Prison Camp or “Prison Clinic?” - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 204

(Marks 2010, 11; see also Chapter 11). I agree. My point is that before we ask “how
can we stop this,” we must answer the question “why is the State driven to do this”?
It is the latter question that motivates me in this work, and Foucault's descriptive (as
opposed to normative) account of State power provides a unique insight into the use
of fMRI technology as it is used on vulnerable populations. 5
BIOPOWER AND THE MEDICAL CHARACTER OF THE STATE
Put briefly, Foucault's account is as follows. During the nineteenth century, the
State began to exercise power in a new way, which Foucault refers to as “biopower”
or “biopolitics.” Biopolitical systems arose, Foucault claims, in response to the
Hobbesian way in which autocrats ruled by the sword. The works of the eighteenth-
century jurists make this transformation clearer. After all, the jurists claimed, did we
not enter into contract with the sovereign in order to protect our lives? “Mustn't life
remain outside the contract to the extent that it was the first, initial, and foundational
reason for the contract itself?” (Foucault 1997, 241). It is this problematizing of
life and death that led to the rise of biopower. Whereas the already existing disci-
plinary power focused on the individual body in a number of ways (surveillance,
exercise, drill, etc.), the newly emerging power focused on “man-as-species”
(Foucault 1997, 242). 6 The former reduced the population into numerous individual
bodies as objects of control, while the latter surveyed a global mass affected by
processes of biology (life, birth, health, illness, reproduction, death). As Foucault
(1997, 243) states, “we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of some-
thing that is no longer anatomo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a
'biopolitics' of the human race.”
Let us pause momentarily and take stock of this claim. The problem of how the
State and its subjects related to life and death in the eighteenth century highlights a
shift in how the State came to utilize life and death in order to control the popula-
tion. Disciplinary power, which focuses on the individual, is now complemented
by biopower, which focuses on the population as a whole. While I will clarify this
distinction in the coming pages, we can already see a foundational quality of bio-
power emerging. Biopower is, as stated above, focused primarily on the health of the
population as a whole. This new function of State power focuses all of its efforts on
tracking and controlling the health of a population. It is sufficient for now to high-
light the change that is taking place; the relation between life and death as utilized
by the State shifts in a way that favors the former.
Let us continue with a brief outline of several areas of biopolitical concern. The
first of these are reproduction and endemics. Birth rate, mortality rate, and longevity
became the first objects of biopolitical concern in the later half of the eighteenth cen-
tury (Foucault 1997, 243). Next, the State engaged in the creation of public hygiene
campaigns and attempts to centralize medical knowledge in an effort to stave off
illnesses prevalent in the population. State agencies compiled this knowledge and
disseminated it through a network of clinics, hospitals, and public service programs
(Foucault 1997, 244). Biopolitical intervention continued into the realms of health
insurance, correction of medical problems caused by industrialization, and alteration
of the environment in order to create sanitary living spaces. 7