ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I proposed that the ‘ageing society’ should be thought of as an epistemic assemblage. In this, I foregrounded the knowledge making procedures and institutions, the techniques and technologies that shaped how we come to see our societies through a demographic, population prism. I argued that there were two constituents in this assemblage: one related to how the actuarial sciences came to mediate the relationship between the mechanism of life and the economy in ‘insurance societies’, the second related to how demographic and actuarial forecasts were called into question and prompted a collective search for a new epistemic architecture that was not only concerned with fertility and mortality but also with issues of health production and the ‘environmental’ manipulation of functionality. But why was further knowledge on health and productivity seen as the solution to the ‘ageing society’? This might seem like an odd question given the societal normative consensus on the value of health and wellbeing for individuals and populations. Drawing on Foucault’s writing on biopolitics, explored in the last chapter, scholars have proposed that advanced liberal democracies have experienced shifts in the way the ‘mechanisms of life’ are known and managed. Rose (2009), for example, has suggested that, in contemporary societies, biopolitics has increasingly focused on the deployment of ‘human vitality and morbidity’ in detriment of problematisations of mortality, in what he called a ‘politics of life itself ’ (also Rabinow and Rose, 2006; Wahlberg and Rose, 2015). Palladino and I (2008) have argued however that instead of positing a substitution of life for death, we should conceive of those terms entering a new relationship. This complementary viewpoint is of crucial importance when investigating the processes through which solutions to the ‘ageing society’ have been so strongly linked to health, vitality, productivity, etc. Indeed, tracing these processes, as I will show in this chapter, requires a re-examination of how we conceptualise the ‘population problem’ in relation to the ‘ageing society’. In demography, population dynamics is usually seen as resulting from the interaction of births, deaths
and migration. Yet in scholarship on the biopolitical, concerns with migration and border control are usually detached from those focused on the ‘politics of life itself ’. In Foucault’s original lectures on biopolitics, however, there is a strong indication that death, life and migration were equivalent constituents of the problem of circulation. Such an approach is not only more adequate to analyse the knowledge practices of population scientists but is also crucial to explore the ‘nexus of ageing and migration as a governance hotspot for the wealthy capitalist world’ (Neilson, 2003: 176). This chapter aims to rethink how the relationship between birth, death and migration has shaped the epistemic assemblage of the ‘ageing society’. To do so, I explore how the stabilisation of the link between the mechanism of life and the economy relied upon what I label a eugenicist agencement focused on the ‘quality of population’. I argue that this epistemic and policy concern with ‘race’ and migratory flows had a significant role in shaping social security systems in liberal welfare states. I trace the transformation of population science in the mid years of the twentieth century, by focusing on how it experienced a shift away from lowering birth rates, which it considered key to economic development, towards a focus on life expectancy and epidemiological aspects of illness onset and management across the life course. I suggest that this focus on health and productivity was achieved through a reinforcement of the problematic role of migration in the cultural economy of population management, where its quantitative redress of population ageing became increasingly trumped by the aim to bolster the use of existing ‘human capital’, through the extension of health and active working life. My argument is that race and migration can be seen as what Law (2004) would label as the ‘absent other’ in the constitution of the ‘ageing society’, that is to say, a set of entities and relations the marginalisation of which is essential for the epistemic and political formatting of an issue (see also Moreira, 2012b).
