May 24, 2004

Empire: Biopower

There is a useful bit of summing up of the recent passages in chapter I of Empire. Hardt and Negri say that, "though the state of exception and police technologies constitute the solid nucleus and the central element of the new imperial right... the biopolitical context of the new paradigm is completely central to our analysis....Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower."
So the account of global governance is going to focus on the way the productive force of the resources of science, bureaucracy and literature are being used to shape the size, longevity, and bodies and culture of whole populations. Though Foucault situated this new kind of power within his analysis of the transformations accompanying the rise of the nation state, Hardt and Negri extend this to a range of contemporary global issues.

Would this be how social bodies are reshaped and re-presented against the backdrop of gendered normalcy in differing national contexts?

In this account it is said that:


"...biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem, as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Biopower does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation, normalisation and institutionalisation. It rather acts on the population in a preventive fashion, its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising life chances, and it operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and the regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’ phenonema on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium and keeping events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a global scale, it is ‘the power to make live."

Biopower is a regulation of the body.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 24, 2004 11:50 PM | TrackBack
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