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Biopolitics
John Marks
Keywords bioethics, biology, biopolitics,
biotechnology, eugenics, life, molecular biology
F
oucault introduces the notion of biopolitics
in The History of Sexuality (1978). Here, it
is essentially a complement to his earlier
formulation of discipline, whereby sovereign rule
– the ultimate right to take life – is increasingly
overlaid by a new focus on the life processes of the
population. From the 18th century onwards,
biological existence is no longer a neutral,
unchanging substrate upon which political exist-
ence is superimposed. Consequently, a new
politics emerges which relates to what it means to
be a living species in a living world: biology is
drawn into the domain of power and knowledge.
The establishment of norms, hierarchies and
statistical analyses gain in importance in relation to
the creation of legal frameworks. Rather than exer-
cising its sovereign right to curtail life in periodic,
spectacular manner, politics focuses increasingly
on the fostering and direction – the government –
of life.
Biopolitical processes as defined by Foucault
have become part of the fabric of everyday reality
in advanced capitalist economies, and the indus-
trial era was in some senses characterized by the
growth of a biopolitical consensus, whereby the
norms of welfare – health, education and various
forms of insurance – were articulated with the
demands of mass, organized industrial and
commercial activity. Today, the globalization of
capital means that previous biopolitical norms,
such as the rights attached to labour, including the
duration of working life and pension rights, are
being reassessed. It is in this context that Hardt
and Negri (2000) have recently proposed an
analysis of the ways in which power in contempor-
ary post-disciplinary ‘control’ societies has become
entirely biopolitical. In their reading, power is
expressed as a form of control that pervades the
entire social field. However, at the same time, they
argue that this very pervasiveness means that
resistance is no longer marginal, but rather
multiple and active. For Hardt and Negri, the
positive focus of potential for resistance to bio-
political control resides in the multitude: a wide-
spread attitude of dissent and refusal in reaction
to biopower’s grip on all aspects of life.
The development of the industrial biopolitical
dispositif which articulated labour, welfare and
capital was also, of course, punctuated by signifi-
cant periods of international armed conflict. These
periods of conflict, and most particularly the First-
and Second World Wars, highlighted the genocidal
counter-tendencies of biopolitics. Materially and
ideologically these wars were fought not only by
armies, but by populations. In this sense, the
Second World War in particular was characterized
by two highly significant aspects of biopower,
which remain as spectres haunting the construc-
tion of viable future global biopolitical structures:
the drift to ‘total war’ pitting population against
population, and the elevation of eugenics to a
brutally racist state policy.
Leaving aside the complex issue of war, which
would necessitate a lengthy discussion in its own
right, we will concentrate here on the issue of
eugenics in an era of biotechnology: an issue which
is implicit but not developed in Foucault’s work.
In the postwar era, developments in medicine and
molecular biology have led to fears that eugenics
might make a return in new forms. In reaction to
this, the conceptual resources of thinking on
biopolitics have been seen by many as a useful
analytical tool for looking in particular at the ways
in which the postwar development of molecular
biology has provided new pathways for politics to
penetrate the material components of ‘life’. From
the discovery of the double-helix structure of
DNA in 1953 onwards, molecular biology has
claimed to render not only visible, but also access-
ible, the code of life itself: a new dimension of
matter that appears to be increasingly available for
observation and manipulation. In this sense,
biotechnological issues such as gene therapy, pre-
implantation and pre-natal genetic screening,
stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning, the
widespread corporate patenting of genes, the
Human Genome Project, and the general
economic issue of data control and access in the
light of genomics and bioinformatics, all raise
significant biopolitical issues.
In the light of these technologies, there is an
increasing sense that we are entering an era of
biopolitical problematization. This era is character-
ized not only by an uncertainty over the way in
which these new technologies reconfigure the
natural world epistemologically and even ontolog-
ically, but also by what Paul Rabinow (1999)
identifies as a ‘purgatorial’ dimension. By this, he
means the fact that most of these technologies
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334 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)
promise much more in terms of material interven-
tions that they can currently deliver. The possibili-
ties for genetic therapy are currently extremely
limited, and it is still the case that pre-natal and
pre-implantation genetic testing can only screen
for a very small number of genetic ‘abnormalities’.
In this sense, as Rabinow indicates, the biopoliti-
cal stakes are uncertain: there is a widespread
sense that we may be on the verge of significant
shifts in our ability to manipulate and transform
life, combined with the knowledge that we do not
yet know the limits of these new capacities.
Following the French political and social
theorist Pierre-André Taguieff (2001), three areas
of what we might call biopolitical anxiety are
raised by these areas of activity, all of which
develop out of the molecular biology revolution.
First, there is the widespread fear of the gradual
reappearance of eugenic practices and eugenic
approaches to social ‘deviancy’. As far as human
reproduction is concerned, it is claimed that the
gradual increase in genetic testing may be leading
to a new, ‘liberal’ eugenics led by consumer choice.
This new eugenics may not correspond to the
state-controlled racist eugenics of National Social-
ism, but it nonetheless threatens to create a radical
new set of social divisions. According to such
scenarios, social groupings that distinguish
between genetically enhanced and non-enhanced
individuals will revive the racist rationale of
previous eugenic projects.
Second, related to anxieties over eugenics,
there is a widespread concern to defend the
integrity of the ‘human’ in the face of biotechno-
logical advances: in other words, the attempt to
prevent a key component of life – namely DNA –
from being subject to modification and manipu-
lation. From a religious standpoint, this determi-
nation to maintain what we might consider as the
‘genetic contingency’ – or, as popular parlance
would have it, the ‘genetic lottery’ – of human
reproduction is conventionally expressed as a
defence of the sacred nature of human life and
procreation. From a secular perspective, as in the
recent work of Jürgen Habermas, this suspicion of
genetic testing and the biotechnological spectre of
so-called ‘designer babies’ is expressed as a
defence of human dignity. Drawing on Arendt,
Habermas presents the contingent nature of
human birth, undetermined by genetic manipu-
lation driven by parental choice or societal/familial
expediency, as the metonymic basis for the funda-
mental existential human freedom to act. The
prospect of a ‘posthuman’ future is also seen as a
threat by those conservatives, such as Fukuyama
(2003), who are attached to what they see as an
essential and relatively unchanging ‘human nature’.
Finally, there is the apocalyptic fear that the
collective human genetic inheritance – the germ
line – might be irreparably damaged by genetic
modification or manipulation. As far as the natural
world is concerned, this anxiety finds expression
in the fear that the combined effect of genetic
patenting and genetically modified crops might be,
at the very least, a significant reduction in levels
of biodiversity. The American political and scien-
tific commentator Jeremy Rifkin (1999) has
talked of a process of ‘genetic enclosure’ that is
analogous to the land enclosures of the 17th
century. It should be pointed out that the alarm
and anxiety occasioned by the possibilities for
molecular intervention and biopolitical control in
contemporary societies is not universally shared.
Following sociobiology in the 1970s, subsequent
‘post-humanist’ inheritors of this strand of
thinking such as Lee M. Silver (1997) have posited
a more genetically ‘efficient’ bio-engineered
human future. Silver seizes upon the opportunities
offered by biotechnology to achieve control of
human evolution, and predicts a future version of
American society in which 10 percent of the popu-
lation – the ‘GenRich’ group – will be bioengi-
neered individuals, constructed from entirely
synthetic genes. This genetic elite will control all
aspects of society, while the remaining 90 percent
of ‘naturals’ will have a subservient social role.
As Eugene Thacker (2004) points out, much
current bioethical deliberation on the biopolitical
issues raised by biotechnological advances is
concerned with the legal and ‘philosophical’ defi-
nition of categories such as ‘potential life’, as well
as the sociological and anthropological analysis of
issues such as risk assessment in the handling of
genetic information. However, he also points to a
form of bioethics that is orientated more towards
critique and problematization, and which is, conse-
quently, more genuinely philosophical in approach.
Thacker argues that this ‘cultural bioethics’, as he
calls it, is concerned with fundamental epistemo-
logical and ontological questions. It asks, for
example, whether the body as a subject can be
made commensurable with the body as an object
of experiment, diagnosis or commodification. It
considers the ontological status of the cyborg and
the relation of life and the body to information.
Thacker goes on to suggest that the conventional
use of a version of Kant’s categorical imperative as
a basis for bioethics leads to the construction of
somewhat rigid ethical protocols. In contrast to
this, he draws attention to what he calls ‘bio-
ethics’ – and what others have labelled a ‘trans-
human’ approach to bioethics – that takes
Spinoza’s treatise The Ethics as its starting point,
rather than Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Taking
its cue from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, bio-
ethics asks a threefold question in relation to the
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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Life (Vitalism)/Experience 335

‘body’: what is a body?; what can a body do?; what
can you do to a body? Whereas bioethics strives to
define a morality that can be applied to the body
as a discrete, quantifiable entity with relatively
well-defined boundaries, bio-ethics conceives of
bodies as much less stable and quantifiable entities
and attempts to assess ethically the affective
relations between bodies.
References
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: The
Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fukuyama, F. (2003) Our Posthuman Future:
Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
London: Phoenix.
Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human
Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rabinow, P. (1999) French DNA: Trouble in
Purgatory. London: University of Chicago
Press.
Rifkin, J. (1999) The Biotech Century: How
Genetic Commerce Will Change the World.
London: Phoenix.
Silver, L.M. (1997) Remaking Eden: Cloning and
Beyond in a Brave New World. New York:
Avon Books.
Taguieff, P.-A. (2001) Du progès: biographie d’une
utopie moderne. Paris: EJL.
Thacker, E. (2004) Biomedia. London: University
of Minnesota Press.
John Marks is Reader in Critical Theory at
Nottingham Trent University. He has written on
Deleuze and Foucault, and he is currently working
on projects dealing with the philosophical and
cultural mediation of molecular biology.

Experience
Scott Lash

Abstract For Kant, experience is epistemological, whereas ontological experience

(Gadamer) is in the first instance poetic and Romantic (Schiller, Goethe). In contradis-
tinction to Kantian Erfahrung, it is most often called Erlebniß. We note further that
Erfahrung is cognitive experience while Erlebnis is also aesthetic experience. Dilthey
and Husserl understand experience pertaining to knowledge through Erlebnis. In
epistemological or classificatory knowledge the parts add up to the whole. Ontological
knowledge instead is holistic in which the whole is present in each of the parts. In onto-
logical knowledge we can know things themselves. Ontological experience is particu-
larly important for global knowledge. This is because knowing another culture is not
reducible to a culture’s qualities or predicates. Culture as a way or form of life is a thing-
itself. A third type of experience is informational experience. This collapses the
epistemological into the ontological and is also increasingly present today. This sort of
experience of non-linear information theory can account for the experience of societies,
of individual humans, of digital media, of neuronal networks, of phenotypes, urban
forms, of cellular organisms, or of inorganic matter.
Keywords aesthetics, classification, creation, destruction, epistemology, Erfahrung,
Erlebnis, information, knowledge, ontology, predicates

Experience
Most commonly encountered in everyday life, experience is spoken of in terms of travel,
tourism, adventure. Though also of course we say that a doctor is well qualified and point to
his or her many years of ‘experience’. We want prime ministers who already have had
some ministerial experience. The first type of experience is a question of undergoing one-off