biopolitics

is a complex of strategies specifically related to human vitality, morbidity and mortality... the ways in which authorities and interventions are established that are defined and legitimized as the most effective and appropriate.

strategies specifically related to human vitality, morbidity and mortality... the ways in which authorities and interventions are established that are defined and legitimized as the most effective and appropriate. For Rose, biopolitics is currently related to the work of biotechnology laboratories in the creation of new phenomena (and pathologies), to the computational power of devices that link clinical histories with genomic sequences, to the marketing powers of pharmaceutical companies, to the regulatory strategies of research, bioethics, and drugs and food surveillance committees, and to the pursuit of profits involving all of these.4

is a concern with a new technology of power called population. Population is not exactly society (i.e. The social body) nor the individual body, but a new body, a multiple body.

What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body, as defined by the jurist), nor is it the individual body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted. Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power's problem.'

is a defuse form of power that operates on the level of taxation, irrigation, sanitation, etc. As such, the death and life of the individual, is wholly anonymized.

With biopolitics, though, individuals live and die as a result of an anonymous, bureaucratized regulating that may involve things such as taxation, irrigation, sanitation, etc. In other words, the biopolitics that anonymizes the death and life of individuals is itself diffuse, exercised through flexible and floating networks that can be anonymous as the flooding of a river. (Houen 2006).

is a form of power addressed to a multiplicity of men (or population), whereas disciplinary power is concerned primarily with breaking a multiplicity of men into individual bodies, and sovereign power instituted the state's power over territory (or land).

disciplinary power is primarily concerned with breaking a 'multiplicity of men' into 'individual bodies,' whereas biopolitics 'is addressed to a multiplicity of men' (SMD, 243). While sovereign and disciplinary power are charged with policing life as individual subjects, then, biopolitics disenfranchises each individual's life and death by turning it into a generalized matter of population. If the subject is 'neutral' in relation to sovereign and disciplinary power, s/he becomes a statistic in terms of biopolitics' (Houen 2006)

is a politics of the bios, or the state's concern with the biological well-being of the population (I.E, disease control and prevention, adequate food and water supply, sanitary shelter, education.).

The increasing state concern with the biological well-being fo the population including disease control and prevention, adequate food and water supply, sanitary shelter, and education.

is a reflexive turn in politics (which typically refers to a state beyond existential necessities) insofar as it places at the innermost core of politics that which usually lies at its limits, namely, the body and life.

the overview of the history and contemporary uses of 'biopolitics' presented in this book reveals that the term is a combination of apparently contradictory elements. If politics in the classical sense refers to a state beyond existential necessities, biopolitics introduces a reflexive dimension. That is to say, it places at the innermost core of politics that which usually lies at its limits, namely, the body and life. (lemke 2011:117)

is a silent war operating outside institutions and disciplining through wider social networks.

According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals' (SMD, 16). 'Simultaneously, then, Foucault in Society Must be Defended sets up a new approach to power and for the first time posits a new form of generalized power, a form that he proceeds to outline in the lectures as one of 'biopolitics.' Thus the shift in analysis does not simply introduce a new genealogical approach to disciplinary power, it is also an attempt to consider how power operates outside institutions and disciplines through wider social networks. And in that sense, Foucault offers the Society Must be Defended lectures as positing a different, 'nondisciplinary' dynamics of power. As he goes on to explain, whereas disciplinary power is aimed at individual bodies, biopolitical power suffuses the general processes of life and death for a whole population' (Sovereignty, Biopolitics, and the Use of Literature: Michel Foucault and Kathy Acker by Alex Houen in Theory and Event V.9.1

is a subfield of biopower concerned with the desirable, the legitimate, and the efficacious in relation to vitality, morbidity, and morality.

whilst Foucault is imprecise in his use of the terms, it might be helpful to suggest that, within the field of biopower, 'biopolitics' designates the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and morality. over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious'

biopolitics, n.All

biopolitics