Christine Young Debate Novice Mrs. Ferguson 20 February 2015

Biopower Research

Biopower

1. “Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself."(24)

2. Biopolitical power is expressed as a control that extends through the depths of consciousness

and bodies of the population and across the entirety of social relations. (p 24)

a. An example of this is the control of life at the molecular level made possible by the sequencing of the Human Genome and recombinant genetics. A consequence of Assisted Reproductive Technologies is that the female body has become a pre­eminent laboratory for a lucrative pharmaceutical industry.

3. Biopolitical power comprises the whole of society; it produces the social body, and our

individual bodies. It is the ground of all productivity and therefore the ground of life. Within the society of control "power is exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (through welfare systems, monitored activities, etc) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and desire for creativity." (23)

a. Under global capital, Biopower mostly creates wealth and power for others and

is not under individual control.

b. Our labor and what we do for a "living"—whether manual or bodily (agricultural, factory), mental/intellectual (knowledge work, immaterial labor), and affective (emotional, service, maintenance of self, family, community)—can be said to be a product or expression of Biopower.

4. Biopower creates materialized labor in which it hides the life­producing, life­sustaining

production, reproduction and maintenance labor largely done by female, poor, immigrant, and minority populations. It is to "think like computers" and our bodies become machine like parts controlled by invisible information and immaterial processes.

Foucault

1. Foucault first used the term biopower to describe a way in which a state can exert total control over its constituents.

2. “Foucault argued biopower to be in which capitalist states exerted control over people to better

promote life. Major means of control were through statistics and probabilities. States, meaning countries, analyzed likely responses to actions by the government and ways in which people could most probably be controlled and directed in all aspects of life. Even in a democratic state, this marriage of the social sciences to political sciences affects a high degree of control over a population, as Foucault claims.”

3. Power such as that suggested in biopower is used for the good of the state to protect the lives of

its people. Such things as managing medical care might be part of a state employing biopower ruling techniques.

a. “Foucault takes this further, suggesting that best control can be achieved through eugenics. Eugenics is the theory rife with racism and classism, where humans apply the concepts of natural selection to benefit the human race.”

A. Thus those with traits undesirable to the society are selected out, by not allowing people with

poor backgrounds or significant health issues to reproduce.

B. As well as employing population control through selective reproduction, protection of the state in order to maintain power is an essential portion of biopower. This includes the destruction of any threatening elements to the state and justifies any actions taken by the state.

a. An example of this type of biopower can be evaluated by the current US relationship to

several Arabic nations. There are some that argue that the best action would be to destroy all Arabic nations and rid the world thus of terrorism. This is biopower in its most ugly and extreme form, and it is justifiable according to the concepts of Foucault. Such an exercise has been seen before in history in the mass extermination of Jews during WWII and in the more recent mass genocides in the Sudan.

C. In Foucault’s view, biopower is the natural trend away from sovereign states that governed by

threatening death to opposers or those who would not obey the law. However, we see both biopower and “threat of death” power in most countries, regardless of their political structure.

D. Foucault identifies and names biopower should not be taken as endorsement of behaviors

associated with such.

“It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (Foucault,1990, pp. 92­93). Research adapted From: http://www.cyberfeminism.net/biopower/bp_aboutbp.html http://www.wisegeek.com/what­is­biopower.htm