This special issue seeks to explore the perspectives of applying the different modalities of biopolitical analysis to four country-based case studies at Europe’s eastern margins. The ambition of this collection is to examine issues pertaining to national political, social and cultural agendas through the prism of biopolitical theorizing as broadly understood. This issue offers a specific examination of the applicability of the concept of biopolitics to research in Central Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus.
As objects of biopolitical inquiry, human lives are matters for different regulatory practices. Biopolitics, according to the French political philosopher Michel Foucault, is a set of regulatory tools and techniques aimed at controlling human bodies, and turning the whole set of corporeal/bodily practices into key elements of political argumentation. The contributors to this special issue treat biopolitics as an epistemic category, and a cognitive tool to help uncover many facets of the contemporary world that otherwise would remain under-theorized. Consequently, the novelty of the concept of biopolitics lies in its explanatory resources; the concept itself does not imply a new quality of politics as such. Ontologically biopower was always an intrinsic element of the polity, yet it was only quite recently that analysts discovered the term and started thinking of making use of it in specific policy contexts.
The group of authors here contributes to the on-going debate on biopolitics by advancing a number of innovative approaches. First, they try to reach theoretically beyond Michel Foucault’s binary distinction of biopolitics-versus-sovereignty. They do so mainly by demonstrating that sovereignty itself is highly biopoliticized in the sense that different strategies of sovereign power are to a large extent grounded on deploying issues of corporeality, sexuality and body politics at the centre of their agendas.
Jaakko Turunen in his contribution discusses the neoliberal policies of PO (Civic Forum) governments in Poland from 2007 to 2015 from the viewpoint of the “politics of warm water on the tap” (polityka ciepłej wody w kranie). Under this post-political condition, politics as an acknowledged attempt to steer society was disguised under a technocratic discourse. To put it differently, “politics” became a word to be avoided. This situation came to an end in 2015 with the ascension to power of the PiS (Law and Justice) party which made “politics” a distinctive type of art of government. Instrumental in introducing “politics” as a specific virtue was the 2015 influx of refugees to the EU and the EU’s plans to introduce binding refugee quotas to all member states. This paper asks how this shift in the conceptualization of politics came about. Methodologically this paper draws on a combination of cultural semiotics and biopolitical analysis. Turunen charts the change from the post-political disdain of “politics” and related polit-terms (politics, policy, politicization, polis) to the realization of a specific type of political virtue. This change is perceivable in the articulated distinctions between bios (qualified life) and zoé (bare life) assigned to Poles and refugees, respectively. The argument put forward is that the “return of the political” in Poland emerged out of the distinction that was drawn between the bios and zoé and how that distinction was acknowledged as something that can be politically produced and maintained. In other words, it was against the argued threat of the refugees that the politically produced character of Polishness came to be acknowledged. This further led to the politicization of a number of other attributes of public life that in Poland have been argued to be “natural” or somehow “beyond” or “above” daily politics such as morality, religion and national interest.
Second, some contributors discuss intricate combinations of biopolitics and ideology. As Bartosz Plotka admits in his article, recent political events, such as the refugee crisis and the debate on multiculturalism, have become post-ideological biopolitical challenges to the theory of citizenship. They show that the grand narratives regarding adherence to the state and laws lose their meaning in favour of the feeling of belonging to a given community. To a certain degree, biopolitics might be viewed as a post-political substitution for the descendant “grand narratives” which are losing their traction as ideological constructs. Against the backdrop of the diminishing appeal of traditional ideologies seen as politically unstable and divisive, we are witnessing an unfolding plethora of discourses revolving around bodily related nodal points, such as debates on the concept of the family and reproductive behaviour, the social and cultural legitimation of non-traditional sexual practices, juvenile justice, “pastoral power,” immigration, health care, and many others. In all cases the centrality of the body and the safety/security of the human life becomes the key justification for biopolitical regulation, but also for biopolitical mobilization and consensus-building, with all ensuing totalizing effects.
Yet in his article Plotka demonstrates a counter-example – the extension of the idea of biological citizenship and the theoretical implications of bioethical cases – which, although initially confirming the “post-ideology claim,” eventually shows the strong ideological underpinnings of biopolitics. Biological citizenship has indeed an individualizing and collectivizing potential (as does any other concept of citizenship through the connection of individual entitlements and collective responsibilities), but when discussed especially in the context of human enhancement, it reflects a rather deep ideological conflict between transhumanists and bioLuddites (or more generally, between bioliberals and bioconservatives). This article unveils the paradoxical nature of ideological considerations on citizenship between different bioethical cases (e.g. human enhancement, abortion, and euthanasia), explains consistency within them, and presents their biopolitical input to the contemporary understanding of citizenship.
Third, biopolitics is not only a particular way of managing and administering allegedly (pre)existing populations, but primarily a subjectifying force producing various collective identities grounded in accepting certain sets of regulatory norms. In this respect, the authors go further than discussing biopolitics as a means of stabilizing and legitimizing extant relations of power, and rather argue that biopolitically regulatory practices are powerful mechanisms of constructing and shaping nations as biopolitical communitie s. As Alexandra Yatsyk explains in her contribution, national identity in Georgia is produced through practices of biopolitical inclusion under the conditions of multiple splits, ruptures and gaps typical for political landscapes in other post-Soviet countries. Consequently, she tackles biopolitics as a set of regulatory mechanisms and tools that applies – along the lines of Foucault and his multiple followers – to the whole population. By the same token, the case of Georgia sheds light on an intricate combination of neoliberal policy practices and deeply conservative social attitudes on the ground. Within the neoliberal reading, largely tied to Foucault’s works, biopolitics is a utilitarian way of utilizing human bodies as an economic resource which needs to be properly administered and duly managed and taken care of, which explains the conceptual nexus between biopower and governmentality touched upon by Yatsyk. However, religion (the Foucauldian “pastoral power”) can also be analysed as a part of biopower toolkit, promoting a biopolitical project of revival of “traditional values.” This type of biopower draws lines of inclusion and exclusion beyond state and national borders, and marks certain population groups as “alien,” “deviant,” or “external.” Apparently, homophobic practices spreading across the post-Soviet space contravene the EU’s norms of tolerance, anti-discrimination, and multiculturalism.
Fourth, biopolitics exists beyond liberal political regimes. As the case of Russia makes clear, national identity-making might enshrine mechanisms of biopolitical surveillance, control and regulation, which contains strong potentialities for biopolitical totalization, paradoxically overlooked in the Foucauldian scholarship. But this is exactly what makes biopolitics a field of resistance and counter-hegemony. Andrey Makarychev and Sergey Medvedev make this point, combining biopolitical analysis and the language of cultural studies. By blending them in a single research agenda, they unpack biopower through cultural representations, performances and imageries that oftentimes elucidate new and unexplored nuances and elements in challenging the sovereign biopolitics of the ruling regime. If Putin’s biopolitics is based on conservative and religious principles of control and surveillance, then there exists an alternative biopolitics of the emancipated body as an object of hegemonic discourses and a subject of resistance.
With all this in mind, the readers can learn from these articles about the complexity of biopolitics as an analytical category that might merge with sovereign power and challenge it; might take ideological and technocratic forms, and might be compatible with and contravene Europeanization. Such a variety of forms of biopower implies that stories about national identities – especially in turbulent countries – remain increasingly incomplete without biopolitical dimensions.