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129 Chapter Ten Biocultural Knowledge anyone with the slightest understanding of biopower might have had a moment of hesitation as well as relief when barack obama said: “The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. . . . it’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. it’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient— especially when it’s inconvenient. because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us.”1 it is significant that obama thinks that science should be free of the political as well as synonymous with truth and understanding. Perhaps he didn’t read foucault when i assigned it to him in the class i taught at columbia University in 1983 when he was my student. There has been a considerable body of knowledge on the subject of biopower and biopolitics. obviously Michel foucault has written most notably on this subject, indeed in some sense inventing it as an organized discourse . surely scholars of gender and race have a prehistory of noting the intersection between bodies and power, but foucault has laid out certain major propositions and ideas in this regard. in dialogue with foucault have been antonio negri and Michael hardt, along with gilles deleuze and felix guattari. georgio agamben has written about the division between bios and zoe. Many others—the list is too long—have explored these various intersections. so what does the idea of biocultures add to biopower and biopolitics? Why not just stick with those rather powerful and suggestive terms? i am 130 • THE END OF NORMAL using biocultures to add a concept beyond what hardt and negri call “immaterial labor,” by which they mean modes of communication through media, the internet, and so on. discussions of biopower tend to think of culture, if they talk about it, as a technical formation or a form of verbal or digital discourse. Michel foucault in an interview said that any one of his few references to the literary in his work is “the object of a report, not part of an analysis. . . . it was a point of rest, a halt”; he says that he uses literature in a negative sense. “excluding it.”2 i am asserting that biopower would do well with a stronger claim to culture, art, literature, film and so on, as something more along the lines of symbolic production, but with a greater sense of it in the public and social sphere. i am thinking of what we might want to call biocultural studies. We might want to consider agamben’s severing of zoe from bios, a move that institutes the sovereign exception, the foundation of government. if you separate bare life from civil life, you have created the foundation for biopower. foucault also uses a notion of separation to found modernity, the separation of disciplinary discourses from discourses of biopower, and deleuze notes these act of separating as really an act of “folding.” but instantiating separations can be risky business, particularly when you don’t see your own discipline as part of some kind of partly heuristic and partly power-driven motive. What concerns me is the way that certain separations or foldings have been either made or ignored. in talking about power and politics it has been too often easy to exclude culture or to see culture as either the handmaiden of power and/or the site of resistance to that power. in either case, culture is peripheral and marginal, aleatory. While studies in biopower focus on the split between discipline, with its thanatopolitics, and modernity, with its biopower, they often fail to see that the very terms used in thinking about culture and power are misleading since they seem to place culture as a function of power, at a second remove from the authority and force of power. That move to divide, i would argue, comes about from the primal separation or rupture that happened concurrently with the historical rise of biopower in the nineteenth century. That is the division between science and the humanities. We can trace a genealogy of this division, which i cannot do here but to which i want to refer. scientists (and the word was invented in the 1840s as a kind of a reverse synonym to the word artist) were initially deemed people with an...

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