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Biopower is part related to what Foucault calls “a history of the present”, “grasping the present in its contingency, unsettling it from its prejudices and exploding their hold on reality, understanding how we have become what we are rather than importing our prejudices on to the past, in the guise of their being eternal truths apprehended by a supra-historical intellect.”
With the term ‘biopower’ Foucault designates the set of mechanisms, techniques and technologies through which the basic biological features of the human species become the object of political strategies in modern Western societies. Biopower is, then, for Foucault the application of power to the human considered as a living being:
To gain a clearer appreciation of Foucault’s point, it is necessary to recall that prior to the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault’s genealogies of the modern modalities of power had concentrated on identifying what he called, most notably in Discipline and Punish, “disciplinary technologies”. These are techniques that emerge in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, and which are directed towards the individual human body understood as a machine, composed, or better, decomposable, into its various moving parts, which can then be rendered capable of performing work. According to Foucault, these technologies sought,
through various regimens and measures, to rule a multiplicity of men, that is, to impose a particular mode of being on men, by dissolving that multiplicity in to individual bodies, and at the level of the individual body, optimize its capabilities, extorting from it various forces, increasing its utility and docility, and integrating it into systems of efficient and economic controls. Disciplinary techniques of power include all those apparatuses and institutions which ensure the distribution of individual bodies in space and time, and which organise around these bodies a whole field of visibility, ordering them or rendering them orderable, in institutions such as universities, secondary schools, military barracks, and workshops.
Like disciplinary techniques and procedures, the technologies of biopower are addressed to a multiplicity, but they are addressed to that multiplicity in so far as it forms a global mass affected by the biological processes of life itself: birth and death, health and illness. To the techniques of discipline that came to hold sway over the human body and which are individualising are added the techniques and technologies of biopower which, on the contrary, but in a complimentary way, are massifying, directed towards humans in the genetic and species sense....Biopower is thus tied to the emergence of the discipline of statistical demography, and there begins the quantification of the phenomena of birth-rate, longevity, the reproductive rates and fertility of a given population, its state of health, patterns of diet and habitation.
Both disciplinary technologies and the techniques and mechanisms of biopower are forms of power over the body. The former, disciplinary technologies, centre on the individual body: they treat it as a machine, considering it as a being consisting of parts, organized in a certain fashion, requiring energy in order to operate and capable of producing certain effects, that is, of working. Decomposing it into its parts, and subjecting them to training, to discipline, it seeks to render the body both docile and utile. Biopower, on the other hand, focuses on the body as the vehicle of species life. Given the nature of the phenomena with which it is concerned it is
regulatory rather than disciplinary.
1
The understanding of biopower as connected to Foucault’s view leads one to
a. Actively probe the present rather than view it from a prejudiced third party stance.
b. See what we have become in the present as a natural outcome of our history.
c. See the present as a phase that is subject to continuous change.
d. Forget the past and understand our prejudices by importing them into the present.
2
The tone of the author is predominantly
a. Argumentative
b. Descriptive
c. Exhorting
d. Exposing
3
Which of the following would not be an example of the outcome/use of Biopower ?
a. Educating people on the need for family planning in response to statistics which show a surge in population growth.
b. A fine on anyone found crossing the railway tracks instead of using the overbridge , in response a rising number of rail accidents.
c. Measures to curb determination of the gender of the child during pregnancy in response to rising incidents of female foeticide resulting in gender imbalance in population.
d. Free vaccination for old people to ward off the threat of M2F8 FLU which affects humans beyond the age of 50 and impacts the mortality rate.
4
The difference between the disciplinary technologies and biopower is that
A. The former is utilizing the human body whereas the latter is aimed at utilizing an entire population
.
B. The former is aimed at utilizing the human body whereas the latter seeks to improve the standard of life as a whole.
C. The former treats the human body as a machine whereas the latter treats the human body as an instrument which ensures propagation of life.
a. Only A
b. A and B
c. B and C
d. A and C
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