Michel Foucault
Security, Territory, Population
Lectures at the College de France
1977-78
Structure
• first three lectures deal with the issues of security
and population;
• fourth and most of the fifth lecture focus on the art
of government;
• the sixth through the ninth examine the history of
pastoral techniques;
• the tenth and eleventh discuss raison D’État;
• and finally, the twelfth and thirteenth lectures deal
with the important early-modern institution of
the police.
Security
• Discipline and security as two different systems of
power because focus is different
• discipline deals with individuals and security with
populations
• “disciplinary society” – Bentham’s Panopticon –
ideal prison whose inmates would continually be
open to surveillance by unseen observer
• Security Society: the government of populations,
through self-regulation, discipline achieved
through norms and normalization (ex of Sexuality)
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Sovereign operates on a territory;
Discipline operates on an individual;
Security operates on a population.
Security apparatus about modulation, not total
reformulation of elements, is always in motion,
with goal of best possible circulation of goods,
things, people in the milieu (understood as the
environment with actions and the materials on
which action operates)
Individual and Population:
Two Foci of Power
• Anatomo-politics of the human body: the
body as a machine, discipline and
optimization of its capabilities, parallel
increase in usefulness and docility
• Bio-politics of population – focused on the
species body, on mechanics of life, on
births, deaths, health, life expectancy
Population
• History: formerly about population of
territory (as in depopulation due to
epidemic)
• Mercantilists: population the object of
sovereignty (along with territory) and
source of sovereign’s strength and could be
regulated as productive force (number,
work, docility)
• Good government then understood as
administrative monarchy (by analogy with head of
family);
• 18C discovery of demographic regularities
(statistics as discipline of state) reconceptualize
population as collection of subjects subjected to
natural phenomena
• Population: natural forces AND economic forces
• Government interest: shift from security
over territory to security over people, the
management of the population
• Management not through authoritarian
dictate but diverse array of direct and
indirect means of influence
• Creates a “mutation” in organization and
rationalization of methods of power
Power
• “has the population as its target, political economy
as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses
of security as its essential technical instrument”
(108)
• Together these three form governmentality
• Major technique is production of knowledges that
yield shared mentalities and norms on which they
may be based
• Power the outcome of dispersed actors and actions
that together yield changes in mentalities and
institutions
• “A constant interplay between techniques of
power and their object gradually carves out
in reality, as a field of reality, population
and its specific phenomena” (79)
• Examples are the emergence of science of
statistics and growing interest by state in
public hygiene (example of smallpox
inoculation and later vaccination)
• Distinction between “government of
populations” and “exercise of sovereignty
over the fine grain of individual
behaviours”
• Self-regulation and normalization
• Example of Sex: change in mentalities
influences populations
History of Sexuality
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Hystericization of Women’s Bodies
Pedagogization of Children’s Sex
Socialization of Sex
Psychiatrization of Perversions
• Third lecture: use of inoculation (1720) and
vaccination (1800) to draw out contrasts between
sovereignty, discipline and security
• Security apparatus from the point of view of
normalization – technologies of normalization
intervene by imposing a system of classification,
hierarchization and distribution (discipline:
normalizing gaze that orders and differentiates)
Normalization in Security
System of Power
• Example of inoculation and vaccination do
not fit in the medical rationality of the time
• Are a) strictly preventative, b) almost
completely successful, c) effective without
undue cost (pol. or ec.) to the population,
and, d) were completely outside reigning
medical theories
Four Corollary Developments
Enabling Integration:
• Emergence and application of statistical methods
rendered the epidemic intelligible in terms of
calculation of probabilities (risk)
• Used material givens and turned their properties
into target of modulation to produce a countereffect (as in political/ec theory) (case)
• Accumulated observations and practices
increasingly focused on population and milieu
(danger zones)
• Creation of a new type of problem: the crisis as
intelligibility of multiplication of cases pp. 60-61
Compare with Disciplinary
Approach to Epidemics
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Spatial separations
Quarantine
Discern not only afflicted but those in areas
Thought of miasma as imbuing areas not yet
behaviours or identities
• Case of cholera in Ghost Map -- miasma
theory of illness (Hippocratic origin)
Pastoral Power
• Individualization techniques and totalization
procedures
• Ensures salvation; sacrifices itself for the
flock; looks after individual during entire
life and not just whole community; needs to
know inside of people’s minds and an
ability to direct conscience.
Some Concepts:
• bio-politics
• The increasing state concern with the
biological well-being of the population
including disease control and prevention,
adequate food and water supply, sanitary
shelter, and education.
bio-technico-power
(or bio-power)
"Power is essentially what dictates its law to sex.
Which means first of all that sex is placed by
power in a binary system: licit and illicit,
permitted and forbidden." (History of Sexuality,
p.83). Bio-power emerged as a coherent political
technology in the seventeenth century. It has two
poles or components. First is the pole of scientific
categories of human beings (think of species,
population, race, gender, sexual practices, etc.).
The second pole is disciplinary power which has
the individual as its focus.
Disciplinary Power
A form of surveillance which is
internalized. With disciplinary power, each
person disciplines him or herself.
Disciplinary power is also one of the poles
of bio-power. The basic goal of
disciplinary power is to produce a person
who is docile.
This is connected to the rise of capitalism.
Disciplinary power is especially important
in the policing of sexual confession
Disciplinary Technologies
Techniques for producing docile people. These are
"techniques of discipline."
"Without the insertion of disciplined, orderly
individuals into the machinery of production, the
new demands of capitalism would have been
stymied.” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, p.135).
The aim of disciplinary technology is to forge a
"docile [body] that may be subjected, used,
transformed and improved" (D and P)
Dispositif (Apparatus)
• The concept of an episteme is insufficient and
dispositif fills in the gap. An episteme is
researched through the analysis of discourse (text),
but there are practices (institutions, architectural
arrangments, regulations, laws, administrative
measures, scientific statements, philosophic
propositions, morality, philanthropy) in addition to
discourse which we may use to do a genealogical
analysis of some particular situation .
Government
“ [B]y government Foucault meant not so
much the political or administrative
structures of the modern state as 'the way in
which the conduct of individuals or of
groups might be directed: the government
of children, of souls, of communities, of
families, of the sick.... To govern, in this
sense, is to structure the possible field of
action of others” (Burchell et al, 1991)
Governmentality
A centralization and increased government power.
This power is not negative.
It produces reality through "rituals of truth" and it creates a particular style
of subjectivity to which one conforms or against which one resists.
Since individuals are taken into this subjectivity (and recognize
themselves in it) they become part of the normalizing force.
Governmentality also includes a growing body of knowledge that presents
itself as "scientific," and which contributes to the power of
governmentality.
Governmentality and Experts
Governmentality is a novel kind of governing that emerged in Europe
during the sixteenth century. It happened when feudalism was failing
and when their was a loss of power in the absolute monarch. Even
though we do not have absolute power of the monarch now, we do
have government. To a large extent this is internalized by people, but
there is also surveillance and reinforcement for conforming to the
rules.
This new kind of governmentality was made possible by the creation of
specific (expert or professional) "knowledges" as well as the
construction of experts, institutions and disciplines (e.g., medicine,
psychology, psychiatry) so that individuals who we think of as experts
can claim the knowledge necessary to command the power of
governmentality.
Pastoral Power:
The Subject and Power
Omnes et singulatum
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The kind of power that is exercised by the
Church. It rests on the church's power to assure
individual salvation in the next world. It is linked
with the notion of individualism (as in individual
salvation). In modern times, the salvation in the
next life has been commuted to a salvation in this
life (health, wellbeing, security, etc.)
Police
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The job of the police is the articulation
and administration of techniques of biopower so as to increase the state's control
over its inhabitants.
• Policing as akin to activities of social
workers in history of policing.