Bio-power and Biopolitics

Foucault says that somewhere in the XVIII century, the situation begins to change. The question of where the border is for the sovereign's intervention begins to be replaced by the question of where he should interfere. In other words, what we, using Foucault's terminology, could call an episteme is changing, that is, the very structure of the basic question regarding power is changing. If earlier this issue was related to the permissible limits of intervention, now it is related to the effective scale of intervention. This is a fundamentally different question. In order for this issue to change, significant historical transformations were required, first of all, of course, due to the fact that Europe, after achieving the Peace of Westphalia, finds itself in a fundamentally new situation when states exist side by side with each other, when they compete, but this competition is no longer directly military. They have made peace with each other and are now forced to compete in a relatively stable world. Firstly, and secondly, the industrial revolution is in full swing in Europe at this time, and it is destroying the traditional way of life, destroying traditional ways of consolidating people into political unity.

What are the consequences and what is the essence of the transformation that Foucault observes? He says that the change of the issue from legal to a new one, which he will call economic - the question of the effectiveness of state intervention - is connected with the fact that the state discovers a new object of management. At the same time, the state, of course, should not be viewed as a personified figure of the sovereign — Foucault easily gets rid of all this terminology. When we talk about the state, it makes sense to talk about the way of government or about such a distributed government. A distributed board has a fundamentally different object. This distributed board discovers that its object is the population. You may ask: "How so? One might think that no one knew before that there was a population." The bottom line is that no one knew before that there was a population. Population is a relatively late term, especially since it is late as a really politically significant designation of the object of government. It was at this time that the first ways of thinking about the population appeared, for example, statistics appeared as the first science about the population. At this point, the state begins to realize the population as its own resource. It becomes clear that the population is not just some indefinite heterogeneous set of people whose ways of life no one cares about, but it is an important resource and that the well-being of the population can and should be transformed into an economic force of competing states.

The policy of mercantilism in the XVI–XVII centuries is partly based on these grounds. Then these foundations are transformed under the influence of liberal thought. The main question for liberal thought is how to make sure that people interacting with each other in the format of self-regulating markets achieve the greatest well-being. If we want to provide them with the opportunity to achieve the greatest well-being, independently interacting with each other, this means that we must seriously think about the extent to which we, as a ruler, should interfere in their lives. This is the reason for switching from the question of permissible limits to the question of efficiency. If before the main threat to the ruler was that he would become illegitimate, because he crosses the boundaries of permissible interference in people's lives, permissible disposal of their lives, now the most important danger for him is that he will become ineffective, that the economy under his control will stop working, economic growth will slow down and we will stop getting rich.

This switch reveals a significant change in the understanding of a person, because now a person is understood as an autonomously functioning individual with his own interests aimed at maximizing his own usefulness. To put it quite crudely, it is a living being that seeks to maximize its enjoyment. And the new policy is based on the management of such living beings. Precisely because everything connected with political unity, everything connected with solidarity, everything connected with the unification of people into some dense social groups that have their own interests, understood not as the sum of individual interests, but as autonomous interests of these groups, is withdrawn from this policy - for all these reasons Foucault says that the new policy becomes biopolitics, or, as his followers said, the policy of life itself, the policy of pure life, life as biological life. It is more convenient for the new regime of government to operate with subjects who are biological beings. This is something fundamentally new, from Foucault's point of view, for the end of the XVIII century. Since then, we have more or less existed in this mode of thinking.

Since then, the key questions that the rulers set themselves, the key questions that political theory answers— are questions that somehow deal with this situation. And it was from that time that economics began to answer many questions about how to rule, because for economics, the issues of maximizing utility by individual individuals, understood as purely biological beings, are fundamental.

How does this affect our lives? The most fundamental consequence, of course, is political transformations. Today we are less and less inclined to think of politics as something inseparable from economic relations. It is from this time that a strong division between economics and politics penetrates into our lives. Today we hear very often that it is impossible to interfere with economics and politics: there are purely economic issues, they do not need to be polluted by some shameless policy, and, conversely, there are political issues that economists should not get involved in - these are issues of national importance. The division between politics and economics arises precisely from the moment of the emergence (or, as Foucault says, the birth) of biopolitics. Thus, the object of management - the population that has become the object of management - is re-described and re-formed as a set of individuals pursuing their narrow economic interests. Everything connected with political consolidation, everything connected with classical Republican political life, everything connected with unification around prestige issues - all this is beginning to be pushed to the periphery. And the meaning of living together no longer consists in achieving some ideals of the common good. Rather, the common good is now understood as maximizing the well-being of individuals, and we find ourselves in a completely new situation.

As a result, we find ourselves in a world where maximizing life becomes our main goal. We spend an incredible amount of effort and resources to maximize our own life: to make it longer, to make it better, to maximize the lives of our loved ones. We are developing biotechnologies that allow us to modify our body, allow us to expand our physiological capabilities. We are developing drug markets that allow us to be treated for new diseases. We do everything we can to prolong our life and get as much pleasure from it as possible.

All these issues are now the subject of ethical discussions, anthropological research, and research on political theory in many areas of social science. Perhaps the most interesting area originated in England in the 80s. This was due to the development of the policy of Thatcherism, which was just based on political grounds and which Foucault so successfully predicted. In the 80s, Foucault's works were rediscovered by his English followers, English-speaking students, and since that time a large field of research has developed, which is called Anglophucodianism in literature. In this area, questions are raised about how we should be in a world dominated by biopolitics.

Kazakh National University of Al-Farabi
Faculty of Philosophy and Political Science
Department of Religious Studies and Cultural Studies
Cultural studies
Student: Aisulu Tokan 4th  course
Scientific adviser: Omirbekova Aliya

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