![]() a community that subscribes to an ideology that maintains and legitimates the state, a population that has been shaped to the state’s desired form. This can be illustrated by the way in which states in the 18 th century began to treat the population as an object of biopolitical concern, managing conditions such as birth, death, health, disease, ‘race’ and sexuality in order to ‘foster life’ (Rogers et al 2013).Īchieving biopower allows the state to produce social categories and ultimately create a society that conforms to norms which secure a ‘vital population’ (Roach 2009 157) i.e. This means then, that state violence is not solely executed and legitimated through juridical strategies but also through strategies that have, at the heart of them, a preoccupation with how the population lives and how life can be optimised. This is not to say that juridical power has been reduced but instead it is accompanied by biopower, they both over-lap and are intrinsically tied up with one another (Ewald 1990 1, Majia and Nadesan 2008 6-7). ![]() The emergence of biopower meant that the ‘ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1978 138). Foucault critiques this conceptualisation of power, arguing that in the 17th century a new power emerged (Foucault 2008 304-308), a ‘power over life’ (biopower). These two poles serve to categorise people as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ in the state’s eyes.Ĭlassical liberal theorists during the 18th century conceived that the main way power operated was juridically (Foucault 1978 135), that is, by subtracting, prohibiting and punishing through official institutions (Ewald 1990 1). Disciplinary power produces ‘docile bodies’ (through disciplinary sites such as schools, prisons, and hospitals) which can be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (Foucault 1977 136) whilst biopolitical power ‘administers life’ (Foucault 1978 138), that is it tries to ‘optimise’ the life of populations (Foucault 1978 139). This concept is helpful in that it connects identity to power and demonstrates how social categories are used to enact and allow state violence on certain subjects.īiopower can be split into two poles that intertwine – anatamo-politics of the body (disciplinary power) and biopolitical power of the population. Foucault’s concept of biopower describes the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body – it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013). The subject (the person, the self, one’s identity) is thus the product of history and power. For Foucault, the self is discursively produced over time by being subjected to the regulatory power relations of the discourses that it is positioned within (Barker 2008 225).
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