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.

Biopolitics is consumed with the notion of political power becoming sovereign over all aspects of human life. This includes what we know as the nanny-state, such as health care, but also police states. An important aspect of the subjugation of human individual and social life is the threat of government violence to protect rather than destroy.

As American constitutional jurisprudence has recognised with the First Amendment, the threat of government power or scrutiny is enough to suspend liberty, such that populations are subjugated through self-regulation.

So what does that mean for artists like Bill Henson who has photographed teens outside of the accepted consumer marketplace of selling semi-sexualised teens?

Artists often occupy a place in the social polis that kids do in the familial environment, pushing at the edge and fringes of what is acceptable and what isn't; forcing reflection on our attitudes and beliefs.

For instance the Boudist writes:

I'm not sure what to think. It's quite clear Bill Henson is a renowned art photographer, not some shameless pornographer. I believe neither he nor the gallery intend to exploit children or that the images are indecent. Yet it's an obviously provocative thing to do. The images are creepy. And anything that exploits or sexualises children is repellent.

Regardless, the work has succeeded in a way much of the best art does. It's provoked an emotional reaction, got people talking and asked more questions than it answers.

But can these issues be resolved without the application of biopower? The liberty of self-governance of polis debate - al-la Australian Republicanism - demands that it is. This requires the debate to be in the public and social realm no t the political application of subjugation and intimidation.

Images and collections like these can be condemned publicly, socially and in the polis such that there is real backlash; like the commercial failure of Henson's art, like social alienation for treading in that area.

It does not require the threat and imposition of a political power to curtail what should be dealt with in the public and social realm by the polis.

Laws are restrained by politics, society and culture to an extent. A law which goes against standard and common practice will get openly disregarded. In the same manner that a law which is too conservative or archaic will be disobeyed as social and cultural practice increasingly liberalizes. The laws can be enforced but at great expenditure of energy. Most police-states end up consuming so much energy that they require propping up by some resource (oil for instance) or they represent a factional interest so exclusively they force the nation into poverty and ruin (Myanmar).

Biopolitics is the process put forward by Michel Foucault to describe how modern liberal democracies protect life through law; whereas before laws protected against violence. The conservative right to life faction has ridden this wave and is many respects the most visible face of this process. However the nanny-state style policies of protecting people from themselves is another insidious biopolitical practice. Alcopops is a very recent example.

As Chris Berg writes trying to establish conventions through the state that contradict common practice means the convention is devalued, the institution ignored and the process brought into disrepute as non-relevant:

It may well be that a third glass of wine dramatically increases the risk of accident and injury to the drinker. But what good are the federal government's new healthy drinking guidelines if they deviate so far from the norm of usual social drinking practices?

The principle of self-governance seeks efficiencies through spontaneous self-organisation with minimal regulation. This process is accepted economically within a free-market with minimal state interference. Yet in other areas governments consistently intrude using biopolitics; or the protection of life; or protecting people from themselves; as the validation for the intrusion.

This week I was coming home down Route 101 north. It is a three lane high way that runs up the East Valley of Phoenix. There is currently a fourth lane being added to the highway and there are jersey barriers in the left lanes. Because of this construction the speed limit is reduced to 55mph.

No-one does it. Not even the police that travel the 101.

The safe speed for this highway is somewhere between 65mph and 75mph. This is what everyone does. Foolishly on Thursday night rush hour a mobile radar detector was put on the 101 north. It caused a traffic jam. People jumped on the brakes, and the free flow of self-organisation was broken. Whoever did it worked out the speed camera was a bad idea as it was removed the next day.

A study was done in New York where speed limits were arbitrarily reduced to see what commuter behaviour was. It turned out the speed limits were ignored and the traffic continued at the speeds commuters considered safe and appropriate.

When people see speeding cameras, whether in NSW or Arizona, they throw the anchors out and pass by the camera at 5pmh below the speed limit. This is more dangerous than the free flow of traffic.

[US] federal and state studies have consistently shown that the drivers most likely to get into accidents in traffic are those traveling significantly below the average speed. According to an Institute of Transportation Engineers Study, those driving 10 mph slower than the prevailing speed are six times as likely to be involved in an accident. That means that if the average speed on an interstate is 70 mph, the person traveling at 60 mph is far more likely to be involved in an accident than someone going 70 or even 80 mph.

The local council of Scottsdale has peppered the north Route 101 from Shea Rd to Scottsdale Rd with speeding cameras. In rush hour there are always traffic jams in that area. Yet the free flowing East Valley 101 from Shea Rd to Warner Rd does not have the same issues. The difference is that the cameras are causing traffic jams.

I have driven on the German autobahns. They are not as open as they used to be, between construction and local principalities putting speed limits on the autobahn (to protect life, not enable liberty) means that much of it is speed limited. As someone from a country that is speed limited everywhere was that Germans were very rule oriented in their behaviour; just general consideration was enough to make the principle of spontaneous self-organisation safe enough at speeds of 170 kmh. The other interesting aspect was that people did the speed they thought as safe and no-one beeped, hassled or drove at them aggressively for it.

This is what gets lost in the over-regulation of the biopolitical state.