January 25, 2007
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.
Perhaps part of the contrast circles around the relatively recent addition of the word “itself” to life. I wonder what this addition means for mapping the contrast you rightly point to?
I totally agree with the importance of zoonotic diseases for the understanding of what life is today. Genomics have revealed the genes we have in common with animals, and now we discover the viruses we share with them. But then what to do with the anthropological difference between men and animals ? If it is not given by nature, how is constructed by politics of life, such as confinement and culling ? It is a biopolitics of another sort that marks the boundaries between men and animals while recognizing everything they have in common.
I am not exactly sure what Rose and Franklin mean to say when they identify the emergence of something like “life itself”. Maybe it would be helpful to have a discussion about this.
From what I understand I would say they primarily see the emergence of “life itself” as a result of the “molecularization of life”. However, one might also argue that today a re-biologization of life is taking place that makes the complex interactions between cells, systems of cells, multicellular organisms, populations of organisms and their environment a focus of heightened attention. So there is a certain return to the organism.
At any rate, the term “life itself” remains obscure if not mystical to me. I also wonder, if it might not ultimately be complicit with the pseudo-religious holy-grail-rhetoric of some molecular biologists.
As to Frédéric’s point, I completely agree. The distinction is being re-invented. But the fact that human biological matter is “not endowed with any particularly special qualities other than the usual species variations”, as Landecker so nicely says, must have some consequence for our thinking about the concept of biopower today. What these consequences might be, I don’t really know.
One move would be to shift beyond the pastoral.
You are right to say that there is a holy-grail rhetoric of molecularization in the term “life itself” however I’m not sure this can completely cover the work the term is doing.
‘Life itself’ seems to be configured in relation to a conception of ‘circuits of vitality’. In Politics of Life Itself Rose writes, “molecularization strips tissues, proteins, molecules and drugs of their specific affinities – to a disease, to an organ, to an individual, to a species – and enables them to be regarded as manipulable and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized”. One response to this freeing from context is what Rose calls “pastoral powers” reconfiguring biopolitics in relation to emerging somatic ethics and politics. A different kind of response would be one which eschews this pastoral mode with its attention to responsibility and risk (not to abandon but to keep moving) and takes up a different ethic which is attentive to the unknown. I am not sure how to imagine this.