Laws are restrained by politics, society and culture to an extent. A law which goes against standard and common practice will get openly disregarded. In the same manner that a law which is too conservative or archaic will be disobeyed as social and cultural practice increasingly liberalizes. The laws can be enforced but at great expenditure of energy. Most police-states end up consuming so much energy that they require propping up by some resource (oil for instance) or they represent a factional interest so exclusively they force the nation into poverty and ruin (Myanmar). (more)
Biopolitics is consumed with the notion of political power becoming sovereign over all aspects of human life. This includes what we know as the nanny-state, such as health care, but also police states. An important aspect of the subjugation of human individual and social life is the threat of government violence to protect rather than destroy.
As American constitutional jurisprudence has recognised with the First Amendment, the threat of government power or scrutiny is enough to suspend liberty, such that populations are subjugated through self-regulation. (more)
In reading
Multitude
and
Homo Sacer
I keep hitting the words
biopower
and
biopolitics
. Apparently they are description of modern political power developed by
Michel Foucault
. So what do they mean?
(more)
