biopolitics, the subject +

The recent edition of CultureMachine focusses on the themes of biopolitics, nomos, bios, etc. Part of the editorial: "However interesting these variations on the theme of biopolitics [those of Virno, Negri, et al], one obvious problem lies with their insensitivity to the moments of rupture and divergence that Foucault's historiography sought to foreground. In all of these accounts, the 'bios' of biopolitics is in danger of becoming as expansive a term as Marx's concept of social reproduction - a black box where everything that had previously been discarded from economic and political philosophy is conveniently recuperated. What gets lost in the process is the temporal precision of Foucault's account and its attention to the minutiae of institutional practice." I'm still reading my way through the edition. But, along with Nate, I'd been pondering the conflation of 'biopolitics' and 'labour power', and (for my part) trying to articulate some concerns, which are perhaps a little different to those raised by Thacker. Anyway, maybe the essays in CultureMachine will help to clarify some of the issues. Also in the same edition is another discussion topic, that of Subject versus subjectivation. Of which Bifo has this to say: "It is thanks to Michel Foucault that the theme of subjectivity has definitively been freed from its Hegelian and historicist legacy, and thought again in a new context – that of biopolitical discipline. The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived."