World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

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ing them. Galileo, so to speak, won the argument and we all stand on the common ground of the grid of relevance and irrelevance which modern philosophy developed as a consequence of this victory." Galileo's reply was his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in which he argued for the strict separation of theological and scientific issues, on the ground that science and religion require different enterprise so that the truth of science should not conflict with the truth of religion.
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Foucault takes this episode as a narrative of power. Two techniques of power with which Foucault has been interested are disciplinary power and bio-power. From the seventeenth century western societies, Foucault suggests that the power to administer life evolved in two basic forms: the first, disciplinary in character, focusing on the body as a productive machine, and the second, bio-power, focusing on the body as a living organism, serving the basis of biological processes (e.g., birth, health).
Power operates through bodies, as bio-power. Dreyfus and Rabinow write, "Foucault's aim is to isolate, identify, and analyze the web of unequal relationships set up by political technologies which underlies and undercuts the theoretical equality posited by the law and political philosophers. Biopower escapes from the representation of power as law and advances under its protection. ... To understand power in its materiality, its day to day operation, we must go to the level of the micropractices, the political technologies in which our practices are formed" Bio-power is a specific form of power that emerges in the modern period (post-18th century) as a part of the larger "technology" of modern societies. Bio-power is a dispersed form of power; rather than coming "from above" and organizing people through restriction and prohibition, bio-power gets us to regulate ourselves.
Think of bio-power this way: once medicine gets a handle on how to cure disease (which really only happens in the 20th century, with the development of antibiotics, chemotherapies, the understanding of hormones and the ability to synthesize them, etc.), there is a shift in emphasis from death to life in medicine. There is a tremendous focus in culture now on "health"; we are told everyday how to eat, sleep, exercise, and basically live our lives in order to extend them or avoid illness. From a traditional perspective, this is a positive development; medicine works to enhance people's lives. From Foucault's perspective, this development represents the enhancement of biopower, as our daily practices must now include myriad micropractices aimed at illness-prevention. The flow of medical information about health is a regulatory discourse and a method of dividing people based on their health practices and outcomes. Unhealthy people become easy to blame for their illnesses within this paradigm, and the state is able to avoid its responsibility to clean up the environment, curb industrial pollution, insure a safe food supply, etc., since the primary emphasis of illness prevention is understood to be
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