The lecture of 17 March 1976, in the terms of Foucault biopower Biopolitics and introduces and talks about racism. Published by Suhrkamp: Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France (1975-76), from the French by Michael Ott, Frankfurt / M. 1999, p. 276-305.
Here are some quotes:
"And I think that one of the most lasting transformations of the political right in the 19th century consisted of the old right of sovereignty - to make die or let live - although not necessarily to replace, supplement, but with another new law, with a law that eliminates the former does not, but it penetrates in, it penetrates changed and the right or rather a power is exactly the opposite: the power to live, "make" and Let Die "to". The right of sovereignty is, accordingly, is to make die or let live. After that, apply this new law: the right to make live and let die "
" I do not want to pursue this change on the level of political theory, but rather the mechanisms, techniques and technologies of power.. This one comes to familiar things: the 17th and 18 Century we see emerging power technologies, which depend heavily on the body, the individual body were addressed. All these procedures allowed the spatial Distribution of the individual body (their separation, their focus, their serialization and control) and the organization of an entire field of visibility around the individual body. Using these techniques levied to the body, they tried their useful force through practice, improve training and so on. It was also about techniques of rationalization and the strict economy of a power that should be applied to the least costly manner by means of an entire system of surveillance, hierarchy, control, recording and reports: This whole technology is known as disciplinary technology called the work . It was late the 17 and in the course of the 18th Century installed. "
" In the second half of the 18th Century we can see, I think, something new occurs, which is another, this time non-disciplinary technology of power. A technology of power that the former does not exclude the non-disciplinary engineering excludes, but includes, integrated, partially modified and it will use primarily by participating in some way in it forms part and thanks to this prior disciplinary technique really sets. This new technique suppresses the disciplinary technique, since it is based simply on another level, on another level, has a different texture and other instruments served.
This new technology of non-disciplinary power can now - in contrast to the discipline that focuses on the body - on the lives of people applying, it does not address if you like, with the body- people, but the living man, man as a living being, and ultimately, if you will, the human species. More specifically, said the discipline of trying to govern the diversity of people, so far this diversity in individual, to be monitored to dressierende, to use, where appropriate, can be divided to punitive body. The new technology, however, depends on the diversity of people, not as they combine them into bodies can, but insofar as these form the contrary, a global mass, which is influenced by her life's overall processes as processes of birth, death, production, illness, etc. According to a first power access to the body, according to the mode individualization takes place, we have a second access of power, not individualizing this time, but massenkonstituierend, if you will, which is addressed not to the body's human, but to the human genus. After the anatomy of the human body politics, which in the course of the 18th Century spread, we see at the end of this century experience something that no policy anatomy of the human body more, but something that I as a "bio-politics' of the human species would call."
"What is at stake in this new technology of power, in this bio-politics, in this bio-power, which begins to prevail? I've said before, in two words: it is a set of processes such as the relationship between birth and death rates, the rise in births, the fertility of a population, etc. These processes of birth and death rate, life just in the second half of the 18th Century in connection with a whole lot of economic and political problems (which I deal not now) the first objects of knowledge and the first targets of bio-political control given. In any case, you realize that time with the first demographic survey of the statistical measurement of these phenomena. It is the observation of more or less spontaneous and planned procedures were performed in the population in terms of birth rate, it is, if you will, to the identification of phenomena of birth control, as in the 18th Century was practiced. It is now in the approach to birth, or at least to policy intervention schemes in these global phenomena of birth. In this bio-politics is not simply the problem of fertility. It is also the problem of mortality, not simply as by then the case was at the level of those famous epidemics, that the risk of political powers since the early Middle Ages as much at risk (the famous epidemics, the dramas of the multiplied temporary death, the threat of death all were). At this point in the late 18th Century, it is not epidemic, but something else that could be called endemic, that is the shape, nature, extent, duration and intensity of the prevailing diseases in a population. More or less difficult ineradicable diseases that are not otherwise than the epidemics seen in the light of increasing cause of death, but as permanent factors - it shall be - withdrawal of forces, the reduction of working hours, the energy loss and economic costs, and as much for the produced by them as lack of care, may cost them. In short, disease as a population phenomenon, not more than death, which lies down brutally on the lives - the epidemic is - , but as a permanent death that speed into the life, it eats away incessantly, it reduces and weakens.
"It's about the concept of" population ". The Biopolitics's up with the population, with the population as a political issue, as both scientific and political Problem to do as a biological and power problem - I think this is the moment in which it makes its appearance "
" die this side of the large absolute, dramatic and dark power of sovereignty, which was to. shall make, now with the technology of bio-power, this technology of power over 'the' population as such, the people as living beings, and learned a lasting power stands out: "the power" to make live. Sovereignty was to die and let live. Now, a power is in evidence, which I would describe as a regulatory power and on the contrary it is to live, and to let die. "
" I would now like to again take up the distinction between the regulatory technology of life and the disciplinary technology of the body, of which I have just spoken. Since 18 Century (or in any case since the end of the 18th century) there are two technologies of power that have become established in a certain time and overlap. First, the disciplinary technique: It depends on the body, it produces individualizing effects, they manipulated the body as a center of forces that are making both useful and docile. And on the other hand, we have a technology that is not the Body, but uses the life: a technology that combines the a population own mass effects and to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass, investigated, a technology that seeks to control the probability (and, where appropriate, modify), to compensate in any case its effects. It is a technology that aims not by individual dressage, but by global balance on something like homeostasis: the security of the whole front of his internal threats. Consequently, a dressage technology as opposed to and distinguished from a security technology, a disciplinary technology that is different from an insurance or control technology is different: a technology which, although in both cases is a technology of the body where it is but in one case, a technology in which the body is individualized as to skills-equipped organism, and the other is a technology be replaced in the body by the total biological processes "
" We have two series: the series body - organism - discipline - institutions, and the series population - biological processes - . regulatory mechanisms * - State "
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"Take a very different - though not completely different, completely different - range; take on a different axis something like Why sexuality, the sexuality in the 19th century to a region whose strategic importance is high.? If the sex was important, then, for various reasons, but primarily from the following: on the one hand, sexuality is a physical conduct of a individualizing disciplinary control in the form of constant surveillance (from the end of the 18th century, for example, started the children famous suspend controls of masturbation and that in the family, in school Area, etc. and they must accurately represent this side of the disciplinary control of sexuality), next to it adds to their sexuality, thanks to a comprehensive reproductive effects simultaneously in the biological processes that affect no more the body of the individual, but that element, that multiple unit the population. Sexuality is at the junction of body and population. Consequently, it is part of the discipline, but also to regulation. "
" More generally, one can say that the element that runs from the regulator-disciplinary and covers the same way on the body and the population, while improving control the disciplinary order of the body and the random events of a biological diversity allows that this element, which circulates from one to the other, the "norm". The standard, which is what is on a body that will discipline the one, as well as can be applied to a population that wants to regulate it. The normalizing society is so seen, not a kind of generalized disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions spread and who had finally covered the entire room - this is only a first and, I think, inadequate interpretation of the idea of normalizing society. The normalizing society is a society in which combine according to a orthogonal link, the norms of discipline and standard of regulation with each other. If you claim that the power in the 19th Century of life has taken possession or at least that power in the 19th Century life has seized, it means that it has been able to cover the entire surface that extends from the organic to organic, from the body to
population thanks to the duplicity of the disciplinary technologies on the one hand, regulation technologies on the other. "
The complete lecture on March 17, 1976 can also be read online:
http://www.momo-berlin.de/Foucault_Vorlesung_17_03_76.html
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