"Biopower Today": an Outline

In the last chapter of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 as well as in several of the 1976 College de France lecture, Michel Foucault introduces and expounds on what he calls “biopower”. While earlier, according to Foucault, the right of ‘death and power over life’ resided with the figure of the sovereign, and was generally part of the sovereign’s right to seize (property, goods, life, etc.), it becomes, since the classical age, one element among many that sought to manage, optimize, control and regularize the social fabric. The old sovereign right, which was essentially ‘to take life or let live’ gets reformulated as the power to ‘make live or let die’. Biopower, in other words, which focuses on a thorough investment in life, health and longevity. Foucault demarcates it to be configured along two axes. The first being the ‘anatamopolitics of the human body’, which seeks to generate at the level of the individual a ‘docile body’ that can then be inserted into social mechanisms. And the second being a ‘biopolitics of the population’ which looks at the human species as a social category and focuses on regularization and normativisation through issues of birth, morbidity, etc.

Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose take up the above concept of biopower and seek to define it as

‘more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital 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 augmented, and then sicken and die. And the vital characteristics of collectives or populations composed of such living beings’.

They take these ‘to embrace all the specific strategies and contestations over problematisations of collectives human vitality, morbidity and mortality; over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority an practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious’. These may include:

a) Single or multiple truth discourses about the ‘vital’ nature of human beings and a network of utterances by persons or institutions considered authorities on the same subject.

b) Interventionist strategies upon the health of populations, or other biosocial collectives such as race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc.

c) ‘Modes of subjectificaion’, or the practices and technologies of the self which are centered on the issue of the life and health of the individual, population, or some other biosocial collective.

They seek 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 which serves to consolidate global domination i.e. ‘Empire’. It is also distinguishes from Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘biopower’-by which subjects become citizens and enter politics - which is seen by Rabinow and Rose o narrowly concentrate only in the politics of death (which has the concentration camp as its ultimate form) as opposed to the politics of life. Further, Rabinow and Rose demarcate the field of operation of biopower, which they locate as being configured along the lines of, using terms from Gilles Deleuze, ‘the molar’ and the ‘molecular’. In the era of the Social State, they claim, it was the ‘molar’ form of biopower that was privileged, even in liberal states, around concerns as diverse as medical provision, housing standards, health education, immigration controls, etc, which have, today been coupled with global ‘molar’ interventions by bodies such as the World Bank, the European Union, etc. They situate, moreover, with the decline of the ‘social’ as a site for national intervention in the liberal society of the West, the emergence of the new collective formations.

They seek to formulate effects of biopower in the contemporary society as well as its field of operation by delineating here realms around which several aspects of contemporary biopower can be located: that of race, reproduction and genomic medicine.

Rainbow and Rose situate the question of race to be central to the genealogy of biopower. Race, they claim, provides a window central to the genealogy of biopower. Race, according to them, provides a window into question of narration, national health, international competitiveness (culminating in the so called war of nations), etc. They race the pre-and post- Darwinian biologization of race in the nineteenth century and link it up to later nineteenth century issues of degeneracy, race suicide, etc. which culminated in strategies for eugenics in the twentieth century. They then cite a post World War II discrediting of racialist discourses, whereby the ‘truth value’ hitherto accorded to quasi-scientific racialist claims is denaturalised. Subsequently, race evolves as a key socio-economic 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 within modern genomics to arrive at a ‘scientific’ understanding of biological diversity. Use here is made of samples which are identified with respect to population of origin, making use of nineteenth century racial typology. Space for biological differences among populations hence gets created which can have significance in terms of factors such as susceptibility to disease. These, they observe ‘immediately open up a new way of conceptualizing population differences in terms of geography and ancestry-at the molecular level’.

With respect to the success related to reproduction, contemporary effects of biopower depart from the initial delineation of the same by Foucault. While Foucault located ‘race’ as a fictitious orgainising principle for technologies centered on the body and on the population, Rabinow and Rose locate a decoupling of various practices and knowledge pertaining to sexuality and reproduction. The realm of reproduction has configured around itself various knowledge and technologies that have little to do with sexuality. They enumerate, in particular, here different lines along which contemporary issues on reproduction occur. First, reproduction is viewed in terms of its economic and political consequences: Overpopulation, demographic management, etc. Second, it is seen in terms of the politics ‘of abortion, which are by and large context-specific. And third, it is viewed through a related issue of reproductive choice which considers infertility as an illness that is curable.

Biopolitical strategies with respect to the above manifest themselves on the molar pole variously as campaigns for population control, such as those in India, China and South East Asia. These operate within the fields of demographics and economics and can take the form of birth control and sterilization (such as sterilization campaign in India) or limitation on family size (such as China’s one child policy). The above are different from eugenics of the early-twentieth century. But there can also be found a twenty-first century variation of eugenics linked to public heath, such 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 that suggests that the above forms of biopolitical strategies have as heir end management of populations. They can be linked rather to a catering of the creation and expansion of pharmaceutical markets:

‘there is no evidence to suggest that the forms of biopolitics that are taking shape around these have, as their strategic objectives, wholesale management of population qualities. Their logic is different, and notably involves attempts to develop and maximize targets for pharmaceutical markets and other health care interventions which entail enrolling individuals, patient groups, doctors and political actors in campaigns of disease awareness and treatment in the name of the maximisation of quality of life’.

The realm of genomic medicine, on the other hand, is cited as being a newly emergent field which has witnessed large-scale investment by national governments, pharmaceutical companies and patient groups. What is at stake is a potentially alternate biopower configuration. They cite the example of the research of Celera Diagnostics which is aimed at providing pre-symptomatic diagnosis. They cite as well the example of the development of ‘pharmacogenics’ which targets neuronal mechanisms that underline despression, to point towards a possible creation of ‘a modified biopolitical rationality in relation to health […], in which knowledge, power and subjectivity are entering into new configurations, some visible, some potential’.

They conclude by recognizing that ‘the economy of contemporary biopolitics operates according to logic of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die. With the development of ever more sophisticated, cheaper and readily available forms of [for instance] genetic testing, biopolitics at both poles-the molar and the molecular-might well be changing’. Contemporary biopolitics they thus surmise combines variously local impulses and supra-national institutional policies. Thus, what is required for the same according to Rabinow and Rose, is not simply a celebration or a renunciation, but ‘empirical investigation and […] inventive development, [which] would surely take its place as a key part in an analytical toolkit adequate to the diagnosis of what Gilles Deleuze has termed “the near future”.