Session 12: State Violence and Biopower

In order to understand state violence and biopower, the position of a sovereign state and how it marks a niche for itself to justify its actions and reinforce its presence for the same is the theme.

The Greeks segregated life into - Bios which is a form of living proper to an individual or group and Zoe a simple fact of living. Simple life is excluded from the polis and is confined only to home, oikos.

In the modern era, as Foucault has defined how natural life began to be included in the calculations of the state power and politics as biopolitics (Agamben, 1995).  Foucault’s study looked at the study of the political techniques and the technologies of the self. Agamben’s Homo Sacer states that the two analyses – juridico institutional and biopolitical models of power cannot be separated because the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original nucleus of sovereign power. With the dissolution of the state structures occurring, the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the state needs to be studied in a new light.  The primary actor of his book is bare life and whose essential function in the modern politics is explored. Modern democracy is based on the liberation from bare life and convert the bare life into a way of life (bios of zoe). But Western politics has failed to remove this diversion between bios and zoe.

Agamben (Agamben, 1995) looked at sacratio as an autonomous figure and use it to assess the presence of a political structure prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, hence comparing sovereignty and homo sacer (bare life). The ambivalence of the sacred was the backdrop used to interpret sovereignty until the first decades of the twentieth century. The structural analogy between sovereign exception and sacratio shows that the sovereign and the homo sacer have the same structure and are correlated. Sovereign is defined as he who decides on the state of exception and as long as state is strongly embedded in all communal life the most extreme sphere cannot come into light. And with respect to homo sacer a person is excluded from human as well as divine. The paradox of sovereignty is defined as being both inside and outside the juridical structure at the same time. The sovereign has monopoly over the final decision and this fact reveals the strength of state authority. Nugent states Corrigan and Sayer from “The Great Arch: English state formation as a Cultural Revolution” about the iterative productions of the state in order to create for a vantage point which is claimed to be uninfluenced. The resurgence of APRA in Peru after the government had declared them as dead no longer put the state at the vantage point where it supposed itself to be (Nugent, 2010).

The law is hollow without the inclusive exclusion of the exception. The usage of brutal repression against the people who went against the state and the justification using the grounds of disturbance to the functioning of the government functions. State activities in a covert or overt ways push for certain activities while marginalizing certain others (Nugent, 2010). The survivors of the Amparo massacre were termed as the accused which showed the power of the state.  Exception and example are the two modes by which a set tries to found and maintain its coherence. If exception is the structure of sovereignty then sovereignty is the originary structure where law refers to life and includes in itself by suspending it.

Another study which looks at an altered way to look at state power and violence is by Nugent (Nugent, 2010). Here APRA which was a political organization functioning underground due to their ban by the state in Peru is said to have the properties for “stateness”. This affected the way the state is looked at  and the examination of state formation by examining state crisis (here power/knowledge and performance/representation) (Nugent, 2010). The importance of the invisible in state formation and its relation with the visible is necessary to understand the counter-state. The interpretation of the conflicts in Venezuela led to the change in the way democracy was looked at. The discourse of Democracy in Venezuela is driven from memories of autocratic rule and economic stagnation. The threats to this discourse are linked to the threats to national sovereignty. (Coronil & Skurski, 1991)

The performance/representation crisis in Peru put strict limits on people and also over media to establish a public sphere which would be supportive of the military regime. This was extended to include signed and notarized oaths and open letters in support of General Odria (The usage of documents as a way to confirm support to the state, showing the relationship between the state and the citizen). This kind of trials at representation was also created in Venezuela when the government tried to create a picture of how liberalization was the way forward for modernity. The position of the president played a dual role as a defender of democracy and as someone who was feared by the public. (Coronil & Skurski, 1991)

The civilizing process supported by the free market ideas where the civilized where the ones who supported free market and the barbarians who fought for state protection (Coronil & Skurski, 1991). Barbarism was used as a justification for the deployment of massive state violence as the masses were deemed irrational and the government was the one who reasoned. This also created marginalization which increased the chances of such people being attacked (Inclusive exception).  State with the power to plot and create realities through performance and the tweaking of powers.