I'm gonna post these here because I think they are pretty helpful in helping unravel the question of forms-of-life. I don't necessarily like all of the things that are posted on this blog, because the dude is totally an academic (in the sense that he has no way, or refuses, to understand the actual political implications of his work - which is largely examining various philosophers that might be within what we call "postmodernism"), but these are pretty good. taken from notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com First Thesis on the Form-of-life There are two forces in this world that propel our lives in opposite directions: the first is the power over life, and the second is the power of life. On the one hand, “biopower” is understood by Agamben as the first force, as the incessant attempt to strip life from its form and reduce it to bare life, to the mere fact of being alive, and thus deplete it of its power. On the other hand, biopower may also be presented as a force that is internal or immanent to a life that is always understood as a form or a way or a manner of living, wherein lies its power. While in the first process life cedes its powers to the forces external to it, in the second process those external forces become powerless in face of life. If the first force does its best to depoliticize our lives in such a way that only the fact that we are alive persists as its main concern, the second force politicizes our lives, because how each and every one of us lives in any given moment becomes the central political question. We will use the term “biopolitics” from now on to designate this constant struggle between these two forces, rather than only one of them independently of the other: on the one hand, the monitoring, controlling, disciplining, and administrating of our lives by apparatuses of power (like the government and the police, but also the education system and economic institutions, to mention just a few obvious examples); on the other hand, our ability to fight these powers by imagining, producing, practicing, or presenting new ways to share our lives with one another. It may be assumed that the power of life is merely a reaction against the growing power over life. But it is also possible to reverse the genealogy and claim that it is actually the various apparatuses of actualized power that are the ones reacting against the potential power embedded in the multifarious ways we live our lives. While it is usually assumed that “life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object,” I would like to turn Deleuze’s formulation on its head: power becomes resistance to life when life takes power as its object. If the power over life is what we usually call “the powers that be,” the power of life is what we may call “the powers that become,” or “the coming power.”
Second Thesis on the Form-of-life Whether they know it or not, all established apparatuses of power tend to agree on one basic point, formulated in the clearest terms by the best theoretical minds of the Third Reich: that since “no political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power,” politics is basically the practice of “giving form to the life of the people.” To complicate our basic dichotomy, it must be admitted that what the power over life is concerned with above all else is how, and not just that, we live. It is only when the powers that be realize that they did not manage to achieve the desired result, when life did not care to conform to a certain form, that the opposite practice is unleashed: the stripping of life from its form (whatever it may be), this diabolical metamorphosis from caring (for the form of life) to forsaking (bare life), as power yields to violence and biopolitics transforms into “thanatopolitics”--a politics concerned with death rather than with life. Bare life is by no means a manifestation of sovereign power, but a proof of sovereign powerlessness, that is, its failure to influence or protect the way we live. Nothing is simpler than to subject a bare life to power (indeed, the desire to do so is usually a mark of weakness); but it is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to completely subject a form of life to a power external to it. No matter how awesome the powers of the state, the law, the sovereign, the government, the police, or the army are, they can only contain the explosive power of the multitude of forms of life with limited success. A life completely devoid of a form, like a point without extension, is a fiction. In the same way that outside the theoretical realm of Euclidean geometry there is no point with zero dimensions, there is no absolutely bare life in the actual world, outside Agamben’s political theory, though horrifying limit cases, like the Muselmann, do exist. (By the same token, we could add that there are no pure forms of life that are totally separated from actual physical life outside Debord’s theses on The Society of the Spectacle, though beatific limit cases, like cartoon characters, do indeed exist.)
Third Thesis on the Form-of-life There is a direct correlation between the growing power of life and the growing power over life. The rise of forms of life does not necessarily lead to the decline of bare lives. The stakes today are simply higher: the more power a life obtains, the more ingenious are the apparatuses designed to control it; the more value a life has, the more intricate are the tactics devised to capitalize on it. While in medieval times the inquisition and the confession were enough to keep most people in line, the modern apparatuses of power employ much more complex techniques to achieve much less effective results. If it is true that today’s men and women are more servile than ever (“the most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history,” Agamben claims), then why is there a need for all those sophisticated and ruthless apparatuses out there to get them? It is generally believed that in a global culture the differences between forms of life gradually give way to a monochromatic existence. But as power grows over more lives in isolated or neglected places, the power of these previously untouched lives with their still not dead forms can eventually grow as well. This is not achieved, however, because the West flattens the image of these cultures in order to feign the semblance of diversity and satisfy its fascination with the Other, but only because those “others” seize the means of representation and impress their own image on the planetary spectacle in which we live. Forms of life cannot be preserved by isolation--they can only be challenged by interaction, which is what a globalized public sphere may facilitate. Trying today to speak or listen while a million different voices crave to be heard at the same time is quite enervating, but this cacophony is still overcome whenever a single person attends to another and understands what he or she has to say. Every such communication or conversation, as fleeting or insubstantial as it may be, is a generator of the power, and form, of life. So despite the fact that we are witnessing a massive proliferation and expansion of apparatuses that are meant to get hold of our lives--from the close-circuit television that monitors our every move to the regular television that manipulates our every desire, from the cell phone that traces our whereabouts to the credit card that keeps a tab on our conspicuous consumption, from the shrinks who dissect our souls to the doctors who regiment our bodies, from the schools that discipline us well into our thirties to the media outlets that monopolize our public domain--it is encouraging to note that these powers only appear mighty. In reality, they are just scrambling to recapture what is constantly slipping through their clumsy fingers.
Fourth Thesis on the Form-of-life [FONT=trebuchet ms]Paraphrasing Nietzsche, we could say that one is a philosopher at the cost of regarding that which all non-philosophers call “form” as content, as “the thing itself.” To be sure, philosophers belong in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes something merely formal--our life included. At its best, philosophy (but also art, as in Nietzsche’s original fragment, and even religion, as in Hegel’s system) allows us to find patterns of forms of life in the seemingly endless and senseless fragments that crowd our everyday existence. It can also help us realize that our manner of being is not merely the arbitrary shape or inconsequential refinement of this rough and ready thing that people call life (their so-called life). Rather, our form of life is precisely what philosophers like to call “the thing itself.” (As an example of this philosophical proclivity at work, think of Judith Butler’s understanding of gender.) This is not to say that philosophers should merely act as the servants of a form of life, or that their true task is to develop some pseudo-science of forms of life. Even though people treat the way they live as fish treat water, philosophers are not fishermen. Philosophy is, above all, a way of life in its own right. Until this elemental fact (which, as Pierre Hadot has shown, was an obvious one for the Ancient Greeks) returns to inform current philosophical practice, it has no chance of getting out of the inconsequential mess in which it finds itself today. Luckily, when philosophy as a form of life devolves into philosophy as a profession, when friends degenerate into peers, the unique power that inheres in such a strange mode of being does not become yet another power that dominates life (aside from the occasional stray student). Kierkegaard probably said it the best: instead of having any power whatsoever, today’s philosophers seem to cheerfully “speculate themselves out of their own skin.”[/FONT]
I'm reading an Introduction to Civil War right now. What the heck are "forms-of-life?"
I honestly can't give you a straightforward answer to that question, and I don't think there is one. The thing you have to understand with these ideas is that you have to actively and critically engage with them. Even if I could give a totally straightforward answer to that question, I probably wouldn't because I think the discussions that arise around new ideas are just as important, if not more so. so if you want to read over the things I posted here and respond in some way to them, or you can start a new thread if you don't like/don't want to respond to these.
