‘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 analysis of biopower aims at highlighting the introduction of a new element
both with respect to 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, turn into the contracting individual and the social
body constituted through the contract (whether voluntary or implicit).
There is a whole literature, which still constitutes the mainstream and hegemonic
paradigm in the teaching of political theory in our times, that adopts such
notions of the workings of power 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 had already shaken 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.
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. It rather acts on the population in
a preventive fashion, its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimising
life chances, and it 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= body-organism-discipline-institution is eventually
juxtapposed and substituted by the series= population-biological processes-regulatory
mechanisms-state, even though some elements such as the police are part both
of the first and the second, both of discipline and security.
The focus on the way Foucault defines biopower is due to the place it grants
to a discourse on subjectivity. The idea that a social function of knowledge
does not need to coincide with its truth value is not a novelty. Foucault
has little originality in stating that and pointing to the interrelation and
mutual constitution of practices of power and knowlegde. What is original
to his definition of biopower and discipline is the analysis of the implication
of applying that knowledge horizontally across society in the formation, or
the 'moulding' of subjectivities. His work on discipline and biopolitics is
where we find the most overtly 'political' emphasis. But his analysis of historical
discourses consistently addresses this issue too. Genealogies are carried
out within the framework of the valorisation of the positive force of power.
What they aim to show is 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 action-reaction chain that characterises
his notion of power/resistance challenged the idea that there is a possibility
to transcend one's position by positing a challenge from the outside. In biopolitics
this is impossible since there is no outside. Disciplinary power however is
actually surpassed in Foucault's comments on contemporary society. Now I want
to see if this makes sense and whether it is in the key of a post-disciplinary
understanding of power that I ought to analyse his writings on Ancient Greece
and through his idea of conduct. Where is this supposedly liberatory potential
of the care of the self, of this new ethos to be found/applied? In his later
writings Foucault seems to be saying that the resistance-power dichotomy is
superfluous. I am referring to interventions of his such as “Un systeme fini
face a une' demande infinie” where he analyses the welfare state and its decline.
His introduction of the power games language implies that we are witnessing
examples of a refusal to play and rejection of the very game in question.
These are the anarchic struggles. The response is equally new. 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. This creates a new function for power. It is the state of 'executive
power' or policing if you like, or 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 move seems important. 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.
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