Biopolitical Logic Research Articles

Bare Nature. The Biopolitical Logic of the International Regulation of Invasive Alien Species

Bare Nature. The Biopolitical Logic of the International Regulation of Invasive Alien Species

State terrorism: orientalism and the drone programme

ABSTRACTThis article builds on the recent and growing scholarship on the negative effects of the drone programme. Current literature has shown that the drone programme terrorises the civilian population that it keeps under surveillance. Furthermore, it has articulated the drone programme’s violence as biopolitical and its surveillance as a necropolitical technology of distinction. It is argued in this article that the Orientalist attitudes and logic necessary for drone targeting form the basis for the biopolitical and necropolitical component of the drone programme. This article explores the Orientalism that suffuses the US drone programme in order to juxtapose it with governmental discourses that characterise the drone programme and its surveillance as neutral and humane – demonstrating the gap between government discourses of modernity and the actual drone programme. The necropolitical logic of distinction used for targeting leads to the assimilation of those under the drone’s gaze to a population that can be put to death, leading the drone programme to operate indiscriminately. The biopolitical logic is visible in the US practices, which I argue constitutes terrorism with the corroboration of civilian testimonies.

Bioethical pastoral: Life, ethics, and the politics of human dignity

The last decade of work on vital politics has seen a sharp and unexpected return to the figure of universal humanity. Despite this return, the canon of work on vital politics remains marked by a curious omission: little attention has been paid to the place of ‘human dignity’ in the governance of the biological body. The reasons for this omission are not obvious. After all, since World War II, talk of dignity has become a sine qua non of global counter-politics. If the reasons are not obvious, the significance is: dignitarian politics is distinguished by a refusal of the logic of biopolitics and an embrace of a political sensibility consistent with what Foucault called pastoral power: the demand that the pastorate must care, simultaneously, for all of the flock and for the soul of each member. This article seeks to highlight the place of pastoral power in the study of vital politics by examining one domain in which vital and dignitarian politics have become entangled: the figure of human dignity in bioethics. Tracing the situated ways dignity has been reimagined and remobilized in relation to the biopolitical body in the case of U.S. stem cell ethics, it seeks to cast new light on contemporary economies of life and power.

“In Order to Live, the Other Must Die”: The Logic of Biopolitics

“In Order to Live, the Other Must Die”: The Logic of Biopolitics

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.

A afirmação dos direitos humanos num contexto de biopolítica: lógica imunitária versus lógica do comum

O artigo tem o objetivo de analisar as duas lógicas biopolíticas contrárias que atravessam a compreensão e a efetivação dos direitos humanos. Essa é uma tarefa central para a bioética. Existe, por um lado, a lógica biopolítica negativa que está serviço da defesa dos direitos do indivíduo contra o coletivo, gerando dinâmicas imunitárias que isentam dos encargos do comum. Essa lógica está presente no sistema jurídico moderno entendido como sistema imunizador da sociedade. Por outro, está presente a lógica biopolítica positiva que assume os direitos humanos como dispositivos de potencialização da constituição do comum, como um caminho protetivo para sua concretização. Essa é a proposta da Bioética de proteção que defende que o Estado tem o dever de proteger populações e grupos vulneráveis através de políticas públicas. Um exemplo concreto desse atravessamento nos direitos Humanos é o direito à saúde, quando se tem presente a judicialização da saúde. Essas duas lógicas biopolíticas aparecem na própria formulação da Declaração Universal de Bioética e Direitos Humanos que foi fruto de um consenso de concepções contrárias.

The Sovereign Claims from Within: The Rhetorical Displacement of Sovereign Bodies in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

This article considers the impact of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies for understanding how claims of sovereignty are authorized and legitimated in a secular age devoid of the divine grace that underwrites the sovereignty of the king in medieval times. Through a reading of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 133 S.Ct. 2552 (2013), a case concerning the custody of a child of Cherokee descent, it demonstrates that sovereign bodies are constituted, (dis)placed, and recognized through an appeal to biopolitical logics. This insight is important as it invites a form of rhetorical critique that might account for the conditions in which sovereign claims fashion the terms of political community.

Whose reproductive futures? Race-biopolitics and resistance in the Black infant mortality reduction campaigns in Milwaukee

This paper contributes to Foucauldian population geographies by examining an infant mortality reduction campaign in Milwaukee. The infant mortality rate for Milwaukee’s Black community is about three times that for whites and higher than rates for other racialized groups. This paper asks how Milwaukee’s public health interventions came to focus on sleep deaths, when population data show that preterm birth and congenital abnormalities are the leading causes of all infant deaths in the city, and the greatest contributor to the racial gap. The City of Milwaukee Health Department and partners drew on contradictory biopolitical logics and practices: On one hand, they located the problem of the “gap” in particular segregated neighborhoods-in-crisis, and on the other hand, they used an ostensibly “race-blind” strategy of promoting safe sleep environments. These spatializations together shifted blame for the crisis onto “failing” parents, especially Black parents. Tracing instances of resistance through the development and implementation of the campaign suggests possibilities for an anti-racist biopolitics.

The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality

This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.

Rebels and Biopolitics: Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084

Biopolitics—the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed and regulated under regimes of authority—is ordinary currency in society, and ruling political systems exercise surveillance, incarceration and killings to a great extent in this regard. Michel Foucault’s work on the regulation of human beings through the production of power serves as an initial medium of investigation into biopolitics. Yet, Giorgio Agamben probes the covert and overt presence of biopolitical violence in society, particularly through his concepts of state of exception and bare life. The Indian playwright Mahasweta Devi’s Anglophone play-text Mother of 1084 (1973) enables scholars to participate in a critical forum on biopolitical praxis, because of its pervasive and explicit representation of state violence and rebels. Nonetheless, the play-text is often renowned for its reference to feminist ideology and mother-son relationship. Existing scholarship has overlooked the manifestation of torture and dead bodies on-stage represented in it. The play is also on the periphery of the mainstream literary criticism. By engaging with a textual portrayal of the play through Foucauldian and Agambenian critical lenses, this article interrogates the ways in which biopolitics coerces populations within the contemporary socio-political milieu. The analysis implies a potential to understand the biopolitical logic more meaningfully, and to be resistant to its stratagems of coercion. It adds to the existing body of literature on biopolitics by creating a specific account of life-politics as characterised in postcolonial theatre, provides a supplemental standpoint to debates on biopolitical subjugation and specifically contributes to current discussions of the play.

Submergence: Precarious Politics in Colombia's Future Port‐City

AbstractThis article examines popular politics under precarious conditions in the rapidly expanding port‐city of Buenaventura on Colombia's Pacific coast. It begins by identifying the intersecting economic, ecological, and political forces contributing to the precarity of life in Buenaventura's intertidal zone. Focusing on conflicts over land in the waterfront settlements of Bajamar (meaning “low‐tide”), it then describes the efforts of Afro‐Colombian settlers and activists to defend their territories against threats of violence and displacement. In doing so, they must navigate historical legacies of ethno‐racial politics as well as formations of liberal governance and their multicultural and biopolitical logics of vulnerability and protection. The socio‐material conditions of the intertidal zone, and in particular the figure of submergence, are used to illuminate forms of political life in Colombia's future port‐city. The struggles of Afro‐Colombians to contest violent dispossession in Buenaventura reflect the racialized politics of precarity under late liberalism.

Eternal Life and the Time of Death

Where survival sickness reigns, desire to live lays hold spontaneously of weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism flourish. For passion destroyed is reborn in passion for destruction. If these conditions persist, no one will survive era of survival. (Vaneigem 2001: 162)This paper takes up problematic raised by Miguel Vatter in his recent text Republic of Living: Biopolitics and Critique of Civil Society: namely, that biopolitical governance, which following Foucault is understood as constant and positive intervention that seeks to develop and improve productive capacities of (human) species, can turn over into its opposite, thanatopolitics or necropolitics1 instituting regimes of mass death. I will begin by outlining theoretical context and conceptual contours of this problem, arguing that this possibility is inherent rather than external to logic of biopolitics. Vatter's text proposes resolution to this problematic in form of reconceptualization of eternal in philosophical and atheistic terms. I will reconstruct and assess this proposal, arguing that, although provocative, it is ultimately inadequate to task and in fact reproduces logic of thanatopolitics.1. AFFIRMATIVE BIOPOLITICSBiopolitics, according to Vatter and following Foucault, is entrance of biological or species into calculations carried out by political rationality (Vatter 2014: 2). As late modernity gave rise to what we now call civil society, issue of politics became less matter of state sovereignty, and more matter of government of biological life (Vatter 2014: 2). Rather than establishing explicit laws whose transgression would occasion state intervention, this new biopolitical regime developed apparatuses of policing and normalization that amount to, as Foucault puts it, a permanent and positive intervention in behavior of individuals (Foucault 2000: 415). Foucault's analyses identify decisive historical shift in form of political rationality, object of which ceases to be human beings as individual organisms, becoming instead population as statistical whole, whose biological well-being is object of governmental management undertaken in order to make life, considered now as species, more productive. (Cf. Foucault 2003b, 2008, 2009)In volume 1 of History of Sexuality, Foucault underscores that this has consequence of gradually replacing laws with norms as primary modality of political potestas: The law always refers to sword. But power whose task is to take charge of needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. is no longer matter of bringing death into play in field of sovereignty, but of distributing living in domain of value and utility (Foucault 1990: 144). Importantly, he also emphasizes that regulatory apparatuses of biopower do not constitute closed circuit of normative networks that fully determine life: It is not that has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them (Foucault 1990: 143; emphasis mine). This apparent capacity of for constant escape, its irrepressible ability to elude regulatory techniques that aim at total closure, provides basis for an understanding of biopolitics that is affirmative: itself resists biopolitical administration, and very functioning of power occasions creative potentialities of living being.2 Vatter argues that diverse bodies of work by Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito all take up this thread, analyzing possibilities and stakes of biopolitics conceived as affirmative, and he situates his own project within this trajectory.3Vatter marks his distance from these thinkers insofar as, on his reading, they understand and law to be mutually exclusive or antinomic.4 antinomian logic of their analyses commits them, he contends, to claim that the politics and governance of global system of universal human rights would be nothing but ideological cover for universal expansion of 'state of exception' that, under neoliberalism, has become 'normal' condition of political life (Vatter 2014: 224). …

Governing uncertainty in a secular age: Rationalities of violence, theodicy and torture

This article explores the problem of governing uncertainty in a secular age by focusing on the theological notion of ‘theodicy’ as the underlying rationale for the use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror’. With God’s departure from the world, the problem of uncertainty acquires new salience as human beings can no longer explain tragic events as part of a transcendent order and must find immanent causes for the ‘evils’ that surround them. Taking a cue from Max Weber, I discuss how the problem of theodicy – how to reconcile the existence of God with the presence of evil in the world – does not disappear in the secular age but is mobilized through a Foucauldian biopolitical logic. Secular theodicy governs uncertainty through the production of economies of knowledge that rationalize processes of criminalization and securitization of entire groups and justify the use of violence. This process is particularly striking when analysing the use of torture in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Through a comparison with medieval practices and focusing on the cases of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the article shows how secular torture is the product of a biopolitical theodicy aimed at governing uncertainty through the construction of the tortured as immanent evils who threaten our ‘good life’ and ‘deserve’ their treatment. Secular theodicy turns torture into an extreme form of governmentality of uncertainty in which the disciplining of conduct becomes the construction of subjectivities based on essentialist, stereotypical and racist – and for these very reasons, reassuring – economies of knowledge.

Cloaks and Veils: Countervisualizing Cigarette Factories In and Outside of China

In this article, I consider what a casual observer can see of a notorious product’s primary place of fabrication. Few products have been criticized in recent years more than cigarettes. Meanwhile, around the world, the factories manufacturing cigarettes rarely come under scrutiny. What have been the optics helping these key links in the cigarette supply chain to be overlooked? What has prompted such optics to be adopted and to what effect? I address these questions using a comparative approach and drawing upon new mapping techniques, fieldwork, and social theory. I argue that a corporate impulse to hide from public health measures, including those of tobacco control, is not the only force to be reckoned with here. Cigarette factory legibility has been coproduced by multiple processes inherent to many forms of manufacturing. Cigarette makers, moreover, do not always run from global tobacco control. Nor have they been avoiding all other manifestations of biopolitics. Rather, in various ways, cigarette makers have been embracing biopolitical logics, conditioning them, and even using them to manage factory legibility. Suggestive of maneuvers outlined by Butler (2009) and Povinelli (2011) such as “norms of recognizability” and “arts of disguise,” cigarette factory concealment foregrounds the role of infrastructural obfuscation in the making of what Berlant (2007) calls “slow death.” Special focus on manufacturing in China illustrates important variations in the public optics of cigarette factories. The terms cloak and veil connote these variations. Whereas tactics currently obscuring cigarette manufacturing facilities generally skew toward an aesthetic of the opaque cloak in much of the world, there are norms of recognizability and arts of disguise applied to many factories across China that are more akin to a diaphanous, playful veil. I conclude with a discussion of how this article’s focus on factory legibility gestures toward novel forms of intervention for advocates working at tackling tobacco today, offering them an alternative political imaginary in what is one of the world’s most important areas of public policy making.

The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War

Within the United States, the Korean War has never attracted the memory culture that other twentieth-century wars do. Korea is remembered only for not being remembered, as the “forgotten war.” And yet, as commentators continue to characterize the war on terror as an unparalleled era marked by permanent war, literary authors are returning to Korea to tell a different story. Many of these authors trace the rhetorical and material origin of the war on terror back to 1945, when the United States established a military government in Korea, and 1950, when the war began in earnest. It was Korea, they remind us, that provided the rationale for building a permanent standing military and a global network of more than seven hundred military installations around the world. Those mining this history include some of the most acclaimed American novelists writing today: Ha Jin in War Trash (2004), Philip Roth in Indignation (2008), Chang-rae Lee in The Surrendered (2010), and Toni Morrison in Home (2012). In considering the literary afterlife of the Korean War, I begin with an analysis of the biopolitical logic of defense that arose after World War II during a time of American global ascendancy and heightened anticommunism. Second, I discuss the understanding of the Korean War as “forgotten,” an idea first introduced in 1951 but more recently taken up by memory studies scholars, before advancing an alternative narrative theory of the Korean War. And finally, I consider the twenty-first-century literary return of the Korean War through readings of Jin’s War Trash and Morrison’s Home. These novels advance counternarratives of the Korean War. Refusing the bracketed, three-year history of the war, they instead reveal the basis of an enduring warfare state in Korea and locate the war on terror in this legacy.

Lightning Rods in the Local Moral Economy: Debating Unauthorized Migrants' Deservingness in Israel

AbstractLocalized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common “local moral economy.” Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country's local moral economy – biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of “fruitful multiplication,” and hasbara (“public diplomacy”/propaganda) – and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship – e.g. “economic” vs. “political” migrants, “migrant workers” vs. “refugees,” even the terms “authorized” and “unauthorized” themselves – bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.

La encarnación de la verdad y la política de la comunidad: Foucault y los cínicos

This article investigates Foucault’s analysis of the philosophical life of the Cynics in The Courage of Truth from the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how truth can be incorporated or embodied? In order to consider philosophy as a form of life and not merely as a doctrine or a science, the question of how can truth be lived or materialized in the physical body is obviously crucial. Whereas both Foucault and Arendt can be read as defenders of the philosophical life because of its ethical-political effects, Arendt argues that the Socratic philosophical life is a life that allows a distance to the body. By way of contrast, in Foucault’s analysis of the Cynics we find an idea of the philosophical life in which truth is revealed or manifest in the material body of life. This article takes up Esposito’s immunitary logic of biopolitics in order to argue that whereas the Platonic-Socratic philosophical life exemplifies an ascetic ideal that reflects an inherently immunitarian idea of politics, the philosophical life of the Cynics uses the communitary resources of embodiment so as to unite life and philosophy in a cosmopolitical form of life.

Badiou's Biopolitics: The Human Animal and the Body of Truth

The paper addresses Alain Badiou's attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a ‘truth procedure’, transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badiou's account of the formation of the ‘body of truth’ fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agamben's definition of biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of ‘good life’. While Badiou's claims to overcome biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the ‘democratic-materialist’ biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badiou's account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badiou's ‘body of truth’ is thus nothing other than the living bodies themselves, plus the truth of their equality. Insofar as in this figure ‘good life’ and ‘mere life’ become indistinct, Badiou's politics of truth accords with Agamben's idea of affirmative biopolitics of a life inseparable from its form.

Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life

This article seeks to do two things: articulate the function of biopolitics as a necessary correlate to human exceptionalism, and argue for the factory farm as a supplementary inverse of biopolitical logic. Human exceptionalism is based fundamentally in a desire to create protected lives, and lives that can be, or even need to be, exterminated. In other words, human exceptionalism is the very definition of biopolitics. However, biopolitical theory was mostly developed around thinking through issues of human genocides, particularly the Nazi Lager. Despite attempts to think the analogies between Auschwitz and a factory farm, such analogies ignore important historical and theoretical specificities. While the biopolitical is an important, even necessary, theoretical understanding of humans’ relations to other animals, it is not sufficient for thinking the realities of factory farming. We need a conceptual apparatus not rooted in the ability to think the horrors of human genocide, but one rooted in the ability to think the horrors of the factory farm. Thus I propose the animals in the factory farm exist in the political ontology of deading life; that is beings who should be alive, but are somehow already dead. This conceptual apparatus is not meant to oppose the thought of the biopolitical, it is meant to supplement the biopolitical—to allow us to think with and beyond the biopolitical.

Border Meals

This article examines how state practices around food contribute to the militarization of the migration experience. Specifically, I argue for more attention to the feeding practices of detention centers in particular, as the topic of food has been relatively absent from critical analyses of surveillance, detention, and deportation of unauthorized migrants. In the case of detention centers, depriving detainees of food is a primary mode of constructing detainee subjectivity. I present evidence of how detention systems both reinforce the logic of contemporary biopolitics by exacting discipline on migrant bodies through the provision of “border meals,” and extract value from detainees’ bodies in the form of profits for private industry. In looking to identify possible pathways toward change in this system, I suggest that there are problems with attempting to dismantle current detention practices by relying on a discourse that foregrounds detainees’ “trauma.” Instead, I argue that we may find migrants’ enacting resistance to the larger structures in which a system of detention in embedded through re-interpreting everyday expressions of affect.