Yesterday, I received no less than four emails festering in my inbox telling me that there existed some contest of some sort, and that I should click on some link to go to some website and vote for some school that happens to be Stuyvesant. The idea seemed to me reminiscent of past whining about hypothetical budget cuts, my opinion of which has been expressed thusly. But I thought that why I will not be voting for Stuyvesant in any such contest needed articulation, and because the Stuyvesant Spectator has made the mistake of allowing me a forum to voice my political ideas rather than just hint at my political ideas and draw overly stylized characters, I decided to write this piece.
I'd call it 'Stuyvesant and Biopolitics or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Placement Test', but because I haven't figured out how to do subtitles, it's just 'Stuyvesant and Biopolitics'. Enjoy.
Stuyvesant and Biopolitics
Michel Foucault, the great philosopher, defined racism as a caesura in the biological spectrum. That is to say, that the primary ends and function of racism is to create solidified dividing lines between people, thus create defined groups, and identities. Such a caesura appears in other spectrums, the sexual, as explored by Foucault himself in The History of Sexuality, the mental, as examined by Deleuze in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and most recently in Agamben's theories of citizens/non-citizens and the camp. What we see in Stuyvesant is a mutated combination, as the SHSAT created a deliberate caesura in the mental-biological spectrum, as it is not only the mental focus of applicants but how finely tuned brain functions and natural ability, to create special class of citizens. Members are not "people who attend Stuyvesant" but "Stuyvesant students", an identity melded with an institution. High school placement is not a matter of a student choosing an institution but the state determining the worthiness of the student. At this point, Agamben becomes upset. First, a bit of an explanation.
Biopolitics, a concept created by Foucault, is the way government functions now. At some point, things shifted from thanatopolitics, in which the all sovereign can do is kill you or tax you, to biopolitics, in which the government's main function becomes that of fostering life. Rather than limiting government, biopolitics is what enables the sprawling control of today, as it functions by utilizing and internalizing the idea of the general good as well as having subjects begin enforcing the rules created by the state upon themselves - a process called disciplinary power. The exterminatory mode of biopolitics is no longer to make die, but to let die.
And letting die is where Giorgio Agamben comes in. Agamben's theories are in a way are an international version of Foucault, as he writes about those let die, most notably, those abandoned by the nation-state system. In fact, he has theories about a lot of stuff, such as how victims of the Nazi genocide were only eliminated once their citizenship had been entirely revoked, and how social services serve only to cement the citizen/non-citizen binary.
We have a little bit of that bad biopolitics displayed by Stuyvesant, as the school system, for all intents and purposes, selects a selection of students to receive resources and a selection of students to abandon. While we should not delve into conspiracy, one should be skeptical of the workings of a test that has been brought to court for testing on materials not taught in disadvantaged areas. Maybe it's not the test that is at fault - Math A is material that you need to know - but that just brings into question the legitimacy of the state's distribution of educational resources, if these schools really aren't taught what they need to know. And those who are taught what they need to know are brought to Stuyvesant. We have been told that "the children are the future" in the past, but now they dispense all universalism and tell us that we are the future. Here at Stuyvesant people work full time to make sure that everyone goes into college (maximizing allocative efficiency) while in "lessor" schools students have career training and often enter the workforce rather than attending college. The message is clear: we are the future, we have been pre-ordained and destined to become the orchestrators of the machine - they are destined to be its subjects.
And we eat it up. Stuyvesant students have been demanding continuation of this caesura, I'm sure, since the beginning - from the creation of this new, unwieldy money-pit of a building (I mean, endless glass boxes instead of money for textbooks?) to complaining about budget cuts and now large in-school mobilization to win a contest for the "best" school with a monetary prize. What was supposed to be a contest to find a school not like this (the website itself says "test scores only tell one side of the story for a school" and asks for "") and turns it into just another state contest for the school with the most people, who want the most, and who can design bots to vote in online contests. The solution is not to pick a school in California to vote for but something different. In the words of James Herod, "[t]o refuse to even cast a vote, for the lesser of two evils (the "evil of two lessors"), even though it only takes an hour or two, is an act of resistance." Because government functions by fostering life - and their crucial decision is what life to foster.
This essay sorta got off track and doesn't have nearly enough Deleuze in it, so I'll be following this up with an entry titled Stuyvesant and the Societies of Control.
I'd call it 'Stuyvesant and Biopolitics or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Placement Test', but because I haven't figured out how to do subtitles, it's just 'Stuyvesant and Biopolitics'. Enjoy.
Stuyvesant and Biopolitics
Michel Foucault, the great philosopher, defined racism as a caesura in the biological spectrum. That is to say, that the primary ends and function of racism is to create solidified dividing lines between people, thus create defined groups, and identities. Such a caesura appears in other spectrums, the sexual, as explored by Foucault himself in The History of Sexuality, the mental, as examined by Deleuze in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and most recently in Agamben's theories of citizens/non-citizens and the camp. What we see in Stuyvesant is a mutated combination, as the SHSAT created a deliberate caesura in the mental-biological spectrum, as it is not only the mental focus of applicants but how finely tuned brain functions and natural ability, to create special class of citizens. Members are not "people who attend Stuyvesant" but "Stuyvesant students", an identity melded with an institution. High school placement is not a matter of a student choosing an institution but the state determining the worthiness of the student. At this point, Agamben becomes upset. First, a bit of an explanation.
Biopolitics, a concept created by Foucault, is the way government functions now. At some point, things shifted from thanatopolitics, in which the all sovereign can do is kill you or tax you, to biopolitics, in which the government's main function becomes that of fostering life. Rather than limiting government, biopolitics is what enables the sprawling control of today, as it functions by utilizing and internalizing the idea of the general good as well as having subjects begin enforcing the rules created by the state upon themselves - a process called disciplinary power. The exterminatory mode of biopolitics is no longer to make die, but to let die.
And letting die is where Giorgio Agamben comes in. Agamben's theories are in a way are an international version of Foucault, as he writes about those let die, most notably, those abandoned by the nation-state system. In fact, he has theories about a lot of stuff, such as how victims of the Nazi genocide were only eliminated once their citizenship had been entirely revoked, and how social services serve only to cement the citizen/non-citizen binary.
We have a little bit of that bad biopolitics displayed by Stuyvesant, as the school system, for all intents and purposes, selects a selection of students to receive resources and a selection of students to abandon. While we should not delve into conspiracy, one should be skeptical of the workings of a test that has been brought to court for testing on materials not taught in disadvantaged areas. Maybe it's not the test that is at fault - Math A is material that you need to know - but that just brings into question the legitimacy of the state's distribution of educational resources, if these schools really aren't taught what they need to know. And those who are taught what they need to know are brought to Stuyvesant. We have been told that "the children are the future" in the past, but now they dispense all universalism and tell us that we are the future. Here at Stuyvesant people work full time to make sure that everyone goes into college (maximizing allocative efficiency) while in "lessor" schools students have career training and often enter the workforce rather than attending college. The message is clear: we are the future, we have been pre-ordained and destined to become the orchestrators of the machine - they are destined to be its subjects.
And we eat it up. Stuyvesant students have been demanding continuation of this caesura, I'm sure, since the beginning - from the creation of this new, unwieldy money-pit of a building (I mean, endless glass boxes instead of money for textbooks?) to complaining about budget cuts and now large in-school mobilization to win a contest for the "best" school with a monetary prize. What was supposed to be a contest to find a school not like this (the website itself says "test scores only tell one side of the story for a school" and asks for "") and turns it into just another state contest for the school with the most people, who want the most, and who can design bots to vote in online contests. The solution is not to pick a school in California to vote for but something different. In the words of James Herod, "[t]o refuse to even cast a vote, for the lesser of two evils (the "evil of two lessors"), even though it only takes an hour or two, is an act of resistance." Because government functions by fostering life - and their crucial decision is what life to foster.
This essay sorta got off track and doesn't have nearly enough Deleuze in it, so I'll be following this up with an entry titled Stuyvesant and the Societies of Control.
Continue reading Stuyvesant and Biopolitics.
