Bio-power, part 2

Bio-power:

• was a critical component in the development of capitalism. This is because capitalism required 1) "the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production" (141), and 2) the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. Bio-power was also necessary to regulate/encourage the growth of both of these factors, "and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern" (141), which goes back to the idea of the body as a machine (the first pole of bio-power): the parallel increase of the body's usefulness as well as its docility. Procedures of power characterized by this first pole, or "the disciplines" (139), regulated this area and enabled the body (entirety of the population) to be inserted into and regulated within the capitalist system.

• has many forms and modes of application. "The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable" (141), probably because they were needed to the rapid growth and expansion of modern (capitalist) society.

• can be defined in its simplest form, perhaps, as the power that regulates and controls various aspects of the human body and human species, yet is simultaneously derived from that which it controls. And what it controls relies on the power that controls it for the same reason; as Foucault says, "against this power that was still new in the nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being" (144). What served as the controlling power also established itself as a new belief system: people did not aspire towards such antiquated goals as the coming of the emperor of the poor, etc., as "what was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man's concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plenitude of the possible" (145).
  

• at the turn of the eighteenth century dictated that "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" (142-143).
  

• brought life and its mechanisms (e.g. the body) into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation in human life. That is, bio-power played a huge role in redistributing the order of the classical episteme and went on to regulate

Sex is important as a political issue, says Foucault, and it fits into the system of bio-power quite specifically. "It was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed teh entire political technology of life" (145). This is how bio-power came about, in a sense. Sex is both tied to the disciplines of the body (the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment an economy of energies) and applied to the regulation of populations (through all the far-reaching effects of its activities). It fits into both categories at once and thus becomes an integral part of bio-power, an aspect of bio-power which addresses both its poles/main components.