From Biopolitics to Biophilosophy, or the Vanishing Subject of Biopolitics

The legend of Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian's feat may seem an odd point of departure for a study of biometrics, dataveillance, and the loss of democratic oversight amid the increasingly sophisticated global reach of surveillance technologies. Manjula Padmanabhan's 1996 futuristic play takes place in a small, single room apartment in the tenement slums of Bombay, which is shared by a young woman by the name of Jaya, her husband Om Prakash, her mother-in-law Ma, and her brother-in-law Jeetu. The play is populated by guards from a mysterious private company called InterPlanta Services, who act as agents for a distant privileged coterie of individuals maintaining their economic and political power through an astonishingly pervasive and watchful privatized surveillance scheme. In many respects, that dark side is simply part of the long shadow cast by neoliberalism and by public policy initiatives that gesture toward a reduction of all aspects of social experience into something quantifiable, that is, into processable data.