Elective Notes July 28

BIOPOLITICS
Nation-states History of Sexuality V1: There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of deathand this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limitsnow presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individuals continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battlethat one has to be capable of killing in order to go on livinghas become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. The population what does Foucault mean? Citizens of the nation-state. For Foucault, the development of biopolitics/biopower is a particular historical phenomenon that arises with the invention of and complication of the nation-state. A nation-state is a particular form of the political (of politics); political instantiation. It is a way of organizing people around a government. But there are other arrangements of governments historically Kingdoms with kings reigning over his subjects. But the object of his rule is the protection of himself as king, not the betterment of society.

Empires are another arrangement of politics they are a form of the political in which power is leveraged for the sake of the rule itself, and they expand for the necessity of that rule. Its not that everyone was a Roman, its that the Roman Empire ruled over its own power, which it gained for itself. The nation-state says that the people are the ones who rule themselves: thats Enlightenment thought its not that they invented democracy (Greek city-state is another example of political arrangement its about those who live off the same space & land). But the Nation-state is different, it says that people are identified as a group part of and subjectivized to the idea of a nation. Were told were Americans, to strive to be American, why America is best and why the American Dream is great, and thus were labeled and identified as American. Its not just citizenship, its a certain identity we subscribe to. We usually dont think about this, but these things are articulated through personal customs, habits, norms and values that are part-and-parcel of being American. The nation-state is when we take the idea of a personal American character and embody that in the state the governmental apparatus. The geographic borders & boundaries then has the power to wield laws, central power and authority (police, military) and leverage its own sovereign its own authority over the population but always for the population: its supposed to act in the name of the people. For the people, of the people, by the people, whatever: thats the nation-state. Social contract, Locke, all that shiz. Foucault argues in Society Must Be Defended that the nation is invented by a particular historical discovery of the unjust right to rule in England and France roughly the same time (1600somethings). This historian guy (name??) recounts a history of the French people as being ruled and dominated by an unjust leader centuries previous, there was an invasion into France, and that invasion produced a King who took power through military force. He ruled the space of France, his groupies took out the old command and made a kingdom. As the nation-state starts to develop in the 16/17th century, the right to rule as King was inherited by the Romans. The historian guy says thats total BS, youve been ruling for centuries unjustly and thus we should overthrow your rule to stake in the rule and right of those who were here first the ones who owned and cultivated the land before you all came in and killed us. In this way they were inventing the idea of the People Of France in a particular historical time. [The discovery of the Americas by the Europeans created a self-Othering, where these European identity people came into here, and then made a self-reflexivity that was internalized in Europe these old Europeans were no longer Europeans and were now Mexicans or Canadians or Americans or whatever. The process is different in America or Europe though; we need to always think of biopolitics in different ways given

whatever formulations of power arose in different historical ways but theres a lot of flux and intersection of ideas and circulation that produces a certain homogeneity but an incomplete one. Colonialism is pretty important for America in general, especially Latin America.] So you have to create the idea of the French or English people and imagine Im a subject of the Chinese you might identify as part of that, but youre saying that youre a subject of that power, not as someone who is in the power relation. Foucault thinks this is how race starts getting invented: that you think the race of the X group is created through a biological inheritance. The discovery of biotruths and scientific facts helps out ideology and they map together and create a scientific or natural basis for the idea of race or supremacy or whatever. Race and biology become interconnected and that is pretty important for things like racism and eugenics. Its not that there is some British state and everyones British there are Scottish and Welsh etc theres no identity of British before William The Conquerer comes and unites these local identities under a single flag. This kind of process is the way just rulers of people and land come about, for Foucault. For Foucault, the discovery and invention of a nation is a relationship of war: the people of France or England are fighting against an unjust rule that has invaded their land. When the nation is created, its in the context of war against an internal unjust rule. Some guy said war is politics by other means. Foucault says politics is war by other means, because it is always defending the society in which it was instantiated we invented society out of the necessity against an internal and external enemy. It produces itself via its threats or its outside. Theres just people hanging out its not like One Dude comes and Is the First French Person. They create a positive notion of themselves through a historical notion of France as a nation, but that culture in France is also identified with the nation culture goes out as the nation comes in. The State, to be the protector and defender and police of Society, is always in a relationship of war against the outside and inside as well sometimes. If thats t rue, then in order to defend the Nation, the State is justified in doing any number of terrible things: going to war, rounding up and exterminating criminals, or putting the mad in a madhouse, or taking the people who are a threat to the States integrity and excluding them, or not giving them legal or political rights. Since the stake of the State is the population (thats what is At Risk), then the State can mobilize its forces (violent or otherwise) to preserve the population like the beginning quote talked about. We can kill in the name of protecting the population. The technology of the State as nation-state allows for quick mobilization for organization, an intensity that was unprecedented before the French Revolution. If

youre fighting for your countrymen, then you will be more fervent than if you were some guy fighting to defend the King. Some people are into that, but not that many. The nation makes an investment: youre an emotional investment in the nation, and you defend it as best you can. This is true in the USA today soldiers, we have an emotional attachment to the idea that you can put your life on the line to protect your country it is the highest honor possible. That honor is only possible because of the identity of a people you can identify with to even protect in the first place. Organization of armies are fighting for their people and nation and are more likely to go through harsh conditions, to not defect. The State is a technology to make more effective the mobilization of power to make warfighting more efficient, more powerful it organizes and mobilizes power in particular ways to increase efficiency. The nation-state, because its such an effective technology, spreads all over the world. Think of it just like its a computer once a company uses a computer, they can register data at a whole new level; faster, higher scale, etc. Same for the nation-state: the reason it spreads globally and becomes the only powerful form of political integration today is because its the most effective at mobilizing the population and organizing armies at organizing security. The States that matter are all nation-states. Its the iPod of politics.

Power Sovereign power: the authority to declare death. Sovereignty the right to rule over a certain geographical area and over a certain people. Theres one State that has no higher authority, and is the law of the land a geographical area. In the US, the FG is the sovereign. Sovereign power: the power to make die. This extends from the kingdoms and Kings of Europe as Foucault said, its the power to make die and let live. To think of it in a kingly sense, think of a king who can pardon people (I can get your head get chopped off, but Ill let you off). For Foucault the nation-state inverts this. Biopolitics is the inversion the State now has the power to make live and let die. That is biopower in the shortest terms. To think about that instead of the State showing mercy, they can make someone into a productive, functioning member of society.

Instead of just executing people, the State now lets those who they dont want to produce as its subjects die. It lets them die. More on that later. To make live: the King just needed enough subjects to make money and feed the population (the King, really); he didnt care how weak and feeble the peasants were. If you have more poor, stupid, peasants, you can really easily convince them of anything; that Christianity is real, that the King is God, whatever. In the nation-State, we flip this around: now, the State wants to produce a positive and productive and healthy and educated society, most optimized version of itself. We have this idea of biology and survival of the fittest, which gets mixed in here. As the State inverts this power in the nation-state, its about producing a healthy educated and optimized subjectivity. How that happens. His first book: History of Madness. Its how society rounded up and seperated the mad: we constructed sanity and reason around a healthy and functioning body: reason and logic coincides with un-reason and madness. These latter people are seperated from society. The Ship of Fools is the ship that went up and down the Danube in Germany (W Europe?) and got crazy people on the ship, and just floated them on a ship, and theyd love it. For Foucault thats symbolic of the rounding-up of the population and with the Enlightenment reason, we put madmen into dungeons and later into asylums. Now when we put them into asylums, thats when shit goes down we try to make them sane, and make them into sanity. For Foucault, all these Truths are fabricated just historically contingent, invented, socially constructed, only came about by chance. Descartes I Think Therefore I Am was a cornerstone of this. For Foucault, he writes Discipline and Punish, and he talks about how we create criminals through the law, and we discipline people into good citizenship. This is disciplinary power producing a good normative subject of the law, state, norm. In the days of kings and olden Europe, there was no pressure to make people into an Ideal Person. There used to just be people some people were crazy, maybe they were homosexual (but that word didnt exist), maybe they were robbers. The Enlightenment was the first instance of disciplinary power: we make people into better subjects. You can get out of an asylum if you demonstrate that youre cured of your sanity. In prison we try to rehabilitate criminals into good citizens. In school, we make crazy ass children into super productive normative model citizens that do things on time and are

productive. Health care creates healthy people, and we fix sick people. These are all forms of disciplinary power they discipline people into the ideal subject that the state wants them to be. The State is changing the foundation of what makes up its own society. These are all at the micro-level though; at school, youre disciplined individually same for asylums and prison. How do we take the people on the fringes and bring them into the visibility of the State and government? This is where biopolitics is invented. We need to take the fringes and unincorporated masses into the society people cant just do whatever they want, we need a technology to make visibile those people and incorporate them in the registers of the State thats biopolitics. Epidemiology disease-tracking and study taking a census is biopolitical. Whos in this area? How many people live here? What are they like? This way, we can make statistical claims about these people and track them the invention of statistical norms as a biopolitical technology of control: making the population visible and then dominating them, making them into proper subjects. Infrastructure housing projects. Police surveillance and such. The NSA doesnt care about one person, they care about ALL the people. Aid tries to craft a people into a better or developed population of subjects modeled after the First World or Enlightened assistance-giver. A more productive economy, etc. Welfare healthcare not just clinics, but universal healthcare: organizing a society around health. There are TONS of examples of biopolitical technologies of the State. Any kind of securitization of oil, goods, etc. are biopolitical.

Neoliberalism Neoliberalism a particular economic system that strives for limiting State intervention but does so through State power that only opens up more markets and makes the economy better. Economy is pretty biopolitical: theyre kinda parallel. The historical period weve been describing has been the one when capitalism was created. We had mercantilism, then capitalism (trading and markets and one big market has cheaper stuff, more profit etc). All that happens around the same period: as colonialism starts to die out, we have Late Capitalism and then neoliberalism. The biopolitical explanation of neoliberalism is that weve shifted the object of power of politics from the protection of society and population to optimization of the market and

economy. We now protect and defend markets, corporations, and flows of capital, rather than populations of biological humans. In the 80s and 90s this really happens the State should try to make markets function more properly and efficiently. It intervenes to make markets better: it does subsidies, free trade agreements, uses the tools of the military to open up new markets (Afghanistan or Iraq or Latin America), it subsidizes new alternative energy technologies to make them more competitive. Its role is to make things better. This isnt necessarily evil neoliberals think that this ends up helping most people. But the shift is from the care of people, to the care of markets and capital flows. It justifies violence and militarization to protect and create markets. Iraq war justification: we needed more oil so we invaded. Naomi Klein talks about disaster capitalism: the State creates disasters to bring in corporations to fix them. It creates new markets for the economy to colonize: NAFTA open up Mexico and let our companies generate wealth there and fill in these new boundaries. For Klein and others, this is violent and virulent because the State can justify all intervention in the name of making-better those markets.

Race Biopower didnt get created in a vacuum it came to power in a whole slew of discriminatory ideas about other people. Racism and sexism co-mingle with biopolitics: we have a strengthening of race and a discriminatory version of that. The nation is created, it invents race because of the idea of population & nation being attached to each other, etc. Racism allowed slavery and we created a hierarchy of racial orders: a certain type of body for obvious reasons in Europe (Enlightenment, high technology etc) became better than the others. The creation of biological beings to be defended means that other biological beings are also created who are threats to our selfness. Pre-existing judgments of people (Jews, blacks, Native Americans) were already reduced to nothingness they can die of smallpox if they dont Whiten up by embracing Christianity, etc. For biopolitics, that discriminatory line of good and bad races is reproduced through biopolitics. Immigration the White America wants to keep out the dirty brown Mexicans. Blacks are created by Whites as an Other Race to do our jobs for us. Blackness is already associated with infiltration, dirtiness, impurity thus they are logically the most criminal (and treated as such).

Ideas of purity led to the idea of an impure element the illegal, the other race, the other people. Biopolitics is enacted around normative racial lines. Normative as in the privileged, valued qualities and characters. A normative behavior has good etiquette, manners, well-educated polite. White male middle-class cissexual bodies sometimes women but usually not. The non-normative fit into that second category. This is the let die part of biopolitics. We let die the others who are not clean, causing bad things to happen or will cause bad things to happen we let die the disabled until more recently (integration into the social body) or the homeless (not capitalist subjects). Those who cant become normative through the market or social structures or whatever, we let them die because they are a threat to the social body itself. Every determination of who is let live? is the positive idea that has a negative counterpart of who is let die? Or like, excluded. Mbembe says its more like made to die. He talks about necropolitics (Foucaults thanatopolitics) certain bodies need to be killed off to let us live and survive. The counter-politics is the counter-part to the political body. Thus, biopolitics isnt a neutral or scientific idea there are existing ideologies and histories that produced the normative and privileged subjects that are on the top. Its not some guy at a microscope saying Oh yes the Chinese do indeed consist of 100% evil, its not that at all: its that there was a history of Orientalism that arose to these ideas and ways of thinking. Escobar, dewfield (sp?) make arguments on why biopolitics is becoming global (H&N say globally-intertwined), and states and societies are becoming one and the same. US & Mexico operate economically as if its one country the only seperation is our national border. Giving aid to Mexico conditions it for the US benefit happier farmers making more food to export to us for cheaper than elsewhere. Violent intervention is justified to save those people (for the ultimate purpose of conditioning them as subjects of the state optimized etc). We did wars for America... now our sphere of influence includes Mexico: so we go to war to protect them.... etc. The ideology of constant threat justifies the States constant existence. ----But if power is over the population, counter-power allows us to resist these hegemonies and flows we can resist the normalization of our body at the local level. We say I will refuse those regimes of biopolitics. The alt of a Foucauldian critique is to pull back: biopower doesnt always do the Holocaust or genocide, but everything prior to those

events led up to them. When the economy is in shits, or crisis is going on, maybe we have to do more radical forms of violence in order to defend them! The rise of Germany after WW1... etc. Alts dont solve the K you cant possibly solve biopower. But they put up a fight against biopolitics to pull back from the brink of biopolitics. Were resisting the call to commit large-scale murders and violence and wars. Its like weighing the scales: a check of the aff for biopolitics it might make it less powerful however. Enough dissension can make for violent demands. ----Biopolitics identifies who fits in what categories. The US as an idea or concept (being American) was a project in the woods cleanse the wilderness of its inhabitants and fill this newly empty land. Scary shit in the woods needs to get cleaned out: so this white Puritan fantasy of emptiness (literally depopulated). Afro-pes lit talks about how its a America/Black.