Biopolitics as a System of Thought with Serene Richards
Aug 11, 2024
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Serene Richards, an insightful author exploring Smart Being within biopolitics and techno-capital, delves into essential issues surrounding governance and the essence of humanity. They discuss the paradox of preemption in security systems and critique predictive technologies, highlighting their role in societal biases. Richards also emphasizes the historical implications of biopolitics on marginalized groups, advocating for a reimagining of governance that prioritizes collective well-being. Ultimately, they encourage embracing uncertainty as a path to genuine freedom.
Smart Being represents a global subjectivity shaped by techno-capitalism, emphasizing safety and certainty over risk and uncertainty.
The continuity of eugenic thought within governance highlights dangerous practices that prioritize efficiency at the expense of human dignity.
Deep dives
The Concept of Smart Being
Smart being is characterized as a form of subjectivity shaped by the techno-capitalist framework, where individuals gravitate towards certainty and safety while avoiding uncertainty and risk. This mode of existence is not confined to specific cultures or nations but can be seen globally, primarily among certain social classes. Smart beings embody an aspiration to achieve success, which is largely defined by market conditions and technological advancements. Ultimately, enjoyment for them is dictated or mediated by technological solutions and capitalist ideologies.
Philosophical Anthropology and Biopolitics
The relationship between philosophical anthropology and biopolitics reveals how Foucault's work emphasizes understanding human beings as both objects and subjects of knowledge within governance frameworks. Foucault's analysis outlines how social life and the parameters of existence are constructed through knowledge derived from various sciences, including biology and linguistics. This philosophical examination underscores that modern governance is intrinsically connected to the evolution of human conceptualization and organization. Therefore, biopolitics becomes a critical examination of how life must be lived according to these established parameters.
Errors in Preemptive Governance
Preemptive governance strives to predict and manage potential risks before they manifest, yet it often fails due to a refusal to acknowledge the inherent unpredictability of human behavior. This results in systems that, despite their advanced technology, can make critical errors, such as misdiagnosing individuals based on preconceived biases, which can lead to abuse of power. The increasing reliance on feedback systems in governance complicates the situation, as the fear of failure may hinder genuine learning and adaptation within these structures. Overall, the ambition for certainty can paradoxically exacerbate vulnerability to unforeseen threats.
Eugenics and Biopolitical Governance
The discussion highlights a troubling continuity of eugenic thought across political spectra, where both left and right have historically employed biopolitical principles that prioritize productivity and optimization of life. An examination of governmental practices, such as Canada's medical assistance in dying program, reveals how identities deemed 'unoptimized' are ruthlessly dismissed in favor of efficiency and control. These dynamics underscore broader implications of governance that often dehumanize individuals by reducing them to mere statistics within populations. Consequently, the persistent eugenic logic urges a re-examination of political ideologies and practices to avert the gravely dated assumptions about human worth and potential.
Purchase 'Biopolitics as a System of Thought' from Bloomsbury: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/biopolitics-as-a-system-of-thought-9781350412095/
Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart Being. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital where living is always at stake and directed to survival. Armed with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode of being and asks how it could be that, while the material conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our capacities for effective political action, understood as the capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear to be diminishing.
Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute level of our everyday lives. She argues that there are conceptual truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics' functioning, for instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of intervention, abandonment, or death, which have implications for our politics. In exciting engagements with political movements such as the post-May 1968 Mouvement des travailleurs Arabes (MTA), Richards shows how demands to transform our system of social relations are undermined by institutional models that proffer to offer rights protection while simultaneously annihilating the living altogether. Through a reappraisal of law, governance and capital, Richards seeks to reconceptualise our collectivity of thought, arguing for a politics of destitution that could form the basis of a communism to come.