1. William Walters on Foucault's Bio-Power

2. Biopower: The operations of power that secure and defend the nation-state as it circulates within civil society
F’s biopower refers to the techniques of “subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” 
18th C: Power was intertwined into the development of capitalism as the bodies of workers were inserted into the production machinery and population was applied to economic processes. 
Segregation and social hierarchization (class) ensured “relations of domination and effects of hegemony”
War of attrition or racial conflicts defend the extablished norms of the society, i.e., it being expressed as the nation-state.
‘if I want to live, you must die’ into a biological formulation: ‘death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal)
In the eighteenth century these techniques of power were still separate but intertwined into the development of capitalism where “the latter 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” (p. 141).  Segregation and social hierarchization guaranteed “relations of domination and effects of hegemony” (p. 141).
Biopolitics finds its defence in war and in statistics: birth and death rates, literacy rates, insurance rates, interest rates, and forecasts that enumerate future projects and quantify normalcy within statistical averages. This form of ‘power has no control over death but it can control mortality’ (Society 248). war is the method and race is the justification. This formation offers insight into race-based alien conflicts in sf films
The power of life and death resided within the rights of the sovereignty; even going to war was a legitimate command by a monarch in order to protect the life and well-being of the state.  Soldiers died in the name of the king so that other citizens could live and in order to protect the king himself.  “The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing” (p. 136).  Foucault extends this statement by “the right to take life or let live” (p. 136).  What kind of power does sovereignty represent?
Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure:  of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.  (p. 136)

3. F’s Biopower: the political logic used to manage and control populations through speculations about the future based on probabilities and statistics.
first 3 min only (2008)
Governmentality is used for the security of the society, i.e., the state’s complex conduits of power as expressed in its institutions, procedures, tactics and calculations are used/ applied on its target population, as its principal form of knowledge, and as its essential apparatuses of security.
This security system is the main apparatus of biopower that are expressed as the state’s policies and practices.
These policies and their implementation should result in the economic maximization of resources while maintaining scarcity and acceptable levels of poverty.

4. ‘Truth’ (as expressed by power) is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions
The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of what should be accepted as ‘the truth’.
truth a soc construct? An argument 6 min
Society assumes that it is the truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’
Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.
the contemporary nation-state is a ‘juridical structure of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure’ of capitalism (296).
multiple repercussions for public life when such power/knowledge relationships are institutionalised, managing popula- tions according to the economic rationalisation du jour

5. Used by official institutions: e.g. govt.
Right to take life or let live is Juridical power: King’s Power over death from the period of Enlightenment
Used by official institutions: e.g. govt.
Prohibits and punishes: Subtraction of freedom of the individual – gain of ones power and loss of another’s
Transgressions are punished
Individual as subject and as object of power
Current State power:
September 2013 BREAKING NEWS FEMA 800 Detention Camps in USA - last days End Times News update
(first 3min)

6. F’s disciplinary and biopolitical power: Power over Life
To make one follow the norm: quantify, measure, appraise and hierarchize
Power to take charge of life: does not separate the state from the citizens
The power effects distributions around the norm.(subtraction vis a vis normalization)
Law operates as the Normalizing instrument
F differentiates between life and norm
Power is productive and positive – investment and valorization of the body
Power administers, optimizes and multiplies and implements the norm
Individual bodies are micromanaged in producing them as normalized bodies
Body politic of the population is similarly normalized
Power is neither inhibiting nor permitting
Unofficial institutions regulate through normative power
e.g.: peer pressure, unwritten rules of social norms

7. Law cannot regulate the way unofficial opinion can over life: e.g.:
Body size; gender and other social organizational aspects
The aim of biopower is that the society must be stabilized and normalized
Opinion regulates such issues that affect others in the society through rewards or negative reinforcements
Power over life:
Means: production of power
Location: everywhere and micromanaged
Source: unofficial
Works through positive/ negative reinforcements

8. Disciplinary power:
Normalizes the individual body
Centered on the body as the anatomic politics of the body
Optimizes and micromanages the body to make it efficient: e.g.,
Diet, beauty regimen, new language learning
Discipline is enforced through surveillance
Biopower: manages and normalizes the body politic (population)
Collect data, categorize and classify, average or normalize to attain
even distribution around the bell curve (norm)
Manage instances that do not fit the bell curve, i.e., pull in the outliers: e.g.: child being measured by doctors (h/w); BMI; population trend of what is normal; monitor the bell curve to enforce the normal for security: the “society must be defended”
Discipline is literal
Biopower is metaphorical

9. Right to death: subtraction of one’s power
Right to life: production of power
In juridical power liberation is fight against subtraction and if power prohibits, resistance is disobedience.
In biopower, resistance and oppositional activities augment the resisters’ power
e.g. sexual revolution of the 60s
When we think we are resisting, we are increasing our access to power – this complements power – can’t get rid of power
How then can you resist power?
Micro-subvert it and not being governed by the system, by playing the system
The care (and practice) of the self

10. Resist normative power
Judith Butler:
Resist normative power
Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance – normative is repetition of the norm
Resist hierarchal binarism
e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism) compared to women
Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through disruption
Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them.
How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity
In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
For Butler (who is following and expanding on Foucault), discipline compels us to repeatedly perform normative behaviors at every moment of every day: we have to sit, stand, gesture, speak, eat, dress, you name it, in a manner appropriate to our assigned/identified gender. However, repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them. How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity (this seems to be one of Sandra Bartky’s points). It’s in the fact of repetition, and in the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
But this model of subversive repetition is primarily temporal: next time I get dressed, I’ll wear more butch clothes; at each of my 3 daily meals today, I’ll eat “girly” foods like salad or yogurt, etc. The unfolding of time brings new instances that demand my performance of a gendered behavior—that’s what makes discipline and subversive repetition temporal phenomena. If biopower is spatial rather than temporal, I’m not sure that subversive repetition—which is temporal—applies to biopower. What is a spatial model for resisting demographic norms? How does one subvert the SAT, the infant mortality rate, the crime rate, the HIV infection rate, etc.?

11. Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions
The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of the truth
We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’
F’s Genealogy’s role:
to connect different events according to ‘the emergence of different interpretations’
to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’ rather than a universal or transcendental truth.
Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.
the contemporary nation-state is a ‘juridical structure of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure’ of capitalism (296).
multiple repercussions for public life when such power/knowledge relationships are institutionalised, managing popula- tions according to the economic rationalisation du jour

12. Reading The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Vol. 1)
Duration: 6:54
Published:
Uploaded:
Author: Michael McDonell
Rather than thinking of sexuality as a biological given that can either be freed or repressed by external forces, Foucault looks at the way that the truth of sexuality is produced by certain institutions and discourses. He argues that we are saturated with images of sexuality, not because we are more free, but because it is a new way for power to be organized - biopolitics.

13. Michel Foucault - The Culture of the Self, First Lecture, Part 5 of 7
Duration: 10:46
Published:
Uploaded:
Author: apolloxias
This is the first of a series of three lectures in which French philosopher Michel Foucault examines Western culture's conceptual development of individual subjectivity. He gave these lectures, in English, at UC Berkeley, beginning on April 12, 1983, roughly a year before he died. There are some negligable distortions in the tape. plato.stanford.edu