The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Notes 173
bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man - as - body but to
the living man, to man - as - living - being; ultimately, if you like, to man - as -
species....After the anatomo - politics of the human body established in the
course of the 18th century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence
of something that is no longer an antomo - politics of the human body,
but what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race.” Michel Foucault, Society
Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975– 76 (New York:
Picador, 2003), 243.
41. For more see Deborah Lupton, Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease,
and the Body in Western Culture (London: Sage, 2000); Giorgio Agamben,
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 1998); Agamben’s essay “Form - of - Life,” in Radical Thought in Italy, ed.
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000).
42. See Foucault’s texts “The Birth of Biopolitics” and “The Politics of
Health in the Eighteenth Century,” both in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994).
43. As Foucault notes, “After a first seizure of power over the body in an
individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing,
but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man - as - body but
at man - as - species.” Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243.
44. While theories of media and communication have preferred the term
“mass audience” to “population,” in the context of the network society, we
can see an increasing predilection toward the “living” aspects of networks.
Quite obviously, the health care and biomedical research sectors are driven
by living forms of all kinds, from “immortalized cell lines” to patients undergoing
clinical trials. And despite the rhetoric of disembodied information
that characterizes cyberculture, the Internet is still driven by the social and
commercial interaction of human beings and “virtual subjects.” So while
Foucault’s use of the term “population” is historically rooted in political economy,
we suggest that it is also useful for understanding how the network diagram
begins to take shape in a political way. That is because the problem of
political economy is also the problem of network management, or what we
have called “protocological control.”
45. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?” in Michel Foucault Philosopher
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 164 (translation and emphasis modified).
46. Foucault, “Security, Territory, Population,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, 246.
47. Gregor Scott, “Guide for Internet Standards Writers,” RFC 2360,
BCP 22, June 1998.
48. See Agamben, Homo Sacer.
49. See the second chapter of Hardt and Negri, Empire.