The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

72 Nodes
The development of the fields of statistics and demography was
crucial for the development of modern biopolitics, what Foucault refers
to as “sciences of the state.” Thus the population is articulated in
such a way that its totalization—and thus control—may be achieved
via methods or techniques of statistical quantification. This is not
only a mode of efficiency; it also forms a political economy of mass
subjects and mass bodies that was to inform political economists from
David Ricardo to Adam Smith.
Biopolitics, in its Foucauldian formulation, can thus be defined as the
strategic integration of biology and informatics toward the development of
techniques of organization and control over masses of individuals, species
groups, and populations.
Foucault’s biopolitics functions via three directives, each associated
with today’s network diagrams.
1. To begin with, biopolitics defines a specific object of governance:
“the population.”
Foucault notes a gradual historical shift from the disciplining of
individualized bodies to the governance of populations. “Population”
does not just mean the masses, or groups of people geographically
bound (that is, “population” is not the same as “individual” or “territory”).
Rather, the population is a flexible articulation of individualizing
and collectivizing tendencies: many individual nodes, clustered
together. Above all, the population is a political object whose core is
biological: the population is not the individual body or organism of
the subject - citizen but rather the mass body of the biological species. 43
In Foucault’s context of the emergence of the modern state - form, the
existence of the state is consonant with the “health” of the state. The
main issue of concern is therefore how effectively to control the co -
existence of individuals, groups, and relations among them. 44
2. Biopolitics defines a means for the production of data surrounding its
object (the population).