H.R. Giger: Birth Machine
Within Society Must be Defended, Foucault critiques society and its subjects by developing and interrogating what he describes as “biopower”. If power is a capacity within individuals and society, biopower is an exercise of capacity by making live and letting die. Using the lens of biopower, who is made to live and who is left to die exposes the power pulsating throughout society.
Holt’s “Problem of Freedom in an Age of Revolution” re-focuses and complicates an interpretation of biopower by injecting an analysis of the logic of capitalism. The work suggests that the two concepts necessitate one-another and aid in each other’s production. The work buttresses Foucault’s concept of biopower by interrupting narratives of capitalism, liberal democracy, freedom and progress. These paragons of modernity and liberty become monumental oversimplifications when illuminated through the intersecting critiques of capitalism and biopower.
Power—and by proxy, biopower—is a capacity, one that exists in myriad forms within modern subjects and institutions. Biopower adopts mechanisms of discipline but it no longer “train[s] individuals by working on the level of the body itself” and instead “take[s] control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are…regularized” (246-7). Foucault is not arguing that bodies cease to function entirely as subjects to disciplinary power, but points to a shift in the approach through which they are subjected; a shift towards regularization (246-7). Regularization allows the establishment of a shifting ideal, a simulacra of the norm so that societal narratives maintain an identity that is always in a state of reformation and crisis. Subjects are both the producer of knowledge and a subordinate of knowledge formations and regularity is the modality of the modern subject. Foucault’s biopolitical society, through regulatory mechanisms “must establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within its general population and its aleatory field” (246). Deviance is expected and implicit within a regulatory society; regulation is betrothed to a norm that is illusive and always in a state of coming-to-be. Regulation accepts—but then attempts control over—deviance; that which deviates isn’t protected within this logical framework.
And hence, within this umbrella of regularity, the necessity to discuss capitalism becomes foundational due to the language and formation of regularities. What constitutes regularity in modernity cannot divorce itself from the hegemony of capitalistic ideology. Foucault never denies the intrinsic connections between biopower and capitalism; both are formations and systems of production. However, biopower is the production of life, capitalism is the production of capital. Nonetheless, biopower can also be read as a production of capital since a healthy, productive population will best produce capital.
The cooperation between capitalism and the exercise of biopower can be extrapolated from Holt’s explanation of Jamacia’s slave revolution in 1873; biopower and the regulatory society promotes a very specific type of life within his piece. The abolitionist argument adopted by England’s Parliament “rejected racist interpretation of slave behavior and insisted that blacks shared the basic, innate traits of other human beings” that they were “motivated by self-interest and the desire for self-improvement” (50). This is telling because it explicitly points to a conception of humanity that is regulatory in nature; a desire for self-improvement isn’t a corporeal trait and yet it forms the basis of the logic that provides humans with rights—within their logic. These slaves were viewed as human because they were viewed as beings that sought to better themselves; freedom had to be earned through “their own industry” (46). The language of self-improvement exposes the regulatory regime within the language of the so-called free subject.
Holt expertly explains that the Jamaicans “would be free, but only after being resocialized to accept the internal discipline that ensured the survival of the existing social order” (53). It is evident that the mechanisms of regularization were fully exercised, masquerading as freedom—which is not to discount the liberty and self-determination that Jamaica achieved through their revolution—however, these trappings of freedom are peculiar because they are particular and remain largely unquestioned. Freedom is subordination to a regime of regularization within modern liberal democracy, to this day.
The multitude of modern, productive, capitalist societies are at odds with themselves, because they—as Thomas Holt points out—require for their “justification a postulate of equal and natural rights and rationality” (6). The central locus of the modern identity is the belief that people are rational, free-willed, productive—and most importantly: equally human—beings. But as Holt elaborates, “freedom as defined by capitalist market relations inevitably produces unequal class relations, which undermine the substantive freedom of most members of society” (6). This struggle between the implicit protective language of equality and the reality of regulatory society’s approach towards deviance exposes a paradox. Structurally, society produces deviance through its promotion of individuality, liberty and free will; yet it simultaneously employs biopower as a mechanism towards control and promotion of regularity.
Adopting the lens that Holt provides, had Jamaica rejected the modality of “earned freedom” and “self improvement” they would have rejected their humanity along with it. To put it another way: a rejection of the system is a rejection of the rights provided by the system. Promotion of life demands participation in the system; the life promoted is enveloped within larger folds of equality, capitalism and liberal democracy. So, a non-participant, the deviant—or deviations within and without the system—expose biopower‘s capacity to “let die.” Through a decided or undecided deviation, non-participation or confrontation of the system, people can be thrust to the peripherals of society—left out there to die. This sequestering need not be physical but it remains a violence against the idea of equality and humanity through its rejection of the right to life. Arguably, the most powerful aspect of biopower is its ability to justify its weeding out of deviance through the language of the individual and their choices, even when that individual was guided by the conceptions of free will and human equality espoused by the system upon which biopower relies.
Through these critiques, it is apparent that society participates in banalities permeated with countless judgments of character and value. The biopolitical is able to discount facets of society and entire groups of people through their non-participation and deviance from the intangible and ever-changing norm. This framework, taken further, accounts for the embedded racist formations—both vestigial and newly mutated—that are presumed anachronistic within societal narratives within liberal democratic society.
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