William Walters on Foucault's Bio-Power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vx90PLATgk

1. William Walters on Foucault's Bio-Power http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vx90PLATgk

2. Biopower: The operations of power that secure and defend the nation-state as it circulates within civil society • F’s biopower refers to the techniques of “subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” • 18th C: Power was intertwined into the development of capitalism as the bodies of workers were inserted into the production machinery and population was applied to economic processes. • Segregation and social hierarchization(class) ensured “relations of domination and effects of hegemony” • War of attrition or racial conflicts defend the extablished norms of the society, i.e., it being expressed as the nation-state. • ‘if I want to live, you must die’ into a biological formulation: ‘death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal)

3. F’s Biopower: the political logic used to manage and control populations through speculations about the future based on probabilities and statistics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhE3Muh3co first 3 min only (2008) Governmentality is used for the security of the society, i.e., the state’s complex conduits of power as expressed in its institutions, procedures, tactics and calculations are used/ applied on its target population, as its principal form of knowledge, and as its essential apparatuses of security. This security system is the main apparatus of biopowerthat are expressed as the state’s policies and practices. These policies and their implementation should result in the economic maximization of resources while maintaining scarcity and acceptable levels of poverty.

4. ‘Truth’ (as expressed by power) is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions • The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of what should be accepted as ‘the truth’. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0hQeykz5ZY truth a soc construct? An argument 6 min • Society assumes that it is the truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’ • Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.

5. Right to take life or let live is Juridical power: King’s Power over death from the period of Enlightenment • Used by official institutions: e.g. govt. • Prohibits and punishes: Subtraction of freedom of the individual – gain of ones power and loss of another’s • Transgressions are punished • Individual as subject and as object of power • Current State power: • September 2013 BREAKING NEWS FEMA 800 Detention Camps in USA - last days End Times News update • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxIoMWS2B0g (first 3min)

6. F’s disciplinary and biopolitical power: Power over Life • To make one follow the norm: quantify, measure, appraise and hierarchize • Power to take charge of life: does not separate the state from the citizens • The power effects distributions around the norm.(subtraction vis a vis normalization) • Law operates as the Normalizing instrument • F differentiates between life and norm • Power is productive and positive – investment and valorization of the body • Power administers, optimizes and multiplies and implements the norm • Individual bodies are micromanaged in producing them as normalized bodies • Body politic of the population is similarly normalized • Power is neither inhibiting nor permitting • Unofficial institutions regulate through normative power • e.g.: peer pressure, unwritten rules of social norms

7. Law cannot regulate the way unofficial opinion can over life: e.g.: • Body size; gender and other social organizational aspects • The aim of biopower is that the society must be stabilized and normalized • Opinion regulates such issues that affect others in the society through rewards or negative reinforcements • Power over life: • Means: production of power • Location: everywhere and micromanaged • Source: unofficial • Works through positive/ negative reinforcements

8. Disciplinary power: • Normalizes the individual body • Centered on the body as the anatomic politics of the body • Optimizes and micromanages the body to make it efficient: e.g., • Diet, beauty regimen, new language learning • Discipline is enforced through surveillance • Biopower: manages and normalizes the body politic (population) • Collect data, categorize and classify, average or normalize to attain • even distribution around the bell curve (norm) • Manage instances that do not fit the bell curve, i.e., pull in the outliers: e.g.: child being measured by doctors (h/w); BMI; population trend of what is normal; monitor the bell curve to enforce the normal for security: the “society must be defended” • Discipline is literal • Biopower is metaphorical

9. Right to death: subtraction of one’s power • Right to life: production of power • In juridical power liberation is fight against subtraction and if power prohibits, resistance is disobedience. • In biopower, resistance and oppositional activities augment the resisters’ power • e.g. sexual revolution of the 60s • When we think we are resisting, we are increasing our access to power – this complements power – can’t get rid of power • How then can you resist power? • Micro-subvert it and not being governed by the system, by playing the system • The care (and practice) of the self

10. Judith Butler: • Resist normative power • Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance – normative is repetition of the norm • Resist hierarchal binarism • e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism) compared to women • Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through disruption • Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them. • How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity • In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.

11. Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions • The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of the truth • We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’ • F’s Genealogy’s role: • to connect different events according to ‘the emergence of different interpretations’ • to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’ rather than a universal or transcendental truth. • Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.

12. Reading The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Vol. 1) Duration: 6:54 Published: 2010-11-13 Uploaded: 2012-09-28 Author: Michael McDonell http://wn.com/Reading_The_History_of_Sexuality_An_Introduction_Vol_1 Rather than thinking of sexuality as a biological given that can either be freed or repressed by external forces, Foucault looks at the way that the truth of sexuality is produced by certain institutions and discourses. He argues that we are saturated with images of sexuality, not because we are more free, but because it is a new way for power to be organized - biopolitics.

13. Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 5 of 7 Duration: 10:46 Published: 2010-07-13 Uploaded: 2012-07-31 Author: apolloxias http://wn.com/Michel_Foucault__The_Culture_of_the_Self,_First_Lecture,_Part_5_of_7 This is the first of a series of three lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture's conceptual development of individual subjectivity. He gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the tape. plato.stanford.edu