Biopolitical Control Research Articles

Biopolitics, Conflict and Not I

Abstract Beckett’s Not I can be studied in the light of biopolitics. In this article its dramatic action is read as a power relationship where Auditor acts as an ‘apparatus’ in Agamben’s sense of the term, and Mouth as a person, understood in the sense of Esposito’s critique of personhood. In this conflict Mouth does not capitulate by means of a double praxis: ‘destituent’ and ‘instituting’: her refusal to use the pronoun ‘I’ is at the same time an action of self-desubjectification which destitutes language and thus attempts to evade biopolitical control, and an act of subjectification which transforms language and attempts to institute a new and different subject.

A More “Human(e)” Society? Animal Autobiography and the Shaping of Race, Species, and Gender

At the turn of the twentieth century, animal welfare work occupied an increasingly prominent position in the United States, with women’s animal autobiographies serving particularly formative roles in teaching child readers “humane” values. During this same period, felines in particular were increasingly brought into the home even as they were also increasingly racialized in larger discourse. This article focuses on three feline autobiographies from this period, arguing that they present the racialized animal as a site of biopolitical control that ultimately resides in the hands of white women. First, the article examines how humane education initiatives taught children to exert police-like roles in animal welfare work, capitalizing on existing cultural connections between children and animals to then teach children to disidentify from and ultimately help control racialized animal bodies. Then, the essay demonstrates how the three feline autobiographies ultimately advocate for the control and shaping of racialized nonhuman and human biological reproduction. The article’s argument emphasizes the importance of interrogating these texts, published during a formative historical moment in the development of humane education, as we work to transform children’s literature and animal welfare work into sites for anti-racist thought and action.

Dystopian Futures and Posthuman Realities

Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland is a dystopian science fiction novel set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, which delves into the complex interplay between posthuman biopolitics, technology, authority, and the human body. This article examined the posthuman dimension through the lens of biopolitics. The article depicts the oppressive nature of pervasive surveillance and corporate control informed by the apartheid past, wherein four characters become entrapped in a society governed by these forces. Moreover, it demonstrates how the bodily integration of the regulatory technology derives from the racial idea of Western personhood, which intensifies the subjugation by altering subjects into posthuman entities. By adopting the Foucauldian theory of biopolitics as an analytical framework, this study traces the pivotal role played by biopolitics in the transformation of individuals into posthumans. The amalgamation of surveillance technologies and bioengineered enhancements leads to the commodification and perpetual manipulation of the subject, serving to uphold social order and preserve capitalist systems. The findings of this study shed light on the intensification of the control exerted by posthuman biopolitics, thereby contributing to the reconfiguration of the place of humans in academic discourse surrounding the intersection of power, technology, and the human body. By critically analysing the novel through the lens of Foucauldian theory, this article offers insights into the consequences of biopolitical control, underscoring the need for critical examination and discourse on the ethical implications of emergent posthuman societies in the Global South.

Towards transformative climate justice: reorienting communication paradigms in India

ABSTRACT This paper explores the intersection of neoliberalism, development communication, and climate justice in India, particularly under the Modi regime. It examines how neoliberal ideologies leverage dominant communication paradigms reflecting class dominance, biopolitical control, and a unified national identity rooted in religion. This form of communication extends to policies related to climate justice with India conceptualised and communicated as a monolithic entity or a nation-state with a homogenous belief system that prioritises development over climate concerns, reinforced through binaries prevalent in global climate justice negotiations. This nation-centric approach to climate justice marginalises the views of vulnerable communities in climate justice. While taking a critical view of environmental movements, this article advocates alternative paradigms of communication through a bottom-up approach and identifies conditions and institutions that promote transformative climate justice.

Global Accumulation & Gendered Class Exploitation: Theory and Evidence from the Garment Industry During the Covid Pandemic

The paper conducts a gendered class analysis of the impact of the Covid pandemic on the global garment industry to explain the coproduction of retailers’ profits in the core, as measured by higher retailer markups, and the biopolitical control over the minds and bodies of women working on production lines via exploitation and oppression (wage-theft, intensification, violence) in the Global South. The paper proposes the concept of an SRT-augmented rate of exploitation to distinguish between necessary and surplus labor performed at two sites, that of the factory as well as the household. The framework demonstrates how, in the aftermath of supply-chain shortages, gendered forms of absolute & relative surplus-value became critical to retailers’ markups at the cost of immiserating working-class women in peripheral capitalist economies. We posit the ‘housewife proletarian’ as negotiating two crises, a crisis of accumulation at the factory and a crisis of care-labor at home, and show how a dynamic interaction of these twin crises led to increased violence and oppression against women at both sites. We then draw upon a host of empirical sources from recent quantitative/qualitative surveys to explore how working women reported these experiences themselves. The paper concludes by arguing that zooming into these differences, as well as similarities, across peripheral economies can not only improve our understanding of how victims of gendered class exploitation subjectively experienced the transformed biopolitics of manufacturing in the aftermath of the pandemic, but can also enrich our general understanding of SRT as a theory of under-development by unearthing the structural relations of violence between monopsonic power and gendered class exploitation.

Rethinking Enclosed Neighbourhoods: Vital Infrastructure for Design Innovation, Civic Engagement, and Biopower in Urban China

Capitalist processes of urbanization and privatization have produced a growing number of enclosed neighbourhoods across the world. Critical scholarship often frames these neighbourhoods as products of an overextended neoliberalism and symbols of the fragmentation, segregation, and hierarchization of both space and society. This paper expands on these theoretical explanations with a focus on China. As neither neoliberal globalization nor tradition can adequately explain various types of China's enclosed neighbourhoods, a differentiated account suggests that they have evolved in different temporal, sociocultural, and political-economic contexts. Nevertheless, they have commonly played vital roles in (re)shaping everyday environments, driving economic restructuring, transforming governance systems, and facilitating normative transformations in China. China's experiences show that enclosed neighbourhoods have been, and will remain, the everyday environments that shape citizens' behaviours, values, and social relations. They have also served, and will continue to serve, as the vital infrastructure that enables both civic engagement and biopolitical control – an irony that remains to be resolved. Lessons from China suggest that future research and practice on enclosed neighbourhoods in different parts of the world can embrace the heterogeneity, adaptability, and practicability of neighbourhood transformations to inspire design and development innovation, enhance social cohesion, and empower citizens.

From Meditation to Techno-Mindfulness: On the Medicalization of Contemplative Practices and Future Prospects

This article explores the historical transformation of mindfulness, through a process of transculturation and commodification, into a biopolitical tool and analyzes possible future scenarios in which this tool will acquire even greater biopolitical strength through the integration of technological devices and artificial intelligence applications, particularly focusing on the growing divide between mindfulness-based therapies and traditional meditation. While both methodologies share the common objective of providing health and psychophysical benefits, they differ fundamentally in their theoretical frameworks, with mindfulness being egolatric and performance oriented while traditional meditation emphasizes transcending psychophysical identity. The development of mindfulness has been influenced by the sociocultural context of neoliberal and capitalist societies, resulting in a model that fosters self-regulation and emphasizes social control. The article also examines the potential biopolitical risks arising from the integration of AI-powered tools into mindfulness-based therapies. The increasing use of digital devices and applications for monitoring physical and mental health may contribute to a society characterized by constant self-surveillance and self-monitoring, reinforcing biopolitical control of the body. Consequently, this raises critical questions regarding the limits of surveillance and the potential exploitation of vulnerabilities through the incorporation of AI-powered tools.

Violence as method: the “white replacement”, “white genocide”, and “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and the biopolitics of networked violence

ABSTRACT In this paper, I consider the “white replacement”, “white genocide”, and “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and the cycles of violence they have inspired, including mass murders in Norway, New Zealand, and the United States. Working from Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and “race struggle”, I investigate how these events enact a form of “networked violence” that combines offline and online actions to enact a distributed strategy of biopolitical control in an effort to discipline and control the bodies of people of colour, migrants, and in particular Muslims. Based in historical and ideological analysis of the three theories and their network logics, the paper aims to extend Foucault’s theories of “race struggle” and governmentality by demonstrating how right-wing extremist strategies of biopolitical control are now digitally networked and use online platforms to predicate and enact alternative systems of governmentality based in race.

Revitalizing Air: More-than-Human Relations in Urban Health Beyond the Modern-Premodern Binary

The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these efforts, we argue that they represent an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than-human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature.

ВИЗУАЛЬНАЯ МИЛИТАРИЗАЦИЯ БЫТИЯ: ГОЛЛИВУДСКИЕ СТРАТЕГИИ ЭСТЕТИЗАЦИИ НАСИЛИЯ

the centuries-old communication between the elite and the masses in the context of modern mass culture has gradually acquired a rather unconventional character. Instead of the usual system of coercion in its various forms, visual ways of manipulating people’s feelings and thoughts are becoming increasingly popular in political discourse. The complex of corporate economic and political interests is becoming the reason for the active transformation of the modernmanagement system under the influence of decisive biopolitical arguments introduced by the authorities into the socio-cultural space. As an archaic form of realization of power interests, war is becoming widespread today, replacing physical coercion with media programming of feelings, thoughts and behavior of individuals. For many decades, the American horror film has successfully positioned itself as one of the most effective ideological tools for establishing effective biopolitical control over the masses of consumers both inside and outside the United States. It is Hollywood horror cinema that acts as a non-trivial, effective and most profitable way to aestheticize and visually promote violence as natural forms of civilization.

Concealment of the face in social protests. Performances, affects and politics

Throughout time, the mask has been a fundamental semiotic device in social protest and artistic practices, and it is considered a versatile figure that expresses a double identity: the one that it hides and the one that it shows. In today’s digital society, the concealment of the face through masks and make-up has become a symbol of protest facial recognition that exercises biopolitical control of faces. The objective of this work is to analyze, from a sociosemiotic perspective in connection with the theory of affects and performance studies, the construction of aesthetic-political meanings that emerge from the concealment of faces in two actions of artistic activism in Argentina: “8M, Women’s Day”, action of the ContraArte collective in the streets of Córdoba, and “Radio funo vol. 7 portraits” of the FUNO group in the city of Buenos Aires. Said analysis will be carried out on the images of both interventions that are published on the social network Facebook. The research results show how the masks used in both experiences configure signs of collective resistance that activate affections in the public space as policy of dissent.

Biopolitical media discourse in France in the COVID-19 pandemics

The publication activities of the French media during the COVID-19 pandemic in a biopolitical way are analyzed. The theoretical frame of the study is set by Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, as well as the propaganda model of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. To collect and analyze empirical data, the methods of computational linguistics and the method of identifying contextual ideologemes were applied. The research materials were the texts of independent media (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Le Parisien), identified using the keywords “pandemic” and “COVID-19” during the four waves of the pandemic (from January 2020 to March 2022). A total of 29,584 Le Figaro articles, 22,446 Le Monde articles, and 6,402 Le Parisien articles were used in the research. The purpose of the research is to analyze the strategies for including the French media in the biopolitical practices of propaganda and public education on the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the research, it turned out that the studied media during the pandemic were integrated both into general information campaigns and into biopolitical education and propaganda campaigns. Two scenarios for organizing media discourse during the pandemic of COVID-19 were identified, determined by target groups and media tasks. The first scenario actively involves educational and propaganda tools to promote state biopolitical goals. The second scenario integrates informing readers about the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures used by the authorities for biopolitical control, with the presentation of the hierarchies of responsible persons/ institutions (within the state biopolitics). It is concluded that the participation of French independent media in the active promotion of biopolitical programs indicates their close connection with the actors and subjects of biopolitics - the state or business representatives.

Activist masks in the Latin American social protest

Abstract Masks, balaclavas, eye masks, and various accessories have been consistently used to hide the face, from Greek times through the grotesque of the Middle Ages to the Latin American theatre festivals of the 1980s. In the twenty-first century, technological advances such as facial recognition, which are being used for the biopolitical control of the face, caused activists to start developing different mechanisms to cover their faces in public spaces. In other words, the mask is not used solely as a device that builds unique aesthetic-political senses but is also used to avoid being captured by surveillance cameras. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the masks used by activists in Latin American public protests, generating new signs that circulate widely in the semiosphere such as physiognomy, representation, and evocation. For this, we will return to Juri Lotman’s proposal on the semiosphere and the notion of facesphere developed by José Finol, concepts that operate as epistemological and heuristic frameworks that allow understanding the concrete meaning production processes as a global dimension and not only a particular one. What faces are hidden and what physiognomies are shown in the social protest? What borders are established? What political and aesthetic meanings do they build? These are the questions that this paper attempts to answer from a perspective of cultural semiotics.

Ethical Citizenship and Contested Notions of Aging During the COVID-19 State of Emergency in Latvia

COVID-19 governance and its related forms of risk perception produced tensions between emergent and pre-existing understandings and practices of aging. This has resulted both in novel forms of biopolitical control and creative forms of resistance and practices of intergenerational care. This paper uses the concept of ethical citizenship to explain how older adults saw their role in the collective project of defeating COVID-19 despite partly being excluded from it. The research is based on a qualitative research-based learning project that was carried out in Latvia in 2020 at the time of the first pandemic- related state of emergency. We argue that the biopolitical approaches of successful aging and the designation of risk groups were ambiguously intertwined with the relational practices of aging while both processes were linked to the broader post-socialist socioeconomic context. We focus on care relations in the daily lives of older adults during the state of emergency to illustrate how the seemingly irrational opposition to state-imposed restrictions was the result of the socio-economic and relational realities of elderly people. We argue that the recognition of relations of mutual care and support is necessary to improve the lives of current and future older adults.

The biopolitics of Chinese tourism governance in the Arctic

ABSTRACT Scholarly attention to China's domestic experimentation and control measures applied to its population (e.g. the Family Planning Policy and Zero-Covid) has expanded. So, too, has the popularity of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, which refers to political strategies of governing based on a population's biological features. However, China's biopolitical rationales for its growing participation in global governance (全球治理 quanqiu zhili) beyond its borders have received less attention. This research focuses on the Arctic, a region where China does not claim territorial sovereignty but has significant involvement, to examine the Chinese state's exertion of biopolitical control over its outbound tourist population. Drawing on a review of policy texts and media reports, complemented by observations at an Arctic conference held in China and three field visits to the Arctic in 2018–2019, we show how China's interventions in Arctic tourism seek to transform Chinese tourists into a productive, self-disciplining population who practice and promote state logics of social and environmental responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of tourism governance in frontier regions with geopolitical significance, as well as the modern state's exterritorial power over its own citizens even when they are beyond its sovereign territory.

Homescapes of im~mobility: Migratory transpatial repertoires during the pandemic

AbstractThe present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus from October to February 2020. Employing a critical discourse analytic approach, the findings showcase the pandemic biopolitics that have resulted in the de/reterritorialisation of everyday sociospatial activities, thus creating heterotopic places within the home. Specifically, the integration of work and political activity into the homescape has led to the resemiotisation of the linguistic landscape of homes and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘named’ spaces in homes. The concept of ‘transpatial repertoire’ captures the hybridisation of the pandemic-affected homescape, taking into consideration the vulnerabilities and emergent resistances to biopolitical control. In other words, it sheds light on the emergent heterotopias of im~mobility. (Pandemic, heterotopia, transpatial repertoire, linguistic landscape, homescape)*

The Muslim genome: postcolonial nation-building through genomics in Pakistan

National genome projects are often celebrated as assertions of genomic sovereignty, with limited critique of their potential as instruments of biopolitical control and extraction by the state. This paper extends analyses of genomics and nationalism by examining how genomics is mobilized in service of an authoritarian nation-state and ideology in Pakistan. Since independence, Pakistan has sought to unify and centralize the state under a militarized project of Islamic nationalism. I demonstrate how the Pakistani genome was scientifically characterized along key contours of statist ideology to naturalize an imagined religious-nationalist-genetic community. Further, I discuss how genomics attempted to resolve two major tensions in statist narratives: the nation’s immense ethnocultural diversity under a homogenous national identity, and a territorial disjuncture between its geographical “homeland” and ideological “heartland”. Thus, I situate Pakistan’s genomics effort in the history of ideological collaboration between state and intellectual elites, and challenge the inherently emancipatory assumptions of national genomics initiatives.

Do Homo Œconomicus ao Homo in Debitum: efeitos do neoliberalismo na educação

ABSTRACT In this paper debt and indebtedness in the educational market is under discussion, which puts in operation a biopolitical control device in the subjectivization processes of the neoliberal logic established by the gradient ofHomo œconomicus, making educational consumption an investment in the constitution of human capital. So, the production of the indebted subject transposes the subjectivity of theHomo œconomicusmodel to the form ofHomo in debitum, which constitutes the effect of the biopolitical device. Finally, the paper points out that the control introduced in the indebted life, in the own biopolitical game, can provoke a resistance toward the invention of different truths that would produce other subjectivities not governed by debt.

(De-)Materializing the Reproductive Body

This essay examines the multilayered configuration of feminized labor in the Chinese government’s development of family planning policies over the past six decades. It argues that an analysis of the term “labor” is especially compelling in its encapsulation of the female body’s response to China’s paradoxical demand—its physical effort to maintain virginity or sexual untaintedness by guarding itself against “unauthorized” male penetration while simultaneously preparing itself as a fertile ground that promises the reproductive potential to carry on a lineage of life. Furthermore, in addition to the corporeal efforts to maintain reproductive capacity, “labor” also refers to the very activation of femininity that undergirds the “becoming” of Chinese women. It is in the materialization of the female body that Chinese femininity assumes shape, at once turning into a kind of “reproductive matter” and becoming a symbolic figure of national prosperity.In this essay, I also turn to the aesthetic as a site in which labor is redefined as the visceral and violent destruction, reconfiguration, or upholding of physical boundaries that keep the notion of femininity intact. I orient my analysis around three pieces of artworks by Danqi Cai, whose anti-natalist contemplations on childbirth, maternity, and biopolitical control in China transpire her radical rethinking of death as an anti-futurist act that de-materializes the body and removes it from its social and political entanglements.

The police state as a symptom: German classical philosophy and modern biopolitics (Hegel vs Fichte)

The article considers a little-known topic in the history of the social thought, which has regained relevance under the pandemic - the discussion between the outstanding philosophers of the German idealism on the conceptual interpretation of police as an earlymodern form of biopolitical control. In the introductory part, the author argues that the critique of the science and practice of policing by the classics of the German idealism is paradigmatic for the present-day study of the new/old functions and powers of the sanitary-police state concerning the modern civil society’s self-reflection. In the first part, the author describes the tension between the Enlightenment philosophy and the ‘science of policing’ developed by the Cameralists of the 17th-18th centuries, and emphasizes the significant intellectual contribution of the Enlightenment thinkers, primarily Kant’s legal doctrine, to the radical innovations in the political semantics at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. Such innovations became the philosophical basis for the rule of law which questioned the discourse of the absolutist state control over its subjects’ welfare by means of police. In the second part, the article presents a brief reconstruction of Fichte’s attempts to combine the old Cameralist ideas with the new modern principles of individual freedoms at the end of the 18th-century era of the science of police - after Kant’s explicit criticism of the state care unauthorized from below. The third part of the article focuses on Hegel’s critique: in the history of the political thought he was often considered an apologist of the authoritarian Prussian state, but questioned the very possibility of the police-scientific idea of the total biopolitical control over social and economic activities of free modern-type individuals. The author reconstructs Hegel’s argumentation of the absurdity of the total sanitary-police regulation as suggested by Fichte, and insists on the relevance of these thinkers, concepts and thematic fields for reconsidering the failure of the Early-Modern biopolitical utopia under the current intersections of lockdowns and sovereignty.