More Foucault

I am posting some notes form last year. I find these texts as more subtle than discipline and punish, they "complete" his ideas and in a way they are more useful to think my interests.

Commentary on Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Modern Power (week 2)
Student: Ana Vivaldi
In his work The Subject and Power Michelle Foucault (2000) states that the objective of his intellectual work has been to understand the way individual are made as subjects. His interest is to understand the emergence of modernity as a new type of power that makes subjects as we are - understand them today. He distinguishes different moments in his work (and this clarification was deeply useful for me to link the different ideas in the different works). One in which he concentrates in the type of knowledge that objectivizes the subjects as their object of inquiry. The other, deals with the making of systems of difference that separates the individual in itself and with others. A third focus in the way people shape themselves as subjects. He is interested in which ways of confrontation to this power exist today as well, even confrontation cannot be thought but inside power which creates the condition of the existence of resistance. Power is deeply linked to the making of subjects, yet as he emphatically clarifies, is not the focus of his analysis. His interest is to understand how, why and where does power (or powers) operate and how the modern subject is made through relations of power. Power for Foucault is a relation, it is how action that conducts action in a certain direction and with certain effects. What can be known about power is not just the effects of it but also where it is operating (which point, in Scott’s 1995 terms), and which space or field of it operation. Other fundamental concept in his work is that of the shaping of differential political rationalities, that shape the types of power relations of particular historical moments as they are the result of them. Modern power sets a new type of relations, a new type of subject, new techniques for the making of subject, new possibilities for those subjects. In the articles on Right of death and Power Over Life the author discusses the way the modern rationality arose as a specific way exercise of power, one which simultaneously disciplines the body through specific politics (body politics), and a biopolitics which is exercised over population (and the making of population as an object of politics is crucial for modernity). In both cases the point of operation of power is over life, in contrary to the power over death in feudal system. The way a collective and individual subject is simultaneously created is through the mechanisms of control divide him form others (individualization) and that are internalized. At the same time the collective body is the result of the making of a population conducted by new different type of knowledge that reaches every individual, this is the rol of medicine, demography among others. Then the key concept for understanding modernity comes into play, the concept of governmentality. I leave this concept (even central for the class) to the end of this commentary as Foucault does not write about it, but he presents it in a lecture. I understand it as outcome of his line of thinking. Governmentality appears in western thinking as the art of governing things, breaking previous notion that the sovereign is the one to govern, governmentality expand the domains of disposing thing in a way so as people behave in a certain way, by their own initiative, now including self and familiar government. Governmentality is putting and emphases on the organization and over the direction of free subjects (a condition for modern society and for governmentality to exist), rather than in the direct control of the people’s life and over territory (that constitute sovereignty). It implies the production of new type of knowledge saviors for governing population (that of political economy, for instance). Government (and the savoir which makes it possible) is extensive as it covers the totality of the population but is also deep as it reaches the individual in its peculiarities. Even the emphasis on different types of power: sovereign, disciplinarian and governmental prevail in different moments (form feudal society to modern one), they reorganize in modernity interacting together over population. The development of apparatuses (of security in a first place) for reaching the collective and individual subject is the result of this new power configuration (but not the opposite, power is not the result of apparatuses).

I have general thoughts on the readings. The notions developed by Foucault help us to understand us a general structure of how people we are working with are modern subjects, here the post colonial thinking will build by adding multiplicity, the many possible modernities and outside modernities that result form this. It helps us understand not only how power constrains us but also how it positively shapes our action, desire, thoughts and will. The body is thus a fundamental point of action of power. I cannot but start thinking how people in a “Toba” neighborhood Northern Argentina are obsessively shaped as subjects through multiple agencies. Just to mention the health agency that intends to direct their reproduction, sanitary habits, nutrition, illness. The neighborhood and its population is thought as an infectious focus. But going back to a general level I guess governmentality help us to understand why and how and where and the political rationality of what we call development. The question of course is if there is a "someone" benefiting form development, or are we just entangled in this net. If power is a relation it is more clear how the subject becomes subjectified - in its double meaning- , but then what is it exactly to be more in control of the disciplining and governmental process? Development is the word for this new type of power that disposes people and things in order that people want to do what power -others peoples’ actions direct them to. Desire your -and others- subjection!