Biopower comes in two forms according to Foucault. The first focuses on disciplining and optimizing the individual body to make it more useful and docile. The second emerged later and focuses on regulating biological processes at the population level, such as health and longevity. Biopower is argued to be the source of capitalism's rise, as states became more interested in normalizing power over life at a population level than punishing individuals.
Biopower comes in two forms according to Foucault. The first focuses on disciplining and optimizing the individual body to make it more useful and docile. The second emerged later and focuses on regulating biological processes at the population level, such as health and longevity. Biopower is argued to be the source of capitalism's rise, as states became more interested in normalizing power over life at a population level than punishing individuals.
Biopower comes in two forms according to Foucault. The first focuses on disciplining and optimizing the individual body to make it more useful and docile. The second emerged later and focuses on regulating biological processes at the population level, such as health and longevity. Biopower is argued to be the source of capitalism's rise, as states became more interested in normalizing power over life at a population level than punishing individuals.
as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls."[9] The second form, Foucault argues, emerged later and focuses on the "species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cause these to vary."[9] Biopower, it is argued, is the source of the rise of capitalism, as states became interested in regulating and normalizing power over life and not as concerned about punishing and condemning actions.