Paul Rabinow
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
CA 94720, USA
Email: Rabinow@SSCL.Berkeley.EDU
and
Nikolas Rose
Department of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
Email: n.rose@lse.ac.uk
THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF BIOPOWER TODAY.
In this talk we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower
and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider
Foucault’s development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close
to ours, from the recent philosophical take-up of the terms by Georgio Agamben and
Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the
‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent
to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of
life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on
themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that while
exceptional ‘paroxysmal’ forms of biopower, linked to the formation of absolutist
dictatorship and mobilization of technical resources, can lead and have led to a
murderous thanatopolitics, biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It
characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making
live (faire vivre) – that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples
from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around
three themes: race, population and reproduction and genomic medicine.
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1
Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose
THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF BIOPOWER TODAY.
"Q; Isn't it logical, given these concerns, that you should be writing a
genealogy of bio-power?"
MF: I have no time for that now but, it could be done. In fact, I have to do
it." 1
What is “biopower”? In a book ostensibly devoted to the history of
sexuality, La volonté du savoir, published in 1976, Michel Foucault
included six highly provocative pages on this theme in a chapter entitled
“Right of Death and Power over Life”. For a long time, he argued, one of
the privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death, a
right that, by the classical age, had been constrained to occasions when
the sovereign himself was threatened from enemies without and within.
This was the juridical form of sovereign power – the right of a ruler to
seize things, time, bodies, ultimately the life of subjects. It was the model
of power that was codified and generalized in classical political
philosophy – a model that remained essentially unaltered when the
“king’s head” was displaced from sovereign to state. But, Foucault
argued, since the classical age, deduction has become merely one element
in a range of mechanisms working to generate, incite, reinforce, control,
monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it. Whilst external wars
are bloodier than ever, and regimes visit holocausts upon their own
populations, he did not consider these wars to be waged in the name of
the sovereign, but in the name of the existence of everyone “entire
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populations are mobilized for the purpose of the wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity … 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 “ (1979: 137). Power,
Foucault argues, is now situated and exercised at the level of life.
Foucault promised to flesh out his sweeping generalizations in one
of the six proposed volumes of the history of sexuality whose titles
appear on the book’s back jacket. That promise was not fulfilled,
although he devoted a number of his 1976 Lectures to this theme. But he
did propose a rather simple and now familiar bipolar diagram of power
over life. In this diagram, one pole of biopower focuses on an anatamopolitics
of the human body, seeking to maximize its forces and integrate it
into efficient systems. The second pole is one 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. He claims that this bipolar technology, which begins to be set
up in the seventeenth century, seeks “to invest life through and through”
(1976: 139). And, by the nineteenth century, he argues, these two poles
were conjoined within a series of “great technologies of power” of which
sexuality was only one. In so establishing themselves, 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).
At its most general, then, the concept of “biopower” serves to bring
into view a field comprised of more or less rationalized attempts to
intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence – human
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3
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 and as collectivities or populations composed of such living
beings. And, whilst Foucault is imprecise in his use of the terms, it
might be helpful to suggest that, within the field of biopower, we can call
‘biopolitics’ the specific strategies and contestations over
problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality.
over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, and practices of
intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious.
More than quarter of a century after the introduction of this concept, at
the threshold of what some have plausibly termed “the biological
century,” this contested field of problems and strategies is ever-more
crucial and enigmatic than ever. Yet surprisingly little work has been
done to develop Foucault’s own sketchy suggestions into an operational
set of tools for critical inquiry.2
The term biopower is more likely to be
taken to refer to the generation of energy from renewable biological
material. The term biopolitics has been taken up by advocates of a range
of environmental and ecological causes.3
However we feel that
Foucault’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics retain considerable
analytical utility. As a first step towards some conceptual clarification,
we propose that the concept of biopower designates a plane of actuality
that must include, at a minimum, the following elements:
• One or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living
human beings, and an array of authorities considered competent to
speak that truth. These truth discourses may not themselves be
‘biological’ in the contemporary sense of the discipline, biological’
in the contemporary sense of the discipline, for instance they may
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hybridize biological and demographic or even sociological styles
of thought, as in the contemporary relations of genomics and risk,
merged in the new language of susceptibility.
• Strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of
life and health, initially addressed to populations that may or may
not be territorialized upon the nation, society or pre-given
communities, but may also be specified in terms of emergent biosocial
collectivities, sometimes specified in terms of categories of
race, ethnicity, gender or religion, as in the emerging forms of
genetic or biological citizenship.
• Modes of subjectification, in which individuals can be brought to
work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation
truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of
individual or collective life or health: Rabinow’s biosociality and
Rose’s somatic individuality address different aspects of this
question.
The limits of biopower
We frame our initial specification in these limited terms partly in
response to the ways in which the term “biopower” has been used by two
of our leading contemporary philosophers – Giorgio Agamben and
Antonio Negri – who have made “biopower” and “biopolitics” central
themes of their recent work. These works have many merits. But they
entail highly general philosophical deployments of the terms which are
totalizing and misleading, yet it appears to be precisely these generalities
that have received attention and approval.4
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Empire
For Hardt and Negri, in Empire, biopower is an encompassing, totalizing
term. In their neo-Marxist reading, their first premise is that all the work
that power does on life can be understood as the extraction of some kind
of value or surplus from that life. Since, for them, this characterizes all
power, all contemporary politics is biopolitics: a “form of power that
regulates social life from its interior” (2000: 23). In a second move, they
conflate this omnipotent and all pervasive biopower serving to secure the
dominion of global Empire with Gilles Deleuze’s argument that we have
moved from “societies of discipline” to “societies of control.” Deleuze
speculated that, in such societies of control, the management of inclusion
and exclusion was not accomplished by an archipelago of disciplinary
institutions dotted across the social field – asylums, factories, schools,
hospitals, universities, each seeking to implant a mode of conduct into
body and its correlate soul - but was immanent in the flexible, fluid and
fluctuating networks of existence itself. Hence, for Hardt and Negri,
biopolitics refers to a power that is “expressed as a control that extends
throughout the depths of the consciousnesses and bodies of the
population.” (2000: 24) And Hardt and Negri reveal that this bio-political
power is exercised in the name of multi-national and trans-national
corporations who, since the second half of the twentieth century have
chosen “to structure global territories bio-politically.” (2000: 31)
This attempt to resurrect a revolutionary view of world history,
updating Marx with Deleuze, ends with a twist of Christianity: a legend
about St. Francis of Assisi who “refused every instrumental discipline,
and … posed a joyous life … against the will of power and corruption.
Once again in post modernity we find ourselves in Francis’s situation,
posting against the misery of power the joy of being” (2000: 413.) Of
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course, it is necessary, today above all, to extend the scope of traditional
analyses of economic exploitation and geopolitics to encompass their
relation to the living character of the human species, perhaps to all living
beings. But it is difficult to see what analytical work can be done by such
an expanded concept of biopower: in the end Hardt and Negri merely
provide a superficial description of certain aspects of our present, framed
within the kind of towering worldview that other theorists of post
modernity had proclaimed a thing of the past, simply re-described in their
own terms and infused with a Manichean opposition of a mysterious
global Empire to an even more phantom “multitude.” This diagram is
quite antithetical to the lessons on power that they should have learned
from Foucault. This version of the concept of “biopower” is emptied of
its analytic force – it can describe everything but analyze nothing.
It might be useful here to remind ourselves that when Foucault
introduced the term in the last of his Collège de France lectures of 1975-
6, Society Must be Defended, he is precise about the historical
phenomena which he is seeking to grasp (Foucault, 2003). He
enumerates them there: issues of the birth rate, and the beginnings of
policies to intervene upon it; issues of 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; the problems of old age and
accidents to be addressed through insurantial mechanisms; the problem of
the race and the impact upon it of geographic, climatic and environmental
conditions, notably in the town. The concept of biopower, then, is a
crystallization after ten years of collective and individual research on the
genealogy of disciplinary power in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century.5
Foucault himself had lectured on the politics of health in the
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7
eighteenth century in Japan and in Brazil; his seminar members were
producing detailed historical studies of the role of medicine, town
planning, royal shipyards, and a host of other sites in which experiments
about how to produce and regulate ways to maximize the capacities of
both the population and the individual as a target of power are being
carried out. The concept of biopower – like that of discipline” – was not
trans-historical or metaphoric, but precisely grounded in historical, or
genealogical, analysis.
Whilst initially linking biopolitics to the regulatory endeavors of
developing States (2003: 250) he recognizes that “the 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, and so on.” (2003: 250).
This is the point at which Foucault begins to develop his concept of
“governmentality” to encompass the variety of ways of problematizing
and acting on individual and collective conduct in the name of certain
objectives which do not have the State as their origin or point of
reference. And as he develops this line of thought, he distances himself
from the view that such power over life is unambiguously nefarious.6
This is also the turning point that leads Foucault to a fascination with
ancient modes of subjectification and the possibilities of freedom. In this
context, it is worth remembering that medicine is perhaps the oldest site
where one can observe the play of truth, power and ethics in relation to
the subject, and to the possibilities of a good, or as the Greeks would have
it, a flourishing, life.
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Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben, in a series of haunting books, identifies the Holocaust
as the ultimate exemplar of biopower; and biopower as the hidden
meaning of all forms of power from the ancient world to the present. He
seeks to use this concept to analyze the profound trauma of European
history. We feel much sympathy with this work: like him, we consider
that Holocaust is not an exceptional moment of throwback to a singular
barbarianism, but an enduring possibility intrinsic to the very project of
civilization and the law. For Agamben, all power rests ultimately on the
ability of one to take the life of another, a phenomenon that he analyses
through the metaphor of homo sacer – the enigmatic figure in Roman
law whose crimes made his sacrifice impossible but who could be killed
with impunity. Like this figure, reduced from bios – crudely, the way of
life proper to an individual or group in a polity – to zöe - “bare life” he
suggests that the birth of biopower in modernity marks the point at which
the biological life of subjects enters politics and belongs to the State.
Following Carl Schmitt, Agamben believe that it is the right of the
Sovereign State to declare “a state of exception” that guarantees modern
rule. The concentration camps, labor camps and death camps of the
Nazi’s are a materialization of this state of exception, and form, for him,
the “nomos” of modernity – a fourth space added to that of state, nation
and land, in which inhabitants are stripped of everything but their bare
life, which is placed without recourse in the hands of power “This is why
the camp is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which
politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is virtually confused with the
citizen.” (Agamben, 1998: 171)
Agamben takes seriously Adorno’s challenge – how is it possible
to think after Auschwitz?7
But for that very reason, it is to trivialize
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Auschwitz to apply Schmitt’s concept of “the state of exception” and
Foucault’s analysis of biopower to every instance where living beings
enter the scope of regulation, control and government. The power to
command under threat of death is exercised by States and their surrogates
in multiple instances, in micro forms and in geopolitical relations. But
this is not to say that this form of power – commands backed up by the
ultimate threat of death – is the guarantee or underpinning principle of all
forms of biopower in contemporary liberal societies. Unlike Agamben,
we do not think that : “the jurist… the doctor, the scientist, the expert, the
priest” depend for their power over life upon an alliance with the State
(1998: 122). Nor is it useful to use this single diagram to analyze every
contemporary instance of thanato-politics – from Rwanda to the
epidemic of AIDS deaths across Africa. Surely the essence of critical
thought must be its capacity to make distinctions that can facilitate
judgment and action. 8
Holocaust is undoubtedly one configuration that modern biopower
can take. Racisms allows power to sub-divide a population into
subspecies known as races, to fragment it, and to allow a relationship in
which the death of the other, of the inferior race, can be seen as
something that will make life in general healthier and purer: as Foucault
put it in 1976 “racism justifies the death-function in the economy of
biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one
biologically stronger insofar as ones is a member of a race or a population
(2003: 258). It is true that in this lecture he suggests that it is “the
emergence of biopower that inscribes [racism] in the mechanisms of the
State … as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern
States. (2003: 254). But the Nazi regime was, in his view, exceptional –
“a paroxysmal development”: “We have, then, in Nazi society something
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that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized
biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the
sovereign right to kill… to kill anyone, meaning not only other people but
also its own people… a coincidence between a generalized biopower and
a dictatorship that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the
entire social body” (2003: 260). ). Biopower in the form it took under
National Socialism was a complex mix of the politics of life and the
politics of death – as Robert Proctor points out, Nazi doctors and health
activists waged war on tobacco, sought to curb exposure to asbestos,
worried about the over use of medication and X-rays, stressed the
importance of a diet for of petrochemical dies and preservatives,
campaigned for whole-grain bread and foods high in vitamins and fiber,
and many were vegetarians (Proctor, 1999). But within this complex, the
path to the death camps was dependent upon a host of other historical,
moral, political and technical conditions. Holocaust is neither exemplary
of thanato-politics, nor the hidden dark truth of biopower.
Sovereignty
Our criticism here is linked to a difference about the question of
“sovereignty.” Whilst Hardt and Negri differentiate ‘empire’ from the
forms of sovereignty that emerged in the nation state, the diagram
remains more or less unaltered: although “imperial sovereignty … is
organized not around one central conflict but rather through a flexible
network of microconflicts”, Empire nonetheless gathers unto itself the
power relations that traverse all those “elusive, proliferating and nonlocalizable
contradictions” (2000: 201). The image of Empire thus
functions as is the imaginary condensation of all those relations into a
single modality of sovereign power, to which can only be opposed a
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radical form of alterity in the form of the multitude – the contemporary
figure of the regicide who will, in eliminating the sovereign, inaugurate a
kingdom in which sovereign power is re-appropriated by subjects
themselves. Despite its apparent radicalism, anti-capitalists might be wary
of the religious underpinnings of this eschatology of resistance.
For Agamben, sovereignty also has something of a sacred form –
the ritual declaration of homo sacer is alive today in the capacity of the
sovereign state to establish the state of exception, to commit those
stripped of the rights of bios to those zones, and to torture or kill those
reduced to the status of zoe free from the legal restraints that would
designate that murder. The power over life exercised today by “the
jurist… the doctor, the scientist, the expert, the priest” arises from the
alliance with the sovereign into which they have entered (1998: 122) –
wittingly or not, like those who populated Althusser’s Ideological State
Apparatuses, they do the sovereign’s will. Homo sacer, for Agamben, is
not an historically marginal phenomenon: it demands our attention as
critical thinkers because it is the ordering principle of contemporary
societies. Against such a “growing bio-political nightmare” the only
solution seems equally sacred: no wonder Agamben invokes the figure,
taken from Walter Benjamin, of a messianic “end of time.” as one
possible way out.
The interpretation of contemporary biopolitics as the politics of a
state modeled on the figure of the sovereign suits the twentieth century
absolutisms of the Nazis and Stalin. But we need a more nuanced account
of sovereign power to analyze contemporary rationalities or technologies
of politics. Since these authors take their concept and point of reference
from Foucault, it is worth contrasting their postulate of a origin and
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beneficiary of biopower to Foucault’s remarks on sovereignty – as a form
of power whose diagram, but not principle, is the figure of the sovereign
ruler. Its’ characteristic is indeed ultimately a mode of power which
relies on the right to take life. However, with the exception of certain
“paroxysmal” moments, this is a mode of power whose activation can
only be sporadic and non-continuous. The totalization of sovereign
power as a mode of ordering daily life would be too costly, and indeed
the very excesses of the exercise of this power seek to compensate for its
sporadic nature. Sovereignty, in this sense, is precisely a diagram of a
form of power not a description of its implementation. Certainly some
forms of colonial power sought to operationalize it, but in the face of its
economic and governmental costs, colonial statecraft was largely to take
a different form. The two megalomaniac State forms of the twentieth
century also sought to actualize it, as have some others in their wake:
Albania under Hoxha, North Korea… But no historian of pre-modern
forms of control could fail to notice the dependence of sovereign rule in
its non-paroxysmal form on a fine web of customary conventions,
reciprocal obligations, and the like, in a word, a moral economy whose
complexity and scope far exceeds the extravagance displays of the
sovereign. Sovereign power is at one and the same time an element in this
moral economy and an attempt to master it. A cursory glance at the work
of Jacques Le Goff – whose work Foucault knew well, or Ferdinand
Braudel and the whole Annales project, or, for English readers, the
writings of EP Thompson should be sufficient to dispel such recent mis-
readings.9
On the one hand, nation states, in the limited form that they took in
the classical age, in addition to their theatres of power and public display,
began to be key mobilisers of the internal forces of their territories so as
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to secure their objectives of prosperity and security. Yet, on the other
hand, the governmentalized states of the late nineteenth century took the
shape that they did through the prior formation of ever-growing
apparatuses of knowledge collection and problematization that formed
alongside the state apparatus, in the emergent terrain of the “social.”
States can rule only because of the ways in which they have managed to
connect themselves up to these apparatuses, which have their own logics
and viscosity which, so long as regimes aspire to liberalism, exercise
demands and constraints on central powers. Non-state bodies played a
key role since the origin of “the social” – philanthropic organizations,
social investigators, pressure groups, medics, feminists and assorted
reformers.
Since the end of the Second World War, and taking here only the
example of health, a range of powerful agencies within states and a range
of transnational bodies taken on a new importance. So have a host of
bioethics commissions, regulatory agencies, and professional
organizations: a whole ‘bioethical complex’ in which the power of
medical agents to ‘let die’ at the end of life, the start of life or in
reproduction are simultaneously enhanced by medical technology and
regulated by other authorities as never before. Further, we have seen the
rise of new kinds of patients’ groups and individuals, who increasingly
define their citizenship in terms of their rights (and obligations) to life,
health and cure. And, of course, new circuits of bioeconomics have taken
shape, a large scale capitalization of bioscience and mobilization of its
elements into new exchange relations: the new molecular knowledges of
life and health are being mapped out, developed and exploited by a range
of commercial enterprises, sometime in alliance with States, sometimes
autonomous from them, establishing constitutive links between life, truth
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and value At the same time, States retain power to designates zones of
exception, even when their legality is dubious –the camp remains a grim
reality from the wars in the Balkans, though Guantanamo Bay to the
‘detentions centers’ springing up across Europe to incarcerate “asylum
seekers” and others who trespass on the spaces of bios but are not
admitted. Do these all form part of a single configuration of biopower?
If so, we don’t think we can use the ‘making die’ aspect of this field to
encompass its other aspects ‘letting die’ of course, but also ‘making live’.
We have suggested that the concept of biopower seeks to
individuate strategies and configurations that combine a form of truth
discourse about living being; an array of authorities considered
competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective
existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in
which individuals can be brought to work on themselves, under certain
forms of authority, in relation to truth discourses, by means of practices
of the self, in the name of individual or collective life or health. Although
we draw these elements from Foucault's all too brief interventions on the
concept, it is worth remembering that his principal site of investigation
was the emergence of forms of power in the eighteenth century, their
transformation in the nineteenth, and to some limited extent an
examination of the forms taking shape at the end of the nineteenth
century. Across the twentieth century, the management of collective life
and health became a key objective of governmentalized states, with
identifiable configurations of truth, power and subjectivity underpinning
the rationalities of welfare and security as well as those of health and
hygiene.
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Whilst the concept of biopower seems to have the capacity to
render visible significant mutations in the government of life and health
at the start of the twenty-first century, each of these configurations of
welfare, security, health and hygiene has taken on different forms. It
would certainly be misleading simply to project forward Foucault’s
analysis as if it could be used to mechanically map our present as well as
our “near future,” to use the telling phrase of Gilles Deleuze.10
One key
mutation concerns the relations between what one might term, clumsily,
the macro and the micro, or following Deleuze, the molar and the
molecular, poles of this mode of power. That is to say, on the one hand,
the emphases and relations on ways of thinking and acting at the level of
population groups and collectivities, variously defined; and, on the other
hand, the individualization of bio-political strategies. Undoubtedly, in the
era of the social state – and in those locales where such states still form
the organizing principle of political struggle – it was the molar that was
privileged. In the twentieth century States not only developed or
supported insurantial mechanisms of security, but gathered together,
organized and rationalized the loose threads of medical provision,
specified and regulated standards of housing, engaged in campaigns of
health education and the like. Even liberal States also played their role in
the battle against degeneracy, imposing immigration controls, sometimes
legitimating compulsory or quasi-compulsory sterilization, encouraging
organizations giving eugenic guidance on marriage and procreation and
so forth. Of course, each of these was to have its ‘molecular’ counterpart,
for example in the transformation of the home into a machine for health,
and the education and solicitation of mothers as ancillary workers in the
health care of their children. Today, much of this configuration remains,
and, indeed, some of it has been translated to a supranational level in the
endeavors of the European Union, the World Bank and the like. But with
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the decline of the domain of the social as a privileged site of national
objectivation and intervention in the ‘advanced liberal’ societies of the
West, we observe new collective formations emergent everywhere, and,
at the same time, new modes of individualization and conceptions of
autonomy with their associated rights to health, life, liberty and the
pursuit of a form of happiness that is increasingly understood in corporeal
and vital terms. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the events
that have surrounded the mapping of “the human genome.”
We will try to contribute to this work by saying a little about three
topics that seem to us to condense some of the bio-political lines of force
active today: race, reproduction, and genomic medicine; no doubt others
would be equally instructive.
Analytics of Biopower
Of course, to place all these diverse developments within the ambit of
biopower is not to imply that there is some unity at work here, or some
essence – truth or falsity - that all these forms exemplify or embody. We
need to recognize dispersion, contingency and virtuality, although not
with deconstructionist intent. Before we can see if some general political
rationality is emerging, the task of analysis is to articulate preliminary
diagnoses at a smaller scale. And, placing the evidence that we see from
such analyses in the framework of biopower, we think we can begin to
identify and analyze elements of such a domain, though it is neither
stable, total, nor already known; nor does it conform to the images
provided by our philosophers. In this configuration, race, health,
genealogy, reproduction and knowledge are intertwined, continually
transforming one another and recombined in multiple manners and
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modes. By this we mean that knowledge of health transforms the idea of
race, that ideas of genealogy are reframed by new conceptions of
reproduction, that changing ideas of genealogy radically impact upon the
politics of race, races and racism. Let us turn to explore some of these
issues in some more detail.
I. Race.
Race, together with health, and in variable relations with it, has been one
of the central poles in the genealogy of biopower. We can enumerate
some moments. The so-called “war of nations” in the eighteenth century
(the topic of several lectures by Foucault in Society Must be Defended),.
The massive biologization of race in the nineteenth century, linked to
pre- and post- Darwinist evolutionary thinking and applied both within
states and in their colonial dominations. The later nineteenth century
obsession with degeneracy and race suicide and the strategies of eugenics
that spread from the United States to Japan and elsewhere in the first half
of the twentieth century. In all these instances and others, conceptions of
race formed a prism not just for the imagination of the nation, but also for
the political management of national health and vitality, and of
international competitiveness. After the Second World War, official
racialist discourses were discredited: by 1963, for example, the United
Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination took as one of its premises “that any doctrine of racial
differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable,
socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial
discrimination either in theory or in practice” (United Nations 1963:
Preamble). Of course, racialist practices hardly subsided, but a biological
understanding of racial categories no longer was “in the truth” in political
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or policy discourse. In part due to the persistent interventions of radical
critics, the link between biological understandings of distinctions
amongst population groups and their socio-political implications seemed
broken or at least de-naturalized. Of course, biologists still believed they
encountered such differences, not least in examining the prevalence of
particular diseases in different regions or the efficacy of medicines in
different national populations. And some individuals and groups
persisted in claiming a politically pertinent correlation between human
qualities capacities and racially differentiated biological capacities in a
whole number of controversies from education to criminality. Moreover,
in the United States for example, race as a socio-economic category, a
mark of discrimination and a mode of identification remained extremely
salient socially and politically, from the allocation of federal funds to the
manifestations of identity politics. Although race functioned as a marker
of belonging and the basis of a claim as to disadvantage, even when
groups or individuals sought to trace their “roots”, they seldom related
this genealogy to a biological substrate. The same is true of the
murderous racist wars that spread across Europe in the wake of the
demise of the Soviet empire, from Armenia to the Balkans. With the
notable exception of Rwanda, appeals to racial identities to ground the
elimination of other groups needed no justification in the truth discourse
of biology.
At the turn of the new century, however, race is once again reentering
the domain of biological truth. At a certain moment, when it
became clear that humans shared over 98 percent of their genome with
chimpanzees, and that inter-group variations in DNA sequences were
greater than intra-group variations, it appeared that genomics itself would
mark the terminal point of biological racism (perhaps even species-ism).
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19
But this humanitarian dream proved to be short-lived. A new molecular
deployment of race has emerged seemingly almost inevitably out of
genomic thinking. Critics denounced the model of a single genome that
underpinned the Human Genome Project, fearing that it would establish a
white male norm. The first move here was cast as ethical: as the initial
proposer of this work, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza put it “to explore the full
range of genome diversity within the human family” and “to help combat
the widespread popular fear and ignorance of human genetics and …
make a significant contribution to the elimination of racism” (M’charek
2000: 5-6). Despite the critics, this effort to ensure the recognition of
diversity in the framing of scientific truth as an essential dimension of
genomic knowledge was later adopted by the Human Genome Project
(HUGO) and funded by the European Community (from 1992) and later
the United States Federal government National Institute for Health. And
subsequently the NIH and the British philanthropic Wellcome Trust have
given considerable funds to research into the establishment of genomic
differences at the SNP level. This funding has been justified precisely in
bio-political terms, as leading towards and ensuring the equal health of
the population in all – or some – of its diversity.
The science itself and the recognition of the variability of the
human genome at the level of the single nucleotide – SNP mapping –
immediately opened up and legitimated a new way of conceptualizing
racial difference at the molecular level. In addition to the ethical
humanism of the state projects, additional pressure to proceed in this
direction came in some areas from the demands of patient groups for
genomic self-knowledge, and in others from the commercial aspirations
of pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical industry for a genomic
strategy for diagnosis, drug development and marketing. In the year 2003
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20
multiple projects are underway to map diversity at the level of the SNP.
The 0.1 percent of the three billion base pairs of the human genome
seems to provide ample space for racial differentiations. This
contemporary program to identify biological differences is justified no in
terms of national well-being but largely in the name of health, of
differences in disease susceptibility and responses to therapeutic
molecules. It would be tempting to say that this highly sophisticated
genomics has produced new complexity into the figure of humanity. But
it is striking and disturbing that the core racial typology of the nineteenth
century -- white (Caucasian), black (African), yellow (Asian), red (Native
American) -- still provide a dominant mould through which this new
genetic knowledge of human difference is taking shape, as medical
researches and gene mappers specify their populations and their samples
in such terms, and drug companies seek to target specific pharmaceuticals
to groups designated, for example, as “African Americans.”
It is undoubtedly the case that SNP mapping will produce
typologies of difference between “population groups” and almost
inevitable that these population groups, in the name of health, will be
coded in terms of broad cultural conceptions of race. In nations like the
United States, and trans-national unities like the European Union
especially as it enlarges from its initial heartland, and in organizations
such as the WHO, where race is a central feature of political contestation,
the interplay between political and genomic classifications of race,
identity politics, racism, health inequities, and SNP mapping must take a
prominent place on the agenda of critical thinking. To address this new
formation requires us not to deny its’ validity in advance, nor to hold up
dire warnings that it must lead to segregation, genocide and eugenics, but
to be attentive to its specific complexities and contingencies. That is to
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say, one needs to try to identify the points and lines of tension where,
because the future is not written, critical judgment, diagnosing specific
new hopes and dangers, might play a part in the direction it takes.
II. Reproduction.
For Foucault, sexuality was crucial in part because was the hinge that
linked an anatamo-politics of the human body with a biopolitics of the
population. But today, perhaps for as long as the last fifty years, these
issues have become decoupled. Sexuality has been disengaged to a degree
from the symbolics and practices of reproduction, and reproduction itself
has become the object of a series of forms of knowledge, technologies,
and political strategies that have little to do with sexuality. From about
the 1970s one can see a triple movement (Rapp, 2000). The question of
reproduction gets problematized, both nationally and supra-nationally,
because of its economic, ecological and political consequences – overpopulation,
limits to growth etc. A new politics of abortion emerges,
taking different forms in different national contexts. And, in the West at
least, a related by different issue of “reproductive choice” begins to take
shape, when a small number of couples in the West, and some doctors,
strove to define infertility as a potentially remediable medical condition,
and consequently the site of legitimate interventions. All of these sites
jointly, yet differentially, combined in making reproduction a problem
space, in which an array of connections appear between the individual
and the collective, the technological and the political, the legal and the
ethical. Such a space is a bio-political space par excellence.
The new technologies and visualization and micro-manipulation,
rudimentary genetic diagnosis and selection, although they have attracted
the most attention in the Anglo- American world have largely remained at
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22
the individual pole and, numerically, and have been highly restricted in
their impact. Though they have been the site of a discursive explosion,
the focus of regulatory attention and political and ethical controversy in
many Western countries, it is hard to discern some unified bio-political
strategy underlying these developments. The rhetoric of choice clearly
resonates with the ethic of autonomy at the heart of advanced liberal
modes of subjectification, and the transformation of infertility into a
treatable illness exemplifies the re-imagining of human capacities as open
to re-engineering and enhancement by medicine. But the actual
procedures have been limited in number, and often unsuccessful. Biopolitically,
reproductive choice in the form of embryo selection, far from
being in the service of general racial improvement or even individualized
“designer babies,” has been almost entirely limited to the identification of
fetuses with major malformations or crippling and terminal genetic
disorders. Even then, the use of diagnostic techniques has not inevitably
led to termination but often to providing anticipatory information in the
services of the kinds of life planning that have become intrinsic to forms
of life in contemporary liberal societies. Perhaps, as many feminists have
argued, the principal biopolitical achievement here lies on the axis of
subjectification: these strategies exhibit the characteristic formation in
which apparent choices entail new forms of ‘responsibilization’ and
impose onerous obligations, especially, in this case, upon women.
Less attention in the Western academy has been paid to the
“molar” pole of the management of reproduction – the campaigns for
population limitation that have spread across the Indian subcontinent,
China and South East Asia and many Latin American Countries. These
biopolitical strategies are undoubtedly underpinned by truth claims,
although they are those of demography and economics, not of heredity
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and eugenics. Take, for example, the publication, in 1972, of the report
from the Club of Rome entitled Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972).
Using a model derived from system dynamics for its analysis, the report
concluded that “If the present growth trends in world population,
industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion
continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached
sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result
will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and
industrial capacity” (1972: ??) Fundamental to their prescription to avert
this problem was birth control to stabilize population, by limiting family
size to two children, especially in those countries where it currently
greatly exceeded that, but even this path was no guarantee of success.
“We end on a note of urgency. We have repeatedly emphasized the
importance of natural delays in the population-capital system of the
world. These delays mean, for example, that if Mexico’s birth rate
gradually declined from its present value to an exact replacement value
by the year 2000, the country’s population would grow from 50 million to
130 million. We cannot say with certainty how much longer mankind
can postpone initiating deliberate control of its growth before it will have
lost the chance for control.” (Meadows et al., 1972: ??) These dire
warnings resonated with a raft of analogous concerns about the impact of
population growth on economic wealth and the need for governments –
especially those of less developed states - to introduce policies to curtail
reproduction - especially amongst the poor - as a pre-requisite to
modernization. These varied from the coercive – China’s One Child
Policy (Greenhalgh, 200?) or the sterilization campaigns in India are the
two best known examples – to those which gradually came to adopt
principles of informed consent to what was euphemistically termed
“voluntary surgical contraception” in Mexico. They were based upon
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24
demographic data and algorithms linking population growth to economic
performance developed by geographers and mathematicians, embedded in
educational programs for development workers and others, proselytized
by numerous private pressure groups and policy advisory bodies, and
built into the policies of development agencies such as the “Office of
Populations” of the “Bureau for Global Programs” of the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID). The “population time
bomb” became part of the common sense of public opinion in the west,
and a major justification for aid from advanced industrial societies to
poorer countries was that this would enable them to limit their population
and hence the danger that their population growth posed.
By the end of the 1980s, policies for the limitation of procreation
amongst the poor stressed the importance of voluntary assent and
informed choice, and argued that the aim was to prevent the misery of
maternal deaths and perinatal mortality in the Third World. Robey et al
(1992) report that Voluntary female Sterilization is the most prevalent
contraceptive method today, used by over 138 million married women of
reproductive age compared to 95 million in 1984. There is particular
controversy over the increasing use of the quinacrine pellet method
developed by Dr. Jaime Zipper in 1984, distributed to 19 countries
around the world, including Bangladesh, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa
Rica, Croatia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan,
Philippines, Venezuela, Vietnam, the United States, Malaysia and
Romania, but subject to later banning in some countries. The use of
quinacrine, often surreptitiously, though direct relations between NGOs
and individual doctors, often aimed at particular segments of the
population considered problematic or undesirable, leads critics to
conclude that these repeat Nazi non-surgical sterilization practices, and
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25
are contemporary successors to the sterilization and population limitation
campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, despite their rhetoric of informed
choice: they amount to global eugenics.11
From the perspective of biopower, however repugnant these
policies, it is misleading to frame that criticism by a rhetorical association
of them with the eugenics of the mid-twentieth century. If we use the
term eugenics to apply to any intervention on the reproduction, morbidity
and mortality of the population, it covers everything from contraception
through abortion to public health, and its use becomes merely part of a
general critical rhetoric. Eugenics – the improvement of the biological
stock of the population – did indeed take both negative and positive
forms, but in each case, it was directed to maximizing racial fitness in the
service of a biological struggle between nation states. The forms of
biological knowledge that inform our ways of governing others and
ourselves are no longer those of the survival of the fittest. Limiting
population in the interests of national economic prosperity does not
operate according to the biopolitical diagram of eugenics, and is not the
same as purification of the race by elimination of degenerates.
This is not to say that there are no forms of eugenics around. One
visible form is linked to public health. In Cyprus, as Stefan Beck has
shown, there are systematic programs of nationwide testing with the
assent of the population, the church and the state, to identify and
eliminate cystic fibrosis- not by embryo selection but by marriage
counseling. We can see something of the same strategy at work in
practices for the control of Tay Sachs amongst Ashkenazi Jews in North
America and in Israel. By any definition this is a strategy aimed at
reducing the levels of inherited morbidity and pathology in a population
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26
considered as a whole by acting on the individual reproductive choices of
each citizen, through various forms of authoritative calculation and
guidance, sanctioned by a range of religious and secular authorities,
including bio-ethicists, and approved of by the population. Although we
put this example forward as a type case of biopolitics, it would be
misleading to diagnose it as a form of genocide, or the re-awakening of
the specter of the camp. This development is particularly striking in a
country where other forms of political violence seem endemic – political
violence between ethnic groups ravages the two countries that we have
cited but that violence turns on a different, non-bio-political register.
The economy of contemporary biopolitics operates according to
logics of vitality, not mortality: whilst it has its circuits of exclusion,
letting die is not making die. With the development of ever more
sophisticated, cheaper and readily available forms of genetic testing, the
biopolitics of both poles – the molar and the molecular – might well be
changing. As endless conferences and books have argued, there seems to
be all the difference in the world between diagnosing Down’s Syndrome
or fetal tube syndrome, and diagnosing intelligence. While the debate on
intelligence seems to us to be on a different level, substantial, if currently
inclusive research is being undertaken on a range of other conditions –
from predisposition to stroke or heart disease to risks of depression or
schizophrenia. Our own current research focuses on close attention to this
work, the scientific and technological techniques directed at these ends.
But there is no evidence to suggest that the forms of biopolitics that are
taking shape around these have, as their strategic objectives, wholesale
management of population qualities; rather, they seek to develop and
maximize targets for pharmaceutical markets and other health care
interventions. This is capitalism and liberalism, not eugenics, by either
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27
the front or back door, at least in so far as eugenics has acquired an
inescapably negative meaning in our contemporary culture.
At present, then, the symbolic importance of the possibilities
opened by genomic management of reproduction looms large, but in fact,
large scale genetic management of the population has not taken place and
is currently technically impossible. However crude the ability to diagnose
embryos may well be, factors such as sex selection, that are currently
feasible, may well have, and do seem to be having, molar consequences
outside Europe, whether or not this is the strategic objective of policies
and practices or of individual choices in particular socio-cultural contexts.
The first question, then, is whether such a project of making such micromanagement
of population characteristics through intervention at the
point of reproduction, scientifically and technically feasible succeed, and
to what extent? And the second question is, even if such wholesale
genomic management of population characteristics becomes possible, the
political shape it will take remains unclear, despite futurology within the
academy and without.
III. Genomic medicine.
The first biopolitical strategies, in the eighteenth century, concerned the
management of illness and health, and from that moment, these issues
have been repeatedly problematized and intervened upon by a whole
range of authorities. They have a peculiar saliency in liberal societies
because they establish links among and between multiple levels of
society, from the aspiration of the individual to be cured, to the
management of the health status of the population as a whole. The issue
of illness has, of course, also been the exemplary field for a whole series
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of other modes of individual and collective problematizations operating
in terms of the division of the normal and the pathological. Several
decades of scholarship has made this much self-evident. Understood in
this sense, it is clear that the poles of this bio-political field extend from
the management of collective health by means of pure water, to annual
health check-ups and insurance, through preventive medicine that
operates in large domains between collectivities and individuals, to the
field of clinical interventions onto the body of the sick person in the name
of health. And, as many have pointed out, action on the collective pole
has been the main motor of increases in longevity and quality of life.
Variations in the applications and financing of the technologies applied to
this collective pole are the key factors determining the scandalous
variations in life expectancy and life chances that we can observe today
around the globe. In the vast majority of these instances, the causes and
the remedies are known, and require no further scientific advance or
technological innovation only political will. Even in apparently novel
disorders, such as SARS, whose outbreak rapidly called forth the whole
panoply of modern biological medicine including the rapid identification
and sequencing of the pathogen, the preventive modes of intervention
required were archaic. They were basically those of quarantine first
applied to epidemic outbreaks such as plague at least since medieval
times, merely updated to take account of contemporary mechanisms of
mobility and communication. And they proved highly effective without
any significant contribution from genomic medicine.
It will have become clear that our diagnosis as to whether or not a
new regime of biopower will take shape – that is to say, will pass a
qualitative new configuration of knowledge, power and subjectivity depends
on many factors. Many of these factors depend on contingencies,
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29
others depend upon the uncertain outcome of genomic research itself. As
we write, in August 2003, the most central unknown is whether the new
forms of knowledge liked to molecular biology in general, and to
genomics in particular, can actually generate the kinds of diagnostic and
therapeutic tools that its advocates hope for. The stakes here are high,
economically, medically and ethically. They lie in the presumed capacity
of genomics to identify precisely some central processes involved in
illness that control the manufacture of proteins, and in doing so, open
these to precise intervention in order to produce therapeutic effect. It is
not just some abstract knowledge gain that gives genomics its potential as
far as scientists, health care systems and the pharmaceutical companies
are concerned but its’ capacity to generate therapeutic targets and
manufactured molecules addressed to those targets; in other words to
ground a new kind of “know how” of life itself. For its advocates, the
genomic identification of functional pathology logically must open a path
towards molecular intervention. But to the degree that this logic proves
faulty, genomics will remain only one dimension of health care and
biological understanding; one that gains its intelligibility within a wider
field of knowledge on the etiology, prognosis and treatment of disease.
How, then, might we begin to think through the implications of the
nascent advances in molecular and genomic technologies? It is clear that
the belief that something significant is at stake here mobilizes the
strategies and tactics of a whole variety of forces. National governments
invest in genomics, set up bio-banks, and fund research into basic and
applied genomic medicine. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies invest
billions and employ tens of thousands of talented scientists and
technicians in subtle and elegant experiments and inventions. Patient
groups invest hope, political capital, their own tissue samples and money
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30
in the search for genetic treatments. So clearly a modified bio-political
rationality in relation to health is taking shape, in which knowledge,
power and subjectivity are entering into new configurations, some visible,
some potential. This formation involves elements that have played their
part in previous apparatuses, and could be seen taking shape after the
Second World War: patient groups aren’t new, pharmaceutical
companies pre-existed genomics, and governments have invested
increasingly large sums in promoting and regulating basic and applied
medical research. But alongside these previous configurations, which
have by no means disappeared, we believe that something new is taking
shape which is beginning to colonize and mutate the major apparatuses
for the management of the health of each and of all, at least in the
industrial democratic world.
Let us take two small examples of these new investments.
Rabinow’s research in 2003 is an anthropological investigation of Celera
Diagnostics, in Alameda California. This company is an offshoot of
Celera Genomics, the company that accelerated the race to map the
human (and other) genome. With several hundred million dollars at its
disposal, it has identified roughly a dozen major disease areas and
adopted an approach that seeks to identify clusters of SNPs (single
nucleotide polymorphisms) in functional areas of the genome. Hence
Celera Diagnostics combines massive, expensive machine capacity,
diverse alliances with multiple disease associations and university
researchers, and a strategy that this will enable the diagnostic
identification of predispositions to complex disease involving variations
in numerous genes. Their model for polygenetic conditions moves
beyond the search for “the gene for” model of the 1990s, a model that is
obviously inadequate to understanding the most common disorders such
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as cancer, heart disease and the like. The goal is to produce diagnostic
tests that would be used massively in reference laboratories in a routine
fashion, to enable pre-symptomatic diagnosis and preventive
interventions on a previously unimaginable scale within the next five
years.
If this model were to succeed, and to be deployed widely, not only
in the developed but also in the less developed world, the logics of
medicine, and the shape of the bio-political field, would be altered, and
new contestations would emerge over access to such technologies and
the resources necessary to follow through their implications. Further, as
the forms of knowledge generated here are those of probability, new ways
of calculating risk, understanding the self, and organizing health care
would undoubtedly emerge. The jury is out as to whether this model will
work. If it does, whilst it is clear that the shape of the bio-political field
would mutate, there is no technological determinism here: multiple
responses are possible. And if we remember, as we always should, that
even in the world’s most prosperous nation, millions are still denied
access to the basic health technologies and medical interventions that
have been established for half a century, the political and social
implications are evidently shaped more by the political side of the biopolitical
than the medical side. If success is partial and patchy, if hopes
are deflated, if venture capital and stock market investments move
elsewhere, this still does not mean that nothing will emerge, merely that,
as with so many previous medical advances, the mutations that will take
place in therapeutics, will be smaller, more dispersed and their effects
harder to see in the short term, though perhaps evident from the
perspective of the future.
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In a related but distinct area of the field, Rose’s research in 2003
has focused on the development known as pharmacogenomics, and in
particular on its engagement with mental disorders. The research site here
concerns the take up, principally in Europe, of the new generation of antidepressant
medication, in the context of a belief, underscored by the
World Health Organization and accepted by international health
management agencies, that by 2020 depression will become the second
largest cause of morbidity in both developed and less developed world,
second only to ischemic heart disease. There are clearly many factors that
have led to this premise, which cannot be addressed here, but include the
humanistic belief of doctors and others that much misery is the result of
an under-diagnosed clinical condition for which safe and effective drug
treatments are now available, the concern of national governments about
the cost to their budgets of days lost through depression, the significance
of the key indicator of suicide rates in international health comparisons;
and the intensive marketing and ‘educational’ campaigns of the
pharmaceutical companies.
What is the link between this and genomics? Firstly, it arises
because the new (third) generation of anti-depressants claim to be
fabricated at a molecular level to target the precise neuronal mechanisms
that underlie depressive symptoms. Second because these drugs are very
variable in their effects, working with some, not working with others,
generating adverse effects in a third group. And thirdly because of the
belief that genetic testing may enable medics to diagnose the precise
subtype of depression in each case, prescribe the effective drug, minimize
adverse effects, maximizing compliance, hence acting not just at the
individual level but also upon key financial and population health
indicators. If successful, driven by the wish of all concerned, including
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patients, to have effective drugs that have minimal side effects, genetic
testing may migrate from the genetic counselor’s office to the general
practitioner, and become as routine as blood tests, opening up the
population as a whole to a genetic understanding of their health, illness,
and predispositions. If only partially successful, the routinization of
genetic testing prior to treatment decisions may be slow, patchy and
limited, but the genetic rewriting of mental illness will nonetheless once
more enter the field of truth, not in the name of population purification
and the elimination of degeneracy, but in the name of quality of life, even
happiness. We have yet to weigh up the costs and benefits of these
contemporary aspirations when they mobilize rationalities of biopolitics.
Perhaps in relation to both of these examples, and to the field more
generally, it is necessary to mark one key difference between the forms of
genetic explanation that were the target of critique of an earlier
generation of radicals as well as many scientists, which rested on the
belief that heredity was genetics and genetics was destiny. While this
view has not completely disappeared, the genomic approach is now,
principally used as a tool to identify function rather than as a total
explanation. Hence critical evaluation would have to take other forms
than denunciation of reductionism, individualism and rejection of the
social. Contemporary genomics is principally directed at illness
conditions rather than gross characteristics such as intelligence or
personality. It understands most of those conditions as arising out of
interactions between multiple coding regions, where gene expression can
be activated and inactivated by many environmental factors at levels
ranging from the cellular to the familial, the social and the environmental.
It seeks not to pronounce on destiny per se, and but rather to render the
future as probabilistic and thereby to open it to technical intervention.
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Conclusion.
One might well imagine what it might have been like in 1800 for an
analyst attempting to grasp the transformative implications of the
forerunners of the “birth of the clinic.” Today we are equally in a
situation of major historical change whose directions are partially obscure
and not yet solidified. Thus it is no surprise that it is hard to tell whether
we are at the early stages of a momentous historical shift, in the middle of
a process that is well underway towards stabilizing new forms, or in a
conjuncture that will prove to be a dead end or at least marginal to other
changes that we cannot envisage today. With that proviso, we feel that the
concept of biopower is pertinent to grasping many diverse contemporary
developments. But the concept remains insufficiently developed, and has
not yet demonstrated its analytic mettle in sufficient cases. We would
recommend that analysts attended to that task, rather than succumbing to
the allure of philosophies that turn a concept into a theory or a world
view.
The three elements that are brought together in the concept of
biopower – knowledge of vital life processes, power relations that take
humans as living beings as their object, and the modes of subjectification
through which subjects work on themselves qua living beings – as well as
their multiple combinations remain to be charted. We argue that analyses
of aimed at clarifying the bio-political rationality of the near future must
pass through detailed empirically grounded inquiry into changes that are
occurring at each of these three axes, and the relations and combinations
amongst them.
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The significance – and indeed the possibility – of the entry of
genomic knowledge into the bio-political field must be situated within the
shifting territorialization both beyond and across nation states – transnational
flows of knowledge are coupled with local intensifications of
research sites, and with supra-national institutions from the European
Union to the World Health Organization. Variable mobilizations of
persons, tissues, organs and pathogens interact with the slower
mobilizations of therapeutics such as generic drugs for the treatment of
AIDS. Parallel motions can be identified on the level of subjectifications:
cystic fibrosis groups cut across national and class barriers as do their
care givers; models of patient activism spread, and are taken up and
reinterpreted form Japan to Bangladesh, and from Turn to Toronto. It is
important to underline that these processes are both individualizing and
collectivizing. Who, in 1955, could have imagined depressed people as a
global category, not only as targets but also as active subjects in a new
biopolitics of mental health?
To carry out these mappings of the possibilities opened up in this
seemingly novel formation of biopower is not to ignore the negatives –
the machinations of international capital, the hyped up marketing
strategies of “big pharma,” the new entanglements between truth, health
and profit that characterize the relations between researchers and industry
as well as the implications of intellectual property for older forms of
knowledge production, the possibilities of pathogenic release with wide
scale effect, the massive inequalities in access to even basic healthcare,
the more traditional forms of geopolitics which will make use of these
new bio-possibilities in all sorts of inventive and often reprehensible
ways. That said, if in fact we are in an emergent moment of vital politics,
celebration or denunciation are insufficient as analytical approaches. One
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of the most pressing demands for critical thought today is the invention,
enlargement and testing of an analytical toolkit adequate to the present
reality. Biopower, used in a precise fashion, and subject to inventive
development, would surely take its place as a key part of such a toolkit.
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NOTES
1
Michel Foucault, On the genealogy of ethics, in P. Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984, p.344.
2
On the “biological century” claim see, Sydney Brenner. Gilles Deleuze in his Foucault, has a
provocative appendix where he talks about the future of biopower. Rabinow and Rose have themselves
written on these themes.
3
For example, the Biopolititics International Organization based in Greece, which focuses on
environmental protection, while in Christian Biopolitics: A Credo & Strategy for the Future by
Kenneth Cauthen seeks to nurture “an emerging new consciousness among many potential dreamers
and doers in the churches who can help provide us with the visions and the values we need to promote
a movement toward an ecologically optimum world community full of justice and joy in which the
human race can not only survive but embark on exciting new adventures of physical and spiritual
enjoyment”.
4
In France the reception of Negri has been minimal and that of Agamben has turned more specifically
on his claims about the concentration camps. (provide reference).
5
The same year that History of Sexuality Volume 1 was published, and never to be returned to again,
aside from a passing comment here and there.
6
Cite the Social Security Interview.
7
See Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan "Giorgio Agamben A l'Epreuve d'Auschwitz," Paris:
Editions Kimé, 2001.
8
This is a point that Agamben himself makes (look at his recent book on the possibility of politics and
judgement).
9
References.
10
Gilles Deleuze "Qu'est-ce qu'un dispositif?" in "Michel Foucault, philosophe," Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1989, p. 191.
11
For examples of the debate, see http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/contra/topic05.html#2