A History of Biopolitics
Before Foucault introduced a relational and historicized analysis of biopolitics, the flow between life and politics had been assumed to be unidirectional—the naturalist finds life at the basis of political action, whereas conversely for the politicist, the governance of life itself as an object constitutes the aim of politics (Lemke 3-4). In an integrated examination on the disputed definitions of biopolitics and its gradual systematization in the west into a prolific field of research, Thomas Lemke looks to late-19th century Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) for a rudimentary model of biopolitical thinking. Gaining ground in Germany at the turn of the century, this school of philosophy critiqued the anti-life processes of rationalization and modernization to advocate the reevaluation and re-centering of life. Among its most notable members are Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, who used life as a criterion for the distinction between what should be desired—“the healthy, the good, and the true” that encourages life—and what should be avoided—“the
‘abstract’ concept, ‘cold’ logic, or the soulless ‘spirit’” that suppresses life forces (9).
Conceiving human life in terms of both biological existence and “lived experience” (Erlebnis), the philosophers revolted against Enlightenment rationalism and mechanistic materialism in favor of intuition, immediacy, as well as spontaneity to restore life back to an authentic and creative state (9). This insistence on life rather than reason, Lemke writes, formulated the discursive core of a politics that emerged in the 20th century.
For Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, who first used the word “biopolitics” to define the similarity he observed between social struggles and the struggle for existence in
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nature, the state is a biological entity, a “super-individual creature[s]” that establishes and rules over itself (qtd. in Lemke 9). Therefore, in his organic theory of the state as a living being asserting “ethnic individuality,” the natural outcome of political development is the nation-state (qtd. in Lemke 10). In the view of Kjellén and many of his contemporary scholars, the state is not so much a democratic construct subjected to the collective will of its people as the source and the receiver of its organic powers, providing foundations for laws, norms, and institutions to guarantee its survival, while strengthening its health through natural selection.
When the state comes to be perceived as an original form of life that holds absolute supremacy over its subjects, and when social phenomena are explained in conjunction with biological analogy, it is inevitable that organicist ideology, with its Social Darwinist implications and dependence on biological laws, will become the stepping stone to racism (10).
Although the notion of a genetically pure population may have outlived Nazism and survived World War II, by the second half of the 20th century, the heyday of racist biopolitics had long past. Eugenic measures were removed from the center of scientific research, nor could biopolitology, the study that attributes political behaviors to biological factors, garner substantial attention outside the United States (15-21). In the early 70s, biopolitical theories diverged from naturalism to embrace a politicist mindset: the foundation of sociopolitical systems was no longer built on an overarching natural law; instead, this new politics attempted to exert power over natural life through placing biological processes under examination (23).
After the exhaustion of two world wars, humankind was faced with a depleted Earth rife with pollutions, contaminations, diseases, and environmental disasters. It was in this atmosphere that ecocentric biopolitics advocated measures aimed at the preservation and conservation of nature. From the introduction of Earth Day, the founding of Greenpeace, to the formation of anti-nuclear groups that remain active thus far, environmental concerns have continued to mobilize mass social movements worldwide. As German political scientist Dietrich Gunst
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observes, this new form of biopolitical approach now focuses on “questions about life and survival” (qtd. in Lemke 24) by promoting policies directed at curbing environmental crises and ameliorating sociopolitical problems that would jeopardize human existence. In relation to global issues such as overpopulation, food shortage, and resource depletion, Gunst proposes a
“life-oriented politics” (qtd. in Lemke 24) with an ecological awareness which informs the economic and political fabric of society. However, Lemke points out, subsequent to the demand for an “ecological world order” was another surge of eugenics and racism in Germany (24).
Right-wing activists held “two undesirable biopolitical trends” culpable for the “sullying of the gene pool”—overpopulation and the “mixing together of all races and genealogical lines”—
stating that biopolitics, being the tendency of future politics, must ensure the genetic quality and purity of the human race (qtd. in Lemke 25).
In addition to an ecological focus that preserves biodiversity and natural equilibrium for future generations, the 70s also saw the emergence of technocentric biopolitics. During the decade, biotechnology made several discoveries, announcing the application of horizontal gene transfer (the movement of genetic materials across species), prenatal diagnosis, and most notably among other advances in reproductive technologies, in-vitro fertilization which gave birth to the first test-tube baby. As a response to the quantum leap in biotechnological research, technocentric biopolitics functions by regulating and monitoring scientific practices in order to guarantee bioethical principles have been enforced. When technological and scientific development compromised the presumed stable boundary between nature and culture, as Lemke puts it, the discipline “intensified political and legal efforts to reestablish that boundary”
(26). Lemke then draws from the interpretation of German sociologist Wolfgang van den Daele to further explain the problem of the fragile border:
Biopolitics responds to the transgression of boundaries. It reacts to the fact that the boundary conditions of human life, which until now were unquestioned
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because they lay beyond the reach of our technical capabilities, are becoming accessible to us. (qtd. in Lemke 27)
While ethical and moral constraints may be the most formidable obstacles for biotechnological innovations, those standards also serve as a reminder for what humanity is, making reality checks to ensure that no research is out of line and constantly asking, “Just because we can, should we?” (Van den Daele, qtd. in Lemke 27). Contrary to the naturalist position eventually occupied by eco-centric biopolitics with its appeal for the implementation of new policies that cater to environmental changes, the technocentric version roots firmly for a development-oriented politics that adapts the natural world to meet human needs and desires.
Regarding a more comprehensive definition of biopolitics that incorporates both naturalism and politicism, Lemke follows philosopher Volker Gerhardt in understanding the field as a set of actions targeted at the security, reinforcement, and protection of the human species (29). In this sense, the individual has become an “object of the life sciences” (Gerhardt, qtd. in Lemke 29), to the extent that every personal choice must serve the interests of biopower and that freedom turns out to be conditional upon its compliance with such power. The objective of these actions is the promotion of life, yet when the right to life and biotechnological interventions begin to override the individual, the question of biopolitical legitimacy emerges.
Who decides on the policy that rules over life? Who has the authority to privilege one life as more worth living than the other? How is life assessed, and by whom? For Lemke, the question of “we” the political subject unveils the fundamental indistinction between life and political discourses that neither naturalists nor politicists acknowledged. Whereas previous intellectuals held on to a clear-cut, a priori division, it is biopolitics that lays out “the borderland in which the distinction between life and action is introduced and dramatized in the first place” (Thomä, qtd. in Lemke 31; emphasis in original). The distinction, which in the classical political world constituted the origin for forms of governance, was revealed by biopolitics not as the root but
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as “an effect of political action” (31-32). The presumed stable border that once kept the natural and the biological on one side, and society and politics on the other, has collapsed in the advent of scientific breakthroughs and new technologies seeking to modify life. Biopolitics therefore by no means operates solely on the basis of life or serves life’s purposes; rather, as the core of this political practice, life is simultaneously the subject and the object of control.
A Foucauldian Investigation
Although Lemke assigns the origin of a biopolitical model to a philosophy of life that formed around the late 19th-century, Foucault and Agamben have argued an earlier date. In the years between 1973 and 1975, Foucault develops a multifaceted interest in the medicalization of society. He investigates the genealogy of psychiatry in two lecture series he gives at the Collège de France (Abnormal; Psychiatric Power), and later in his 1974 lecture “The Birth of Social Medicine,” he traces the historical evolution of a society that has begun to organize itself into a medical framework since the end of the 18th century. Although at the time of the lecture Foucault has yet to advance his theorization of the term “biopolitics,” he emphasizes the biopolitical correlation between capitalist society and its socialization of body as labor force, stating that its “control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body” (“Birth of Social Medicine” 137). To probe into this growing concern with the corporeal and the subsequent expansion of medical and sanitary systems, Foucault points to three fields of study: first, a biohistory centering upon the interplay between biosphere and the development of human civilization; second, the “network of medicalization” through which society exercises a tightening grip on the biological, physical, and mental dimensions of its human subjects; third, the economy of health that proposes a
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positive relation between the nation’s financial prowess and the physical well-being of its people (135). All three aspects underline the fact that modern medicine cannot be discussed without considering the rationale behind its inclusion into social practices as a technology of managing the human body. Despite variations in medical strategies adopted by governments over time, Majia Nadesan observes in Foucault’s argument that “they tend to cohere around security problematics posed to, and by, the vitality, fecundity, and productivity of the population” (93). As Foucault explains in “The Birth of Social Medicine,” medico-scientific management of the people prevailed solely as a guarantee of national security until the late 19th century at the height of modern capitalism, when extracting maximum labor power became the primary agenda for the state to achieve political and economic success: “For capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else. The body is a biopolitical reality; medicine is a biopolitical strategy” (137).
Foucault’s work on the formation of social medicine takes 19th-century Germany, France, and England as models for analysis, presenting a three-step process that moves from the systematization and monitoring of somatic health, the implementation of public hygiene, to the institution of welfare medicine for the poor. Foucault traces the first instance of the concept “science of the state” (Staatswissenschaft) to Germany (137), where since the 17th century knowledge about natural resources possessed by the country as well as the living conditions of its populations has been studied to enact more effective modes of governance.
Following the mercantilist mindset that predominates 18th-century Germany and coupling national wealth and power with population productivity, state medicine is developed and exerted by the “medical police.” This newly founded authoritarian system is targeted at standardizing medical protocols, subjugating medical practitioners to administrative supervision, and incorporating those professionals into the organization of the state through appointing them as medical officers. While state medicine mainly operates from above,
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Nadesan notes that power apparatuses function also via ideological interpellation, referring to the multiplication of literature aimed at instilling into the educated class the responsibility to stay physically healthy during the era. In Foucault’s words, such “imperative of health” is “at once the duty of each and the objective of all” (“The Politics of Health” 170).
The second stage of social medicalization was urban medicine. Large city in France in the late-18th and 19th centuries was “a jumbled multitude of heterogeneous territories and rival powers” in urgent need of a unified authority consistent in regulating the rapidly expanding economic activities within the city and forceful enough to suppress revolts led by the proletarian underclass (“Birth of Social Medicine” 142-43). The lack of a coherent metropolitan vision exacerbated the social consequences of industrialization and urbanization—from overcrowding, pollution, diseases, squalor, visible poverty, immorality, to crime—all those downsides of civilization wound up in feelings of fear and anxiety induced by the city. As Foucault describes, it was
an urban fear, a fear of the city, a very characteristic uneasiness: a fear of the workshops and factories being constructed, the crowding together of the population, the excessive height of the buildings, the urban epidemics, the rumors that invaded the city; a fear of the sinks and pits on which were constructed houses that threatened to collapse at any moment. (144)
Amidst the chaos and the panic that reflected a “politico-sanitary anxiety” produced by the urban machine (144), the idea of public hygiene appeared. The main objectives of urban medicine included analyzing city spaces, especially those “zones of congestion, disorder, and danger” deemed responsible for disease outbreaks (147); organizing and controlling the circulation of air and water; and the redistribution and sanitary surveillance of city spaces. Here instead of the attempt to heal or strengthen the human body, this medical practice provided “a medicine of things” intended to remedy the city (150). Under the public health apparatus,
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administration over the salubrity and insalubrity of urban environments must be enforced for the city, or even the entire nation, to attain economic and political stability.
The last phase of social medicine, labor force medicine, takes English Poor Law as example. A tax-supported and state-funded welfare program, the law was established in the 19th century to guarantee the health and wealth of the upper-class through providing medical treatment for the destitute. This medical legislation, which created “an officially sanctioned sanitary cordon between the rich and the poor” (153), declared the inauguration of an intricate system of control that extended well into the 1870s, when John Simon set up the Health Service and the Offices for the “protection of the entire population without distinction” (154). The institutions claimed to offer “nonindividualized care” directed toward every social class, and concerned the environmental sanitation and living conditions of city inhabitants (154), sharing similar strategies with the Poor Law as well as the aforementioned French urban medicine. But again, just like its predecessors, the underlying logic of English social medicine was far from philanthropic; rather, it was a medical control operating at the collective level upon the bodies of underprivileged groups “to make them more fit for labor and less dangerous to the wealthy classes” (155). To achieve these ends in a nation characterized by class antagonisms, three medical systems were designed to correspond to different social ranks: a medical welfare for the underclass; an administrative medicine that ensured the health and safety of the general public; and for those higher up the social pyramid, a private medicine providing quality medical care.
It was precisely due to the complex mechanisms involved in balancing between the subjection of the people to compulsory medicalization, and the appeasement thereafter offered in return, that led to Foucault’s conclusion that the English system exceeds German state medicine and French urban medicine in terms of scope, efficiency, and efficacy. This does not suggest that labor force medicine simply replaced the other two dimensions in the evolution of
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social medicine, Nadesan remarks, as national security relies heavily on an abundant workforce and productivity growth. But one can tell from this genealogy of social medicine and what Foucault later examined in Security, Territory, Population that the medical apparatus bespeaks the governmental technologies of its time and adjusts accordingly, as exemplified by the general shift of its concern from disciplinary problematics to an emphasis on securitization (Nadesan 96-97).
“We need to cut off the King’s head,” Foucault declares, warning about “the great trap we are in danger of falling into” when we analyze sovereign power (Power/Knowledge 121;
SMBD 34). Instead of offering generalized claims about state apparatuses, institutions, and ruling classes, Foucault attempts to avert systematized discourses and directs his analytical focus toward “the techniques and tactics of domination” (SMBD 34); in other words, Foucault is discussing the capillary network of power and control mechanisms that have seeped into the lives of unsuspecting political subjects. The great trap that we must proceed with caution, that Foucault censures, is the juridico-political theory of sovereignty which can be dated back to Medieval Roman law and its later reactivation in the mid-Middles Ages. Centered on mechanisms of royal power, this theory fulfilled a quadruple function: it pointed to a specific power structure that founded the feudal monarchy; it served as the principle facilitating the establishment and legitimacy of sovereignty; it has also been deployed as a weapon to either curb or consolidate the aristocracy in social struggles by both sides since the 16th and 17th centuries, especially during the Wars of Religion; and finally, it took on a different role in the 18th-century call for a turning away from authoritarian absolute regimes and presented an alternative model that embraced parliamentary democracies (SMBD 35). This theory, while being “the theory we have to get away from if we want to analyze power,” is necessary for it is “coextensive with the general mechanics of power,” as Foucault emphasizes, it characterizes not only traditional sovereign practices but also any feudal-type social structure based on a
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sovereign/subject relationship (35). It therefore demonstrates the fundamental mechanisms through which power operates, and is pertinent to any social body that depends on the execution of stratified, top-down forms of power.
As Foucault clearly explains, “the sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (HS 136). Sovereignty had as its symbol the sword that guards its holder from harms by exposing others to death with the “right to take life or let live” (136, emphasis in original); but it was also a power of extraction (prélèvement), Foucault adds, a means of appropriation through which the monarch gained authority over the wealth, goods, time, labor, and ultimately, the life of its people. Sovereignty was most powerfully founded upon the absolute authority over life and death, yet from the 18th century onward with the rise of classical political philosophy, the right derived from Roman patria potestas (paternal power) declined, so that the sovereign was to exert the power only to protect himself from external threats. It seemed, on the one hand, that the unconditional right to kill
As Foucault clearly explains, “the sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (HS 136). Sovereignty had as its symbol the sword that guards its holder from harms by exposing others to death with the “right to take life or let live” (136, emphasis in original); but it was also a power of extraction (prélèvement), Foucault adds, a means of appropriation through which the monarch gained authority over the wealth, goods, time, labor, and ultimately, the life of its people. Sovereignty was most powerfully founded upon the absolute authority over life and death, yet from the 18th century onward with the rise of classical political philosophy, the right derived from Roman patria potestas (paternal power) declined, so that the sovereign was to exert the power only to protect himself from external threats. It seemed, on the one hand, that the unconditional right to kill