1. I’m interested to understand how Marxism and Foucauldianism can come into conversation with each other in understanding circuits of power

2. I’m particularly interested in how those circuits of power are enacted on and through bodies

3. which brings in Bruce Braun and his two-sided understanding of what biosocial citizenship means

So how do I tie these together?

1. there are four key terms that will bring this together: ideology, hegemony, discourse and governmentality – Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams offer ideology and hegemony (looking back at Marx, Gramsci, and others), Althusser can offer some insight, as well; Discourse and Governmentality are Nikolas Rose, Bruce Braun, Foucault.

2. next, tie this into understandings of citizenship – again, Foucault, Nikolas Rose

3. then biosocial citizenship – Foucault, Rose, Braun

But how do I bring back Marxism into a conversation about biosocial control?

1. think about what purpose power serves (returning to early questions) – who is it serving? And in what ways? Then draw back into Braun and questions of security.

Suffice to say, i’m back to square one. Thinking, now of simply doing a closer reading of Bruce Braun’s “Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life” (cultural geographies, 2007, 14:6-28).

One thing that i am certain i want to do is to explore how Marxism and Foucauldianism and the ideas of biopolitics actually work in concert with one another. And while Marxists generally complain that Foucault’s close attention to the processes of power in such specific instances fails to address global political issues, particularly the relations between society and the state (or so says Colin Gordon, The Foucault Effect, pg. 3), i feel, particularly in light of neo-liberalism, that paying attention at particular instances is actually useful in understanding the government’s interest in individual bodies as productive of state power and of process of capitalism (capital flows). In today’s rationalities of governance, the function of government is to protect economic interests – the economic is political.

At a recent AAG, Dick Peet said that capitalism is now interested in the surplus of reproductive labour, e.g., mortgage and other credit interest collected from within the realm of reproductive labour (my word – think about how much i’ll be spending in loan interest simply for pursuing a PhD). Now, more than ever, there is a fantastic tie between Marxian thought and those who are interested in biolpolitics. And while Braun insists that biopolitics is so very different from those in the global south from the global north, i do believe that these interests are not diametric, rather, they support each other. Yes, Rose was mildly short-sighted in his article, “The Politics of Life Itslef” (Theory, Culture & Society, Dec 2001; vol. 18: pp. 1 – 30), but i don’t believe,as Braun does, that this leaves the exploration of global reach of biopolitics so far out of reach that it cannot be related to the individualized reach within Western cultures. In fact, it is only through understanding it within this context that it makes any sense at all. I don’t necessarily see this new reach of sovereignty as merely an outcropping of old colonial forms, but a neo-colonialism that is both dependent upon older forms of colonialism and new forms of biopolitics working in concert to inform biosecurity within a rubric that is more closely aligned with fears cultivated through insistences of the articulations of nationalism (see Gillian Hart, Changing Concepts of Articulation: Political States in South Africa Today, Review of African Political Economy, 111:85-101).

So here we are. Is this enough for a seven-to-ten page paper? Let’s hope so…