The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Nodes 73
A crucial challenge is to determine how data pertinent to the regulation
of the health of the population may be extracted from it.
Within biomedicine, the “vital statistics” of reproduction, mortality
rates, the spread of diseases, heredity, and other factors become a
means for monitoring the population as a single, dynamic entity.
This is evident in the recent events surrounding anthrax bioterrorism
and the SARS epidemic, but it already exists in the push toward
the computerization of health care (“infomedicine”) and the use of
information technologies to mediate doctor - patient relationships
(“telemedicine”). As Foucault notes, in the nineteenth century, the
use of informatic sciences in biopolitics enabled the implementation
of new techniques for regulating the population. The increased use of
statistics created changes in birth - control practices, as well as epidemiology,
public hygiene campaigns, and criminology.
Taken together, the two elements of biology and informatics serve to
make biopolitical control more nuanced, and more effective.
Confinement is on the wane, but what takes its place is control.
“Our present reality,” wrote Deleuze for a colloquium on Foucault,
“presents itself in the apparatuses of open and continuous control.” 45 It
is not a contradiction to say that in societies of control there is both
an increase in openness and an increase in control. The two go hand
in hand. A new aggregation, the “new multiple body” (we can say a
network), exists today, and regulation of this species - population would
have to take into account how local actions affect global patterns of
control. As Foucault notes, the characteristics of the population “are
phenomena that are aleatory and unpredictable when taken in themselves
or individually, but which, at the collective level, display constants
that are easy, or at least possible, to establish.” 46 Thus if any
single node experiences greater freedom from control, it is most likely
due to a greater imposition of control on the macro level. At the macro
level, the species - population can not only be studied and analyzed
but can also be extrapolated, its characteristic behaviors projected
into plausible futures (birth/ death rates, growth, development, etc.).
The proto– information sciences of demographics, and later statistics,