How to subvert biopower? (on Foucault, Butler, and subversive repetition)
Monday night in my Critical Race Theory class, we were discussing the second half of Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended. Here, he argues that 20th (and, I think there are good reasons for also claiming 21st) century State racism/racist discourse proceeds significantly by means of biopower. Biopower is normative power applied to populations: it is interested in controlling deviations and accounting for/eliminating random instances, in maintaining a “normal” population. In some senses, biopower is the use of demography to identify, maintain, and reinforce norms. Biopower differs from discipline in two main ways: first, discipline is applied to individual bodies, and biopower is applied to populations; second, discipline is more temporal (we must repeat the same gendered behaviors every day, every time we choose what to wear, how to gesture, etc.), and I think biopower is more spatial—it’s demo-graphy, a sort of charting or mapping of trends across groups. Or, as my brother the geographer says, geography is the study of relationships you can express on a map; insofar as demography is a branch of geography, and biopower works via demography, then biopower seems significantly—if not necessarily or completely—spatial.
As I mentioned last night in class, biopower may be considered the “return” of geography to race(ist) discourse. Kant and Hegel, in developing the European concept of “race,” relied heavily on physical geography; 19th c race science was less explicitly about geography and more about heredity, cephalic indices, and the “human sciences” generally. 20th c racist discourse, to the extent that it relies overtly on demography, could thus be seen as more overtly “geographic.”
However, we ended class with the following question/concern—and, b/c we couldn’t resolve it, I’d appreciate any thoughts you readers may have. SO: we have a pretty clear Foucaultian framework for resisting discipline. Foucault calls it “critique” or “not being governed quite so much” (see his essay, “What is Critique?”), and Butler has extensively theorized her Foucault-inspired idea of subversive repetition. For Butler (who is following and expanding on Foucault), discipline compels us to repeatedly perform normative behaviors at every moment of every day: we have to sit, stand, gesture, speak, eat, dress, you name it, in a manner appropriate to our assigned/identified gender. However, repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them. How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity (this seems to be one of Sandra Bartky’s points). It’s in the fact of repetition, and in the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
But this model of subversive repetition is primarily temporal: next time I get dressed, I’ll wear more butch clothes; at each of my 3 daily meals today, I’ll eat “girly” foods like salad or yogurt, etc. The unfolding of time brings new instances that demand my performance of a gendered behavior—that’s what makes discipline and subversive repetition temporal phenomena. If biopower is spatial rather than temporal, I’m not sure that subversive repetition—which is temporal—applies to biopower. What is a spatial model for resisting demographic norms? How does one subvert the SAT, the infant mortality rate, the crime rate, the HIV infection rate, etc.?
There must be someone out there who’s thought about and written on this. I’m sure this is not an original insight. Heck, I may be totally wrong with this spatial biopower vs. temporal discipline model. Who should I be reading/talking to?
I would start by determining what spatial models assert demographic norms which then lead to HIV infection, infant mortality etc… The only work I know of, off the top of my head, that relates to this is the economist Steven Levit’s work looking at the effect that legal and available abortions had on society. He linked, statistically and irrefutably, the drop in violent crime in the mid to late 90’s to the availability of abortions in the late 70’s. Conversely, he linked the the rising crime rates since 2000 to the social pressures which limited a woman’s access, but also willingness, to get an abortion threw the Regan/Bush Sr. years.
it seems both discipline and biopower are temporal and spatial. disciplinary practices crystallized in certain places, institutions whose very spatiality constituted the disciplinary practice: the panopticon is the example par excellence.
biopower is also temporal. think about how demographers/state planners project population growth into the future. it’s about reproducing the nation, the population, and that is something that is happening now, but also linked to the aspirations for the future and a constructed past that makes a population legible.
Yeah, that’s a good point–I may have been overly schematic in that spatial/temporal distinction.
Hey Robin,
I came to your blog from viewing your YouTube lecture on Foucault, Butler and Biopower (which was excellent btw!). In regards to your questions on how to resist biopower, maybe this is a bit of a stretch but do you think it’s perhaps possible to organize and mobilize the demographied masses to purposely skewer the results of data collection? For example in regards to the ACT, what if there was a widespread movement by teachers unions to effectively organize a school district wide students trike where students purposely fail the SATs? Obviously this only works for some demographic profiles, but it’ a start. And with the SATs in particular, this is really problematic given the dynamics of capital at play here. But it’s at least an idea.
Um… biopower acts on the individual and the population. Know your Foucault, dude.
As this post was made nearly 3 years ago, it’s likely that you’ve already resolved the question of spatiality in resisting demographic trends, but just something else I’ve been considering: for my dissertation research I was looking at ethnic conflict in Burma and the way in which ethnonationalism and the struggle for sovereignty and rights for the various ethnic communities impacts the State-level functions. Some of the ways such struggles serve as a form of resistance to demographic norms might include: choosing death, fleeing across borders, reproduction or non-reproduction, hiding, resisting or pursuing formal incorporation/membership through citizenship. etc. Also, a question of my own: can the State subvert itself? In Burma state police forces strike the names of individuals off residential lists as a way of limiting the person’s rights, thus manipulating and misrepresenting their own demographics. Is there any resistance in this?