Biopolitics entrenches the structure of coercion—the state has become us, and we’re surveilling ourselves-- we have the unique agency to overthrow the state.

Foucault’s analysis of biopower replaces an understanding of power that is traditionally attached to sovereignty as ‘the right to take life or let live’, with the power ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1978, 138). In this respect, this power applies to humans not simply as individual beings, but as species (Foucault 2003). Note that power in the Foucauldian vocabulary is conceived as a multiplicity of relations immanent in a setting, whereas state sovereignty, the formulation of law and other established social hegemonies constitute only terminal forms in which power materialises (1978). Biopower is primarily concerned with fostering the health and wellbeing of populations so they can live and be more productive longer (Randell-Moon and Tippet 2016), and it appears in two forms: one centred on disciplining the body and optimising its capabilities towards becoming integrated into systems of efficient and economic controls; and another focussed on the regulatory controls of the population (Foucault 1978). As such, biopower moves away from notions of power dealing with ‘legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death’ (Foucault 1978, 142–143). Thus biopolitics constitutes a technology of power, which, according to Foucault’s historical analysis, developed during modernity to involve sets of (social) interventionist processes and techniques, like statistics and demographics, for observing and controlling such objectives as birth and mortality rates, population fertility and so on; economically rational mechanisms, like individual and collective insurance, security and safety measures, for dealing with accidents and old age incapacities; and control over relations between human beings and their geographical, climatic, or hydro- graphic environment, including urban environments (Foucault 2003).

Foucault located biopolitics within the context of governance practices of the evolving Western liberal state. During the rise of modern capitalism (through the 18th and 19th centuries), an interest in the relationship between populations and their environments was linked with overarching goals of health and productivity: the desire to supply business and other productive enterprises with physically and mentally healthy labour force, called for closer attention to life contingencies and demanded government devised, organised and actualised towards effectively calculating and managing ‘climate, disease, industry, finance, custom, and disaster’ (Miller 2014, 191–192). As ‘biological existence was reflected in political existence’ (Foucault 1978, 142) and ‘life’ emerged as the centre of political strategies (Lemke 2011), the governmentalisation 12 of life and its mechanisms would unfold in schools, hospitals, the army, prisons and psychiatric institutions, marking a gradual key shift from power accumulated by the sovereign towards power dispersed among populations (Miller 2014). Biopolitics connotes bodies being placed within dispersed networks of material, institutional and administrative coercions and knowledge structures, through which they become subject to processes of self-surveillance and self-discipline towards optimising and securing their existence (Foucault 2003; Miller 2014).13 This also connects to Foucault’s idea of government as not limited to political structures or management by the state, but as including a broader range of practices too, that ‘structure the possible field of actions of others’ and control conduct (Foucault 1983, 221). Thus biopolitics denotes ‘a distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance’ (Lemke 2011, 34).