Conway

"Power is redefined in the pastoral context. “The shepherd wields power over the flock rather than over the land” (Foucault 2001, 301). Pastoral power sits at the connecting roots of the administration of population and the regulation of life, it has a small but informative role to play in the development of biopolitics. The pastor concerns themselves with the conduct of both individual members of the flock, but also the general community of the flock. Its divine purpose, the solemn responsibility God bestows upon the pastor, is to ensure the salvation of the flock in its entirety. However, with pastoral power comes a paradox, one that is not unlike the paradox of the biopolitical administrating of life. “The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned” (Foucault 2007, 169). This paradox is the violent sovereign kernel in the pastoral. If the flock is to be saved, it must be pure. The good shepherd must keep their senses tuned to the possibility of any corruption which may desecrate the flock with its profane presence. This is the primary modality of the “sacral prohibition” (Stiker 1999, 26).

However, salvation takes on a new orientation in the era of the birth of the modern state. No longer is there a closed salvation history, one where empires and kingdoms, “at a certain moment, had to become unified as the universal time of an Empire in which all differences would be effaced […] and this would be the time of Christ’s return” (Foucault 2007, 260). The indefinite deferral of the return of Christ pulls the worries of the pastoral back to the secular game of pure immediate governance. This new salvation will take the form of the maximization of state forces, which will be achieved through policing. “The police must ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). At the center of these series of practices that constitute the state, the police, and strategies of population and security, is development and productivity. Salvation becomes biopolitical. And with productivity as its criterion, the problem of abnormality becomes a problem of social order and of deliverance".

"Lombroso describes revolutionaries such as Marx and Charlotte Corday as possessing “wonderfully harmonious physiognomies”. Contrarily, in his analysis of a photo of forty-one anarchists arrested in Paris, “31 percent of them had serious physical defects. Of one hundred anarchists arrested in Turin, thirty-four lacked the wonderfully harmonious figure of Charlotte Corday or Karl Marx” (Foucault 2003, 154)."

"Giorgio Agamben, calling upon the work Walter Benjamin, attests that “the state of exception turned into rule signals law’s fulfillment and its becoming indistinguishable from life” (Agamben 1998, 53). The law as indistinguishable from life, that is the horror at the core of the lingering state of exception. One could say the same of the biopolitical apparatus; that its perfect functioning is found when one’s life, its motions, habits, and behaviors become indistinguishable from the processes that “ensure the state’s splendor” (Foucault 2007, 313). The terror of the norm reigns everywhere life and policing enter a zone of indiscernibility. Biopolitical circuitry functions seamlessly when one can no longer identify its content. The means of control become so vast, and so precise, one no longer notices them".

"Giorgio Agamben, in his genealogical treatment of the term dispositif, explicitly includes the discipline and literature of philosophy as an apparatus. To Agamben, an apparatus is that which has “the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure, the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben 2009, 14). The dogmatic image of thought which upholds the validity of a particular mode of being and the validity of a particular form-of-life coincides directly with both Agamben’s and Foucault’s utilization of this term."

"Biopolitics and the image of thought, especially as it pertains to the immunopolitics of the sovereign right to life, come to a critical interaction. A terror must be made to reign, a “terror of straying too far from the norm” (Tiqqun 2011, 162). We will have to, once again, return to Peter Singer".

"The image of thought is a mechanism of domination because the chasm between thought and practice collapses. One may recall Foucault’s statement about thought itself. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave.”

"Governing structures have the moral mission of ensuring their population’s utility, however, that righteous obligation was dispersed across the horizon, permeating and redefining the power relation between the state and citizen. Usefulness is virtue, incapacity—burden—is its corresponding vice. The relation between community and individual, between state and body, between, even, labor and capital, is governed by this doctrine of utility".

"To many, it emits a very distinct signal. Disabled bodies are a social indication of a cure not yet found, of a fetal screening process not yet perfected, of an imminent antiquity, or, worse, of a problem that will eventually be solved. Just as the king was the physical embodiment of the power and laws of the Ancien Régime or the criminal’s twisted tortured body carried the truth of his delinquency, the disabled possess a signifying element of abandonment.[1] For Gilles Deleuze, disability acts as the “model” for the institutionalization of abandonment...

"The disabled are often not classified as adherents to the “great ethical pact” of usefulness. They are not always observants of the doctrine of utility. The fate of the disabled throughout the ages is defined by indirect, but perpetual, dehumanization.

This literary history of disability is an oeuvre of what is unwritten; it is a library of assumption. The disabled exist at the margins of the social body because the essence of their bodies is constructed and simultaneously repudiated in the margins of philosophical works that ground and maintain our social orders through time.

Socrates and Plato established the virtue of the aesthetical unity of bodies, a unity disabled bodies despoil. The body’s “harmony” reflects the functionality of the society it exists within. The disabled, or those who are not “sound” in mind or body, disrupt the harmony of society. “Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves” (Book III, Republic). It is worth noting that passive, almost completely fluid, shift from the pathological to the moral". 

Will Conway