246 RüdigerKunow
laterstates.Thereisnospaceheretodealwiththisnewnormativeinall
itsdetailsandfiliations.Thenextchapterwillseektodescribethesocio-
political context which makes such visions appealing if not compelling,
alwayskeeping in mind whatthis means forthe differentialdistribution
oflifechancesforU.S.-Americanpopulations.
ApocalypticEmbodiment:TheCivicIdentityofLateLife
The body of "age" has at various times and in various historical
constellations consistently been the site of multiple interventions from
the outside, gestural (through forms of violence against the elderly),
linguistic(throughderogatoryinterpellations),social(throughregulatory
practices),andotherwise.WhatMarxintheGrundrissedescribesasthe
"socialconnectedness"(n.pag.)ofhumanlifehasmade"age"alsoasite
of vital connections (in the original sense of the word) between the
privatebodyandthebodypolitic.Theseconnectionshavebeenmaterial
as well as symbolic while their scope and significance is negotiated in
thepublicsphereofdeliberationanddecision-making.Asarguedearlier,
nobody becomes "old" alone, but the constellations identified by the
term "age"emergeintheinterpersonalorcommunalcontextswhichare
somewhat schematically identified by the term "biopolitics."^81 Such
politics, as Hardt and Negri argue, is inherently political and cultural,
because it extends "through the depths of the consciousness and bodies
of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social
(^81) "Biopolitics" is of course mostly associated with Foucault who regarded it as
yet another technology of power, evolving during the 18thcentury "through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls" as "a biopolitics of the
population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population
constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was
deployed." (HistoryofSexuality139). In addition, Foucault insists, as Marx had
done earlier, on the rigorous insertion of human life into the capitalist mode of
production: "This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in
the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without
the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the
adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes" (Historyof
Sexuality140-41,also147).