Necro comes from the Greek root nekros, meaning “corpse.” Necropolitics, therefore, translates as “the politics of death.” Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes necropolitics as “the capacity of government to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019.
Conceptualized in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish the term refers to human bodies as malléable on which disciplinary power is asserted to maximize utility and docility; ‘out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit’.
Foucaldian key concept. Biopower is targeting the basic biological features of the human species to secure both individual wellbeing and levying control over entire populations. It is a set of techniques achieving authority over life processes like birth and death rates, longevity, public health to ultimately ensure a healthy workforce for production labor.
Estrangement is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which alienates a person from their humanity. Marx identifies several aspects of alienation that occur to the worker labouring under the capitalist system of industrial production. He claims that labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being. Marx, Karl: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Progress Publishers, 1974.
A new type of capitalism, that surpassed the materiality of industrial production and regards knowledge as a factor of production like any other, there to be mined and made over into all lands of complex collective goods. The emphasis moves from product to process, and the capturing of gains from knowledge and innovation is the central issue for accumulation, playing a determining role in generating profits. Moulier-Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Polity Press, 2012.
Portmanteau of the words proletariat and cognitive (labor), terminology used by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. ‘Cognitariat is the social corporeality of cognitive labour.’ The collective body of intellectual workers, who produce value through intellectual toil, the proletariat of inmaterial labor. Berardi, Franco. “What Does Cognitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 2013, pp. 57–63., https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v11i2.3656.
The psychic turn of biopolitics, the neoliberal way of controlling modern society. Byung Chul Han delivers an analytical inquiry of what novel techniques are dominating governmentality of today. He claims, that as immaterial and non-physical forms of production are determining the course of capitalism today, the body does no longer represents a central force in production. This constitutes that productivity levels are not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance but are about optimising psychic and mental processes. Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2017.
Precarity defines existence lacking in predictability, existential security, It also refers to the widespread condition of temporary, flexible, short-term and casual type of work in today’s neoliberal society. utler advances precariousness as “a social condition from which clear political demands and principles emerge”.