Biopolitical Control Research Articles

The Letting Die of the South Asian Body: a Foucauldian Analysis of White Hegemony in Western Cardiovascular Medicine

Cardiovascular disease is the second leading cause of death in Canada and disproportionately affects those of South Asian ancestry. Anecdotally, stories of missed signs and emergency bypass surgeries are abound; empirically, medical research has identified a series of distinct risk factors for South Asian individuals. However, these factors are typically unrecognized by healthcare workers who are typically trained to use recommendations that are founded research done using Caucasian participants. The consequence of this omission is the normalization of the Caucasian body as 'the body' in medicine through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms, and the 'letting die' of the South Asian body as a result. In taking a Foucauldian approach to this issue, this essay first maps the empirical evidence for the heightened CVD risk in South Asians, namely their predisposition to developing type 2 diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome, and dyslipidemia, among other factors. Disciplinary mechanisms to enforce social cohesion discount these differences as exceptions, and attempt to rehabilitate the South Asian body towards the Caucasian norm. These actions are often subconscious, but result in real actions like spending less time with South Asian patients, misuse of assessment metrics, and lower cardiac rehabilitation referral rates. On a population level, research funding is rarely given to studies investigating disease in particular ethnic groups. Hence, clinical practice guidelines must rely on incomplete data to create population-level recommendations. These guidelines act as if they apply to all individuals, but are in fact partisan; thus, the biopolitical control of populations is made apparent through the racist undertones that thrum beneath the veneer of an equal society. Ultimately, this essay serves a counterhistorical function, and demands recognition of the South Asian body in the medical literature. The current medical regime routinely discounts populations who exist outside the norm. Future research and acknowledgement of these groups is necessary to ensure equitable treatment of all patients, regardless of their background.

‘We are doing better’: Biopolitical nationalism and the COVID-19 virus in East Asia

The COVID-19 pandemic stirs up strong nationalist and localist sentiments; places pride themselves on containing the virus more effectively: We are doing better. We call this ‘biopolitical nationalism’, understood by us as the dynamics between body, geopolitics and affect. When looking at mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, we analyse how the biopolitical efforts of these places are being compared, applauded and supported. Under a discourse of life and survival, this celebration of biopolitical control does not fall into the classic reproduction of capital, but speaks to geopolitical identification. Biopolitics has morphed into a field of competition, of rivalry, of nationalistic – or, perhaps more generally, localist – power games. What can we do as Cultural Studies scholars?

Assemblages of desire

This paper considers the operations of affective technology within contemporary technocapitalism through affect theory. It is argued that affective technologies enter into power arrangements with political and corporate interests, altering an acting bodies’ affect — in the Spinozan definition, the “capacity to affect and be affected” — within social and political life. Affective computation uses machine learning techniques to ‘capture’ and quantify affective intensities in data form, automating a normalizing logic of division and categorization that classifies bodies, emotions, and objects. Affective technologies invoke what Luciana Parisi called “automated decisionism,” where machine learning processes digitize incomputable states in order to impose a self-rationalizing logic structure that regulates a user-subject’s actions (Parisi, “Reprogramming Decisionism”). Affective technologies exert biopolitical control over users through quantified logics of division and devaluation. It is suggested thataffect might simultaneously operate as an analytic lens to speculate on whether collective affectivity and political agency might be reclaimed through using these technologies. The following concludes with an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages of desire” to suggest that affective technologies might produce other micropolitical arrangements that increase user agency as social and political subjects.

Healthcare of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and its Politicization, 1970–1991: Treating the Body Politic

Abstract:This article explores the health service provided by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) during the Eritrean Liberation War, and its political dimensions and implications. The EPLF used healthcare to define itself politically against its rivals and to penetrate communities. It aimed to incorporate population groups into the struggle, to inculcate EPLF ideology, and to transform the national community. EPLF practitioners were most successful when they cooperated with existing structures of power. The progressive, dynamic, and transformative nature of the healthcare system is inextricable from the coercion sometimes used to achieve the ideals of the EPLF, and the way in which healthcare became an instrument of biopolitical control.

Representing anxious parents in China: A study ofParenting Sciencemagazine 1980–2016

This article analyses the representation of parental practices in Parenting Science, the first and longest running parenting magazine published in China since 1980. Drawing on Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics as well as their current development in cultural studies and sociology of health, this article critically investigates the cultural frames that surround parental practices relating to the health and development of young children. It explores how issues of medicalisation, intensive parenting, responsibility and self-management are represented in the magazine, ‘reflecting’ as well as ‘reinforcing’ dominant cultural ideas of parenting and childrearing in China. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 2295 items from 37 issues of the magazine (1980–2016), including editorials, feature stories, standard articles, Q&As, adverts and other short items, this article has identified three major frames of parental practices in monitoring and facilitating children’s health, development and wellbeing: (1) the medicalisation of children’s health problems, (2) the rise of expert authority and (3) the responsibilisation of parents. This article argues that these frames underpin the construction of an intensive and anxious parenting culture in China and serve as powerful tools of biopolitical control.

Justicia, amor y disyunción en <em>Palais de Justice</em> (2014), de José Ángel Valente

En 2014 se publicaba Palais de Justice, el volumen en prosa donde José Ángel Valente recreaba el juicio desencadenado por el divorcio de su primera mujer en los años ochenta, y en el que se inscribe una paradoja entre el amor y el derecho, en la medida en que el primero es sometido al control biopolítico del segundo mediante la institución matrimonial. Partiendo del contraste entre justicia y ley propuesto por Jacques Derrida y otros pensadores contemporáneos, este artículo examina cómo, en el texto de Valente, el sentimiento amoroso opera una disyunción respecto a lo legal para desplegar un ámbito suspendido en el que habita un orden otro. Inquietudes permanentes de Valente como la atención a la mística o al lenguaje se actualizan en una postulación de la existencia como la «nuda vida» teorizada por Giorgio Agamben. Con ella se cuestiona el fundamento legalista de la civilización occidental.

Surveillance e as “novas” tecnologias de Controle biopolítico

O presente estudo tem como tema o surveillance e a sociedade do controle biopolítico, sendo dada ênfase à conexão com o sistema penal e as tecnologias dispostas nas práticas de segurança. Tem-se como problema de pesquisa como e de que forma operam os “novos” mecanismos de surveillance em prol da segurança no modelo biopolítico do Estado penal? Conclui-se que o modelo de controle atual baseado em riscos e algoritmos emprega o surveillance (e suas “novas” tecnologias) em uma atuação securitária seletiva, adotando o discurso “científico/tecnológico” como escusa para manutenção discriminatória de uma biopolítica da atuação penal voltada para morte de sujeitos e grupos sociais específicos. Por fim, a metodologia empregada compreende uma abordagem fenomenológico-hermenêutica, um método de procedimento monográfico e técnica de pesquisa por documentação indireta.

‘Occupied Enclave’: Policing and the underbelly of humanitarian governance in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya

This article transports discussions on the geographies of occupation to the refugee camp and infers that rethinking militarised policing in camps as a form of occupation brings into sharper relief the everyday violence of humanitarian governance. While most research on the administration of camps has focused on the biopolitical control of humanitarian agencies and NGOs that register, sustain, and manage refugee lives in exile, far less is known about the role of the police and paramilitary. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, this article provides an alternative reading of the militarised spatialities of the camp, in which Kenya's (post)colonial disposition for state violence has merged indistinguishably with the contemporary securitisation of refugees, and the humanitarian need for unobstructed management of aid operations. This article proposes that these converging trajectories have transformed the refugee camp into a zone under military-style occupation: an ‘occupied enclave’. In this tightly controlled space, Kenyan police act as enforcers of humanitarian violence that is inflicted on a civilian population of refugees with precarious life chances and limited freedom of movement. This is analysed through four domains of occupation – architecture, bureaucracy, physical force and material extraction – that work in conjunction to produce violent spatial effects of immobility, exclusion, and exception. Revisiting the camp through this lens bridges the gap between the literatures on humanitarian governance and military occupation and reiterates the continuing importance of enclave spaces for governing mobile and unwanted populations.

Showtime: the biopolitical performance of ‘effective beginning science teacher’

Over the past decade, neoliberal practices for ensuring teacher effectiveness have shaped the landscape of education. In the midst of policy mandates for highly effective teachers, a biopolitical movement also undergirds the desire for a particular kind of ideal classroom. Grounded in traditions of scientism, beginning science teachers and their practices are implicitly and explicitly subjected to biopolitical control. The central question of this research includes: How does the desire to standardized science teacher practice through regular government-mandated evaluation of science teacher teachers produce biopolitical subjects? Using post-qualitative inquiry, this study examines ethnographic moments with one beginning science teacher alongside one teacher evaluation rubric used for formal teacher evaluation to explore ontological considerations for the implicated subjects. By illuminating the intra-active relationship between micro- and macro-discourses within one high school science classroom, the depths to which biopower functions is made visible. The paper concludes by calling science teacher educators and those responsible for their induction to examine the multifaceted ethical dilemmas inherently shaping their work with beginning science teachers.

Fiction Machines: Oporavak

In this statement I consider the single screen video work Oporavak (2016), a work that has been shown in galleries, film festivals and media art biennales. The video is part of an ongoing research project called Fiction Machines where I interrogate how fictional methods can be used to produce works that propose new forms of machine that are able to escape, subvert and re-write contemporary control technologies, their content and modulation mechanisms. I begin by providing the theoretical context for Oporavak, highlighting the new forms of virtualised and biopolitical control that are enabled by networked computational writing machines powered by informatics and affective modulations. I then look at the fictional methods deployed in the production of the work including the speculative recycling of appropriated material and the deployment of the video as a form of subversive re-writing machine that both enhances and destabilises control mechanics. Finally, I consider how the video uses affective tactics to perform on, and manipulate, the expectations of the audience and their own conscious/unconscious control desires.

The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre

Reviewed by: The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender by Michael Tondre Devin M. Garofalo TONDRE, MICHAEL. The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 240 pp. $45.00 hardcover; $45.00 e-book. Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility traces the relationship between novels and statistical thinking in the Victorian period. It does so to explore how they together configured the real not as a question of what is but rather, and more tantalizingly, what might have been. Taking as its point of departure Henry James’s likening of novels to “loose baggy monsters,” The Physics of Possibility offers “a revised history of the novel” wherein “what was once deemed bad form”—narrative disruptions and digressions, occlusions and abandonments—is in fact “a meaningful legacy of fiction,” rife with “expansive ethical and political aims” that do not abide organicist models of narrative form (1). Tondre revivifies this legacy and its aims by reading for “ensemble effects,” or “moments that break the diegetic frame of a plot” in order to tarry with the conditional, the possible, the might have been (11). These moments mark critical “deviations from the coherence of a fictional world,” conjuring instead “a composite of different possible plots imagined at a given fictional moment or location” (11). To read for ensemble effects is in some sense to read for ghosts—for the strange alter-novels that flicker into view in moments of narrative irresolution and indirection, when narrative “nonhappenings” take forceful if not also fleeting shape (26). As Tondre notes, “ensemble” connotes simultaneity and thus a thinking of the present as a landscape of presents in dynamic formation (26). By the end of the nineteenth century, the word also connotes “statistical ensembles,” or “versions of a physical system, each expressing a possible state of affairs at a given moment” (11). This shift coincides with a broader cultural reconfiguration underway during the Victorian period: namely, the reconceptualization of chance as neither strictly subjective nor objective—as “something more than an illusion” and yet “less than a plain fact” (7). Such irresolutions were the focal point of what Tondre calls the “physics of possibility”: “a conceptual legacy” (19) wherein various thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Henry Maudsley, and James Clerk Maxwell, among others—attempted to statistically “approximate the condition[s]” of the real and the alternatives with which it teems. Reimagining norms not as fateful determinates but potentially realizable fictions, Victorian scientists “cultivated” with their novelist contemporaries a set of “common techniques of representation” (2). Together, they tell a story about statistical data that departs from familiar narratives of biopolitical control. Along the way, these disciplinary crossovers also reveal how novels do science. As Tondre puts it, “latent scientific irresolutions…had singular importance in literature and as literature” (25). If Victorian scientists were unable to [End Page 617] put the unresolved relationship between the real and the possible to rest, novelists took over from there, turning to fiction for what it does best: thinking beyond and outside the “propositional logic of science” to “pose ideas without prescribing truth claims, invite multiple perspectives on what had seemed self-evident, and question what went without saying” (25). Tondre thus attends to the ways “fictional aesthetics are adept at reimagining” (rather than “simply reifying”) “historical realities” (2). This, Tondre argues, is the “lost promise and ameliorative potential” of the Victorian novel (60): it never produces “a single composite claim of truth” (73), preserving instead the ethical potentiality of “stand[ing] outside” or in multivalent relation to “the present” (66). Crucial to the ethics of Tondre’s argument is his engagement with queer theory. The Physics of Possibility tracks alternatives to the organicist telos of the Bildungsroman, exploring how Victorian novels deviate from this norm to noninstrumentalist ends. Reminding his readers that “Victorians conceived of character as a field of possibilities from classical norms of formation,” Tondre tracks “a tradition of realism couched in the conditional or subjunctive mood,” which tends toward failed formation and its “altered futures” (4). Eve Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading—as well as Elizabeth Freeman’s and Heather Love’s respective refusals...

A toupeira e a serpente

O artigo tem como ponto de arranque o estudo sobre o biopoder, em particular, desde as transformações da atual fase de expansão mundial do capitalismo. Para tanto, seguindo a trilha de Foucault, no trânsito e contaminações entre soberania, disciplina e biopoder, interroga a série de elementos configuradores das tecnologias voltadas ao “governo da vida”, tanto em relação ao controle dos corpos quanto da população. Assim, analisando duas figuras zoopolíticas, índices do alojamento da vida, para Deleuze, a serpente a e toupeira, aponta a profunda mutação do capitalismo como sociedade de controle biopolítico, sobretudo, destacando como o fluxo único e ininterrupto de informações é gerenciado para fins de segurança (riscos) ou de valorização imediata (dados). Noutros termos, há, por um lado, algoritmos de controle biopolítico que mo­dulam fluxos de informação, filtram e canalizam a mobilidade de indivíduos e populações e que, por outro, forjam bancos de dados e pacotes de informações que descrevem estilos de consumo e capturam formas de vida através de coo­peração gratuita. Enfim, o decisivo quanto à evolução do biopoder passa pelo controle de fluxos que opera algoritmos de administração e gerenciamento do social, produzindo uma série de tecnologias sobrepostas para fins comerciais, securitários e militares.

Pastoralism in Latin America: An Ensemble of Religious Governmental Technologies in Colonial Costa Rica

Based on a critical empirical application of Foucault’s concept of pastoralism and a genealogical research approach, this article suggests that the Catholic regime that operated in Costa Rica during the Spanish colonial period (16th to 19th centuries), developed an ensemble of distinctive ‘technologies of government’—charity, ceremonial strictness, bio-political control, geo-political rule, and administrative efficiency. Drawing on documentary and archival material, the analysis highlights both the governmental ‘logics’ and the governmental ‘techniques’ of the above technologies, as well as their complex centuries-long operation. The conclusions remark how such a complex ensemble of religious governmental technologies problematizes the synchronicistic and reductionist analyses of religion and politics; historical–institutionalist studies of colonial Catholicism in Latin America; and the compartmentalization of sovereignty, discipline, and apparatuses of security that Foucault originally proposed to account for the historical development of governmentality.

Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways

This special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal offers a discussion of settler-colonial biopolitics as it targets Indigenous life across a range of transnationally related, yet distinct, sites of colonial settlement. Moving across these sites, it examines how settler colonial regimes at different locations and at different positions within an economically hierarchized globality employ forms of biopolitics in historically specific ways to their own ends. At the same time, this special issue explores Indigenous life in its manifold manifestations as a site of resurgence, decolonial resistance, and enduring continuity that exceeds any attempt at biopolitical control. The contributions to this special issue thus engage scholarly conversations in critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies that connect a biopolitical logic of racialization, regularization, and naturalization to a geopolitical logic of dispossession and removal as inherent to the eliminatory logics of settler colonialism.

La reforma educativa en México: 1970-1976

This article examines the education reform enacted in the earlier half of the 1970s in Mexico, as a paradigmatic case of the effect of criticism and social movements on the formation of government programs. The historical process is reconstructed on the basis of the concept of regimes of governmentality, developed by Foucault (1991) and the so-called Anglo-Foucauldian scholars Burchel, Gordon and Miller (1991); Rose (1999); Dean (1999); and Rose, O’Malley and Valverdes (2006). The text discusses the formation and development of a mentality of government that reflects on the educational movements of 1968 and 1971 as expressions of the growing illegitimacy of the institutions of political control, school, family and political authority. In response to that burgeoning rejection, it became necessary to overhaul and refashion the intervening authorities, the purposes, media and institutions of biopolitical control. In particular, the educational reform of 1973 was an attempt to reshape the processes of subjectivation that had been being employed since the 1968 crisis, and to integrate controls over citizens’ daily lives into the powers of the State security apparatus.

A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection on Resistance by Irregular Refugees against Fingerprinting as State Biopolitical Control in the European Union

A Life Absolutely Bare? A Reflection on Resistance by Irregular Refugees against Fingerprinting as State Biopolitical Control in the European Union

Evading Biopolitical Control: Capoeira as Total Resistance

The analysis of “total war” as systemic, ubiquitous and unrelenting has increased the analytical and political urgency of understanding resistance. Drawing on Foucault’s elaboration of biopolitics and “making strange”, this article theorises “total resistance” through a study of the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira. It explores how capoeira adepts in the early 20th century resisted the “total war” of state repression of capoeira and the heritage that it embodied. This article argues that, by engaging with, and protecting themselves against, the state, capoeira practitioners demonstrated resilience through adaptation and diversification. The corporeality of capoeira provided a holistic response to the biopolitical power of the state, and capoeira players “made strange” (in Foucauldian terms) the normalcy of power, rescuing themselves and their way of life. In answer to the “total war” that makes patterns of violence apparently inevitable, the “total resistance” of capoeira evaded obliteration, and maintained the possibility of other outcomes.

A constitucionalização simbólica da Emenda Constitucional Nº 81/2014 e a vida nua do trabalhador escravo no Brasil

A Emenda Constitucional nº 81/2014 determinou a expropriação de bens oriundos da exploração do trabalho escravo. No entanto, tal alteração é compreendida como uma norma de eficácia contida, que depende de regulação infraconstitucional. Houve, assim, transferência da solução para outro momento, caracterizando-se um ato de constitucionalização simbólica como fórmula de compromisso dilatório. Paralelamente, no mesmo momento histórico em que se discute no parlamento brasileiro fórmulas para redução do alcance do conceito de escravidão, o Brasil é instado internacionalmente a aprimorar os seus mecanismos de combate à escravidão. Este artigo, utilizando-se do aporte teórico da biopolítica do filósofo Giorgio Agamben, defende que a constitucionalização simbólica é uma ferramenta do poder soberano, no exercício de suas táticas de controle e manutenção de poder sobre a vida. Desse modo, seria mantida a estrutura da sociedade brasileira baseada em um controle biopolítico de exclusão-inclusão do sujeito vivente – no caso, o trabalhador escravo –, consolidando, assim, a vida nua na sociedade contemporânea.

Conspiración y nuda vida ¿The X-Files, I want to believe: mundo posible o mundo presente?

This article problematizes, in general, the conspiracy as a fundamental political and narrative structure of Modernity. Through a film analysis of the series The X-Files, I want to believe , we propose to reveal how the topic of the conspiracy, on a superficial level, is an articulator of the plot of the series, but at a deep and broad level, we understand conspiracy as an articulating strategy of modern life and, in this context, of bio-political control. Thus, the article shows how the argumentative structure of the series proposes plots and characters through which governmental power intervenes in bodies and space, removes and allows life, distorts reality, informs and misinforms. Everything is part of a global strategy of conspiracy and concealment of the truth. In conclusion, the television series allows us to observe the hypervisibility and intervention regimes of the current government machine and is, to this extent, a point of entry to recognize current social and political problems.

Book Review: The Use of Bodies

The Use of Bodies. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. xxii + 291 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).With English publication of The Use of Bodies, we now have final volume of Giorgio Agamben s remarkable series of investigations into ontological foundations of Western politics. Beginning with eponymous volume in 1995, nine entries of Homo Sacer series attempt an elucidation of deepest philosophical and theological foundations of contemporary Western politics. As Agamben specifies his project, he is after the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had remained at same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in (p. 263).In book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben famously claimed that Western politics is based on aporiatic exception, where natural life (zoe) was distinguished from a political life (bios). We see this distinction most acutely in Roman legal figure of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is paradoxical because it is a life that can be killed (because it has been stripped of its political meaning), yet not sacrificed (also because it has been stripped of its political meaning). Precisely because of its (former) life in political order, figure of homo sacer has been stripped of its political being and exists merely as bare life (zoe). It is included in political order only, paradoxically, by exclusion.Through an intricate analysis of both ontological and theological themes, Agamben claims this divlsio is fundamentally constitutive of Western political order. Politics, then, is founded on a specific definition and attendant understanding of life. In so doing, West produces a politics that brings natural life, or very fact of living, into question. Moving beyond Foucault and Arendt, Agamben controversially names concentration camp as bio-political paradigm of Western modernity, place where sovereignty can both produce and have absolute power over bare life. The paradigma of camp is representative instance of bio-political control that sovereign power wants to achieve; not then as an aberration of modern West, but rather its truest expression.In The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to series' origin and takes up again topic of life, giving us perhaps most complete genealogy of philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of form-of-life, long awaited in his work. …