"Society Must be Defended" - 17 March 1976 - Michel Foucault

"Society Must be Defended" - 17 March 1976 - Michel Foucault

Question!?

How do we understand the operation of biopower/biopolitics in the modern state? In the modern era of globalization? Does the state still serve the same function? How might we understand power to have intensified?

So where do we see the intersection of these mechanisms of power - disciplinary and regulatory?

• Foucault looks to the middle-class town:
• Disciplinary mechanisms that localized families and individuals, spatial layout leading to policing and surveillance
• Regulatory mechanisms applied to population as a whole, encouraging patterns of saving related to home ownership, old age pensions, hygiene, health insurance, etc.

Sexuality expresses this duality as well

• Obsessively focuses on the individual body
• Also takes place in broad biological processes – procreation, fertility, etc.
• “Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet” (251-252).
• The element that circulates between the body and the population, and which makes it possible for power to control these two fields (disciplinary and regulatory), is the norm
• "The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation" (253)

The power over life in general: Disciplinary and Regulating

The power to regularize

Intensifying Still: Biopower

1st Domain:

Population Health

• Ratios of births to death
• Fertility rates
• Rates of production
• Introduction to demographics:
• Identifying phenomena of birth control practices
• Morbidity trends
• concerned not with epidemics (temporary disasters that caused multiple deaths) but endemics – the form, nature, extension, duration, and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population
• The development of medicine whose main function is now public hygiene
• medicalization of the population

Biopolitics' Domains

(Objects of knowledge)

From the power of the Sovereign, to power's hold over life

[As they appeared in the late 18th and early 19th century]

• In the second half of the 18th century, we see a new technology of power that is not disciplinary (although it does not exclude disciplinary power - It modifies it, infiltrates it, embeds itself in disciplinary techniques
• This new power, rather than applied to individual bodies, is applied to person-as-living-being: Person as species
• This power is addressed to a multiplicity of people to the extent that they form a global mass affected by overall, generalizable processes
• Individualizing to massifying
• No longer an anatomo-politics of the human body but a biopower of the human race.

2nd Domain: Rational Coping Mechanisms

1. Biopolitics deals with the population as a political and scientific problem. The population is a biological problem and thus, it is power’s problem

2. Biopolitics addresses the phenomena of events that occur within a population that exists over a period of time

3. Biopolitics introduces mechanisms that include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures

• The objective of these mechanisms is to allow for regularization of the population.
• Not to modify an individual insofar as they are an individual but to intervene at the level of generality

*Not disciplinary power over the individual but

regularizing power over the species

• The sovereign has right to life and death - the right to take life or let live
• Sovereign exercises this right through the right to kill
• The right of the sword

3rd Domain: Human-environmental relations

The introduction subtle, rational mechanisms to cope with accidents, infirmaries, etc.

• Charitable organizations
• Insurance
• Individual and collective savings
• Safety measures

"Control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live." (245)

• effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment
• The problem of the environment so far as it is not natural, but created and effected by the population - the urban problem

• Since biopower doesn't exclude disciplinary power, we end up with a regulatory technology of life and a disciplinary technology of the body
• Could see this shift as power’s response to demographic explosion and industrialization – Too many things were escaping the old mechanism of power
• Disciplinary power adjusts through surveillance and training
• Biopower intensifies mechanisms of power to reflect phenomena in population
• Foucault identifies this in two series: The body-organism-discipline-institutions series and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State (250)

War - what is it good for?

• The problem of war can be seen as a grid for understanding historical processes
• For Foucault, war can be understood primarily as a war between races
• This lecture/chapter shows how the theme of 'race' becomes something very different in the latter half of the 18th century: STATE RACISM
• More significantly, I think, Foucault's ideas here illustrate the intensification of power over the past few centuries, with the transformation of racism as one way of understanding this intensification

The Power to make live and let die

• Unlike sovereign power (power to take life or let live), biopower is the power to make live and let die
• Different from the sovereign's power of the right to kill, that is, the sovereign's power over death, biopower reaches its limits at death
• Power has a grip on death only in overall, general, statistical terms
• We might say biopower has no control over death, only a control over mortality
• Power literally ignores death

The intensification of power: Disciplinary power

• Foucault traces power through mechanisms, techniques and technologies (as opposed to at the level of political theory)
• In the 17th and 18th Centuries we see techniques of power that are primarily centered on the body
• From the sovereign right to kill, to the disciplinary mechanisms emerging in the 18th century, the individual body remains the object of power

"[I]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we saw the emergence of techniques of power that were essentially centered on the body, on the individual body. They included all devices that were used to ensure the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, their alignment, their serialization, and their surveillance) and the organization, around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility. They were also techniques that could be used to take control over bodies. Attempts were made to increase their productive force through exercise, drill, and so on. They were also techniques for rationalizing and strictly, economizing on a power that had to be used in the least costly way possible, thanks to a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports -- all the technology that can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor." (241-242)

From Jeffrey T. Nealon's "Foucault Beyond Foucault" P. 28

Century of Emergence: 17th 17th - 18th 18th - 19th

Mode of Power: Sovereign Social Discipline

Primary Actor: King Jurist Expert

Primary Target: Flesh Signs Capacities

Primary Hinge: Bodies Souls Training/Actions

Primary Practice: Ceremony Representation Exercise

Most Intense Form: Torture Reform Panopticism

Desired Outcome: Obedience Community Docility

Foucault's key questions!!!

The limits of biopower and the birth of state racism

• "If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective? How can a power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings”? (254)

• How, under these conditions, can a political power kill, call for deaths, and expose both its enemies and own population to death?

• "How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?"

If it is a power that has taken control of life in general - with the body as one pole and the population as the other - we can see the paradoxes or limits of biopower in things such as the atom bomb – which is the power to kill people (the fundamental right of the sovereign), but also the power to kill life itself, thus to kill its own hold over power

“Either it (power) is sovereign and uses the atom bomb, and therefore cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life, as it has been ever since the nineteenth century. 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. This excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive. This formidable extension of biopower, unlike what I was just saying about atomic power, will put it beyond all human sovereignty” (254)

Enter Racism

...Racism continued

• For Foucault racism is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die
• Racism fragments, creates caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower ( Through hierarchies, dichotomies between good and inferior...)
• Allows for positive relation: “The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more”

• Racism becomes the precondition for exercising the right to kill
• Not necessarily murder, but exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or for some, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.
• "If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist."
• We can see how this alters the idea of war from not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race, "of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there represent to our race" (257).
• Regeneration of one's race through the death of another

In Conclusion

• Power intensifies to become power's hold over life (Sovereign - Disciplinary - Regulatory)
• Biopower takes life itself as its object of knowledge
• Since other forms of power do not disappear, but intensify, power operates on the individual body and the individual as species
• Racism allows for a fragmentation in the biological that is under power's control - racism allows biopower (and the State) to kill, and to actively let die.
• For the modern state to kill they must become racist - biopolitical
• Killing, in this sense, allows for a purification, or regeneration of the race
• Racism, war and biopower become intrinsically connected