New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Hobbes, Biopolitics, Security

By Gordon Hull

Foucault aligns Hobbes with juridical power, not biopower.  Juridical power is repressive and takes life away; it is epitomized by monarchy.  Biopower, in contrast, is power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS 1, 137).  Foucault then famously says that “the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still / have not cut off the head of the king” (HS1, 88-89).  In Society must be Defended, he argues that:

“Rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as the subject.  To grasp the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects would, if you like, be to do precisely the opposite of what Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan” (SMD 28).

Well, no. I think this is a misreading of Hobbes, and in my Hobbes book, I argued that it’s productive to see Hobbes as a sort of proto-theorist of biopolitics in the Foucauldian sense. How so?  My argument was basically that Hobbes actually rejects a juridical model of power that’s focused on the king, and instead focuses on how the commonwealth can bolster the population.  More precisely, Hobbes starts by rejecting the Aristotelian zoon politikon.  In De Cive, Hobbes claims that “man is made fit for society not by nature, but by training” (DC I.2, note).  This is a direct repudiation of the Aristotelian dictum that “the political art does not make men but takes them from nature and uses them” (Politics 1258a22).  On my reading, Hobbes shifts focus to how to make people fit for society, a project that involves their subjectification as rational subjects.  This requires, above all, careful regulation of the system of signification at work in the commonwealth, because stability there is key to getting inside people’s heads.  After all, Hobbesian people actually lack an intellectual faculty – intellect specifically reduces to imagination. The pithiest pronouncement of this thesis is in De Homine, where Hobbes announces that “intellect is in fact imagination, but which arises from the settled signification of words [est enim intellectus imaginatio quidem, sed quae oritur ex verborum significatione constituta]” (DH 10.1; OL II, 89).  This means that if you can control external stimuli, you have a pretty good shot at getting bad thoughts out of people’s heads.

NC GOP Forgets 9/11

That's right, the party of flag and God and country found something more important to do today than remembering 9/11: making sure that poor North Carolinians don't get health insurance.  The current state budget does not include Medicaid expansion because the GOP so hates Obama that insuring 600,000+ people and creating 30,000+ jobs in the process, almost entirely on the dime of the Feds, just seems like a bad idea.  But the Republicans lost their veto-proof majorities in 2018, so this time when Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed it, they couldn't just steamroll him.  There's been a two-month stalemate since, largely featuring GOP scheduling override votes, dangling various bits of pork spending in front of democrats, not getting enough defectors, and then abruptly canceling the vote.

Then today in the NC House, the GOP assured everyone that there would be no votes because of 9/11.  When they realized that a number of democrats were out commemorating 9/11 or otherwise absent, they - SURPRISE! - voted to override Cooper's veto.

This legislature is beyond shameless, but it's not even the voting that is perhaps the most shameless thing they did today.  No, that award goes to the sanctimonious bit of hypocritcal drivel from one Rep. Jason Saine, who is "appalled that anyone in our country would stop going about their normal business on this day. When we stop being a beacon of freedom, hope and democracy, then the terrorists win."  Yep, 'cuz nothing shines that light of freedom, hope and democracy brighter than a minority party that holds power only because of unconstitutionally gerrymandered districts depriving poor people of the ability to see the doctor!

Imagine if Nancy Pelosi conducted a vote for something important on 9/11, after telling the GOP that she wouldn't.

The budget is now in the hands of the Senate, where the GOP only needs one democratic defector to continue on its gerrymandered way.

Big Win on Gerrymandering!

The awful NC legislature, largely the product of breathtakingly effective partisan gerrymandering, may finally be about to get more competitive.  A lower Court in NC just unanimously ruled that the GOP maps violated the state constitution (which keeps it out of federal courts), and the state GOP apparently does not plan to appeal (virtually all observers think that they would have lost in the NC Supreme Court, after the GOP outsmarted itself and lost a Supreme Court seat to an anti-gerrymandering progressive).  The Court gave the legislature two weeks to produce new maps, and set some very stringent conditions on how they could do it.

Vox has the story here.

This is very, very good news!