I’ve been revising some stuff I wrote before, and had a few thoughts. I’ve argued before that, at least in the sense that Hardt and Negri use the term, biopolitics is not new. This is how I understand some of Agamben’s remarks on biopolitics too.
One thing that struck me this morning was that one of the stakes in understanding questions of sovereignty and exception is the connection between ‘biopolitics’ and Agamben’s ‘thanatopolitics’ (or necropolitics). While I don’t claim to understand (though I do have strong convictions on!) the relation of state and capital, a similar question could be asked of capitalism, when it’s biopolitical and when necropolitical. (And, to be clear, it’s when, not what. The relationship of the management of life and the management of death varies historically and geographically, and by other factors too like strata. The ultimate determination of course is power, but saying “it’s power, stupid” says very little. What balances of power instantiated in what forms, that’s the crux.)
I’m pretty emphatic that these are not stages, but rather… procedures, strategies. It strikes me that my notes on deadtime are at least tangentially relevant here. Aside from that, I think I’d want to say that the resort to thanatopolitics would happen in four modes, which don’t necessarily conflict and may actually overlap:
1. indifference (we die, they don’t notice)
2. irrationality (we die in a way not functional to them)
3. instrumentalized (we die so they might live in the way they demand, this means in the routine sense - industrial accidents, being worked to death - more than deliberate acts of murder. This may just repeat #1.)
4. iniquity (we die because we are a problem, this is what I think of as the exception in the Schmitt/Agamben sense, classically speaking maybe, the rioter mowed down, the dissident disappeared. One of the things that happens, though, I think, in the use of the term biopolitics and in the passage from Schmitt to Foucault is that sovereignty gets displaced - whoever kills is sovereign, to some degree, just as for Agamben wherever a certain juridical condition obtains is a camp regardless of architecture. There’s a power in this, the making of connections, but there’s a big risk of some important distinctions being lost. )
This also links w/ things I’ve been trying to think through for a while on emergenc(i)es and the political metaphor of visibility. If the exception is one way when They become explicitly and self-consciously (and, in a localize sense, newly) necropolitical, and the exception happens when They pick up on certain things that We are doing/have done, then we clearly want to avoid the exception as much as possible (by not getting noticed, at least until the balance of forces is such that They’re less likely to attempt resort to exception and such that We are more likely to win should they attempt to do so none the less).