This document summarizes a lecture on biopower and deconstructing experience given by Dr. Claudia Stein. It recaps Foucault's view of power as non-repressive and circulating through social relations, and discusses three forms of discipline over bodies: hierarchical observation through architectures like panopticons; normalizing judgement through ranking systems; and examination through formalization and objectification within power/knowledge relations. It then outlines Foucault's concept of biopower as regulatory power over populations through mechanisms like statistics on life, death, and productivity. Finally, it discusses how French theory traveled to the US and engaged with different intellectual needs in that context regarding notions of power, identity, and experience.

1. Lecture 3, Term II
Biopower and De(constructing) Experience
Dr Claudia Stein

2. Recap:
Foucault develops his view of modern power AGAINST prevailing ideas of power at the
time, mainly Marxists ideas of power:
1. power as manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class relations.
Power is ‘held’ by the domineering class or individual or in institutions
2. Power is ‘negative’; it supresses, dominates individuals or groups in order
to be kept in the hands of person/group
3. Different views on origin/location of class power and how it is ‘kept’ (e.g. in
forces/social relations of production, in control of the state, or in intellectual
‘hegemony’ over minds (Gramsci)
but common to all of them is.....
4. ....that continuing ‘struggle’ is needed to secure/overturn power

3. Differences between premodern and modern ways of punishment:
1. Punishment is no longer a public display; a spectacular demonstration of all of the sovereign’s irresistible
force majeure, but rather a discrete, almost embarrassed application of constraints needed to preserve public
order.
2. What is punished is not longer the crime but the criminal; the concern of the law being not so much what
criminals have done as what (environment, heredity, parental actions etc) has led them to do it.
3. Those who determine the precise nature and duration of the punishment are no longer the judges who
impose penalties in conformity with the law, but the “experts” (psychiatrists, social workers, parole boards etc)
who decide how to implement indeterminate judicial sentences.
4. The avowed purpose of punishment is no longer retribution (either to eter others or for the same of pure
justice) but the reform and rehabilitation of the criminal.
(from: Gary Gutting, Foucault: A very Short Introduction, p. 80)

4. Three different forms of how to discipline bodies
1. Hierarchical observation
Foucault uses ideas of the
founder of English
utilitarianism Jeremy
Bentham.....

5. Bentham’s idea of the prison panopticum
“...an architecture that would
operate to transform individuals; to
act on those its shelters, to provide
a hold on their conduct…..to make it
possible to know them, to alter
them.’ (DP, 172)

6. ‘….we induce in the inmate a state of
consciousness and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power.’
Prison, schools, lecture halls,
office buildings (all glass and
cubicles) and so on.

7. 2. Normalising Judgement
Individuals are judged not by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts
but by where their actions are placed on a ranked scale that compares them to
everyone else.
We are subjected to a whole set of micro-normalising judgements (regarding time keeping, daily
activities, speech, of body, of sexuality). We use discipline to punish non-conformity to the ranked
scale system.
We strive to be ‘normal’, not to stick out. We fear that there is no orientation if this system breaks
down, so we do all we can to keep it up.
Three different forms of how to discipline bodies

8. Foucault uses 19th century micro-management of the body in school

9. Three different forms of how to discipline bodies
3. Examination An examination is the process of “formalization of
the individual within power relations.”
The ‘examination’ permits modern societies to
exact its power upon individuals without any use of
direct force. This is achieved because, for Foucault,
the examination objectifies us all by formalising all
of our individualities into a power
structure/knowledge that primary consist of
language.
It turns everyone of us into an ‘object’ of
knowledge; this has real consequences for your life
Nexus: power/knowledge
Power is always linked to knowledge and vice versa

10. Power according to Foucault...
• Power is not a commodity or a possession of an individual, a group or a class, rather it
circulates through the social body, and is exercised through a net-like organisation in which all
are caught; power is strategic.
• Therefore analysis of power begins at the micro-level in order to reveal the particular histories,
techniques and tactics of power
• Power is always directed at the human body
• Power produces knowledge and knowledge always produces power (Power/Knowledge nexus)
• power is productive and not repressive. It often produces pleasure. So, we need to start
investigation into modern power by choosing something we think is ‘good’, ‘pleasurable’;
something that we consider ‘normal’; any investigation has to proceed from there
• Power always requires resistance; so to resist power actually supports it.

11. 2. Investigation of regulatory power directed at ‘populations’
Human sexuality becomes THE central mechanism to
exercise power over individual and large population

12. A straightforward extension of DP, discussing the three different
disciplinary forms – particularly examination (power/knowledge) –
applied to the subject of human sexuality.
‘a historical critique’ of sexuality
Central to it is ‘repressive hypothesis’:
assumption that the primary attitude of modern society towards
sex was negative; unless it was ‘done’ in the sphere of
monogamous marriage, sexuality was opposed, silenced, and, as
far as possible, eliminated.

13. ‘The question I would like to pose is not ‘Why are we supressed?
But rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much
resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and
against ourselves, that we are repressed’?’
(HS, vol. 1, p. 8/9)
‘What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated
themselves to speaking of it ‘ad infinitum’, while exploring it as
the secret.’
(HS, vol. 1, p. 35)

14. Biopower:
‘I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant,
namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological
features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of
a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th
century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental
biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called
biopower.’
The book is describing sex and disciplinary power but then he moves to another
characteristic of modern power.....sex has two power poles:
Regulatory control: centres on the whole population through technologies such as statistics
that traces life/death, disease, productivity,migratation etc.
Disciplinary control: centres on the body as a machine and its disciplining, the optimization
of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of usefulness and its
docility
Biopower

15. Why does biopower emerge from the 18th century?
‘without question an indispensable element of the development of
free-market liberal capitalism’
‘This biopower… would not have been possible without the controlled
insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the
adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.’
(HS, p. 141)
Governmentality: the history of the art of governing people

16. The history of governmentality how to govern people

17. ‘French theory’ in the US engages with an entirely different socio-economic and
political context
Poststructuralism here helps to rework notions of power and identity in a rapidly
globalizing free-market society in which the individual and its self-interest is key
‘Identity’ as a matter of individual choice and performance; a hybrid construct of
‘self-fashioning’; in endless re-construction one the self without a core in order
to adapt to new opportunities offered by a globalizing liberal market economy
Robert D. Putman, ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’, Journal of
Democracy 6 (1995): 65-78.
disappearance of older models/practices of
sociability; decline in the use of older notions of
power or ‘class’
‘French Theory’ travels.....and encounters different intellectual needs

18. Joan Scott, 1941-
The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a
Nineteenth Century City (1974
Women, Work and Family (coauthored with Louise Tilly) New York:1978)
"Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical
Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
"The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry (Summer 1991): 363–387.
French Theory Travels.....and encounters different intellectual needs...

19. My article embodied my growing impatience with my fellow social historians who assumed that
experience was transparent, that there was a direct relationship between, say, economic circumstances and
political action, that there was no need to ask what counted as experience – we could know what that was
from a sociological description of the conditions of life of groups and individuals.
The telling point in Toews’ article (articles she was writing against) was the absence of any definition of the
term experience – he assumed we all knew what it meant.
My readings of Foucault, Derrida, Freud, Lacan, Irigaray and others had led me to doubt that words like
experience were self-evident;
the point was to ask what kind of work they were doing, how they were establishing meaning, how some
things and not others came to be included in the term. When ‘experience’ was alluded to by historians what
did they mean by the term? What were they including and excluding? How were they measuring the impact
of ‘experience’ on the psyches of individuals? How did an appeal to a common experience create a sense of
member- ship in a group?
These were the kinds of questions that seemed to me to be left aside when the meaning of experience was
taken to be known by historians.’
Victoria Hesford and Lisa Diedrich, ‘On ‘The evidence of experience’ and its reverberations: An interview
with Joan W. Scott’, Feminist Theory 15,2 (2014) 15(2); 199

20. ‘It makes more sense to teach our students and to tell ourselves that identities are historically
conferred, that the conferral is ambiguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a
false clarity),
that subjects are produced through multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient
for a time in certain contexts,
and that the project of history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing
process of differentiation, relentless in its repetition, but also….subject to redefinition, resistance,
and change.
(Joan Scott, ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity’, in The Identity Question, ed. John Rajchman
(1995), p. 11
What is identity? Scott’s answer....