The individual was of interest exactly insofar as he or she could contribute to the strength of the state. The lives, deaths, activities, work, joy of individuals were important to the extent that these everyday concerns became politically useful. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, p139)
In this final section, I discuss the relevance of Foucault’s concept of bio-power by drawing upon three key texts: The Birth of Social Medicine (BSM), Society Must be Defended (SMD), and The History of Sexuality (HOS). Bio-power describes the ‘increasing organisation of population and welfare for the sake of increased force and productivity’ (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, p8). Whereas we thought of the regulatory function of disciplinary power as training aimed at producing ‘docile minds/bodies’ at the institutional level, bio-power refers to how this process manifests within society’s ‘social body’. Bio-power refers to techniques or technologies of population management that produce diverse forms of knowledge aiming to create in human beings the desire for normalcy. Foucault theorises that bio-power like all power, is not simply repressive, rather saliency lies in its potent dispersion of multiple discourses (Mayo, 1997).
The politicisation of the population through hegemonic discourses is not new. However, bio-power as a flexible technology of power can produce novel forms of governance. At times the technologies operate to highlight that conflict is intra- societal (for example, championing hetero-normativity and heterosexuality), while at other times the conflict is between society and outside groups (for example, race war discourses or Islamophobia). Foucault applies the bio-power concept to illustrate technologies of population management techniques to establish biological delineation demarcated by sexual preferences or along racial lines. In both cases bio- power is rationalised as a protection of the ‘bloodline’ of the population that requires managerial techniques aimed at normalising the sexual activities and/or proclivities of the population.
Foucault’s thinking shifted throughout his life and he subsequently abandoned bio- power in favour of governmentality as a concept to understand technologies for management of populations. However, the genesis of his work around bio-power is relevant to this thesis in order to theorise about the influence of other knowledge forms that B.E.M. teachers may/may not adopt or that can influence their actions and the production of counter-narratives. The analytic usefulness is that bio-power allows me to link ideas about the working of power-knowledge in. pupils’ belief with B.E.M. teachers’ understandings of how they counter-act them. I can assess the extent to which B.E.M. teachers and pupils’ knowledge about racism and sexuality, once manufactured and/or reproduced, gain ascendency within the school’s social body.
Bio-power & Sexuality
The deployment of sexuality defines the regimes of power, knowledge and pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality. (Foucault, 1978, p11) The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (HOS) is a study of how the modern subject’s sexual nature and cultural interpretation of it, result from discourses that define sexuality. The work considers the manner within which human beings become obliged to recognise their sexual behaviour and judge themselves accordingly. Foucault (1975) argues that the control of and administration of knowledge about sexuality was a key factor in processes whereby the population could be morally disciplined (O’Farrell, 2005, p106). He uses the term the ‘repressive hypothesis’ to discuss the idea that through supposedly repressive discourses, things which were previously thought of as taboo or silenced became the subject of extensive production of knowledge. Foucault (1975) contends that the administrative mechanisms through which power operates arise out of the proliferation of ‘experts’, scientific and medical knowledge, as well as forms of discourse (moral, confessional and so on). New categories of knowledge are produced and other knowledge forms are reiteratively created; sexuality becomes a problem of truth. The instrumental effect of the deployment of bio-power is the ‘implantation of perversion’ into sexual discourses. As human beings create and collaborate in the manufacture of ‘truths’ about themselves they become implicated in their own control through confessional acts of disclosure. In addition to the impulse for confessional acts about one’s sexuality, there is a
generation of knowledge and refinement in terms of normality and abnormality. The effect of iterative categorisation processes is to locate human beings into ever- decreasing subsets of deviancy. HOS highlights how sexuality, a natural private human activity, becomes objectified and thus subjected to unprecedented levels of control. Furthermore, the proliferation of sex discourses, together with other dominant discourses (for example, religious) leads the individual to morally self- judge. The relation of power to sex becomes optimal when it surfaces to intervene on the individual’s practices.
Foucault argues that the deployment of these technologies of power can be applied to any human activity previously located in the private domain regardless of whether it is prohibitive or taboo. Manifestation of the repressive hypothesis is evident in our modern era when judgements are made about ‘political correctness’. Language descriptors once deemed derogatory are parodied in common vernacular, for example in comedy. Previously concerted efforts were made to eliminate such language choices because they were argued to be offensive to certain groups, now these taboos are recouped for popular consumption. My argument here is that while anti-sexist and anti-racist movements originally sought to eliminate the proliferation of subliminal negative thinking, there is a turn towards legitimising prejudices and legitimate bias. Recipients of taboo statements are accused of being oversensitive and the speech act is justified as inconsequential.
The idea of the capillary effect of bio-power permeating at the personal, intimate level is pertinent when theorising about teachers and pupils’ interpersonal sphere. Schools are no longer required to record or report racist incidences; the effect is that some pupils may not necessarily understand how to recognise these if/when they occur. Any claim that a recipient may make is subject to re-interpretation by teachers (the experts) who may reclassify or dismiss it as they choose. Not only do the technologies of power inculcate particular forms of value and perspectives, there is also an imposition of a new self-perception (Foucault, 1975).
HOS’s relevance to this thesis is that it highlights the impact of discursive forces on the body (Mills, 2000). In this regard, the B.E.M. teachers and pupils’ bodies are sites on which discourses (including deficit pathology) are both enacted and where they are contested (Mills, 2000). Therefore, one needs to give an account in the theoretical
framing of the notion that these teachers’ experiences are always mediated through social construction about B.E.M. men/women. If as is suggested, even B.E.M. teachers’ private domain can be encroached through technologies of power, then they are vulnerable to implanted forms of classification. In the school context, how pupils perceive representations of B.E.M. men/women and what their teachers understand these beliefs to be is of interest. For example, pupils’ beliefs about the role of women may be contested by other ideas developed through their involvement with B.E.M. teachers’ intentionally or otherwise. Likewise, the capillary effect of bio-power can be seen to function in the way black men are represented in society and may influence how B.E.M. teachers interact with and talk to pupils about negative classifications and the implantation of sexist ideas.
Bio-power and Racism
In SMD, Foucault distinguishes between racism and race war discourses defining the former as merely particular and localised episodes. However, other critics comment on the limitations of such views (McWhorter, 2011; Rusmussen, 2011) pointing to the role of economic imperatives in perpetuating racist beliefs, and the absence of post-colonial perspectives to his thinking about the deliberate under-development of the colonies. Said (1978) for example, criticises Foucault on the truth of representation, by pointing to colonial writings about primitive indigenous people as constructed lies. However, Foucault’s definition of racism which is clearly under- developed, is partly due to his subsequent reworking of bio-power into conceptions around governmentality. In this thesis, I apply Foucault’s theory of bio-power to discuss how racism and racist discourses are internalised into the social fabric of society. This feature of internalised racism ‘operates as a biological caesura within a population between worthy and unworthy life’ (Foucault, 1997). The effect of racism is to, bring about the unification of a population creating the ‘us’ or biological whole:
[R]acism justifies the death-function in the economy of bio-power by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race of a population, insofar as one is an element in a living plurality. (Foucault, 1976b, p258))
Racism is arguably an example of how bio-power operates to justify division and classification of sections of the population. Historically the perpetuation of racism
has served to satisfy colonial economic imperatives; this is justified by the need to treat ‘selected differences of morphology, behaviour or belief as biological deviations to be contained or eliminated’ (McWhorter, 2011, p85). Biological difference, despite evidence to the contrary, is rooted in eugenic ideals that rationalises forms of exclusion, for example, social apartheid or social genocide. Such extreme perspectives align with the idea of protecting the ‘composition, the reproduction, and the development of the population by isolating and excluding the abnormal’ (Rusmussen, 2011, p38). Racism as a ‘mechanism for individuation underwrites practices that isolate non-conformities and identifies them as aberrations to be neutralised’ (McWhorter, 2011, p88). Thus, technologies of racism operate within a given population to both unify and differentiate. As McWhorter (2011) points out:
as a technology, racism easily articulates with both sovereign power, in its unifying action, and disciplinary normalization, in its individuating and its pathologization of deviation. It renders critiques for non-normal perspectives inaudible at the level of rational debate by treating them as biologically threatening behaviours rather than claims to truth. (McWhorter, 2011, p88) There is a historical legacy of racist-thinking embedded in the psyche of Western society characterised by the idea that it is in perpetual war from ‘home-grown enemies’ or otherwise (McWhorter, 2011). Hook (2005) uses the term pre-discursive racism to describe these non-verbal thought processes, arguing that while yet realised bodily, they manifest in aversions and as intuitions. A close approximation to the machinations of racist thinking on the populace is as technologies of affect (Hook, 2005). Here I align with Hook’s theoretical understanding of how racism operates as simultaneously material discourse and affective phenomena. This leads to the idea that bio-power facilitates discourses of affect, in its more efficient or pervasive form, and surfaces as emotional responses to phenomena about the ‘other’. Furthermore, given its diversified form, racist ideas can be mobilised for political intervention to justify a host of regulatory powers. In this respect, I align with Winant’s (2000) contention that the longevity of the race concept and the continuation of race thinking and racialised acts of violence and aggression guarantee that race remains a globalised feature of social reality. Racialised landscapes are influenced by world events from which schools and other institutions are not exempt (Crozier & Davies, 2008).
Bio-power is relevant to this thesis since it draws attention to the permeation of sexist and racist beliefs and how they manifest through the proliferation of varied learned discourses about human nature. A theoretical framing which acknowledges the existence of institutional (or otherwise) racist and sexist attitudes enables me to give an account of the extent to which it affects the lives of B.E.M. teachers and pupils. One cannot assume either party are immune to the effects of intolerance, since ideas about a human being’s raced or sexed nature are sustained in the very discourses that define them. With regard to this thesis, consideration is given to situations that reinforce cultural reproduction of human nature because these ‘natural traits’ always carry the potential to be expressed as deviant or abnormal. The point I want to raise here is that these teachers not only have an overview of (and opinion on) the effects of bio-power as part of their social condition in school but are positioned to understand some of the ramifications for pupils. Hence I argue these teachers, who are marginalised within the school hierarchy, occupy a liminal position from which they hold empathy towards B.E.M. pupils.