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Hi. My name is Dinesh Wadiwel, and I'm a
researcher and teacher at the University
of Sydney.
I'm going to talk today about the concept,
"biopolitics."
The idea of biopolitics was made famous by
the French thinker, Michel Foucault.
In thinking about power, Foucault was
interested in how power changed in its
rationality of organization over a number
of centuries, and particularly interested
in the shift between the organization of 
power, say, in medieval Europe, and the
organization of power today.
At a different time, Foucault theorizes
that power was much more concerned with
the use of violence and coercion to
attain resources and territory.
So, he conjures the image of — for example
— a medieval king who rules by the sword
for their own gain.
Against this, Foucault notices that in the
contemporary period, it's not so clear
that governments purely rule by the sword.
While the use of violence and coercion is
central to contemporary logics of
govern mentality, he also notices that,
increasingly, governments look to foster
the lives of populations in some way.
For example, many governments invest
actively in public health, they actively
encourage — through public campaigns —
individuals to better their own health and
survival; for example, encouraging drivers
to drive safely, or encouraging
individuals through public media campaigns
to stop smoking.
While there is an interest for Foucault in
the way that contemporary governments
flourish or make populations flourish, he
also notices that this biopolitical
rationality also shapes the way that
violence is orchestrated in contemporary
societies.
Throughout the twentieth century, many 
governments use violence and coercion as a
tool to secure the life of particular
populations.
Foucault argues that we see this most
clearly in the logic of state racism,
where a population will seek to target and
persecute and potentially annihilate a
minority population in the name of the
securement and betterment of another
population.
Foucault's primary example for this — 
for thinking about this — is the Holocaust.
Foucault's account of biopolitics is
highly persuasive in many ways, however
it contained a number of omissions.
At least one problem with the account is, 
for example, that Foucault tends to ignore
the history of colonization, and with
that, the spectacles of violence that
accompanied colonization, such as racial
slavery.
Other scholars have pointed out that 
Foucault doesn't do so well in describing
the relationship of gender to biopolitics,
or disability to biopolitics.
Another area of significant omission is in
relation to thinking about animals.
Foucault seems largely uninterested 
in the way that biopolitical rationalities
have shaped the lives of animals,
and certainly, if we look at the
history of the twentieth century, it's
hard not to notice the way that
biopolitical rationality has shaped our
treatment of animals, particularly
in industrial agriculture.
If we think about the factory farm today,
it involves the most ruthless controls
over nutrition — what animals eat — their
movement, their relationality with other
animals, lighting, their sexuality, and
their reproduction.
In fact, control over all of these
elements is essential for industrial
animal agriculture to turn a profit today.
Foucault famously remarked that the logic
of biopolitics is something like this:
the capacity to foster life and disallow
it to the point of death.
A question that myself and others have
asked is, "Isn't this precisely what we
did to animals in the twentieth century? 
Didn't we foster their lives up until the
point at which they were no longer useful
to us, and then killed them for our own
benefit, for our own tastes and desires, 
for our own profits?"
To that extent, I think biopolitics
remains a really useful tool for
understanding contemporary power relations
between humans and animals.
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