Rethinking Biopolitics, Race, and Power in the Wake of Foucault

Michael Foucault’s biopolitics arguments

Michael Foucault’s biopolitics arguments define what takes life and its mechanisms into the field of clear measurement and establishes information control as a human life transition agent. Foucault distinguished historical and theoretical ’power to life aspects. Person body discipline is one dimension, and social or population control body is the other. According to Foucault, bio-politics shows straight cuts in modernity and puts life at the center of political order. As a result, the constitution of industrial society is intertwined with the birth of biopolitics. The control of society is achieved through ideologies, consciousness, and also the body. The biopolitics in capitalist governments, the biological matters more compared to anything else.

Racism disrupts the regime of power

Racism disrupts the regime of power and tends to introduce a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control. Racism intends to disintegrate and create caesura with the biological continuum that bio-power aimed to address. Secondly, racism transforms older power over life and death associated with sovereignty (Macey, 2009). The old sovereignty power over life allowed imperative to kill or actual killing so long as it does not result in political adversaries. It was acceptable to eliminate biological threat eminent within species of a race.

Bio-power aims at regulation the population

Bio-power aims at regulation the population and the homogenous body. However, human groups are classified or categorized into homogenous groups referred to as races. Racism may be understood from biological or genetic theories. However, it extends to a visible difference of certain minority culture or religion. According to Foucault, the ’races’ have more to do with lineage, breeding, and lines of descent than with the difference between (Macey, 2009). Therefore, it results in creating ethnicity but does little to eliminate the confusion. The races are always at war with one another competing for power and control. The Nazism, for instance, was a movement that aimed at eliminating a certain race of people. However, the Macey in Society Must be Defended article indicated that racism is a serious threat to the core existence of societies (Macey, 2009). Defending the society means shifting the discourse from race wars into peaceful coexistence. The people must prepare to eliminate sovereign powers that conquer the vanquished and embrace inclusivity.

Strength and Weakness

The lecturer at the college de France in 1978-1979 enabled Michael Foucault to introduce the Birth of Biopolitics (Macey, 2009). Foucault supports Rancere’s interpretation but still needed to bridge the gap Foucault critique and appropriate place of life. The gaps existing in the theory on bio-power as suggested by Foucault can be closed through tracking Goerge Canguilhem’s influence. Canguilhem worked hard in explaining biopower through psychoanalysis to Marxism as it examined the relationship between vitalism and the science of life. In the analysis, Canguilhem indicated that life science develops within cultures that subscribe to the notion it is possible to be true about life. In addition, this great thinker indicated that neither biology nor physiology can determine norms in life, especially if it falls within political spheres. Foucault expanded Canguilhem’s work and tried to expand how politics give birth to certain truths about life. The modern system of government, according to Foucauldian biopolitics, expresses some life’s truth as they take control and regulate the subject or population.

One may question about the truth about life

One may question about the truth about life. The truth may not always set individuals free. Rather, politics and truth are the means of ruling and controlling the life of individuals and those of the larger population. The control and regulations in life mark Foucault’s departure from Freud arguments. Some feminists from France criticized psychoanalysis through the phallocentric charge. The criticism indicates that Freud’s theory makes female sexual pleasures a problem. However, Foucault criticized Freud but does not indicate privileges enjoyed by the male in their life which is fundamental to the conception of biopower expressed in Foucault’s theory. The profiling of women within the masculinity complex proves that the men are biased as much as Foucault’s biopower notions. Women are constantly put in an impossible battle is the norm and is, therefore, a greater display of power. The control is similar to the sovereign power model that expressed or evinced power using death.

The bio-power notion by Michael Foucault

The bio-power notion by Michael Foucault is the fertile concept in recent theory. It is able to influence thinkers from various concerns and disciplines. In The History of Sexuality: an introduction, the author indicated forces that help individuals and the population to grow, impede them and make them submit and sometimes destroy them (Macey, 2009). Critiquing the psychoanalysis by Foucauldian also widely differs from the pseudo-science charge as presented by Canguilhem George, Foucault’s mentor. Canguilhem had earlier indicated that psychoanalysis does not meet the threshold of genuine science. The work done by Foucault, in contrast, allows the readers to identify issues at stake when people debate on whether psychoanalysis is a science or not. The answers according to Foucault arguments are in bio-power. The science of truth is privileged as it effectively disseminates certain norms of the body thus assists in regulating individuals and the larger population. Science, therefore, therefore obscures the creation of norms thus make them look as natural truth.

References

Macey, D. (January 01, 2009). Rethinking Biopolitics, Race and Power in the Wake of Foucault. Theory Culture and Society, 26, 6, 186-205.