Contemporary Biopolitics Research Articles

From Face to Facies

Abstract This article considers Beckett’s faces in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s account of the face as a disputed biopolitical marker. Agamben refers to the face both in terms of social and juridical identity in ancient Rome and as an icon of contemporary biopolitics, as social identity gives way to biometric recognition. Beckett’s own face figures prominently in the series of machine-generated Eigenface portraits created by artist Trevor Paglen in 2017, and whose use of the Eigenface method invokes modern facial recognition technologies. The Eigenface is examined here in relation to a gallery of ghostly progenitors: the faces of Beckett’s late plays.

면역성과 취약성의 교차적 관점에서 본 코로나19 팬데믹 이후 생명/삶의 정치

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic through the lenses of immunity and vulnerability, delving into contemporary biopolitics and its social and political ramifications. The pandemic has not only been a public health crisis but has also exposed and intensified socio-political and economic inequalities, underlining vulnerabilities associated with neoliberal globalization and biomedicalization. Neoliberal policies have weakened public health systems and exacerbated health inequalities, resulting in an immune crisis that has accelerated the spread of COVID-19. Drawing on the theories of Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler, Henk ten Have, and Didier Fassin, this paper reinterprets the intersection of immunity and vulnerability, highlighting the negative biopolitics triggered by the crisis and exploring the potential for a shift toward affirmative biopolitics. By leveraging the interconstitutive approach of modern immunology, it proposes moving beyond traditional self-defense-based concepts of immunity towards a new direction for affirmative biopolitics. This new approach aims to foster social solidarity and community formation in the post-pandemic world, advocating for an inclusive and interdependent “politics of life” that acknowledges and embraces human vulnerability.

Oscillation of Contemporary Bodies between Biopolitics and Necropolitics

The article examines Tania Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, UK) and the three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009 and 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, Lauren Berlant’s on “slow death,” and Michel Foucault’s on biopolitics, Paramana suggests that 10,148,451 addresses the collective subject and critiques contemporary necropolitics, while the versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 address individuals as political subjects, and comment on the panoptic gaze and contemporary biopolitics. Through her analysis of these works, Paramana shows how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political economies in which it is presented, how the perception of the work’s politics differs when presented in different political economies, and the insights therefore the work might offer to them. Paramana argues that Bruguera’s work has often achieved more than local and national governments and that her “symbolic work with activist parameters” is surprisingly more efficacious than her activist work. The article concludes with the insights Bruguera’s work offers for the future of bodies in the 21st century.

On Moral Legitimacy of the Normative Reconstruction of Subject Behavior in Post-pandemic Era

The enlightening significance of contemporary and modern biopolitics’ appearance in COVID-19 pandemic lies in Life’s appeal of both the fear of death and the fear of been dominated. Therefore, the authority and its agency are responsible for the moral promise of individual safety which follows the logic of survival and free development which follows the logic of human beings’ development. The value ranking of the above two parts in different social contexts constitute the moral legitimacy basis when the authority formulates the policy on the normative reconstruction of subject behavior. In this respect, the Post-pandemic Era means the reverse of value ranking in the state of emergency, meanwhile, the normal and regulation of subject behavior need to be reconstructed, and then the moral rationality and legitimacy need to be simultaneously and theoretically illustrated. The relational thinking based on commensalism, rather than the reductionism thinking based on individualistic-atomic theory, will help to recognize the internal connection among the individual, the other and the community. Then the illustration of moral rationality which is constructed for the social temporary order in a state of emergency will be provided, and a probable path to deal the dilemma of the contemporary biopolitics will finally be proposed.

Seismic noise to public health signal: investigating the effects of pandemic guidance in Mexico

ABSTRACT Understanding public activities and developing thoughtful public health strategies are key goals in efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores how seismic noise data can be used as part of such efforts. We show that the fluctuation of seismic noise levels has the capacity to demonstrate aggregate human movement. When considered in relation to major public health efforts, these data can help us evaluate the effectiveness of public health communication strategies that seek to limit social activity. We show evidence that, broadly speaking, Mexican national efforts to encourage “lockdown” worked for a few months in areas around seismic stations, and broke down as time went on. Further, we suggest that changes in the levels of human activity detected in seismic noise can be read alongside social data that provide some clues as to why people respond or not to health recommendations. Our findings have implications for both efforts to understand the nature and effects of public trust in the Mexican state and also the practicalities of using seismic noise data in this manner. An interdisciplinary analysis allows us to address these data and their possible use in a way that takes seriously the opportunities and challenges that emerge in the context of contemporary biopolitics and emerging configurations of surveillance technologies. Analyzing anthropogenic seismic activity opens up new opportunities for ethical data collection and use.

Multiculturalism, Biotechnology, and Biopolitics in Zadie Smith’sWhite Teeth

AbstractThis article traces the critical reception of Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) to argue that both neoliberal and neoconservative interpretations of her work (and personal celebrity) have distorted the novel’s critique of contemporary biopolitics as a project of debilitating inclusion and racial eugenics. Rather than treating White Teeth as a “hysterical” or “naive” celebration of multiculturalism, this essay, focused on the ending of the novel, instead argues that White Teeth not only anticipates criticisms of multiculturalism as an inadequate model of belonging but also, more importantly, demonstrates a biopolitical understanding of race as a category that manages the distribution of life chances in postcolonial Britain. Drawing on work by Jasbir Puar, Achille Mbembe, and Luce Irigaray, this reframing of White Teeth opens new connections between her early work and her more recent “pessimistic” novels, such as Swing Time.

Resilience and Sovereignty in the Context of Contemporary Biopolitics

Abstract This essay offers a critical history, in the Foucauldian sense, of the contemporary hegemony of resilience as a new risk-management technology. Its hypothesis is that resilience is a new way of conjoining biopolitics with thanatopolitics or sovereign power. If, for Roberto Esposito, the paradigm of immunization explained this deadly linkage, resilience refers to a different biopolitical matrix, one that can no longer be understood in Esposito's terms. While the paradigm of immunization is staked on securing biopolitical bodies, resilience is a strategy for enhancing life itself. This shift, from protecting bodies to protecting life, is related to resilience's biopolitical matrix, which mediates between the molecular fiction of life and an ecological eschatology. The essay concludes, in the first place, that the discourse of resilience entails a naturalization and a seeming depoliticization of precarious forms of life—which must learn not to resist but to adapt to precarity. And, secondly, this essay concludes that, in the context of resilience, the sovereign's old right to kill is no longer invoked in the name of epistemic uncertainty (fear of the unpredictability of the future) but of ontological uncertainty: fear of the annihilation of the conditions of existence for certain life-forms.

Disability, Masculinity, Militarism: The Paralympics and the Cultural (Re-)production of the Para-athlete-soldier

In this paper, we unpack the body politic of the para-athlete-soldier and its positioning within masculinizing, militarized, national, popular cultural discourses. Drawing on an integrated methodological approach that explored the media production, representation and consumption of the 2016 Paralympics, we focus on the inscription of a disabled masculinity onto the bodies of ex-military personnel that inculcate normative notions of heterosexuality and the neoliberal (‘inclusive’) national and ableist body politic. The data set indicate that the hyper- and hypo-visibility of Paralympians construct inclusive cultural collective imaginaries around disability inclusion and the ‘progressive’ state whilst at the same time structuring forms of disciplinary exclusion. We conclude that the gendered, technologized and commodified bodies [Pullen, E. & Silk, M. 2020. Gender, Technology and the Ablenational Paralympic Body Politic. Cultural Studies, 34(3):466–88] of National Paralympic bodies offers compelling insights into contemporary disability biopolitics where sport, militarization, gender and the neoliberal national body intersect.

Notes on ‘Lichen’

ABSTRACT‘Notes on “Lichen”’ develops a lichenised homage to Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’, rewilding Sontag’s essay to suggest a poetics of Lichen, a poetics associated symbiotically with the manifestos of Donna Haraway. This Lichen poetics engages with questions of symbiosis and solidarity, mutualism and collective voicing, sketching the turn away from humanist poetics as a critical characteristic of contemporary ecopoetics. From Conceptual Art to contemporary pop, lichen perspectives are gleaned. The attempt is made to rewild earlier conceptual formations, to recycle and repurpose shifts in contemporary taste and their associated politics. New faultlines in contemporary biopolitics are outlined. A chorus of micro-political shifts and transpositions are sketched, revealing emergent and potential turning-points in the rewilding of textual practice.

Nietzsche in Contemporary Biopolitics

Nietzsche in Contemporary Biopolitics

Subjectives and biotechnologies in umbilical cord-trunk bodies: Addresses to psychology.

This article aims to problematize the marketing network that markets the stem cells present in the umbilical cord through the analysis of statements made by relatives about their relationship with the umbilical cord, collected on homepages of Brazilian private banks. Based on the Foucaultian archegenealogical studies, we argue that one of the facets of contemporary biopolitics is centered on the regulation and normalization of bodies and health, as well as the accumulation of biological capital through the autologous storage of umbilical cells. It is specifically a cut of a master's research carried out by the research laboratory in "Science, Technology and Creation", within the scope of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Culture Studies, Federal University of Mato Grosso. In this work, we call attention to the forms of subjectivity that emerge in the commercialization of umbilical stem cells, characterized mainly by self-management and indebtedness.

Lifelogging: Digital technologies of the self as the practices of contemporary biopolitics

In the paper we apply a theoretical concept of technologies of the self developed by Michel Foucault to the field of lifelogging practices. Lifelogging is a global social phenomenon, a part of contemporary experience of everyday, especially in the developed societies of the West. Our hypothesis is that, despite different ways of quantifying self, lifelogging practices have some characteristics in common: they all belong to the field of biopolitics. This is demonstrated on the levels of the body, identity and subjectivity, since they are influenced and changed by lifelogging. At the same time, lifelogging practices blur the relationship between coercion and consent, power and resistance. The theoretical framework for addressing lifelogging is the concept of biopolitics, also developed by, since it refers to the mechanisms, techniques and technologies, as well as the forms of rationality that regulate life and its various manifestations. In conclusion, we claim that it is still not possible to explain lifelogging exclusively in the terms of biopower, since it has a potential for the ?counter-conduct? and resistance. This also makes lifelogging practices open for development of new forms of subjectivity.

“Playing the away game”: AFRICOM in the Sahara-Sahel

This article presents evidence to revise hypotheses of how biopolitical strategies are deployed in contemporary global security regimes, and with what effects. It is based on research into the US military's Africa Command (AFRICOM). Elaborating on two concepts that Michel Foucault hypothesized in his Security, Territory, Population lectures –the “people” and the “milieu” –I argue that AFRICOM's strategy is informed by biopolitical rationalities, but that this does not necessarily situate African populations as either part of a population to secure or as a threat to that population. Instead, I suggest that (unlike in the urban and national contexts that Foucault analyzed) biopolitical security strategies at the global scale are characterized by varying degrees of distance between the way(s) of life they aim to defend and what Foucault termed the “field of intervention” or “milieu” that they target. This hypothesis, and its elaboration through the case of AFRICOM, contributes to efforts to historicize and spatialize accounts of contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, it suggests that we can better understand the production of very uneven geographies of security and insecurity by attending to the relationships between the ways of life being secured and the (potentially distant) material contexts situated as relevant “fields of intervention”.

‘Doggy-biopolitics’: Governing via the First Dog

Biopolitics, traditionally understood as management of the human population, has been extended to include nonhuman animal life and posthuman life. In this article, we turn to literatures that advance Foucauldian biopolitics to explore the mode of government enabled by the dog of the US presidential family – the First Dog called Bo Obama. With analytical focus on vitalisation efforts, we follow the construction of Bo in various outlets, such as the websites of the White House and an animal rights organisation. Bo’s microphysical escapades and the negotiation thereof show how contemporary biopolitics, which targets the vitality of the dog population, is linked to seductive neoliberal management techniques and subjectivities. We discuss ‘cuddly management’ in relation to Foucauldian scholarship within organisation and management studies and propose that the construction of Bo facilitates interspecies family norms and an empathic embrace of difference circumscribed by vitalisation efforts that we pinpoint as ‘doggy-biopolitics’.

From Bare Life to Eternal Life

Let me begin by thanking Peg Birmingham for generously offering to organize the original book discussion at DePaul University in January 2015, out of which developed this written exchange. I am very grateful to Peter Fenves, Alessia Ricciardi, and Gil Morejon for their extremely stimulating and incisive texts. With such careful readers, my task is made both easier and more gratifying: easier because they present my views in ways that clarify them even to myself; more gratifying because it allows me to move straight to the decisive points and questions raised by these texts, not in the spirit of someone who believes to have any answers, but more modestly as another participant in a series of conversations that transcend this particular occasion.Gil Morejon:Morejon's essay permits me to say something about how I understand the relation between an affirmative and republicanism. But his comments also pointedly introduce the perspective of critical race theory and critical ethnic studies into the discussion of biopolitics, a perspective which my book does not as such take up. Thirdly, Morejon critically engages my claim that an affirmative needs to take seriously the idea of eternal if it is going to escape and oppose what Foucault called thanatopolitics and Mbembe calls necropolitics. Both terms refer to death-worlds in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of dead (Mbembe).Morejon is right to see in the attempt to think affirmative together with republicanism a not so veiled critique of the antinomianism prevalent in contemporary biopolitics, since for me a basic definition of republicanism is the attempt to replace the rule of persons by the rule of law. The connection between and republicanism is a direct one since by the term biopolitics I understand the study of the different ways in which law and life relate to each other. In many regimes, this relation may become thanatopolitical, but I do not think that all law is as such thanatopolitical. I think one should at least distinguish between, say, totalitarian understandings of law, neoliberal understandings of law, and republican understandings of law. Totalitarian domination, as Arendt has argued, proceeds by stripping legal personality from an individual (that is, by reinstating the belief that some life is by nature guilty, and deserves to be punished even if it has done no wrong); then by imposing a regime of forced labour that disallows any leisure to think; and lastly by setting up a perverse system of exchange that makes any solidarity with the other have a prohibitive cost, making it tantamount to suicide. Morejon, for his part, cites Mbembe's triple loss of home, rights over her or his body, and expulsion from humanity altogether as constitutive of the death-in-life of the slave. As far as I am concerned the points made by Arendt, Mbembe and Agamben share something in common, in that all of them analyse a separation of bios from zoe such that the life (bios) of one part of humanity is thought to require the selection, segregation, exploitation and extermination, in short the of the life (zoe) of another part of humanity by its reduction to a kind of living death.There is an important literature on the differences between how the concentration camp and the slave plantation go about establishing domination. But since this term was first coined by Arendt, and only subsequently employed by many others, including Mbembe, I do not really see why Morejon discards outright the possibility that Arendt's own concept of natality, on which she bases the human right to have rights, cannot be used to counteract the radical natal alienation that Mbembe sees at work in slavery. More to the point, under regimes of total domination the final goal of law is to make human life entirely subservient to the commands of a person. …

Sygdom på sociale medier

The article investigates how new forms of illness communication online are challenging the famous ’sick role’ described by Talcott Parsons in favour of more activist, participatory and entrepreneurial illness voices. The article more specifically makes a case study of online platforms made by the English blogger Stephen Sutton and it discusses his extremely positive and spirited way of handling a life threatening cancer disease, which resulted in the crowdfunding of almost five million GBP for the Teenage Cancer Trust. The concepts of ’biological citizenship’ from Nikolas Rose and ’affective labor’ from Michael Hardt are used to establish an analytical framework able to grasp the dilemmas related to the case and to the rising tendency of intertwining intimate pathographies with social, economical or political projects. These concepts are chosen because they allow the researcher to affirm the positive discursive, affective and economical consequences of Sutton’s work, while also reflecting on the way the maintenance of vitality, happiness and hope, as key components of contemporary biopolitics, are possibly affecting and transforming current illness practices.

Hegel's Pathology of Recognition: A Biopolitical Fable

ABSTRACTThis article examines the figures of life and death as rhetorical and material conditions for self-consciousness and mutual recognition, notoriously described in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It turns to Hegel's treatment of life and death, concepts that—according to Hegel's mature system—anticipate and prefigure the struggle for recognition and its master-slave dialectic. Part 1 analyzes the Philosophy of Nature, with attention to how the sex relation, species-life, and the diseased body “pathologically” figure the life and death of the nonhuman (animal) organism. Part 2 takes up Hegel's “Anthropology,” which opens his Philosophy of Mind, exploring the problematic relationship between (reproductive) sex and love as an incipient politics of woman, family, civil society, and state. Part 3 brings Hegel's world-historical system into dialogue with contemporary biopolitics, arguing that recognition today is driven by a world-historical discourse on bios and that Hegel's “pathological” figures might occasion a productive critique of affirmative biopolitics.

Retraçando os deslocamentos de Foucault: o lugar da biopolítica e da governamentalidade

Este estudo tem o objetivo de descrever os deslocamentos realizados por Foucault em sua obra, entendendo-se a que novos problemas eles respondiam. Busca-se também realçar sua reflexão política no uso das noções de biopolítica e de governamentalidade. Optou-se por analisar trechos da obra que resultem de sínteses feitas por Foucault sobre seu percurso, focalizando os deslocamentos ocorridos no período da genealogia do poder em diálogo com comentaristas. Discute-se a retomada contemporânea da noção de biopolítica e o valor heurístico da noção de governamentalidade. Com ela, Foucault buscou um instrumento analítico mais operacional, que lhe permitisse fazer uma análise macrossocial sustentada pela perspectiva da microfísica dos poderes. Argumenta-se que, em Foucault, o processo de teorização é privilegiado em relação à síntese teórica final. Assim, defende-se uma orientação de leitura pela primazia da dimensão teórico-metodológica sobre a teórico-temática. Aponta-se a importância de se utilizar as ferramentas teóricas de Foucault tanto em estudos temáticos particulares quanto em estudos de uma escala macropolítica.

Contesting a biopolitics of information and communications: The importance of truth and sousveillance after Snowden

This article aims to provide a novel conceptual understanding of the nature of the global mass surveillance policies and practices revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in collaboration with the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. The critical analysis and conceptual reinterpretation of state and corporate surveillance and its impact on the political agency of civil society is multidisciplinary. An intersection of surveillance studies, political philosophy, and global politics/international relations provides an overview of the policies and practices that states and corporations develop and implement in relation to information and communications technologies (ICT). Clarifying how contemporary society is global and digital, it analyzes the way in which political economies inform contemporary policies and practices of surveillance. A critical analysis the relation of political economy to neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical technologies of power, and contemporary regimes of truth, leads to posit that global mass surveillance is a technology of power deployed by a contemporary biopolitics of information and communication. A conceptual reinterpretation of Foucault’s notion of parrhesia and Mann’s notion of sousveillance leads to posit that parrhesiastic sousveillance is a socio-political and technologically-enabled modality of resistance that can resemantize contemporary politics of truth and lead towards a newborn digital agency for global(ized) civil society.

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat