DOCSLIB.ORG

Securing Populations: Foucault and the Cartography of Natural Bodies

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Securing Populations: Foucault and the Cartography of Natural Bodies Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 10-1-2012 12:00 AM Securing Populations: Foucault and the Cartography of Natural Bodies Andrew A.T. Grant The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Calin Mihailescu The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © Andrew A.T. Grant 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the French and Francophone Literature Commons Recommended Citation Grant, Andrew A.T., "Securing Populations: Foucault and the Cartography of Natural Bodies" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 894. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/894 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SECURING POPULATIONS: FOUCAULT AND THE CARTOGRAPHY OF NATURAL BODIES (Thesis Format: Monograph) By Andrew Aubrey Thompson Grant Graduate Program at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © Andrew Aubrey Thompson Grant 2012 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners ______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Călin Mihăilescu Dr. Daniel Vaillancourt ______________________________ Dr. Christopher Keep ______________________________ Dr. Carole Farber The thesis by Andrew Aubrey Thompson Grant entitled: Securing Populations: Foucault and the Cartography of Natural Bodies is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts ______________________ _______________________________ Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii Abstract The concept of biopolitics tends towards universal applicability and thus analytical impotency. By examining Foucault’s lecture seminars that address this concept directly and indirectly, this project aims to delimit its coordinates for future use. To do so, I begin by looking at the way biopolitical discourses on the population constituted liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century. This analysis will be supplemented by a cartography of the surfaces on which biopolitics emerges before and within liberalism, affecting its formation. I will therefore map out the formation of two objects that characterize modern biopower: the ‘natural’ body of the individual and the ‘natural’ body of the population. This will open up the problem of normalization and the constitution of a regime of truth run through with relations of power. Counter-posed to the disciplines, the dispositif of security will be shown to produce normalizing effects at the level of probable events, congealing them into realities of their own. The naturalness of the population will be normalized as such a reality constituting biopolitics as a politics of the chance event of life. Keywords Foucault, biopolitics, probability, normalization, disciplines, power-knowledge, regime of truth, discourse, governmentality, dispositif. iii Acknowledgements As it is with every project that demands nothing less than total immersion, concentration, and exertion of energy, this thesis would not have been possible without the understanding and support of those around me. Thank you, Călin Mihăilescu, for offering to supervise this project and for giving me the space, time and cryptic riddles to work through my material. Thank you Mom and Dad for the moral and financial support throughout my entire university experience. Finally, thank you Nickola for putting up with my insanity and constant absence. I cannot begin to estimate the profound influence you had on me these past two years, but I am positive that I wouldn’t have finished without you. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Context and Proceeding……………………………….……………………………………….……………………1 Part 1: War, Law and Biopolitical Governmentality 1.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….………..9 1.2 Bare Life, Bare Death War…………………………………………………………………….……….………..……………12 1.3 War, Biopolitics and Security…………………………………………………………….……….………….……….…….24 1.4 Discourses of War and Governmentality…………………………………….…………………….……….…………32 1.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………..………………..……….………………………………………….…42 Part 2: Mapping Normalizations 2. General Aims and Objectives…………………………………………….………………...…………….……….……….45 3. Anatomo-politics and Biopolitics…………..…………………………………………………………….…..…….…….54 4. The ‘Nature’ of the Disciplines…………………………………………………………………..…………….…………..65 4.2 The Technically ‘Natural’ Body………………………………………………………….…………….…..………….67 4.3 Normation as Penitential Enclosure…………………………………………………………………..…..……….78 5. Police: Sovereignty and Tactical Normation.…………………….……...……………………..…..…..…………83 6. Biopolitics of the Population…………………..…………………….……………………………………..…..…………92 6.2 Force of Multiplicity, Population of Forces…………………………………………………………….…………94 6.3 Normalization and the Emergence of the ‘Natural’ Population…………………….….……….…...106 7. Life, Death, and the Birth of Eugenics………………………………….………….………………………………….118 Concluding Remarks………………………………………………………..…………………………………………………………...129 Works Cited...………………………………………………..………………..…………………………………………………………...136 Curriculum Vita……………..………………………………………..………………….………………………..……………………...141 v List of Abbreviations Because this monograph is centred on Foucault’s work and comprises of a large amount of textual exegesis, it has become apparent that simplifying these references would be useful. While all other citations will remain consistent among themselves, references to Foucault’s writings will use abbreviations inside the parentheses. They are as follows: AK – The Archeology of Knowledge BB – The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 BC – The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception DP – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison HS – The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 NGH – “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” QM – “Questions of Method” STP – Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 SMD – Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 SP – “The Subject and Power” TP – “Truth and Power” WC – “What is Critique” vi 1 Introduction: Context and Proceeding For many commentators on Foucault’s lectures during the 1970’s, there is a problem that seems irresolvable. Especially in the two lecture seminars known as Security, Territory Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault begins by announcing that biopolitics will be the primary object of inquiry, but never seems to follow through. Instead he turns his attention towards the development of what he calls governmentality as a way into the problems posed by biopolitics. He writes: I thought I could do a course on biopolitics this year. I will try to show how the central core of all the problems that I am presently trying to identify is what is called population. Consequently, this is the basis on which something like biopolitics could be formed. But it seems to me that the analysis of biopolitics can only get underway when we have understood the general regime of governmental reason I have talked about. (BB 21-22) Thus at the centre of the problem of a governmental reason, “the level of reflection in the practise of government and on the practise of government” (BB 2), is the figure of the population around which biopolitics gains its consistency. Although this relationship has been analysed by many contemporary scholars,1 Foucault never actually manages to bring together his analyses of governmentality with his discussions of the population with any specificity. Moreover, biopolitics was identified in numerous texts but never given the critical analysis to adequately define its conceptual coordinates. Instead biopolitics, whatever this might be, 1 See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society; Majia Holmer Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life; Julian Reid and Michael Dillon, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. 2 seems to haunt Foucault’s lectures, and beyond them, as a spectral force within contemporary political discourse. Indeed, one may speculate on the reasons for the sudden explosion of interest in biopolitics given its general lack of definition. Perhaps it is as simple as the facility with which the very name of the concept can be manipulated and deployed in a range of heterogeneous disciplines that examine the human body, its representation, its capture, its production, distribution, consumption. It is no doubt true that politics has always been concerned with the ways that individuals have lived their lives, the manner in which they interact, and certainly their bodies. But perhaps biopolitics is much more and much less than this. Much of the popularity can likely be attributed to the uses made of this concept in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. However divergent the interpretations, whether as a post-Marxist concept of living productivity, or as the referent of
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Art of 'Governing Nature': 'Green' Governmentality
    THE ART OF ‘GOVERNING NATURE’: ‘GREEN’ GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE MANAGEMENT OF NATURE by KRISTAN JAMES HART A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Environmental Studies In conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Environmental Studies Queen„s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2011) Copyright ©Kristan James Hart, 2011 Abstract This thesis seeks to unpack the notions of Michael Foucault's late work on governmentality and what insights it might have for understanding the „governing of nature‟. In doing this it also operates as a critique of what is often termed 'resourcism', a way of evaluating nature which only accounts for its utility for human use and does not give any acceptance to the idea of protecting nature for its own sake, or any conception of a nature that cannot be managed. By utilizing a study of the govern-mentalities emerging throughout liberalism, welfare-liberalism and neoliberalism I argue that this form of 'knowing' nature-as-resource has always been internal to rationalities of liberal government, but that the bracketing out of other moral valuations to the logic of the market is a specific function of neoliberal rationalities of governing. I then seek to offer an analysis of the implications for this form of nature rationality, in that it is becoming increasingly globalized, and with that bringing more aspects of nature into metrics for government, bringing new justifications for intervening in „deficient‟ populations under the rubric of „sustainable development. I argue, that with this a new (global) environmental subject is being constructed; one that can rationally assess nature-as-resource in a cost-benefit logic of wise-use conservation.
    [Show full text]
  • GEO 755 Political Ecology: Nature, Culture, Power Syllabus
    Political Ecology: Nature, Culture, Power Geography 755 Tuesdays, 5:00-7:45pm, Eggers 155 Professor Tom Perreault Eggers 529 Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:00-4:00pm or by appointment [email protected] 443-9467 Course Overview This course surveys key themes in the field of political ecology. We will examine the political economies of environmental change, as well as the ways in which our understandings of nature are materially and discursively bound up with notions of culture and the production of subjectivity. The course does not attempt to present a comprehensive review of the political ecology literature. Rather, it is a critical exploration of theories and themes related to nature, political economy, and culture; themes that, to my mind, fundamentally underlie the relationship between society and environment. The course is divided into four sections: (I) “Foundations of Political Ecology: Core Concepts and Key Debates” examines the intellectual foundations and key debates of political ecology as a field; (II) “Governing Nature” examines capitalist transformations of nature, with a particular focus on neoliberalism and commodification, and the modes of environmental governance they engender; (III) “Nature and Subjectivity” focuses on subjectivity and the production of social difference, and how these are experienced in relation to nature; and (IV) “Spaces and Scales of Political Ecology” considers three key spheres of political ecological research: (a) agrarian political economy and rural livelihoods; (b) urban political ecology; and (c) the Anthropocene. No seminar can be completely comprehensive in its treatment of a given field, and this class is no exception. There are large and well-developed literatures within political ecology that are not included in the course schedule.
    [Show full text]
  • 6. Neoliberal Governmentality: Foucault on the Birth of Biopolitics
    MICHAEL A. PETERS 6. NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY: FOUCAULT ON THE BIRTH OF BIOPOLITICS The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to liberate the individual from the State and its institutions, but to liberate ourselves from the State and the type of individualisation linked to it (Foucault, 1982, p. 216). Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. (Foucault, 1982, p. 221). INTRODUCTION In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the Collège de France the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterised by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school. Among Foucault’s great insights in his work on governmentality was the critical link he observed in liberalism between the governance of the self and government of the state – understood as the exercise of political sovereignty over a territory and its population. He focuses on government as a set of practices legitimated by specific rationalities and saw that these three schools of contemporary economic liberalism focused on the question of too much government – a permanent critique of the state that Foucault considers as a set of techniques for governing the self through the market. Liberal modes of governing, Foucault tells us, are distinguished in general by the ways in which they utilise the capacities of free acting subjects and, consequently, modes of government differ according to the value and definition accorded the concept of freedom. These different mentalities of rule, thus, turn on whether freedom is seen as a natural attribute as with the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, a product of rational choice making, or, as with Hayek, a civiliz- ational artefact theorised as both negative and anti-naturalist.
    [Show full text]
  • Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège De France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality
    1 "The Birth of Bio-Politics" – Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality From 1970 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault held the Chair of "History of Systems of Thought" at the Collège de France.1 In his public lectures delivered each Wednesday from early January through to the end of March/beginning of April, he reported on his research goals and findings, presenting unpublished material and new conceptual and theoretical research tools. Many of the ideas developed there were later to be taken up in his various book projects. However, he was in fact never to elaborate in writing on some of the research angles he presented there. Foucault's early and unexpected death meant that two of the key series of lectures have remained largely unpublished ever since, namely the lectures held in 1978 ("Sécurité, territoire et population") and in 1979 ("La naissance de la biopolitique").2 These lectures focused on the "genealogy of the modern state" (Lect. April 5, 1978/1982b, 43). Foucault deploys the concept of government or "governmentality" as a "guideline" for the analysis he offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from Ancient Greek through to modern neo-liberalism (Foucault 1978b, 719). I wish to emphasize two points here, as they seem important for an adequate assessment of the innovative potential of the notion of governmentality. First of all, the concept of governmentality demonstrates Foucault's working hypothesis on the reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge. The semantic linking of governing ("gouverner") and modes of thought ("mentalité") indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them.
    [Show full text]
  • Foucauldian Madness: a Historiographical Anti-Psychiatry
    International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI) ISSN (Online): 2319 – 7722, ISSN (Print): 2319 – 7714 www.ijhssi.org ||Volume 9 Issue 6 Ser. II || June 2020 || PP 48-51 Foucauldian Madness: A Historiographical Anti-psychiatry Bhaskar Sarkar M.A, Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad ABSTRACT- Foucault has been criticized as anti-psychiatric in nature yet his scepticism toward madness is actually based on its institutionalized treatment not in its academic reception. This paper tries to trace back Foucauldian inspirations in historiography of psychiatry and its power relations in asylum. Presuming madness as social construction, the paper tries to establish the limitations of pseudoscientific, moral assumptions toward insanity. Historiographical examination has been suggested here to reduce the psychiatric predispositions with threat for the civilization while it proves that insanity is a product of civilization.Everywhere the capitalist world order is associated with established religious morality. Presuming this, the reception toward insanity, academically and socially, has been challenged in this paper in order to theorize anti-disciplinary insanity into consideration. KEYWORDS- Insanity, Unreasoning, Foucault, Historiography, Anti-psychiatry ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Date of Submission: 01-06-2020 Date of Acceptance: 15-06-2020 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [Show full text]
  • Governmentality and the Biopolitics of 'Improvement'
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library Economy and Space Article EPA: Economy and Space 2019, Vol. 51(1) 156–177 Revisiting neoliberalism in ! The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: the oceans: Governmentality sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308518X18803110 and the biopolitics of journals.sagepub.com/home/epn ‘improvement’ in the Irish and European fisheries Patrick Bresnihan Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Abstract Foucault’s account of the emergence of biopolitics in the late 18th century helps frame the political economy of ‘improvements’ as an environmental project linked to the well-being of the population. Since the 1970s, biopolitical concerns have shifted towards non-human popula- tions and the reproduction of natural resources and ecosystems. This has become evident in the European fisheries, where after decades of exploitation greatly intensified since the 1960s, the extractive demands of the fishing industry have caught up with the reproductive capacities of most commercially targeted fish stocks. This contradiction has given rise to a new political economy of ‘improvements’ that seeks to sustain the biological health of commercially targeted fish populations while maintaining an economically profitable fishing industry. Central to this transition is the active role that fishers are expected to play in sustainably managing the fish stocks they exploit while adapting to ‘green’ market opportunities. Tradeable quota systems, eco-accreditation schemes and community-based resource management have all emerged as managerial strategies for inciting the active participation of fishers in this ‘common’ project of sustainable development.
    [Show full text]
  • Memory, Materiality, and Meritocracy at the Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2019 RECOLLECTIONS: MEMORY, MATERIALITY, AND MERITOCRACY AT THE DR. JAMES STILL HISTORIC OFFICE AND HOMESTEAD Marc Lorenc University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Lorenc, Marc, "RECOLLECTIONS: MEMORY, MATERIALITY, AND MERITOCRACY AT THE DR. JAMES STILL HISTORIC OFFICE AND HOMESTEAD" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1608. https://doi.org/10.7275/14189307 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1608 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RECOLLECTIONS: MEMORY, MATERIALITY, AND MERITOCRACY AT THE DR. JAMES STILL HISTORIC OFFICE AND HOMESTEAD A Dissertation Presented by MARC LORENC Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2019 Department of Anthropology © Copyright by Marc Lorenc 2019 All Rights Reserved RECOLLECTIONS: MEMORY, MATERIALITY, AND MERITOCRACY AT THE DR. JAMES STILL HISTORIC OFFICE AND HOMESTEAD A Dissertation Presented by MARC LORENC Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Chair ____________________________________ Sonya Atalay, Member ____________________________________ Britt Rusert, Member ____________________________________ Julie Hemment Department of Anthropology DEDICATION To those struggling with the American Dream. “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”- Eugene V.
    [Show full text]
  • Carceral Biocitizenship
    2 Carceral Biocitizenship The Rhetorics of Sovereignty in Incarceration Sarah Burgess and Stuart J. Murray Introduction On October 19, 2007, nineteen- year- old Ashley Smith died of self- inflicted strangulation while on suicide watch at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. As she tied a liga- ture around her neck, correctional officers, who had been instructed not to enter into her cell if she was still breathing, watched— and in com- pliance with Canadian regulations,1 videorecorded—her death. As the video footage attests, they entered her cell only when she was nonrespon- sive and could not be resuscitated. Six days later, the three correctional officers who stood by and watched Smith’s suicide were charged, along with one of their supervisors, with criminal negligence causing death, while the warden and deputy warden were fired. Criminal charges were later dropped. The case gained some attention following the June 2008 publication of a report by the Office of the Correctional Investigator of Canada titled A Preventable Death; and public outcry grew considerably when Canada’s national CBC News Network’s The Fifth Estate broadcast two special investigative reports in January and November 2010, titled “Out of Control” and “Behind the Wall,” respectively. The latter broad- cast included the video footage of Smith’s death, and the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) came under intense scrutiny for its treatment of prisoners with mental health problems. What emerged over the course of the Coroner’s Inquests (there were two, in 2011 and 2012) were the systemic yet oftentimes highly coordi- nated, seemingly intentional failures and abuses on the part of the CSC.
    [Show full text]
  • View, Even As Power Restricts and Censors, It Has Generative Effects
    Producing Pacification: The Disciplinary Technologies of Smart Bombs and National Anti-War Organizing Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Andrew Curtis Culp Graduate Program in Comparative Studies The Ohio State University 2009 Thesis Committee: Eugene W. Holland, Advisor Philip Armstrong Mathew Coleman Copyright by Andrew Curtis Culp 2009 Abstract The disciplinary technology of pacification works as a tool, embedded within the logistical assemblage of liberalism, which works to maintain lines of force necessary for reproducing liberalism’s conditions for existence. Chapter One develops this conceptual framework, situating my approach in relation to Foucaultian scholarship on biopolitics and war. The proceeding chapters are an exploration of two different cases that demonstrate radically different contexts in which the pacification-assemblage-force assemblage is mobilized. In Chapter Two, I consider smart bombs as a disciplinary technology of pacification within the assemblage of ‘virtuous war’, tracing effects of the affective force of the bombs. And Chapter Three is a criticism of the current national anti-war strategy and concludes with a brief suggestion on a new paradigm – affectivism – that recenters a politics of resistance on deploying minor knowledge to produce new potentialities. Each one of the three elements of the triad, the disciplinary technology of pacification, the form of the concrete assemblage, and schematically mapping the topography of lines of force, are crucial components to the political analytics. ii Dedication For Tristan iii Acknowledgements The idea for the thesis began while preparing for the National Debate Tournament in 2006.
    [Show full text]
  • Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence
    humanities Article Vulnerable Life: Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence Steven Pokornowski Division of Communications and Languages, Rio Hondo College, 3600 Workman Mill Rd., Whittier, CA 90601, USA; [email protected]; Tel.: +1-568-908-3429 Academic Editor: Myra Mendible Received: 1 June 2016; Accepted: 17 August 2016; Published: 25 August 2016 Abstract: This essay offers an intervention in biopolitical theory—using the term “vulnerable life” to recalibrate discussions of how life is valued and violence is justified in the contemporary bioinsecurity regime. It reads the discursive structures that dehumanize and pathologize figures in U.S. zombie narratives against the discursive structures present in contemporary legal narratives and media reports on the killing of black Americans. Through this unsettling paralleling of structures, the essay suggests how the current ubiquity of zombies and the profusion of racial tension in the U.S. are related. In the process, the essay emphasizes the highly racialized nature of the zombie itself—which has never been the empty signifier it is often read as—and drives home just how dangerous the proliferation of postracial and posthuman discourses can be if they serve to elide historical limitations about the highly political determinations of just who is quite human. Keywords: biopolitics; race; zombies; postracial; posthuman; #BlackLivesMatter; violence 1. Introduction: The Mattering of Lives, Life that Matters, and the Justification of Violence The zombie’s recent cultural ubiquity parallels, and is in some measure symptomatic of, an increasingly visible racial tension in the U.S. That is not to say that such deaths as those of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, to name just a few of those recently in need of memorialization, are a new phenomenon; nor is it to say that the structural disenfranchisement and systemic inequity that created the tense policing situations and rampant economic and political inequality in Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Chicago are new, either [1,2]1.
    [Show full text]
  • Global Mental Health, Biopolitics, & Depression in Chile
    TRANSFORMING SUBJECTIVITIES: GLOBAL MENTAL HEALTH, BIOPOLITICS, & DEPRESSION IN CHILE BY COURTNEY A. CUTHBERTSON DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Assata Zerai, Chair Associate Professor Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi Associate Professor Zsuzsa Gille Associate Professor Jonathan Inda Associate Professor Julie Dowling ABSTRACT As the leading cause of disability around the world (WHO 2012), depression has become a major public health concern. The global mental health movement has organized to increase access to mental health care within primary care and to protect the human rights of those who experience mental illnesses. Within this movement, the World Health Organization (WHO) MIND Project which operated in the early 2000s aimed to increase services and legal protections for people with mental illness, through collaboration with national governments and with the assertion that through such collaboration, global psychiatric knowledge would trickle down to the general population. Foucault (1978) has argued that in contemporary society, governance takes place through biopolitics as the “making live” of populations through construction of health problems as simultaneously political and economic ones. Rose (2007) posited that the outcome of living in such a society is the creation of individual-level biological citizenship, where people increasingly see themselves in biological ways. Biological citizenship is theorized as an active process of describing the self in biologically-colored languages while also making demands upon the state for the provision of health care. This dissertation project examined the potential transfer of psychiatric knowledge from the global organizational level to the level of individuals in Chile, a country claimed as a success of the global mental health movement.
    [Show full text]
  • Foucault Lectures the Beginning of a Study of Biopower
    Foucault Lectures A series published by Foucault Studies © Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson ISSN: 2597-2545 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22439/fsl.vi0.6151 Foucault Lectures, Vol III, no. 1, 5-26, December 2020 ARTICLE The Beginning of a Study of Biopower: Foucault’s 1978 Lectures at the Collège de France VERENA ERLENBUSCH-ANDERSON Syracuse University, USA ABSTRACT. While Foucault introduced the 1978 lecture course Security, Territory, Population as a study of biopower, the reception of the lectures has largely focused on other concepts, such as governmentality, security, liberalism, and counter-conduct. This paper situates the lecture course within the larger context of Foucault’s development of an analytics of power to explore in what sense Security, Territory, Population can be said to constitute a study of biopower. I argue that the 1978 course is best understood as a continuation-through-transformation of Foucault’s earlier work. It revisits familiar material to supplement Foucault’s microphysics of power, which he traced in institutions like prisons or asylums and with regard to its effects on the bodies of individuals, with a genealogy of practices of power that target the biological life of the population and give rise to the modern state. Keywords: Foucault, biopower, governmentality, (neo)liberalism, genealogy INTRODUCTION On January 11, 1978, after a sabbatical year and an almost two-year long absence from his responsibilities to present ongoing research at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault returned to the lectern on January 11,
    [Show full text]