Archive for the ‘ biopolitics ’ Category

Moral Evolution

The rationale for statements of evolutionary truth is moral. It gives permission to say: had not this or that adaptation taken place, your species would have died out long ago, which is to say, your existence depends on our logic, which is to say, you must not think for yourself. This may be the form [ READ MORE ]

Evolution and Innovation

Evolution and computing can be described as counter-poles in contemporary American culture, as though that which transforms very fast required, to maintain some cosmic balance, a partner that changed correspondingly slowly. This is not just a felicitous figure: there are deeper grounds. Homo faber, in realizing the power to shape the experience of fellow producers [ READ MORE ]

pinball

The traditional role of the game, once deprived of a pedagogic, let alone sacral, function, has been to waste time.   Having to gamble is the fate imposed on those who do not labor: when all time is measured as labor time, then true leisure (rather than the recreation time of the laborer) is possible only [ READ MORE ]

On beauty

It is the serial killer’s responsibility to exceed in beauty every attempt by the cops or the psychologists to apprehend him, and it is always a him. He is an aesthete who, whether his victims are skinned, decapitated, defenestrated, dismembered, skewered, raped, or stewed, always admires them for their appearance, with an utterly uncultured, almost [ READ MORE ]

nip/tuck

Agamben wrote of the doctor who, terminally ill with leukemia, turns his body into a laboratory. This marks a certain extreme point in the production of the biopolitical body.  But what are we to make of the plastic surgeons who operates on the mere surface of bodies, and even their own — or, rather, who [ READ MORE ]

house

The theme of all television is the tenuous relation of the public and private. Every essential genre of television involves a different relation to liminality: to the threshold that first constitutes the private and public through their reciprocal relations. In  police and medical dramas, the gesture is always the same: violation. And the most important [ READ MORE ]

demectomy

It is no accident that so many reality shows begin with 12 contestants.  One genealogy of the reality show might indeed trace it back to the jury system, and the odd practice, so characteristic of the anxieties of liberal democracy, of sequestering.  The reality show, indeed, brings to its breaking point a paradox endemic to modern [ READ MORE ]

Ghost and Crime

If the psychic has suddenly become such an important television personality, it is not only because of the rise of a vague “new age” spirituality.  Nor is it that the psychic is essentially, radically telegenic: that the psychic’s vision is nothing but a form of tele-vision, and thus coincides perfectly with the medium that would [ READ MORE ]

A*theism

One way in which religion is more rational than science. It says simply “because” and offers no further reasons for submitting to its code. The arbitrariness of the content of God’s will coincides with a historical view. These habits, customs, names, and — even — reasons have no other ground than the demand to submit [ READ MORE ]

To the commodities themselves!

ET no longer needs to phone home. He can call his friends in-network. A commodity-centered political economy, rather than a labor-centered one, would have to abandon one facet of a theory of capital: its tendency to generalize. Instead, it would start from the commodities themselves. From them it would produce a variegated map of their [ READ MORE ]

excrement and enterprise

Foucault, in his 1978-79 lectures at the College of France (published in English as the “Birth of Biopolitics”) argues that the neo-liberal art of government does not aim at a standardized “mass society of the spectacle,” but rather the “multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises.”  Only thus would it be possible to make the “market, competition, [ READ MORE ]

pandemocracy

For those who were in Seoul in the Spring and Summer of 2008, and who experienced first hand the massive rallies that followed the government’s decision to lift the import ban on American beef, perhaps the most strange, unsettling thing about the looming pandemic is the silence of the people.  Of course, there is nothing surprising in this: one [ READ MORE ]