In “The History of Sexuality”, the French thinker Michel Foucault elaborates how the Victorian Era defined for the people the things that are to be considered as taboo. Sex, for instance, was one of them. Much of it comes from the type of mentality imposed during the period. Health has become a matter of technique or the “care of the self.” Foucault did not use actual models for his explanation of the concept of Biopolitics. But his reflections show how power operates in society. The body has become the object of control. Sexuality is objectified and has become an apparatus as people are defined on the basis of their body.
The state imposes its will on the population that is subjugated since they submit themselves to the rule of the sovereign. Power, however is not rooted in any foundation. It does not matter where it is from. For Foucault, power is relations. It is about the way power influences the behavior of people in a social body or the life of the individual. The people submit themselves to certain bodies of knowledge that in return govern them. For instance, experts control the whole population since they define the rules, procedures, and protocols, their influence over us expanding in the sphere of our private lives.
Governmentality is the way power operates in the system. For example, the people gave science is a privileged position compared to other types of knowledge. Recently, the Covid-19 Pandemic has become the excuse for uneven policies that strip people of their basic freedoms and rights. People have been subjected to a type of bodily punishment that is meant to embarrass and not to teach them the law and its basic purpose. Health experts become the arbiters of the truth on the basis of their authority. Dr. Daniel Mishori of Tel Aviv University calls it medical technocracy.
It should be of no interest to us where power is from. Rather, our concern is how it governs us in terms of its totalizing and normalizing gaze. For Foucault, power can be distinguished into two – repressive power and normative power. The first refers to how the state punishes people on the basis of its authority, whether legitimate or illegitimate, using force or violence. In such an instance, the state represses the body politic, extending all the harm that power can do to the population which is later normalized under the scheme of institutional rules. Society can be seen in this respect as a big prison system in which the state and its mechanisms monitor every move of the people, regulating their behavior, and making them docile bodies who obey rules without question.
There is, however, a subtle form of power that undermines people without them knowing about it. This is what Foucault calls disciplinary power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzed how torture, as a public spectacle, was replaced with subtle forms of control employed in various systems. Its purpose is the reform of the human soul. What happened to Damiens the Regicide is a reminder of the power of the sovereign over his subjects. The spectacle is meant to sow fear on people. In this way, the idea of disciplinary power is for people to believe that they are “watched over” and so their behavior is determined by the notion that they are constantly being monitored. The Panopticon is the symbolic representation of disciplinary power in the social body.
Power is everywhere. It possesses us. Schools, clinics, and the prison system for Foucault are places where power is manifest. Discipline makes people behave. Power is constituted by different forms of discourse, understanding, and knowledge. The truth is a result of the effects of power that is produced in society and its very institutions through its manner or type of politics, which helps determine those systems that create new realities, things, and meanings that will eventually form the kind of world in which the human body becomes its own microcosm in terms of control. For Foucault, power creates “regimes of truth” that perform that dominant but positive function in society, constantly defining and redefining, like a flux, what is normal and what is not.
