Topic > "Biopower today": a summary

In the last chapter of History of Sexuality vol. 1 and in several conferences at the Collège de France in 1976, Michel Foucault introduces and explains what he calls "biopower". first, according to Foucault , the right of "death and power over life" resided in the figure of the sovereign, and generally fell within the sovereign's right of confiscation (property, goods, life, etc.), becomes, since the classical age, one element among the many that aimed to manage, optimize, control and regularize the old sovereign right, which was essentially "take life or let live", is reformulated as the power to "make live or let die", in other words. which focuses on an in-depth investment in life, health and longevity, delimits it by configuring itself along two axes. The first is the anatomopolitics of the human body, which seeks to generate the individual a 'docile body' which can then be inserted into social mechanisms. And the second is a “population biopolitics” that looks at the human species as a social category and focuses on regularization and normativeization through issues of birth, morbidity, etc. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose take up the above concept of biopower and try to define it as "more or less rationalized attempts to intervene in vital aspects." characteristics of human existence. The vital characteristics of human beings, as living creatures who are born, mature, inhabit a body that can be trained and enhanced, and then get sick and die. And the vital characteristics of collectives or populations composed of such living beings." They assume that these «embrace all specific strategies and contestations on problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality; on forms of knowledge, authority regimes and desirable, legitimate and effective intervention practices'. These may include: a) Single or multiple truth discourses on the "vital" nature of human beings and a network of statements by people or institutions considered authorities on the same topic. b) Interventionist strategies on the health of populations or other biosocial collectives such as race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.c) "Modes of subjectivation", or practices and technologies of the self centered on the question of the life and health of the individual, of the population or of some other biosocial collective. We try to distinguish this formation from that of Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri. “Biopower” in Hardt and Negri's work is seen as an extraction of “surplus value” from human life that serves to consolidate global domination, i.e. “Empire.” It is also distinguished from Giorgio Agamben's concept of "biopower" - through which subjects become citizens and enter politics - which according to Rabinow and Rose focuses exclusively on the politics of death (which has the concentration camp as its ultimate form) as the opposite to the politics of life. Furthermore, Rabinow and Rose delimit the field of activity of biopower, which they identify as configured along the lines, using Gilles Deleuze's terms, of the “molar” and the “molecular”. In the era of the welfare state, they argue, it was the “molar” form of biopower that was privileged, even in liberal states, around concerns as diverse as health care, housing standards, health education, immigration control , etc. , today coupled with global "molar" interventions by bodies such as the World Bank, the European Union, etc. They are also situated with the decline of the "social" as a site of national intervention in the liberal society of the West, the emergence of newcollective formations. They seek to formulate the effects of biopower in contemporary society as well as its field of action by outlining areas around which different aspects of contemporary biopower can be placed: that of race, reproduction and genomic medicine. Rainbow and Rose place the question of race at the center of the genealogy of biopower. Race, they argue, provides a central window into the genealogy of biopower. Race, they argue, provides a window into the question of storytelling, national health, international competitiveness (culminating in the so-called war of the nations), etc. They question the pre- and post-Darwinian biologization of race in the nineteenth century and link up to the problems of degeneration, racial suicide, etc. of the late 19th century, etc., culminating in the eugenic strategies of the 20th century. Then they cite the discrediting of racist speeches after the Second World War, whereby the "truth value" hitherto accorded to quasi-scientific racist statements is denaturalized. Subsequently, race evolves as a key socioeconomic category and has much to do with issues such as federal funding and identity politics. However, Rabinow and Rose claim what they see as a re-emergence of "race" as "biological truth", this time through a 'molecular' gaze. They cite research conducted in modern genomics to arrive at a "scientific" understanding of biological diversity. Here we use samples identified with respect to the population of origin, making use of the nineteenth-century racial typology. This creates space for biological differences between populations that may have significance in terms of factors such as susceptibility to disease. These, they note, “immediately open up a new way of conceptualizing population differences in terms of geography and ancestry, at the molecular level.” As regards the success linked to reproduction, the contemporary effects of biopower start from the initial delineation of the same by Foucault. While Foucault identified “race” as a fictional organizing principle for body- and population-centered technologies, Rabinow and Rose identify a decoupling of various practices and knowledges related to sexuality and reproduction. The realm of reproduction has configured various knowledge and technologies around itself that have little to do with sexuality. Here we list, in particular, the different lines along which contemporary issues on reproduction take place. First, reproduction is seen in terms of its economic and political consequences: overpopulation, population management, etc. Second, it is seen in terms of abortion politics, which are generally context specific. And third, it is viewed through a reproductive choice-related issue that views infertility as a treatable disease. Biopolitical strategies with respect to the above manifest themselves on the molar pole variously as population control campaigns, such as those in India, China and South East Asia. These operate in the fields of demography and economics and can take the form of birth control and sterilization (such as the sterilization campaign in India) or limiting family size (such as the one-child policy in China). The above is different from the eugenics of the early 20th century. But one can also find a 21st-century variant of eugenics linked to public health, as in the case of campaigns in Cyprus to eliminate cystic fibrosis through marriage counseling. However, Rabinow and Rose comment on the lack of evidence to suggest that the forms of strategies,”.