From February to May 2009, students and others are organizing a weekly autonomous seminar that addresses the themes of biopolitics, the metropolis, civil war, the war machine and the whatever singularity in relation to current political debates and strategies of refusal. More info below.
What is Civil War? An Inquiry and a Call
Seminar on Biopower/Biopolitics
Mondays, 4:15 to 6:15pm, Spring 2009
Room 4304
CUNY Graduate Center
http://biopolitics09.wordpress.com/
“We are at war with one another; a battle front runs through the whole of society,
continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one
side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all
inevitably someone’s adversary.”
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
In this student-run seminar, we will focus on the historical reorganization of power relations in the neoliberal era, as they are defined by twin strategies, namely (1) the worldwide attempt within struggles to become more and more autonomous of both the state and capital’s mechanisms of domination, exploitation and subjugation by grounding resistance in life itself; and (2) capital’s response to global anti-capitalist and anti-statist struggles by the penetration of techniques of power into all social life. Put simply, we are looking into a situation of global civil war.
We will explore various forms of control as they are differentiated within technical and political class compositions, as well as hierarchies (and geographies) of experience in order to interrogate what biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’ tell us about the field of ‘politics’, ‘power’ and its refusal. While hierarchies and divisions are power’s strategy, we will explore struggles that actively challenge these processes. Much as Foucault suggests, we will “take the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” In what ways does focusing on ‘life’ over ‘politics’ enable us to understand and coordinate autonomous struggles as they attempt to disrupt current relations of power?
Against the tendency within the university as well as many left milieus to theorize without practice, the goal of the seminar is to understand struggles for autonomy through the lens of biopolitics/biopower, at the same time as we understand biopolitics/biopower through the lens of autonomous struggles. Thus, each week we will pose and reflect on the question of revolt and contemporary strategies of refusal.
More information can be found here: http://biopolitics09.wordpress.com/