Biopolitical Geographies

2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 16211634, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00163.x

Bio-Political Geographies

Kolson Schlosser*Department of Geography and Geology, Western Kentucky University

AbstractThis article reviews the debate on bio-politics in order to clarify its many usesand applications in geography. In doing so, I review how bio-politics is conceivedby Foucault, Hardt and Negri, and Agamben, as well as how geographers haveemployed, added to, or disagreed with their insights. More specifically, I structurethis review around how various analysts have understood the relationship betweenbio-political power and traditional forms of sovereign power, and, relatedly, howa focus by geographers on micro-scales of analysis can help explore this relationship.

Introduction

For better or worse, bio-politics has become a popular analytical tool ingeography. In general, most analysts use it to connote the incorporationof life into modern forms of politics, or the means by which the groupof living beings understood as a population is measured in order to begoverned (Elden 2007a, 32). This broad commonality in the usage of theterm only gets us so far, however, because within this there is still atremendous amount of variation in its interpretation and application.1 Thepurpose of this article is to provide an entry point into this highly variedliterature, but in doing so I also suggest that geographers are well suitedto address some of these inconsistencies. Much of the variation in theliterature on bio-politics regards whether it departs from or is integral toterritorially based forms of sovereign power. Geography potentiallyaddresses this issue to the extent that geographers frequently explore con-nections between scales of power from the body, to the state, to the globaleconomy.

I first set the table for this discussion by reviewing some of the coreinsights offered by Michel Foucault, and by explicating some of the basic,if not complex and overlapping, nomenclature of bio-politics. The thirdsection of this article then lays out two important and related issues at thecore of the immense variation in how bio-politics is understood: themanner in which forms of power have shifted over time, and the scale atwhich bio-political power operates. Section four discusses how MichaelHardt, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Dillon, and geographers,

1622 Bio-political geographies

2008 The Author Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 16211634, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00163.xJournal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

such as Derek Gregory, have addressed these issues. Section five reviewshow geographers have usefully applied insights about bio-politics, whilethe concluding section discusses how they can continue to do this in thefuture.

Foucault and the Birth of Bio-Politics

If French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault did not originallycoin the term bio-politics, his theorization of it undoubtedly inspired thecurrent wide-ranging application and critique of bio-politics in the socialsciences, and it is for that reason that I begin with Foucaults work. As abroad first swipe, Foucault details a historical shift from power focused onthe sovereign control of territory as a means to preserve monarchicalauthority to power focused on the governance of people and resourceswithin that territory for a range of reasons not limited to monarchicalauthority or what he calls bio-power. The term bio-power is not quitethe same as bio-politics as defined above, although the terms overlapsignificantly. For the purpose of this essay, bio-power is a broader categorythat includes bio-politics, along with disciplinary power as describedbriefly below. At this point, I distinguish it from sovereign power, but aswe will see later, other authors make different distinctions. In order tomake this complexity more manageable, I will use, as an entry point, aconcept Foucault developed late in his life called governmentality, andwork backwards from there.

Foucault (1991) famously illustrates how, by the end of the 17thcentury, a rather strict focus on sovereign power gave way to a new artof government based on the conduct of conduct or governmentality.In other words, the population of a given territory, rather than beingcollapsed into that which is circumscribed, protected, and reigned over bya monarch, was converted into a people with identifiable and calculablecharacteristics. In these terms, a people can be rendered intelligible in sucha way that life and politics become integral to each other. Analyzingexactly how this has played out in both the past and present is major focusof an increasing number of geographers, many of whom are discussed inthis article and who constitute what Elden and Crampton (2007, 6) referto as a geo-governmentality school (e.g., Agrawal 2005; Braun 2000;Elden 2007a,c; Hannah 2000; Legg 2007; Rose-Redwood 2006).2

Foucaults lecture on governmentality was the last of a course entitledSecurity, Territory, Population (Foucault 2007b) and was his first attempt atrelating his previous work on bio-politics to the modern state.3 Afrequently cited passage from The History of Sexuality (1978) is instructivein teasing out the nomenclature of bio-politics and governmentality.Describing how historically the ancient right to take life or let live wasreplaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death(Foucault 1978, 138, italics in original), Foucault (1978, 139) further explains:


Bio-political geographies 1623

In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over lifeevolved in two basic forms . . . One of these . . . centered on the body as amachine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion ofits forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integrationinto systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by theprocedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of thehuman body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body,the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of thebiological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, lifeexpectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions andregulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.

That Foucault distinguishes between an anatomo-politics of the bodyand a bio-politics of the population is crucial here. Anatomo-politics isassociated more with what Foucault (1977) termed disciplinary power,which was most clearly evidenced in his examination of the transitionfrom penal systems focused on the body (public torture, beheadings, etc.)to a focus on incarceration and surveillance. An analysis of Foucaultsargument about prisons is beyond the scope of this article, but the pointis that disciplinary power was qualitatively different than sovereign power,and not yet bio-political either; it was focused on the individual scaletoward producing more docile populations. Disciplinary power can beseen as one form of bio-power. By the mid-1970s, he had extended hisconception of bio-power to broader scales of analysis, such as in his courseSociety Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003). This is how Foucault comes tothe issue of bio-politics as discussed in The History of Sexuality as well asa number of other texts (Foucault 1976, 2007a).

Disciplinary and bio-political power are both employed to foster lifeor disallow it to the point of death as quoted above, but differ in thesense that the former is a more direct domination exerted over humansubjects while the latter is about producing subjectivities (what Foucaultcalls techniques of the self ) from within a broader field of power.Foucault gave a course late in his life called The Birth of Bio-Politics(Foucault 1997), which ties his analysis of bio-politics to the developmentof liberal and neo-liberal economic rationalities. As Lemke (2001, 191)puts it, Foucault shows how the modern sovereign state and the modernautonomous individual co-determine each others emergence. If disciplinarypower stunts individual agency, bio-political power and governmentalityoperate through the agency of individuals, such that if one wants toanalyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization, he has to takeinto account not only techniques of domination but also techniques ofthe self . . . (Foucault, quoted in Lemke 2001, 203204).

It is very important here that Foucault is talking about quite differentforms of power working in conjunction with each other, a point whichwill be elaborated further in the next section. To put it (perhaps overly)



baldly, he was showing how governance (not necessarily in the form ofthe state) produces the very folks who internalize the political and eco-nomic rationalities that work in conjunction with the modern state.4 Foucaultnever sets these modes of power in opposition together, instead preferringto see them as working together as a field of power within whichsubjects are produced bio-politically. In case what it means to producesubjects bio-politically is as yet unclear, the remainder of the article willshow how geographers, and others, have since taken up Foucaults project.

SovereigntyDisciplineGovernment

Different analysts have thought about this field of power within whichbio-politics works in different ways, but perhaps Foucaults (1991, 102)clearest and most frequently cited passage on the topic is this:

. . . we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society ofsovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of adisciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle,sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target populationas its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.

What Foucault suggests here is that historical shifts in the dominant modeof power are at most shifts in emphasis, but certainly not linear transitionsfrom one mode to another. The combination of sovereign power, disci-plinary power, and governmentality is this field of power within whichpopulations are managed.

As Sparke (2006) argues, much work in geography on governmentalityhas a micrological focus, whereas neoliberalism5 is analyzed as though itwas a macrological phenomenon. Sparkes insistence on bridging thesefoci by examining neoliberalism as a micrological phenomenon toucheson inherent issues of scale within this triad of sovereigntydisciplinegovernment and how it is examined in geography. Sparke (2006, 157)emphasizes the need to examine the messy actualities6 and the nitty-gritty details of bio-political production within this broader and perhapsmore abstract field of power. Again, and at the risk of oversimplification,sovereignty works through the circumscription of territory, disciplineworks upon individual bodies, and bio-politics and governmentality workthrough the agency of individuals toward the reproduction of social andpolitical life, but the trick for geographers is to show how an analyticalfocus on individual bodies relates to broader scale issues such as geopoliticsand national economic and political policy, and vice versa. In other words,if these three modes of power work in conjunction rather than oppositionto each other, then how do they do this and what are the messy actualitiesthrough which they work?

Along the same vein, Coleman and Agnew (2007) differentiate betweenthe micro-practices of disciplinary power and the macro-practices of



bio-political power, and point out that geographers following up Foucaultswork have traditionally focused on the former. Jessop (2007, 39) arguesthat we can escape the dichotomy of micro- and macro-power by seeinga focus on micro-power as a perspective, not a reality delimited to onescale. This is, for example, how Mountz (2004) is able to effectivelyexamine the state by shifting her focus to the much finer scale of theimmigrant body.

What we have at this point, then, are two very important points ofdeparture from Foucault. The first concerns whether the sovereigntydisciplinegovernment triad represents a linear movement from one modeof power to another or whether it represents a shifting locus of powerwhich alters, but does not replace, previous modes. For example, Ojakan-gas (2005, 6) specifically states that sovereign power has been replacedby bio-power, while Elden (2007a, 30) describes the above triad not ona linear model, but rather as a space of political action. The degree oflinearity or teleology interpreted in these changing modes of power iscrucial to how one analyzes bio-politics. The other, and related, problematicis that of varying scales of analysis of this field of power. If the conceptof governmentality itself is trans-scalar (Legg 2005, 142), then so is bio-politics. These issues of (non)linearity and scale serve as reference pointsto situate the discussion of bio-politics in geography in the next section.

Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Geography

Coleman and Agnews (2007) distinction between the micro-practices ofdisciplinary power and the macro-practices of bio-political power (citedabove) was part of an important critique of Hardt and Negris Empire(2000), a book often credited as an application of Foucauldian conceptsof bio-politics to globalization. Empire marks a decisive conceptual breakin which analyses of global political economy shifted away from state-oriented, territorial conceptions of power and toward postmodern,non-territorial, and at times non-spatial conceptions of power or,imperialism without an emperor (Coleman and Agnew 2007, 318).

The sovereigntydisciplinegovernment triad is an important analyticalstarting point for Empire. Hardt and Negri (2000) couch much of theiranalyses within the transition from a disciplinary society to a society ofcontrol, with the latter being based on bio-political power. Thus, whileimperialism as it has traditionally been known was emblematic of disciplinarypower, what Hardt and Negri (2000) term empire is emblematic of anewer, postmodern, non-territorialized form of power which regulatessocial life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, andrearticulating it (pp. 2324). They argue (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24):

Disciplinarity . . . did not reach the point of permeating entirely the conscious-nesses of bodies of individuals, the point of treating and organizing them inthe totality of their activities . . . By contrast, when power becomes entirely



biopolitical, the whole social body is compromised by powers machine anddeveloped in its virtuality . . . Society, subsumed within a power that reachesdown to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development,reacts like a single body. Power is thus expressed as a control that extendsthroughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population . . .

Hardt and Negri (2000, 28), however, claim that what Foucault failsto grasp finally are the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society.They locate these dynamics of production not within states, but withinthe global networks of corporate capital which produce not only com-modities but also subjectivities (p. 32). They see states now as onemechanism within this globalized bio-political machine (p. 40), operatingmore as accountants than as purveyors of sovereign authority. Hardt andNegris radically de-territorialized notions of power and near abandon-ment of sovereign power, and even disciplinary power to some extent, hasbeen extensively criticized (Boron 2005; Coleman and Agnew 2007),7 buttheir explication of empire has also provided a backdrop for geographersto illustrate the dynamics of bio-political production. Paterson and Dalby(2006), for example, locate symbols of foreign conquest, masculinity, anddomination of nature invoked in car advertisements within this globalizedbio-political machine, arguing that empire is not just a condition withinwhich consumer culture operates, but that empire itself reproducesconsumer culture. This exemplifies how bio-political power works throughindividual agency, not upon it.

Coleman and Agnews (2007) critique of Empire hits the mark to theextent that it suggests that Hardt and Negri see the transition from sov-ereign to bio-political power as too easily sequential. Consequently, Hardtand Negris conception of power is polarized; it is either territorial andbased on inside/outside binaries or it is postmodern and diffuse in nature.Hardt and Negri, therefore, see sovereigntydisciplinegovernment as infact not a triad, but a linear progression of history, not as a field of powerwithin which bio-politics works, but in fact as a movement away fromsovereignty and toward bio-political power. Empire has also been criticizedfor offering an overly abstracted explanation with too few concrete examples(Sidaway 2005), for obscuring important regional variation within theso-called empire (Ramirez 2003), and for taking the possibility of aglobal citizenry, termed the multitude by Hardt and Negri, too muchfor granted (Painter 2003).

While Hardt and Negris (2000) use of bio-politics takes it away fromsovereign power, Agamben (1998) uses it to explain newer forms of sov-ereign power. Agambens Homo Sacer seeks to accomplish what Foucaultnever completed an investigation into the role of bio-politics in thedevelopment of the modern state. He critiques Foucaults conception ofbio-power by arguing that life, rather than being incorporated into therealm of the political only during the modern era, was crucial to theoriginal constitution of sovereign power in antiquity. Agamben interprets



the foundations of political theory laid by Aristotle to have distinguishedbare life, or mere biological existence, from good life, or life in thepolitical sphere. Therefore, what Foucault (1978) had identified as a tran-sition from the right to take life or let live to the power to foster life ordisallow it to the point of death (p. 138) in modernity was for Agambenthe very distinction that was the constitutive moment of sovereign power.The basis of this distinction was the creation of spaces of exception inwhich the normal legal order did not apply (or applied to a lesser degree).The legal order is not opposed to these spaces, but rather indifferent tothem (Ek 2006), and this indifference is essentially what Foucault calls thepower to disallow life to the point of death. For Agamben (1998, 181),Western politics is a bio-politics from the very beginning, and whatchanged in modernity was only that this became more obvious.

Agamben applies this to the development of the modern state by definingthe sovereign as whoever determines spaces of exception within states.Crucially, spaces of exception for Agamben are not imposed by thesovereign from above, but are part of what constitutes the sovereign inthe first place, and as such are outside and inside sovereign space simul-taneously. Subjects in the modern state are thus not either in or out ofthe polis at any given time, but move along greater or lesser degrees ofinclusion/exclusion, and can be more or less excepted from the legalorder and reduced to the essentials of bare life accordingly. One of thefirst fruitful geographic applications of Agambens theory of power was,in fact, Edkins (2000, 2003) analyses of the rise of humanitarianism as acomplicated extraction of the inherent rights of all people from rights tiedto citizenship, and her observation that this legal geography is fundamentalto the sovereign.8

As another example, Gregory (2006, 2007) identifies the Americanmilitary prisons at Guantnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as spaces of exceptionwhere legal order is stripped down to bare life. The fact that these spacesare simultaneously outside the United States territorially and inside theUnited States legally is important to the reproduction of the sovereignbecause it allows the detention and interrogation of its captives. Agamben(2005), in fact, later suggests that although exception as a form of bio-political power predates modernity, it has been amplified and exemplifiedby the US state particularly during the current US War on Terror. Thisobservation is further empiricized by Eldens (2007b) analysis of terroristtraining camps as spaces of exception.

Agamben, of course, has his share of critics (Mitchell 2006; Ojakangas2005; Pratt 2005).9 But by showing how bio-political power works inconjunction with sovereign power, Agamben offers a theory which seesthese as constituting a field of power with complex geographies of subjectformation. In this essay, I generally read Hardt and Negri (2000) againstAgamben (1998), but in their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri (2005)respond to some of their critics by further distinguishing bio-power from



bio-political production. Here, they argue that an all pervasive fear of warin postmodernity operates as a regime of biopower (Hardt and Negri 2005,13) which is a totalizing force in social life. Bio-power, not bio-politics,reconnects in this account with sovereign power: The sovereign powerthat controls such means of destruction is a form of biopower in this mostnegative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly overdeath (Hardt and Negri 2005, 18; emphasis in original). This quote focuseson the death function of bio-power, but they stress that it consequentlypermeates and creates life. Bio-political production, on the other hand,operates immanently within society rather being centered around thesovereign.10 This is a slightly different distinction between bio-politics andbio-power than I offered at the outset of this essay when discussingFoucault, and it is somewhat specific to Hardt and Negri.

This brings us to the important work of Michael Dillon, who offersperhaps a yet tighter couplet between bio-political and sovereign powerthan even Agamben, and certainly than Hardt and Negri. Dillon (2004)maintains that sovereign, territorial power is still extremely important iffor no other reason than many of our imaginative possibilities are struc-tured around it. Dillon (2007a) also shows the importance of bio-politicsto Western security practices. One of the basic observations made byFoucault and many of his followers is that bio-political governance is basedon the quantification, categorization, and knowledge/power formationabout political subjects as a means for governing them or, as I put itearlier, creating a people out of population. According to Dillon (2007a),the creation of generalizable knowledge claims about populations,although important is not itself the exercise of bio-political power. Thefactical life (Dillon 2007a) upon which these truth claims are based isnever stable, but rather endlessly contingent and threatened. Bio-politicalpower is exercised not by creating factical life, but by governing thiscontingency.

Hannah (2006) illustrates this well by showing how the deployment ofthe ticking bomb scenario in political discourse is, in effect, a matter ofgoverning contingency. Hannah (2006, 622) argues that governmentalityoperates to create mappable landscapes of expectation in which geogra-phies of governability and ungovernability are known, quantified, andincorporated into the operations of government. The unpredictability anddisproportionately disruptive effects of terrorism threaten these knowl-edge/power formations (i.e., these imagined landscapes of governability).Going back to Dillon (2007a), bio-political governance, at least as it relatesto Western practices of security, is as much about governing contingencyof such power/knowledge formations as it is about creating them in thefirst place; in Hannahs example, the discursive construction of a tickingbomb about to explode unless extreme measures are taken exemplifies thebio-political governance of contingency. It is bio-political particularly inthe sense that it is a legitimating discourse for torture.11



Dillon (2007b, 8) argues that Western bio-politics revolve(s) around . . . anall-pervasive terror of contingency long before the contingency of globalterror arose. In other words, the bio-politics of terror precedes the currentUS War on Terror, and operates only to manage terror, not to end it.Along the same lines, Minca (2006) applies Agambens theories to examinethe progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exceptionwithin Western democracies. Duffields (2007) bio-political analysis ofdevelopment and security regimes in both colonial and postcolonialcontexts provides a good example of this. These sorts of observations helpgeographers and other analysts specify how the persistent threat of terrorand death reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure (Hardt andNegri 2000, 24) and works to create bio-political subjects. Katz (2007),for example, refers to reminders of contingency more subtle and everydaythan ticking bomb scenarios, such as color-coded warning schemes andcamouflaged soldier in urban arenas, as examples of banal terrorism, usedto construct the War on Terror as a common sense reaction to independentstimuli.

Bio-Politics and Geography

My comments to this point have focused on bio-politics as either adeparture from, or a reformulation of, sovereign power; this sectionbriefly describes how geographers have explored the nitty-gritty detailsof biopolitical production (Sparke 2006, 157) within a complex field ofbio-political, sovereign, and disciplinary power. For example, while Rose(2001)12 sees in the increasing molecularization (as evidenced in the humangenome project, genetic engineering, etc.) of life and the body a transitionin bio-political power from management at the population scale to indi-vidual management at the bodily scale (or ethopolitics), and therefore theindividualization of risk, Braun (2007) situates the body within globalscales of economic and political power and emphasizes the contingencyof bodily security in this context. Collapsing this too-easy distinctionbetween bio-political and sovereign power is in part to suggest that,

[I]t may be necessary to trace the ways that biopolitics has merged withgeopolitics, and the government of life has revealed itself to be intimatelyrelated to the exercise and extension of sovereign power. We are perhaps leftnot with opposed understandings of how our biological existence is related toour political existence one that draws on notions of governmentality, andanother that focuses on sovereignty but with the task of understanding howthe two are related. (Braun 2007, 8)

This article takes this project seriously, and recognizes that it implies amove away from a conception of history as an accretion of legislativechange towards an engagement with the everyday spaces of modernitythrough which power is radically dispersed (Gandy 2006, 501). In otherwords, circumventing simplistic oppositions between sovereign and



bio-political power is in fact a matter of bridging the dichotomy ofmicro- and macro-power mentioned earlier by Jessop (2007, 39), a scalarissue which geographers are well positioned to address.

Derek Gregory and Allan Preds recent edited volume Violent Geogra-phies (2007) contributes to this by locating spaces of exception in, forexample, English colonization of Ireland (Kearns 2007) and nuclear weaponstesting in Nevada in the United States (Paglen 2007). Other geographershave done the same in analyses of urban structure (Gandy 2006), NewOrleans after Hurricane Katrina (Braun and McCarthy 2005), and evenhumanitarian relief camps (Edkins 2003; Elden 2006). Because such spacesare integral to the reproduction of the sovereign, knowing what is goingon within them helps understand geographies of power. Sparke (2006)bridges micro- and macro-scales of analysis by examining the bio-politicsof citizenship, particularly in terms of United StatesCanada border controls.The relevance of border activity to the bio-political production ofcitizenship has also been examined by Carter and Merrill (2007), whilethe relevance of bodily and bio-medical discourse to bio-politics and themodern state has been explored by Landzelius (2006) and Schlosser (2007).These examples help illustrate why exploring the relationship between bio-political and sovereign power is relevant to understanding modern geopo-litical imaginaries and the construction of national and cultural identities.

Conclusions

This article has explored how geographers (and others) have employedbio-politics as an analytic tool in order to explore modern forms ofgovernance. One important contribution geographers can make in thisregard is to bridge micro and macro perspectives on power, as describedthroughout this essay. One important purpose of this is to, as also sug-gested by Sidaway (2005), locate those specific examples and explanationswithin the global abstraction of empire that Hardt and Negris (2000) accountis often said to lack, and to use the abstraction of global bio-politicalpower to help theorize those examples and explanations.

But it is also to help illuminate the dynamic role of the sovereignwithin such a framework, and in this regard Ek (2006) provides a robustpathway for research using Agambens ideas. In short, Ek suggests fourprimary avenues, the first of which is that bio-politics can enhance thediscursive approach toward understanding international political orderingwithin critical geopolitics literature. More specifically, understandingbio-political and sovereign power can help explain how the politics ofsecurity and terror often work in relation to each other in complex ways(see Korf 2006, for example). Ek also suggests Agambens theories ofexception are applicable to studies on the exclusionary tendencies of speedand mobility. He also argues that bio-politics can address one of theprimary criticisms of actor-network theory, that it is primarily descriptive



in nature and lacks any explanatory power, by providing a more powerfulspatial theory of power. Finally, Ek suggests that geographers can examinehow the production of geographic knowledge is implicated in the pro-duction of bare life and spaces of exception. To this I would add thatbio-politics can shed important light on critical conceptions of citizenshipand nationalism in geography. In particular, a spatial theory of powerfocused on a constant flux between inclusion and exclusion, such asAgambens theory of exception, is particularly applicable to analyses ofhow citizenship, for instance, can operate variably as either a set of sociallyendowed rights or as a discourse of power to reify sovereign authority.

This is important because it shows that bio-politics is about more thansimply state level governance, a point underscored by Minca (2007) as heargues for the relevance of Agambens work for political geographers. Mincaargues that misunderstanding the structure of exception (as described above)is why Western political theory, try as it might, has thus far failed to thinkbeyond territorial states in a meaningful way. In a manner dovetailing withEks (2006) suggestion that the production of geographic knowledge isimplicated in the production of exception and bare life, Minca (2007, 86)also argues that an ongoing conflation of space and place that is operatedby a triumphant cartographic logic is part and parcel of this very obfuscation.In my opinion this points to the salience of bio-politics for geographers;for all its potential pitfalls, bio-politics offers an important framework withwhich geographers can more fully theorize their own analyses. I alsosuggest that literature on bio-politics can benefit from geographers whoavoid dualistic notions of bio-political and sovereign power by bridgingthose micro and macro scales of power.

Short Biography

Kolson Schlosser is a visiting assistant professor in the Department ofGeography and Geology at Western Kentucky University. He holds a BAin environmental studies from Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock,PA, and an MS and a PhD in geography from Penn State, PA, USA. Hehas published journal articles on the politics of the Arctic National WildlifeRefuge as well as the intertextuality of geopolitical and bio-medical dis-course, and is in the process of publishing work on how neo-Malthusiandiscourse has operated bio-politically in the post-WWII United States.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Kolson Schlosser, Department of Geography and Geology, WesternKentucky University, 1906 College Heights Blvd (#31066), Bowling Green, KY 42101, USA.E-mail: [email protected].

1 In fact, whether the term is hyphenated also varies from author to author. There is nostandard in this regard. My approach in this article was to use the hyphenated bio-politics



whenever possible, because the hyphen tends to connote a mutual constitution and reinforce-ment of the bio and politics. However, I use the non-hyphenated bio-politics either whenquoting authors who choose not to hyphenate, or when discussing their work on it. For thatreason, both versions show up in this review. The same rule of thumb applies in reference tobio-power and biopower in this article.2 One very clear example of this is Hannahs (2000, 2) influential book Governmentality and theMastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America, in which he details the administrative tech-niques of national social ordering that undergirded the modernization and bureaucratization ofgovernmental power in the 19th-century US history. These techniques included the categorizingand normalizing impulses along lines of race, class, and gender characteristic of the efforts bythe US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to render intelligible a rapidly changingand diverse social body.3 See Elden (2007c) for a thorough discussion of this course and The Birth of Biopolitics.4 Governmentality is somewhat of a broader term than bio-politics, and was coined by Foucaulthimself. As Hannah (2006, 628) distinguishes it, where biopower as a general approach seeksabove all to improve demographic health, even, if necessary, at the expense of some individualfreedom, governmentality makes freedom the top priority, even, if necessary, at the expense ofsome demographic or biological well-being.5 Sparke (2006, 153154) defines neoliberalism as an ideology organized around the twin ideasof liberalizing the capitalist market from state control and refashioning state practices in theidealized image of the free market.6 Sparke (2006) borrows messy actualities from Larner (2000).7 Also see Kirsch (2003) and Dean and Passavant (2004) for more reaction, both positive andnegative, to Empire.8 For more on Agamben, see Norris (2005) and Minca (2007).9 Ojakangas (2005), for instance, disagrees with Agamben that sovereign and bio-politicalpower are so closely intertwined, pointing out that Foucaults conception of bio-power was thatit fosters life in a positive sense rather than destroying it. Consequently, the welfare state is themodern paradigm of bio-political power, rather than the concentration camp as Agambenargued. This critique, however, turns on the much deeper issue of what life in politics meansin the first place whether it is an issue of enhancing or degrading lived experience or whetherit is an issue of creating political subjectivities and this is an issue addressed by Dillon (2005).Regardless, critiquing Agamben along these lines potentially repeats the same distortion ofFoucault made by Hardt and Negri (2000), that the sovereigntydisciplinegovernment triadrepresents a linear temporal evolution of forms of power.10 In other words, what Hardt and Negri term bio-politics is for them something quitedifferent than bio-power, rather than a subset of it as some others would suggest.11 It is also why Hannah (2006, 623) says that Hardt and Negri (2005, 19) are correct to claimthat when individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture.12 Also, see Rose (2007) for an expanded and updated version.

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