1. Foucault 6 Biopolitics Nikolas Rose 1

2. The politics of life itself ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The will to knowledge. 2

3. The politics of life itself La volonté du savoir, 1976: 6 pages on “Right of Death and Power over Life”. From power as deduction to power as management of life and survival of bodies and race – i.e. to ‘governing’ humans as living creatures Biopower seeks to exert a ‘positive’ influence on life, to administer, maximize, multiply it ((HoS: 137) Not to take life or let live, but to actively foster the powers of vitality. NB politics of life vs ‘necropolitics’ of death 3

4. Biopower (in History of Sexuality, v1) One pole: anatamo-politics of the human body, seeking to maximize its forces and integrate it into efficient systems. “Discipline” A second pole of regulatory controls, a biopolitics of the population, focusing on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanisms of life: birth, morbidity, mortality, longevity. “Biopolitics” This bipolar technology, emerging in the seventeenth century, seeks “to invest life through and through” (1976: 139). 4

5. Biopower (in History of Sexuality, v1) By the nineteenth century these two poles were conjoined within a series of “great technologies of power”. New kinds of political struggle could emerge, in which “life as a political object” was turned back against the controls exercised over it, in the name of claims to a “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to the satisfaction of one’s needs (1976: 145). 5

6. Politics of health in the 18 th Century (1976) Extension of obligations of authorities to governing individual and collective vital processes of their subjects and citizens in name of each and of all: the birth rate, and policies to intervene upon it morbidity, not so much epidemics but the illnesses that are routinely prevalent in a particular population and sap its strength requiring interventions in the name of public hygiene and new measures to co- ordinate medical care; old age and accidents to be addressed through insurantial mechanisms the race and the impact upon it of geographic, climatic and environmental conditions, notably in the town. NB ‘governing’ realms that had their own internal laws 6

7. Biopower (in Lectures of 1978)."By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower” Security, Territory, Population [lectures of 1978] p. 1 (2007) 7

8. Biopolitics Initially linked biopolitics to the regulatory endeavors of developing States. But “great overall regulations that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century … are also found at the sub-State level, in a whole series of sub-State institutes such as medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance …” Ways of problematizing and acting on individual and collective conduct in the name of objectives which do not (necessarily) have the State as their origin or point of reference. “Governmentality” 8

9. Biopower and Biopolitics defined ‘Biopower’: range of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence – human beings, individually and collectively, as living creatures who are born, mature, inhabit a body that can be trained and augmented, and then sicken and die. ‘Biopolitics’ contestations over the ways in which human vitality, morbidity and mortality should be problematized, over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious. 9

10. Rabinow and Rose on Biopower Biopower involves: Truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings, and an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth. Truth discourses may not be ‘biological’ in the contemporary sense of the discipline: e.g. may hybridize biological and demographic or even sociological styles of thought, as in the contemporary relations of genomics and risk. Strategies for intervention on collective existence in the name of life and health sometimes territorialized upon the nation, society or pre-given communities, but today often on emergent bio-social collectivities, sometimes in terms of race, ethnicity, gender or religion Modes of subjectification individuals work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of life or health 10

11. Hardt and Negri's on Biopower in Empire "Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself."(p.24) What, then, is not ‘biopower’? 11

12. Biopolitics in C21 Th e Politics of Life Itself Molecularization The (neuro)molecular gaze Optimization (Hope and Fear) Susceptibility Enhancement Subjectification Somatic individuality New practices of collectivisation Biological citizenship Somatic ethics Expertise A new pastorate Bioeconomics Mobilisation of latent value inherent in life Somatic ethic and the spirit of biocapital

13. The Age of Biological Control - Ian Wilmut (2000) “Until the birth of Dolly, scientists were apt to declare that this or that procedure would be ‘biologically impossible’-- but now that expression …seems to have lost all meaning. In the 21st century and beyond, human ambition will be bound only by the laws of physics, the rules of logic, and our descendant’s own sense of right and wrong. Truly, Dolly has taken us into the era of biological control” “ This means that we can no longer assume that the biological itself will impose limits on human ambitions. As a result, humans must accept much greater responsibility toward the realm of the biological, which has, in a sense, become a wholly contingent condition ” CONTINGENT A.adj. … 2. a.Liable to happen or not; of uncertain occurrence or incidence. b.Incidental (to). 4.Happening or coming by chance; not fixed by necessity or fate; accidental, fortuitous. 5. Not determined by necessity in regard to action or existence; free. Obs. 6. Subject to or at the mercy of accidents; liable to chance and change. 7. Metaph. a.Not of the nature of necessary truth; true only under existing conditions. b.That does not exist of itself, but in dependence on something else. c. Non-essential. 8. Dependent for its occurrence or character on or upon some prior occurrence or condition.

14. Biological control? Scientific hubris of course much remains ‘ biologically impossible ’ ‘ nature ’ says no as often as yes But points to a mutation in our very idea of life Life as mechanism, bodies and brains as engineerable apparatus? Finally - an end to vitalism? (perpetual reminder of the specificity of life itself) Beyond the binary of the normal and the pathological no-one is normal, normality and pathology explained in the same terms, no such thing as normal body, brain, genome, scan, aging… An age of control over our biology? Beyond normalisation? Bioprediction – to know and control our biofutures.

15. Deleuze: From discipline to control? L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) “We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. … everyone knows that these institutions are finished…It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the … term for …the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process…. [It is] within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another.”

16. Deleuze: From discipline to control? L'Autre journal, no. 1 (May 1990) Control Not once for all shaping of habits and conscience No single standard of normal against which all are judged Not a single ‘ individual ’ with fixed capacities, but a ‘ dividual ’ with an array of distinct, divisible elements OED: dividualism, dividuality (used as the opposites of individualism, individuality). But constant, discontinuous, sociotechnical evaluation and assessment of particular capacities and conduct Multiple dispersed and distributed switch points of inclusion, modulation or exclusion according to system parameters Logics of modulation in a constant present oriented to the future Dystopian vision, but points to something that has mutated in logics and technologies for conduct of conduct Norbert Wiener on cybernetics and control William S. Burroughs on The Instrument of Control

17. Ethics and Economics Max Weber An elective affinity between early Calvinism and early accumulative capitalism Between a form of extraction: capitalisation And a way of conducting ones life: Lebensfűhring

18. Somatic Ethics Kant’s questions: – what can I know? – What must I do? – What may I hope? Now posed in ‘somatic’ terms: – ‘Soma’ – our genome, our neurotransmitters: our ‘biology’ - given salience – Somatic experts articulate rules for living – We understand ourselves partly in ‘biological’ terms – Expectations, hopes shaped in terms of maintenance of health and prolongation of earthly existence.

19. Somatic Ethics and the Spirit of Biocapital Does this ‘somatic’ ethical economy have elective affinity with biocapital? Only where life itself has achieved such ethical importance Only where the technologies for maintaining and improving it can place themselves in the service of health and life Can biocapital achieve this hold on economies of hope, of imagination and of profit. In this sense somatic ethics is intrinsically linked to the ‘spirit of biocapital’.