Space, Knowledge, Power, Discourse: Foucault on Biopower
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. The Foucault Reader: On Biopower 1984. New York, Vintage Books, 2010, pp. 258–289
Foucault has defined power with concepts such as ‘sovereign power’ where people enforce the sovereign’s right to rule over others and ‘disciplinary power’ in which discipline and obedience allow one to be disciplined to prevent opposition. Sovereign power is the right to enact power over life. Biopower is the technology of power that is used for managing humans in large groups. Biopower is split into anatomy politics of the body, which can be controlled using the population’s disciplinary power and biopolitical power.
The body’s anatomical politics such as birth, death and population control are managed through disciplinary means as the physical body is caught in objectification and constraint. This makes the subject a victim of dominance and objectification by the sovereign. The population’s biopolitical power also produces social categories that create a society that conforms to norms that serve a ‘vital’ population. With categories, anomalies are made and those who do not conform to the requisites of these social categories will be abandoned through disinvestment and juridical power.
The biopower correlates with capitalism as capitalism places bodies in the machinery of production in a controlled manner and the control of populations in economic means (Rabinow,1991). Biopower correlates to capitalism as it creates social categories and norms to which groups must conform to biopower created by the sovereign. Additionally, societal constructions such as race and gender are seen as tactics of biopower under capitalism through hierarchies. In the aspects of race, Nazism is one of the more cunning forms of power where social hierarchies and constructions of race based on the purity of blood determined their survival and quality of life; for non-Aryans, they were kept away in concentration camps and the sovereign, in this case through a dictatorship exercised the power to rob life.
Not only was biopower used as a weapon to rob away life but it was done through the improvement of healthcare to extend life. In Politics and Health of the 18th Century, Foucault wrote of ‘nosopolitics’ which is the mechanisms of power through medical means with support from the liberal structures of power and the health of the collective (Rabinow, 1984, pg 274). Foucault writes on how the sickness of the poor begins to figure into the relationship of the imperatives of labour to the needs of production (Rabinow, 1984, pg 277). This form of hierarchical power in nosopolitics rings true with the negligence of the homeless, the poor and the insane by alienating them and keeping them away from society.
He incorporates his thesis into understanding how the family is privileged in terms of access to healthcare for the sole reason of producing healthy children and how doctors bestow the ‘surplus of power’ through their expertise (Rabinow,1984, pg 283) unto doctors to observing, correcting and improving the social body while maintaining it in a permanent state of health (Rabinow,1984, pg284). By creating this vision to have a permanent state of health, constructions such as healthy vs unhealthy are made to discipline the body and punish those who do not conform through knowledge and expertise such as exercise and diet.
Through capitalism and the increased need for inoculations, medicine and knowledge of diet, exercise and healthcare, this system continues to effectively control all participants: both active and passive by merely playing along.
This summary was for a module Approaches to Theory (MLAC4088) which was convened by Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo
