Andrew Flood posted Ronit Lentin’s talk on “Biopower, Race and State in contemporary Ireland” recently. Since then a few people have either said to me face to face or online that they don’t get the concept. I’m not sure that I get it either, but maybe its like Irony - impossible to explain but you know it when you see it.
And I’m pretty sure this is it:
Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government’s new vetting agency…
If a teaching assistant was believed to be “unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships” and also had a “chaotic, unstable lifestyle” they could be barred from ever working with children.
If a nurse was judged to suffer from “severe emotional loneliness” and believed to have “poor coping skills” their career could also be ended.
Comments 1
Biopower, biopolitics - these phenomenon arise when life itself becomes an object of political power. Prior to the modern era, political power could order the taking of life, or its confinement; modernity offers power the chance to actively *reshape* the life of its citizens. The idea of mass conscript armies as ’schools of men’ which train the dangerous classes for the duties of citizenship would be one example; so too would be welfare systems which demand regulation of the individual (when arbiting what constitutes ‘poor coping skills’, the balance of power will not be with the individual). Biopower probably reaches its highest expression in state-sponsored eugenics.
Posted 19 Mar 2010 at 3:36 pm ¶Post a Comment