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.”
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.