Bruce Braun

Biopolitics and the molecularization of life

In what ways can it be said of the molecularization of life that it has made our biological existence a political concern in new ways? This essay examines two different answers to this question. The first, exemplified by the work of Nikolas Rose, suggests that the molecularization of life, together with the individualization of risk, has given rise to a new ‘somatic’ self, and a new ‘ethopolitical’ order in which our biological life has becomes our lifes work. The second, most evident in growing concern over ‘biosecurity’, posits a vulnerable subject, thrown into an unpredictable molecular world characterized by exchange and circulation and full of ‘emergent’ risks. Whereas the former has arguably led to new forms of governmentality, and new kinds of pastoral power, this paper argues that the latter has been widley taken up as a justification for the global extension of forms of sovereign power whose purpose is to pre-empt certain biological futures in favour of others. An exclusive focus on the former not only risks leaving the latter unexamined, it may leave us unable to consider how the two are related.

Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada

This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature.

A new urban dispositif? Governing life in an age of climate change

In an interview in 1977 Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the ‘management’ of urban life, this paper reworks Foucaults concept as a means for understanding—and potentially contesting—new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of ‘government’ in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, this paper emphasizes the ad hoc, and ex post facto nature of ‘government’ as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce ‘economy’ into existing relations in response to a perceived ‘crisis’. The paper concludes by exploring Agambens notion of ‘profanation’ as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.

Colonialism’s afterlife: vision and visuality on the Northwest Coast

This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of their representation of relations between indigenous peoples, physical landscapes, state power, and modernity, and in the context of ongoing political struggles over land, resources and the environment between First Nations and the Canadian government. The paper also calls attention to the multiple and fractured nature of postcolonial visualities, to the discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that shape how landscapes are experienced and represented, and, ultimately, to the trace of colonial pasts in the environmental and political imaginaries of a postcolonial present.

Futures: Imagining Socioecological Transformation—An Introduction

Action cannot be delayed because time does not flow from the present to the future—as if we had to choose between scenarios, hoping for the best—but as if time flowed from what is coming (“l’avenir...

Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics

The theoretical innovations that emerged out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s have enjoyed a striking revival in Anglophone critical scholarship in the past two decades, informing a generation of political activism that erupted in force with the alter-globalization movements of the late 1990s. In the midst of the “Italian miracle” of industrial growth following the country’s postwar devastation, a broad-based movement of workers, students, and intellectuals refused capital’s “gift” of work (Tronti 2007) and advanced a politics of self-determination and selfvalorization outside of state and party politics. Autonomia, Italian for autonomy, referred both to the ontological priority of labor power vis-à-vis capital and to a rejection of the bureaucratic politics of compromise characteristic of the establishment Left.1 Among the movement’s ongoing legacies is a vibrant intellectual tradition that has transformed established categories of Marxist analysis to contend with the changing political terrain that accompanied the rise of what is now referred to as a post-Fordist mode of production. Along with Latin American and indigenous anticolonial movements, Autonomia forms one of several intellectual undercurrents nourishing the

Book review forum: Everyday Environmentalism by Alex Loftus, with commentaries from Katie McGrath Meehan, Bruce Braun, Michael Ekers, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Richard Walker, and Alex Loftus

7. B. Massumi, quoted in I.G.R. Shaw and K. Meehan, ‘Force-Full’. 8. Jamie Lorimer makes a similar point in his review of the book. See: J. Lorimer, ‘Book review: Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology by Alex Loftus’, Area, 45, 2013, pp. 126−8. 9. A. Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism, p. 32. 10. K.M. Meehan, ‘Greywater and the Grid: Informal Technologies as Urban Water Provision in Mexico’, (under review). 11. K. Bakker, Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World’s Urban Water Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 188. 12. A. Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism, p. 13. 13. A. Merrifield, quoted in A. Loftus, Everyday Environmentalism, p. 136.