The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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at which “life itself ” plays a particular role in the ongoing management
of the social and the political.
This is differentiated from, but not opposed to, an “anatomo -
politics,” in which a range of disciplinary techniques, habits, and movements—most
often situated within institutions such as the prison,
the hospital, the military, and the school—collectively act on and
render docile the individualized body of the subject. 40
Contemporary interpretations of biopolitical instances vary from
the medical - sociological emphasis on normativity, to the philosophical
emphasis on the concept of “bare life,” to the political and existential
emphasis on biopolitics as the production of the social. 41
Our approach will be very specific. We want to pose the question: what
does biopolitics mean today, in the context of networks, control, and protocol?
If networks permeate the social fabric, and if networks bring with
them novel forms of control, then it follows that an analysis of networks
would have to consider them as living networks (and politics
as biopolitics). Therefore we can consider the biopolitics of networks
by highlighting two aspects nascent within Foucault’s concept: that
of biology and that of informatics.
Biopolitics is, as the term implies, an intersection between notions of
biological life and the power relations into which those notions are stitched.
Both are historical, and both are constantly undergoing changes.
Foucault mentions the regulation of birth and death rates, reproduction,
pathology, theories of degeneracy, health and hygiene, as well
as new statistical methods of tracking the migration of peoples
within and between nations, all of which emerge from the end of the
eighteenth century through the late nineteenth. 42 Biopolitical forms
thus exist alongside the emergence of Darwinian evolution, germ
theory, social Darwinism, and early theorizations of eugenics.
But biopolitics is not simply biology in the service of the state. It
is created, in part, by a set of new technologies through which populations
may be organized and governed. The accumulation and ordering
of different types of information are thus central to biopolitics.