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Record W2086899920 · doi:10.3828/sfftv.2011.11

Introduction: Science fiction and biopolitics

2011· article· en· W2086899920 on OpenAlex
Sherryl Vint

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueScience Fiction Film & Television · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiopowerTechnoscienceEnvironmental ethicsGovernmentalityContext (archaeology)PoliticsPopulationAestheticsSociologyCorporate governancePolitical scienceSocial scienceHistoryLawArtPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The concept of biopolitics emerges from Michel Foucault's work on biopower and his analysis of the increasing turn of governance toward the bodies of citizens since the late seventeenth century. For Foucault, biopower has two interrelated objects of governance: the disciplined body of the individual subject and the managed citizenry, conceived on the aggregate level of the population. In twenty- first-century technoculture, both of these biopolitical objects are thoroughly colonised by subjects which once belonged entirely to the fictional realm. For example, bioethical debates over the status of emergent citizen/subjects, such as embryonic stem cells or 'brain dead' patients, challenge the ideas of what counts as life or death, distinctions once thought to be pragmatically straightforward. At the same time, epidemics and their attendant panics - such as 2005's spread of 'avian flu' and 2008's H1N1, with their images of burning pyres of animals and airports filled with people wearing surgical masks - conflate the management of borders, disease vectors and agriculture trade with speculative fantasies about invader species and zombie plagues. Under biopolitics, life itself becomes the object of political governance, and political governance becomes the practice of steering the biological life of individuals and species. Technoscience, sf speculation and biopolitical practice converge in this context.We live in an era in which the speculative and the material are so entwined that neither can be understood in isolation. This is true not only in the mundane sense that biotechnological science has advanced to the point that a layperson can no longer distinguish hype from fact, but more importantly in the material sense that our beliefs and assumptions about the biological world and its 'norms' can now be made manifest because biology has become a science of engineering. In Dolly Mixtures, her book on the famous cloned sheep, Sarah Franklin uses the term 'biocultural' to 'emphasise the inseparability of the new biologies from the meaning systems they both reproduce and depend upon, such as beliefs about nature, reproduction, scientific progress, or categories such as gender, sex and species' (3). In a biocultural age, understanding the speculative discourses of biopolitics is imperative, and sf is in a privileged position to help us think through its anxieties and contradictions: the complicated parenting of IVF and other assistive reproductive technologies, including ideas of 'designer' babies, evoked in films such as Splice (Natali Canada/France/US 2009); the fear of pandemics, often conflated with the spectre of bioterrorism to produce narratives about virulent disease and equally treacherous carriers, as in 28 Days Later (Boyle UK 2002); the new economics of patented life forms and privatised food, presented as a nightmare which leads to cannibalism in Pandorum (Alvart Germany/UK 2009). As all aspects of human biological life increasingly fall under government management and control, the external functions of the military and the internal functions of the police converge, and the 'state of exception' (see Agamben) becomes normalised and continual, hypersecurity vigilance becomes naturalised 'to ensure that there are no procedural hindrances to state violence if it is deemed necessary' (Gerlach et al. 162-3).Biopolitics involves a new power over life, and a new relationship between sovereignty and life. While 'the right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live', the new right established with the rise of modern governance is 'the right to make live or to let die' (Foucault Society 241). Crucially, there are two aspects to the new exercise of biopower. Not only are certain kinds of lives fostered and shaped through its disciplinary institutions, while others are let expire through neglect or design, but also, and more importantly, this new biopower establishes a logical connection between the making live and letting die that institutes a paradoxical logic. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.057
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.005
Science and technology studies0.0030.008
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.316
Teacher spread0.242 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it