Showing papers in "Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory in 2007"

An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory

Abstract: This article explores the contribution of an ‘analytics of government’ to state theory. This approach takes up methodological and theoretical considerations that Michel Foucault developed in his lectures 0f1978 and 1979 at the College de France on the ‘history of “governmentality”’. The article argues that an analytics of government is characterized by three theoretical dimensions: a nominalist account that stresses the central importance of knowledge and political discourses in the constitution of the state; a broad concept of technology that encompasses not only material but also symbolic devices, including political technologies as well as technologies of the self; a strategic account that conceives of the state as an instrument and effect of political strategies. After presenting the three analytical dimensions, the last part of the article will compare this theoretical perspective with the concept of governance and with critical accounts of neo-liberalism. The article concludes that Foucault's work o...

Measuring progress: calculating the life of nations

Abstract: In recent years, sociological examinations of genetics, therapeutic cloning, neuroscience and tissue engineering have suggested that ‘life itself’ is currently being transformed through technique with profound implications for the ways in which we understand and govern ourselves and others. In this paper, argue that a growing focus on frontier technologies in the life sciences in discussions about bio-power today has come at the cost of empirical investigations into how, for example, ‘quality of life’ came to be a crucial object of bio-power in the 20th century. Just as Foucault outlined the emergence of a multiple body—the population—in the 18th century, I suggest, building on work by Rose, Rabinow and Hacking, that we can also discern the emergence of a multiple subjectivity—state of civilisation, public opinion, human capability, national attitudes, culture—as scientific and political problem. If bio-politics deals with the population as a biological and political problem, then what we might think of as an anthropo-politics deals with a collective subjectivity as a psychological, sociological and/or anthropological problem that can be measured, mapped out and intervened upon in much the same way that mortality rates, life expectancy or morbidity rates can. By analysing the concrete ways in which human progress has been globally measured and taxonomised in the past two centuries or so, I will show how global stratifications of countries according to their states of ‘civilisation’, ‘development’ and more recently ‘human capability’, have relied not just on the population as biological object, but also on a collective subjectivity. Using this analysis, I will go on to conclude that the politics of life is in no way limited to biological contestations and problems, but equally importantly includes psychological, sociological and anthropological problematisations about what a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ or ‘quality’ life is and how they might be measured.

Speaking Truth to Biopower: On the Genealogy of Bioeconomy

Abstract: Much of the biopolitical literature has been preoccupied with the relationship between biopolitics and economy, or bioeconomy as it is increasingly called. Although much has been said about the economical aspects of developments in biotechnology and biomedicine, the central concept of bioeconomy has been vasdy under-theorized, a situation that leads to serious confusion over the novelty of the phenomenon. This article argues that Foucault's lectures on biopolitics clearly demonstrate how intimately its origin is bound up with political economy and liberalism. Instead of seeing biotechnology as creating an unholy alliance with contemporary capitalism, we should rather see today's developments against the backdrop of an initial relationship between biopolitics and political economy; this article seeks to elaborate the genealogy of this initial relationship. Two aspects are important in this alleged genealogy of bioeconomy: first, the concept of the population and its proper form of ‘economical’ self-regulat...

Actor-networking ceta-sociality, or, what is sociological about contemporary whales?

Abstract: In contemporary urban Euro-American societies, whales have become hugely popular and iconic creatures, arousing controversies more intense than most other instances of animal politics How to account sociologically, however, for the dramatic social transformation of whales, from natural resource to near-sacrosanct agent, is far from self-evident This article advocates a change of theoretical perspective, inspired by the work of actor-network theorists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon Rather than focussing solely on the ‘humanity’ of human-animal relations, as does most of sociology, actor-network theory (ANT) allows for the inclusion of non-human ‘actants’ (like whales) into the fabric of sociality In the ontology of ANT, sociality emerges as semiotic-material configurations of humans, animals, and technologies- Starting from a critical review of the work by Adrian Franklin on growing ‘zoocentrism’ in late modernity, the article proceeds by demonstrating how an ‘ecologised’ ANT sociology contributes towa

Life, autopoiesis, debt: Inventing the Bioeconomy

Abstract: This article considers the genealogies of the ‘bioeconomy’ by investigating shifting conceptions of life, debt and regeneration across the disciplines of biology and political economy. Returning to the post-industrial literature of the seventies, it seeks to understand how the perception of economic and ecological crisis fed into the US's decision to promote life science innovation as the cutting edge of its new economic strategies. There is an intimate connection, it argues, between the world oil crisis, US debt and the speculative reinvention of life. In this context, a number of methodological and conceptual questions become imperative. When capital mobilizes the biological, how do we theorize the relationship between the creation of money (surplus from debt; futures from promise) and the technological recreation of life? When capitalism confronts the geochemical limits of the earth, where does it move? What is the space-time—the world—of late capitalism and where are its boundaries? What finally, beco...

The virtual bioeconomy: the 'failure' of performativity and the implications for bioeconomics

Abstract: This article considers how the bioeconomy—conceived as a market constituted by and constituting technologies derived from the biosciences—can be usefully considered as a virtual economy in that the representations and practices of economic activity differ significantly from one another. It does so through an analysis of the economic theories on spatial innovation processes (e.g. clusters) that have proved a popular approach in economic geography. The article contrasts the theory of performativity with that of virtualism in order to illustrate how the failure of economic performativity helps to explain economic practices rather than assuming that economic theories necessarily ‘work’ as implied by die theory of performativity. This has important implications for how we understand the bioeconomy because it means that we have to reconsider die production of biovalue.

I do it for the chocolate

Abstract: In this article, blood donation in Denmark is analysed with the theoretical perspective on exchange developed by Pierre Bourdieu In most western countries blood donation is based on free donations given by voluntary donors to an unknown recipient However, this supposedly non-economic donation cannot be seen isolated from the wider web of bioeconomical relations in which it is embedded In the blood bank donors are met with hospitality and small counter-prestations also highlighting it as part of a symbolic economy Ethnographic data mainly consisting of interviews and observations collected at a blood bank can thus with Bourdieu be said to show the relationship between donor and bank as one that is maintained and characterized by strategies of reciprocity employed by blood bank personnel to ensure that donors keep coming back These strategies are essential in the social construction of the ideas of altruism and the ‘pure gift’ Finally the article elaborates on Bourdieu's contribution to the debate on

On the promise of a sociological aesthetics: from Georg Simmel to Michel Maffesoli

Abstract: This article outlines the contribution of a sociological aesthetics to explaining social life. The central argument is that aesthetic phenomena are neither incidental nor epiphenomenal to social structure; rather the social bond itself possesses an aesthetic dimension. The two central thinkers discussed are Georg Simmel and Michel Maffesoli. The first pioneered a sociology grounded in aesthetics through the study of forms of sociation where, as social interaction becomes more fully autonomous, the aesthetic attraction of doing things together starts to dominate. The second emphasizes what social actors feel they have in common when they share tastes, customs or habits. He terms this an ‘ethics of aesthetics’ and asks whether it is becoming the dominant form of collective bonding. Synthesizing these insights, the article concludes by advocating that the full potential of a sociological aesthetics is realized only when: (i)careful attention is paid to the specific character of aesthetic forms of integration...

The law of growth

Abstract: This paper addresses the conditions and implications of aggregating humans into ‘populations’ through statistical means. Engaging with statistical constructions of world population and population growth in the 20th century the paper discusses the ‘biological law of population growth’ which corroborated predictions of a ‘population explosion’ and demands for ‘population control’ after World War II. The biostatistical model and curve were developed in experimental animal population biology to describe the self-limiting growth of self-contained populations over time, and informed the human development studies of the 1960s and 1970s reckoning on a limited global ecological ‘carrying capacity’. The paper explores the economies inherent in the ‘law of growth’, arguing that the law structured and insinuated a biopolitical system of classification and allocation of human lives. The paper analyses the scientific strategies of abstraction, reduction, formalization, and visualization effective in the growth law and ...

War without End(s): The End of Clausewitz?

Abstract: This article argues that both anti- and pro-Clausewitzians have tended to base their views on an incomplete understanding of Clausewitz. We claim that the so-called ‘new wars’ do not require a new analytical paradigm, as is suggested by anti-Clausewitzians like Martin van Creveld and John Keegan. But this does not mean that the prevailing pro-Clausewitzian discourse cannot be challenged. Clausewitz, as is well-known, employed a dialectical method of arguing in extremes. But whereas we suggest that Clausewitz sought to situate actual war between extremes, the modern discourses share the mistake of seeing the extremes as incompatible alternatives. We argue that a deeper understanding of Clausewitz's theory, and in particular his views on the state, on policy and politics, as well as on his so-called ‘trinity’ of competing forces of war, provides a framework for analysis that is still valid. This also implies that the attempt to replace Clausewitz with another classical thinker, Sun Tzu, may not be necessary...

Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel

Abstract: Commencing from Georg Simmel's notion of the general tendency of modern thought as the ‘dissolution of substance into functions’, the article analyzes Simmel's own thought as an apotheosis of that dissolution. The focus is on Simmel's conception of society as an ‘event’ (Geschehen), which rejects the reifying conception of society as a substantive entity, but does not reduce the social to action nor actors either- event has primacy both over subject and substance. The article asserts that the Simmelian event has two main aspects: that of reciprocal causation and inner antagonism. Along with clarifying the event dynamics in accordance with these aspects, the key sociological implications of Simmel's philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) are also unfolded: it is claimed that event expresses the deep continuity between the vital and the social in Simmel's thought. In the end, the uses of the notion of the event are elaborated by connecting Simmel's reflections to more recent insightful conceptualizations of...

The Subject and Historical Theory

Abstract: This paper asks two questions: how we should conceive of the subject after Foucault? What implications does rethinking the subject have for historical theory? It attempts to modify Foucault's own persistent hostility to humanist concepts of the subject by distinguishing clearly between autonomy and agency. Autonomy would consist of the ability to hold beliefs and so to perform actions uninfluenced by society or power. Postfoundationalists can reject this concept of autonomy while reclaiming agency, conceived as the ability to modify the beliefs and even practices that one inherits from others. A rejection of autonomy, but not agency, is sufficient to sustain Foucault's main critiques of other concepts of the subject, notably those associated with Sartre, Hegel, and Marcuse. Yet, a clear commitment to agency would significantly alter Foucault's theory of history.

Deleuze and Derrida on the Concept and Future of Democracy

Abstract: This paper argues that Deleuze and Derrida share a conception of the open-ended character of political concepts that resembles in some respects the constructivist approach of Rawls and other liberal theorists. It explores the hypothesis that their understanding of concepts is related to their essentially critical conception of the task of political philosophy. It discusses Deleuze's ‘becoming-democratic’ and Derrida's ‘democracy to come’ in order to show how both philosophers offer ‘transformative’ concepts that draw in different ways upon elements of existing conceptions of democracy in order to open up new approaches to democratic politics. It points to strengths and weaknesses of both approaches before suggesting, finally, that Derrida's use of his concept of ‘democracy to come’ is in some ways the more adventurous.