Biopower

This article is about Michel Foucault's social theory. For the Saab automobile engine of the same name, see Saab H engine. For transesterified lipids used as a fuel source, see Biodiesel.

Biopower (or biopouvoir in French) is a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". Foucault first used the term in his lecture courses at the Collège de France, but the term first appeared in print in The Will To Knowledge, Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health. It is closely related to a term he uses much less frequently, but which subsequent thinkers have taken up independently, biopolitics.

Foucault and the concept of biopower

Bio-power can be understood as the sole prerogative of the modern Nation state to "make live and let die" which is distinct from the medieval system of rule by the singular sovereign an invention from the sovereign power derived from the ancient legal apparatus of Roman law Pater familias which would be "let live and make die" defined by the personal power of a monarch. This kind of attitude of the state toward the lives of its social subjects, Foucault argues, is a way of understanding how the new formation of power dominates Western society today.

For Foucault, biopower is a technology of power for managing people as a large group; the distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It is an integral feature and essential to the workings of—and makes possible—the emergence of the modern nation state and capitalism, etc. Biopower is literally having power over bodies; it is "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". Foucault elaborates further in his lecture courses on Biopower entitled Security, Territory, Population delivered at the Collège de France between January and April 1978:

By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower.

It relates to governmental concerns of fostering the life of the population, "an anatomo-politics of the human body a global mass that is affected by overall characteristics specific to life, like birth, death, production, illness, and so on. It produces a generalized disciplinary society and regulatory controls through biopolitics of the population". In his lecture Society Must Be Defended, Foucault's tentative sojourner into biopolitical state racism, and its accomplished rationale of myth-making and narrative, he states the fundamental difference between biopolitics and discipline:

Where discipline is the technology deployed to make individuals behave, to be efficient and productive workers, biopolitics is deployed to manage population; for example, to ensure a healthy workforce".

Foucault claims that the previous Greco-Roman, Medieval rule of the emperors, the Divine right of kings and Absolute monarchy model of power and social control over the body was an individualizing mode. However, after the emergence of the medieval metaphor body politic which meant society as a whole with the ruler, in this case the king, as the head of society with the so-called Estates of the realm next to the monarch with the majority of the peasant population or feudal serfs at the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid. This meaning of the metaphor was then codified into medieval law for the offence of high treason and if found guilty the sentence of Hanged, drawn and quartered was carried out. However, this was drastically altered in 18th century Europe with the advent of modern political power as opposed to the ancient and Medieval version of political power. The voting franchise; liberal democracy and Political parties; universal adult suffrage: exclusively male at this time, extended to women in Europe in 1929, and extending to people of African descent in America in 1964 (see Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965).

The emergence of the human sciences and its subsequent direction, primarily aimed at the modern western man and the society he inhabits, together with the invention of Disciplinary institutions. During the 16th and 18th centuries with the advent of anatomo-politics of the human body a transition occurred through forcible removal of various European monarchs into a "scientific" state apparatus and the radical overhaul of judiciary practices coupled with the reinvention and division of those who were to be punished.

A second mode for seizure of power was invented and discovered; while this type of power was stochastic and "massifying", not "individualizing", as in respect to the king, as in previous cases. By "massifying" Foucault means transforming into a population ("population state") with an extra added impetus of a governing mechanism in the form of a scientific machinery and apparatus. This scientific mechanism which we now know as the State "governs less" of the population and concentrates more on administrating external devices: such as money, policy making decisions, military technology, education, medical administration, social welfare, criminal and legal legislation, production and industrial output, industrial legislation etc., allowing the population to "govern themselves". This power is no longer "directed at man-as-body, but at man-as-species".

Foucault argues that nation states, police, government, legal practices, human sciences and medical institutions have their own rationale, cause and effects, strategies, technologies, mechanisms and codes and have managed successfully in the past to obscure their workings by hiding behind observation and scrutiny. Foucault insists social institutions such as governments, laws, religion, politics, social administration, monetary institutions, military institutions cannot have the same rigorous practices and procedure with claims to independent knowledge like those of the human sciences; such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, physics, genetics, and the biological sciences. Foucault saw these differences in techniques as nothing more than "behaviour control technologies", and modern biopower as nothing more than a series of webs and networks working its way around the societal body.

However, Foucault argues the exercise of power in the service of maximizing life carries a dark underside. When the state is invested in protecting the life of the population, when the stakes are life itself, anything can be justified. Groups identified as the threat to the existence of the life of the nation or of humanity can be eradicated with impunity.

If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.

Milieu intérieur and Biopower

Foucault concentrates his attention on what he calls the major political and social project namely the Milieu intérieur (the environment within). How did the project milieu become interwoven into the political and social relations of men? Foucault takes as his starting point from the 16th century right up until the 18th century with the milieu culminating into the founding disciplines of science, mathematics, political economy and statistics Foucault makes an explicit point on the value of secrecy of government (arcana imperii from the Latin which means secrecy of power Secrets of the empire which goes back to the time of the Roman empire in the age of Tacitus) coined by Jean Bodin. Which, according to Foucault, had to be incorporated into a politics of truth (Foucault means public opinion he also mentions a group called The Ideologues) through raison d'état. Here the modern version of government is presented in the national media, both in the electronic medium-television and radio, especially in the written press as the modicum of efficiency, fiscal optimization, responsibility, a fiscal rigorousness and also a public discourse of government solidarity emerges and social consensus is emphasized on all these four points. What general components that were essential and necessary to make this consensus happen? Foucault traces the first dynamics, the first historical dimensions belonging to the early Middle Ages.

While Foucault doesn't mention him by name, one key note thinker which forms a parallel with Foucault’s own work an Medieval historian from this period; Ernst Kantorowicz gets a brief mention here. Kantorowicz mentions a Medieval device known as the Body politic (the king's two bodies). This Medieval device was so well received by legal theorists and lawyers of the day that it was incorporated and codified into Medieval society and institutions (Kantorowicz mentions the term Corporation which would later become known to us as Capitalism, an economic category). Kantorowicz mentions the Glossator's belonging to a well-known branch of legal schools in medieval Europe, experts in jurisprudence and law science, appeal of treason, and The Lords Appellant and the commentaries of jurist Edmund Plowden and his Plowden Reports. In Kantorowicz analysis, a Medieval Political theology emerged right throughout the Middle Ages which provided the modern basis for the democratization of the hereditary succession for the modern political hierarchical order (in other words the democratization of Sovereignty, which is known in modern political terms as "Liberal democracy").According to Kantorowicz a Medieval triumvirate appears, a private enterprise of wealth and succession. Co-operation was needed by the three groups—the Monarchy, the Church, and the Nobility—in an uneasy Medieval alliance, though, at times, it appeared fractious and according to some historians the King wasn't the major land owner in medieval Christendom and according to evidence presented by historian Sidney Madge at least in one instance the king was only third in line, he had to share that right with others. Throughout its history, it was never a smooth arrangement; see Barons war.

What is the reasoning behind the whole population subservience with the worshipping of state emblems, symbols and related mechanisms with their associates who represent the institutional mechanism (democratization of sovereignty); where fierce loyalty from the population is presented, in modern times as universal admiration for the president, the monarch and the prime minister, one could argue is it irony or fierce logic that dictates this sort of behaviour. Well, which one is it? Foucault would argue that while all the cost benefits were met by the new founded urban population in the form of production and Political power that it is precisely this type of behaviour which keeps the well-oiled machine smoothly ticking over and ultimately giving the Nation state not only its rationale but its "govening less" impenetrable apparatus. In other words, it is dictated by our own inherited political rationality which gives the false impression and appearance of joint solidarity giving the machine (Foucault uses the term Dispositif) not only legitimacy but an air of invincibility from its main primary sources: reason, truth, freedom, and human existence.

Foucault makes special note on the biological "naturalness" of the human species and the new founded scientific interest that was developing around not only with the species interaction with milieu and technology, but most importantly, technology operating as system not as so often portrayed by the political and social sciences which insisted on technology operating as social improvement. Both milieu, natural sciences and technology, allied with the characteristics surrounding social organization and increasingly the categorization of the sciences to help deal with this "naturalness" of milieu and of the inscription of truth onto nature. Due to Foucault's discussions with Georges Canguilhem, Foucault notices that not only was milieu now a newly discovered scientific biological naturalness ever-present in Lamarckian Biology the notion (biological naturalness) was actually invented and imported from Newtonian mechanics (Classical mechanics) via Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon due to Buffon mentorship and friendship with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and used by Biology in the middle of the 18th century borrowing from Newton the explanatory model of an organic reaction through the action of "milieu Newtonian" physics used by Isaac Newton and the Newtonians. Humans (the species being mentioned in Marx) were now both the object of this newly discovered scientific and "natural" truth and new categorization, but subjected to it allied by laws, both scientific and Natural law (scientific Jurisprudence), the state's mode of governmental rationality to the will of its population. But, most importantly, interaction with the social environment and social interactions with others and the modern nation state's interest in the populations well-being and the destructive capability that the state possess in its armoury and it was with the group who called themselves the économistes (Vincent de Gournay, François Quesnay, François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot) who continued with the rationalization of this "naturalness". Foucault notices that this "naturalness" continues and is extended further with the advent of political society with the new founded implement "population" and their (political population) association with raison d'état.

See also

• Governmentality
• Biopolitics
• Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France

Sources

• Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
• Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude

Further reading

• Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy By Roberto Esposito Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy Contains chapter on Thantopolitics By Roberto Esposito 24 August 2011
• Research In Biopolitics: Volume 9: Biology and Political Behavior: The Brain, Genes and Politics - the Cutting Edge (2011) edited by Steven A. Peterson, Albert Somit Research In Biopolitics: Volume 9: Biology and Political Behavior: The Brain, Genes and Politics - the Cutting Edge Accessed 11 August 2011
• Nicolas Delamare Traité de la police: où l'on trouvera l'histoire de son établissement Treaty of the police (1707) Accessed 11 August 2011
• Nicolas Delamare: A Brief Biography Nicolas Delamare: A Brief Biography Accessed 1 November 2011
• Policante, A. "War against Biopower: Timely Reflections on an Historicist Foucault" Theory & Event, 13. 1 March 2010]
• Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics (1872) Accessed 3 January 2011
• Albion Small The Cameralists The Pioneers of German Social Policy 1909Accessed 13 November 2011
• Communication Power Manuel Castells (2009) Accessed 3 March 2011
• Biopolitics encyclopedia entry from Generation-Online Accessed 22 October 2010
• The New Age Volume 10, Number 9 Biopolitics p. 197 London: The New Age Press, Ltd., 29 December 1911
• "Biopower. Foucault" on Philosophy.com: Gary Sauer-Thompson's Weblog Accessed 13 September 2009
• Rabinow, Paul & Rose, Nikolas (2006) "Biopower Today", BioSocieties 1, 195–217 (London School of Economics and Political Science) Accessed 13 September 2009
• Culture Machine eJournal Volume 7 (2005): Special edition on Biopolitics Edited by Melinda Cooper, Andrew Goffey and Anna Munster
• Foucault Studies: Number 10: November 2010: Foucault and Agamben Accessed 2 March 2011
• Foucault Studies: Number 11: February 2011: Foucault and Pragmatism Accessed 22 April 2011
• Foucault Studies: Number 7, September 2009: Review article By Marius Gudmand-Høyer and Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 Accessed 25 July 2011
• Foucault Studies: Number 5, January 2008, Review Article By Thomas F. Tierney Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977‐1978Accessed 25 July 2011
• Foucault Studies: Number 12, October 2011 Review Article By Thomas Biebricher The Biopolitics of Ordoliberalism Thomas Biebricher The Biopolitics Of Ordoliberalism Accessed 22 February 2012