The Concept of Biopower - Essay Example

Biopower Biopower is a concept that was developed by a French social theorist, scholar and historian, Michel Foucault. The term relates to the modern practice of the nations together with their regulation of their subjects by the use of diverse techniques for realizing the conquests of bodies and the control of people (Guesterson 23). In the works of In Foucault, biopower has been used to denote practices of risk regulation, public health, and regulation of heredity among other regulatory mechanisms usually linked less directly to the literal physical health. Biopower can also be understood to be the only privilege of the modern states to "make live or let die". This notion is different from the old form of rule of the independent power derived from the prehistoric Roman law that was "let live and make die" dictated by the individual strength of a monarch (Guesterson 24). According to Foucault, this form of attitude of a nation towards the lives of its subjects is a way of gaining understanding the novel information on power in the modern western society. Biopower, for Foucault, is a technology of authority. The unique feature of this political technology is its ability to allow for the control of the whole population (Guesterson 25). It is an important feature which is vital for the functioning of the contemporary nation-states, as well as capitalism. It also makes the emergence of these states possible. Biopower entails having power over bodies. This implies that it is a set of techniques through which the primary biological elements of the human species is considered to be the object of a general tactic of power, that is, political strategy (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 31). It explains how the modern western societies, from the 18th century, embraced the essential biological point that human beings are a species. Biopower concerns government issues of fostering life of its population (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 33). In this sense, it is perceived as an anatomy and politics of the human body, a universal body that is influenced by the general features that are unique to life such as birth, production, death, and illness, among others. In this perspective, biopower yields a universal disciplinary society. Also, in this standpoint, biopower produces regulatory governors through biopolitics of the entire population. According to Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 34, biopower is a type of power that regulates social life as it follows, absorbs, and interprets it from the interior. According to them, each and every individual not only embraces this power but also reactivates it for his or her harmony. They argue that the primary role of this power is to administer life. In their viewpoint, biopower is a situation whereby what is directly in power becomes the production as well as the reproduction of life itself. Biopolitical power is regarded as a control that spreads through the complexities of consciousness, as well as the bodies of the population and cuts across the whole social relations (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 38). An excellent example provided is the control of life at the molecular level that has been made possible by the arrangement of recombinant genetics and human genome. In the international pan capitalism, we dwell in a society of control and not one of discipline. In this society, biopolitical power encompasses the entire community. It yields the social body together with the individual agencies. This power is the basis of all productivity and hence the basis of life. In a society of control, the practice of authority is enforced through the use of machines that directly shape the brain in information networks and communication systems (Petryna 26). These machines also organize bodies through monitored activities and welfare systems toward an autonomous alienation state from the desire for creativity and a sense of life. Under global capital, biopower majorly generates power and wealth for others and is not under the control of an individual. How then do individuals take part in biopower? How does biopower express or manifest itself in people’s daily lives? It does so through the labor. Labor is all that individuals do for a living. This can be manual, mental, bodily labor, or affective labor (Petryna 29). Physical labor entails agricultural and factory labor, while mental energy may be immaterial labor or knowledge work. Affective labor deals with service, emotional, and maintenance of family, self, and community (Petryna 30). All these are said to be expressions or products of biopower. Biopower controls and yields the physical body as much as it controls the social body. The same resistance contained by the social body over the control of biopower adds to the function of biopower since it can only be yielded in the midst of the entire group of people all acting as one. Society, as well as each part of our existence, appears to have become a machine. For instance, production of food requires an enormous machine where factory farming for milk and beef is an ideal example. Another vast machine is educating children to become knowledgeable workers and the technocrats for the future (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 42). All these machines are interlinked. For instance, the department of science and technology in a university is linked to industrialized agriculture, food production, and food distribution networks. The society uses machines to both produce and become progressively mechanic itself with an increase in integration of the means of production into the bodies and minds of the society. Re-appropriation in this context, refers to having unrestricted access to and control over information, communication, knowledge, and effects since these are some of the fundamental means of biopolitical production (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 43). The mere fact that these productive machines are integrated into the society is not an implication that the society has control over them. Instead, society makes their alienation more injurious and vicious (Maguire, Frois & Zurawski, 45). The right to re-appropriation is essentially the society’s right to self-control and independent self-production. It is usually hard for individuals to think of how to resist all the detailed framework that we are deeply rooted and connected to an extent that we are not aware of how we are operating or functioning within it. How we can arrive at greater consciousness, imagine what it might look like to re-appropriate control of the self, and independent life are questions that can be addressed by a deeper understanding of biopower. Works Cited Maguire, M., Frois, C. And Zurawski, N. (eds). The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control. London: Pluto Books, 2014 Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Princeton University Press, 2002. Gusterson, Hugh. Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War. University of California Press, 1998. Read More