Cinepolitics and Biosecurity

The post I want to publish today is about a new condition we are researching in relation with biosecurity and the politic management, surveillance and power.

In fact, as I have already written a post where I talk about biosecurity and biopolitics, pointing out some short ideas mentioning the work of Foucault, Agamben or Negri, for instance. The reason for the brevity of that post is we are deploying a work where biopolitics would give away to cinepolitics, that is to say, the management of movement or flows, and no longer souls or bodies as it happens in biopolitics.

However, what is cinepolitics exactly? As Tirado (2010) says, consists in a highlight into the Foucault notion of movement within biopolitics. In this sense, Foucault assumes that movement is one variable that is added to either vital and biologics that shape biopolitics. Nonetheless, in cinepolitics the key concept is this movement, located at the same level of biology where control and management is carried out by the exchange and motility.

Thus, control and management is exercised throughout the movement of data (in a Nikolas Rose interpretation), information (maybe XXXX) or bioactants in this case. For instance, a virus that is transported by a flock of sheep or bacteria that comes from a tropical country to Europe through an air travel. The result is typically shown in maps where fluxes are enacted with arrows or lines. Because of this, bodies are no longer the key concept of management: there is a shift where bodies become solely a further element, that is to say, one bioactant more in the set of bioactants put on stage. Now, we can say that one essential feature of bioactant is the need of movement.

In this realm of cinepolitics, bodies are transformed: we are in front of open bodies, bodies that lookout better than look in, and waiting for connections with other bioactants. The most important issue then, is not what is connected but how is the connection:

a    a) The connection folds space and time: bioactants perform as acceleration operators. 

    b)The body is no longer self-contained: body is one element that flows and is monitored due to its open nature. Body is constituted by a set of little bodies (human-virus-bacteria-animals) that is a potential risk from others bioactants (flocks, population… but also economy, public infrastructure…).

References:

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be Defended. New York: Picador.

Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Tirado, Francisco. Baleriola, Enrique. Amaral Giordani, M. Do. A. Giordani, Tiago. Torrejón, Pedro. (2014). Subjetividad y subjetivadores en las tecnologías de bioseguridad en la Unión Europea. Polis e Psique, 3(4), 23-50.

Tirado, F. (2010). Cinepolítica y cinevalor: la gran transformación de la biopolítica. In Ignacio Mendiola (ed.) Rastros y rostros de la biopolítica. Barcelona: Anthropos.

PhotoCredit: Flickr, user Alexander Babashov