Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 07:27:53 -0000 From: "Zach Hale" <queengayboi-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Comments? Essay on Biopower, Knowledge, and Genetics...Help ASAP! I'm a high school Junior and I'm doing my IB extended essay, does anyone have any comments on my paper? My teachers seem to think its too abstract and they don't really comprehend it nor foucault's ideas, so the insight or commentary (good or bad) I get from them is minimal. Thanks for your help! - Zach (queengayboi-AT-yahoo.com) Abstract Genetics is about to bring a revolution far more powerful and encompassing than even the revolution in physics in the early 20th century. Its power to manipulate the human body brings about questions about the nature of our being. However, society tends only to object to genetics in regards to certain uses, like cloning or eugenics. The problem lies in the fact that analysis tends to follow the flawed notion of power. The key question that needs to be asked is how do Michel Foucault's concepts of power, genealogy, and resistance apply to genetics? This paper uses Foucault's analysis of power and power relations in order to actively criticize and resist the project in unforeseen ways. The genealogy-the specific context and power structures that allow something to come into play and for knowledge to be produces-of genetics is analyzed in order to determine within what structure the knowledge is intended to operate. It is concluded that genetics has major power-knowledge implications and it arose out of a need for an even more precise measure of maintaining, controlling, and developing the health and security of the population. This system of bio-power has been in place for the past two centuries and genetics could quite possibly be the end point of this process, totalizing control of the human body. In a society designed to maintain and "cure" the population through different institutions-prisons, asylums, schools, hospitals-this has major implications-changing the relationship we have with ourselves. The change could bring about a new conceptional framework for the world just like the revolutions and other advances did at the end of the 18th century-marking the shift from the classical episteme to our current humanist episteme. Constant criticism and resistance as conceptualized by Foucault is needed. Introduction French intellectual Michel Foucault provided the world with a revolutionary analysis of how power works in contemporary society. Enraging both conservatives and the liberals that thought he was their ally, he conjured up some of the most shocking concepts in the 20th century. His analysis of bio-power-the management, maintenance, and control of the social body, as the way power works in modern society-is one of his most original contributions. He doesn't claim to explain everything, or even to do it correctly, but his ideas unlike any before seem to make things fall into place. The Human Genome Project has been the site of much hope and much distress in recent years. It offers the potential to have complete control over the physical body. Yet the project itself continues on without much objection to its information gathering on who or what we are. Unfortunately, Foucault did not live long enough to talk about the possibilities and dangers of genetics nor was he able to expand on his concept of bio-power. This paper's purpose serves as an instrument to encourage critical engagement of the project and its possible effects. Significantly, genetic information and engineering, as institutions of power, will have significant implications in terms of Michel Foucault's analysis of bio-power and power-knowledge and can only be resisted by understanding the workings of power. An Analysis of "Power" Jana Sawicki, professor of philosophy at Williams College, explains that our modern conception of power, the "juridico-discursive" model, has three basic assumptions: Power is possessed (individuals, a class, the people), it is controlled by a centralized source in a top to bottom fashion (the law, the economy, the state), and that it is primarily repressive in nature. Foucault noted that this model is hardly adequate to describe power in society. He does not deny that this is one type of power, but he does not think that it explains the forms of power that make centralized and repressive forms of power possible --- mainly the multitude of power relations operating on the micro level of society (Disciplining 20). Instead, power should be viewed as the relations that control life. Power is nothing substantive, but scattered (Caputo and Yount 5). "[It] is the thin, inescapable film that covers all human interactions, whether inside institutions or out" (Caputo and Yount 5). It must be viewed as something that is not repressive but rather productive. For example, in order to create knowledge of the body, it had to be seen through military and educational disciplines. It was power over the body that produced medical knowledge (Power/Knowledge 59). It is not situated at any source, it is, however, just a web of relations pervading society and interactions. Power can't be analyzed in terms of a source, but rather sources must be analyzed in terms of power (Caputo and Yount 4-5). Power-Knowledge Foucault puts a twist on Bacon's "knowledge is power". One of his most startling revelations was his concept that power produces knowledge and uses it to disperse itself. Truth is not something that liberates. Without power, no "truth" could exist. "Knowledge is what power relations produce in order to spread and disseminate more effectively" (Caputo and Yount 7). This means that knowledge claims are always linked with power and that knowledge only exists if power relations allow it to. Certain large institutions tend to produce a lot of knowledge, and thus tend to exert an enormous amount of power. In modern society such institutions could be psychology, medicine, economics and perhaps the human genome project. These institutions, however, don't exert their own power, but instead are the means that power uses (Caputo and Yount 4-5). Genetics as an Institution of Power & Science's Power Effects Genetics is situating itself to be a tremendous locus of power and in some ways it already is. There are many reasons why this may be true, most significantly in regards to Foucault's concept of bio- power, to be discussed later on. But generally society uncritically accepts the goals and methods of science and scientific research. We don't think that science is problematic outside of its uses. We want to know everything. We are willing to let science work and deal with the consequences later, while believing our current social institutions can absorb these advances. Therefore, the genome project is a product of our "collective and uniform moral and scientific expectations" (Murphy 3). Despite being wrong, science always appears to be right, and therefore all-powerful---and sometimes had ended up extremely bloody as a tool of power (Appleyard 68). Most ethical analysis tends to shy away from problematization of the project itself (Murphy 3). "The silence [surrounding the Human Genome Project] is more than likely the result of our society's homogeneous views as regards the morality of scientific inquiry [^Å] the result of the erroneous view that scientific inquiry is itself value free and only morally significant with regards to its consequences" (Murphy 5). The federal government helped to create a scientific orthodoxy with its funding of the project. Making our pitfall more dangerous, "every time there are converts to a scientific project, voices of dissent capable of correcting and advancing human knowledge and wisdom may be lost" (Murphy 4). Genetics is a big science with big consequences, and it can form a moral ideology because of its single-natured views- conforming people and their discourse and their expectations (4). Furthermore, the scientist is given the role of a specific intellectual-given authority because of their value and their title and less because of reason (Foucault Reader 23). They are situated at the level of knowledge and thus have tremendous power effects with their claims to truth. But more importantly they are also the product of power relations. Timothy Murphy, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, notes: "There are many ways to represent the nature of human beings, and none of them are value neutral. Even a genomatic characterization is already always determined by our social and conceptual background. What we see, therefore, in a genomatic characterization of human beings depends on what we are accustomed to and interested in seeing. This for both the species as a whole and an individual in particular. There is no escaping the immersion in the social and conceptual preconditions of observation, representation, science, and language; we cannot ever hope to achieve the position of an entirely unconditional, uninterested observer" (7). Medicine has always been a tool for the exercise of public opinion - more focused on order than truth (History of Sexuality 54). It will be these scientists and society as a whole determining what is "normal" as opposed to the "abnormal". We continue on our commitment to orthodox science, hoping for the production of knowledge, its positive effects, to the point at which we remain complacent in regards to how this knowledge will effect society (Murphy 5). Throughout the course of history, science has changed abruptly at several junctures. This is true for both the human and the natural sciences, and each shows a complete conceptional discontinuity to former practices (Foucault Reader 9). Only Foucault's model of power can adequately explain why this type of transition occurs and doesn't destroy the population's faith in science. Knowledge is contingent on the power structures that create it, and the discontinuities are significant events in the struggle of power. This is extremely important in regards to genetics in particular. We need to realize that it is ridiculous to say that science today is not like the mistakes of the past because they were based on "wrong" science. Five hundred or even fifty years from now the same will be said of us (Appleyard 68). Moreover, Foucault noted that conceptions of what is "normal" and "abnormal" have changed over time. These arbitrary categories are defined in order to separate the abnormal, and within our current system, are used as tools for normalization of the "abnormal" in order to make these social "misfits" more acceptable (Ransom 46). This process of normalization is part of the process of bio-power, which is what Foucault saw as the apparatus of power operating in modern society. This is what I perceive as the most dangerous application of genetics, as I will discuss later. Genetics has the potential to have many other power effects. It is impossible to determine what exactly is going to happen because power is everywhere and the infinite power relations ensure that perception will be different than actuality. But it is possible to theorize some of the possible power-knowledge consequences. Paul Rabinow, a professor of anthropology at the University of California and noted Foucault scholar, writes that older categories such as race, gender, and age may be combined with the vast array of new ones bringing about new forms of racism, sexism, and ageism. Our preexistent categories won't be replaced with the new ones, but instead will "cross-cut, partially supersede, and eventually redefine" them (Essays 103). Consistent with Foucault's concept of genealogy-the process of discovering the point of creation of a concept or event and why and how power relations were situated in order for this to occur-I must determine the origin of genetics. With a little help from Foucault himself, this is not too difficult. In the last section of The History of Sexuality, Foucault gives a startling insight into bio- power, the power of the social body in managing, ensuring, maintaining, and developing life. He views this as the power structures as situated in our day. Genetics can be seen as a continuation of this process, and possibly the absolute totalized application of bio-power. Bio-Power Foucault's most amazing and shocking contribution is this concept of bio-power. "For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death" (History of Sexuality 135). The king exercised his power by the power to extinguish life, his right to kill. But at the end of 18th century all of that changed. Since the classical age we have undergone a serious transformation in power mechanisms. As Nietzche proclaimed the death of God, man turned inwards on himself, seeking to manage the social body-"working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them" (136). This coincided with the ability of European food production to keep stable for the population. "This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life" (136). This is humanism. Various institutions have been created to exert this power. Medicine is perhaps the most pervasive of these. The body is viewed in relation to life-population, health, age-and disciplines through which power is exercised provide a power whose intention is not death but an investment in life. The body is viewed as a machine- discipline, optimization, utility, docility, integration into efficient systems, and economic controls-are all ensured by the procedures of anatomo-politics (139). This is a process of normalization, of eliminating that outside of the "norm." Institutions and centers of power--medicine, psychiatry, economics, schools-form the young into complacent subjects of normalization. Institutions-asylums, hospitals, prisons-also reform the abnormal who stray beyond the limits of normalcy (Caputo and Yount 6). The goal of political power is to raise the health of the population and ensure well-being. Power apparatuses are called upon to control bodies in order to ensure health. Health becomes the duty of each and the objective of all (Power/Knowledge ?). It is easy to see how genetics falls quite easily into the mechanisms of bio-power. It is important to recognize that no one directs this type of power but everyone is increasingly enmeshed in it, which only leads to the increase of the power and the order. Our normalizing society is the outcome of these procedures of power centered on life. Law operates as a norm rather than as a controlling factor. It is situated at the level of rights---"the 'right' to life, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right' to rediscover what one is and all that one can be." All of our democratic Constitutions, revisions, and our continuous legislative activity, these are all the forms that make "an essentially normalizing power acceptable"-and were produced merely in reaction to these new power structures that the classical juridical system was "utterly incapable of understanding" (History of Sexuality 144-145). Foucault also points out the effects of this humanist system. Wars are bloodier than they have ever been, we no longer fight under the name of the sovereign, but instead for the sanctity of the human race, for human existence. Never before have regimes exerted such massive slaughters on their own populations. "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return of an ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Strikingly, only under this system of power is the atomic situation possible. " The power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence." One has to kill to go on living, this is the rule of the world of today (136-137). Foucault boldly declares, "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question" (143). Genetics and Bio-Power Bio-power has allowed for the existence of genetics. It is only in this system of control of health and of the body that such a technology would surface. Most people believe that eugenics-the process of creating a "master race" or of "perfecting" the human being-through genetics would not happen in our society. But knowing what we know about the situation of bio-power, is it really that improbable? The problem with the current conception of power is that it rests on the axiom that power is controlled, so the only type of eugenics people conceive of is that of state-sponsored eugenics along the lines of Hitlerean politics. But bio-power is eugenics, it is a process by which the population is normalized, controlled, perfected, and inserted into an economic and political machine. We as a society have been committing eugenics for 200 years. Genetics has many bio-political implications. It is so dangerous because it does provide the perfect technology for social control and the manipulation of the body. Once we are able to manipulate DNA, we will have complete control over the body. Like the doctor over the past couple centuries, the geneticist will become the expert, the advisor responsible for improving the social body and maintaining its health. It offers control like never before and it offers normalization like never before. "The model of the gene as the blueprint, as a determining factor and a source of good and evil, nicely fits into our pursuit for control over life and health and security" (Jochemsen 80). The truth is that genetics is already being set up to become an extremely large center of power. A diverse group of disciplines are making claims of the connection between an array of social problems (crime, mental illness, alcoholism, gender relations, intelligence), even though few of these claims are valid. These claims of scientific truth merely exercise power to entrench societal morality in the guise of a medical norm. As mentioned before, with changes in power, formulations of what is "abnormal" and what is "normal" have changed. Therefore our current conceptions of these categories are limited to the power relations we exist in. The genomatic characterization will represent not the individual, but the "ideal form," allowing interpretation of desirable/undesirable and normalcy/difference (Murphy 7). A trait we consider a "problem" to be exterminated now might not be so from another viewpoint in the future. The advances can have parents choose desirable traits based on society's comparative terms (Kevles 25). The population will carry out eugenics with seemingly autonomous choices, however abuses and coercion will occur with no government interference (Dyck 30). People generally desire the same things for their children- intelligence, health, normalcy-this will form eugenics in the social body (Appleyard 83). In the context of a free market economy, the situation becomes even more perilous. Striven for competition in this genetically engineered environment, parents fearful of their kids being left behind will ensure that their genetic makeup will not be of disadvantage. "Problems" will be corrected, and "desirable" traits will be added. We are marching down a path of normalization in which people will be engineered "autonomously" to be the same. This absolute control of the body-combined with institutions like the schools, the prisons, the factories, and asylums that are set in place to improve and develop the social body-is the completion of the biopolitical dream. This is the opposite of state-sponsored eugenics. The eugenics of the free market combined with genetic knowledge has major implications. Public tolerance may be there, but privately we would not want to have a gay child-if only so that they would not have to experience hardships. This would be a perfect program of eugenics-more effective than Hitler. "The free market takes off where Nazism left off" (Appleyard 84). The homosexuality example is a good one to demonstrate the side effects of this process. The extermination of homosexuality might prevent the birth of important people whose contribution to society is tied to their sexuality. This would "push society towards a preconceived idea of morality" (83). We admire those with genius, the abnormal-Mozart, Michaelangelo, James Joyce. When it comes to genius, the closest to normal was Shakespeare, and most think he was bisexual. Yet we will want the low-risk "normal approach" to ensure social integration (86). Without resistance, a concept I will get to later, prevailing power structures will only serve to reentrench themselves. Genetics as a Possible Opening to a New Episteme The power that genetics can exert makes it very precarious. Foucault makes the claim that man can die just as God did for Nietzsche, that the humanist episteme-the complete framework of knowledge, the way power is situated, the way the world is conceptualized-will come crashing down just as the classical episteme did at the end of the 18th century. He doesn't know where or how, but it will be sudden, over a period of just a few years (Order of Things 386-387). He concludes The Order of Things with one of the most powerful statements in philosophy: "If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility- without knowing whether what its form will be or what its premises-were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (387). Genetics, I wager, could be that event destroying our conception of humanity. Its control is enormous enough, its power so total that the complete system of bio-power will no longer be necessary. Rabinow comes close to making this point when he says that the new genetics will cease being just a biological metaphor for modern society, but instead it will be its own system that he terms "biosociality" in contrast to the current term of sociobiology. "If sociobiology is culture constructed on the basis of a metaphor of nature, then in biosociality, nature will be modeled on culture understood as practice" (Essays 99). Rabinow also claims that of the three foci that Foucault thinks that would open the way for a new episteme-life, labor, language-life is the most "potent present site of new knowledges and powers" (92). Foucault had mistakenly predicted language would be the one to cause the change, and he acknowledged his error a decade after The Order of Things (92). Rabinow points out that the object of knowledge-the human genome-is to be known in a matter so that it can be modified. "Representing and intervening, knowledge and power, understanding and reform, are built in, from the start, as simultaneous goals and means" (93). More than anything before, genetics has the ability to changes man's conception of himself and also change man's relation to society. If genetics truly does bring an end to our episteme there is no way that we can conceptualize what is to replace it. But the end product of our current path is quite clear, a completely normalized society with a lack of diversity and a complacent population. This seems like an actualization of Nietzsche's concept of "The Last Man." Critical resistance is needed to counteract current power structures, but we need to understand how power works in order to resist its effects. Significantly and traumatically, genetic technology will transform man's conception of himself. "The self that has been changed is the self that is trying to understand that change" (Appleyard 5). Therefore we must engage in resistance and criticism now, beginning a difficult and never-ending process. Resistance & Criticism Reading this paper is the first step. Our solutions are tied to how we understand the problem, we must question that method. We need to ask how the problems in society that supposedly need to be solved came to be problems in the first place-we need to find their genealogy (Hoy 89). Even though there is a lot of conflict on certain issues, there is a striking consensus on which issues to fight about, this creates an inability to apprehend new things (French DNA 178). Foucault's analysis expanding the political to include the power struggles in the microlevel of society helps to open up space for resistance and self-creation by attacking the constraining effect of totalizing theories and the juridico-discursive model of power (Disciplining 62). "Resistance must be carried out in local struggles against the many forms of power exercised at the everyday level of social relations" (Disciplining 23). Resistance needs to be perpetually acted out, as a power-free society is impossible, and we must never grow complacent-"victories are overturned; changes may take on different faces over time" (27-28). Foucault maintained that there is definite value in negative criticism-that which is not necessarily coupled with an alternative or a solution (Feminism 65-66). Through analyses such as this essay, we can open the space for resistance---we can criticize the existing power/knowledge regimes. The value of which is stated no better than Foucault himself, "[Critique] should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the law for the law. It isn't a stage in programming. It is a challenge directed to what is" (qtd. in Gandal 279). Summation Genetics has clear power-knowledge implications within our current framework of bio-power. It is so powerful it will cause the complete realization of bio-power and quite possibly the death of man-the death of our humanist episteme. Like the wave washing over the drawing in sand on the beach, man is a fragile invention. This is neither good nor bad, but dangerous if only because we don't know what will replace it or what is going to happen. Power is a fluid that can't be grasped nor destroyed so micropolitical resistance is the only way to combat current power structures bent on normalization and the proliferation of such discourse in the realm of genetics. Works Cited Appleyard, Bryan. Brave New Worlds. England: Penguin Books. 1998. Caputo, John, and Mark Yount, eds. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1993. Davis, Joel. Mapping the Code. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1998. Dyck, Arthur. "Eugenics in Historical and Ethical Perspective." Genetic Ethics: Do the Ends Justify the Genes? John Kilner, Rebecca D. Penic, and Frank Yount, eds. Michigan: Paternoster Press. 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books. 1978. -------. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. 1978. -------. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. 1970. -------. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books. 1981. -------. Power. James Faubion, ed. New York: New York Press. 1994. -------. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books. 1985. Hoy, David. Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments. Volume 3. Ed. Barry Smart. New York: Routledge. 1994. Jochemsen, Hank. "Reducing People to Genetics." Genetic Ethics: Do the Ends Justify the Genes? John Kilner, Rebecca D. Penic, and Frank Yount, eds. Michigan: Paternoster Press. 1997. Kevles, Daniel. "Eugenics and the Human Genome Project is the Past Prologue." Justice and the Human Genome Project. Ed. Timothy Murphy. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. Mehlman, Maxwell, and Jeffrey Botkin. Access to the Genome: The Challenge to Equality. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 1998. Murphy, Timothy. "The Genome Project and the Meaning of Difference." Justice and the Human Genome Project. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. Rabinow, Paul. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1996. -------, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. 1984. -------. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Ransom, John S. Foucault's Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press. 1997. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge. 1991. -------. "Feminism, Foucault, and 'Subjects' of Power and Freedom." Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Ed. Susan J. Heckman. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1996
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