‘For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with
the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an
animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.’
Michel Foucault, History
of Sexuality 1: The will to knowledge.
The concept of biopolitics
marks the introduction of a new element within judicial power and disciplinary
techniques. The theory of sovereign right functioned on the basis of
the pre-determined and complementary notions of individual and society,
which, at the outcome of the sovereign constitutive process, are transformed
into the contracting individual and the social body constituted through
the contract (whether voluntary or implicit).
Much of the literature that still constitutes the mainstream and hegemonic
paradigm in the teaching of political theory in our times, adopts notions
of the workings of power such as sovereignty, right, duty and contract
as the foundation of any possible reflection and advancement on the
idea of government and its exercise.
In Survelleir et punire Foucault began to shake the foundations
of the political theory of sovereignty with his notion of disciplines.
Unlike the judicial power of sovereign right, these were concerned with
the practice of power on the individual and his body.
He was later to complement the idea of discipline with that of biopower
and biopolitics. The novel aspect introduced in the analysis of power
by the notion of biopolitics is that the latter does not deal with society
(as the judicial body defined by law and the contract), nor with the
individual-body. What emerges with the introduction of biopower as a
practice is the notion of a social body as the object of government.
It is the notion of population: biopolitics is concerned with population
as a political and scientific problem, as a biological issue of the
exercise of power. Biopower does not act on the individual a posteriori,
as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms of rehabilitation, normalisation
and institutionalisation. Rather, it acts on the population in a preventive
fashion. Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising
life chances, and biopower operates through surveys for the prevention
of epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and
the regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and
‘unpredictable’ phenonema on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium
and keeping events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just
discipline but regulation on a global scale, it is ‘the power to make
live. Power won’t make die, but it will regulate mortality.’
As Foucault puts it, the series of body-organism-discipline-institution
is eventually juxtaposed and substituted by the series of population-biological
processes-regulatory mechanisms-state, even though some elements such
as the police are part of the first and the second, both of discipline
and security.
Foucault's definition of biopower and discipline is intertwined with
an analysis of the implications of applying knowledge across society
in the formation, or the 'moulding' of subjectivities. The genealogies
carried out within the framework of the valorisation of the positive
force of power aim to show that the productivity of power is realised
precisely through the policies that allow for the formation of the individual
(through the disciplinary normalisation plans) and population (through
the biopolitical mass scale interventions). Liberalism needs the police
to reduce government.
What appears to be the almost physical chain of action and reaction
that characterises his notion of power/resistance challenged the idea
that it is possibile to transcend one's position by positing a challenge
from the outside. In biopolitics this is impossible since there is no
outside. In “Un systeme fini face a une' demande infinie” Foucault states
that discipline is only one mode of 'expression' for power. The system
has changed to incorporate the new needs of a post welfare state/pastoral
power. From surveillance on criminality we have moved towards the control
of the population. This is due to the endorsement by the system of resistances
and its adoption of their techniques, which creates a new function for
power. It is the state of 'executive power' or policing, monitoring,
or recording that constitutes the excess which is the reality of the
norm. This political state of permanent exception is tightly linked
to the ideology of governmentability and of security. The way a society
of control functions is no more based on the individuation and subjectifying
of individuals as 'types', it doesn't work on individuation of the marginalised
finalised to their subsequent 'inclusive rehabilitation'. Statistics
now come to dissect the individual and fragment it to its smallest components.
This is most evident in the division of labour into skills and of the
body into genes. Hence, control can be exercised in virtue of its own
creation 'positive' determination of multiple subjectifications within
the same individual. The role of law itself changes with it in so far
as instead of functioning as the arbiter or regulator of incompatible
interests, it abdicates its ambition to social integration and with
the crisis of welfare it is forced to reduce its scope to that of only
representing negotiable interests whilst neutralising and silencing
the rest. The relations between state of exception and biopolitics are
theorised by Agamben in his Homo Sacer series. Recently, Negri, Lazzarato
and other theorists of the post-operaista tradition have inscribed a
difference in the two notions of biopoower and biopolitics. Dissatisfied
with Foucault's alleged pessimism, they established biopolitics to be
the subversive counterpart to biopower. For more on this, see Lazzarato's
article below. |
