The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

BIOPOWER / 45

of death from the grip of a power that is now evaluated from the standpoint of its ability to make live. Biopower, which regularizes life, is juxtaposed with sovereignty over death. In fact, there are two different systems of power: sovereign power, which took life and let live, and biopower, which makes live and lets die (ECF-SMD, 247– 249). But if death escapes sovereign power, death becomes power’s limit, its nadir. Racism is the means by which biopower asserts its control over death. Thus, biopower has two modalities, making live and making die, putting to death, as part and parcel of an economy of life: “[R]acism justiies the death-function in the economy of biopower” (ECF-SMD, 258). In the age of biopolitics, then, we should talk simultaneously about biopower and necropower, or thanatopower. In an important interview with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow conducted in 1983, Foucault responded

to the question of whether he “should be writing a genealogy of bio-power” in light of his recent preoccupations with the “genealogy of problems, of problèmatiques,” by

saying: “I have no time for that now, but it could be done. In fact, I have to do it” (EEW1, 256). This answer is perhaps coy, as in fact most of his work through the late seventies and early eighties had been a genealogy of modalities of biopower. In this same interview, Foucault identiies three possible domains of genealogy: “First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a ield of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents” (EEW1, 262). A genealogy of biopower would be part of a historical ontology of how we have constituted ourselves as objects of medical power-knowledge, how we govern ourselves as living entities, and how we relate to ourselves in terms of an ethics of life, a practice of life that is both a subjection and also resistance. In the Collège de France course from 1978–1979, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” Foucault set out to discuss biopolitics in relation to the history of governmentality, albeit without referring to biopower directly, though noting that in order to understand biopolitics we have to understand power: “The term itself, power, does no more than designate a [domain] of relations which are entirely still to be analyzed, and what I have proposed to call governmentality, that is to say, the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power” (ECF-BBIO, 186). The concept of biopower thus must be studied from within three different moments in Foucault’s work: in terms of an “analytics of power,” that is to say, in terms of the transformations of sovereign power between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries; in terms of what he called the “history of governmentality”; and in terms of a historical ontology of what he called the era of biopower.

Of all the places where Foucault discusses how his work is not about a theory of power but about the analysis of power relations, perhaps the most incisive and elucidating is “The Subject and Power,” which he wrote in the early 1980s. In this

46 / Eduardo Mendieta

work, Foucault states that an analytics of power “demands that a certain number of points be established”:

1.) The system of differentiations that permit one to act upon the actions of others; 2.) The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the actions of others; 3.) Instrumental modes: whether power is exercised by the threat of arms, by the effects of speech, through economic disparities, by more or less complex means of control; 4.) Forms of institutionalization: these may mix traditional conditions, legal structures, matters of habit or fashion (such as one sees in the institution of the family); 5.) Degree of rationalization: the bringing into play of power relations as action in a ield of possibilities may be more or less elaborate in terms of the effectiveness of its instruments. (EEW3, 344–345)

In this differentiation of “points,” one can see that Foucault means that in order to analyze power without rendering it an institution, or “something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away” (EHS1, 94), one must see “why the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to a series of institutions or even the study of all those institutions that would merit the name ‘political.’ Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social” (EEW3, 345).

Biopower therefore cannot be reduced to the study of one particular institution, be it the modern medicalized hospital, the Polizei, the rise of the welfare state, the modern

psychiatric ward, or even the rise of the eugenic state, which became nefariously epitomized in the Nazi state. Nor can it be reduced to the set of differentiations that operate under biopolitics, those that are made under the rule of the norm: healthy versus pathological. Nor still can it be reduced to the analysis of the way in which biopower aims to both normalize and regularize, discipline and control. Biopower also cannot simply be analyzed in terms of the degree of rationalization that may be achieved in terms of modes of mathematization through statistical analysis of regulatory control. Power is produced, circulated, augmented, diffused, and made eficacious, but also resisted, countered, opposed, and refracted, diverted by the ield of relations that is established among institutions, disciplines, and rationalities, with their respective subjects of discipline and control, modes of knowing and rendering into objects of knowledge, and calculus of maximization of governmentality with the least expenditure of force. An analytics of biopower, to put it positively, therefore requires that we be attentive to the ield of forces that is constituted by the emergence in the late eighteenth century of a series of disciplines, objects of knowledge, modes of analyzing, and set of preoccupa-

tions. Biopolitics, which attends to the human being as a member of a species, generates biopower through its dispositifs: sexuality, race, productivity, health, mortality, fertility,

and so on. If one of the key aspects of biopolitics is the treatment of humans as a population, then biopower is what fashions, monitors, surveys, controls, and secures populations in terms of a calculus of forces: health, hygiene, and vitality, but also inirmity,

BIOPOWER / 47

sickness, old age, vice, and degeneracy. Biopower is generated by the emergence and interaction among the ields of the general vitality of populations, their pathologies, and everything that may affect both either positively or negatively: the environment, whether it be determined by nature or humans (i.e., geography and the urban setting), nutrition, and so on. Biopower thus is also generated by all those institutions that attend to the disciplining of individuals and the control of a population in terms of either normalization or regularization: schools, barracks, prisons, and hospitals, but also the philanthropic, government, and nongovernment agencies that monitor whom we marry, whether we are healthy, whether we have been vaccinated, everything that falls under the general umbrella of “public health.” Death, however, as that which is internal to life, the very manifestation of life, is also a concern of biopolitics. It can be said that for Foucault what characterizes the age of biopolitics is that death itself is now an object of an economy of life. The political economy of health, the general politics of life, assumes two extreme forms under the same continuum: life and death. The politics of life, biopolitics, is a politics of death, a thanato-politics. The politics of health has as its Janus face a politics of pathology. This dual aspect of biopower is eerily illustrated at the extreme ends of its excesses: absolute power over life turns into absolute power of death, and vice versa. For Foucault this is illustrated in the absurdity of nuclear weapons: either sovereign power “uses the atom bomb, and therefore cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life” or “at the opposite extreme, you no longer have a sovereign right that is in excess of biopower, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign right” (ECF-SMD, 253–255). This excess of biopower appears when humans can generate, modify, and proliferate life, such that human life itself ceases to be human and becomes monstrous and beyond human sovereignty. The threat of nuclear war and the possible abolition of humanity by biotechnology – which is nothing but a manifestation of biopolitics – exhibit brilliantly how biopower is a power over life and death inasmuch as it makes live by killing and kills by making live. Nuclear weapons and biotechnology, whether as positive genetic engineering or negative eugenic modiication of the human genotype, are the two extremes within which all life is determined in a new way of gen-

erating power.As excesses of biopower, nuclear annihilation and biotechnological chaos are headings in a new chapter in biohistory.

In the Collège de France from 1977 through 1979, which Foucault says should have been called a “history of governmentality” (ECF-STP, 108), the analysis of biopower in terms of an analytics of sovereign power turns into an analysis of biopower in terms of the “governmentalization of the state” in particular and of governmentality in general. One of the consequences of biopolitics, as the control of populations through mechanisms of regulation and security, is that it makes the problem of “sovereignty even more acute” (ECF-STP, 107). The transformation of sovereign power between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is no longer the replacement of sovereign power by something like biopower. Rather, as Foucault notes, what we have is a “triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management” (ibid.).

48 / Eduardo Mendieta

Within this triangle, however, there is the preeminence of a type of power that is called “government.” Thus, now biopower has to be seen as a dispositif (apparatus) of the governmentalization of the state and the statiication (étatisation) of society.

Biopower is now generated by government, where this is to be understood as government over others and over ourselves that exhibits a particular calculus: to govern

best by governing least. Biopower is now generated and circulated by the instruments that are internal to what it aims to direct (diriger): the life of a population. Biopower

directs that which is both singular and collectivized, individuated and massiied. This

is power that attends to every individual while never losing sight of the whole: Omnes et singulatim (EEW3, 298). Biopower as a modality and operationality of power that

is generated and circulated through attention to the life of populations has its genealogy in pastoral power as well as in raison d’État. The dispositifs (apparatuses) of natality,

sexuality, race, health, mortality, diet, and so on have descended from the processes by means of which the state has been governmentalized; that is, submitted more and more to the logic internal to that which the state attends to and less by the logic that is internal to the state itself. The governmentalization of the state has meant, simultaneously, the statiication of society (ECF-STP, 109). Biopolitics is the acme of this dual process by means of which the development of the lives of the individuals qua members of a living species, a population, entails simultaneously “the strength of the state” (EEW3, 322). This strengthening of the state, this statiication of society, which makes the micropowers of the state more capillary and diffused through society, is governmentality. Governmentality is but the synergy of the “encounter between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self” (EEW1, 225). The analysis of biopower in terms of governmentality turns, then, into a study of political rationality and technologies of the self.

Foucault famously claimed toward the end of his life that “it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research” (EEW3, 327). There is a way

in which all of Foucault’s work can be read as prodigiously creative exercises in the study of different forms of subjectiication, of becoming and being made into a subject

(i.e., technologies of the self). The general study of these different technologies of the self Foucault called “hermeneutics of the self” (EEW1, 225; ECF-HOS). The eschewal of a theory of power for an analytics of power relations always meant to refer us back to the dual issues of subjection and subjectiication, of domination and resistance, of control and revolt. To ask about the “how” of power rather than the

“what” or “whence” of power means to direct our critical attention to processes of subject formation; it means to “give oneself as the object of analysis of power relations

and not power itself” (EEW3, 339). Foucault’s works thus should be understood as genealogical analyses of different technologies of the self, of political technologies of subjection and subjectiication. When he answered Dreyfus and Rabinow that there are “three possible axes of genealogy” (EEW1, 262) that focus on three historical ontological domains (knowledge, power, and ethics), Foucault was gesturing toward

BIOPOWER / 49

a critical analysis of how we have made ourselves what we have become. Toward the end of his life, Foucault began to conceive of his work as a “critical ontology of ourselves” (EEW1, 319), an “ontology of actuality” (FDE4, 688), and an “ontology of the present” (FDE4, 687). The genealogical study of technologies of the self is nothing but the study of how we have become who we have become, not to afirm the immutability of this identity but to disclose its contingency. A critical ontology of ourselves is a critical project that is genealogical in design and archaeological in method. This genealogically oriented critical ontology “will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (EEW1, 315–316). A genealogy of technologies of the self, as a critical ontology of ourselves, aims to give impetus to the “undeined work of freedom” (EEW1, 316). We can now discern a different meaning of biopower and biopolitics, not one that is negative and proscriptive but positive and prescriptive. If biopower refers to a modality of governmentality, the general art of governing others and oneself, in which there is a superseding of the dichotomy of society and state (the governmentalization of the state is at the same time the statiication of society), then a politics of life can also signify a form of living, a mode of life, a certain art of living, which can become the locus of power production itself. Life itself can become the germ of a counterpower, counter-conducts, or counterpractices. “There is no power without potential refusal or revolt” (EEW3, 324). Power relations cannot be separated from “freedom’s refusal.” “At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom” (EEW3, 342). If biopower is a modality of power that aims to control and regularize the life of the individual as a member of the human species, life itself can be the place whence a counter-biopower can be enacted. If biopolitics then marks the transition between politics and ethics, then biopower and thanatopower are met by an intransigent freedom that fashions new, critical, emancipatory forms of living and dying. Biopower incites a new art, techne, of living.

Eduardo Mendieta

See Also

Biopolitics

Death

Governmentality

Life

50 / Eduardo Mendieta

Politics

Power

Sovereignty

Suggested Reading

Bernasconi, Robert. 2010. “The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Bio-power within the History of Racisms,” Bioethical Inquiry 7:205–216.

Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. 2006. “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1, no. 2:195–217.

52 / John Protevi

Order of Things: the key move in the shift from natural history to biology is from the tabular classiication of visible surface properties to internal functions and temporal processes. The move to organic functions as the essence of life is the revealing of a temporal dimension. In a celebrated archaeological tour de force, Foucault shows how Cuvier is the decisive break; by positing organic structure as prior to taxonomy, Cuvier could isolate the functions rather than the properties (size, shape, location, etc.) of organs. With Cuvier, life becomes a functional system and a science of life, modern biology, is possible.

We will see this move from surface display to internal temporality in the genealogical register of Discipline and Punish (to which we now turn), a move from the surface of the body on which torturers and executioners display the power of the sovereign to the internal forces of bodies, which disciplinary practices harness and make work together. The titles of two key chapters of Discipline and Punish indicate our itinerary: from “the body of the condemned” on the scaffold of the sovereign to “docile bodies” trained in disciplinary institutions.

Discipline and Punish presents itself as a study of different stages in the “political economy” of the body, in which it is always “the body and its forces, their utility and docility, their distribution and their submission” that are at stake (EDP, 25). Foucault’s focused treatment of the body in Discipline and Punish is to be distinguished from the “history of the body” others have attempted, which considers the relation of politics and the biological reality of human populations (ibid.; this is what will later be treated as “biopolitics” by Foucault in volume one of The History of Sexuality and in the lecture course published as Security, Territory, Population). Here in Discipline and Punish, however, Foucault is interested in how the “body is also directly involved in a political ield” (ibid.); that is, how, via a “political technology of the body,” the body “becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected [assujetti] body” (EDP, 26). To conduct this investigation, we need to thematize “a micro-physics of power, whose ield of validity is situated in a sense between these great functionings [social institutions and state apparatuses] and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces” (ibid.).

We should note the way in which the political technology of the body inherent in disciplinary practices gives birth to the modern “soul” (âme) (EDP, 29). The modern soul is a reality formed via discursive and nondiscursive practices targeting the body in the disciplinary matrix of the human sciences. The modern soul is “psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness” (ibid.); in Discipline and Punish, the soul is the seat of the criminal behind the crime, and in volume one of The History of Sexuality that of the homosexual behind the act. The modern soul is historically constituted; it is the “present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body” (ibid.). The modern soul is no religious iction; it “has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects”

Body / 53

(ibid.). In tracing the political economy of the body, in particular, in focusing on the genealogy of the disciplinary “political technology of the body,” we see “the historical reality of this soul ... [which] is born ... out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint” (ibid.).

In Discipline and Punish, we ind three different dispositifs (apparatuses) of the political economy of the body as a target of punishment: those in which the predominant form is sovereign power, reform punishment, or discipline. For sovereign power, the body of the criminal tortured on the scaffold is the scene whereby the might of the sovereign can be displayed. For the reformers, the body displayed in the punitive city is the site where the idea of punishment could be linked to the idea of the crime. For discipline, bodies are malleable; they are what is to be rendered docile so that productivity increases while political resistance decreases.

Foucault’s treatment of the body as a target of sovereign power produces the gut-wrenching and unforgettable opening passage of Discipline and Punish. It both describes the way in which the torture and destruction of the body of the criminal displays the dissymmetry of power that reveals sovereign might and reminds us that the bodies of the spectators were essential to the dispositif (apparatus) of sovereign power. Sovereign power is quite literally terroristic (EDP, 49); we can speculate, though Foucault does not thematize this dimension, that the terror of the spectators rests on a bodily sympathy, a sharing of the pain of the victim (“feelings of terror”: EDP, 58). But this sympathy was both the basis of terror and the basis for possible revolt against the agents of the crown (EDP, 58–65). This is the danger of the scaffold that the reformers thought was too much to risk (EDP, 63).

The body for the reformers was only a means of producing signs, part of a “semio-technique of punishment” (EDP, 103). (Foucault does discuss the “social body” in this context as a term for society [e.g., EDP, 80, 92, 139] but it is only a igure of speech, notwithstanding an interesting reference to the “homeostasis” of the social body in volume one of The History of Sexuality [EHS1, 107].) For the reformers, it was not the body that was of interest; what counted was the juridical subject as constituted in social contract theories. Foucault encapsulates the move from the tortured body subjected to sovereign power to the juridical subject that was the focus of the reformers in a justly famous statement: “[F]rom being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights” (EDP, 11). For the reformers, the body was only a support for life, so capital punishment was simply the deprivation of the right to life (ibid.). This presents us with the logic of the guillotine, which would take life via minimal contact with the body (EDP, 13).

The reformers failed to take hold; the focus of Discipline and Punish, what makes it a classic, is the analysis of discipline. With the disciplines, the classical age “discovered the body as object and target of power” (EDP, 136). The body is a machine, though not simply a mechanism; the disciplined body is not simply a “mechanical body – the body composed of solids and assigned movements” (EDP, 155). The