Bio-Politics

This article puts forward two main arguments. First, it highlights the relation between different phases of neoliberalism in Morocco together with the specific methods and techniques of urban government that were deployed in efforts to govern the slums and their populations. A period of roll back neoliberalism during the 1980s generated reforms that tried to increase government control over the urban territory to compensate for the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment. The subsequent period of roll out neoliberalism coincided with the attempt to manage and regulate the slum population as such, through new modalities of state intervention. Secondly, while evolutions in neoliberal government reflected a gradual process, this transition in Morocco was accelerated by security concerns following two severe moments of urban violence: the 1981 riots and the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca. Therefore, Morocco’s recent political transformations cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narrative linking economic liberalization to democratization. Rather, it reflects a profound shift towards intrinsically authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government which are clearly revealed at the urban scale.

This article investigates how colonial attitudes towards race operate alongside official multiculturalism in Canada to justify the legally exceptional exclusion of migrant farm workers from Canada’s socio-political framework. The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is presented in this article as a relic of Canada’s racist and colonial past, one that continues uninterrupted in the present age of statist multiculturalism. The legal continuation and growth in the use of non-citizens to conduct labour distasteful to Canadian nationals has provided an effective means for the Canadian state to regulate the ongoing flow of non-preferred races on the margins while promoting a pluralist and ethnically diverse political image at home and abroad.

In the face of a labour shortage constructed as a political crisis of considerable urgency, the Canadian state has continued to admit non-immigrants into the country to perform labour deemed unattractive yet necessary for the well-being of Canadian citizens while simultaneously suspending the citizenship and individual rights of those same individual migrant workers. By legislating the restriction of rights and freedoms to a permanently revolving door of temporary non-citizens through the mechanism of a guest worker programme, the Canadian state is participating in the bio-political regulation of foreign nationals.

La presente reflexión se deriva de un proyecto de investigación en el área de la telemedicina y su relación con la responsabilidad social y ética como apoyo a la responsabilidad civil y penal del médico en su ejercicio profesional. Para ello, se recurrió a la revisión de la literatura y a la consulta de expertos de la Fundación Cardiovascular de Colombia. Como resultado, se tiene que ante las leyes netamente definitorias sobre telemedicina; la bioética, la deontología, la responsabilidad social y los principios morales cumplen la labor propia del principio hipocrático de primum non nocere, “no hacer daño”, es decir, de hacer el bien en la sociedad al guiar al médico hacia principios del deber ser. Ante normas dispersas e inespecíficas que regulen la prestación del servicio de telemedicina, la conciencia moral y ética del médico evita la deshumanización de la medicina y la desigualdad en el acceso a los servicios de salud.

Abstract. This reflection is derived from a research project in the area of tele-medicine and its relationship with social responsibility and ethics to support civil and criminal responsibility of doctors in their practice. To do this, we researched scientific literature and interviewed experts from the Cardiovascular Foundation of Colombia. As a result, it can be said that in face of simple laws defining tele-medicine; bioethics, deontology, social responsibility and moral principles comply with the Hippocratic Oath, knowed as of primum non nocere, “above all do no harm”, that is, to do good in society while guiding doctors to principles of what should be. Regarding given scattered and unspecific rules governing the provision of tele-medicine, moral and ethical conscience of the doctors avoids the dehumanization of medicine and inequality in access to health services.

Radical, ‘eventful’ bodily vulnerability has yet to receive sustained attention in contemporary human geography. As one way of addressing the implications of existential vulnerability, this thesis explores the social geographies of people living with epilepsy. It draws upon multiple-methods research comprising an extensive mixed-methods questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, all conducted with people with epilepsy who are members of the charity, Epilepsy Scotland, the project partner. By paying attention to the (post-)phenomenological experience of ‘seizures’, the thesis argues that a failure to appreciate the complex and often extremely troubling spatialities of epileptic episodes invariably results in sustaining the stigmatisation of epilepsy and the partial views of ‘outsiders’. By exploring changed, changing and changeable relations between self, body, space, time and others, the thesis suggests that spatial behaviours in and across different places shift according to various biographical, social and illness experiences and contexts. More specifically, it contends that certain spaces become risky some or all of the time because of the body that not only threatens personal disorientation but also the very foundations of the social order. While there is a corresponding risk that individuals with epilepsy will confine themselves within the socially (although not materially) contained homeplace, many adopt active and resourceful practices, taking into account immediate time-space and embodied knowledges so as to resist being told what they can do, where and when. Disciplining the ‘epileptic body’ and environment to accommodate the unpredictability of seizures are put forward as a challenging case study for thinking through how the vital vulnerabilities of everyday life are made sense of through the very governmental regimes that they will always escape.

"Resumen - Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy recorre el cuerpo como una Summa, como un Corpus, lo sustrae del horizonte bio–teleológico del organismo para entregarlo al horizonte del acontecimiento, lo cual implica dejar de pensar en un cuerpo organizado sobre la base de una finalidad separada de sí mismo.
Nancy desarrolla una filosofía del cuerpo en la cual trastoca la interpretación generalmente aceptada en torno al lugar (subordinado) del cuerpo en la constitución del sujeto moderno. De allí que Nancy insista en que “no tenemos un cuerpo, sino que somos un cuerpo”. Así en el nuevo estatuto ontológico y epistémico del cuerpo no sólo se conforman nuevas formas de subjetividad, sino también una “nueva carne”. Así en las fronteras entre lo natural y lo artificial surge la posibilidad de pensar en un cuerpo fragmentado, en un cuerpo cuyos órganos se hayan emancipado, en lo que Deleuze y Guattari llamaron el Cuerpo Sin Órganos. Como se verá el conocimiento del cuerpo nunca es entero y absoluto, sino modal y fraccionado, y la forma del discurso que mejor comporta tal saber es la de un Corpus, precisamente, una cartografía, un inventario de las zonas del cuerpo que brinda un conjunto de acercamientos, revelando lo que el propio Nancy llamó “indicios del cuerpo”. De este modo lo que interesa en Corpus no es el todo orgánico, sino las partes desprendidas y sus posibles, en cuanto múltiples, relaciones.
Paralelamente se examinará el pensamiento posthumanista, desarrollado por Sloterdijk, sus fuentes filosóficas y sus medios técnicos, para luego  abordar –desde allí el problema de la alteridad,  la reconfiguración de la subjetividad y la ontología del cuerpo tal como es propuesta por Jean–Luc Nancy. De este modo se revisará el  fenómeno de la histeria anti-tecnológica; las metáforas y escatología de la enfermedad, profundizando la vivencia del trasplantado, para terminar discutiendo las consecuencias éticas de esta suerte de ontología del cuerpo que comienza a configurarse, una ontología modal –si se quiere– ya que el cuerpo dice relación más con con posiciones, tensiones, y pesos, que con esencias o sustancias."

This article explores Andy Warhol's early films as a mechanism of bio-political production: both challenging capitalist logic of production and mobilizing subjectivity as a source of financial value. The article introduces Maurizio Lazarrato's view of Duchamp's readymade as a 'lazy technique'-a strategy of production that links inactivity and the refusal of work with the creation of non-normative forms of life. Drawing on Isabelle Graw's notion of Warhol's Factory as a site of post-Fordist production, and employing Antonio Negri's concept of "social capture"-this article shows how Warhol's early films (Sleep, 1963; the Screen Tests project, 1964-1966) served as means of appropriating the non-normative lifestyle of his employees (Warhol's Superstars). However, I argue that at the same time they also deployed significant strategies of challenging capitalist notions of productivity and efficiency. Warhol rejected traditional aspects of filmmaking, adopted an 'indifferent imposition' towards the films' subjects, and made an extensive use of repetition to produce a prolonged duration, queer visibility and a collective viewing experience. By doing so, I conclude, Warhol's early films functioned as a "lazy technique"-they explored the refusal of work under bio-political production and its inherent link to non-normative forms of life.

This article discusses the biopolitics of digital circulation in the specific context of refugee relief. Drawing up on observational fieldwork conducted in Nahr el Bared, one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in North Lebanon, it explores how the digital capture of social and spatial evidences fundamentally transforms the social capital invested in local knowledge, gradually eroding critical capacities for community self-governance. Building upon the concept of " data derivatives " developed by Louise Amore's, the article focuses in particular on the speculative dimension of data to suggest that the conversion of an embodied memory into data-based forms provides powerful means for rendering unsanctioned claims of ownership and belonging visible, actionable and effective. At the same time it opens up new modes of " probalistic containment " that restrict individual and collective life chances under the pretext of democratic participation and empowerment.

In this thesis ethnographical interviews with women in Buenos Aires are analyzed with discourse theory in order to examine how discourses of safe/unsafe and urban poor construct places and bodies. A central element of discourse is argued to be the partially fixed inscription of danger in territories and bodies of the urban poor. Neoliberalism´s impact on urban space has meant a transformation of public space and impacts on constructing reality. This transformation of meaning is connected to the neoliberal transformation of the labor market, once invested with rights and security, now deregulated and precarious. Urban poor are visible in every interviewed woman´s everyday life, but the way of constructing them as subjects varies with level of closeness and identification. The Argentine historic construction of Europeaness, modernity and civilization as opposed to Latin Americaness, backwardness and barbarism can be found in many of the women´s constructions of urban poor. So is the othering of them in relationship to motherhood and citizenship. The constructions of the urban poor are also analyzed with the Foucaultian concept of biopower.

A chapter from Rational Freedom vol 6 Mediation by Dr Peter Critchley

In the context of debates over postmodernity there is value in. integrating the critical insights of Marx and Weber in relation to capitalist modernity, relating the process of rationalisation to the process of capital accumulation. This is to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the ideas of Marx and Weber by revealing how organisation in the modern world is based upon relations of power,, control and domination in many forms. These ideas converge with those of Marx, who locates the process of rationalisation in the need for surplus value and the accumulation of capital.

In this paper, he commentary on Welfare Economics (WE) may seem to be an anti-modernist agenda that wants to negate the scientific endeavour of modern state for the well being of the subjects. This type of responses that negates western enlightenment, are not in the good book of WE-specialist. For example, in two lectures (Abha Maity and Satyajit Ray Memorial lecture), Amartya Sen tried to rescue WE-metanarrative (a derivative of enlightenment project) by anticipating Post-modern non-formal and plural responses. To him, science is always science — not sciences; there is no geographical particularism in the construction of global science. The cultural plurality vanishes by the introduction of gross cultural diffusionism in Sen’s discourse. And anything goes against the print capitalist construct of “nation state” he was ready to rescue it. Thus the free will of enlightenment project is imported from “above” for subjugating the “free will” of below.
In fact, WE is a Post-industrial epistemology that confirms, as a supplier of disciplinary technology, the legitimated existence of simulated state, which is a hyper-reality for the sake of free-flowing market economy, the dominant form of which is death industry!