In reading Multitude and Homo Sacer I keep hitting the words biopower and biopolitics . Apparently they are description of modern political power developed by Michel Foucault . So what do they mean?

I am self-taught in nearly all areas of knowledge, so this isn't an article of fact, more thinking out loud as I try to grasp the meanings of these two words. Both words are used in Multitude and Homo Sacer as if the reader is already familiar with them. I am not however.

It appears that Foucault saw politics permeating and influencing all life. So the discussion of power, whether state-based, economic, social etc is meaningless without politics being included in the discussion and description of power.

This seems to be a modern view of politics. Then again the introduction of working social democracy expanded the range of issues that government, with its economic and legislative power, became responsible for. This can be seen in human rights, rather than political rights being put forward as an absolute.

Government's also pick up the tab for social mechanisms such as child-care, welfare gifts for the act of having a child. Prior to twentieth century social democracy, children and birth rates were not rewarded by the state or the existing power structures.

Modern political power has become one of economic nurture and physical protection.

This is probably where the national security state comes from. It is the political ideology of protection, as opposed to deterrence or punishment. I recall reading recently in an op-ed in the Washington Post an article that claimed a city was a failed one if its people weren't secure.

Unfortunately this leaves an opening for drunken government to fabricate a state of exception, and then make it permanent, to the point where the state can monitor and regulate an individuals entire life.

Wikipedia contains this definition of biopower;

Biopower was a term originally coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states to regulate their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations", in particular through the use of statistics and probabilities.

In both Foucault's work and the work of later theorists it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation (François Ewald), among many other things often linked less directly with literal physical health.

I have not read any Foucault, so take anything I say with a pinch of salt, but it appears that biopower is a bureaucratic and legislative device of the state to conform a population to its vision and desires through manipulating for more of the individual's life than just the juridical component.

So biopower then becomes a highly sophisticated control mechanism of the state.

More Reading on Multitude

• Multitude
• Homo Sacer
• Michel Foucault
• Biopower
• Biopolitics
• Biopower and Biopolitics