STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2007 > Farm Report > News > Chip Heath

STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2007 > Farm Report > News > Chip Heath

But there are ways to “sell” ideas, apart from their merits. That’s the essence of Heath’s course—and of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t (Random House) that he wrote with his brother, educational publisher Dan Heath.

While Dan drew on the methods of esteemed professional teachers, Chip and his students catalogued urban legends, wartime rumors, conspiracy theories, proverbs and even jokes, and conducted experiments with more than 1,700 subjects. They found that “sticky ideas shared certain traits”: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional appeal and a story. Take the rumor dating back to the 1960s that some misanthrope put razor blades in Halloween apples. In 1985, an exhaustive study showed that the only recorded incidents of trick-or-treat tampering since 1958 were done to candy inside two families’ homes. Why does the myth persist? Because it entails a simple, concrete, surprising but plausible story that arouses emotion.

Biopower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Biopower - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For Foucault, biopower is a technology of power, which is a way of exercising various techniques into a single technology of power. For Foucault, the distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is thus essential to the emergence of the modern nation state, modern capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over other bodies, "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations" (History of Sexuality, Vol.I, p.140). It relates to the government's concern with fostering the life of the population, and centers on the poles of disciplines ("an anatomo-politics of the human body") and regulatory controls ("a biopolitics of the population").

Biopower for Foucault contrasts with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign. In an era where power must be justified rationally, biopower is utilized by an emphasis on the protection of life rather than the threat of death, on the regulation of the body, and the production of other technologies of power, such as the notion of sexuality. Regulation of customs, habits, health, reproductive practices, family, "blood", and "well-being" would be straightforward examples of biopower, as would any conception of the state as a "body" and the use of state power as essential to its "life". Hence the conceived relationship between biopower, eugenics and state racism.
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Furthermore, the exercise of power in the service of maximizing life carries a dark underside. When the state is invested in protecting the life of the population, when the stakes are life itself, anything can be justified. Groups identified as the threat to the existence of the life of the nation or of humanity can be eradicated with impunity. "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population." (History of Sexuality, Vol. I in The Foucault Reader p. 137).

From biopower to biopolitics

From biopower to biopolitics

Rather than starting from a theory of obedience and its legitimating forms, its dispositifs and practices, Foucault interrogates power beginning with the 'freedom' and the 'capacity for transformation' that every 'exercise of power' implies. The new ontology sanctioned by the introduction of 'life into history' enables Foucault to 'defend the subject's freedom' to establish relationships with himself and with others, relationships that are, for him, the very stuff [matière] of ethics. Habermas and the philosophers of the Constitutional State are not wrong in taking Foucault’s thought as their privileged target because it represents a radical alternative to a transcendental ethics of communication and the rights of man.
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Why should we look for the 'arcana imperii' of modernity within political economy? Biopolitics, understood as a government-population-political economy relationship, refers to a dynamic of forces that establishes a new relationship between ontology and politics. The political economy that Foucault talks about is neither the political economy of capital and work of classical economists, nor the Marxist economic critique of 'living labor.' It is a political economy of forces that is very close yet very distant from either of these points of view. It is very close to Marx’s viewpoint because the problem of how to coordinate and command the relationships between men, insofar as they are living beings, and those of men with 'things,' keeping the aim of extracting a 'surplus of power' in mind, is not simply an economic problem but an ontological one. It is very distant because Foucault faulted Marx and political economy with reducing the relations between forces to relations between capital and labor, with making these binary and symmetric relations the source of all social dynamics and every power relation. The political economy that Foucault talks about, on the contrary, governs 'the whole of a complex material field where not only are natural resources, the products of labor, their circulation and the scope of commerce engaged, but where the management of towns and routes, the conditions of life (habitat, diet, etc.), the number of inhabitants, their life span, their ability and fitness for work also come into play.'

...If power, in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need an ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs, one that begins with infinitesimal mechanisms that are subsequently 'invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more general mechanisms, and by forms of global domination.'

Consequently, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power relations in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings. Biopolitics is a strategic relation; it is not the pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions of 'coordination and determination' concede that biopower, from the moment it begins to operate in this particular manner, is not the true source of power. Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly belong to it, that comes from the 'outside.' Biopower is always born of something other than itself.

... What we need to emphasize is the difference of the principles and the dynamics that regulate the socialization of forces, sovereign power and biopower. The relations between the latter two are only comprehensible on the basis of the multiple and heterogeneous action of forces. Without the introduction of the 'freedom' and the resistance of forces the dispositifs of modern power remain incomprehensible, and their intelligibility will be inexorably reduced to the logic of political science. Foucault explains the issue in the following manner:

'So resistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the other forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the keyword, in this dynamic.'

5. ...He saw his work retrospectively as an analysis and a history of the different modalities through which human beings are constituted as subjects in Western culture, rather than as an analysis of the transformations of the dispositifs of power. 'Therefore it is not power, but the subject, that constitutes the general theme of my investigations.'

The analysis of power dispositifs should then begin, without any ambiguity, with the dynamic of forces and the 'freedom' of subjects, and not with the dynamics of institutions, even if they are biopolitical institutions, because if one starts to pose the question of power starting from the institution one will inevitably end up with a theory of the 'subject of law'. In this last and definitive theory of 'power' Foucault distinguishes three different concepts which are usually confused within a single category: strategic relations, techniques of government and states of domination.

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The ethico-political struggle takes on its full meaning at the frontier between 'strategic relations' and 'states of domination,' on the terrain of 'governmental technologies.' Ethical action, then, is concentrated upon the crux of the relation between strategic relations and governmental technologies, and it has two principal goals: 1. to permit, by providing rules and techniques to manage the relationships established with the self and with others, the interplay of strategic relations with the minimum possible domination, 2. to augment their freedom, their mobility and reversibility in the exercise of power because these are the prerequisites of resistance and creation.

6. The determination of the relationship between resistance and creation is the last limit that Foucault’s thought attempted to breach. The forces that resist and create are to be found in strategic relations and in the will of subjects who are virtually free to 'control the conduct of others.' Power, the condensation of strategic relations into relations of domination, the contraction of the spaces of freedom by the desire to control the conduct of others, always meets with resistance; this resistance should be sought out in the strategic dynamic. Consequently, life and living being become a 'matter' of ethics through the dynamic that simultaneously resists power and creates new forms of life. In an interview in 1984, a year before his death, Foucault was asked about the definition of the relation between resistance and creation:

'Resistance was conceptualized only in terms of negation. Nevertheless, as you see it, resistance is not solely a negation but a creative process. To create and recreate, to transform the situation, to participate actively in the process, that is to resist.'

Mapping Project: Cultures of Technology Connections

Mapping Project: Cultures of Technology Connections

What do university students, knowledge workers, factory farmers and migrant workers have in common? How is a university like a factory farm? What is Biopower? Why should you give a moo about poo? This map traces connections between different cultures of technology that are part of the apparatus of Biopower. Biopower is a form of power that regulates "the production and reproduction of life itself."

Amazon.com: Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892: Books: Howard Markel

Amazon.com: Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892: Books: Howard Markel

As a practicing physician, Markel takes seriously the need for disease control based on sound scientific principles. Yet he warns against the dangers of a "quarantine mentality," in which "not only does the infectious disease become the `enemy' but, so, too, do the human beings (and their contacts) who have encountered the microbe in question." When a contagious disease becomes linked to a specific group of people, Markel argues, public health authorities must be doubly vigilant to guard those people's individual rights and to combat their stigmatization. As he concludes, "The burden of illness is wearing enough for those stricken with contagious disease without the added social layers of separation."

Artfacts.Net: Christoph Büchel – HOLE

Artfacts.Net: Christoph Büchel – HOLE

Aside at installations. Büchel repeatedly carries out more conceptual projects and actions which deal with current political conflicts. His project with Gianni Motti entitled "Guantánamo Initiative" highlighted the USA's claim on Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The USA maintains an internment camp there for terror suspects who are mainly Moslems. Given the fact that the USA is not obliged to apply its own laws in this extraterritorial space, various infringements of the prisoners' human rights are the result. On the other hand, the USA are also contravening the rental contract which they themselves forced on Cuba, because the rented land should not be used for military purposes. With their initiative, Büchel and Motti attempted to legally rent Guantánamo Bay from the state of Cuba. The resulting correspondence, plus documentary material, including a copy of the rental contract between America and Cuba dated 1901, were presented by the artists in a transport container at this year's Venice biennial.

http://www.e-flux.com/displayshow.php?file=message_1094828409.txt

Sushi for Two - New York Times

Sushi for Two - New York Times

When sushi took root in the United States in the 1970s, a few Japanese chefs tried to educate Americans about the variety of seafood eaten in traditional sushi, and a few made the effort to recreate the neighborhood sushi bar, with its cheerful chatter, trusting relationships, lack of menus and reasonable prices.

But the dirty little secret of American sushi is that from the beginning, many Japanese chefs assumed that we could never appreciate the wide-ranging experience the way their Japanese customers did, so they didn’t bother to educate us. Simple sushi took over, featuring the usual suspects: tuna, salmon, boiled shrimp.