‘The Biopolitics of Value(s)'
An ESRC Seminar Series
Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Research Network
and
Research Institute for Law, Politics, and Justice,
Keele University
Claus Moser Research Centre, University of Keele
19-20th January 2010
Organised by:Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Dr Peter Adey
Please register with Chris Zebrowski
Biopolitics of Security Research Unit, Keele Univeristy
'c.zebrowski@ilpj.keele.ac.uk‘
Podcasts: Keynote Address: |
Programme
(Download Workshop Programme)
Tuesday 19 January
12.00-13.00 – Lunch and Registration
Foyer of the Claus Moser Building
13.00 –13.30 Introduction:
-Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Peter Adey (University of Keele)
The Biopolitics of ‘Value(s)’
13.30 –15.00 Panel 1:
Value – Infrastructures - Life
Discussant: Pete Adey (Keele University)
Lucy Budd, Adam Warren, and Morag Bell (Geography Department, Loughborough University)
‘Value’, ‘cost’ and ethics: UK airports and the governance of pandemic H1N1 risk
Julia Trombetta (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Security, public values and infrastructures
15.00- 16.30 Panel 2:
Siting Biopolitical Value
Discussant: Veronique Pin-Fat (University of Manchester)
Suvi Alt (University of Lapland, Finland)
The Value(s) of the Human of Human Security: The Indeterminacy of the Human of Biopower
Owen Parker (University of Warwick)
The Boundaries of a Cosmopolitan Governmentality: Habermas, France and the EU
Andrea Rossi (Lancaster University)
The value of the ‘non-self’
16.30-17.00– Tea and Coffee
17.00- 18.30 Keynote address:
Prof. Peter Burgess (Peace Research Institute of Oslo)
Chair: Dan Bulley (Queen’s University Belfast)
19.00 – Drinks reception: Keele Hall, Sneyd Ante-Room
19.30 – Workshop Dinner: Keele Hall, Old Library
Wednesday 20 January
9.00-10:30 Panel 3
Economies of Life and Death
Discussant: Ronnie Lippens (Keele University)
Tomás Sánchez-Criado (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Daniel López Gómez (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Care as Immunity: the Biopolitics of lifestyle monitoring in second and third generation telecare services
Sakari Hänninen (National Institute of Health and Welfare / University of Finland)
Mobilisation in Heterotopias
Sofie Hellberg (University of Gothenburg)
The governing of life through water management: the production of sustainable lives and the sustainable water user in eThekwini Municipality, South Africa
10.30-10.45 Tea and Coffee
10.45-12.15 Panel 4
Aesthetics, Time, Value
Discussant:Barry Ryan (Keele University)
Patrick Pinkerton (University of Manchester)
Securing Ethnic Value in Biopolitical Time
Paul McFadden (University of Newcastle)
The production of economic value and the formation of subjectivities in the post-modern economy
Corey Walker-Mortimer (Keele University)
The Biopolitics of Aesthetics and Value: the Green Grid as Strategised Design
12.15-13.00
Roundtable and closure
13.00 – Lunch
Introduction
The biopolitics of security is understood as the strategic imperative of governance that seeks to promote and protect ‘forms of life’. But what are the constitutive features of ‘forms of life’, as referents of promotion and protection?
The workshop is organised around the proposition that forms of life can be understood by analysing the ‘value(s)’ that individuals and collectivities struggle to secure. In this respect, values operate as the defining features of forms of life, and as such, become objects of analysis of the biopolitics of security.
Value(s) can be understood in various, and yet intricate, ways. As an economic feature, value(s) are related to the constitution of capital. At a personal and social level they relate as much to emotions and passions as they do to social and political cohesion. As moral entities, values are often used for understanding cultures and ‘orders’. In all these ways, value(s) are intrinsically related to understandings of life and forms of life.
As such, value(s) represent epistemic features through which the promotion and protection of ways of being in the world can be explored and further theorised. By examining the role of ‘value(s)’ as epistemic objects of security, the workshop will be used to further understand and theorise contemporary biopolitical security through four main themes:
- What kind of values (e.g. trust and confidence), and in which form, characterise contemporary forms of life?
- How are values constituted and secured as an object of security?
- How is security itself assigned a value?
- How do values relate to the knowledge economies of the security industries
Abstracts
Panel 1:
Value – Infrastructures - Life
Lucy Budd, Adam Warren, and Morag Bell (Geography Department, Loughborough University)
‘Value’, ‘cost’ and ethics: UK airports and the governance of pandemic H1N1 risk
The outbreak and subsequent worldwide spread of pandemic influenza H1N1, popularly known as ‘swine flu’, from the spring of 2009 has illustrated our continued microbial vulnerability in a highly interconnected aeromobile world. The UK has been particularly affected by the first ‘wave’ of infection, with some commentators suggesting this was an inevitable consequence of the country’s status as a hub of global air communications. Given that the virus was almost certainly brought to the UK by holidaymakers returning from Mexico, the role of the UK airport as the ‘first line’ of defence against the importation of infectious disease has been subject to particular scrutiny. An important debate has subsequently emerged surrounding the ‘rights’ of airline passengers to move unimpeded through the world’s airports (without being subjected to medical screening) against the ‘rights’ of individual nations to be protected from the spread of infection through the employment of ‘strict’ screening practices. Focusing on concepts of ‘value’ and ‘cost’, as applied to individual ‘forms of life’, we consider how the governance of H1N1 risk at UK airports has generated a set of complex and interlocking biopolitical and ethical concerns associated with the safeguarding of the national border. We conclude by commenting on how this tension, between securing and ethically valuing life, may inform future UK policy responses to infectious disease control at its international airports.
Julia Trombetta (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Security, public values and infrastructures
Definition and protection of critical infrastructures represents a way in which liberal regimes of governance are secured. Even if threats to infrastructures are considered as part of a continuum, the specification and construction of criticality is associated with what can be considered as a process of securitization, in which existential threats are evoked and exceptional measure allowed.
Securitization theory, however, has been criticized for depicting a de-contextualized and essentialised process that does not account for the complexity of “threats politics.” A broader approach to threat politics—which considers how existential threats are conceptualized and their consequences—implies to explore how essential values within a society are constructed as threatened and how this process creates new institutional arrangements. Protection of critical infrastructures involves forms of regulations, the development of public private partnerships in which public values (including safety and security) are defined and became part of a process of assessment and minimization of transaction costs.
The paper is part of a broader project that applies concepts from biopolitics, securitization theory and institutional economy to compare and contrast security practices and discourses involving the protection of critical infrastructures within different sectors. The paper considers the developments of institutional arrangements as a result of what has been labeled as clicks-Krieg or distributed denial of services attacks.
Panel 2:
Siting Biopolitical Value
Suvi Alt (University of Lapland, Finland)
The Value(s) of the Human of Human Security: The Indeterminacy of the Human of Biopower
Although the contemporary world is often described as being plagued by insecurity, uncertainty, breakdown, alienation and despair, there is also a parallel discourse that celebrates the possibilities of human rights, human development and, more recently, human security. It has been argued that human security is “a signifier of shared political and moral values” (Mack 2004: 367). However, this conception of human security leaves unproblematised both these allegedly shared values and the 'human' that they are ascribed to. This paper thus pursues a biopolitical problematisation of the value(s) of the 'human' of human security. While contemporary biopolitical critiques often seek to conflate the works of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper differentiates between the accounts of the human of biopower given by Foucault and Agamben.
A Foucauldian biopolitical problematisation depicts the human of human security as the subject of biopolitical techniques that work through administering, regulating and correcting life. The values assigned to the human are those of health, activity, efficiency, qualification and entrepreneurship. While sharing the view that the discourse of human security serves to limit the life lived by its subjects, an Agambenite reading sees the 'value' of the human of human security differently. Through Agamben's work, the discourse of human security can be read as producing 'bare life', the human of which is essentially a desubjectified subject. These diverse accounts also offer significantly different possibilities for the agency of the human of biopower. Foucault's understanding of political agency is grounded on the conditions of the contemporary world and his understanding of resistance calls for both practical and theoretical engagement with the discourses that shape our being as subjects. Agamben, in contrast, gestures towards a new 'form-of-life' that is based on a rethinking of the concept of potentiality. While the works of both Foucault and Agamben can be used to argue that the discourse of human security limits the potentiality of being human, it is nevertheless necessary to recognise the very different implications for politics these readings entail.
Owen Parker (University of Warwick)
The Boundaries of a Cosmopolitan Governmentality: Habermas, France and the EU
This paper assesses one attempt to bring a cosmopolitan ‘governmentality’ to bear on the EU via a critical engagement with Jürgen Habermas’s thought on postnational politics. There exists in Habermas’s thought an apparent tension between his universalist ideal cosmopolitan discourse ethics and his political engagement with the postnational politics of Europe, where he advocates the promotion of a constitutional patriotism and an ethical closure, in an apparent attempt to revive in a postnational setting certain secular, social-democratic values of the post World-War II European nation-state. Certain French policy towards the EU is taken as an exemplar of a Habermasian governmentality in practice and is assessed in order to reflect on its possibilities and limitations. A universalist republican biopolitics holds out great promise for European citizens, as reflected in France’s social-democratic rejection of the constitutional treaty or Habermas’s invocation of a constitutional ‘social’ security counterposed to a 'Market Europe'. However, the subject of the valued republican citizen is substantively drawn or secured, as reflected on the one hand in Habermas’s designation of a ‘core’ Europe (and associated core values) and, on the other hand, in the French invocation of the 'Polish plumber', its tough stance towards Turkey's EU membership and its promotion of an exclusionary and/or assimilatory immigration policy at the European level. It is suggested that Habermas’s ‘European’ cosmopolitan governmentality illustrates the ambiguity inherent in a cosmopolitan universality, which is itself always-already a particular conditionality and, sometimes, a violent exclusion of 'other(s)'.
Andrea Rossi (Lancaster University)
The value of the ‘non-self’
Modern configurations of power have established a necessary bond between species life and political economy. Accordingly, economic knowledge has historically played a pivotal role in conceptualizing the human in its biological needs and desires. Every economics presupposes an ontological view of homo oeconomicus, as Foucault has forcefully shown in The Birth of Biopolitics. In particular, since the advent of the marginalist school, a perfectly rational subject, a strategic utility-maximizer has occupied the horizon of economic power/knowledge. This paper attempts to update Foucault’s genealogy of homo oeconomicus in light of the emergence of regimes of knowledge – notably behavioural economics and complexity economics – which, drawing on the work of modern cognitive sciences, have thought economic behaviour in terms of bounded rationality, inductive reasoning and evolving and self-organizing preferences. It thus shows how this shift is consubstantial to a governmental rationality aiming at the desubjectification and liquefaction of the subject. The economic subject appears to be destructured and dissolved into the multifarious and conflicting trajectories drawn by the contemporary bioeconomic assemblage.
Panel 3
Economies of Life and Death
Tomás Sánchez-Criado (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Daniel López Gómez (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Care as Immunity: the Biopolitics of lifestyle monitoring in second and third generation telecare services
Nowadays a growing industry of telecare devices is actually being used in a great number of care services. Besides the original home telecare services this brand new market of care has developed different care-commodities through the use of information technologies’ developments for both the home and the street. Telecare is evolving from the classic “social or community alarm” technologies, which used a sort of “panic button” embedded in either a pendant or a bracelet, to a “smart home” approach: second and third generation devices using home-located sensors dedicated to gathering data of the users, creating a pattern of their activities, predicting and eventually preventing risky behaviours, such as bathroom falls or lack of food ingestion. In brief, telecare is going to be deeply involved in caring elders’ through monitoring their lifestyle.
In this paper, we will propose a reflection on the biopolitics of care implied in these services and devices currently under development. Even though each and every one of these devices have inscribed their own peculiarities, and that they may be contested or used in very different ways than the ones “proposed” by the designers, we think that a specific regime of security could be in place, a culture of care which implies ways of dwelling and living, a politics of life that we will term “immunity” following the work of Roberto Esposito. Esposito’s arguments, closely related to the work by Giorgio Agamben and Nikolas Rose, could be of interest to explore the very definitions of life “inscribed” in these telecare services and to open up a space to reflect and contest them.
Sakari Hänninen (National Institute of Health and Welfare / University of Finland)
Mobilisation in Heterotopias
My paper will provide an evental analysis of the Kemijärvi locale (in north-eastern Finland) in relation to the global field of forces and transnational strategies of multinationals which thoroughly challenged the normative trust of denizens of Kemijärvi. The principal employer of the region, the multinational pulp and paper company (Stora-Enso) recently closed down the still profitable pulp factory due to managemental reasons of economic values. In the aftermath of this decision the Kemijärvi-movement has been mobilized in order to challenge and reverse the decision made. The analysis of this local experience and movement makes it possible to approach the clash between environmental and governmental dispositives in dynamic terms.
In this dynamics, it is especially interesting to rethink what is the relation (of deseverance) between environmental experiences of closeness and remoteness especially since the multinational Stora-Enso expands its production even violently in Brazil while closing down its plants in Finland. A truly important gesture, in this respect, was the meeting of the activists of the Kemijärvi movement with the activists of the landless people's movement of Brazil. Was it about a circulation of new values?
This paper addresses a situation of absolute break which threatens the future of a remote community Kemijärvi which is characterized by a strong sense of place, both at the individual and collective level.
Such a break is linked to a clash between environmental experiences of positive local affordances and the governmental reason acting-at-a-distance which does not recognize these opportunities.
This is a clash of values. The community in such a situation might be conceptualized as a heterotopia which is linked to a definite slice of time, a novel heterochrony. In such a situation - it has been claimed by Foucault - the heterotopia can begin to function at full capacity, since men arrive at this sort of absolute break with their traditional time, and face the threat of a loss of familiar mode of living and way of life. In such a situation people's sense of security and set of values are closely connected by their interpretative and normative commitments (nomos), which are put in question by the course of events running according to the global logic of the multinationals. In this context the efforts of the government to manage the crisis of the Kemijärvi region could well be called biopolitical measures of security which only confirmed the heterotopic character of the locale which faced a real threat - or a chance - of becoming a non-place (in Marc Augé's sense).
Sofie Hellberg (University of Gothenburg)
The governing of life through water management: the production of sustainable lives and the sustainable water user in eThekwini Municipality, South Africa
Water is life and death and everything in between and has increasingly become a critical issue in global and local governance, raising questions about human and environmental security. Globally there seems to be an emerging consensus on the need for a more conserving approach in water management and for changing our perceptions and handling of water resources. The efforts are developed under the heading of ‘Integrated Water Resource Management’ (IWRM) and are set to promote management of water that is efficient, equitable and sustainable – values that make out the core of IWRM. With the aim of securing a homeostasis in water allocation, such water management controls and regulates individuals’ and populations’ water use.
This paper explores how IWRM as an approach to water management can be understood as a technique of biopower. More specifically, in order to understand how the biopolitics of water management work to promote different ‘forms of life’, this paper critically discusses the way technologies of water management have been incorporated and implemented in the local context of eThekwini, situated in the KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. The municipality enjoys the reputation of being a pioneer in sustainable service provision, striking a balance between the social economic and environmental values of water. However. this does not necessarily reflect the lived experiences of people whose use of, and relationship to water, is being managed and whose security is being affected. Nor does it address the politics of such management. Ultimately, therefore, through examining the biopolitics of water management and through conducting a biopolitical reading of local water narratives, this paper explores how technologies of water management govern life, how they enable and constrain people in their every day lives and simultaneously produce ‘sustainable lives’ and ‘the sustainable water user’.
Panel 4
Aesthetics, Time, Value
Patrick Pinkerton (University of Manchester)
Securing Ethnic Value in Biopolitical Time
Within certain political and social cultures, great value is attached to ethnic belonging. Central to such conceptualisations are notions of blood, ancestry and lineage, which are seen as determining ethnic identity across time. In other words, ethnic value is vested in the biological components of a particular group. The processes that translate these biological determinants into political ‘facts’ can therefore be seen as exemplars of biopolitics, in that they transcribe the limits of what makes life liveable within a political community. This paper will explore the consequences of attempts to secure a biopolitical conception of ethnic value against threatening others. Through an examination of the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the end of the 1992-95 war, I will argue that the multi-ethnic political system enforced by the international community, in tandem with the main ethno-nationalist parties, has reduced politics to the ‘continuation of war by other means’ . Political debate is reduced to argument between competing ethnic groups, differentiated along lines of biological divergence. The differences between the groups become ever-more solidified and questions of ethnic survival come to the fore. Furthermore, by basing politics on essentialised notions of identity seen as constant throughout history, the securing of ethnic value takes place in what I call ‘biopolitical time’. This will be seen as the temporality of a politics ultimately tasked with safeguarding the biological qualities of life. Facets of identity beyond the remit of this biology are downplayed, and the possibility of exploring a past or imagining a future filled by more than the biopolitical (re)production of life is foreclosed. The paper will thus conclude with an elucidation of biopolitical time in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an endless present in which the ethnic value of life is regulated and secured.
Paul McFadden (University of Newcastle)
The production of economic value and the formation of subjectivities in the post-modern economy
This paper addresses itself to literature on aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour in order to extend understanding of the determinate and determinant relationships that occur between the processes of the production of economic value and the processes of the formation of subjectivities. I argue for a theoretical re-evaluation of the importance of labour in analysis of the ‘modes of life’ of contemporary society by examining these forms of labour in the context of the Autonomist Marxist thesis of the ‘General Intellect’. Labour under capitalism is the site of the production of subjectivity and the activity of the production of economic value and these forms of labour are preponderant over other labours in the knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. My analysis presents the specific importance of work in the processes of the production of contemporary life.
Although the concepts of these forms of labour present qualitative difference, they also exhibit confluence. I seek to extend the usefulness of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour as analytical categories by operationalising them in a new stage of the division of labour with reference to previous ethnographic studies and to the Marxist extension of Smith’s concept. Analysis of these labours show that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour, as in Marx’s formal subsumption of labour under capital. New regimes of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in Fordist modes of labour, toward a commodification of workers’ subjectivities. Worker subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the direction of the worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity. I identify the determinate relationships between worker- and social-subjectivities and the significance of reproduction of labour by these social subjectivities to the production of modes of life and the formation of social values. Subjectivity is alienated from the subject and commodified in the activity of these forms of labour and is then consumed by social-subjects whose subjectivities are in turn transformed in the act of consumption. My analysis of the operation of these forms of labour in post-modern economy explores how processes in capitalist social organisation act in such a way that economic-value producing labour-activity produces human subjectivity and how subjectivity determines modes of life. The production of economic value is a determinate factor in the production of social values.
In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of wage-labour in the post-modern economy effects a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic subjectivities. Capital annexes the ‘outside’ of capital, the sphere of non-work, and the production of subjectivity reveals a tendency for the production of a capitalistic mode of life. Thus what appears to be a new form of life in which workers are free to act autonomously in capitalism is actually a new form of alienation. However, many thinkers in the field of post-modern political economy underplay the real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West, the Fordist nature of the power-relations that occur in aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour, in which the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion.
Corey Walker-Mortimer (Keele University)
The Biopolitics of Recombinant Urban Design: Aesthetics, Value and Green Infrastructure
This paper seeks to extend the biopolitical analysis of the securatization of infrastructure within contemporary liberal security. Illustrated through a case study of the East-London Green Grid (ELGG) it will do so by exploring a problematization that the governance of novel forms of green infrastructure exceed the established conceptions of criticality and protection currently underpinning discourses of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). Falling outside of the security imagination of traditional CIP discourse, analytical purchase over the aims, operation and effects of the ELGG is also found left wanting by ‘environmental security approaches’. A biopolitical approach to the governance of infrastructure however, offers a framework for interrogating the ELGG and how ‘quality of life’ is promoted, regulated and thus secured, through a complex governmentality of ‘ecosystems approaches’ to urban design. Here, networked connectivity of specific sites of environmental asset, whose ‘natural capital’ is valued and capitalised in relation to social values surrounding conceptions of ‘well being’, becomes subject to a biopolitical valuation process and an experimental logic of recombinant urban design. This paper thus seeks to explore the rationalities of aesthetics and value that inform the biopolitical strategisation of life through green infrastructure. It will conclude with a reflection on the ethical subject of a biopolitics of security by utilizing Rancierre’s concept of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ to frame immanent aesthetic experience of designed space as a site of emerging forms of biopolitical control; but also as a key site of ethicality and possibility for dissent within life’s encounter with a biopolitics of recombinant urban design.
