Biopower, Biopolitics; Necropower, Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe’s and Michel Foucault's concepts explained.

1. William Allen Rogers's 1904 cartoon recreates an episode in Gulliver's Travels - The Big Stick in the Caribbean Sea

Mbembe brings to the center of his philosophical system issues such as race, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation between the global North and the South. The Cameroonian stands out within international circuits of the humanities due to his capability of expanding, in a sophisticated process of historicization and genealogy, the Foucauldian thought about biopolitics. Before briefly delving into the African philosopher's political theory proposal, it is necessary to clarify the concepts he mobilizes. For the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow, by biopolitics, Michel Foucault understands “all specific strategies and challenges about the problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality, about the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and intervention practices that are desirable, legitimate and effective ”[1]. The concept appears in Foucault within his series of works on the genealogy of power. There, he answers how the execution of power changed in the West from the historical “subject and sovereign” binomials towards our current understanding of “citizens and states” within modernity.

Power, in its socio-political-economic dimension, is a force entangled in-between a certain duality - in other words, a tension of opposing forces in dispute for the dimension of power. People and institutions are seen in the thinking of Michel Foucault (and those who followed him) as representative of the challenges faced by those that tried a definition of the concept of power, a complex phenomenon permeated by nuances and perspectives. The operation of power presented is contrary to what many of his critics claim. It is less of a psychotic and negative view and much more like an object of “neutral” study, that is, with the potential to serve those who are submitted to it productively, in a positive manner. Biopolitics is the aggregator term manipulated by Foucault to encompass the countless dimensions in which power manifests itself in its application in the sphere of human beings' administration and body regulation. As already pointed out by him, his objective is to create an archive of the diverse ways in which culture transforms these same beings into “subjects” — in the sense of being subjected to someone or something. Science appears as an instrument of objectification of the human, directly and indirectly, because as Foucault rightly points out, knowledge is a form of power. Knowledge about Man, about their physiological and social dimensions, allows the State to exercise biopower over the subjugated masses.

2. Portuguese Colonial War propaganda

Therefore, biopower is the set of practices, authorities, and technologies that embrace and speak with real value about the social reproduction of humans. For Foucault, and by extension Agamben and Mbembe, it is the application of methods of intervention on life and death in territorialized populations under the direct control of the State that shapes our ordinary lives. Power seeks ways of subjectification of individuals who end up, like Bentham's Panopticon, internalizing the mechanisms of social control and, thus, becoming subjects. The difference between the binomial biopower-biopolitics and the relative terms prefixed by necro — in Mbembe’s critique of capitalism — lies in its intentionality.

When Foucault uses bio, he has in mind the Greek root of the word, which means "life". Biopower and biopolitics operate within the framework of care: maintaining a certain group to detriment of another, on top-down interventional health practices. From the government level to the citizen, as in the case of the State of Emergency, mandatory vaccination and mandatory 12-year education, etc.; underlies the idea of the pursue of the common good, however, distorted it may be. Therefore, the importance is given by the French philosopher to the rise of European medicine as a paradigmatic example of biopower. It is at this point that Mbembe begins to expand beyond Foucault, by using the image of the “Other” as the foundation of his philosophical system. Power ceases to be the careful and intensive management of life to become the intensive and absolute management of death[2].

In Mbembe, the Greek root nekros, "death" or "dead tissue", acts as a clear indicator of the radically negative side that biopolitics takes on colonized territories. For the Cameroonian, necropolitics is the space for deliberation and planning for the exercise of necro power, the ability to operate in space and against individual or collective bodies to decide who should live, die, or live with the perpetual imminence of death. As in Israel, walls, cameras, drones, marriage bans, network enclosures of supply and information infrastructures, are all technologies of power (of the necro power) that act directly on the ability of individuals to ensure their survival. Necropolitics allows the maintenance of death for the profitable maintenance of a dominant group, all within a delicate game of global powers that increasingly feel pressured to innovate their war machines. When considering transnational institutions, their powers of regulation and inspection, the ability to exercise the right of managing death is then enhanced by an instrumentalized science that favors the colonial state. Mbembe sees it as one of the darkest sides of our contemporary capitalist paradigm, one that bets on perpetual territorial (and physiological) expansion. The “war machine” is nothing more than the capillarity of such a colonial state operating “bodies marked by death” as vectors, pawns of its execution, and destiny’s fulfillment.

References

Mbembe, A. (2011). Necropolítica. Sobre el gobierno privado indirecto. Barcelona: Melusina.

[1] Rabinow, P., & Rose, N. (2006). O conceito de biopoder hoje. Política & Trabalho, 24, 27-57.

[2] Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical inquiry, 8(4), 777-795.