This is a presentiment of the quintessential biopolitical concern for scaled management of the processes of life.]. Are we most usefully thought of as biological bodies with a capacity for organic health or illness (and a vulnerability to contagion), economic actors with material interests, or citizens with rights and obligations under law? Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. You gotta understand, We are sick, sick, sick, [The delinquent, reasonably enough, is starkly dissatisfied with the low-status, entry-level service jobs that are the only ones available to him in the post-industrial economy. That’s why I’m a jerk! Gee, Officer Krupke, Officer Krupke, you've done it again. My sister wears a mustache, DIESEL (as JUDGE) ALL Edit Lyrics. I found it hugely useful, and enjoyed it greatly. Gee, Officer Krupke, DIESEL: (Spoken, as Judge) In the opinion on this court, [The extension of governmentality into everyday life requires the deployment of multiple registers of specialized technical expertise, typically the sort of expertise that devises categories or taxonomies of human behavior and assigns people to them; Foucault calls this “power/knowledge.”. Like we’re psychologic’ly disturbed. BABY JOHN (As Female Social Worker) ( Log Out /  As Foucault describes it, the ultimate aim of liberal governmentality is the production of subjects who do not require much in the way of active administration, because they administer themselves. We're down on our knees, The trouble is he drinks. My grandma pushes tea. Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks! Lemme tell it to the world! As we’ll see, “Krupke” is such a concise, vivid and memorable encapsulation of governmentality theory that it could readily be used as an introduction to this entire line of thought. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. It’s just our bringin’ upke Foucault’s project was to ask just how these conceptions came to be, and how we ourselves came to internalize them. Still more intriguingly to me, the notion that there exist sequences of words so potent that uttering them properly and under the correct conditions is all it takes to do work in the world is at best only quasi-rational. They say go earn a buck. The Jets further propose that the question of delinquency will be decided on the terrain of the social, a sphere of human activity discovered by the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess! We are sick, sick, sick, The song is sung by members of the street gang the Jets, who poke fun at the gruff Police Sergeant Krupke by singing about the societal forces that led them to join a gang. It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed. Dear kindly social worker, A-RAB (As Psychiatrist) both the failure to integrate a meaningful family-planning curriculum into secondary education, and to distribute or otherwise guarantee access to contraceptives and other necessary resources. That's why I'm a jerk! ACTION AND JETS And this brings us to “Gee, Officer Krupke,” as sung by Action, Snowboy, Diesel, A-Rab and Baby John — members of a working-class white street gang called the Jets, whose “turf” occupies a few square blocks of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. DIESEL (As Judge) We’re down on our knees, BABY JOHN (as SOCIAL WORKER) Gee Officer Krupke, we’re very upset; ALL Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived! The problematic of juvenile delinquency and its management will become one of the main obsessions of American mass media and government alike, in the years before the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the emergence of a putatively “New Left” furnished them with more urgent concerns.].