Doo Uap, Doo Uap, Doo Uap

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FOUCAULT – Power

* Foucault’s concept of modern disciplinary power

- Power is a set of ever-changing relations.
- Power is not possessed but exercised. By exercising power certain relationship is being built. (e.g. patriarchy: power operates to shape certain types of people, certain desires and relationships.)
- Thus, power is not necessarily repressive, but rather productive.  There is always resistance.

* Disciplinary power

- Based on classification, surveillance and control of individuals.
- Modern power (based on routine surveillance)
- Creation of new forms of knowledge such as medicine, criminology and sexology in hierarchical categories. Knowledge is produced by discourses.
- The role of medicine, criminal justice, psychiatry is to produce new forms of power and knowledge over bodies.

   - Development of disciplinary techniques. Exercised on the bodies of individual

   - Collection of knowledge of individual and population (e.g. fertility rate)

* Biopower – thought of as a subject of disciplinary power

- From right of death to power over life. Power to foster life.

- Power is to govern people (e.g. demographic, statistics are important for the govt. to build policies)

- Biopower aims to govern a population’s life forces. (as the medium for the play of power)
   : the body comes to be linked to new political rationalities specifically located within new technologies of biopower.

- These two forms come together in broad ‘technologies of power/knowledge’.

Two forms: 1) The anatomic-politics of the human body (Body as a machine)
                           (focus on the discipline of the individual body to normalise their comportment)
                       2) The bio-politics of the population (the regulation of the population)
   (population become new objective power that could be managed,  e.g. baby bonus, life protecting laws)

- We become ‘self-regulating’ subjects who monitor our health and act to reduce our ‘risk factors’.

- Surveillance is central to biopower and is institutionalised through the types of disciplinary techniques, which result in the production of ‘docile bodies’.               

- Biopolitics become a scientific and political problem to be known categorised and governed.

- Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls.

- Biopower is an individualising and a totalising form of power.

* Biopower since 1984

- Capitalism and the modern nation state are impossible without biopower. (142-3)

- Medicine shifts its focus from curing disease to health, risk and prevention.

- Expansion of biological knowledge: genetics, genomics, neuroscience.

- Scientific development and biomedicine in the context of state and law (how these are used)

- Biological discourse has come to understand our body.