Bio-power

Starting in the 17th century, there was a major shift in the structure of power from the "right to kill" (take life/let live) to the "control over life" (foster life/disallow to the point of death).

"As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life" (138) writes Foucault, "its reason for being... made it more and more difficult to apply the death penalty." That is, once power's function became the administration of life, it became pointless, or at least extreme, to administer death, given that once a life has been taken, there can be no further power exerted over said life.

So now that it is throughout life, rather than through the threat of death, that power exercises control; death is no longer a viable basis for power because, quite simply, "death is power's limit" (138). Death is the very moment in which a life may escape power, because it is, as Foucault says, a private moment.

Why is it no longer possible to control a population through power derived from the right to kill? Well, remember that the sovereign "exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing" (136), which is more or less how power functioned in earlier societies. What happens in the 17th century to provoke a (gradual) change? Most likely this is primarily related to the advancement of civilization, etc. etc. In the face of a changing, growing, unpredictable population, a new power had to take the place of the old one, and it had to be capable of controlling more complex factors than before. This isn't simply ordering subjects about under the threat of death should they disobey; this is a whole new level of complexity and order, and as society evolved, power constructs had to evolve alongside it.

Why bio-power? Perhaps because those were the elements that needed to be controlled: the body as a machine, and the "specifies body," the body as it pertains to biological processes.

Here's the fun part.


WHAT IS BIO-POWER?

Bio-power is comprised of these two areas, which Foucault refers to as "poles." The first, again, deals with the body as a machine. The disciplines (an anatomo-politics of the human body) and their procedures of power ensure the body's disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. More simply, the body, as a machine, needs to be both productive (to society) and controllable.

The second of the two poles focuses on the "species body" (139, Foucault's words again) - that is, the body as it relates to biological processes. The regulatory controls (a bio-politics of the population) supervise those processes, which include "propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary" (139).

Bio-power's highest function is not the right to kill but to "invest life through and through" (139); again, power cannot be exercised through or over death, given that this is explicitly defined by Foucault as the limit of power. Rather, bio-power is power exerted and controlling throughout the duration of life, which allows for greater specificity than the comparatively simple "take life/let live" dichotomy. Thus, bio-power is a calculated management of life: it seeks to achieve the subjugation of bodies (first pole, the body as machine) and the control of populations (second pole, the species body).