# Introduction Foucault introduces biopolitics and biopower. ![[GHM102 Session 13 Global health politics and identity#^f388af]] Foucault concept of biopolitics orients itself not only against the idea of processes of life as a foundation of politics, but also maintains a critical distance from theories that view life as the object of politics. [[Politics is the way in which free societies are governed. Politics is politics and other forms of rule are something else]] Foucault use of biopolitics is not consistent though. He deploys it in three different ways: 1. Biopolitics stands for a historical rupture in political thinking and practice that is characterized by a rearticulation of sovereign power. 2. Foucault assigns to biopolitical mechanisms a central role in the rise of modern racism. 3. Distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance. # Making Live and Letting Die Foucault sees the particularity of this biopower in the fact that it fosters life or disallows it to the point of death, whereas the sover­eign power takes life or lets live (2003, 241). Repressive power over death is subordinated to a power over life that deals with living beings rather than with legal subjects. Foucault distinguishes “two ba­sic forms” of this power over life: the disciplining o f the individual body and the regulatory control of the population (1980, 139). The disciplinary technology to supervise and control the individual body had already emerged in the 17th century. This “anatomo-politics of the human body” (ibid.) conceives of the human body as a complex machine. Rather than repressing or concealing, it works by constitut­ing and structuring perceptual grids and physical routines. In con­trast to more traditional forms of domination such as slavery or serf­ dom, discipline allows for the increase of the economic productivity of the body, while at the same time weakening its forces to assure political subjection. It is exactly this coupling of economic and po­litical imperatives that define discipline and establish its status as a technology: > The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. (Fou­ cault 1977; 137- 138) In the second half of the 18th century another technology of power emerged, which was directed not at the bodies of individuals but at the collective body of a population. ==By “population” Foucault does not imagine a legal or political entity (e.g., the totality of individuals) but an independent biological corpus: a "social body” that is characterized by its own processes and phenomena, such as birth and death rates, health status, life span, and the production of wealth and its circulation. The totality of the concrete processes of life in a pop­ulation is the target of a "technology of security".== This technology aims at the mass phenomena characteristic of a popula­ tion and its conditions of variation in order to prevent or compensate for dangers and risks that result from the existence of a population as a biological entity. ==The instruments applied here are regulation and control, rather than discipline and supervision==. They define a “tech­nology which aims to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (ibid., 249). According to Foucault, the “apparatus of sexuality”— whose in­vestigation stands at the center of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 occupies a prominent position in this setting. ==Foucault is interested in sexuality because of its position “at the pivot of the two axes" be­ tween both forms of power (1980,145). Sexuality represents a bodily behavior that gives rise to normative expectations and is open to measures of surveillance and discipline. At the same time, it is also important for reproductive purposes and as such part of the bio­logical processes of a population (cf. Foucault 2003, 251-252)==. Thus, sexuality assumes a privileged position since its effects are situated on the microlevel of the body and on the macrolevel of a popula­tion. On the one hand, it is taken to be the “stamp of individuality”: “behind” the visible behavior, “underneath” the words spoken, and “in” the dreams one seeks hidden desires and sexual motives. On the other hand, sexuality has become “the theme of political operations, economic interventions . . . , and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was put forward as the index of a society’s strength, revealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor” (1980,146). [[Insights]] Interesting observation from [[Foucault]] on sexuality. The two axes of power are exercising power over behavior (surveillance and discipline) and the biological process of sex (reproductive purposes). From the individual perspective, thus sexuality is unique both in the microlevel of the body and on the macrolevel of a population. It is a stamp of individuality and the theme of political operation, economic interventions, and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility. In this context, the concept of the [[Global norms can change, and engaging in global norm contestation is a political act that happens in a political stage, for example MDGs were able to achieve norm contestation that extreme poverty is morally unacceptable|norm]] plays a key role. The an­cient “power over life and death” operated on the basis of the binary legal code, whereas biopolitics marks a movement in which the “right” is more and more displaced by the “norm.” The absolute right of the sovereign tends to be replaced by a relative logic of calculating, measuring, and comparing. A society defined by natural law is super­ seded by a “normalizing society”: > 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 enemy of the sovereign from his loyal subjects. It effects distributions around the norm. (1980,144) # Racism and Power of Death Biopolitics here stands not so much for the “ biological threshold of modernity” (1980, 143) as for the “ break between what must live and what must die” (2003, 254). Foucault’s working thesis is that the transformation of sovereign power into biopower leads to a shift from a political military discourse into a racist-biological one. Racism fulfills two important functions within an economy of biopower. ==First, it creates fissures in the social domain that allow for the division of what is imagined in principle to be a homogeneous biological whole (for example, a population or the entire human spe­cies). In this manner, a differentiation into good and bad, higher and lower, ascending or descending “races” is made possible and a divid­ing line established “ between what must live and what must die” (ibid., 254).'== Indeed, “to fragment, to create caesuras within the bio­ logical continuum” presupposes its creation (ibid. 255). In contrast to the traditional theme of race war, which is marked by the idea of a binary society divided into two opposing races, in the 19th century there emerged the idea o f a society “that is, in contrast, biologically monist” (ibid., 80). ==The idea of a plurality of races shifts to one of a single race that is no longer threatened from without but from within==. The result is a “racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization” (ibid., 62). From this perspec­tive, homogenization and hierarchization do not oppose one another but rather represent complementary strategies. ==The second function of racism goes even further. It does not limit itself to establishing a dividing line between “ healthy” and “sick," “worthy of living” and “not worthy of living.” Rather, it searches for “the establishment of a positive relation of this type: ‘The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause’ or ‘The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more’” (ibid., 255).== [[Insights]] It's like a zero sum-game between life and death. Racism facilitates that kind of thinking. # Political economy and liberal government Within this analytics of government, biopolitics takes on a deci­sive meaning. The “ birth of biopolitics” (the title of the 1979 lecture series) is closely linked to the emergence of liberal forms o f govern­ ment. Foucault conceives o f liberalism not as an economic theory or a political ideology but as a specific art of governing human beings. Liberalism introduces a rationality of government that differs both from medieval concepts of domination and from early modern state reason: the idea o f a nature o f society that constitutes the basis and the border of governmental practice. Political economy, which emerged as a distinctive form of knowl­ edge in the 18th century, replaced the moralistic and rigid principles of mercantilist and cameralist economic regulation with the idea of spontaneous self-regulation of the market on the basis of “natural” prices. Authors such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Fer­guson assumed that there exists a nature that is peculiar to govern­mental practices and that governments have to respect this nature in their operations. ==Thus, governmental practices should be in line with the laws of a nature that they themselves have constituted.== For this reason, the principle of government shifts from external congruence to internal regulation. The coordinates of governmental action are no longer legitimacy or illegitimacy but success or failure; reflection focuses not on the abuse or arrogance of power but rather on igno­ rance concerning its use. > The liberal art of government takes society rather than true state as its starting point and asks, "Why must one govern? That is to say: What makes government necessary, and what ends must it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its own existence?” (2008, 319). The formation of political economy and population as new po­litical figures in the 18th century cannot be separated from the emer­ gence of modern biology. Liberal concepts of autonomy and freedom are closely connected to biological notions of self-regulation and self-preservation that prevailed against the hitherto dominant phys­ical-mechanistic paradigm of investigating bodies. In the 1978 and 1979 lectures, Foucault conceives of “liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics” (2008, 22). This account o f liberalism signals a shift of emphasis in relation to his previous work. The theoretical displacement results from the self-critical in­ sight that his earlier analysis of biopolitics was one-dimensional and reductive, in the sense that it primarily focused on the biological and physical life of a population and on the politics of the body. Introducing the notion o f government helps to broaden the theo­retical horizon, as it links the interest in a “political anatomy of the human body” with the investigation of subjectivation processes and moral-political forms of existence. From this perspective, biopolitics represents a particular and dynamic constellation that character­izes liberal government. With liberalism, but not before, the ques­tion arises of how subjects are to be governed if they are both legal persons and living beings (see ibid. 2008, 317). Foucault focuses on this problem when he insists that biopolitical problems cannot be separated from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity. This means “[[liberalism]],” since it was in relation to liberalism that they assumed the form of a chal­lenge. How can the phenomena of “population,” with its specific ef­fects and problems, be taken into account in a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and individual free enterprise? In the name of what and according to what rules can it be managed? (2008, 317) #health-technology The reformulation of the concept of biopolitics within an analyt­ics of government has a number of theoretical advantages. First, such a research perspective allows for the ==exploration of the connections between physical being and moral-political existence==: how do cer­tain objects of knowledge and experiences become a moral, political, or legal problem? This is the theme o f the last volume of Foucaults History of Sexuality, at whose center stand moral problematizations of physical experiences and forms of self-constitution (1988, 1990). ==Contemporary examples are the figure of the human being and the legal construct of human dignity, both of which are coming under in­creasing pressure as a result of biotechnical innovation==. The problem has thus emerged, for example, of whether embryos possess human dignity and can claim human rights. Furthermore, on what natural assumptions do the guarantees of political and social rights depend? What is the relationship between different forms of socialization and biological traits? Such a perspective focuses our attention on the re­lationship between technologies and governmental practices: How do liberal forms of government make use of corporeal techniques and forms of self-guidance? How do they form interests, needs, and structures of preference? How do present technologies model indi­ viduals as active and free citizens, as members o f self-managing com­ munities and organizations, as autonomous actors who are in the position— or at least should be— to rationally calculate their own life risks? In [[neoliberalism|neoliberal]] theories, what is the relationship between the concept of the responsible and rational subject and that of human life as human capital? # Resistance and the Practices of Freedom For Foucault, resistance and practices of freedom are an organic element of biopolitical strategies. Processes of power that seek to regulate and control life provoke forms of opposition, which formulate claims and demand recognition in the name of the body and of life. > The disciplining of bodies and the regulation of the population caused new political struggles that did not invoke old and forgotten rights but claimed new categories of rights, such as the right to life, a body, health, sexuality, and the satisfaction of basic needs. Foucaults historical thesis is that biopolitical conflicts have become increasingly important since World War II and especially since the 1960s. Along­ side the struggles against political, social, or religious forms o f domi­ nation and economic exploitation, a new field o f conflicts emerged: struggles against forms o f subjectivation (see 2000b, 331~332-)- It is possible to detect a “developing crisis of government" (2000c, 295), which manifests itself in numerous social oppositions between men and women, conflicts on the definition of health and disease, reason and madness, in the rise o f ecological movements, peace movements, and sexual minorities. ==Taken together these developments signal that traditional forms of subjectivation and concepts of the body are los­ing their binding force.== These struggles are characterized by the fact that they oppose a “government of individualization" (2000b, 330). They call into question the adaptation of individuals to allegedly uni­versally valid and scientifically grounded social norms that regulate models of the body, relations of the sexes, and forms of life.