What if Foucault was Right?
A brief primary source look at the concept of bio-power
What did Foucault have in mind when he coined the term bio-power? I’m going to tell you in less than 800 words because I’m cool like that.
In The Right of Death and Power Over Life1, Foucault describes bio-power as a power whose task is to take charge of life. (p. 266) In The Birth of Clinic2, Foucault writes about the accession of the individual — rational discourse is based less on the geometry of light than on the insistent, impenetrable density of the object … the gaze is passively linked to the experience of absorbing and mastering the object that’s the subject of rational discourse (p. xiv). The human body represents origin, space and distribution of disease (p. 3). Humans pose a particular conundrum because of their dynamism, at some point it becomes difficult to distinguish the disease state from the individual’s nature. So much of disease becomes a projection with little depth, then, doesn’t it? (p. 6)
What implications does projection of dis-ease onto the human being have for human relationships in society? Does it have any implications?
Noso-politics grapples with this necessary tension involving the objectification of a dynamic process, i.e. the individual body versus the collective body. Foucault discusses the juncture of the individual body with the collective one, with the transformation of government as having power over death to that of having power over life to distribute, measure and rank the living across the domain of economics — value and utility.
“life as a political object was … taken at face value and turned … against the system … bent on controlling it … life more than the law … became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning rights” (p. 267)
Bio-power, a power whose task is to take charge of life, played a pivotal role in the erection of capitalist society. Think about all the ways that the body politic regulates and manages the living body in order to perpetuate the system of production and the societal institutions that arose from it all. Foucault describes an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations (p. 262). He notes that the social body no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one sought to coordinate these two techniques of power, the role of ideology as being a vehicle for the development a theory of the integration of these two methods of bi-power into governance (p. 263).
So, bio-power simply describes the phenomenon that happened in modern western societies when technology exploded and the human body became a locus for power — its ranking, categorising, and distribution as economic unit. Foucault never intended to develop a theory of humanity, he stresses this repeatedly, he surely cannot be held responsible for the failure of the ideological right to grasp his historical observations. I’ll end with a quote from The Right of Death and Power Over Life, which I found in The Foucault Reader (see note 1).
But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. 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 norm3, 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. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life. (p. 266)
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Vintage books edition. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., 2010.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Princeton, N.J.: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2008.
Note in Foucauldian canon, the norm is manufactured by ongoing discourse over time, his is a rather cynical view of humanity and human nature and behaviour, in the aggregate based on historical analysis.