August 9, 2009
Concept Work: “Vital”
Over the past few years Andy and I have been trying to find appropriate terms to describe a distinctive diagram of power that is concerned with the vulnerability of transportation and energy infrastructures, public health apparatuses, and webs of industrial production, to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events. The diagram draws together diverse techniques and practices, such as vulnerability assessment, simulation, cataloguing of resources, enactment, and preparedness planning, according to a normative rationality or strategic logic. We have provisionally used the term “vital systems” to refer to the central object of knowledge and target of intervention of this diagram of power. We see this diagram as distinct from – but related to – the problematic of the “population” central to apparatuses of security that Foucault described in Security, Territory, Population. The term “vital” is valuable in pointing to this relation, but our use needs further elaboration. It is frequently used by first-order observers in the domains we are examining, but is slippery: laden with associations both wanted and unwanted. So, in the interest of advancing conceptual work on the vital I wanted to open a discussion by: first, indicating how the observers in the fields we have been examining use it; second, outlining potential problems it raises; third, through reference to Sloterdijk’s use of the concept of “the vital” in Terror from the Air on which Paul has posted recently (here, here, and here), pointing to a possible “mutation of the vital” that accompanies the emergence of the diagram of power we are describing.
Read more after the jump.