An attempt at formalising Foucault's notion of bio-power!
what is the effect of biopower in individuals?
bio-power invents and then distributes the "soul" of individuals.
I understand the word "soul" as refering to an individuals subjectivity. I use the word subjectivity in the sense that it makes referance to an individual's agency. Subjects act and objects are out there in the world. Foucaut teaches me that even subjectivities are invented and distributed by a power (bio-power) external to the individual.
Foucualt emphasizes that the soul has a real, tangible, and even material existence.
"[the soul] esists; it has a reality; it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those... one supervises, trains, and corrects." 177
Finally, the soul is a creation of a political investment in the body. This is the EFFECT of biopower: it creates and distributes subjective existences in individuals.
"A "soul" in habits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The souls i the effect and instrument of a political anatomy..." 177
This can be
what is the political technology of the body
it is diffuse
"this technology is diffuse, rearely formulated in continuous, systematic disourse; it is often made up of bits and pieces; it implements a disparate set of tools or methods.
Because it is diffuse it is cannot be assigned to any one actor who controls it or is controlled by it.
Biopower is not a relation analogous to property: one does not possess it. It is, rather, a strategy. It is constantly acted out.
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I left a comment on one of Greg F's posts about how Foucault's notion of power reminds me of Freud's account of the development of the super-ego (http://gregsfoucaultforum.blogspot.com/2007/01/birth-of-asylum.html)
- the story of childhood development that psychoanalysis tells as all about the way in which an individual is "subjectified".
Some of the key points of comparison for me are:
- it works through the body, through its pleasures and pains: the sense of self can't be separated from the disciplining of the body
- it works through desire as much as punishment: the child's ego is a 'sedimentation' of desired figures, although it's true that in the key stage of the Oedipal scenario, a certain form of subjectivity is coerced
- things can and do go wrong, all the time
This is not to say that Foucault is a psychoanalyst: it's just another account of power working through the initially odd notion of "subjectification".
Maybe the question is whether the more general extension of processes of subjectification and bio-power signals a kind of generalised "paternalism" or extension of a family/private regime to the public sphere.
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