The Mole & the Snake
by Sandro Chignola
pp. 52-76 Issue 9 (5,1) – January-June 2018 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: 1017450/180104
Abstract
This article starts from the Foucaultanian notions of biopower and discipline, dealing with the strategies of the modern and contemporary capitalism. Introducing the term biopower into his research, Foucault is alluding to a series of transformations related to the capitalist system: life enters into the scope of power in terms of “controlled insertion of bodies” in the social apparatus of production, as well as in terms of an “adaptation of population phenomena to economic processes”. It involves the exchange of services on which the Fordist social pact was founded in the twentieth century. The life that is claimed in and against the relationship of capital concerns “needs” that refer to a “concrete essence of man”. In the undeniable awareness of a “triangulation” between sovereignty, discipline and biopower, the author, as a criterion for reading the dynamics of contemporary power, analyzes the theme of control referring to Deleuze. This is delineated in the double form of “biopolitical algorithms” and of the normalization that by means of the selection and targeted processing of big data and information packages, incessantly produced by social activity in and on the network, capture forms of life at the service of capitalism.