This a paper I had to write for a philosophy class I was kinda proud of it so I m posting it for all to enjoy (or not)
Biopower
Biopower is a form of power that takes for it s subject the life of the human species. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 Michel Foucault describes this mechanism of power in contrast to another form of power. He states that preceding biopower, there was a mechanism that was concerned with the power of life and death, a power consolidated in the sovereign who held the power to kill those he saw fit. This type of power began to wane with the increase in discourse during the classical period. These discourses were concerned with life. Foucault categorizes this as the entrance of life into history. With this entrance of life into history, into knowledge, power could no longer be explicitly concerned with the welfare of the sovereign and his right to kill; the concern of power would now be the life of the human species.
Foucault provides a couple of examples to illustrate the claim: war and capital punishment. He notes in the first example that though the concern is no longer the power of death, and if fact it is life, there have never been bloodier wars than those waged since the nineteenth century. Yet it is this type of war that exemplifies the transformation to a power concerned with life. This type of death is framed as having “a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone . . .” (137). The death penalty on the other hand goes into decline. Capital punishment, as well as war, was for a long time “the right of the sword” (137). It was in the domain of the sovereign’s power, which was conducted against those who committed acts against the law of the sovereign. This could no longer happen. The exercise of power is now aimed toward the maintenance of life, therefore the death penalty became rare. It remains today “by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal” (138). Therefore capital punishment is no longer framed as the right of the sovereign to protect “his will, his law, or his person” (137-38) it is instead framed as a means of protecting society. So as individual death by the government goes down, massacre goes up. It is this last fact, the increase in the bloodiness of war that is of particular interest to me. In the fast few years the world has quite explicitly seen the bloodiness of war, and in the following essay I will use Foucault's notion of biopower to analyze how the war in Iraq was executed and justified. Before I present my points I will further flush out the details of biopower as presented in Foucault's The History of Sexuality.
This power, centered on a concern to foster and maintain life, developed in two forms. Foucault notes that they are linked together in a number of relations, and refers to them as “two poles of development” (139). These poles are the discipline of bodies, and the regulation of the population. The first pole deals with the individual and his/her development. Bodies are seen as machines, with power focused on “its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls . . .” (139). This is manifest in what Louis Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses. The disciplining of bodies occurs in “universities, secondary schools, barracks, [and] workshops . . .” (140). The regulation of the population is reflected in things like demography and economics. It is concerned with “propagation, birth and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity . . . “ (140). These two poles are the muscle of biopower, this is how it is able to function. Instead of a sovereign exerting his power over a population, the tools of power work from within. This brings us to another important aspect of biopower.
Biopower is exercised from within a body of people. It is by norms, instead of the law, that people fall into line. They are no longer motivated by the imminence of death. Instead social norms present a paradigm of how to behave, and for what actions to take. In his essay “The Subject and Power,” Foucault states that power functions by acting upon actions. This is manifest in the function of norms as a structuring device for human populations. So instead of being coerced by threats, which would occur under a power structure concerned with death, the population is lead to certain actions and behaviors by the example of others. This is generated by social norms, and state apparatuses like schools. This does not mean that laws are subverted. On the contrary laws remain a force of social construction, but they begin to resemble social norms: “I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.” (144) So as the technology of power transitions to what Foucault calls biopower it becomes more normalizing. This is an important point for it illustrates how power is always working from with in society; it functions at the level of the people. As people advance in the sciences, new discourses arise, they influences the way people act, talk, shop, and govern. That’s the most important characteristic of biopower: it is able to regulate the population in every aspect of their life no matter their distance from the center of political power.
These last two paragraphs contain the reasons why sexuality becomes a significant force. If sexuality was not repressed, as Foucault argues, then biopower explains its proliferation. Sex “was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life” (145), in other words sex is a common ground where the disciplining of bodies and the regulation of the population meet. Through state apparatuses like schools the subject is indoctrinated in the division of gender, and what things can and cannot occur in the presence of the opposite gender. Through institutions like the medical and pharmaceutical industry the limits of healthy sexuality are discussed. For instance the advent of drugs like Viagra is stretching the limits of age in sexual conduct. Through norms people are guided in how they interact with their body, and how to interact with the bodies of others. If laws being to resemble norms this is true of laws related to sexuality and our bodies. In 1973 with the passage of Roe V. Wade through the Supreme Court, the issue of abortion became a pivotal legal and political issue. Because of this, women’s bodies and their reproductive function has become the center of political debate for decades. But the problem of sexuality is not the focus of this essay. I will not turn to the war in Iraq to illustrate how biopower has affected our lives today.
The first issue is related to the regulation of the population. Though there is a joke that the war in Iraq was waged because Saddam Hussein threatened to kill the current President’s father, in it not due to sovereign power of death that this war was mobilized. It is very much tied to “the existence of everyone” (137). The major point of justification for the invasion of Iraq was the claim that they were in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. This point is crucial for it goes beyond the material make-up of these weapons—though that is a concern that will be brought up as well—and is focused on the rhetorical devices used to describe them. “Mass Destruction” goes beyond any mere attack, it is not a matter of our borders being breach; it is a matter of the entire population being effected. Mass destruction is not calculated in number of bodies, it is measure in range of destructiveness. It is a matter of whole blocks, and entire cities demolished. When speaking in such immense terms the issue of instigating violence where the loss of life might possibly be calculated in the thousands doesn't seem so severe. It becomes a ratio: numbers of soldiers dead versus number of Americans threatened by nuclear, biological, or chemical attack.
This last point leads to another aspect of the weapons argument; the material existence of the weapons. It is certainly a huge issue to say that the entire population is at risk, but the how of this is crucial as well. The terms “biological weapon,” “germ warfare,” and “dirty bomb” become central elements for arguing towards such a war. Biological suggests something grotesquely Frankensteinian. Fear becomes rampant when there is a threat that something may invade ones body, alter the way one is used to it working; it is almost beyond death. This is a society obsessed with medicine, phobic of illness, and yet largely unable to pay for health care. The maintenance of the body is of utmost importance, so to allude that is might be threatened is an important tactic to motivation. Another line of rhetoric is the dirty bomb. It is key almost because it does not immediately effect. It is said that a dirty bomb could be set off in a street in a major metropolitan area, not directly harm any one, but the radio active material would be set adrift to effect people blocks away. This is a weapon that uses our own urban development against us, and when it attacks it could effect the very building blocks of life: DNA. These points are important because it is our own social make-up that allows them to be effective. Television bombards the population with new pharmaceuticals, the threat every year of a mutated flu virus, and health care plans we should all have. So already there is a concern for ones health, and its maintenance. Add to this the self regulation of the social body, and most people are instant experts on the workings of the enemy arsenal. But thats not all, the enemy is also just as important as the arsenal, which brings me to the next point.
In the wake of September 11th the population has had a major threat to its safety. This threat of course is terrorism. Terrorism, like weapons of mass destruction, in important due to the range of its threat; it has a long reach. Since September 11th we have seen the attacks in America, England, Spain, Iraq; there have been several threats of new attacks with in the U.S. and most recently Saudi Arabia. Our own vulnerabilities have been stressed by the news media: foreign embassies, ports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, food supplies etc . . . This gives a glimpse of a global threat; one that can arise at any moment, and occur at any place. So the best way power can maintain the subjugation of bodies and the regulation of the population is through a war on this mysterious global enemy. By engaging in a global war on terror the Bush administration has taken as its target the preservation of the American population. The focus is on the American people, the fact that we have been free of terror attacks, and the assurance that the insurgents in Iraq could have been terrorists with their target aimed at the United States instead of their fellow Iraqis. The preservation of the American people was inscribed into the war in Iraq by the administration's insistence on the implicating Saddam Hussein in the terrorist attacks of September 11th. This implication ties Hussein to Al Qaeda and thus ties together American anxiety over mass destruction, biological warfare, and global terrorism.
So far this analysis has relied on a hierarchal model of power, with influence coming from the top, but Foucault states that power actually comes from below. It comes from with in the social body. So to continue this analysis I will look at how our society enables such power to take hold and lead to such a devastating war.
One example of this comes from the “Support Our Troops” debate over who is considered a patriot. There are two sides to this, both claiming to “Support Our Troops,” but arguing a different point of view. This is not the only similarity between the two; both sides are concerned with the life of the subject of the debate: the soldier. On one side there are those who support the war and see this war as a means for the soldier to attain his livelihood. They are soldiers, there job is to go to war, therefore protest against the war is protest against the soldier; against the person behind the uniform. In this argument the very humanity of the soldier is brought forward: he/she is an American, a person, with a spouse and children to support, with a job that requires one to give ones self for their country. They are fighting for you and me, the well being of the entire population. The other side is against the war. They on the other hand see the war as a means to end the life of the soldier. They oppose the war claiming they have the interest of preserving the soldiers life in mind. Like the previously discussed position, on this side the soldier is humanized. He/She is a person, vulnerable like anyone else, with a family that will suffer if this soldier is gunned down in battle. It would seem that I have backed my self into a hole, bringing up opposition to the war in the same terms that justify it. But this is exactly my point. Foucault says this himself in The History of Sexuality: “More over, against this power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is on life and man as a living being” (144). It is the right of life that is being argued on both sides. This right of life only serves to further implicate both sides in the forces of biopower. To be so fully invested in a debate over life only further allows biopower to subjugate the bodies and regulate the population.
What then is the answer? How does one resist biopower? I must admit my own deficiency on answering this question. Foucault is not explicit about this point. All I can do is draw assumptions from claims made in Foucault's text. So what does Foucault say about resistance. One thing has already been mentioned. He says that resistance has usually come in the terms of biopower. As seen in the preceding example, resistance functions by invoking the same humanity, the life of the individual and the population, as those it rebels against. Foucault's most explicit reference to resistance comes in the last few pages of the text: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim . . . to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counter attack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex desire, but bodies and pleasures.” (157) What Foucault seems to be saying here is that we must reject speaking about sex. “We must break away from sex” so we must no longer engage with sex to fight the deployment of sexuality. He further qualifies this point on the following page. He discusses how ironic it it that there is so much noise made about sex, about liberating it, when in fact it was already liberated. The very presence of a discourse about sexual liberation is a product of biopower, a power structure that enabled the multiplicity of discourse on human sexuality. It seems that what needs to be done is reject the discourses of biopower; to no longer speak about life in order to release powers control of bodies and populations. Instead we should take for a rallying point “bodies and pleasures.” I admit I do not know what Foucault means by this. So instead of engaging with this point I will question Foucault's notion of “breaking away.” How could this be done? If the terms of the debate are already formed around life how can anyone reject this. It seems that one is forced to speak in these terms. Take for instance the debate over abortion. The terms of the debates inherently revolve about the woman's body, the fetus, and its status as a human being. By arguing on these lines the opposition has successfully chipped away at Roe v. Wade. How can pro-choice activists not engage in a debate on life when these terms have been set by the opposition in the political discourse on this issue?
