😂Todd 🐐🐐🐐😂

True. But I guess Todd meant that with regard to the smooth functioning of everyday capitalism and the national economy… which up to that point automatically took priority over all other issues. He did not mean it in the sense of saying capitalism was overturned and suspended completely.

@@Hic_Rhodus Todd forgot the part where we gave direct stimulus to the econ in unprecendented amounts, and forgot the part where labor markets and the econ ran red hot for 2021 and 2022. From Foucault's perspective, there was no wrench, but rather another example of the state's protectionist policy organizing the economy around its own ends of growth at all costs from the ordoliberal or neoliberal purview. How Todd construes this as the workings of capital is beyond me. He doesn't even correctly lay out Foucault's thesis on biopower.

@@JS-dt1tn Yup. Complete misconstrual. Unfortunate.

yeah.. feels like this talk cares more about the opportunity to stir controversy, not to learn... and in a rather shallow manner at that... makes it that more difficult to have enough good faith to engage with the work of a philosopher, knowing that their insights might just be this much hollow side effects of rather common one-upmanship ..

It's a great question. I do think that the situation in China is different, but I still wouldn't call it biopower. To me, it's just a standard oppressive and nationalistic regime, not really at all what Agamben's on to.

he problematizes knowledge through power. The problem isn't power (ergo we need to disarm ourselves), the problem is all apparent matters of fact are in some way bound up with power. Therefore all epistemes need contextualization through geneology to bring forward their constitutive effects. Power is not only the ability to disavow but to produce as well.

There's no great secret, but I usually start with the punch line and then work for a long time trying to come up with something funny. I'm not self-aware enough to make a video about how I go about it because it's also a mystery to me.

That's what I was saying about capitalism, for sure. Concerning Foucault, you raise a key point about attempting to focus on the body rather than the subject, since the subject is precisely the cause insofar as it is what doesn't work. Or: subjectivity is the break in the chain of cause-effect and thus a genuine cause. This doesn't hold for the body, which is why the turn to power is typically accompanied by a turn from subject to body. This makes any hiccup in the functioning of power part of the process. For Foucault, power capitalizes on every failure, so that it succeeds through its failure, whereas I would say that power fails even when it succeeds.

@@toddmcgowan8233 Thanks Todd, thats great. Really love the last line, has wonderful clarity and a kick like a mule!

@@toddmcgowan8233 Any attempt to say that the state is somehow servant to the economy is flying in the face of 50 years of economic policy designed precisely to engineer economic stability and consistent growth, this was of course Foucault's premise in his lectures on biopolitics, and the data supports this view plainly for all to see. The state has expanded its deficit spending and has engaged in the monetization of that debt for decades now, across all major DMs. It has become so commonplace it really doesn't need mentioning. Your argument that covid put a wrench in the accumulation of capital is empirically false. You say that the attempt to preserve life actually interrupted the functioning of capitalism. You say that the measures taken by the state acted as a brake on the capitalist system, and that even when those actions were framed as net positive for capital, they were effectively putting a halt to accumulation. Here's where I take offense with your lecture. You conflate the regulation of the movement of bodies, the lockdowns, etc., with the fiscal and monetary actions taken by the state and the fed, as if they are interchangeable with or irreducible to each other and 'the flow of capital' in general @ 8:45. It makes it hard to argue against your points when you failed to even mention the fiscal and monetary policies in response to covid, but I assume you lump these policies in with capital. Anways, you miss how the latter was the state's attempt to balance the effects of the former, which is why it is extremely confusing to claim as you do that both exercises of power somehow represent state intervention and capital markets coming to a head, when in reality both where state interventions in the first place @ 9:45; somehow you see both as opposed to each other when they are emanating from a single origin (the state broadly, not capital markets or 'capital'). You then use this as proof that, ergo, there is no single site of power in the biopolitical schema. Again you are confused in saying that the state's double response, first on bodies and then on capital markets somehow represents two opposing forces. That play between the control of bodies (or the control of crisis for Agamben), backstopped by an increasingly interventionist protectionist state, mainly in capital markets as it concerned covid, is PRECISELY the mechanism that both Foucault and Agamben attempt to parse out. The state's attempt to balance both exercises of power, to make live for both bodies and markets, perfectly validates Foucault's lectures from 79. Foucault, I can only imagine, would claim that no such interruption occurred, and that more importantly, the state's justification for control over the economy was increased, substantiated by the expected downstream effect OF ITS OWN interventionist telos regarding the question of the movement of bodies in a world with covid. Hard to argue that you provide an example of a theoretical misstep when your own argument committed a theoretical misstep and failed to present Foucault's argument cogently. What am I missing here? Someone, please? The reason why all major DM states have organized their entire fiscal policies around growth is not, as you argue, because they center around capital but around political control; politicians know that economic monotony is good for election results. It's why Clinton and Trump agreed only upon increased social security spending, on increased fiscal spending in general. They don't advocate for those policies because capital puts a gun to their head, but becuase the people have become pavlovian dogs for economic stability. Now if you want to argue that the people's will is actually simply capital at work, ok, but that fails to grasp why states engage in the actions that they do immanently. And what's more, markets discount for economic stability, its a simple way to expand multiples. And what did the fed do during the covid lockdowns? Purchase trillions in corporate debt... What did congress do, etc. Capital doesn't need stability, it needs equivalence. This is another key aspect of Foucault's 79 lectures that I wish you covered, and I love it becuase it is empircally supported. The state engages in producing a range for that equivalence to occur...! That is the ordoliberal's Kantian turn. Occam's razor man. I'm pretty sure any of these empirical facts are far less amorphous than 'capital', no? Thanks for providing your lectures online, gives me great food for thought.

@@toddmcgowan8233 Also your point at 10:10 is perfectly covered by Foucault when he discusses homo economicus, covered in lecture 9 of the lecture series on biopolitics. I might expand on this at a later date.

You've got that backwards. Under Neo or ordoliberalism, the economy is servant to the state. Todd has his own opinion of the state-economy relation which makes the whole discussion problematic as it moves antithetical to Focuault's own defintions in The Birth of Biopolitics. For Foucault, Neoliberalism marks the beginning of a statist scheme which finds its raison d'etre in the organization of the capital markets, whereas in liberalism proper the goal is protecting individual interests without touching the functioning of the markets. Liberalism is where the state works within the capitalist order, neoliberalism is where the state claims the market under is purview and attempts to displace the market's logic with its own protectionist orientation. Focuault finds this trend to be staunchly anti-liberal. That is where one major misconstrual occurs.

Absolutely.

@@flavioballarin4912 check out my latest defence of agamben video

Where would you say he misses the mark?

so ture... what's the « _concentrated means held in the state to define the parameters of what.. alienation ought to be_ »

@@tsenotanev The state has a monopoly over violence, or as foucault would say, to 'let live and let die'. Sociality, when defined by the ordoliberal state, is always going to be statist, i.e., directed towards its own ends. As we learned during Covid, this always present power of the state to control bodies can become incredibly visceral. If we are accepting Todd's Hegelian reading of alienation, the critique put forth by Foucault and Agamben would be that the state is far more immediate and violent in determining the degrees of alienation than any naturally occurring socio-cultural force ever could be. For example, the pressure to engage in performative social acts is only ever dependent on your engagement with it. The state is however far more capable of acting on bodies at will, without awareness or subconscious psychical engagement by the individual. Clearly were talking about two very different degrees of alienation. Biopower (and under the ordoliberal regime, sociality) was not interrupted by Covid, for our response to Covid was only made thinkable by an ordoliberal biopower already present in our politics. I'm still completely dumbfounded that Todd believes Covid "acted as a break on capitalist expansion". Any simple account of the movement of money and wealth will show that in response to a potential risk to capital, the ordoliberal regime engaged in unprecedented levels of market intervention to 'make live' both the market and bodies, fully aware of their interdependence for the capitalist class. Maybe it's because he doesn't see how capital, which is primary to the ordoliberal scheme, is the means by which biopower becomes reified. First via economic relations, then literal bodies for the sake of producing the proper environment to 'let live' qua capitalism. That's the ideological function underpinning all ordoliberal structures, statist intervention to bring about the most natural environment (of course you see the irony). Of course Agamben is more radical than this, I sometimes think he means to say that today biopower is more primary than capital. And I can see that point too, first control bodies in response to a crisis, then make metered responses to capital markets in the aftermath. I highly recommend Focuault's lecture The Birth of Biopolitics. I find it to be one of the most captivating of his lecture series. Sorry for the poorly edited response.

@@tsenotanev Around the 17:30 mark on, Todd somehow thinks that the response to Covid "blows wide open" the relationship between the state and capital because the state had to resort to all sorts of anti-capitalist acts (closing businesses, giving out money to the forcibly unemployed, expand free medical care, etc.). He claims rightfully that these actions are not beneficial to capital, and in the classical understanding of capital this is correct. Two issues, first, he selectively stops time to ignore the concurrent state response concerning capital, which was massive federal socialization of financial risk, which led to one of the largest wealth transfers in the history of this country as risk assets like stocks rallied to all-time highs. It's like Todd actively ignores the socialization of private financial risk and how that degree of government engagement funnels money directly to capital. Its not like we've been engaged in that for decades or anything... Second, theoretically, Todd fails to see how ordoliberal ideology allows for these ostensibly anti-capitalist actions to act directly in the interests of capital. Sure, if we had a true laissez-faire political economy these actions would be perfectly anti-capitalist, but in a political economy where the government backstops any and all financial risk that threatens the proper functioning of the markets (read: ordoliberal), in effect, money was handed directly to capital, and reason given for such unprecended action was the states own claim to power over bodies. Now, any and all exogenous reasons to control bodies, if it interrupts the flow of capital, is excuse enough to give money directly to capital. We see the perfect marrying of ordoliberalism and biopower. Ordoliberalism in the name of biopower, biopower in the name of ordoliberalism. They become each others raison d'être. I feel like I've repeated myself a dozen times. Todd is clearly working with a false understanding of the current paradigm of political economy.

@@JS-dt1tn yeah.. i didn't think there'd be politically conscious people who are still unconvinced that the state has long ago lost all it's ability to resist capital .. if it ever had it ..

Increase in wealth is not the same as capital accumulation. There was big supply chain issue which has not completely resolved and infact China's zero covid policy are still affecting global supply chains.

Capitalists can still try to make bank off of a disaster - but ultimately the thing they want most is to get the flow of capital started again. That's not going to happen with lockdowns and the solidarity required to survive a pandemic. Sure, it's no surprise that the structure of capitalism moved wealth upwards in a crisis, but the point isn't to make some money, it's to make *all* the money.

the truth is too important to be sorry.

I think in the end that you may be correct, but there were voices during the pandemic initial phases that wanted nothing to interrupt the movement of capital. Something did. That logic was challenged, at least at some point.

@@toddmcgowan8233 In the first stage, but then they took the situation as an opportunity as they like say it.. Another comment on Vighi's speculation would also be cool to hear. Thx!

not really. Bur vaccine believers are getting debunked XD

This was a completely ahistorical conceptually incorrect reading by Todd.

yep.

Wouldn't the sanctity of the foetus be the very apotheosis of bare life though?

peeps, you should separate between discourse (symbolic) and real.