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From: Richard Bailey <rb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 18:13:09 +1000
Mark Kelly wrote:
I have to disagree with Machiel here - biopower is the government of
populations. Foucault is extremely precise about the relation of
biopower to discipline in Society Must Be Defended.
In the HoS v.1 Foucault talks about the anatamo-politics of the body as
machine and the biopolitics of population marking the era of biopower. I
have always seen "biopower" as covering both government and discipline
in Foucault? This would seem to be the way it is taken up by Agamben et. al.
Its not quite film but I have always found Big Brother (the TV reality
show) as interesting when thinking about Foucault. I find it quite
startling how the contestants do not guard their behaviour in the face
of truly a panoptic situation, rather they behave extravagantly, as if
they are in fact characters in a scripted melodrama. The hidden cameras
clearly produce rather restrict their behavior.
I think this says a lot about how surveillance has so thoroughly
permeated society and subjectivity.