Biopower

Biopower is political rule through a population's health and well-being (Gates, 2011, p. 104).

ACCORDING TO Ericson and Haggerty (1997): "Biopower is the power of biography, of constructing biographical profiles of human populations for risk management and security provision" (p. 91) with things like social classifications organizing themselves around the idea of "normal." Biopower is what makes up people; it puts risk onto a body and is then measured off of a standard through which the institution asserts is the norm. The norm is made of supposed hard data like statistics and probabilities which further creates the idea of "normal" persons, hierarchies, and exclusions. The words "human nature" sometimes replace the word "normal." There is no norm, however, except for deviation from the statistical norm (p. 92). Success of biopower occurs when the public believes the logic of the norm objectively; if people will believe they fit into categories; they will act accordingly. This biography becomes power and controls them. Bordieu uses biopower in his discussions of institutions; institutions "impress on people who they should be and what they should do, to the point where they see each other through the institutional hall of mirrors" (p. 92). For Bordieu, people could re-categorize themselves once they become aware of "different possibilities of personhood," but overwhelmingly, "risk calculation schemes provide scripts for actors to construct their selves and their actions, scripts that vary across institutional space and activity" (p. 93). Risk profiles of the normal fit into liberal ideas of government because "they construct active, autonomous, and self-regulating individuals" (p. 94). Governmentality relates to risk technologies and practices which assist in self-governance of which biopower contributes.

According to Foucault, biopower is different than discipline which are "the techniques and practices by which the human body is make subject to regular and predictable routines" and sovereignty which is "the command of central authority over territory" (p. 91). Although Foucault mostly focused on the state's use of biopower, discipline and sovereignty, non-state institutions can also exercise these powers.

Foucault saw discipline, sovereignty and government as a triangle of interconnectivity (Nadesan, 2008, p. 7).

"Biopower operates as a technology of power that both privileges and marginalizes, employers and disciplines" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 5).

Biopower and governmentality are achieved through bureaucracy and surveillance (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997, p. 94). The positivist ideas of social science and the "experts" that create these ideas combine to create ways of classifying norms and deviations (Nadesan, 2008, p. 67). Things like fertility, productivity, and health are sites of classification (Nadesan, 2008 p. 95). "Aggregate population statistics replaced uncertainty with the seemingly more exact and objective science and probability, legitimizing and institutionalizing "epidemiological" medicine predicated in population surveillance and the statistical creation of risk factors and risk profiles" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 107). Conservative authorities use biopower to carry out narratives-i.e., crime and poverty show why single parents are bad (p. 112) and STD's supposedly show how people should heed God's plan of monogamy and marriage (113). The state can use biopower for suveillance through things like statistics and genetic data (p. 121). In the 19th century, Foucault showed how externally dangers like immigrants and internal dangers like "madness, 'idiocy,' criminality, and the other forms of 'degeneracy' or 'perversion'" (Nadesan, 2008, p 138). Prisons and mental institutions became important places to hold those who couldn't govern themselves (p. 139).

Under the welfare state liberalism, the state took control of managing state responsibilities.

Biopolitics was the development and operations of knowledge about people into categorizes in or to secure the nation (Nadesan, 200, p. 25).

"Sovereignty thus arises in the decision of exceptionality and in the concomitant use of repression to discipline those deemed incapable of self-government" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 196). "Nineteenth-century biopower operated in the sovereign mode by designating populations as degenerate and/or threatening, leading to the in institutional exclusion in enclosed and disciplinary spaces. Twentieth-century biopower is sought to engineer the health of populations through hygienic and neohygyienic technologies, which eventually stressed technologies of the self" (Nadesan, 2008, p. 187). The increased data gathering from technologies has increased the biopolitical risk categories (p.189).

Facial recognition technology and using identification practices such as attaching a photo to an ID places individuals in categories of inclusion and exclusion to determine if a one is a legitimate, self-governing person or a more problematic identity outside of the who fall outside of the norm (Gates, 2011, p. 34).

Biometrics and biometric technology (like fingerprint monitors) are being sold as a way to keep oneself secure (Gates, 2011, p 133).

Lyon (2009) says an old definition of biometrics is the "quantitative or statistical study of biology,' but today's definitions generally assume the enabling presence of information technologies that permit the measurement and analysis of human body characteristics" (p. 114). "...many assume that both bodies and identities are stable" (p. 119). "The claim is often made that biometrics replaces the subjective eye of the inspector with the objective eye of the scanner, but the problem is that the 'objectivity' is compromised by the ways that key differences - of class, race, and gender - are defined" (p. 121). With biometrics, the body becomes the password (p. 123), and "categorization is central to identification processes."

References:

Bordieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. London: Routledge.

Ericson, R. V., & Haggerty, K.D. (1997). The Risk Society. In R.V. Ericson & K.D. Haggerty (Eds.) Policing the risk society (pp. 81-130). U of Toronto: Toronto.

Gates, K A. (2011). Our biometric future: Facial recognition technology and the culture of surveillance. New York: New York UP.

Lyon, D. (2009). Identifying citizens: ID cards as surveillance. Malden: Polity. Nadesan, M.H. (2008). Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life. Florence, KY: Routledge.