January 29, 2007
Lakoff Talk @ UCSF: Wednesday 7th Feb
http://dahsm.medschool.ucsf.edu/seminarSeries/index.aspx
Thanks China for the heads up, as it conflicts with the proposed time for a general get together let’s find a different day to do it.
January 28, 2007
The Social
We have been working to specify the concept of “the social” in relationship to concepts such as biopolitics and vital systems. One approach has been to look at how various authors working in a Foucaultian tradition have used the term in recent work. What follows is a brief summary of Nikolas Rose’s discussion of the historical emergence of “the social” as a political and analytic category in his book, Powers of Freedom.
Rose’s approach is that of historical ontology – ie. looking at how the social came into being as an entity with its own positivity, in response to specific problems of government. Thus, for Rose the social is one distinctive way of problematizing collective life. And one that is now operating in relation to other ways of thinking about and intervening in collective life. Read more »
connectivity
Proposal to call a general get together to see what is going on with the lab. Wednesday 7th Feb 5pm.
Read more »
January 25, 2007
We are go…
Props to Chris for excellent work. All blogs are up. The main site is online. Collaborators: collaborate!
Life
In his chapter on The Right of Death and the Power over Life, Foucault argues that power is now situated and exercised at the level of life. However, there seems to be a certain ambiguity in Foucault’s use of the category of “life”. In his chapter, Foucault seems to mean by “life” primarily “human life”. Concepts such as “anatomo-politics of the human body” and “biopolitics of the population” as well as “the power to foster life and to disallow it to the point of death” all refer to human life.
Conversely, however, the force of biopower is clearly based on a certain disregard for the distinction between human life and other forms of life. Biopower implies the envisioning of human life primarily in terms of its vital aspects. It seems to be clear what this means for human life, and almost all work on biopower and biopolitics has focused on this and led to insights of fundamental importance. Assuming that the distinction between human life and other forms of life is more in question today than ever, we might ask: What does this mean for the concept of biopower?
My sense is that we need to focus on the other side of the equation. Hannah Landecker points into this direction when she writes: “Biological matter derived from human bodies is a subset of all the biological matter that is out there in the world – it is, in the logic of the life sciences, not endowed with any particularly special qualities other than the usual species variations. Thus the more we develop ways to use insects, the more we develop approaches to human materiality that are continuous with the way we use insects, and this goes for all kinds of obscure organisms: when we change insects, we change what it is to be biological.â€
I remember a veterinarian who once told me that now with the increasing attention to zoonotic diseases veterinarian practice is increasingly seen as a contribution to public health. Animals have become ‘model organisms’ of a new sort.
Mapping what “life†means today in contrast to what “life†meant for nineteenth century biology seems key to me if we want to re-invent the concept of biopower.
January 18, 2007
The Contemporary
What is the contemporary ? This issue is a central one for ARC. We are in the process of constructing a glossary that will include concepts such as this one.
Previous discussions can be found in Rabinow: French DNA, epilogue The Anthropological Contemporary, as well as in Anthropos Today, and the forthcoming Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton 2007) and Rabinow, Rees, Marcus and Faubion, Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary (forthcoming).
Biopower and the Contemporary
Welcome to the new blog.
We look forward to making this an international space for debate, thinking, edification and even some fun.
There are a set of debates that we should all enter into.
(1) What is biopower? and what is its connection and distinctions from biopolitics?
On that score: the English translation of the course on “Security, territory, population” is announced for April 2007. Its appearance will signal a new level of interest and debate. Given the horrendous confusions surround the term, as well as that of governmentality, it would opportune to begin to weigh in now.
We will produce some links shortly.
January 16, 2007
A different kind of concept work
Just browsing to see what “Concept Work” gets us. One thing it gets us is this.
January 13, 2007
ARC 2.0 Countdown
The new ARC site is close to going public. We are all about functionality now.