Biopolitical Space Research Articles

A new EUtopia – Understanding Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and the criminalisation of migration in Europe

The aim of this paper is to expound and critically analyse the proposed reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in December 2023. Drawing on insights from migration science and political philosophy, it argues that political agreement on the controversial reform can best be understood through a Foucauldian lens, conceptualising the European border regime as a biopolitical space in which migrant lives are contested. Against the background of the ever-expanding criminalisation and securitisation of migration, analyses of disciplinary and biopower offer unique insights into modern-day European asylum and border politics. The article criticises the bifurcation of European rights discourses in light of this trend, and calls for differentiated engagement with developments in European asylum politics.

THE VICTIM AS A MEDIA CONSTRUCT IN THE SPACE OF BIOPOLITICS

The article makes sense of the phenomenon of victim construction by means of transmedia communication. The first part is devoted to the role of media technologies in the modern biopolitical space. It is emphasized that control over communication within the framework of new power paradigms is carried out by a netocratic elite – a new form of cyber-technological superpanoptism. The importance of media logic in the new system of social relations and worldview models is shown. In the second part, based on the study of the phenomena of deep mediatization, the specificity of cultural grass and sacrifice as media constructs, products of information technologies designed to reproduce biopolitical imperatives is understood.

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Vita COVIDa as a Biopolitical Modality of Life in a Pandemic

The pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus infection has formed a special biopolitical modality of life, that of vita COVIDa. Biopolitics, the tools of which the authorities turned to in a pandemic, re-assembled the social space, thus changing the flow of social time. In this accelerated mode, the path from isolation through quarantine to vaccination has been completed. Historically-proven tools to combat the pandemic have been consistently combined. What was new was the appeal to the arsenal of modern digital technologies which made it possible to create a unique flexible barrier environment and control the process of the immunization of the population. Vita COVIDa was a form of further restriction of active life (vita activa). During the pandemic, consumption increased as an aspect of the work managed by animal laborans; there is a lack of creative activity carried out by homo faber; and there is a collapse of public space, leading to a pseudo-political virtual polemic in which a person gets bogged down as a zoon politikon. In conditions when the contemplative life (vita contemplativa) is captured by the effect of stickiness in the interpassivity mode, vita COVIDa slides to routine work and hyper-consumption, increasingly assigning the priority role of animal laborans to a person. The special spaces of the stationary (“Red Zone” or “camp of life”) and mobile (QR code) camps, formed in the mode of an undeclared state of emergency, produce a “naked life” (vita nuda). The increasing tension creates prerequisites for the invasion of the friend/enemy political-identifier proper into social relations, situationally assigning the status of homo sacer to persons whose modus operandi is perceived as risky. Foucault understood racism is actualized in the biopolitical space of the pandemic. The contradictory trends of the pandemic should be considered within the framework of the Esposito immunization paradigm, in which the pandemic with its threats of social collapse should be considered as something that requires an immune response in the form of a coordinated response of the authorities and the population to the threats of social collapse. The intense confrontations between humanity and disease and between the authorities and the population in the field of imposed restrictions and responsible adoption of the proposed measures lead to the need to develop co-vida vita (co-life) as a way of living and overcoming vita COVIDa during the return to the “old” new normality.

Securitization, surveillance and ‘de-extremization’ in Xinjiang

Abstract Previous explanations on China's counterterrorism strategy have highlighted the results of China's strategy of repression in Xinjiang, the historical antecedents and institutional foundations of its counterterrorism policies, as well as international and domestic sources of China's counterterrorism strategy. While acknowledging the importance of all these dimensions, this article draws attention to a largely neglected feature of China's counterterrorism strategy: the Chinese party-state's social engineering of Xinjiang. Building on Maoist-era practices such as the mass line and the ‘friend vs. enemy’ binary, the Communist party under Xi Jinping has integrated surveillance technologies as part of its strategy of preventive counterterrorism and ‘de-extremization’. This article argues that the Chinese party-state's embrace of modern technologies, a weak liberal tradition in China, Xi Jinping's rise to power in late 2012, and the appointment of Chen Quanguo as Xinjiang's party-secretary in 2016, provides the socio-political background for the intensification of securitization, surveillance and introduction of ‘re-education and training centres’ in Xinjiang. Surveillance technologies now complement collective, face-to-face methods of surveillance and Maoist-era techniques of mass mobilization, enabling the Chinese party-state to govern and manage the biopolitical spaces of Uyghurs with greater intensity, according to the state's precise norms. The legalization and institutionalization of ‘de-extremization’ has also led to the shift from mass ‘de-extremization’ propaganda to ‘drip-irrigation’ ideological and political re-education of individuals deemed at risk of extremism. The result is an increased capacity by the Chinese party-state to surveil and control the region, and to more effectively negate the possibility of individual resistance.

Missing Men: Canadian Prisoners of War in Alan Cumyn’s Great War Novel The Famished Lover

This article focuses on the representation of Canadian prisoners of war in Alan Cumyn’s Great War novel The Famished Lover (2006). Relying on historical sources, I attempt to show how the experience of captivity, marginalized for a long time in historical research, alters our understanding of the First World War and the evolution of forced labour in the twentieth century. I approach Canadian POWs as missing persons, disappeared in the biopolitical regime of the POW camp, the post-war discourses of commemoration, and the gaps in cultural memory. The article explores Cumyn’s representation of the camp as a biopolitical space and the production of the POW as Agambenian bare life. Central to the analysis are issues of trauma, masculinity, and heroic defiance. I also engage with the long-lasting sequelae of captivity, as well as the difficult reintegration of the returned POW, based on the example of the protagonist of the novel.

АРХИТЕКТУРНО-ГОРОДСКОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО В КОНЦЕПЦИИ БИОПОЛИТИКИ М. ФУКО

The article is devoted to the problem of interrelation of biopolitics and architectural and urban space in M. Foucault’s philosophy. The research objective includes interpreting and analysing different types of architectural and urban space in M. Foucault’s works. In accordance with the research objective, its tasks are as follows: to trace the formation of biopolitical space, to reveal its influence on the body and life of the population; to suggest interpretation of M. Foucault’s architectural and urban conception in the context of the media theory; to justify M. Foucault’s understanding of architecture and city as political media. Originality of the study lies in the fact that M. Foucault’s architectural and urban space models are considered as special spatial and political forms of media.

The Womb as a Biopolitical Space: Examining Negative Selection within the Context of Surrogacy

Reproductive technologies are increasingly used not just to detect the presence of fetal “abnormalities” but also to “correct” or eliminate them before birth. This is done with the aim to enable the birth of “healthy” and “normal” children who can contribute better to the nation’s productivity. Although these processes are common to most women, the situation is further aggravated for surrogates within developing country contexts, who already work in precarious conditions and occupy the lower end of the hierarchy within the surrogacy arrangement. Highlighting the Indian surrogacy context, I discuss and analyze some of these biopolitical challenges and complexities.

The forest and the heath: Defining the human in medieval romance

AbstractThis article examines the thirteenth‐century romance Perlesvaus as a biopolitical fantasy and specifically examines one episode in which the Crucifixion is staged with animal actors coded as Christ and Jews. This episode frames the forest surrounding the event as a liminal space, as a biopolitical space of exception that surrounds the clearing or heath where miracles happen and produce biblical truth in Arthurian Britain. The anonymous author places Jews at this frontier, both constitutive of the New Law/civilization and its greatest menace. From this episode emerges a biopolitical narrative that responds to geopolitical crisis in the medieval Francophone world while affirming the violence of the Crusades and anti‐Semitic logic. As this romance is often dismissed for its messy, violent, and confusing narrative and theology, this article contests that its racialized fantasy of the Crucifixion performance shows Perlesvaus to be in line with contemporary values of the Church rather than at the margins. Instead of reading this romance as abhorrent, we explore how romance uses marvels and miracles to assert a certain biopolitical ideology. Biopolitics thus emerges as having a medieval past in fantasy writing, rooted in pre‐modern categories of race, religion, and the human.

Contemporary Arab Petrofiction: Opening up Biopolitical Spaces for the Dispossessed

Contemporary Arab Petrofiction: Opening up Biopolitical Spaces for the Dispossessed

TOWARDS A BIOPOLITICS OF THE VICTIMIZED BODY

This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices.

БИОПОЛИТИЧЕСКОЕ ИЗМЕРЕНИЕ АРХИТЕКТУРНОЙ МЕДИАЛЬНОСТИ

The study aims to clarify the functioning of bio-politics in architecture. Architectural works are considered as the research object of media-philosophy, i.e. as a special type of media mediating the authoritative relations of urban space. Relying on B. Latour’s “oligopticons” conception and M. Foucault’s “panopticism” conception the author describes the logic of arranging modern architectural space and its role in the implementation of the authoritative mechanisms to regulate a modern human’s biological life. The conceptions of oligopticons, panopticon and bio-political spaces serve to show the immediate relation between the most frequent political management models and concrete architectural topology. Such an approach contributes to the critical re-interpretation of the image of modern architectural urban environment.

Settler Modernity’s Spatial Exceptions: The US POW Camp, Metapolitical Authority, and Ha Jin’s War Trash

This essay provides a critical genealogy of the United States’ militarized relation with China through an analysis of Ha Jin’s novel War Trash . This vexed relation takes form in the novel as a self-described “documentary style” memoir of a Chinese POW who survives the brutality of a UN–US camp during the Korean War. War Trash gestures to the significance of China in the consolidation of the United States as an increasingly militarized national security and permanent warfare state from World War II and into the twenty-first century. Focusing on how the novel renders the POW camp as a particular kind of spatial exception, in which the biopolitical space and the geopolitical territory coconstitute each other, the essay demonstrates how the nexus of US militarism, imperialism, and settler colonialism—an ensemble theorized as settler modernity—in Asia and the Pacific is largely structured and reproduced through such exceptions. War Trash’s rendering of the Korean War POW camp thus generates broader questions about US settler modernity’s attempt to seize metapolitical authority through spatial exceptions extending beyond what became the fifty states (or incorporated territories) constituting the United States in an era when the settler state also becomes a military empire.

Estado de Exceção Permanente: o campo e a experiência biopolítica

This article concisely presents the concept of camp and how this was an absolute biopolitical space. The relationship between the permanent state of exception (the camp ) and biopolitics was presented from the work of Giorgio Agamben. It was concluded that the camp was an absolute biopolitical space, because in this space, the biopolitics caesuras didn't affect the politicized zoe , but upon the bare life that couldn't be anymore included in the legal system. Understanding the structure of the camp , we can strengthen our fight against the existing spaces of exception in the democracies.

The critical intimacies of walking in the Abasto Shopping mall, Buenos Aires, Argentina

In recent years, scholars have focused on how affective life becomes implicated in biopolitical interventions in a variety of spaces, including spaces of consumption. Less has been said about how the emotional domain also becomes a space of biopolitics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a mall in Buenos Aires, this paper attends to this link and outlines a methodology that generates insight into the layers of intimacy that help shape these social and political spaces. What I am calling images of critical intimacy point to how these biopolitical spaces may be operating today and also what their limits appear to be.

From spaces of exception to ‘campscapes’: Palestinian refugee camps and informal settlements in Beirut

The recent literature on the refugee condition and spaces has heavily drawn on Agamben's reflection on ‘bare life’ and the ‘camp’. As refugees are cast out the normal juridical order, their lives are confined to refugee camps, biopolitical spaces that allow for the separation of the alien from the nation. But is the camp the only spatial device that separates qualified and expendable lives? What happens when the space of the camp overlaps with the space of the city? Taking the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut as a case, this study problematises the utilisation of legal prisms and clear-cut distinctions for the understanding of the production of bare life and spaces of exception. Isolated at the time of its establishment, Shatila is today part of the so-called ‘misery belt’. Physical continuities are also reflected by the distribution of the population as both Palestinians and non-Palestinians, including Lebanese, live in Shatila and the surrounding informal settlements. As physical and symbolic boundaries separating the refugee and the citizen blur, I argue that the exception is not only produced through law and its suspension. While legal exceptions place the Palestinians outside the juridical order, other exclusions run along sectarian and socio-economic lines cutting through the Lebanese body. As Shatila and the informal settlements are entangled, a new spatial model of analysis defined as the ‘campscape’ is proposed. Once the exception leaks out of the space of the camp, the campscape becomes the threshold where the refugee, the citizen and other outcasts meet.

The Biopolitical Border in Practice: Surveillance and Death at the Greece-Turkey Borderzones

This paper examines biopolitical control practices at the Greece—Turkey borders and addresses current debates in the study of borders and biopolitics. The Greek and Frontex authorities have established diverse surveillance mechanisms to control the borderzone space and to monitor, intercept, apprehend, and push back migrants or to block their passage. The location of contemporary borders has been much debated in the literature. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of borders by demonstrating that while borders are diffusing beyond and inside state territories, their practices and effects are concentrated at the edges of state territories—ie, borderzones. Borderzones are biopolitical spaces in which surveillance is most intense and migrants suffer the direct threat of injury and death. Applying biopolitics in the context of borderzones also prompts us to revisit the concept. While Foucault posits that biopolitics is the product of the historical transition away from sovereign powers controlling territory and imposing practices of death towards governmental powers managing population mainly through pastoral, productive, and deterritorialized techniques, the case of the Greece—Turkey borderzones demonstrates that biopolitics operates through sovereign territorial controls and surveillance, practices of death and exclusion, and suspension of rights. This study also highlights the fact that, despite the biopolitical realities, migrants continue to cross the borders.

Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement

AbstractRefugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under‐explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that is still un‐urban. This article challenges this idea of the camp as space of pure biopolitics and explores the politics of space in the refugee camp using urban debates. Using case studies from the Middle East and South Asia, it looks at how the refugee spaces developed and became informalized, and how people recovered their agency through ‘producing spaces’ both physically and politically. In doing so, it draws connections between refugee camps and other spaces of urban marginality, and suggests that refugee spaces can be seen as important sites for articulating new politics.

Rationalising Bt Technology: Creating a Biopolitical Space Around Bt Cotton

Sociologists have long recognised rationalisation as a process through which a universally applicable technical code crystallises as technological rationality of a modern society. This article challenges such essentialist theories that offer deter-ministic and universal generalisations about such abstract categories as technical rationality. Rather it suggests that technical rationality in itself is constructed by a network of actors in a specific context. This article analyses the historical moment of the introduction of Bt cotton in India, in 2002, in order to explore how the technical rationality guiding the introduction of Bt technology was itself constructed by a network of neoliberal actors. In doing so, the article reveals the political economy of this technology at both the discursive and institutional levels. Here, rationalisation is defined as a biopolitical process whereby a host of neoliberal actors used discursive framings and institutional strategies in order to create a hospitable environment for an imported Bt technology. The article argues that a hegemonic capitalist rationale guided the adoption of Bt cotton through the 2002 policy decision. The construction of this context-specific rationale led to the emergence of a global agbiotech industry at the local level, which, in turn, further strengthened the state-biotechnology-market nexus.

The Racism of the Nazi Lager: The Boundaries Between Reality and Fiction in Moravia’s Dio Kurt

This paper aims at exploring the question of racism in the Nazi concentration camp as it emerges in Moravia’s 1968 play Dio Kurt . The focus of Moravia’s play is on Oedipus, a Jew detained in a Nazi concentration camp, and Fate, personified by the camp commander, Colonel Kurt, who forces Oedipus-Saul and his family to enact in reality the Sophoclean tragedy Oedipus Rex . Through a series of barbarous machinations derived by Kurt, the boundaries between reality and fiction that characterize a work of fiction and the artistic process more generally, are surpassed. If, as Levinas maintains, in Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism (1934), racism and Nazism question the very essence of humanity in man in the moment in which they ‘enslave’ being to the body, and if, as Agamben asserts in Homo sacer (1995), the concentration camp is the biopolitical space par excellence , the interpretive consequences on a reading of Moravia’s play are manifold. In Dio Kurt, the Jews are reduced to a biological state, to ‘bare life’ to use Benjamin’s term, through the manipulation of the artistic tradition that is transformed into an instrument in the annihilation of humanity precisely when it loses its status of cathartic fiction.