on 1/28/01 4:05 PM, Lionel Boxer at lboxer@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I get the impression that Bio-power is the power that people confer onto
> doctors such that what they say is perceived to be truth. That truth can
> lead to the legitimate creation of addicts of various drugs and processes to
> resolve problems that might be symptoms of things other than doctors
> diagnosis.
>
> My impression of Bernauer's comment about how Bio-Power creates the
> possibility for the annihilation of the human race is that he considers that
> people will try to make themselves well by believing doctors' 'truths'.
> Reliance on that sort of assurance could result in people becoming reliant
> on drugs and unable to create natural defences to ever mutating virises and
> bacteria.
I think that Ann Laura Stoler gives an incredibly interesting (and perhaps
most extensive that I've seen) reading of Biopower. Take a look at _Race and
the Education of Desire_. One chapter in particular deals almost exclusively
with Biopower and its functioning.
My reading is that biopower is a question of the biological state and how it
functions to produce subjects and control over those subjects - the ability
to differentiate between different types of "biological" subjects. Here is
an excerpt that might be useful:
Laura Ann Stoler, Prof Anthropology @ U. Mich, 1995
[ Race and the Education of Desire ]
For Foucault, this is the point where racism intervenes. It is not that all
racisms are invented at this moment. Racisms have existed in other forms at
other times: Now, ³what inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is
the emergence of biopower ? racism inscribes itself as a fundamental
mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states² (TM:53). What
does racist discourse do? For one, it is a ³means of introducing ? a
fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die²
(TM:53). It fragments the biological field, it establishes a break (césure)
inside the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of
races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as
³good,² fit and superior.
More importantly, it establishes a positive relation between the right to
kill and the assurance of life. It posits that ³the more you kill [and] ?
let die, the more you will live.² It is neither racism nor the state that
invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside
the social body. Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way,
establishing a biological confrontation between ³my life and the death of
others² (TM:53). It gives credence to the claim that the more ³degenerates²
and ³abnormals² are eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be
stronger, more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not political
adversaries, but those identified as external and internal threats to the
population. ³Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put
[certain people] to death in a society of normalization² (TM:54). The
murderous function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism
which is ³indispensable² to it (TM:54).
Several crucial phenomena follow from this. One is evidence in this knot
that binds nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power:
Basically, evolutionism understood in the broad sense, that is not so much
Darwin¹s theory itself but the ensemble of [its] notion, has become ? in the
nineteenth century, not only a way of transcribing political discourse in
biological terms, ? of hiding political discourse in scientific dress, but a
way of thinking the relations of colonization, the necessity of war,
criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness ? (TM:55).
In addition, racism will develop in modern societies where biopower is
prevalent and particularly at certain ³privileged points² where the right to
kill is required, ³primo with colonization, with colonizing genocide.² How
else, Foucault rhetorically asks, could a biopolitical state kill ³peoples,
a population, civilizations² if not by activating the ³themes of
evolutionism² and racism² (TM:55). Colonialism is only mentioned in passing
because what really concerns him is not racism¹s legitimating function to
kill ³others,² but its part in justifying the ³exposure of one¹s own
citizens² to death and war. In modern racist discourse, war does more than
reinforce one¹s own kind by eliminating a racial adversary; it ³regenerates²
one¹s own race (TM:56).
In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life
productively converge. But, he argues, one could also see criminality,
madness, and various anomalies in a similar way, thereby resituating the
subjects of his earlier projects (on madness, prisons, and sexuality) as
expressions of the murderous qualities of the normalizing state, as
sub-themes in a genealogy of racism in which the exclusion and/or
elimination of some assures the protection of others (TM:56). Here discourse
has concrete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the
biological taxonomies of the racist state:
You see that we are very far from a racism that would be, as traditionally,
a simple disdain or hate of some races for others. We are also very far from
a racism that would be a sort of ideological operation by which the State or
a class would attempt to divert those hostilities towards a mythical
adversary ? I think it is much more profound than an old tradition ? than a
new ideology, it is something else. The specificity of modern racism ? is
not tied to mentalities, ideologies, to the deceits of power. It is linked
to the technology of power ? to that which places us far from the war of
races and this intelligibility of history: to a mechanism that permits
biopower to exercise itself. Racism is tied to the functioning of a state
that is compelled to use race, the elimination of races and the purification
of the race to exercise its sovereign power. (TM: 56-57)
Not surprisingly an explanation of the Nazi state underwrites his argument.
As a state that combined the tightest regimes of discipline and regulation,
it expressed the ³paroxysms of a new mechanism of power² culled from the
eighteenth century² (TM:57). At once disciplinary and universally assuring
(³assurancielle²), insuring, and regulatory, the Nazi state generalized both
biopower and the right to kill in a form that was ³racist, murderous, and
suicidal² (TM:59).
Foucault ends his final lecture here on a prescient and ominous note. While
the deadly play between a power based on the sovereign right to kill and the
biopolitical management of life are exemplified in the Nazi state, it is not
housed there alone. His argument is broader still, namely that this play
between the two appears in all modern states, be they fascist, capitalist or
socialist;
I think that the socialist State, socialism, is also marked by racism ?
social racism does not await the formation of socialist states to appear ?
it is difficult for me to speak about this ? But one thing is certain: that
the theme of biopower ? was not just criticized by socialism, but, in fact,
embraced by it, developed, reimplanted, modified on certain points, but
absolutely not reexamined in its foundations and in its modes of
functioning. (TM:59-60)
Invoking nineteenth-century popular mobilizations revered by the French
left, Blanquism, the Communards, and the Anarchists, Foucault contended that
their notions of society and the state (or whatever authoritarian
institutions might substitute for it) were predicated on the strongly racist
principle that a collective body should manage life, take life in charge,
and compensate for its aleatory events. In so doing, such forms of socialism
exercised the right to kill and to disqualify its own members. Whether this
should rightly be labeled a ³racist principle² or be understood as a
particular effect of biopolitical technologies more generally is open to
question. Foucault justifies his designation in these terms: ³Each time that
socialism has had to insist on the problem of the struggle, of the struggle
against the enemy, of the elimination of the adversary inside capitalist
society ? racism has revived ? a racism that is not really ethnic but
biological² (TM:60).
---
Asher Haig ahaig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dartmouth 2004
> I get the impression that Bio-power is the power that people confer onto
> doctors such that what they say is perceived to be truth. That truth can
> lead to the legitimate creation of addicts of various drugs and processes to
> resolve problems that might be symptoms of things other than doctors
> diagnosis.
>
> My impression of Bernauer's comment about how Bio-Power creates the
> possibility for the annihilation of the human race is that he considers that
> people will try to make themselves well by believing doctors' 'truths'.
> Reliance on that sort of assurance could result in people becoming reliant
> on drugs and unable to create natural defences to ever mutating virises and
> bacteria.
I think that Ann Laura Stoler gives an incredibly interesting (and perhaps
most extensive that I've seen) reading of Biopower. Take a look at _Race and
the Education of Desire_. One chapter in particular deals almost exclusively
with Biopower and its functioning.
My reading is that biopower is a question of the biological state and how it
functions to produce subjects and control over those subjects - the ability
to differentiate between different types of "biological" subjects. Here is
an excerpt that might be useful:
Laura Ann Stoler, Prof Anthropology @ U. Mich, 1995
[ Race and the Education of Desire ]
For Foucault, this is the point where racism intervenes. It is not that all
racisms are invented at this moment. Racisms have existed in other forms at
other times: Now, ³what inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state is
the emergence of biopower ? racism inscribes itself as a fundamental
mechanism of power that exercises itself in modern states² (TM:53). What
does racist discourse do? For one, it is a ³means of introducing ? a
fundamental division between those who must live and those who must die²
(TM:53). It fragments the biological field, it establishes a break (césure)
inside the biological continuum of human beings by defining a hierarchy of
races, a set of subdivisions in which certain races are classified as
³good,² fit and superior.
More importantly, it establishes a positive relation between the right to
kill and the assurance of life. It posits that ³the more you kill [and] ?
let die, the more you will live.² It is neither racism nor the state that
invented this connection, but the permanency of war-like relations inside
the social body. Racism now activates this discourse in a novel way,
establishing a biological confrontation between ³my life and the death of
others² (TM:53). It gives credence to the claim that the more ³degenerates²
and ³abnormals² are eliminated, the lives of those who speak will be
stronger, more vigorous, and improved. The enemies are not political
adversaries, but those identified as external and internal threats to the
population. ³Racism is the condition that makes it acceptable to put
[certain people] to death in a society of normalization² (TM:54). The
murderous function of the biopolitical state can only be assured by racism
which is ³indispensable² to it (TM:54).
Several crucial phenomena follow from this. One is evidence in this knot
that binds nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power:
Basically, evolutionism understood in the broad sense, that is not so much
Darwin¹s theory itself but the ensemble of [its] notion, has become ? in the
nineteenth century, not only a way of transcribing political discourse in
biological terms, ? of hiding political discourse in scientific dress, but a
way of thinking the relations of colonization, the necessity of war,
criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness ? (TM:55).
In addition, racism will develop in modern societies where biopower is
prevalent and particularly at certain ³privileged points² where the right to
kill is required, ³primo with colonization, with colonizing genocide.² How
else, Foucault rhetorically asks, could a biopolitical state kill ³peoples,
a population, civilizations² if not by activating the ³themes of
evolutionism² and racism² (TM:55). Colonialism is only mentioned in passing
because what really concerns him is not racism¹s legitimating function to
kill ³others,² but its part in justifying the ³exposure of one¹s own
citizens² to death and war. In modern racist discourse, war does more than
reinforce one¹s own kind by eliminating a racial adversary; it ³regenerates²
one¹s own race (TM:56).
In conditions of war proper, the right to kill and the affirmation of life
productively converge. But, he argues, one could also see criminality,
madness, and various anomalies in a similar way, thereby resituating the
subjects of his earlier projects (on madness, prisons, and sexuality) as
expressions of the murderous qualities of the normalizing state, as
sub-themes in a genealogy of racism in which the exclusion and/or
elimination of some assures the protection of others (TM:56). Here discourse
has concrete effects; its practices are prescribed and motivated by the
biological taxonomies of the racist state:
You see that we are very far from a racism that would be, as traditionally,
a simple disdain or hate of some races for others. We are also very far from
a racism that would be a sort of ideological operation by which the State or
a class would attempt to divert those hostilities towards a mythical
adversary ? I think it is much more profound than an old tradition ? than a
new ideology, it is something else. The specificity of modern racism ? is
not tied to mentalities, ideologies, to the deceits of power. It is linked
to the technology of power ? to that which places us far from the war of
races and this intelligibility of history: to a mechanism that permits
biopower to exercise itself. Racism is tied to the functioning of a state
that is compelled to use race, the elimination of races and the purification
of the race to exercise its sovereign power. (TM: 56-57)
Not surprisingly an explanation of the Nazi state underwrites his argument.
As a state that combined the tightest regimes of discipline and regulation,
it expressed the ³paroxysms of a new mechanism of power² culled from the
eighteenth century² (TM:57). At once disciplinary and universally assuring
(³assurancielle²), insuring, and regulatory, the Nazi state generalized both
biopower and the right to kill in a form that was ³racist, murderous, and
suicidal² (TM:59).
Foucault ends his final lecture here on a prescient and ominous note. While
the deadly play between a power based on the sovereign right to kill and the
biopolitical management of life are exemplified in the Nazi state, it is not
housed there alone. His argument is broader still, namely that this play
between the two appears in all modern states, be they fascist, capitalist or
socialist;
I think that the socialist State, socialism, is also marked by racism ?
social racism does not await the formation of socialist states to appear ?
it is difficult for me to speak about this ? But one thing is certain: that
the theme of biopower ? was not just criticized by socialism, but, in fact,
embraced by it, developed, reimplanted, modified on certain points, but
absolutely not reexamined in its foundations and in its modes of
functioning. (TM:59-60)
Invoking nineteenth-century popular mobilizations revered by the French
left, Blanquism, the Communards, and the Anarchists, Foucault contended that
their notions of society and the state (or whatever authoritarian
institutions might substitute for it) were predicated on the strongly racist
principle that a collective body should manage life, take life in charge,
and compensate for its aleatory events. In so doing, such forms of socialism
exercised the right to kill and to disqualify its own members. Whether this
should rightly be labeled a ³racist principle² or be understood as a
particular effect of biopolitical technologies more generally is open to
question. Foucault justifies his designation in these terms: ³Each time that
socialism has had to insist on the problem of the struggle, of the struggle
against the enemy, of the elimination of the adversary inside capitalist
society ? racism has revived ? a racism that is not really ethnic but
biological² (TM:60).
---
Asher Haig ahaig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dartmouth 2004