Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading…
Transcript

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production"

Michel Foucault: From the "disciplinary society" to the "society of control"

Disciplinary Society:

  • Network of dispositifs that produce and regulates customs [Verhaltensweisen] , habits, and productive practicies.
  • Mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion accomplished by institutions (prison, factory, school, [...].
  • Basis: "Reason" of discipline.

Society of Control:

  • Mechanisms of control become more 'democratic':
  • Machines that directly organizes the brain (communication systems, information network (compare this statement with Fukuyama's position). Thus: Behavior of social integration and exclusion are more and more "interiorized". (Hardt/Negri 2001: pp. 22-23)

Michel Foucault: the "biopolitical" nature of the new paradigm of power.

  • "Live has now become...an object of power"
  • Biopower: Production and reproduction of life itself
  • In the disciplinary society the statics between the power and the individual created resisitance.
  • By contrast, when power becomes entirely biopolitical, the whole social body is comprised [umfasst] by power's machine and in its virtuality. The relationship is open, qualitative, and affective. How can we describe this concept?

Deleuze/Guattari (1992):

  • The analysis of real subsumption [as: subordination (Unterordung) as a procedure of classification]: not only the economic or cultural dimension of society but rather the bios itelf.
  • Civil society is absorbed by the state: "Resistances are no longer marginal but active in the center of a society that opens up in networks [...]." How can we describe this concept? Are there evident Examples?
  • "A paradox of power, while it unifies and envelops within itself every element of social life [...no mediation...], at that very moment reveals a new context, a new milieu of maxium plurality and uncontainable singulatization - a milieu of the event. What does the milieu of event means?

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production" (Pages 24-25)

"Biopower in the Society of control"

  • Throughout the unbounded global spaces, to the depth of the biopolitical world, and confronting an unforseeable temporality - these are the determinations on which the new supranational right mus be defined. Here is where the concept of Empire must struggle to establish istself, where it must prove its effectiveness, and hence where the machine must be set in motion.

  • "Our analysis must focus its attention rather on the productive dimension of biopower."

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production" (Pages 26-27)

"The Production of Life"

Michel Foucault: The development of the modern disciplinary state is not understandable without the biopolitical context as a part of the capitalist accumulation: "The control of society over indiviuals is not conducted only through consciousness or ideology; but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal." Examples?

Foucault beyond Marxist theories: The problem of power can not be restricted to the superstructural level (Überbau) seperate from the real, base level of production. Foucault locates the problem of social production (and the superstructure) back to within the material, fundamental structure amd define this terrain not only in economic trems but also in cultural, corporeal, and subjective ones. What could be the concequences of this concept?

Society of control as a figure of power active throughout the entire biopolitics of society.

But Foucault stays in a structuralist epistemology as a part of a functionalist anaysis in the realm of the human siences, "a method that effectively sacrifices the dynamic of the system, the creative temporalitiy of ist movements, the ontological substance of cultural and social reproduction."

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production" (Page 27)

  • Deleuze/Guattari:

  • The present a poststrucuralist understanding of biopower that renews materialist thought: question on the [concrete] production of social beeing

  • "They focus our attention clearly on the ontological substance of social production. Machines [and social machines] produce".

  • "Deleuze and Guattari discover the the productivity of social reproduction (creative production, production of values, social relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articualte it on superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by ungraspable event."

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production" (Pages 28)

Points for discussion: Visions of a cognitive industry

  • Group of Marxists in Italy: Recognizing "[...] the biopolitical dimenasion in terms of a new nature of productive labor and its living development in society, using terms such as 'mass intellectuality', 'immaterial labor', and the Marxian concept of 'general intellect'."

  • "The central role of previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of of surplus value is today increasingly filled by the intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power."

  • "We will elaborate the three primary aspects of immaterial labor in the contemporary economy: [a] the communicative labor of industrial production that has newly become linked in informational networks, [b] the interactive labor of symbolic analysis and problem solving, [c] and the labor of production and manupilation of affects." The potential of biopolitical production...What do biopolitics mean in this context?

  • "[...] we will be abel to identify the new figure of the collective biopolitical body [...]. This body becomes structure not only by negating the originary productive force that animates it but by recignizing it; it becomes language [scientifc, social] because it is a multitude of singular and determinate bodies that seek realtion.

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production" (Pages 28-30)

Corporations and Communication:

Points for discussion:

  • The new role of supranational regularity institutions like UN (along) IMF, the World Bank, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)... their function in the symbology of the imperial order. (p. 31)

  • The role of money or the international financial marked

  • The role of the communication industries (p. 32)

  • Communication and and the biopolitical context (what is a bout Habermas' critical Communicative Action? ) (p. 33)

  • The role of master narratives (p. 34)

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production"

Interventions

Points for discussion:

  • The role of the NGO's (p. 36)

  • NGO's and the biopolitical production (p. 36)

  • Moral intervention (p. 37)

  • A state of permanent exception (p. 38) (See also Agamben's "State of Exception")

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production"

Royal Prerogatives

Points for discussion:

  • In fact, center and margin seem continually to be shifting positions, fleeting any determinate locations. We could even say that the process itself is virtual and that its power resides in the power of the virtual. (p. 39)

  • Virtuality and discontinuity (p. 39)

  • Asking for a juridical model of the Empire (p.40): The constitutin of the Empire

  • The relation between social production and juridical legitimation (p. 41)

Michael Hardt; Antonio Negri

1.2 "Biopolitical Production"

Fukuyama's Visions

of a democratic Future.

The overlay between Genetic- and 'Social Engenering'

The notion of biopolitics calls into question the topology of the political. According to the traditional hierarchy, the political is defined as humanity elevating itself as zoon politikon above mere biological existence.

When life itself becomes an object of politics, this has consequences for the foundations, tools, and goals of political action. No one saw more clearly this shift in the nature of politics more clearly than Michel Foucault.

Thomas Lemke

2. Life as an Object of Politics

1. Life as the Basis of Politics

State Biology: From Organicist Concepts to Racist Concepts

Ecological Biopolitics

1960th-1970th: the meaning of biopolitics assumed another form. Imortant impulse: Report of the Club of Rome 1972: The Limits to Growth. It was based on scientificmodeling and a computer simultion of expotential economic and population growth. Five varialbles were examined: World population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion.

The report demanded political interventionto halt the destruction of the natural environment. It was postulated that nothing less than life on the planet and the survival of the human species were at stake

Biopolitcs came to stand for the development of a new field of politics and political action directed at the preservation of the natural environment of humanity.

The concept of biopolitics was linked to ecological considerations and became a reference point for various ideological, political, and religious interests. (Green Parties / Greenpeace etc.)

19th-20th century: Philosophers of Life like Schopenhauer, Nitzsche, Bergson. Life understood as organic existence (instinct, intuition, feeling). “Experience” (Erlebnis) was opposed to the “dead” and the “petrified,”which were represented by the “abstract” concept, “cold” logic, or the soulless “spirit.”

Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922): Swedish political scientist. He defined the (nation-)state (with its "Lebensraum") as a “superindividual creature with an "ethnic individuality". Herer science of biology is transformed in biopolitics. Only a politics that orients itself toward biological laws and takes them as a guideline can count as legitimate and commensurate with reality. Biopolitcs elude every rational foundation or democraticdecision-making. Kjellén inspired pre-fashist and fashist thinker.

National Socialism: The organist concept aquired a racist basis. The widely used metaphor of “the people’s body” (Volkskörper) at this time designated an authoritarian, hierarchically structured,

and racially homogeneous community.

1) Subjects of history are self-enclosed communities with a common genetic heritage. There is a hierachy of different groups with “inherited biological quality. ”

2) National Socialist ideology rested on the belief that social relations and political problems could ultimately be attributed to biological causes.

Technocentric Biopolitic

1973: first transfer of DNA from one species to another. The growing significance of genetic and reproductive technologiesraised concerns about the regulation and control of scientific progress. That demonstrated how contingent and fragile are the boundary between nature and culture.

Since then: Considerations and concerns of bioethics. Debates about regulationthat come down to the old question: Just because we can, should we?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to know, becauseof bioscientific discoveries and technological innovations, what exactly the “natural foundations” of life are and how these can be distinguished

from “artificial” forms of life. Biology a practice of engineering. Bodies as constructs.

Four Authors

Three Positions

Vital Signs - Cloning Terror

Points for discussion about Cloning Terror:

"To some eyes, the seemingly benign image of the cloned sheep is no less o horror than the catastrophic image of terrorist destruction. The creation of an image can be just as deep an abomination as its destruction, and in each case there is a kind of paradoxical 'creative destruction' at work."(p. 16)

Points for discussion about Cloning Terror:

"The widely televised spectacle of the destruction of Saddam Husseins's stature in Baghdad during the second Gulf War was clearly a staged ritual meant to archive iconoc status." (p. 18)

First law of iconoclasm: The idolater is always someone else. (p. 19)

Second law of iconoclasm: The iconoclast believes that idolaters believer their images to be holy, alive, powerful. (p. 20)

Points for discussion about Cloning Terror:

"Dolly and the the World Trade Center have an additional dimension of vitality in that they are symbols of life - let us call them biothechnology and global capitalism respectively- that participate in the life process they are stand for." (p. 15)

They are "living symbols"...

"Why dit Dolly became the icon of cloning and biotechnology?"

Points for discussion about cloning Terror:

What transforms pictures into "vital signs" - as livings things?

What does Mitchell investigate with the question "What do pictures want?" (p. 6)

Critique-as-iconoclasm is, in my view, just as much a symptom of the live of images as its observe, the naive faith in the inner life of works of art. (p. 8)

Points for discussion about Vital Signs:

What transforms pictures into "vital signs" - as livings things?

What does Mitchell investigate with the question "What do pictures want?" (p. 6)

Critique-as-iconoclasm is, in my view, just as much a symptom of the live of images as its observe, the naive faith in the inner life of works of art. (p. 8)

Points for discussion about Cloning Terror:

"The clone signifies the potential for the creation of new images in our time - new images that fulfill the ancient dream of creating a "living image"a replica or a copy that is merely a mechanichal duplicate but an organic, biologically viable simulacrum of a living organism." (pp. 12-13)

"The image of the World Trade Center, by contrast, signifies the potential for destruction of images in our time, a new and more virulent form of iconoclas." (p. 13)

Points for discussion about Cloning Terror:

"Thus 'terrorism'has become a verbal idol of the mind of our time, a figure of radical evil that need only be invoked to preempt all discussion or reflection. Like cloning, terrorismm is an invisble icon, a shape-shifting fantasy that may be initiated in almost any form, from the stereotyped (or "radically profiled") figure of the brown person with an Arab surname to the caricature of the zealous fanatic, the suicide bomber as psychotic.. Insofar terror is a collective state of mind more than any specific military action, the strategic choices of the U.S. governement - preemptive warfare, suspension of civil liberties, expansion of police and military powers, a repudiation (zurückweisung) of international judical institutions - are perfect devices for cloning terror, for spreading fantasies of dread and the conditions for their global circulation." (p. 22)

Mitchell published that text 2005. Date of the first lecture on Cloning Terror 2002.

How one should describe the developments of the last decade?

Fukuyama in "Our Posthuman Future"

Fukuyama in "Our Posthuman Future

Fukuyama on "1984" (George Orwell, 1949) and "Brave New Wold" (Aldous Huxley, 1932)

Fukuyama and his idea of the positive relation between the liberal democracy and the human nature

Many of those who believed in the social construction of human behavior had strong ulterior

motives: they hoped to use social engineering to create societies that were just or fair according to some abstract ideological principle. Beginning with the French Revolution, the world has been convulsed with a series of utopian political movements that sought to create an earthly heaven by radically rearranging the most basic institutions of society, from the family to private property to the state. These movements crested in the twentieth century, with the socialist revolutions that took place in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

By the end of the century, virtually every one of these experiments had failed, and in their place came efforts to create or restore equally modem but less politically radical liberal democracies. One important reason for this worldwide convergence on liberal democracy had to do with the tenacity (Beharrlichkeit) of human nature. Fukuyama, pp. 13-14.

A S T R A I G H T F O R WA R D S O L U T I O N

What should we do in response to biotechnology that in the future

will mix great potential benefits with threats that are either physical

and overt or spiritual and subtle? The answer is obvious: We should

use the power of the state to regulate it. And if this proves to be beyond

the power of any individual nation-state to regulate, it needs to be

regulated on an international basis. We need to start thinking concretely now about how to build institutions that can discriminate between good and bad uses of biotechnology, and effectively enforce

these rules both nationally and internationally. Fukuyama 2002, p. 10.

Points for dicussion:

Statement Fukuyama:

  • 1984 was entirely wrong. The year 1984 came and went, with the United States still locked in a Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. That year saw the introduction of a new model of the IBM personal computer and the beginning of what became the PC revolution.

  • As Peter Huber has argued, the personal computer, linked to the

Internet, was in fact the realization of Orwell's telescreen. But instead

of becoming an instrument of centralization and tyranny, it led

to just the opposite: the democratization of access to information and

the decentralization of politics.

  • Instead of Big Brother watching everyone, people could use the PC and Internet to watch Big Brother, as governments everywhere were driven to publish more information on their own activities.

Fukuyama 2002, p. 4.

"1984": Was about what we now call information technology - the telescreen, a wallsized flat-panel display that could simultaneously send and receive images from each individual household to a hovering Big Brother - as a part of the success a the vast, totalitarian empire.

Fukuyama 2002, pp. 3-4.

" 'Brave New World' by contrast, was about the other big technological revolution about to take place, that of biotechnology. Bokanovskification, the hatching of people not in wombs but, as we now say, in vitro; the drug soma, which gave people instant happiness; "

Fukuyama 2002, p. 4.

Points for discussion

Statement Fukuyama:

"The aim of this book is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a "posthuman" stage of history.

This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology

powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign

consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself."

Fukuyama 2002, p. 7.

BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE RECOMMENCEMENT OF HISTORY

Aristotle argued, in effect, that human notions of right and wrong-what we today call human rights-were ultimately based on human nature.

The purpose of his philosophy was to try to differentiate the natural from the conventional, and to rationally order human goods.

Aristotle, together with his immediate predecessors Socrates and Plato, initiated a dialogue about the nature of human nature that continued in the Western philosophical tradition right up to the early modern period, when liberal democracy was born.

While there were significant disputes over what human nature was, no one contested

its importance as a basis for rights and justice. Among the believers in natural right were the American Founding Fathers, who based their revolution against the British crown on it. Nonetheless, the concept has been out of favor for the past century or two among academic

philosophers and intellectuals.

As we will see in Part II of this book, I believe this is a mistake,

and that any meaningful definition of rights must be based on substantive

judgments about human nature. Fukuyama, pp. 12 -13.

Stages of Biopolitcs

Social Ethics, Politics and the unforeseeable future of social live

Ethic of sciences and

the invisible process of microbiological cloning with digital support

The creation of Adam. Michelangelo, between 1508-1512. Fresco - Sistine Chapel, Rome.

Part of a family of pictures

Sistine Chapel: Built between 1477-1480. The ceiling painted by Michelangelo between 1508-1512.

Two possible interpretations in the context of

biopolitics and cloning

1) The creation of men:

The holy creation of men by God.

He is the only one who is allowed

to create life as live itself

The encounter between God as an entity "ad infinitum" and the dimension of human life and size

2) The creation of the picture (sculpture) of men made by men

The inspired and souled brain of Michelangelo creates not only a painted sculpture.

He/It shows a scene of "creation" within God as a part of an artwork made by Michelangelo.

Traditional subject in myths, religion,

and the history of art

Nicolas Poussin:

"The Adoration of the golden Calf" 1633 National Gallery

Gian Lorenzo Bernini:

Apollo and Daphne 1622-1625.

(Daphne's transformation into a laurel tree)

Galleria Borghese, Rome

Etienne-Maurice Falconet:

"Pygmalion and Galatee" 1763.

(The sculpture starts to live)

Erimitage St. Petersburg

Michelangelo "The Last Judgement". 1537-1541.

Sistine Chapel.

Jesus as the human 'Son' of God in the center.

The last Judgement points to the highest law of men: The divine law, the christian doctrine, the christian morality, the reality of the bible.

Today:

Tension between different concepts of images and image-production, between text and image, law (made by man) and the production of images.

Prototype: The discussion between biopolitics and the different types or images of cloning

Different discourses:

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi