ABSTRACT

Contemporary biopolitical forms of global governance entail the instrumentalization or commodification of life, or the production of what Giorgio Agamben has aptly called ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998; 2005).2 The treatment of life as bare life entails a disregard for aspects of personhood and involves protocols of communication and administration that treat people as objects. In parallel with the global spread of states of exception described by Agamben we can track a global spread of forms of social interaction, governance and communication that produce life as bare life. Examples are numerous and widely discussed: the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the famine relief efforts of the 1980s, where life was something that was to be ‘saved’, nothing more – victims were not given a political voice – and the terrorist attacks and arbitrary detentions of the present decade, where once more life is disqualified politically and seen as an appropriate if maybe regrettable target of attack without warning or incarceration without trial.3 One critique levelled at Agamben has been that he takes too grim a view of contemporary life: while it may be true that there are instances where life has been subject to the arbitrary whims of authority, this is not generally the case. The argument is that we are not all reduced to bare life, as Agamben claims (Laclau 2007: 11-22).4 However, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, when we look at small-scale, local practices we find in the detail of what happens – in the protocols of communication and the bureaucracies of governance – precisely that reduction or commodification of life of which Agamben warns.