Sunday, June 20, 2010

Week 3: HUMAN/ANIMAL: Foucault and Berger

According to Foucault, disciplinary power involves power over individual bodies. Biopower, on the other hand, centers on the regulation of individuals as a "global mass" or "species." As such, biopolitics concerns itself with "the mass effects characteristic of a population," ie. birth/mortality rates, modes of production, biological disabilities, the effects of the environment, etc. In Foucault's words:

"Both technologies [of power] are obviously technologies of the body, but one is a technology in which the body is individualized as an organism endowed with capacities, and the other is a technology in which bodies are replaced by general biological processes" (p. 249).

Foucault argues that science and politics are increasingly -- and inextricably -- linked. For example, he notes how late-18th-C biological evolutionalism -- the notion that "natural selection" eliminates the less fit in a species -- was used to justify acts of colonization, war, and genocide. As another example, he shows how modern racism creates a biological hierarchy of races within a population, and makes it so that killing is acceptable as long as it results in the elimination of a biopolitical threat to one's race.

This intersection of science and politics immediately brought to mind the rhetoric used for recent controversies topics ranging from racial profiling to gay marriage to birth control. Do you agree that our modern political system is one centered upon biopower? What are some other recent examples in the media where the language of science is invoked for political ends?

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While Foucault draws parallels between modern racism and Darwinian evolutionism, John Berger analyses the marginalistion of animals from humans, paying particular attention to media representations and sites of "enforced marginalisation," including zoos.

"Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance... they are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are" (p. 16).

How can we apply Berger's quote above to the experience of watching King Kong? More broadly, how does Berger's analysis of human-animal observation compare and contrast to some of the topics we have been discussing in class ie. the subject-object relationship, nostalgia, authenticity, and notions of Otherness?

Jen

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