The result was a growing fear among the
bourgeoisie
that the "dregs" of society would eventually overtake them.
Foucault-Key-Concepts
ants and clerks planning the fine details of work, preparing instruction slips and managing records, subtended by teachers working intimately with workers to make sure that they carry out the tasks spelled out in the instruction slips as well as tool-room men preparing standard- ized implements for the execution of these tasks (ibid.
).
This structure nicely illustrates the network of gazes facilitating the play of hierarchi- cal observation.
Taylor's exposition of scientific management abounds with such examples of disciplinary power but it also de-naturalizes this modal- ity of power by demonstrating that disciplinary practices bound up with the application of scientific management have yet to take root, and that they are subject to great contestation (at the risk of belabour- ing the obvious, it is worth keeping in mind that if these disciplinary practices had taken root, Taylor would not have needed to compose Principles). Indeed, Taylor paints his vision of scientifically managed labour-processes on a canvas of sceptical employers as well as a mass of recalcitrant, if not openly hostile, workers. Against the disciplinary demand for maximized utility, we find in Taylor's narrative workers who threaten to strike, workers who intimidate managers and workers who damage machinery (ibid. : 49-52). Taylor is acutely aware of the prospect of inciting warfare within the interstices of the labour process. For this reason, he warns prospective practitioners against the hasty application of his principles of scientific management and insists that only a prolonged period of habituation will result in the successful application of these principles (ibid. : 128-35). To paraphrase Foucault, we could therefore say that the not so distant "roar of battle" (Foucault 1979: 308) resounds throughout Taylor's theory, suggesting that only an ensemble of deeply contested practices sustain the exercise of a dis- ciplinary power that strives to appear natural and spontaneous in the very bodies of individuals.
? 39
TH REE
Biopower
Chloe Taylor
French philosopher Michel Foucault is perhaps best known as a theorist of power. Foucault analysed several different types of power, includ- ing sovereign power, disciplinary power and the subject of the current chapter: biopower. In what follows, I will first provide an overview of biopower as Foucault conceives of it. This overview will distinguish biopower from sovereign and disciplinary power, identify and discuss distinctive characteristics of biopower and provide examples which illustrate these characteristics. The final section of the chapter under- takes an extended example of a particular occurrence of biopower within modern and contemporary Western societies.
Powers of life and death:from sovereign power to biopower
In The History ofSexuality: An Introduction (1990a) and in his 1975- 76 College de France course, Society Must Be Defended (2003) Foucault describes biopower as a power which takes hold of human life. In both these works Foucault traces the shift from classical, juridico-legal or sovereign power to two typically modern forms of power, discipline and biopower, as a shift from a right of death to a power over life: "in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty's basic attributes . . . The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die" (2003: 240-41). Sovereign power is a power which deduces. It is the right to take away not only life but wealth, services, labour and products. Its only power over life is to
? ? 41
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
seize that life, to end, impoverish or enslave it; what it does not seize it leaves alone. Sovereign power's right over life is merely the right of subtraction, not of regulation or control. As Foucault writes:
The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. (1990a: 136, emphasis added)
The seventeenth-century theorist of sovereign power Thomas Hob- bes illustrates Foucault's points, writing:
For seeing there is no Common-wealth in the world, wherein there be Rules enough set down, for the regulating of all the actions, and words of men, (as being a thing impossible : ) it followeth necessar- ily, that in all kinds of actions, by the laws praetermitted, men have the Liberty, of doing what their own reasons shall suggest, for the most profitable to themselves. (19 8 6 : 264)
Hobbes notes in particular that it would be ludicrous for a sovereign to attempt to regulate the corporeal dimensions of a subject's existence, and hence no covenant with the sovereign could be concerned with these aspects of a subject's life. Hobbes argues that so far as "corporall Liberty" is concerned, subjects of any commonwealth are free: "For if wee take Liberty in the proper sense, for corporall Liberty; that is to say, freedome from chains, and prison, it were very absurd for men to clamor as they doe, for the Liberty they so manifestly enjoy" (ibid. ). The freedom of subjects, for Hobbes, consists of those aspects of life with respect to which there are no covenants with the sovereign. For Hobbes, it would be absurd to imagine certain mundane aspects of life, such as liberty over one's body and private life, being the subject of such covenants. Hobbes simply cannot imagine these being of interest to the king or to the commonwealth, or mechanisms of power which might function at this level. He elaborates:
The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermit- ted: such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves
42
BIOPOWER
think fit: & the like. " Hobbes adds that "Lawes are of no power . . . Without a Sword in the hands of a man, or men, to cause those laws to be put in execution. (Ibid. )
And he assumes that concerns such as dwelling, diet and childcare could never warrant the wielding of a sword or the exercise of law. Sovereign power is, then, for Hobbes as for Foucault, a juridico-legal power to kill which leaves the daily life of the body alone, and its symbol is the sword or the threat of death. In those realms where one would not wield a sword or the force of law, one is free or escapes from power. In particular, Hobbes thinks that our bodies are free, or that we have "corporall Liberty" unless the sovereign has us literally in chains.
In contrast to sovereign power which could "take life or let live", biopower is the power "to foster life or disallow it to the point of death" (Foucault 1990a: 138, emphasis added). Foucault writes,
Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself: it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. (Ibid. : 142-3)
Hobbes deems corporeal aspects of life such as dwelling (abode), desires (what we want to purchase and consume), the care of the body (diet), and childcare and education to be outside of the interests of the sovereign and hence free. Yet for Foucault these aspects become some of the privileged loci of the mechanisms of biopower, indicating a transformation of power which Hobbes would have deemed "a thing impossible". 1 Biopower is able to access the body because it functions through norms rather than laws, because it is internalized by subjects rather than exercised from above through acts or threats of violence, and because it is dispersed throughout society rather than located in a single individual or government body. While the sovereign power which Hobbes describes could only seize life or kill, Foucault writes of "a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power", in which "deduction" would be replaced by a power "working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and order- ing them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them" (ibid. : 136).
? ? 43
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Two levels of biopower: discipline and regulation
In his 1977-78 College de France course, Security, Territory, Popula- tion, Foucault takes the example of a prohibition such as "do not steal" or "do not murder" in order to illustrate the differences between sover- eign power, discipline and biopower in a simple way (Foucault 2007). Under sovereign power, which predominated up until the end of the seventeenth century when Hobbes was writing, an individual who trans- gressed these prohibitions against theft and murder would be subjected to the law and punished solely on the basis of his crime; he might, for instance, be executed, exiled or fined. Under disciplinary power, which emerged in the eighteenth century, the criminal will still be subjected to the law or punished, however it will no longer be a mere matter of his crime. Rather, power will now be at least as interested in the thief 's or murderer's character. It will want to know the conditions, both material and psychological, under which the individual committed his crime. This information will be deemed important in order to anticipate and intervene in the likelihood that the criminal will reoffend. In order to predict and control the individual's chance of recidivating, the crimi- nal needs to be subjected to psychological examinations, surveillance and rehabilitative practices unknown under sovereign power. For this reason, the punishment is less likely to put an end to the criminal's life, and more likely to control his life through tactics such as prison, psychiatric treatment, parole and probation. Finally, under biopower, which emerged later in the eighteenth century, the focus and target of power becomes the numbers of thefts and murders occurring in the population. Power now takes an interest in whether crime rates are rising or falling, in which demographic groups particular crimes are predominant, and how crime rates can be optimally controlled or regu- lated. While many of the same tactics will be employed under biopower as under disciplinary power, the focus will now be on the population rather than the individual.
If at times Foucault describes discipline and biopower as two distinct (although intersecting and overlapping) forms of power,2 at other times he includes discipline within biopower, or describes discipline as one of the two levels at which biopower works. Biopower is a power over bios or life, and lives may be managed on both an individual and a group basis. While at one level disciplinary institutions such as schools, workshops, prisons and psychiatric hospitals target individual bodies as they deviate from norms, at another level the state is concerned with knowing and administrating the norms of the population as a whole and thus with understanding and regulating "the problems of
? 44
BIOPOWER
birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration" (Foucault 1990a: 140). Disciplinary power works primarily through institutions, while biopower works primarily through the state, however the state is also involved in many institutions, such as the prison. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault writes of biopower:
this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these two forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles - the first to be formed, it seems - centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the opti- mization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the paral- lel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics ofthe human body. The second, formed some- what later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological proc- esses: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of thepopulation. (Ibid. : 139, emphasis added)
Discipline may be seen as biopower as it targets the individual body, therefore, while another level of biopower targets the species-body. Foucault will describe these two levels as "the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed" (ibid. ). These two levels of power are necessarily intertwined, since bodies make up popu- lations and populations are made up of individual bodies. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault insists that a biopolitics of the population:
does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. (2003 : 242)
One way of conceptualizing the p oint of this passage is to say that dis- cipline is the micro-technology and biopolitics is the macro-technology
? ? 45
Table 3. 1 Two levels of biopower Aim
Institutions The state
Schools, armies, prisons, asylums, hospitals, workshops
Tactics
Studies and practices
of demographers, sociologists, economists; interventions in the birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, migration
Studies and practices
of criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators; apprenticeship, tests, education, training
MICHEL FOU CAULT:
KEY CON CEPTS
? ? ? ? Regulatory power (biopolitics)
Disciplinary power (anatomo- politics)
Populations, species,
race
Individuals, bodies
Knowledge/ power and control of the population
Knowledge/ power and subjugation of bodies
? of the same power over life. Table 3. 1 schematizes the distinctions between these two levels of biopower.
Administering life: from the census to sexuality
Biopower administers life rather than threatening to take it away. In order to administer life, it is important for the state to obtain forecasts and statistical estimates concerning such demographic factors as fertil- ity, natality, immigration, dwelling and mortality rates (Foucault 1990a: 25). For this reason, an important moment in the history of biopower is the development of the modern census. While inventories of heads of households, property and men who could serve in the military were taken in ancient Rome, China, Palestine, Babylonia, Persia and Egypt, they were almost unknown throughout the Middle Ages (an exception being the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror), and differed from the modern census in that they did not attempt to gather infor- mation about the entirety of the population, but only about specific types of individuals: those who could be taxed, drafted or forced to work. The idea of enumerating the entirety of a population was only introduced in Western countries at the end of the seventeenth century and became increasingly detailed in the centuries that followed. Soon, the census secured data on dates and places of birth, marital status and occupations. Modern states recognized the necessity of understanding the characteristics, structures and trends of their populations in order to manage them or to compensate for what they could not control.
46
BIOPOWER
One subject of biopolitical concern is the age of a population, "together with a whole series of related economic and political prob- lems" (Foucault 2003 : 243 ). The state is concerned with demographic forecasts which foresee a "sapp[ing of] the population's strength, [a] shorten[ing of] the working week, wasted energy, and cost money [. . . ] (ibid. : 244 ). We often hear of the ageing of the "baby boomer" genera- tion, for example, when unprecedented segments of the population will retire from the work force and require expensive geriatric care. Both a "sapping" of the labour force and of medical resources are predicted as a result and need to be compensated for, while retirement and geriatric care facilities need to be established and staffed in anticipation of this event.
Another area of biopolitical study and intervention is the health and survival of neo-nates, managed, for instance, through government- sponsored breastfeeding advocacy campaigns (see Kukla 2005 : chs 2, 5). States may also be concerned with what sorts of babies are born, or which demographic groups they are born into. The French Canadian province of Quebec has a profound interest in keeping the French language alive in its territory, for instance, and is thus concerned with increasing its francophone population in particular. Since the census reveals that French Canadians have fewer children than English Canadi- ans, "allophones" and immigrants, the province compensates with pro- natal policies, by promoting immigration from francophone countries (through financial incentives), and by promoting immigration in general (through attractions such as inexpensive day-care) while obliging chil- dren of non-francophone families to attend French-language schools.
As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality :
At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was sex . . . It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizens' sex, and the use they made of it . . . Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less. (1990a: 26)
While non-reproductive sexual acts had long been considered sinful, since the eighteenth century they have come to be seen as a threat to soci- ety. At the disciplinary level, individuals engaging in non-reproductive sexual acts and women uninterested in procreative sex have been medi- cally treated for perversion, frigidity and sexual dysfunction. At the biopolitical level, non-reproductive sexual acts and the rejection of reproductive sexuality are issues which need to be managed. It is neces- sary to know what proportion of the population is engaging in specific
? 47
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
sexual acts, or is using contraceptives, in order to intervene in this behav- iour or to compensate for it. While in some segments of society the state is concerned with promoting procreation and thus with providing incentives to parenthood, in other segments of the population the state is concerned with containing and preventing procreation. In particu- lar, certain groups, such as unwed women, the poor, criminals and the mentally or physically ill or disabled have been deemed (and in some instances continue to be deemed) unfit to procreate or to raise children. 3
As these cases show, sex is important at both levels of biopower, concerning as it does both the individual's use of his or her body and the growth and health of the population. As Foucault notes, "Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a mat- ter for discipline, but also a matter for regularization" (2003 : 25 1-2).
Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth cen- tury sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences . . . . But one also sees it becoming the theme of politi- cal operations, economic interventions (through incitements to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was put forward as an index of a society's strength, revealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor. Spread out from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the object of disciplining the bodyandthatofregulatingpopulations. (1990a: 146)
Far from being something which we have recently liberated (or still struggle to liberate) from an archaic and repressive power, Foucault therefore argues that sex is in fact a privileged site and indeed a product of the workings of modern forms of power.
Death in the age of biopolitics
In contrast to sex, Foucault argues that death has now receded from view, becoming private and hidden. While sovereign power entailed the right to impose death, the aims of biopower are to foster and manage life, and so death becomes a "scandal". Under sovereign power death was ritualized as the moment of passing from one sovereign authority to the next. Death was the ultimate expression of the sovereign's power
48
BIOPOWER
and was made into a public spectacle whenever this power needed to be affirmed. In contrast, under biopower, death is the moment in which we escape power (Foucault 2003: 248). Foucault writes of the "disqualification of death" in the biopolitical age, and observes that the "great public ritualization of death gradually began to disappear" (ibid. : 247). For this reason suicide was illegal under sovereign power, perceived as a seizure of the king's power to take life, whereas today it is a medical problem, a shameful secret and a bewildering threat. As an escape from bio-disciplinary power, suicide is described by Foucault as a subversive act of resistance in works such as "I, Pierre Riviere . . . " (1982b) and Herculine Barbin (1980a).
One manifestation of the shift from the sovereign power to kill to the biopolitical interest in fostering life is that capital punishment came to be contested in the modern period and new forms of punishment were invented to replace it, most notably the prison. While the death penalty was abolished in most Western democracies by the 1970s, its practice had long since become rare. In those places where it is still legal and regularly practised today, such as the United States, it is widely criticized as backward and anachronistic. 4 In earlier eras, execution for murder or theft was understood as punishment for having broken the sovereign's law and for undermining his power. Crime was conceived as a personal attack on the sovereign rather than on the individual victims of the crime or on the security of the population as a whole. Punishment was the sovereign's counter-attack, his reaffirmation of power. In contrast, the current view of punishment is a "paying of one's debt to society", while executions, where they are permitted at all, are justified in the name of security. A criminal condemned to death must be perceived as a threat to the population rather than to the ruler's power. For this reason serial killers are executed in the United States today but the president's political opponents are not.
Capital punishment aside, there is little direct control over death under biopower. As Foucault notes, we now have the power to keep people alive when they should be dead and to decide when to "let them die", or to regulate their lives even after, biologically speaking, they should be dead (2003: 248-9). We may thus choose to cease manag- ing an individual's life by letting her die, or to not foster certain lives to begin with, but this is not the same thing as the sovereign right to kill. While a person might be allowed to die or her life may be disal- lowed to the point of death, and while the state monitors the morbidity rate, you can be fairly sure that your death will not be claimed by the state, and that your life will be managed but not seized. This is why death is now privatized - it is, according to Foucault, "outside the
? ? 49
MICHEL FO U CA U LT: KEY CONCEPTS
power relationship" (ibid. : 248). While we claim that sex is silenced and repressed, Foucault compellingly argues throughout The History ofSexuality that this is not the case and that we in fact talk about sex more than anything else; on the other hand, death today truly is taboo.
Foucault thinks that the irony of this "disqualification of death" is that wars are bloodier than ever but are justified in the name of life. He writes:
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nine- teenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formida- ble power of death . . . now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it . . . Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. (1990a: 137)
The Holocaust of the Jews, along with the extermination of gypsies and the "euthanasia" of the mentally ill and persons with developmental disabilites, were justified under the Nazi regime as "racial hygiene", nec- essary or beneficial to German flourishing. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as a plague of rats that posed a threat to German well-being, and presented medical care for the mentally ill and disabled as a drain on German resources better used for those fit to survive. Indeed, despite the "disqualification of death" in the modern era, Foucault argues that there will be more genocides under biopower than under sovereign power, because biopower wants to manage the health of populations. When combined with racism, this management becomes cast as a con- cern for the racial purity of a people. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault argues that biopower is almost necessarily racist, since racism, broadly construed, is an "indispensable precondition" that grants the state the power to kill (2003 : 256). 5 Under such conditions, eradicating sub-groups of that population is perceived as a justifiable form of man- aging and protecting a people. Foucault writes: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill, it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1990a: 13 7).
We can take the example of the recent US-led invasion of Iraq to illustrate the manner in which the modern biopolitical state justifies
50
BIOPOWER
mass killings in the name of life, and both produces and exploits racism in order to do so. The original justifications for the invasion of Iraq involved claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The Bush and Blair administrations suggested that Iraq would use its weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States and its allies, affiliated as it was with the attacks of 9/11. Anti- Muslim and anti-Arab racism abounded in this period in the US and was exploited in the arguments for invading Iraq. In this way Iraq was pre- sented as a racialized threat to American existence or to the Western way of life, and invasion of this country was deemed necessary to protect life in Western democracies. When no weapons of mass destruction and no link to Al-Qaeda were found, the Bush and Blair administrations shifted tactics, emphasizing the slaughters and massacres that Saddam Hus- sein had committed against his own people, much like the oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan is exploited to justify the military incursions into this country. Over time these wars are recast as charity missions, undertaken not so much to protect lives in the West as to save innocent lives in the East. While critics point out that the alleged desires to save Iraqi lives and to liberate oppressed women are pretences, the important point is that we now need pretences such as these in order to justify war. We no longer pursue military invasions for the overt sake of glory, gain or conquest, or to defend the honour of the sovereign. While the ancient Romans could invade a foreign country for the undisguised purposes of occupying a land, enslaving a people and gaining access to resources, today we must mask our massacres as humanitarian efforts even while bringing about the deaths of thousands of civilians, turning millions more into refugees, and immediately securing the oil fields.
Social Darwinism and eugenics
In the nineteenth century, Europeans and North Americans grappled with the effects of increased urbanization, including the steady growth of slums inhabited by an underclass of paupers, prostitutes and thieves, many of whom were sickly and, the middle class thought, lazy and immoral. Rates of crime, disease, mental illness, alcoholism, promiscu- ity and prostitution were rampant in this segment of the population, which was, moreover, reproducing itself more quickly than the middle classes.
The result was a growing fear among the bourgeoisie that the "dregs" of society would eventually overtake them. The middle classes in Western countries began to suspect that their race was degenerating, both because they were not reproducing quickly enough and because
? 51
MI C H EL FOU CAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
the lower class was reproducing too quickly. These fears were exac- erbated in Britain when studies of the records of the height, weight and health of soldiers throughout the nineteenth century suggested "a progressive physical degeneracy of race" (Childs 2001: 1). European exploration of non-Western countries also confronted Europeans with races they deemed inferior, but which, because they must have a com- mon ancestry with Europeans in Adam and Eve, were believed to have degenerated over time, falling from their original nobility (ibid. ) . The possibility of nationwide racial degeneration was thus posed, and anxi- ety mounted that Europeans could descend to the level of these "inferior races" if procreation patterns were not controlled.
In response to these fears, the science of eugenics was born in the late nineteenth century in Britain with the works of the statistician Francis Galton, and reached its height in the first half of the twentieth century throughout the Western world. Galton drew on his cousin Charles Dar- win's theory of natural selection and argued that human societies were preventing natural selection or the "survival of the fittest" by protecting the sick, the poor and the weak through welfare programmes, charity and medicine. He coined the term "eugenics" from the Greek roots eu (good or well) and genes (born), and described the science as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations" (Black 2004: 18). Social Darwin- ists argued that the "survival of the fittest" human beings would come about naturally if welfare systems were simply withdrawn: although the poor would continue to have more children than the middle classes, this would be compensated for by higher mortality rates resulting from poverty and lack of medical care. As one Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, explains:
It seems hard that an unskilfulness . . . should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a laborer incapacitated by sickness . . . should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately but in connexion with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of beneficence. (Childs 2001: 2-3)
Spencer thus suggests that nature be allowed to run its course, eliminat- ing the weak from society. Individuals such as Spencer rejected the argu- ment that improving the environment of the poor might reduce their rates of mental illness, infection, alcoholism, promiscuity and crime. While those advocating environmental reform suggested improvements
? 52
BIOPOWER
in education and health care for the urban poor, and thus argued for biopolitical interventions of a different order (carried out at the level of disciplinary incursions into the lives of disorderly and abnormal members of society), Social Darwinists opposed such methods, argu- ing that they would only exacerbate the problem by helping to sustain those segments of society better left to die.
While Spencer's approach is to let the poor and the weak die out through non-intervention, other eugenicists advocated more active tac- tics. These tactics were divided into what were called "negative" and "positive" eugenics. "Negative eugenics", as the philosopher and eugen- ist F. C. S. Schiller puts it, "aims at checking the deterioration to which the human stock is exposed, owing to the rapid proliferation of what may be called human weeds" (ibid. : 3). This strategy entails preventing individuals and groups deemed "degenerate" from procreating through abortions, forced sterilization, incapacitation (such as locking up the mentally ill), "euthanasia" or, as in the case of Nazi Germany, genocide. Such "negative" tactics, however, can only prevent further deteriora- tion; they cannot improve the species and so strategies of "positive eugenics" were simultaneously promoted. "Positive eugenics" involved encouraging or compelling "human flowers" to produce large families, for instance through economic stimuli. Abortion by "fit" women was illegal in Nazi Germany, and middle-class women who attempted to enter the work force were discouraged on the grounds that j obs outside the home were "race-destroying occupations" (ibid. : 7).
Eugenics thus attempts to improve the gene pool; however, what is meant by "improve" is inevitably socioculturally defined and has always been tainted by classism, racism and abilism. Early eugenicists were concerned with increasing the intelligence of the population, for instance, but this concern tended to promote births in the middle class while preventing them among the working classes. Racist eugenicists are opposed to miscegenation. With the Immigration Act of 1924, eugeni- cists successfully argued against allowing "inferior stock" from southern and eastern Europe into the United States. Laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit the mentally ill from marrying and to allow them to be sterilized in psychiatric institutions. These laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 and were only abolished in the mid-twentieth century. As a result, 60,000 mentally ill Americans were sterilized in order to prevent them from passing on their genes. This is particularly problematic since what qualifies as "mental illness" is noto- riously unstable and, as Foucault argues in works such as The History of' Madness (2006b) and Psychiatric Power (2006a), has tended to describe social mores and norms rather than genuine medical conditions. 6
? 53
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Social Darwinism and eugenics may be described as biopolitical movements since they involve strategies for managing the health and productivity of populations through interventions in natality and mor- tality rates, mental and physical health, and immigration, even if what is taken to be "healthy" is highly problematic, entailing as it does preju- dices ranging from abilism and classism to sexism, nationalism and racism. Following the Second World War, there has been a tendency to repress the fact that other countries besides Germany have histories of eugenics, histories which quietly continued long after the defeat of the Nazis (Childs 2001: 15 ) . Ladelle McWhorter not only traces the exten- sive history of eugenics in the United States, however, but argues that the contemporary and mostly unquestioned pro-family movement in this country is a mere recasting and extension of the eugenics movement (McWhorter 2009). Eugenic uses of science also arguably continue in the cases of pro-family financial, social and political incentives, designer babies, genetic counselling, preemptive abortions, and the creation of "genius sperm banks". Many of these examples entail the use of new scientific technology to improve the genes of individual babies and of the population as a whole while preventing babies deemed "unfit" from ever being born. These biopolitical practices thus further entrench the prejudices of an abilist society while continuing the goals of eugenics in manners which have become increasingly unbounded by the state.
Notes
1. For a Foucauldian study of how biopower and discipline control the care of o n e ' s b o d y, s e e B a r t k y 1 9 8 8 ; f o r h o w d i s c i p l i n a r y p o w e r c o n t r o l s d i e t , s e e B o r d o (2003) and Heyes (2006); for a Foucauldian study of how biopower controls housing choices and opportunities and the raising and education of children, see Feder (1996, 2007).
2. In the second and third lectures of Security, Territory, Population, Foucault contrasts disciplinary mechanisms and security measures aimed at the level of population which, at the beginning of the first lecture, he calls "somewhat vaguely, bio-power" (2007: 1).
3. SeeKukla(2005:chs2,5).
3. For a n extended discussion of biopolitical interventions in the birthrate among
these demographic groups in the United States, see McWhorter (2009).
4. Bedau,"TheCaseAgainsttheDeathPenalty":www. skepticfiles. org/aclu/case_
aga. htm (accessed August 2010).
5. Foucault writes of "racism against the abnormal" in this lecture, and hence is
not limiting himself to racism based on skin colour in making these claims.
6. To take but one example, homosexuality was included in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders until 1 973 .
? ? ? ? ? 54
? FOU R
Power/ knowledg
Ellen K. Feder
Foucault explicitly introduces the composite term, "power/knowledge" (pouvoir/savoir) in the middle, "genealogical" period of his work. At the same time, however, the concept of power/knowledge in many ways encompasses the entire corpus, characterizing the implicit project of his "archaeological" works, the explicit focus of the "genealogical", and the working out of the implications for living a good life in the later "ethical" work.
To understand what Foucault means by power/knowledge we first have to engage in a little translation. Notice that when the term is used in philosophy written in English, the original French in which Foucault spoke and wrote often follows it. In French, there are different ways of expressing distinctive categories of knowledge which English speakers mark by qualifications such as "folk knowledge" or "book knowledge". In many of his earlier, archaeological works, Foucault is interested in investigating how a particular kind of implicit knowledge - the savoir - permeating a historical period, that is, the understanding that counts as the "common sense" of that time/place/people, shapes the explicit knowledge ? the connaissance ? that is institutionalized in the disci- plines that make up the human sciences, including natural (e. g. biology) or social (e. g. psychology) science (Foucault 1972: 182-3).
As a noun, pouvoir is most typically translated as "power", but it is also the infinitive form of the verb meaning "to be able to", and is the most common way of saying "can" in Romance languages. In Foucault's work, pouvoir must be understood in this dual sense, as both "power" as English speakers generally take it (which could also be rendered as puissance or force in French), but also as a kind of potentiality,
? ? 55
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
capability or capacity. Power, Foucault tells us, must be understood to be more complex than a term like puissance conveys; it has multiple forms and can issue from "anywhere". Foucault urges us not to think of power only in terms of its "old" monarchical form, as something an individual possesses or wields over another or others. For him power works through culture and customs, institutions and individuals. Like- wise, its effects are also multiple, not simply negative or positive, but, as he puts it, "productive" : they are both positive and negative, unstable valuations that can be reversed through history.
The composite "power/knowledge" is also not quite translatable. Lit- erary theorist and translator Gayatri Spivak helpfully calls our attention to what she describes as the "homely verbiness of savoir in savoir-faire [a ready and polished kind of 'know-how', in English], savoir-vivre [an understanding of social life and customs] into pouvoir", and suggests that regarded in this way:
you might come up with something like this: if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something that are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines. Pouvoir-savoir - being able to do something - only as you are able to make sense ofit. (1993: 34)
The kind of knowledge to which Foucault directs us with this term, then, is one that has no clear source, but that a genealogical analysis - an examination of the historical conditions of possibility - illuminates, describing the accidents of history that result in particular consolida- tions of what counts as truth or knowledge. It is not the knowledge that is decreed by some authoritative body "from on high", but is more precisely described in the passive voice: it is the kind of knowledge that is "recognized as true", "known to be the case". For Foucault, this knowledge can only exist with the support of arrangements of power, arrangements that likewise have no clear origin, no person or body who can be said to "have" it.
An example illustrates many of the dimensions of power/knowledge as they are taken up in Foucault's work. It will also help to clarify how the concept of power/knowledge is salient throughout the dif- ferent periods into which scholars generally divide Foucault's corpus: the early (archaeological) texts where, Foucault later says, power/ knowledge was present even if unnamed;1 the middle (genealogical) texts where the concept power/knowledge is explicitly introduced; and finally the late (ethical) reflections, where power understood as
56
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
capacity becomes more central. In what follows, I examine the concept of sexual difference and its enforcement. Despite his famous interest in questions concerning "sexuality", Foucault does not take up the matter of sexual difference directly; nevertheless, Foucault's work has been highly influential among scholars and activists over the past sev- eral decades who have done so, and have compellingly demonstrated how the tools offered by Foucault's analysis can help us to clarify and deepen our understanding of a critical, yet surprisingly under-studied, concept.
Example: dividing the sexes, or boys will be boys
We take for granted sexual difference. It seems obvious that men and women, boys and girls, make up the world's populace. We may rec- ognize that sexual difference can be understood somewhat differently across the globe; some cultures have standards for masculine and femi- nine behaviour that differ from others. But there remains under the blan- ket of social distinctions what we take to be a brute biological or genetic "fact" of sexual difference. Common sense ? a kind of unquestioned knowledge - tells us that this sexual division into male and female is true, how things are. But if this difference is so obvious we might ask why the distinction between the sexes requires enforcement.
Take the example of four-year-old Nathan who is teased by his class- mates because he enjoys playing "like a girl", dressing up in high heels and dresses instead of like a cowboy, enjoying play with baby dolls instead of trucks. Perhaps we could say that the boy suffers the teasing of his preschool classmates because his play violates the other children's common sense. "You can't be a little girl" (Rekers & Varni 1977: 428), the other children tell Nathan.
What happens to Nathan is not unusual among preschoolers. But Nathan's story is distinctive because his is a published case, among the first of a number of cases, of a condition that was first discussed in US psychiatry in the early 1970s. "Gender Identity Disorder", or GID, continues to be actively treated today. In the paper in which Nathan's story is featured, the authors recount how Nathan's diagnosis led to a long period of therapy designed to help him accept that as a boy he was expected to play with "boys' toys". His parents were instructed to observe him and offer positive reinforcement for playing with gender- appropriate toys, and to ignore him when he played with inappropri- ate toys. Eventually, the case study reports, Nathan was given a wrist counter and told to press the counter when he played with boys' toys
? ? 57
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KE Y CONCEPTS
but not when playing with girls' toys. When he accumulated enough points he received a prize.
Reading the story of Nathan through the theoretical lens of Foucault, it is striking how closely Nathan's treatment regimen corresponds to the levels and character of surveillance Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, and to the levels of surveillance the Panoptic structure organ- izes. Most accounts of the Panopticon focus on the prisoners (or mad- men, paupers, schoolchildren) in the machine, those who are isolated and are the clear objects of the anonymous gaze signified by the invisible inhabitant(s) of the central tower. The objective of panopticism is the "internalization" of the authoritative gaze, where one:
subjected to a field of visibility . . . assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1979: 202-3)
But among the many lessons of panopticism is that the power that seems focused on one individual is in fact "distributed" throughout the structure, so that every individual is at the same time both "object" and "subject" of this power: the prisoner is "watched", but is being trained to watch himself, to be his own inspector. The inspector is by definition the "watcher", and yet he, too, is the object of a gaze: his performance as watcher is ever under scrutiny. The Panopticon is Foucault's best lesson in unsettling the way we typically conceive power and its operation.
Foucault's analysis points us to ways that power can be exercised from unexpected places. As the study reports the succession of events, it is not Nathan 's distress -- over his desire to play with girls' toys, or the teasing he faces - or worry by his parents or teacher about his behav- iour that brings him to the team of psychologists and researchers who subject him to treatment; it is, rather, the other children's teasing that distresses the teacher, who alerts the parents, who finally bring Nathan to treatment. It may seem obvious that children's interaction with one another is an important dimension of their psychosocial development, but the authority the children's voices command is arresting. We could speculate that the parents, teacher and treatment team see something important, even "natural", about the other children's intolerance of Nathan's behaviour. Viewing children as natural arbiters of gender norms might capture something of the intuitive sense of the adults involved in the case of Nathan, but this perspective calls for analysis of how such authority is vested in Nathan's four-year-old peers.
58
POWER/ KNOWLE D GE
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts disciplinary power with the ordinary understanding of power as something that can be "pos- sessed as a thing" and brandished against another (1979: 177; see also 1990a: 94). Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, is instead an expression of power that is associated with what he calls, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the "assignment" of subjective positions (1972: 95), whereby individuals are allotted roles in the social world, positions that provide different possibilities for the exercise of power. The power that one can exercise as parent, simply by virtue of being a parent - power that is supported by society and by law - is one good example, but so is the power that is exercised by a bureaucrat in the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It is not that the individual in one or the other of these positions "is" powerful in Foucaultian terms, but that different positions individuals take up or are assigned afford specific arenas for the exercise of power. Once an individual no longer occupies a given position - the parent goes to school to finish his college degree and at least for some part of the day occupies the position of student, or the clerk at the DMV goes home after a day of work - the power associated with that position can no longer be exercised. In the first volume of The History ofSexuality, Foucault clarifies that "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (1990a: 93). The story of a little boy who is teased in the playground and becomes a psychological case-study illustrates how power relations are distributed widely among young children, teachers and mental health professionals, forming what Foucault described as a "dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being localized in them" (ibid. : 96). Power is for Foucault inaccurately described as issuing "from above" or "outside"; instead, i t i s more instructive t o understand first the way it "comes from below" (ibid. : 94).
In Bentham's design of the Panopticon, the occupants of the central tower take up positions of surveillance vis-a-vis each of the inmates (and indeed, of one another). Nathan's classmates are similarly enjoined, enlisted in a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gen- dered subjects. If the exercise of the classmates' gaze is evidenced by their teasing, it should be counted among the "essential techniques" of disciplinary power. Foucault describes such techniques as:
always meticulous, often minute techniques, but they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a "new micro-physics of power" [that] had constantly reached out to
? 59
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
ever broader domains, as if . . . intended to cover the entire social bod? (1979: 139)
Loosed from its discursive field, the children's forthright announce- ment to Nathan that "You can't be a little girl" resists characterization as a subtle expression of power. Conceived within the terms of its field, however, their blunt repudiation is precisely the sort of "capillary intervention" (1990a: 84) that epitomizes a microphysics of power. It is consequential not for its sheer force but for the disciplinary effects it can provoke, that is, for its ability to "reach out to ever broader domains". The children's intervention in the case of Nathan activates a complex machinery of interlocking institutional interests - embodied by his teacher, his parents and an entire team of psychologists, assistants and technicians - functioning to subject Nathan to a "field of visibility" whereby he will learn, as his peers have already learned, to assume "responsibility for the constraints of power . . . [to] become the princi- ple of his own subjection" (1979: 202-3). Located at the extremities of this "productive network of power which runs through the whole social body" (1980d: 119), the children's exposure of Nathan's viola- tion is instrumental in two linked ways: it rouses the apparatus that will therapeutically draft Nathan into his prescribed role and correct the parental missteps that resulted in Nathan's deviation; it also provides an opportunity to produce new knowledge, that is, new "understand- ings", new "truths", not only about Nathan, but about the increasing numbers of children - and their parents2 - who would be identified under this new disorder. 3
Bentham himself understood that "panopticism" functions not only to circulate power, as it clearly does in the example of the prison, but also to produce knowledge. Foucault's formulation of the term "power/ knowledge" is developed from Bentham's own expectation that the Panopticon would serve as a "laboratory . . . [that] could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train and correct individuals" (Foucault 1979: 203). It is a "privileged place for experi- ments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transfor- mations that may be obtained from them" (ibid. : 204) . "Thanks to its mechanisms of observation," Foucault reflects, the Panopticon "gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowl- edge follows advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (ibid. : 204). But while many would understand in narrow terms the new "object" that is cre- ated to be the "gender disordered" child of the late twentieth century, Foucault's advancement of the analysis of power/knowledge clarifies
? ? ? 60
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
that the objects must be taken to be more widely dispersed, that no one, in fact, escapes the objectification that comes, in the nineteenth century, to be centred around the notion of sexual identity.
Normalizing sex(uality)
Foucault most famously elaborated on this expression of power/ knowledge in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (tellingly titled in French as La Valente de Savoir, "The Will to Knowledge"), the book that immediately follows Discipline and Punish. In The History of Sexuality Foucault makes the remarkable claim that "the 'question' of sex" becomes in the late nineteenth century the most important question "in both senses: as interrogation and problema- tization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of rationality" (1990a: 69). A whole host of technologies are born to regulate what becomes understood as a person's (sexual) "essence", the truth of an individual, who he or she "really" is. The most sali- ent of these technologies is confession, first religious (as mandated by early Christianity), then psychological (in the nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis) and finally political, as the mandate to pro- duce information becomes the ground for what became known as population control. 4 What unites these different technologies is the concern with identifying (and so, Foucault explains, what in fact turns out itself to create, as a category, or object of understanding) a whole variety of "perversions" born during this time, different ways to vio- late the multiplying rules governing the important distinction between licit and illicit, normal and abnormal.
Of all the technologies, medicine comes to play the most important role in the development of "the norm", dictating, for example, what constitutes normal marital relations. Children's sexual activity also became an object of keen interest and concern, not only because of a perceived need to "detect" violations of new norms, but, as we saw in the example of the case of Nathan, to be on the alert for problems with parents' rearing of their children:
Wherever there was the chance that [masturbation] might appear, devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compel- ling admissions . . . parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not sufficiently strong . . . [parents'] conduct was prescribed and their pedagogy
? 61
MICHE L FOUCAU LT: KEY CONCEPTS
recodified; an entire medical-sexual regime took hold of the fam- ily milieu. (Foucault 1990a: 42)
Further, a whole class of deviant individuals comes to be identified at this time. Among the zoophiles (those who engage in sex with non-human animals), auto-monosexualists (those who are only able to experience erotic pleasure by themselves), gynecomasts (men with atypically large breasts), presbyophiles (those who engage in sex with the elderly) and dysparauenistic women (those for whom sexual intercourse is painful), perhaps the most lasting category of individual is "the homosexual", a new species of individual "born" in 1 8 70 (ibid. : 43 ) . 5
I n the late-twentieth-century diagnosis o f the gender dysphoric child there is embedded a whole history of power/knowledge that involves a complex of elements that come to be designated in Foucault's work by the term "normalization". Normalization, the institutionalization of the norm, of what counts as normal, indicates the pervasive standards that structure and define social meaning. Norms are at once everywhere and nowhere. They are obvious when we are talking about the sorts of standards against which one can be tested with respect to intelligence or body mass, for example. But they are less conspicuous when they are unspoken, what we may even take to be natural or understand as our own (what Foucault would see as their "internalization"), as is often the case with norms concerning gender.
We may think that medicine has always played the role it has in shaping our understanding of the norm, but Foucault's earlier his- tory of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, suggests otherwise.
Taylor's exposition of scientific management abounds with such examples of disciplinary power but it also de-naturalizes this modal- ity of power by demonstrating that disciplinary practices bound up with the application of scientific management have yet to take root, and that they are subject to great contestation (at the risk of belabour- ing the obvious, it is worth keeping in mind that if these disciplinary practices had taken root, Taylor would not have needed to compose Principles). Indeed, Taylor paints his vision of scientifically managed labour-processes on a canvas of sceptical employers as well as a mass of recalcitrant, if not openly hostile, workers. Against the disciplinary demand for maximized utility, we find in Taylor's narrative workers who threaten to strike, workers who intimidate managers and workers who damage machinery (ibid. : 49-52). Taylor is acutely aware of the prospect of inciting warfare within the interstices of the labour process. For this reason, he warns prospective practitioners against the hasty application of his principles of scientific management and insists that only a prolonged period of habituation will result in the successful application of these principles (ibid. : 128-35). To paraphrase Foucault, we could therefore say that the not so distant "roar of battle" (Foucault 1979: 308) resounds throughout Taylor's theory, suggesting that only an ensemble of deeply contested practices sustain the exercise of a dis- ciplinary power that strives to appear natural and spontaneous in the very bodies of individuals.
? 39
TH REE
Biopower
Chloe Taylor
French philosopher Michel Foucault is perhaps best known as a theorist of power. Foucault analysed several different types of power, includ- ing sovereign power, disciplinary power and the subject of the current chapter: biopower. In what follows, I will first provide an overview of biopower as Foucault conceives of it. This overview will distinguish biopower from sovereign and disciplinary power, identify and discuss distinctive characteristics of biopower and provide examples which illustrate these characteristics. The final section of the chapter under- takes an extended example of a particular occurrence of biopower within modern and contemporary Western societies.
Powers of life and death:from sovereign power to biopower
In The History ofSexuality: An Introduction (1990a) and in his 1975- 76 College de France course, Society Must Be Defended (2003) Foucault describes biopower as a power which takes hold of human life. In both these works Foucault traces the shift from classical, juridico-legal or sovereign power to two typically modern forms of power, discipline and biopower, as a shift from a right of death to a power over life: "in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty's basic attributes . . . The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die" (2003: 240-41). Sovereign power is a power which deduces. It is the right to take away not only life but wealth, services, labour and products. Its only power over life is to
? ? 41
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
seize that life, to end, impoverish or enslave it; what it does not seize it leaves alone. Sovereign power's right over life is merely the right of subtraction, not of regulation or control. As Foucault writes:
The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. (1990a: 136, emphasis added)
The seventeenth-century theorist of sovereign power Thomas Hob- bes illustrates Foucault's points, writing:
For seeing there is no Common-wealth in the world, wherein there be Rules enough set down, for the regulating of all the actions, and words of men, (as being a thing impossible : ) it followeth necessar- ily, that in all kinds of actions, by the laws praetermitted, men have the Liberty, of doing what their own reasons shall suggest, for the most profitable to themselves. (19 8 6 : 264)
Hobbes notes in particular that it would be ludicrous for a sovereign to attempt to regulate the corporeal dimensions of a subject's existence, and hence no covenant with the sovereign could be concerned with these aspects of a subject's life. Hobbes argues that so far as "corporall Liberty" is concerned, subjects of any commonwealth are free: "For if wee take Liberty in the proper sense, for corporall Liberty; that is to say, freedome from chains, and prison, it were very absurd for men to clamor as they doe, for the Liberty they so manifestly enjoy" (ibid. ). The freedom of subjects, for Hobbes, consists of those aspects of life with respect to which there are no covenants with the sovereign. For Hobbes, it would be absurd to imagine certain mundane aspects of life, such as liberty over one's body and private life, being the subject of such covenants. Hobbes simply cannot imagine these being of interest to the king or to the commonwealth, or mechanisms of power which might function at this level. He elaborates:
The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermit- ted: such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves
42
BIOPOWER
think fit: & the like. " Hobbes adds that "Lawes are of no power . . . Without a Sword in the hands of a man, or men, to cause those laws to be put in execution. (Ibid. )
And he assumes that concerns such as dwelling, diet and childcare could never warrant the wielding of a sword or the exercise of law. Sovereign power is, then, for Hobbes as for Foucault, a juridico-legal power to kill which leaves the daily life of the body alone, and its symbol is the sword or the threat of death. In those realms where one would not wield a sword or the force of law, one is free or escapes from power. In particular, Hobbes thinks that our bodies are free, or that we have "corporall Liberty" unless the sovereign has us literally in chains.
In contrast to sovereign power which could "take life or let live", biopower is the power "to foster life or disallow it to the point of death" (Foucault 1990a: 138, emphasis added). Foucault writes,
Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself: it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. (Ibid. : 142-3)
Hobbes deems corporeal aspects of life such as dwelling (abode), desires (what we want to purchase and consume), the care of the body (diet), and childcare and education to be outside of the interests of the sovereign and hence free. Yet for Foucault these aspects become some of the privileged loci of the mechanisms of biopower, indicating a transformation of power which Hobbes would have deemed "a thing impossible". 1 Biopower is able to access the body because it functions through norms rather than laws, because it is internalized by subjects rather than exercised from above through acts or threats of violence, and because it is dispersed throughout society rather than located in a single individual or government body. While the sovereign power which Hobbes describes could only seize life or kill, Foucault writes of "a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power", in which "deduction" would be replaced by a power "working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and order- ing them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them" (ibid. : 136).
? ? 43
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Two levels of biopower: discipline and regulation
In his 1977-78 College de France course, Security, Territory, Popula- tion, Foucault takes the example of a prohibition such as "do not steal" or "do not murder" in order to illustrate the differences between sover- eign power, discipline and biopower in a simple way (Foucault 2007). Under sovereign power, which predominated up until the end of the seventeenth century when Hobbes was writing, an individual who trans- gressed these prohibitions against theft and murder would be subjected to the law and punished solely on the basis of his crime; he might, for instance, be executed, exiled or fined. Under disciplinary power, which emerged in the eighteenth century, the criminal will still be subjected to the law or punished, however it will no longer be a mere matter of his crime. Rather, power will now be at least as interested in the thief 's or murderer's character. It will want to know the conditions, both material and psychological, under which the individual committed his crime. This information will be deemed important in order to anticipate and intervene in the likelihood that the criminal will reoffend. In order to predict and control the individual's chance of recidivating, the crimi- nal needs to be subjected to psychological examinations, surveillance and rehabilitative practices unknown under sovereign power. For this reason, the punishment is less likely to put an end to the criminal's life, and more likely to control his life through tactics such as prison, psychiatric treatment, parole and probation. Finally, under biopower, which emerged later in the eighteenth century, the focus and target of power becomes the numbers of thefts and murders occurring in the population. Power now takes an interest in whether crime rates are rising or falling, in which demographic groups particular crimes are predominant, and how crime rates can be optimally controlled or regu- lated. While many of the same tactics will be employed under biopower as under disciplinary power, the focus will now be on the population rather than the individual.
If at times Foucault describes discipline and biopower as two distinct (although intersecting and overlapping) forms of power,2 at other times he includes discipline within biopower, or describes discipline as one of the two levels at which biopower works. Biopower is a power over bios or life, and lives may be managed on both an individual and a group basis. While at one level disciplinary institutions such as schools, workshops, prisons and psychiatric hospitals target individual bodies as they deviate from norms, at another level the state is concerned with knowing and administrating the norms of the population as a whole and thus with understanding and regulating "the problems of
? 44
BIOPOWER
birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration" (Foucault 1990a: 140). Disciplinary power works primarily through institutions, while biopower works primarily through the state, however the state is also involved in many institutions, such as the prison. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault writes of biopower:
this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these two forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles - the first to be formed, it seems - centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the opti- mization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the paral- lel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics ofthe human body. The second, formed some- what later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological proc- esses: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of thepopulation. (Ibid. : 139, emphasis added)
Discipline may be seen as biopower as it targets the individual body, therefore, while another level of biopower targets the species-body. Foucault will describe these two levels as "the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed" (ibid. ). These two levels of power are necessarily intertwined, since bodies make up popu- lations and populations are made up of individual bodies. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault insists that a biopolitics of the population:
does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. (2003 : 242)
One way of conceptualizing the p oint of this passage is to say that dis- cipline is the micro-technology and biopolitics is the macro-technology
? ? 45
Table 3. 1 Two levels of biopower Aim
Institutions The state
Schools, armies, prisons, asylums, hospitals, workshops
Tactics
Studies and practices
of demographers, sociologists, economists; interventions in the birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, migration
Studies and practices
of criminologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, educators; apprenticeship, tests, education, training
MICHEL FOU CAULT:
KEY CON CEPTS
? ? ? ? Regulatory power (biopolitics)
Disciplinary power (anatomo- politics)
Populations, species,
race
Individuals, bodies
Knowledge/ power and control of the population
Knowledge/ power and subjugation of bodies
? of the same power over life. Table 3. 1 schematizes the distinctions between these two levels of biopower.
Administering life: from the census to sexuality
Biopower administers life rather than threatening to take it away. In order to administer life, it is important for the state to obtain forecasts and statistical estimates concerning such demographic factors as fertil- ity, natality, immigration, dwelling and mortality rates (Foucault 1990a: 25). For this reason, an important moment in the history of biopower is the development of the modern census. While inventories of heads of households, property and men who could serve in the military were taken in ancient Rome, China, Palestine, Babylonia, Persia and Egypt, they were almost unknown throughout the Middle Ages (an exception being the Domesday Book of William the Conqueror), and differed from the modern census in that they did not attempt to gather infor- mation about the entirety of the population, but only about specific types of individuals: those who could be taxed, drafted or forced to work. The idea of enumerating the entirety of a population was only introduced in Western countries at the end of the seventeenth century and became increasingly detailed in the centuries that followed. Soon, the census secured data on dates and places of birth, marital status and occupations. Modern states recognized the necessity of understanding the characteristics, structures and trends of their populations in order to manage them or to compensate for what they could not control.
46
BIOPOWER
One subject of biopolitical concern is the age of a population, "together with a whole series of related economic and political prob- lems" (Foucault 2003 : 243 ). The state is concerned with demographic forecasts which foresee a "sapp[ing of] the population's strength, [a] shorten[ing of] the working week, wasted energy, and cost money [. . . ] (ibid. : 244 ). We often hear of the ageing of the "baby boomer" genera- tion, for example, when unprecedented segments of the population will retire from the work force and require expensive geriatric care. Both a "sapping" of the labour force and of medical resources are predicted as a result and need to be compensated for, while retirement and geriatric care facilities need to be established and staffed in anticipation of this event.
Another area of biopolitical study and intervention is the health and survival of neo-nates, managed, for instance, through government- sponsored breastfeeding advocacy campaigns (see Kukla 2005 : chs 2, 5). States may also be concerned with what sorts of babies are born, or which demographic groups they are born into. The French Canadian province of Quebec has a profound interest in keeping the French language alive in its territory, for instance, and is thus concerned with increasing its francophone population in particular. Since the census reveals that French Canadians have fewer children than English Canadi- ans, "allophones" and immigrants, the province compensates with pro- natal policies, by promoting immigration from francophone countries (through financial incentives), and by promoting immigration in general (through attractions such as inexpensive day-care) while obliging chil- dren of non-francophone families to attend French-language schools.
As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality :
At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was sex . . . It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizens' sex, and the use they made of it . . . Between the state and the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less. (1990a: 26)
While non-reproductive sexual acts had long been considered sinful, since the eighteenth century they have come to be seen as a threat to soci- ety. At the disciplinary level, individuals engaging in non-reproductive sexual acts and women uninterested in procreative sex have been medi- cally treated for perversion, frigidity and sexual dysfunction. At the biopolitical level, non-reproductive sexual acts and the rejection of reproductive sexuality are issues which need to be managed. It is neces- sary to know what proportion of the population is engaging in specific
? 47
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
sexual acts, or is using contraceptives, in order to intervene in this behav- iour or to compensate for it. While in some segments of society the state is concerned with promoting procreation and thus with providing incentives to parenthood, in other segments of the population the state is concerned with containing and preventing procreation. In particu- lar, certain groups, such as unwed women, the poor, criminals and the mentally or physically ill or disabled have been deemed (and in some instances continue to be deemed) unfit to procreate or to raise children. 3
As these cases show, sex is important at both levels of biopower, concerning as it does both the individual's use of his or her body and the growth and health of the population. As Foucault notes, "Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a mat- ter for discipline, but also a matter for regularization" (2003 : 25 1-2).
Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth cen- tury sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences . . . . But one also sees it becoming the theme of politi- cal operations, economic interventions (through incitements to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was put forward as an index of a society's strength, revealing of both its political energy and its biological vigor. Spread out from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the object of disciplining the bodyandthatofregulatingpopulations. (1990a: 146)
Far from being something which we have recently liberated (or still struggle to liberate) from an archaic and repressive power, Foucault therefore argues that sex is in fact a privileged site and indeed a product of the workings of modern forms of power.
Death in the age of biopolitics
In contrast to sex, Foucault argues that death has now receded from view, becoming private and hidden. While sovereign power entailed the right to impose death, the aims of biopower are to foster and manage life, and so death becomes a "scandal". Under sovereign power death was ritualized as the moment of passing from one sovereign authority to the next. Death was the ultimate expression of the sovereign's power
48
BIOPOWER
and was made into a public spectacle whenever this power needed to be affirmed. In contrast, under biopower, death is the moment in which we escape power (Foucault 2003: 248). Foucault writes of the "disqualification of death" in the biopolitical age, and observes that the "great public ritualization of death gradually began to disappear" (ibid. : 247). For this reason suicide was illegal under sovereign power, perceived as a seizure of the king's power to take life, whereas today it is a medical problem, a shameful secret and a bewildering threat. As an escape from bio-disciplinary power, suicide is described by Foucault as a subversive act of resistance in works such as "I, Pierre Riviere . . . " (1982b) and Herculine Barbin (1980a).
One manifestation of the shift from the sovereign power to kill to the biopolitical interest in fostering life is that capital punishment came to be contested in the modern period and new forms of punishment were invented to replace it, most notably the prison. While the death penalty was abolished in most Western democracies by the 1970s, its practice had long since become rare. In those places where it is still legal and regularly practised today, such as the United States, it is widely criticized as backward and anachronistic. 4 In earlier eras, execution for murder or theft was understood as punishment for having broken the sovereign's law and for undermining his power. Crime was conceived as a personal attack on the sovereign rather than on the individual victims of the crime or on the security of the population as a whole. Punishment was the sovereign's counter-attack, his reaffirmation of power. In contrast, the current view of punishment is a "paying of one's debt to society", while executions, where they are permitted at all, are justified in the name of security. A criminal condemned to death must be perceived as a threat to the population rather than to the ruler's power. For this reason serial killers are executed in the United States today but the president's political opponents are not.
Capital punishment aside, there is little direct control over death under biopower. As Foucault notes, we now have the power to keep people alive when they should be dead and to decide when to "let them die", or to regulate their lives even after, biologically speaking, they should be dead (2003: 248-9). We may thus choose to cease manag- ing an individual's life by letting her die, or to not foster certain lives to begin with, but this is not the same thing as the sovereign right to kill. While a person might be allowed to die or her life may be disal- lowed to the point of death, and while the state monitors the morbidity rate, you can be fairly sure that your death will not be claimed by the state, and that your life will be managed but not seized. This is why death is now privatized - it is, according to Foucault, "outside the
? ? 49
MICHEL FO U CA U LT: KEY CONCEPTS
power relationship" (ibid. : 248). While we claim that sex is silenced and repressed, Foucault compellingly argues throughout The History ofSexuality that this is not the case and that we in fact talk about sex more than anything else; on the other hand, death today truly is taboo.
Foucault thinks that the irony of this "disqualification of death" is that wars are bloodier than ever but are justified in the name of life. He writes:
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nine- teenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formida- ble power of death . . . now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it . . . Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. (1990a: 137)
The Holocaust of the Jews, along with the extermination of gypsies and the "euthanasia" of the mentally ill and persons with developmental disabilites, were justified under the Nazi regime as "racial hygiene", nec- essary or beneficial to German flourishing. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as a plague of rats that posed a threat to German well-being, and presented medical care for the mentally ill and disabled as a drain on German resources better used for those fit to survive. Indeed, despite the "disqualification of death" in the modern era, Foucault argues that there will be more genocides under biopower than under sovereign power, because biopower wants to manage the health of populations. When combined with racism, this management becomes cast as a con- cern for the racial purity of a people. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault argues that biopower is almost necessarily racist, since racism, broadly construed, is an "indispensable precondition" that grants the state the power to kill (2003 : 256). 5 Under such conditions, eradicating sub-groups of that population is perceived as a justifiable form of man- aging and protecting a people. Foucault writes: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill, it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (1990a: 13 7).
We can take the example of the recent US-led invasion of Iraq to illustrate the manner in which the modern biopolitical state justifies
50
BIOPOWER
mass killings in the name of life, and both produces and exploits racism in order to do so. The original justifications for the invasion of Iraq involved claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The Bush and Blair administrations suggested that Iraq would use its weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States and its allies, affiliated as it was with the attacks of 9/11. Anti- Muslim and anti-Arab racism abounded in this period in the US and was exploited in the arguments for invading Iraq. In this way Iraq was pre- sented as a racialized threat to American existence or to the Western way of life, and invasion of this country was deemed necessary to protect life in Western democracies. When no weapons of mass destruction and no link to Al-Qaeda were found, the Bush and Blair administrations shifted tactics, emphasizing the slaughters and massacres that Saddam Hus- sein had committed against his own people, much like the oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan is exploited to justify the military incursions into this country. Over time these wars are recast as charity missions, undertaken not so much to protect lives in the West as to save innocent lives in the East. While critics point out that the alleged desires to save Iraqi lives and to liberate oppressed women are pretences, the important point is that we now need pretences such as these in order to justify war. We no longer pursue military invasions for the overt sake of glory, gain or conquest, or to defend the honour of the sovereign. While the ancient Romans could invade a foreign country for the undisguised purposes of occupying a land, enslaving a people and gaining access to resources, today we must mask our massacres as humanitarian efforts even while bringing about the deaths of thousands of civilians, turning millions more into refugees, and immediately securing the oil fields.
Social Darwinism and eugenics
In the nineteenth century, Europeans and North Americans grappled with the effects of increased urbanization, including the steady growth of slums inhabited by an underclass of paupers, prostitutes and thieves, many of whom were sickly and, the middle class thought, lazy and immoral. Rates of crime, disease, mental illness, alcoholism, promiscu- ity and prostitution were rampant in this segment of the population, which was, moreover, reproducing itself more quickly than the middle classes.
The result was a growing fear among the bourgeoisie that the "dregs" of society would eventually overtake them. The middle classes in Western countries began to suspect that their race was degenerating, both because they were not reproducing quickly enough and because
? 51
MI C H EL FOU CAULT: KEY CON CEPTS
the lower class was reproducing too quickly. These fears were exac- erbated in Britain when studies of the records of the height, weight and health of soldiers throughout the nineteenth century suggested "a progressive physical degeneracy of race" (Childs 2001: 1). European exploration of non-Western countries also confronted Europeans with races they deemed inferior, but which, because they must have a com- mon ancestry with Europeans in Adam and Eve, were believed to have degenerated over time, falling from their original nobility (ibid. ) . The possibility of nationwide racial degeneration was thus posed, and anxi- ety mounted that Europeans could descend to the level of these "inferior races" if procreation patterns were not controlled.
In response to these fears, the science of eugenics was born in the late nineteenth century in Britain with the works of the statistician Francis Galton, and reached its height in the first half of the twentieth century throughout the Western world. Galton drew on his cousin Charles Dar- win's theory of natural selection and argued that human societies were preventing natural selection or the "survival of the fittest" by protecting the sick, the poor and the weak through welfare programmes, charity and medicine. He coined the term "eugenics" from the Greek roots eu (good or well) and genes (born), and described the science as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations" (Black 2004: 18). Social Darwin- ists argued that the "survival of the fittest" human beings would come about naturally if welfare systems were simply withdrawn: although the poor would continue to have more children than the middle classes, this would be compensated for by higher mortality rates resulting from poverty and lack of medical care. As one Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, explains:
It seems hard that an unskilfulness . . . should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a laborer incapacitated by sickness . . . should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately but in connexion with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of beneficence. (Childs 2001: 2-3)
Spencer thus suggests that nature be allowed to run its course, eliminat- ing the weak from society. Individuals such as Spencer rejected the argu- ment that improving the environment of the poor might reduce their rates of mental illness, infection, alcoholism, promiscuity and crime. While those advocating environmental reform suggested improvements
? 52
BIOPOWER
in education and health care for the urban poor, and thus argued for biopolitical interventions of a different order (carried out at the level of disciplinary incursions into the lives of disorderly and abnormal members of society), Social Darwinists opposed such methods, argu- ing that they would only exacerbate the problem by helping to sustain those segments of society better left to die.
While Spencer's approach is to let the poor and the weak die out through non-intervention, other eugenicists advocated more active tac- tics. These tactics were divided into what were called "negative" and "positive" eugenics. "Negative eugenics", as the philosopher and eugen- ist F. C. S. Schiller puts it, "aims at checking the deterioration to which the human stock is exposed, owing to the rapid proliferation of what may be called human weeds" (ibid. : 3). This strategy entails preventing individuals and groups deemed "degenerate" from procreating through abortions, forced sterilization, incapacitation (such as locking up the mentally ill), "euthanasia" or, as in the case of Nazi Germany, genocide. Such "negative" tactics, however, can only prevent further deteriora- tion; they cannot improve the species and so strategies of "positive eugenics" were simultaneously promoted. "Positive eugenics" involved encouraging or compelling "human flowers" to produce large families, for instance through economic stimuli. Abortion by "fit" women was illegal in Nazi Germany, and middle-class women who attempted to enter the work force were discouraged on the grounds that j obs outside the home were "race-destroying occupations" (ibid. : 7).
Eugenics thus attempts to improve the gene pool; however, what is meant by "improve" is inevitably socioculturally defined and has always been tainted by classism, racism and abilism. Early eugenicists were concerned with increasing the intelligence of the population, for instance, but this concern tended to promote births in the middle class while preventing them among the working classes. Racist eugenicists are opposed to miscegenation. With the Immigration Act of 1924, eugeni- cists successfully argued against allowing "inferior stock" from southern and eastern Europe into the United States. Laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit the mentally ill from marrying and to allow them to be sterilized in psychiatric institutions. These laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 and were only abolished in the mid-twentieth century. As a result, 60,000 mentally ill Americans were sterilized in order to prevent them from passing on their genes. This is particularly problematic since what qualifies as "mental illness" is noto- riously unstable and, as Foucault argues in works such as The History of' Madness (2006b) and Psychiatric Power (2006a), has tended to describe social mores and norms rather than genuine medical conditions. 6
? 53
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
Social Darwinism and eugenics may be described as biopolitical movements since they involve strategies for managing the health and productivity of populations through interventions in natality and mor- tality rates, mental and physical health, and immigration, even if what is taken to be "healthy" is highly problematic, entailing as it does preju- dices ranging from abilism and classism to sexism, nationalism and racism. Following the Second World War, there has been a tendency to repress the fact that other countries besides Germany have histories of eugenics, histories which quietly continued long after the defeat of the Nazis (Childs 2001: 15 ) . Ladelle McWhorter not only traces the exten- sive history of eugenics in the United States, however, but argues that the contemporary and mostly unquestioned pro-family movement in this country is a mere recasting and extension of the eugenics movement (McWhorter 2009). Eugenic uses of science also arguably continue in the cases of pro-family financial, social and political incentives, designer babies, genetic counselling, preemptive abortions, and the creation of "genius sperm banks". Many of these examples entail the use of new scientific technology to improve the genes of individual babies and of the population as a whole while preventing babies deemed "unfit" from ever being born. These biopolitical practices thus further entrench the prejudices of an abilist society while continuing the goals of eugenics in manners which have become increasingly unbounded by the state.
Notes
1. For a Foucauldian study of how biopower and discipline control the care of o n e ' s b o d y, s e e B a r t k y 1 9 8 8 ; f o r h o w d i s c i p l i n a r y p o w e r c o n t r o l s d i e t , s e e B o r d o (2003) and Heyes (2006); for a Foucauldian study of how biopower controls housing choices and opportunities and the raising and education of children, see Feder (1996, 2007).
2. In the second and third lectures of Security, Territory, Population, Foucault contrasts disciplinary mechanisms and security measures aimed at the level of population which, at the beginning of the first lecture, he calls "somewhat vaguely, bio-power" (2007: 1).
3. SeeKukla(2005:chs2,5).
3. For a n extended discussion of biopolitical interventions in the birthrate among
these demographic groups in the United States, see McWhorter (2009).
4. Bedau,"TheCaseAgainsttheDeathPenalty":www. skepticfiles. org/aclu/case_
aga. htm (accessed August 2010).
5. Foucault writes of "racism against the abnormal" in this lecture, and hence is
not limiting himself to racism based on skin colour in making these claims.
6. To take but one example, homosexuality was included in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual ofMental Disorders until 1 973 .
? ? ? ? ? 54
? FOU R
Power/ knowledg
Ellen K. Feder
Foucault explicitly introduces the composite term, "power/knowledge" (pouvoir/savoir) in the middle, "genealogical" period of his work. At the same time, however, the concept of power/knowledge in many ways encompasses the entire corpus, characterizing the implicit project of his "archaeological" works, the explicit focus of the "genealogical", and the working out of the implications for living a good life in the later "ethical" work.
To understand what Foucault means by power/knowledge we first have to engage in a little translation. Notice that when the term is used in philosophy written in English, the original French in which Foucault spoke and wrote often follows it. In French, there are different ways of expressing distinctive categories of knowledge which English speakers mark by qualifications such as "folk knowledge" or "book knowledge". In many of his earlier, archaeological works, Foucault is interested in investigating how a particular kind of implicit knowledge - the savoir - permeating a historical period, that is, the understanding that counts as the "common sense" of that time/place/people, shapes the explicit knowledge ? the connaissance ? that is institutionalized in the disci- plines that make up the human sciences, including natural (e. g. biology) or social (e. g. psychology) science (Foucault 1972: 182-3).
As a noun, pouvoir is most typically translated as "power", but it is also the infinitive form of the verb meaning "to be able to", and is the most common way of saying "can" in Romance languages. In Foucault's work, pouvoir must be understood in this dual sense, as both "power" as English speakers generally take it (which could also be rendered as puissance or force in French), but also as a kind of potentiality,
? ? 55
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
capability or capacity. Power, Foucault tells us, must be understood to be more complex than a term like puissance conveys; it has multiple forms and can issue from "anywhere". Foucault urges us not to think of power only in terms of its "old" monarchical form, as something an individual possesses or wields over another or others. For him power works through culture and customs, institutions and individuals. Like- wise, its effects are also multiple, not simply negative or positive, but, as he puts it, "productive" : they are both positive and negative, unstable valuations that can be reversed through history.
The composite "power/knowledge" is also not quite translatable. Lit- erary theorist and translator Gayatri Spivak helpfully calls our attention to what she describes as the "homely verbiness of savoir in savoir-faire [a ready and polished kind of 'know-how', in English], savoir-vivre [an understanding of social life and customs] into pouvoir", and suggests that regarded in this way:
you might come up with something like this: if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something that are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines. Pouvoir-savoir - being able to do something - only as you are able to make sense ofit. (1993: 34)
The kind of knowledge to which Foucault directs us with this term, then, is one that has no clear source, but that a genealogical analysis - an examination of the historical conditions of possibility - illuminates, describing the accidents of history that result in particular consolida- tions of what counts as truth or knowledge. It is not the knowledge that is decreed by some authoritative body "from on high", but is more precisely described in the passive voice: it is the kind of knowledge that is "recognized as true", "known to be the case". For Foucault, this knowledge can only exist with the support of arrangements of power, arrangements that likewise have no clear origin, no person or body who can be said to "have" it.
An example illustrates many of the dimensions of power/knowledge as they are taken up in Foucault's work. It will also help to clarify how the concept of power/knowledge is salient throughout the dif- ferent periods into which scholars generally divide Foucault's corpus: the early (archaeological) texts where, Foucault later says, power/ knowledge was present even if unnamed;1 the middle (genealogical) texts where the concept power/knowledge is explicitly introduced; and finally the late (ethical) reflections, where power understood as
56
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
capacity becomes more central. In what follows, I examine the concept of sexual difference and its enforcement. Despite his famous interest in questions concerning "sexuality", Foucault does not take up the matter of sexual difference directly; nevertheless, Foucault's work has been highly influential among scholars and activists over the past sev- eral decades who have done so, and have compellingly demonstrated how the tools offered by Foucault's analysis can help us to clarify and deepen our understanding of a critical, yet surprisingly under-studied, concept.
Example: dividing the sexes, or boys will be boys
We take for granted sexual difference. It seems obvious that men and women, boys and girls, make up the world's populace. We may rec- ognize that sexual difference can be understood somewhat differently across the globe; some cultures have standards for masculine and femi- nine behaviour that differ from others. But there remains under the blan- ket of social distinctions what we take to be a brute biological or genetic "fact" of sexual difference. Common sense ? a kind of unquestioned knowledge - tells us that this sexual division into male and female is true, how things are. But if this difference is so obvious we might ask why the distinction between the sexes requires enforcement.
Take the example of four-year-old Nathan who is teased by his class- mates because he enjoys playing "like a girl", dressing up in high heels and dresses instead of like a cowboy, enjoying play with baby dolls instead of trucks. Perhaps we could say that the boy suffers the teasing of his preschool classmates because his play violates the other children's common sense. "You can't be a little girl" (Rekers & Varni 1977: 428), the other children tell Nathan.
What happens to Nathan is not unusual among preschoolers. But Nathan's story is distinctive because his is a published case, among the first of a number of cases, of a condition that was first discussed in US psychiatry in the early 1970s. "Gender Identity Disorder", or GID, continues to be actively treated today. In the paper in which Nathan's story is featured, the authors recount how Nathan's diagnosis led to a long period of therapy designed to help him accept that as a boy he was expected to play with "boys' toys". His parents were instructed to observe him and offer positive reinforcement for playing with gender- appropriate toys, and to ignore him when he played with inappropri- ate toys. Eventually, the case study reports, Nathan was given a wrist counter and told to press the counter when he played with boys' toys
? ? 57
MICHEL FOU CAULT: KE Y CONCEPTS
but not when playing with girls' toys. When he accumulated enough points he received a prize.
Reading the story of Nathan through the theoretical lens of Foucault, it is striking how closely Nathan's treatment regimen corresponds to the levels and character of surveillance Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, and to the levels of surveillance the Panoptic structure organ- izes. Most accounts of the Panopticon focus on the prisoners (or mad- men, paupers, schoolchildren) in the machine, those who are isolated and are the clear objects of the anonymous gaze signified by the invisible inhabitant(s) of the central tower. The objective of panopticism is the "internalization" of the authoritative gaze, where one:
subjected to a field of visibility . . . assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault 1979: 202-3)
But among the many lessons of panopticism is that the power that seems focused on one individual is in fact "distributed" throughout the structure, so that every individual is at the same time both "object" and "subject" of this power: the prisoner is "watched", but is being trained to watch himself, to be his own inspector. The inspector is by definition the "watcher", and yet he, too, is the object of a gaze: his performance as watcher is ever under scrutiny. The Panopticon is Foucault's best lesson in unsettling the way we typically conceive power and its operation.
Foucault's analysis points us to ways that power can be exercised from unexpected places. As the study reports the succession of events, it is not Nathan 's distress -- over his desire to play with girls' toys, or the teasing he faces - or worry by his parents or teacher about his behav- iour that brings him to the team of psychologists and researchers who subject him to treatment; it is, rather, the other children's teasing that distresses the teacher, who alerts the parents, who finally bring Nathan to treatment. It may seem obvious that children's interaction with one another is an important dimension of their psychosocial development, but the authority the children's voices command is arresting. We could speculate that the parents, teacher and treatment team see something important, even "natural", about the other children's intolerance of Nathan's behaviour. Viewing children as natural arbiters of gender norms might capture something of the intuitive sense of the adults involved in the case of Nathan, but this perspective calls for analysis of how such authority is vested in Nathan's four-year-old peers.
58
POWER/ KNOWLE D GE
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault contrasts disciplinary power with the ordinary understanding of power as something that can be "pos- sessed as a thing" and brandished against another (1979: 177; see also 1990a: 94). Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, is instead an expression of power that is associated with what he calls, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, the "assignment" of subjective positions (1972: 95), whereby individuals are allotted roles in the social world, positions that provide different possibilities for the exercise of power. The power that one can exercise as parent, simply by virtue of being a parent - power that is supported by society and by law - is one good example, but so is the power that is exercised by a bureaucrat in the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). It is not that the individual in one or the other of these positions "is" powerful in Foucaultian terms, but that different positions individuals take up or are assigned afford specific arenas for the exercise of power. Once an individual no longer occupies a given position - the parent goes to school to finish his college degree and at least for some part of the day occupies the position of student, or the clerk at the DMV goes home after a day of work - the power associated with that position can no longer be exercised. In the first volume of The History ofSexuality, Foucault clarifies that "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (1990a: 93). The story of a little boy who is teased in the playground and becomes a psychological case-study illustrates how power relations are distributed widely among young children, teachers and mental health professionals, forming what Foucault described as a "dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being localized in them" (ibid. : 96). Power is for Foucault inaccurately described as issuing "from above" or "outside"; instead, i t i s more instructive t o understand first the way it "comes from below" (ibid. : 94).
In Bentham's design of the Panopticon, the occupants of the central tower take up positions of surveillance vis-a-vis each of the inmates (and indeed, of one another). Nathan's classmates are similarly enjoined, enlisted in a panoptic apparatus that operates to ensure properly gen- dered subjects. If the exercise of the classmates' gaze is evidenced by their teasing, it should be counted among the "essential techniques" of disciplinary power. Foucault describes such techniques as:
always meticulous, often minute techniques, but they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a "new micro-physics of power" [that] had constantly reached out to
? 59
MICHEL FOUCAULT: KEY CONCEPTS
ever broader domains, as if . . . intended to cover the entire social bod? (1979: 139)
Loosed from its discursive field, the children's forthright announce- ment to Nathan that "You can't be a little girl" resists characterization as a subtle expression of power. Conceived within the terms of its field, however, their blunt repudiation is precisely the sort of "capillary intervention" (1990a: 84) that epitomizes a microphysics of power. It is consequential not for its sheer force but for the disciplinary effects it can provoke, that is, for its ability to "reach out to ever broader domains". The children's intervention in the case of Nathan activates a complex machinery of interlocking institutional interests - embodied by his teacher, his parents and an entire team of psychologists, assistants and technicians - functioning to subject Nathan to a "field of visibility" whereby he will learn, as his peers have already learned, to assume "responsibility for the constraints of power . . . [to] become the princi- ple of his own subjection" (1979: 202-3). Located at the extremities of this "productive network of power which runs through the whole social body" (1980d: 119), the children's exposure of Nathan's viola- tion is instrumental in two linked ways: it rouses the apparatus that will therapeutically draft Nathan into his prescribed role and correct the parental missteps that resulted in Nathan's deviation; it also provides an opportunity to produce new knowledge, that is, new "understand- ings", new "truths", not only about Nathan, but about the increasing numbers of children - and their parents2 - who would be identified under this new disorder. 3
Bentham himself understood that "panopticism" functions not only to circulate power, as it clearly does in the example of the prison, but also to produce knowledge. Foucault's formulation of the term "power/ knowledge" is developed from Bentham's own expectation that the Panopticon would serve as a "laboratory . . . [that] could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train and correct individuals" (Foucault 1979: 203). It is a "privileged place for experi- ments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transfor- mations that may be obtained from them" (ibid. : 204) . "Thanks to its mechanisms of observation," Foucault reflects, the Panopticon "gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowl- edge follows advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (ibid. : 204). But while many would understand in narrow terms the new "object" that is cre- ated to be the "gender disordered" child of the late twentieth century, Foucault's advancement of the analysis of power/knowledge clarifies
? ? ? 60
POWER/ KNOWLEDGE
that the objects must be taken to be more widely dispersed, that no one, in fact, escapes the objectification that comes, in the nineteenth century, to be centred around the notion of sexual identity.
Normalizing sex(uality)
Foucault most famously elaborated on this expression of power/ knowledge in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (tellingly titled in French as La Valente de Savoir, "The Will to Knowledge"), the book that immediately follows Discipline and Punish. In The History of Sexuality Foucault makes the remarkable claim that "the 'question' of sex" becomes in the late nineteenth century the most important question "in both senses: as interrogation and problema- tization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of rationality" (1990a: 69). A whole host of technologies are born to regulate what becomes understood as a person's (sexual) "essence", the truth of an individual, who he or she "really" is. The most sali- ent of these technologies is confession, first religious (as mandated by early Christianity), then psychological (in the nineteenth-century science of psychoanalysis) and finally political, as the mandate to pro- duce information becomes the ground for what became known as population control. 4 What unites these different technologies is the concern with identifying (and so, Foucault explains, what in fact turns out itself to create, as a category, or object of understanding) a whole variety of "perversions" born during this time, different ways to vio- late the multiplying rules governing the important distinction between licit and illicit, normal and abnormal.
Of all the technologies, medicine comes to play the most important role in the development of "the norm", dictating, for example, what constitutes normal marital relations. Children's sexual activity also became an object of keen interest and concern, not only because of a perceived need to "detect" violations of new norms, but, as we saw in the example of the case of Nathan, to be on the alert for problems with parents' rearing of their children:
Wherever there was the chance that [masturbation] might appear, devices of surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compel- ling admissions . . . parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not sufficiently strong . . . [parents'] conduct was prescribed and their pedagogy
? 61
MICHE L FOUCAU LT: KEY CONCEPTS
recodified; an entire medical-sexual regime took hold of the fam- ily milieu. (Foucault 1990a: 42)
Further, a whole class of deviant individuals comes to be identified at this time. Among the zoophiles (those who engage in sex with non-human animals), auto-monosexualists (those who are only able to experience erotic pleasure by themselves), gynecomasts (men with atypically large breasts), presbyophiles (those who engage in sex with the elderly) and dysparauenistic women (those for whom sexual intercourse is painful), perhaps the most lasting category of individual is "the homosexual", a new species of individual "born" in 1 8 70 (ibid. : 43 ) . 5
I n the late-twentieth-century diagnosis o f the gender dysphoric child there is embedded a whole history of power/knowledge that involves a complex of elements that come to be designated in Foucault's work by the term "normalization". Normalization, the institutionalization of the norm, of what counts as normal, indicates the pervasive standards that structure and define social meaning. Norms are at once everywhere and nowhere. They are obvious when we are talking about the sorts of standards against which one can be tested with respect to intelligence or body mass, for example. But they are less conspicuous when they are unspoken, what we may even take to be natural or understand as our own (what Foucault would see as their "internalization"), as is often the case with norms concerning gender.
We may think that medicine has always played the role it has in shaping our understanding of the norm, but Foucault's earlier his- tory of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic, suggests otherwise.
