Thinking About Biopolitics- Michael Miller

It has been stated that biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific problem. This can be understood in the context of population density and the duration of life.
These two factors are the driving forces of biopolitics. These two factors have created the complexity of what we perceive as simultaneity.

Biopolitics is a problem of state power. State power is concerned with the life and death of the social body. Life and death do not constitute a dichotomy in this context. The social body is conceived in the sense of the collective. It is the collective life and death. The problem
of the collective life and death has emerged as being “affected with a public interest.” It is in the collective interest that the one should perish for the people, rather than the many. This is sometimes referred to as the Caiaphas maxim (John 18:14). This is a maxim of preemption. Life and death have become “affected with a public interest.” This is our modernism. The issue is who shall determine the public interest.

Any form of governance in which the few stand-in place of the many creates the locus of
power in the hands of those who decide the exception. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 1922). Sovereign are the few who decide what is “affected with a public interest.” Representative governance is a system of the few standing in place of the many. They decide the exception that is “affected with a public interest.”

The public interest is interwoven with the state interest. That which is “affected with a public interest” also becomes a “corporate responsibility.” The many become responsible for the actions of the few. The many have the responsibility and the few have the power. The driving force of judicial power is fostered by the state. The persistence of the law as a social construct is linked to the continuity of the state. The law and the state are the forces that protect against chaos. It is here that the two concepts merge in purpose. The idea of the corporate responsibility shared by the social body and that it is in the interests of the social body that the better is that one man should perish for the people share the same social reason.

“The whole group, including its past, present, and future members, might function as a single individual through any one of those members conceived as representative of it. Because it was not confined to the living, but included the dead and the unborn, the group could be conceived as living forever.” H.Wheeler Robinson. “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality.” In Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, rev. edn., 1980, 25-26]. See: Joel S. Kaminsky. Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible. Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

This merging becomes operative within the internal and external contexts of state power. State power depends upon two things, fear of the masses and obedience of the masses.

If biopolitics is concerned with the problemization of life and death politics, as I think it might be, it is bound up in governance as the arbiter of life and death. The “governmental reason” (Michael Foucault) is the question. The avoidance of collective disobedience or the promotion of collective liberty are governmental reasons of a kind. Each is dependent upon state power and the persistence of law. We view state power through the illusion of an “equitable equilibrium” created by the myth of representative (stand-in) governance. Test the state power and learn the meaning of biopolitics that is embodied in life and death. The crucial concept is that state power involves two aspects, one of simultaneity and one of succession. We can only perceive of state power in the present state of our motion through the lens of collective action of obedience.