Biopolitics, Territory, Citizenship

1
Biopolitics, Territory, Citizenship
2

• Life and power
• From structuralism to post-structuralism
• Biopolitics and Population
• Biopolitics today

3
The body and the gaze

• The stethoscope, solidified distance, transmits
  profound and invisible events along a
  semi-tactile, semi-auditory axis. Instrumental
  mediation outside the body authorizes a withdrawl
  that measures the moral distance involved the
  prohibition of physical contact makes it possible
  to fix the virtual image of what is occurring
  well below the visible area. For the hidden, the
  distance of shame is a projection screenthus
  armed, the medical gaze embraces more than is
  said by the word gaze alone. It contains within
  a single structure different sensorial
  fields..touch/sight/hearing Foucault Birth of
  the Clinic, 1973, p.164

4
A structural analysis

• historical and critical
• Determining the conditions of possibility
• a structural study that sets out to disentangle
  the conditions of its history from the density of
  discourse Birth of the Clinic, p.xix

5
Biopower

• Starting in the 17th century
• Distinction between anatomo-politics of the human
  body (in Discipline and Punish)
• the body as a machine its disciplining, the
  optimization of its capacities

6
Biopolitics of population

• focused on the species body, the body imbued
  with the mechanics of life and serving as the
  basis of the biological processes propagation,
  births and mortality, the left of health, life
  expectancy, and the conditions that can cause
  these to vary (History of Sexuality, p.139)
  life was brought into the realm of explicit
  calculations (p.143)

7

• Bipolitics is a historical form of power a set
  of strategies and techniques.
• In which collective life becomes an object of
  calculation and management and a target of
  powerwith demographics, social geography and
  psychology, sociology.

8
Power is microphysical

• Power is not just exercised through discourse
• Power is excercised through the microphysics of
  techniques (examinations, procedures,
  inspections)
• But it is not repressive, but productive.sexual
  ity is not repressed

9
Micro and molar..

• and we must not take micro to mean a simple
  miniaturization of the visible and articulable
  forms instead it signifies another domain, a new
  type of thought which is irreducible to
  knowledge. Micro therefore means mobile and
  non-localisable connections, Deleuze, Foucault,
  1988, p.74

10
Deleuze on Foucault

• Structural analysis (Foucault 1960s-early 70s)
• Conditions of existence
• Structural commonalities within which differences
  exist

• Microphysics(Foucault 1970s.)
• Movements, flows, deviations, differences
• Minute inventions as well as common forms
• Imitation produces difference!!

11
Imitation and difference

• Tarde wished to examine the diffuse,
  infinitesimal relations which are not those of
  large sets or great men, but are rather the tiny
  ideas of little men a civil servants flourish,
  a new local custom, a linguistic deviation, a
  visual twisting that becomes widespread.
  Deleuze, Foucault, p.142

12
Biopolitics today?

• the very idea of citizenship is now charged with
  the superadded burden of survival
• A new biological territory
• Adriana Petryna on biological citizenship in
  Ukraine

13
Biopolitics

• . While citizenship has long had a biological
  dimension, a new kind of biological citizenship
  is taking shape in the age of rapid biological
  discovery, genomics, biotechnological
  fabrication, and biomedicine. New subjectivities,
  new politics, and new ethics are shaping todays
  biological citizens Rose and Novas, 2005
• e.g. AIDS activism, Manic Depression Fellowship,
  Huntingdons Disease advocacy center

14
Biosocial identities

• Biologically defined citizens encouraged and
  equipped to become political subjects

15
Criticisms of application of biopolitics

• Not a structural analysis in Foucaults sense
  more specific
• But also overgeneralises!

16

• But lack of interest in change and movement
  suggested by Deleuzes reading of Foucault
• Too sociological! Foucaults concepts are
  inventionsFoucault is a modernist not a realist

17
Territory and Milieu

• What about territory?
• With the development of biopolitics, the
  significance of territory changes associated
  increasingly with population

18
Contrasting ways of organising space

• Apparatuses of sovereignty the defence of
  territory
• Apparatuses of discipline the architecture and
  management of schools, hospitals and urban
  spaces.

19

• the territorial sovereign became the architect
  of the disciplined space, but also at the same
  time the regulator of a milieu, which involved
  not so much establishing limits and frontiers, or
  fixing locations, as, above all, and essentially,
  making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring
  circulation of people, merchandise, and air,
  etc., Security, Territory, Population, p.29

20
Governing the environment

• So the government of the milieu the
  environment including the air, water etc.
  becomes a critical feature of biopolitics.of the
  ways in which the security and health of the
  population is enhanced
• e.g. It is up to government to change the air
  temperature (Moheau, 1778), quoted in Foucault,
  lecture of 11th January 1978

21
conclusions

• The historical formation of different forms of
  political spaceterritories, disciplinary
  institutions, circulations of objects and
  materials
• The formation of milieu/environment as an object
  of government.and therefore politics
• Foucault as genealogist of geography the
  science of milieu and relations