We began, as per custom, with questions...
What notion of the sovereign is she working with? (p3)
What are the politics of the possibility of risk (p8)
What is an apparatus? (p4) Referencing Deleuze and Guattari
Distinguishing between the norm and becoming the norm
What is her relationship between biopolitics and the sovereign?
Relationship between probability and possibility? (p24) Are we pointing to a new kind of power?
Moving from discipline to risk (p8) have we left discipline behind?
Why does she neglect climate change? Even when she lists terrorist organizations, border security, etc. it is not that new risks come into being but that society comes to understand
How does she decide to stabilize her cases and why are they not inflected with climate change?
What is Agamben’s distinction between civil society and bare life? (p13) what renders bodies governable?
Discussion ensued...
How do we define the exception? The role of the sovereign is decide btwn friend and foe also to decide the state of exception (for both Agamben and Schmidt). Is this a being rather than a state of being? An exceptional process instead of a state of exceptionality. She is pluralizing the possibility of sovereignty claiming an exceptional space. Maybe is happens in governance, border control, etc. is she assuming a split between the economy and the sovereign? (p20) even though they share an entymology? Although she uses economy in its broadest sense (p15). Drawing attention to the reintegration of soverignity into arena that were traditionally biopolitical. Sept 11th brings biopolitics to a close and now were are again within a sovereignty, her intervention is complicating this move increasingly present in political theory. Is it the same sovereignty (that which can institute an exception) that came before? Most would say no. Another read says there is an interrelation between the two – it is was takes the lead in a given apparatus
– it is not an epoch or an era.
She may or may not be tweeking Agamben. Some reads of Agamben say it is simply re-emerging in the same form because it was always inside it. Logic of sovereignty is present even if we can’t point to one particular sovereign. Expands the places in which sovereignty can take place.
Contra Beck – relationship to science and expertise expand
Whole person is a criminal of a certain kind, now segmentation in to different selfhoods, parsing out parts of ourselves seems to parse out, multiply, expand risk. Does this give rise to a multiplicity of authorities?
Norms function in this way (p17). But wasn’t risk always present? Only in the fact that we are attempting. Risk has not change just the calculus of risk has changed – shift to risks of “low probability but high consequence” this is the shift between logics of probability that works against playing out of events vs. unfolding of events through a ray of imagined possible futures. Logic of possibility actuality math moves to predictual math – power will lay with those who can access data and articulate a solution , not so much arrangement of risk factors and the correlation itself, it is the translation of a best strategy. Is this the Deleuzian idea of the virtual?
Could war “Terroist attack” was not probabilistically or conceptually possible. Then it becomes a possibility so it joins together a series or range of disparate acts. Being able to mobiltze the kinds and size of BIG DATA produces something new that maybe doesnt translate (she traces actuarial math to predictive formulas) to earlier models of soverignity.
P9-10 change in the status of science expertise and decision are rearticulated so the distinction btwn scicen and non-science becomes more malleable. What logic is operating here? Imagined scenarios are not lead by the data but how the data is used?
Identify threat that one can articulate threats that competitors cannot, would win the bid on her argument.
Creative ways to bring about terrorists threats to the country. Is there a difference between the large positron collider – is one more made up politically, more explicitly value laden? Influence decision making in governmental activity. The arguments for building the collider (funding) are going to be value laden – it is hard to get big science projects built
Probability is based on predictive based on past events, and the move to possibility based on complex algorithms of computerized very remote possibilities – what is the difference? The difference is that the probability of these new possibilities are so low.
In disciplinary case, you run probabilities and try to control at the end of the situation. Whereas now, control come much sooner, you control the combination of possibilities, by controlling what can become possible.
How does this translate into the dividuated self? You could actually stop people at the border and search them
Is she right to conceptualize the argument this way? If she is right then the people who do security this way are crazy? Travel patterns, communication history, is hypothetically the process at getting at possbilitites and getting at intervening.
Is the infopolitical age merely an outgrowth of biopolitics? What do we gain with this conceptual shift? What can we say with this that we could not say before? There is a significantly quantitative data, she is describing the shift that makes big data possible. We have always had too much data. Possibilities lend themselves better to sovereign-power but probabilities lend themselves better to biopolitics which would have to be true if her argument is correct. Is it neoliberalism, is it sovereignty redux? Maybe these are useful terms, maybe not but within political theory this helps us understand what is new.
Are we assessing high concentrations of risk in individuals and then eliminating them, by drone attack. Does the military still use probalistic analysis in that this person is 80% likely to carry out a terrorist attack so they should be eliminated
She believes there is something new – first page “in an era after the events of 9/11”- she is proposing a new epoch.
Right plays catastrophe on terrorism while the left play catastrophe on climate change.
She grasps the commodification of the state of exception.
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