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Essay: What is Power?

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  • Subject area(s): Politics essays
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  • Published: 23 March 2018*
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  • Words: 2,317 (approx)
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When I first encountered the word Power in this course, all I thought of was the forms of power over people or populations, the basic rudimentary form of power. Which makes sense, it’s easy to see when you have power over a person or a group of people. But power is not infinite and it eventually crashes down. Take the Roman Empire for an example of a population that had a huge amount of influence and power over its constituents. I know this wasn’t all that power encompasses, but I never thought about what all it could envelop. I have taken previous philosophy courses before, so I had some idea that power wasn’t what I thought it was. Even before I read Foucault, the very first reading was “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” by Ray Scranton. It opened my eyes on our climate and political landscapes and showed me more of what my own understanding of power was/is.

In the Theory Toolbox, my understanding of power expanded and I noticed myself thinking more about the terms in the course and trying to relate it to the real world and other concepts. Nealons book really exposed my brain to a different way of thinking, more than any quantitative class has done. When the authors stated “to remember theory rule number 1: Everything is suspect.“ in relation to “Author/ity” it reminds me that nothing is certain or random, everything around me is somehow in relation to each other in some form. I thought of power as being one of the forms around me because of the relation to Author/ity and how the word “author-function” translates from “the author functions as a guarantee of meaning or authenticity behind the text” which meant to me the words when attached to someone can give them unintended power over the understanding of the their work. But as soon as that person dies, their work becomes up for debate, trying to find new meaning. You can only find a “new” meaning when the author is dead, and not supplying the sole, real, meaning. Even saying all of that, the multiplicity of meaning increases, which is backed by Nealon’s Theory Rule Number 1, “Everything is suspect.“

But what really expanded my view was Michel Foucault and his work on sexuality and biopower. In the first few sentences of his Chapter on Method in “The Deployment of Sexuality” he stated:

“By power, I do not mean “Power” as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domi­nation exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes.”

Foucault explains what the term power is, concurrently explaining power in light of a force that has been surrounding us forever. Foucault lays forward five propositions regarding power and its complexity. First, power is around us at all times in any relationship. I view this as the tension between teachers and students, parents and children, boyfriend and girlfriend. Second, power is inside every relationship and determines their internal structure of economics, knowledge, power. Third, power relationships can appear at all levels of society. This is independent of the ruling class or power. Populations and people, president and citizen, world leader and world leader. Fourth, there is a rationality and an underlying logic in every relationship, but this does not mean that there is a person behind it all. These relationships are for a reason, but not one source is the sole contributor to the conflict. A president doesn’t directly control individual lives, yet influences them in ways that might not be known. Fifth, resistance is not an external pressure, but a part of every power relationship. Naturally, a force between two things can cause strain because these individuals are different and have different identities that are constantly crashing. This still felt like a stepping stone to fully understanding (or at least the most I can fully grasp) of power. It explained the over-arching ideas of power but didn’t explain the connection to every day society as a whole. I know this was suspect.

Foucault’s Biopower

The idea of a “force” that controls at the worldview stage is alluring. When we think of a figure or a person controlling us, we either come up with God or it’s not possible. We take our own lives in our hands. Which is true to a certain extent as this form of power lives amongst us and all around us. Its been there since we were born and it will be there til we die, even until the last human takes a breath. It’s so dense that we don’t even think its there. It’s not something we actively think about, we have to shift our minds and our thinking to even fully grasp the idea.

Foucault makes known the transition from sovereign (right to death) to a more modern forms of power, disciplinary and biopower. Disciplinary power is a form of power that tries to control an individual, whereas biopower is form of power that emerged with the increase of population. Foucault describes biopower as, “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”. He argues that biopower is a technology or a tool (an expansion of man to species) which arose in the late eighteenth century for governing populations. Biopower wants to regulate, manage, and administer the multiplicity of bodies that forms a population. After the emergence of biopower over sovereign power, the former did not completely replace the latter. Instead, the two forms, along with disciplinary power, become twisted, intertwined, co-determining. This form of “knowledge is power” arises intertwined, relating to the control of a population or the “subjugation of bodies”.

Biopower is the reason why we have the system of capitalism (or communism for that manner). It is the realizations of knowing you are a living species in a living world, knowing that there are probabilities in life, forces that can be manipulated, as we’ve already seen reading Foucault. Man is a collection of existence, of individual and species. Man reached a point in history that showed that life is apparent, death is less random. That power would no longer be dealing head first over a individual populace that was controlled by Death. “Right of Death and Power over Life” as Foucault says. We have huge groups of populations thriving and more democratic politics. We see concepts like the census, enabling power to the nation. This results in the benefit of society and means of production. that were not present before this shift to biopower. Evolution of the species, of man, a natural path that followed sovereign power as death became less certain. As an example, the world shifted to bodies of greater force and greater conformity, that had an efficient rate of consumption. Through these democratic regulations and efficient production, it is certain that Foucault’s biopower is a historically incidental phenomenon. Emerging during the late 18th century, biopower ended up playing a major role in the development of large populations and the rise of capitalism.

Biopower is a force for keeping people alive, or letting people live in the simplest of terms. But this doesn’t explain the unspoken transition from sovereign to biopower. Death is in full view in the Classical Age, in the Sovereign state. Public beheadings, hangings, all explain the act of choosing life by the elite. Since the purpose of biopower is to foster and make a population thrive so as to “manage life” as Chloë Ta
ylor puts it in Foucault: Key Concepts. Death becomes irrelevant. This is apparent as we transition to modernity, as the death penalty becomes rarely used and even outlawed. We transitioned to a state that wants to keep its constituents alive as long as possible, for the sake of capitalism. Heads of corporations want to see you live so you can be a consumer, a worker, etc. Life becomes valuable even to the point of going to war and continually going to war for corporate interests. Even though money is a contributor, the right to life is all encompassing. “Death is privatized” and because of that, death is out of bounds. The key point here is that a personal feeling of death has vanished for the experience of death through other means. Corporate warfare and the idolization of guns and violence have emerged and Death is different if it’s an unknown terrorist in another country. War is death, but in the same form that death is viewed as managing a population. Not completely dire, but as a necessary cause of the protection of the people and global/corporate interests. The end justifies the means. The theory of power over life and the realizations of death in and around modern life, politics, and war (and through realizations of Foucault and Taylor) make biopower a truly intense force that cant be directly manipulated. We have the power to keep people alive and to regulate those same lives. A new sense of safety appears (subconsciously) to the population.

Biopolitics and War

Mark Kelly’s main thoughts, on war and biopolitics are surrounding the idea of state racism and its grasp on society and their enemies. I think an interesting point Kelly cultivates are the realizations of race never being about appearance, rather an idea of finding differences in a group of people. This difference can be fueled by the state and biopolitics. Immigration in this way becomes a huge issue because you have this idea of wanting to enrich or enhance your population because of economic prosperity and continued growth. When thousands of refugees show up one day, you are presented the entire set of that population, meaning you get the weak, the poor, the old, the young. That is not good for economic growth, as these people cannot all work and add to the labor workforce and consumerism. Kelly remarks by saying that refugees arriving by boat is “biopolitically offensive”, its hard dealing with a curveball thrown at you. While there still is ethnic racism, the predominant form of race is this population divide and difference in identities. The only reason to hate another group is because of nationalism. And nationalism is ambiguous for race.

This idea of having enemies leads to the reason we care so much about war. Our focus is about helping our nation prosper. When the government frames the idea of war, it’s always in tandem with nationalism and of sacrifice for the “greater good”. Tie this to the economy and you have profits of war. September 11th was a shift in identity of America, an attack is a wake up call for change in a society. Biopolitics manifests itself in the stability and growth of a nation. An attack on the integrity of the nation is detrimental to the average American that is never exposed to this amount of violence, and like refugees, you have to deal with consequences. Parallel to the thought that death is privatized.

When we went to war with Iraq, it was from baseless claims and lies from the state. The reason was the control of oil, and it had nothing to do with revenge against the September 11th attackers. To cease control of the forms of production or to make a better deal with the middle east would be the epitome of biopolitics, as the nation is deciding what is best for us, by involving us in a war with false claims that Iraq conducted the attack. Lying and intentionally being vague about the reasons for going to war, is “doing it for the greater good”. This is apparent in the Documentary “Why We fight”, where biopolitics are at every move of a government. The facade of defense spending increasing year over year also piggybacks off what President Eisenhower called “the business of war”. This reach can affect how we are seen around the world and who are our enemies. Do we gain more enemies on expanded power? Probably, and this makes sense as we are increasing our presence by show of a standing army.

The documentary does a really good job conveying the emotions and the narrative of wartime and violence. President Eisenhower’s (and also Washingtons) farewell address both precluded with warnings for the future that both ended up true. The military-industrial complex shows the power of biopolitics in the sphere of war, showing that constantly being mislead about war opens up a new economy for violence and racism. Propaganda is used subtly to convince Americans that our well being is under question and that going to war benefits us all. This documentary helped solidify my current concept of biopower from Foucault as it gave this historical view of the acts of America in war and it explained, as an example, a form of very prominent biopower. Biopower is an undying force in this world molded by economics and the acts of war. Bridging biopower and disciplinary power, expanding it on a global stage, making man a species, gives the true societal power. Unintentionally or not we use and manipulate this power every day to form our relationships and identities. This film and Jarecki’s other film “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” both explain (unintentionally) huge impacts of America biopolitics.

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