, cujo critério é a optimização dos processos e dos resultados – o controlo da doença e a maximização da vida. Por outro lado, a tomada de poder pelo médico que Foucault aí denota pode também dar a ver o modo como o médico, no topo da hierarquia hospitalar, é afinal assujeitado pelo poder que representa.

Subjects of History: Foucault on the Emergence of Conflictual Nationhood and Biopolitics

Scholarship often overlooks Foucault's 1976 lecture-course, where he illuminates a historical shift from a system of sovereignty to a biopolitical apparatus. Locating discourses in the early modern period that developed or provided historicized codings of social relations, Foucault explores how such discourses contained embedded references to a 'war of the races,' of which a key element was an assertion of the presence of strife or division within the body politic. In particular, Foucault indicates how Thomas Hobbes' juridically-oriented theory countered this discourse of perpetual strife, and how discourses of the French nobiliary reaction furthered it. This article argues that Foucault's understanding of biopower and its emergence from such historical discourses sheds light on the history of nationalism, helping to understand the modern political experience of subjectivity as circumscribed by tensions operating within modern nation-states and also as mobilized towards national objectives.

Biopolitics and Becoming in Animal-Technology Assemblages

Abstract This article critically explores Foucauldian approaches to the human-animal-technology nexus central to modern industrialised agriculture, in particular those which draw upon Foucault’s conception of power as productive to posit the reconstitution of animal subjectivities in relation to changing agricultural technologies. This is situated in the context of key recent literature addressing animals and biopolitics, and worked through a historical case study of an emergent dairy technology. On this basis it is argued that such approaches contain important insights but also involve risks for the analyses of human-animal-technology relations, especially the risk of subsuming what is irreducible in animal subjectivity and agency under the shaping power of technologies conceived as disciplinary or biopolitical apparatuses. It is argued that this can be avoided by bringing biopolitical analysis into dialogue with currents from actor-network theory in order to trace the formation of biopolitical collectives as heterogeneous assemblages. Drawing upon documentary archive sources, the article explores this by working these different framings of biopolitics through a historical case study of the development of the first mechanical milking machines for use on dairy farms.

LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.

Policing the social body: Medicine and the administration of legal gender recognition in France and Italy, an historical perspective

This paper explores the role of medicine in the regulation of legal gender recognition for trans and gender diverse people in France and Italy. I focus on the processes that led the two countries to establish for the first time a procedure for legal gender change in the 1980s/1990s. Despite the differences, both in France and in Italy medical knowledge and technologies were embedded in the procedures for legal gender change and health professionals took a role as gatekeepers to gender recognition. The medicalization of legal gender recognition, I argue, was part of the deploying of a bio-political apparatus that aimed at regulating and controlling “gender transitions” through regulation and normalization rather then through repression.

The biopolitics of carbon accounting in Indonesia’s forests

Across developing countries substantial effort and resources have been dedicated to setting up systems for the measurement, recording and verification of greenhouse gas emissions in the forestry and land-use sectors – a key initiative of the global climate programme Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. This paper approaches these systems through the lens of conservation biopolitics, identifying the calculative processes and spatial logics that attempt to regulate the life and death of the forest. It uses an example of the Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System to explore how a biopolitical apparatus of constant data accumulation and presentation integrates an infinitely complex set of ecological processes across highly differentiated spatial landscapes, and organises these into governable carbon domains. The Indonesian National Carbon Accounting System provides a visual and numeric representation of the various policy and socio-economic processes that drive and limit carbon emissions, and identifies where this occurs in the landscape. By understanding these forest–carbon–human dynamics, programmes can be designed that change how populations access, use and potentially restore the life of the forest. For state and non-state interests alike, the System was viewed as a critical tool for both developing and evaluating the performance of multiple forest carbon initiatives. It also offers a surveillance apparatus to regulate the carbon market and to discipline the actions of various agents that utilise forests and land. Critically, the biopolitical utility of these systems have been undermined by waning commitment within Indonesia to overhaul forest governance towards carbon outcomes.

Imagining Online Sexual Health Outreach: A Critical Investigation into AIDS Service Organizations Workers’ Notions of ‘Gay Community’

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how online outreach workers within AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) discursively imagine notions of “gay community” and the tensions between inequities in varying conceptions of “community” that operate in providers’ and managers’ sexual health online outreach. Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) of interview data from a community-based research project examining sexual health outreach among gay, bisexual, and queer (GBQ) men, we provide an analysis that problematizes notions of a unitary “gay community” while illustrating how certain privileged subjects are deemed ideal for inclusion and representation within both online and ASO communities. Moreover, we interrogate how online medical health regimes constitute the ideal neoliberal gay male subject who self-responsibilizes and individualizes his sexual health while erasing inequities relating to social location and intersecting identities. Our analysis highlights how homonormative politics infiltrates GBQ sexual health programming and the ways in which understandings of the “self” and gay subjectivities are constituted through biopolitical apparatuses and online sexual health surveillance. We argue that it is necessary to move online sexual health outreach beyond specifically focusing on the needs of white GBQ men by bringing a greater awareness to the continual exclusions which operate within GBQ “communities”.

Blake'sVisions of the Daughters of Albionand the Biopolitical Unconscious

Alan Bewell identifies a newly globalized, consumerist nature in the Romantic period, one aspect of a larger context in which Michel Foucault observed the “dawn of biopolitics.” This historical context, along with Erasmus Darwin's best-selling poemThe Loves of the Plants(1789), is brought to bear here on William Blake'sVisions of the Daughters of Albionand on traditional readings of it that manifest nostalgia for an idealized past, a past predating enclosure's separation of population and environment, of human being and nature. Correcting the prevalent misidentification of the marigold that Oothoon plucks inVisions, my reading newly envisions an Oothoon whose relation to the life-forms around her replicates the modes of domination and exploitation inherent in capitalist ideology. What have seemed to be anomalies in Oothoon, her curious connections to Bromion and her offer to procure girls for Theotormon, instead reflect central character traits. In the end, a reaccounting of the historicity of Blake's poetic text yields a heroine and a reading population struggling to view themselves as at the center of a reflexive system that governs and exploits the mutual relations of natural and social surroundings but that also is governed and exploited by the same biopolitical apparatus.

Nación-frontera: Apuntes sobre la expansión de la frontera y algunas de sus implicaciones

Analizados los acontecimientos recientes en los fluujos migratorios hacia el interior del <em>primer mundo</em>, y en especial en la última década los movimientos hacia Europa, se considera en este trabajo que la frontera ha superado su categoría inicial de límite físico entre dos entidades político-administrativas diferenciadas. El presente trabajo es un rastreo del estatus actual de la frontera a través del que se alcanza a especular con las repercusiones que su extensión espacial y temporal está produciendo en el mundo contemporáneo. Si las fronteras, en su anterior estatus funcionaban como dispositivos biopolíticos, ejerciendo como límite de una soberanía con derecho a administrar la vida (cuya expresión extrema es el exterminio); los nuevos usos de la frontera dan pie a considerarlas dispositivos transpolíticos que hacen surgir una nueva categoría de sujeto al que no se desea administrar: <em>personas-residuo</em> cuya propia piel marca el confín del estado.

Place branding as urban policy: the (im)political place branding

The present paper argues for more conceptually-laden research on the constitution of place branding as a hybrid form of urban policy. By both drawing from empirical examples and problematizing the extensive research on place branding, this paper offers the view of place branding as an impolitical form of urban policy that emerges as a biopolitical apparatus in an ecology of complex political practices which can materialize both negatively and positively. Ultimately, this paper outlines a novel alternative approach for conducting research and analyse the politics of place branding. Such an approach has the potential to more clearly analyse and theorize the political dimensions of place branding.

Giorgio Agamben, J. G. Farrell’sThe Singapore Grip, and the ColonialDispositif

In his Afterword toThe Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell thanks Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben for suggesting the phrase that became the title of his novel. What can we make of this surprising and unexpected connection between an Anglo-Irish author’s novel about colonial Singapore on the eve of its fall to the Japanese army during World War II and Agamben’s writings on biopolitics? Despite the serendipitous nature of the encounter between the two writers and the lack of any causal relation between their works, my paper argues that there is an unacknowledged affinity that allows us to open them up to what Agamben calls theirEntwicklungsfähigkeit, “the locus and the moment wherein they are susceptible to development,” thereby bringing out the biopolitical elements in Farrell’s novel and turning Agamben’s insights intodispositifsor biopolitical apparatuses in the direction of the analysis of colonial rule.