SISP 320/SOC 320:
Life and Death: Relations of Biopower and Necropower
Spring 2016
Mondays1:10-4:00pm
Allbrtitton 004
Instructor: Professor Anthony (Tony) Hatch
Office:214 Allbritton (up the “Veranda”)
Office Hours:Thursdays 3:00-4:30pm and by appointment
Email:
Phone:860-685-3991
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This seminar is an advanced examination of how science and technology shape the politics of life and death. We will consider how science and technology have become handmaidens to human (and, in some cases, not human) life and death, impacting the social, legal, and ethical frameworks we use to define what constitutes the embodied, relational, and conceptual space between "alive" and "dead." Using theories of biopower and necropower as our guides, we will cover a diverse set of themes including sexual reproduction, birth, population, toxicity, decay, genocide, mortality, and the afterlife as they intersect with modern institutions of power.We will ask: how can we better understand the ways in which social institutions and actors deploy sciences and technologies to foster health or manufacture death?
One central aim of our investigation is to articulate the space where theories of biopower and necropower converge and diverge in social life. What space does life inhabit that does not also fall within the shadow of death? As political theories, biopower and necropower are not things that exist in the world, but rather represent ways of defining, thinking about, and acting on actual technoscientific relationships that do, in fact, exist between people, technologies, and knowledges.These technoscientific relationships emerge from institutionalized practices that accompany colonialism, capitalism, state bureaucracy, and science.By mapping the intertwined intellectual histories of these two theories of modern power simultaneously, we might be positioned to draw and make sense of the fleshy terrain that they circumscribe.
We will investigate how the same institutional practices that foster life can be used to manufacture death. Technologies pull life and death within the jurisdictional domain of a range of sciences that, in turn, define the meanings of life and death that circulate in cultures, structure political economies, and chisel human populations out of the mass of humanity. What are the ethical implications of constructing life and death in technological and scientific terms?We will contemplate how variation in the political rationalities and bureaucratic aims those practices are designed to serve in any given historical moment shape our ethics and sense of equality.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
When this course is over, you should understand biopower and necropower as political theories, be able to applythese theories to examinations of social life, and evaluate their historical and contemporary significance to conditions of injustice and the possibilities for freedom.
COURSE READINGS
A large number of our readings are free to read online through Wesleyan’s online library, including the six (6) books we will read in full. For any readings that are not available online through Wesleyan’s library online, I will upload a PDF to Moodle for your convenience and place a reader that contains those readings on reserve in the Olin Library.
Lisa Stevenson. 2014. Life beside itself: Imagining care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press.(Wesleyan Library Online)
Rob Nixon. 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (Wesleyan Online Library)
Timothy Pachirat. 2013. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven: Yale University Press. (Wesleyan Library Online)
Lisa Marie Cacho. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. (Wesleyan Online Library)
João Biehl. 2013. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.(Wesleyan Online Library)
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
This is an advanced seminar that utilizes lecture and discussion to understand difficult and mature material. You will draw heavily upon your familiarity with core ideas in critical sociological theory and science and technology studies. You will be evaluated in part on your contributions to making the class successful for yourself and others. This is a reading and writing intensive course where you will have to read and write about a large quantity of material in a relatively short period of time. This is also a course that values you as a person and respects your lived experience; share your brilliance and experience with everyone else! Based on these emphases, your grade is calculated out of 500 points distributed across four elements:
Class Participation10 percent 50 points
Discussion Questions10 percent 50 points
Top Ten Portfolio15 percent 75 points
Reading Notes Project20 percent 100 points
Analytic Essay45 percent 225 points
Class Participation (10 percent of your grade @ 50 pts)
I expect you to attend every class, on time, prepared to engage fully in your own education. This is a dialogic course where we will engage in substantive open group discussion with daily prompting and questioning from me. I expect for you to be an active participant in every moment of every class. It’s your education. Be present for others. Be mindful of the collective space we share. I will evaluate your participation according to the following criteria.
Exemplary = up to 50 points. This means you attended every class (with reasonable exceptions for illness, athletics, verifiable emergencies, etc.), open demonstrated outstanding preparedness for each class, and made significant contributions to our collective learning.
Good = up to 40 points. This means you attended most classes, demonstrated consistent preparation for each class, and made substantive contributions to our collective leaning.
Fair = up to 30 points. This means you missed about 3-4 classes, are generally prepared for each class, and made marginal contributions to our collective learning.
Poor = up to 20 points. This means you were chronically late and/or absent from class, were rarely prepared for each class, and either make minimal contributions to our learning or take away from our learning.
Discussion Questions (10 percent of your grade @ 50 points)
By 11:00 am each Monday morning, you are to send me two (2) questions that you would like to see asked and answered in class discussion (for now, send them to ). Ground your questions in the readings, offering us specific page numbers and/or passages we can refer to in answering your questions. Be as thoughtful, clear, and concise as you can be, considering that I will ask people to respond to your questions. I will compile your collective questions and post them to Moodle. I will apply a low-degree of scrutiny to your discussion questions, but they need to be quality!
Top Ten Portfolio (15 percent of your grade @ 75 points)
Throughout the course, I will present information in class through media that communicate the meanings attached to life and death in our societies. Media consists of images, news stories, music, films, documentaries, novels, art, and so on. You are going to do the same thing. Your assignment is to construct a top ten (10) portfolio of media that best speak to our seminar’s themes and write ~200 words per choice that justify why you believe that media belongs in your ten best list (e.g., this paragraph is 140 words). Prepare to share your lists with the class—we will figure out the medium for sharing later. You can build your list around any of the following eight categories (or propose new category if one comes to mind), but please no more than three (3) selections per category—spread your love around!
- Films
- Documentaries
- Songs/Albums
- Novels
- Performance Art
- Visual Art
- News stories
- Short form writing (blogs, op-eds, essays)
Portfolio Due Date: Monday, April 18 on Moodle.
Reading Notes Project (20 percent of your grade @ 100 points)
Taking notes on what you read for class is a critically important intellectual activity, one that we spend almost no time interrogating.Why do we take notes? What purpose(s) to they serve us as students/activists/scholars? We use note taking for a wide range of intellectual pursuits: interpreting texts, outlining arguments, identifying and defining key ideas, generating new thoughts, posing new questions, establishing conceptual linkages, memorization, drafting preliminary writings, and so on.What makes some notes really good and some pretty worthless horrible?A set of great notes will prevent usfrom having to re-read a text again, position us to make a text more useful, and, perhaps most importantly, help to foster our deeper understanding of and connectivity with a text. A set of weak notes will soon be ignored, forgotten, and then later recycled when you pack your things to leave Wesleyan and/or do a major life purge. You want great useful notes, not weak garbage notes.
Practically speaking, your reading notes for this seminar should be focused on describing the main arguments, defining key concepts, and identifying what you think is most important and compelling about the readings. Your notes should set you up to do two things a) to help you map core ideas for later use in your analytic essay and b) to make substantive contributions to class discussion. You need to aim for between 1-2 pages of notes per reading, depending on the size of your handwriting or font.
Your assignment has two parts:
(1)Submit ten (10) sets ofyour reading notes. Start taking notes right away in week two of the course so that you have completed five (5) sets of notes before Spring Break. You will write your personal essay having completed half of the notes; then you will complete the other five (5) sets of notes in response to the self-critique you raise in the personal essay.
(2)Write a five (5) page reflective personal essay that interrogates and analyzes your own note-taking process. In crafting your reflective personal essay, respond to the following questions:
How would you describe your own note taking process?
What works and does not work about your note taking process?
How might you improve or change your process?
How would you describe "high quality" notes? What about “low quality” notes?
How might you teach someone to produce high quality notes?
The reading notes project is worth 100 points. The completed notes are worth 5 points each and the essay is worth 50 points. I will apply low-to-moderate degree of scrutiny to your reading notes project, focused mainly on the personal essay.I will focus on the substance and depth of your reflection and the extent to which you address weaknesses in your own process.
Reading Notes Project Due Dates:
Monday, March 28: Personal reflective essay due; first set of five (5) reading notes.
Monday, May 2: Resubmit the graded essay; second set of five (5) reading notes.
AnalyticEssay (45 percent of your grade @ 225 points)
You will write one ten (10) page analytic essay that uses either/both frameworks of biopower and necropower to analyze a topic of your choice. We will discuss the instructions for the analytic essay later in the course. I strongly encourage you to make regular use of my office hours to discuss this assignment. I will make myself available during the reading period for extra help with your papers.
Proposal Due Date: A one (1) page proposal for the paper is due on Monday, April 11that informs me of your provisional thinking. Upload your completed proposal to Moodle before class. This proposal is worth 25 points out of 225 for the final research paper. I prefer clearly articulated and well conceived proposals to thin and muddled proposals.
Paper Due Date: 5:00pm on Friday, May 15th in Moodle.
Grading Scale
PercentPointsGrade
97-100 485-500A+
93-96465-484A
90-92450-464A-
87-89435-449B+
83-86415-434B
80-82400-414B-
77-79385-399C+
73-76365-384C
70-72350-364C-
67-69335-349D+
63-66315-334D
60-63300-314D-
57-59285-299F+
53-56265-284F
50-52250-264F-
47-49235-249E+
44-46220-234E
40-43200-219E-
below 40below 200F
OTHER VERY IMPORTANT COURSE INFORMATION
This course requires a high level of student preparedness and endurance. I do not expect this to be an easy course, but I do expect it to be an engaging, enriching, and empowering one. Please review the following information, as it is essential to your success. You are responsible for all of the information that follows—please consult the syllabus before you email me with questions about course policies.
DISCLAIMER
This syllabus provides a general plan for the course: deviations may be necessary.
HOW TO CONTACT ME
Please email me with any questions or concerns about the class, but please note that I only read and respond to student emails during normal business hours (9-5, M-F) except in rare cases of actual emergency. Please allow 1-2 days for an email response from me for non-urgent issues. Be sure to review the syllabus carefully before emailing me about course policies.
I would also love to see you during my office hours on Thursdays 3:00-4:30pm and by appointment. Please have respect for the fact that I’m a writer and work in my office everyday. If you come to my office unannounced, I will politely ask you to come on Thursday or to email me for an appointment.
Extra CrediT
I reserve the right to offer extra credit during the semester at my discretion. I also reserve the right not to offer extra credit.
Late Work
You can make up any missed work from class with an excused absence during my weekly office hours (Thursdays 3-4:30). If you have an excused absence, you are still welcome to submit discussions questions for full credit. Discussion questions cannot be made up. Generally, I will not hunt you down asking you to make up your work—it is your responsibility to stay on top of your work and progress. I retain the right to offer and/or deny make-ups based on my assessment of your situation and any relevant documentation.
USING MOodle
I will make regular use of Moodle’s “News” feature to communicate with the entire class. It is your responsibility to monitor Moodle regularly for any important announcements!
Technology Use in class
You are permitted to use devices during class for the purposes of active research, writing, and note taking. Do not access texts, Facebook, or other applications that do not directly relate to our class labor. Be digitally unavailable to your people during class time (that’s what I do). Be on notice: I favor public humiliation if you violate this ethic.
Academic DISHONESTY IS SERIOUS
I treat all forms of academic honesty with the utmost seriousness and strongly encourage you to comply with Wesleyan’s Honor Code which you can review within the student handbook (
Violations of the Honor Code may result in an F in the course and possible academic and disciplinary action. All violations will be reported without exception.
DisabilitY RESOURCES
Wesleyan University is committed to ensuring that all qualified students with disabilities are afforded an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from its programs and services.To receive accommodations, a student must have a documented disability as defined by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and provide documentation of the disability. Since accommodations may require early planning and generally are not provided retroactively, please contact Disability Resources as soon as possible. If you believe that you might need accommodations for a disability, please contact Dean Patey in Disability Resources, located in North College, Room 021, or call 860/685-5581 for an appointment to discuss your needs and the process for requesting accommodations.
Course Evaluation
Your honest and constructive assessment of this course plays an indispensable role in shaping the future of education at Wesleyan and my prospects for future employment here (for real). Upon completing this course, please take time to fill out the online course evaluation.
ABOUT THE SUPPLEMENTAL READINGS LISTED BELOW
I have provided you with a list of supplemental readings for each week that you might reference for further study. You may find these materials quite useful both in this seminar and beyond to help round out and deepen your understanding. I will generally not refer to them in any direct way in our class, but wanted you to know about additional options.
COURSE CALENDAR
1. Monday, January 25: Introduction, Syllabus, Questions
Part I: Power Over Life
2. Monday, February 1: FramingBiopowerand Necropower
Required readings:
Michel Foucault. 2003. “Lecture One, January 7,” pp. 1-22 and “Lecture 11, March 17,” pp. 239-264 in Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College of France, 1975-76. (Translated by David Macey). New York: Picador.
Thomas Lemke. 2011. “The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault,” pp. 33-52 in Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Georgio Agamben. 2005. “The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government,” pp. 1-31 in State of Exception (Translated by Kevin Attell). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Achille Mbembe. 2003. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15:11-40.
Supplemental readings:
Biopower
Didier Fassin. 2009. “Another Politics of Life is Possible.” Theory, Culture & Society 26(5):44-
60.
Michel Foucault. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College of France, 1978-79.
(Translated by David Macey). New York: Picador.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2000. “Biopolitical Production,” pp. 22-41 in Empire.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Shane Harris. 2010. The watchers: The rise of America's Surveillance State. New York: Penguin
Press.
Nikolas Rose. 2007. “Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century,” pp. 9-40 in The Politics of Life
Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Necropower
Georgio Agamben. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Achille Mbembe. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Monday, February 8:Life, Health, and Medicine