Biopower

JIE YANG
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Michel Foucault coined the term “biopower” in the 1970s to refer to a particular mode
of power that administers life. Biopower is exercised through numerous techniques, all
aimed at achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations. Operating
within a capitalist frame, the main goal of biopower is not to repress people but to make
populations productive. Life and living beings are at the heart of political struggles and
economic development. As the juncture of power and life, biopower relates to govern-
ment’s interest in fostering the life of the population through discipline and regulation.
In describing the evolution since the seventeenth century of this form of power over
life, Foucault focuses on two poles of development. One is centered on the body—the
optimization of the body’s capabilities and its integration into systems of efficient and
economic controls. Foucault calls the procedures of power that characterize this pole
the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second pole, formed some-
what later, focuses on the species body—the biological processes of propagation, births,
and mortality. Their supervision is effected through a series of interventions and reg-
ulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. For Foucault, the operation of sexu-
ality is biopower exercised through both discipline and regulation; it is at the inter-
section of the individualizing processes of discipline and training and of the manage-
ment of the population. According to Foucault, while the eighteenth-century biopol-
itics was associated with particular strategies to govern populations, it coexisted with
other forms of political power, including strategies for disciplining individual bodies
(i.e., anatomo-politics). While the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of
control remains mostly implicit in the work of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1988), in his
commentary entitled Foucault, stresses that disciplinary societies depend on sites of
confinement—for example, the prison, the hospital, the factory, the school, and the
family—which have broken down in recent times and are being replaced by modulating
and regulating systems.
For Foucault, biopower contrasts with traditional modes of power that are based on
the threat of death from a sovereign. Unlike sovereignty, which consists in the power to
take life and let live, biopolitics is the power of regularization, which consists in making
live and letting die. In an era in which power must be justified rationally, biopower
emphasizes the protection of life, the regulation of the body, and the production of other
technologies of power. Regulation of customs, habits, health, sexuality, reproductive
practices, family, “blood,” and “wellbeing” would be examples of biopower, as would
eugenics and state racism.
The significance of biopower emerges in its break with sovereign power, inasmuch as
it no longer focuses only on the human body but instead moves to include knowledge
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1696
2 B I O P O WE R

of and investment in populations. In this new mode, knowledge is also derived from
and produced through such mechanisms as birth rates, mortality rates, biological
disabilities, environmental effects, and so on. In recent works refining Foucault’s
initial analysis, scholars generally view biopower as a contemporary mode of power
coalescing around two poles: first, the human species as a population, and so not a
juridical subject, and, second, the human body as an object that is manipulated and
controlled by and within different operations of authority.
Biopower in the form of both discipline and regulation has been drawn together in a
diagnosis of contemporary societies. The widespread application of this notion by social
scientists across disciplines may be due to the fact that, with the postmodern turn, the
body has risen to the status of a primary category of social and cultural theory and it is
recognized as a fundamental unifying category of human existence in all its senses and
levels: cultural, social, biological, and psychological (Turner 1995). Foucault anticipated
and furthered this focus when he implied that the body, as an analytical category, is
more concrete or practical than the Marxian notion of ideology. He views the body as
a malleable object susceptible to manipulation by power and discourse and as a site on
which power is inscribed through various institutions, practices, and techniques. The
body can take the form of concrete arrangements that make up both the anatomic and
biopolitical technologies of power.
However, anthropologists or scholars who adopt anthropological approaches also
highlight the subjective, experiential dimension of the body and its agency in securing
resources. To redress the dearth of studies on the body-as-subject (Jackson 1983),
on the body as the source of subjectivity, Thomas J. Csordas (1990), for example,
conceptualizes the body as a site of affectivity, a dynamic point of intersection with
social and cultural processes. That is, one’s body as materiality is situated and mediated
through the adaptive strategies one develops to integrate experiences into one’s life,
through what Csordas calls “being-in-the-world.” Similarly, Jose Gil (1998) sees the
body as a force, converging and transforming other forces. The study of the body
as a force manifests how the body functions in its own right, apart from the signs
and symbols that are attached to it. Bodily force, in this conceptualization, cannot be
entirely captured by language; it goes beyond the representationalism of received ideas
in the study of body image or cultural constructionism of the body by highlighting
the body as an “infrastructure” to reproduce and transform the social and political
worlds.

New developments of biopower

Giorgio Agamben (1998) is one important theorist to take up Foucault’s analysis of

biopower. But he shifts the meaning and context of the notion by reestablishing it on the
very terrain from which Foucault broke: sovereignty. Agamben argues that sovereign
power is not connected to the capacity to bear rights but is linked to a “bare life,” which
he defines as inclusion in the political realm by a paradoxical exclusion and, thus, expo-
sure to the violence of sovereign power.
 B I O P O WE R 3

Meanwhile, beginning with the Human Genome Project (HGP) in the 1990s,
social scientists have become interested in biological sciences and Foucault’s ideas
on biopower have proved to be productive for sociologists, anthropologists, political
scientists, psychologists, and scholars interested in the consequences of changes in
the biosciences, biomedicine, and biotechnology. For example, Michael Flower and
Deborah Heath (1993) suggest that the new genetic technologies emanating from
the HGP would form a new disciplinary power, inducing and imposing particular
behaviors on individual bodies through genetic screening, testing, and research. This
marks a new development in the exercise of biopower whereby the bipolar technology
of anatomo-politics and biopolitics would be conjoined into a “macromolecular
politics” signifying power/knowledge of both the individual and the human species.
Another influential approach to Foucault’s notion of biopower comes from the work
of Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. Unlike Flower and Heath’s (1993) emphasis on
the HGP and its role in disciplining bodies and the surveillance of societies, Rabi-
now and Rose adopt a more open and devolved approach, through which individuals
draw on sciences to articulate their own judgments and political claims. Rabinow and
Rose (2006) point out that Foucault developed the notion of biopower not based on
the state or a dominant group but on the multiplicity of forms and sources of authority.
Emphasizing how biopower can be exercised at the substate level, by institutes or non-
state bodies, they criticize scholarship that treats biopower either as something that
resides in the power of some to threaten the death of others or as the politics of a
state modeled on the figure of the sovereign. Rabinow and Rose contend that even
sovereign rule is based on a fine web of customary conventions, reciprocal obligations,
or a moral economy whose complexity and scope far exceeds the extravagant displays
of the sovereign. Sovereign power is only one element in this moral economy and an
attempt to master it.
Advocating a clear analytical specificity and defining biopower as strategies for
governing life, Rabinow and Rose (2006) argue that biopower operates through the
following elements: truth discourses about the vital character of living human beings
articulated by a number of competent authorities; strategies for interventions into
the collective existence of whole populations or subgroups in the name of health and
life; and the modes of subjectification by which individuals work on themselves in
relation to the foregoing. The precise nature of these elements may, however, vary
over time.
In his critique of contemporary biopolitics, for example, Rose (2007) suggests
that modern genetics transformed the landscape of medical discourse, effectively
dismembering and deindividualizing the body into a combination of molecularized
parts. In this way, while biopower is still concerned with governing life itself, its focus
on controlling, managing, engineering, reshaping, and modulating human life thus
shifts to a molecular level and adapts from a clinical notion of accidents, illnesses,
injuries, and the body. What characterizes this new phase of medical discourse is
therefore a split between the molar level (i.e., the scale of limbs, tissues, organs,
circulation, hormones) and the molecular level, in which considerations of genes,
lineages, cells, tissues, DNA, and other fragments of human life are rendered visible,
4 B I O P O WE R

isolated, decomposed, stabilized, stored, commodified, transported, and are, therefore,

open to manipulation and transformation.

Molecular biopolitics

Rabinow and Rose further developed their influential theories of “molecularized

biopower” and “politics of life” by pointing out that molecularization signals the end
of population-centered biopolitics and the disciplining of subjects, as described by
Foucault, and the rise of new forms of biosociality and biological citizenship. The
molecule has come to replace the population in contemporary biopower.
Rabinow and Rose highlight patient groups or disease advocacy organizations and
their role in utilizing new biomedical knowledge about genetic predispositions and
disease to aid people with certain conditions. They claim that these groups exemplify
how people are taking responsibility for their own health, informing themselves of
their conditions, petitioning for recognition and resources, and forging collaborations
with scientists to find cures. For Rabinow and Rose, the analysis of biopolitics needs to
examine these self-organizing groups as significant actors who represent new forms of
(bio)sociality and reflect broader transformations in people’s understanding of them-
selves as “biological” citizens. Rabinow and Rose’s notion of biopower dispenses with
any references to anatomo-politics or the disciplinary nature of individual action. Rabi-
now (1996) even suggests that biosocieties are now postdisciplinary and that there is a
biopolitics “from below” working in ways that are no longer linked to the maintenance
of state biopolitical strategies.
While Rabinow and Rose suggest that individuals “work upon themselves” in rela-
tion to new molecular knowledge and collective strategies and contestations about life
itself, these modes of subjectification reflect what Rose (2007) calls “ethopolitics,” the
self-techniques by which human beings should judge themselves and act on themselves
to make themselves better than they are. It contrasts with both disciplinary power,
which individualizes and normalizes, and biopower, which collectivizes and socializes.
Ethopolitics engages contested political and ethical value—as witnessed in debates over
abortion, stem-cell research, and euthanasia.
However, scholars such as Sujatha Raman and Richard Tutton (2010) suggest that
actually biopower operates at both the molecular and the populations levels through
what Foucault himself describes as two poles of development of biopower linked
together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. What is required is the tracing
and understanding of this cluster of relations. They point out that the “bio” in biopower
relates not only to the discipline of biology, as the account of Rabinow and Rose implies
(“life sciences”), but also to the broader question of how the biological existence of
different human beings is brought into the political domain (at the population level)
through a variety of complementary and competing discourses. Biopower consists of
a more complex cluster of relationships between the molecular and the population. In
other words, the biological existence of different human beings is politicized through
discourses around medical therapies, choices at the beginning and end of life, public
 B I O P O WE R 5

health, environment, and migration and border controls, implying a multiple rather
than a singular politics of life.

Imagination, potentiality, and psycho-politics

Human faculties such as memory, emotions, potential, and imagination have also
been subject to biopolitical manipulation. For example, scholars have discussed how
governance can operate by playing on people’s imaginations. Adriano Bugliani (2011)
suggests that instead of looking for power in terms of its location (as in who wields
it), scholars should look for power as expressed in the limits placed on peoples’
faculty to imagine and in how these limits are imposed. In this view, biopower seeks
to optimize the positive potentials of individuals (i.e., toward entrepreneurship and
achievement of the good life) while preempting potential threats to the society posed
by groups. For instance, such power discourages depression leading to the inability to
work, incomplete education, physical violence, alcohol abuse, social unrest, and so on.
Others have built on these insights into the operation of biopower through psychology,
what we can call “psychologization” or “psycho-politics” (Yang 2013).
This psycho-political process can mobilize the emotions and potentials of individuals
for political reordering and economic advancement in such a way that certain groups
in society are privileged over others. This may result in condemning or excusing spe-
cific individuals for ills such as impoverishment on the grounds of their psychological
problems, real or invented, in the absence of, or contrary to, factual evidence. But this
psychologization is not only a process of rendering socioeconomic issues in psycho-
logical terms but is also a process through which psychology, as an array of practical
modes of understanding and acting, affects people’s social imagination of who they are
or what they might be. This process can thus become a mode of control and meanwhile
disguise or naturalize such control in terms of caring for people or maximizing their
potential (Yang 2015).
Indeed, scholars have started to consider this diversion of attention from negative
potential toward positive potential (through psychological imagination) as an impor-
tant aspect of governance. In this context, people’s potential to act, and their potential
to withhold action, become a parameter of biopolitics. Mette N. Svendsen proposes an
anthropological approach to this potential, or potentiality. This approach “addresses the
cultural context as well as the material conditions of that seen as incomplete yet with
a power—a potency—to develop into something else” (Svendsen 2011, 416). Svend-
sen emphasizes the potency of potentiality in actualizing and transforming social net-
works and relations. However, this formulation neglects the more practical negative
aspects of a politics of potentiality in cases where the constitution, animation, actual-
ization, and preemption of potentialities occur under the purview of state power. Cases
of authoritarian rule, such as today’s China, demonstrate that government and experts
can politicize people’s (imagined) potential to dramatic ends, many leading to extreme
marginalization (see Yang 2015).
Alongside imagination, potential, and psychology, other theorists have proposed
that kinship (and its ambivalence) can also act as a key axis of biopower. Defining
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ambivalence as the simultaneous experience of powerful, contradictory emotions or

attitudes toward a single phenomenon, Michael Peletz (2001) contends that ambiva-
lence is a feature of virtually all kinship systems because of the inherently contradictory
structural imperatives of those systems and all kinships are hierarchical and power
laden. He calls for more serious attention to ambivalent feelings and culturally specific
(and generalized) forms of personal submission, humiliation, degradation, and
coercive incorporation that are not tied to class-based hierarchies or to systems of
caste, apartheid, slavery, and the like. In this view, a focus purely on class dimensions
works to obscure power and its other significant dimensions.

Affect, biopolitics, and security

As the notion of biopower has evolved, research has turned to the way that it must
inevitably work through people’s affective life. Affect is understood in multiple ways
but in general it is viewed as bodily changes that are pre- or nonconscious and extend
beyond. Affect theory, in its most typical form, attempts to situate the body as a cen-
tral element in social analysis, viewing interaction between bodies and environments
as a means to understanding not only the capacity of the body as a receiver of infor-
mation but also as an affective influence. It considers not simply sociality, or the body,
but both as parts within a dynamic and ongoing historical and biological process. For
example, Nigel Thrift (2007) sees affect theory as an approach that provides a frame-
work in which individuals are understood to be the effects of their body’s responses
to, and participation in, the events in which they are engaged. Or, simply put, affect
is the “push” of life; it creates new ways of living amid the vicissitude of everyday life.
Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn (2010) have also dealt with this notion of affectivity
in considering the body not as an object or entity, but rather as an entangled milieu of
processes and a capacity to affect and be affected. This move to a more active and trans-
formational body is thought to offer two essential strengths: it de-universalizes the body
and situates it within the context of time and space, allowing its mediation and augmen-
tation by and of other bodies, as well as current practices and technologies; and, second,
it does not rely heavily on rationalist, cognitivist or disembodied definitions of the
body. Like Thrift’s notion, Venn and Blackman’s work has strived to invest in notions of
co-constitutionality and co-enactment as key in the development and transformation of
sociality.
Indeed, a new economic dynamic privileges the individual-as-body much more
than in previous biopower regimes, wherein individuals were mainly political sub-
jects. What is developing here is a greater focus on human beings as possessors
of an enjoyment of life and, therefore, as a wealth within themselves. In this way,
contemporary biopower is becoming much more associated with affective spaces
and responses, such as considerations of consumer satisfaction as a lucrative form of
regulating ways of living. In agreement with this perspective, Venn (2007) considers
all politics as biopolitics and biopower as a kind of virtuality or as a mode of power
that sees being (i.e., identities, relations, and so on) as an animated potentiality. While
biopower still refers to governance over life itself, the operations of this mode of
 B I O P O WE R 7

governance are understood through an economy of affective registers related to broad

potentialities.
Ben Anderson (2012) also approaches biopower from an affect perspective. He argues
that biopower works through affect based on three key relations: affective relations and
capacities as object targets for discipline, biopolitics, and security; affective life as the
outside through which new ways of living may emerge; and specific collective affects as
part of the conditions for the birth of forms of biopower. Life is made productive and
expansive through techniques of intervention. Anderson then points out that attending
to affective life offers new promises: it opens up a way of relating to the surpluses of life
that Foucault invoked when first introducing the concept of biopower: “It is not that life
has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly
escapes them” (Foucault 1978, 143).
Similarly, Antonio Negri’s (1991) sole and jointly authored (with Michael Hardt 1999,
2000) works update Foucault’s (1978) comments on the link between biopower and
capitalism by showing how surplus value is extracted throughout all of life—including
affect. He points out that everything has the potential to become an “economic fac-
tor” that may contribute to “growth.” This claim implies that it is not only that “af-
fect itself” is now bought and sold, including affective labor in the service sector and
all the other forms of bodily labor, but affective capacities are harnessed across pro-
duction processes. Negri uses the notion of the “real subsumption of life” as a way
to understand the relation between capital and life that is made systematic through
multiple, partially connected apparatuses for producing value. The concept of the real
subsumpton of life encompasses a twofold relation between value-producing activities
and life that results in a bio-economy or bio-capitalism, including all of human life,
rather than only the genetic, microbial, or cellular levels of biological life. First, desires,
subjectivities, and needs are constantly mutating alongside capital. Second, productive
labor becomes any act that involves the direct production of potentials for doing and
being.
Once value is extracted from all of life, the relation biopower has with contingency
changes; the homeostasis or equilibrium that is the aim of discipline and biopolitics is
no longer possible or desirable. Productive life must be constantly secured to avoid the
dangers that lurk within it. Life is on the verge of disasters that may emerge in unan-
ticipated ways to disrupt value-producing activities. Also, the securing of life must not
oppose the positive development of a creative relation with contingency. In this con-
text, Anderson (2012) suggests that a form of biopower emerges to address the interplay
between freedom and danger: security.
For Anderson, security consists of a set of apparatuses that aim to regulate within
reality because the field of intervention is a series of aleatory events that perpetually
escape command (2012, 34). Apparatuses of security enable the circulations that
define the personal and commercial “freedoms” of liberal–democratic life. The goal
is to respond to an emergency in a way that minimizes interruptions to normal life.
Anderson points out that security can be understood as a break with discipline and
an intensification of biopolitics. Security like biopolitics is dispersive and expansive.
The mechanisms of security are anticipating processes of emergence that may become
definite threats.
8 B I O P O WE R

Negri’s work also invites us to rethink the fundamental relation between affect
and biopower. His notion of “biopower from below” implies that affective life is the
nonrepresentational “outside” that opens up the space for something new. Indeed, a
range of techniques and styles of research have described how affective life exceeds
attempts to make it into an object target for forms of power; for example, Jane
Bennett’s (2001) work on enchantment as a specific ethos of engagement. Through
a combination of wonder and disturbance, Bennett discloses a world of things with
lively properties and capacities. She suggests that revealing sites of enchantment can
foster new human attachments to the physical world in the context of environmental
destruction.

Resistance

For Foucault, resistance to biopower must be rooted in the very terrain that has been
put at stake in power: life. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1978,
145) writes that “life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned
back against the system that was bent on controlling it.” Political struggles are grounded
in life. A right to life, to one’s body, to sexuality, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction
of needs is expressed as a political response to all these new procedures of power which
do not derive from the traditional right of sovereignty.
In general, Foucault considers resistance as not solely a negation but also a creative
process. To resist is to create and re-create, to transform the situation, to participate
actively in the process. Life and living beings become the very dynamics that resist
power and meanwhile create new forms of life. For example, Foucault asserts that
minorities (homosexuals), to whom the relation between resistance and creation is a
matter of political survival, should not only defend themselves and resist but should
also create new forms of life and a culture. They should affirm themselves, not merely
in their identity but also affirm themselves in their differentiation insofar as they are a
creative force.

SEE ALSO: Biopolitics; Citizenship; Conflict and Security; Cultural Politics; Death and
Burial; Demographic Anthropology; Detention; Diabetes; Ethnomedicine; Foucault,
Michel (1926–84); Genetic Screening and Medical Genetics; Governance; Governmen-
tality; Humanitarianism as Ideology and Practice; Philosophical Anthropology; Popu-
lation Issues in Development; Power, Anthropological Approaches to; Scientific Exper-
tise; Security; Sovereignty; States; States: Police Powers

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