Function of Biopower

1489 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Discuss the concept of sovereignty

What I’m interested in exploring with the series of work Apparatus of Sovereign Power as Mechanisms of Control, are the functions of biopower (a term devised by French philosopher Michel Foucault which applies to the concept of controlling populations and managing people1), the political mechanisms through which biopower operates, and the effects on identity and the physical self. In this small body of work, I have created four drawings in charcoal that make an attempt to mock scenarios in which sovereign states utilize mechanisms (in the form of regulations and physical forces) to control and regulate large bodies of people and their territory.
In the accompanying titles of my work, the term “apparatus” has been appropriated from Michel Foucault2, but I have transformed his idea of the “Mechanism of Power” 3 into an eccentric set of reflections on the way sovereign states attempt to control and maintain influence over other populations. The apparatuses in the drawings are meant to illustrate the underlying processes taking place along borders, where people are subject to forces on their bodies (through things like checkpoints and terminals), their sovereignty, and their physical homeland. The very land and landscape become major components within the processes of biopower in regard to borders, and the way in which movement is limited, and territory is defined. The intent of this work is to describe the mechanics of biopower, and the sense of absurdness that seems to accompany it, using a visual language.
The first drawing in the series Apparatus for Controlling Sovereign Rule, depicts two masses of land (these represent a sovereign state or states) with a border down the middle separating the two. The landscapes or landmass...

... middle of paper ...

...eign and the One-Way Mirror." Global Visual Cultures; an anthology (2011): 102-103. Print.
5) Weizman, Eyal. "Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror." Global Visual Cultures; an anthology (2011): 104. Print.
6) Weizman, Eyal. "Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror." Global Visual Cultures; an anthology (2011): 105-106. Print.
7) Levy, Gideon. "Twilight Zone / Just Another Morning in Bethlehem." Haaretz.com. N.p., Sept.-Oct. 2012. Web. 30 Oct. 2013
8) Weizman, Eyal. "Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror." Global Visual Cultures; an anthology (2011): 107. Print.
9) Ratnam, Niru. "Art and Globalisation." Themes in Contemporary Art 2004th ser. (2004): 276-311. Print.
10) Nikolopoulou, Kalliopi, Giorgio Agamben, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life." SubStance 29.3 (2000): 15-29. Print.

Show More
Related

  • Roger Williams' A Key Into the Language of America

    2167 Words  | 5 Pages

    ...erience all of the same feelings and emotions that one prides one's self upon experiencing? The author creates such a strong sense of identity in humanity between the two societies that it seems difficult that the stereotypes and clichés continued to exist after the work's publication.

    Read More

  • Five Themes as Expressed Through “The Power of Place” by Harm de Blij

    1261 Words  | 3 Pages

    Blij has clearly put this book into historical significance by mentioning the idea of geography and how it plays a role in societies all over the world. However, the five themes of culture regions, cultural diffusion, cultural interaction, cultural ecology, and cultural landscapes are all clearly defined within a specific context to a particular nation. Through reading this intriguing piece of literature I received the underlying notion that Blij firmly believes that landscapes of the world realm are not going to change. De Blij worldview of regions, diffusion, interaction, ecology, and landscapes has allowed him to simultaneously link issues together from the United States all the way to Southeast Asia.

    Read More

  • Geographic Borders: Borders: A Very Short Introduction, by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

    1214 Words  | 3 Pages

    Borders: A Very Short Introduction, by Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, is a brief the history of geographic borders and their implications on the world throughout history. Diener and Hagen make the argument that borders, as commonly understood today, are a relatively new phenomenon and as humanity moves forward borders modern boarders will no longer be possible. The writers maintain as globalization continues to make the world a smaller place or as they say, “make the world flat”, the notion of the formal state border is slowly coming to an end. Acknowledging that borders as they are understood today will not vanish overnight and will be here for the foreseeable future but in time they must change is central to their argument (Diener & Hagen, 2012). In making their case they give the reader a brief history of geographic boarders and how the modern nation state came about.

    Read More

  • Children’s Literature through an Americanized Scope

    1244 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...templates for strong and weak western narratives of other places but lacks literary rigor. Even so, both are equally important for the education of young people in a larger, global setting with diverse experiences and cultures trying to understand one another. She draws attention to voice appropriation, authorial national ideological agendas, and the Americanized slant in representations of the non-west by westerners. The presence of Americanized interpretation and editing can cause a crooked depiction of the other, ultimately telling us more about ourselves than about them.

    Read More

  • Saudi Arabia: Islam and Oil

    1445 Words  | 3 Pages

    Such efforts to mask the involvement of Americans in Saudi Arabia are doomed to eventual failure because of the unique nature of the Saudi territory, comprising some of the most symbolically important desert in world...

    Read More

  • Henri Cartier-Bresson

    616 Words  | 2 Pages

    Henri Cartier-Bresson has been called "equivocal, ambivalent and accidental"1 since his debut as a photojournalist. Amplified and enriched, the work of the photographer is revealed in all its grandeur. While he may appear to "be a hurried man or a traveler without luggage"2, to quote a few of his titles, he is a poet, attentive to the act of love made with each photograph, and this is where the genius is revealed. From a desired distance, we discover simultaneously the geographer, who analyses the permanence or vulnerability of cultures; the ethnographer, who captures gestures of work and rituals of religion; the anthropologist, who reflects the spectrum of emotions; and the sociologist, who reveals the development of destinies and histories.3 Cartier-Bresson's dependence and uncompromising view of photography; to rely solely on the moment in time, is why he will always be remembered.

    Read More

  • Comparing the Democratic and Republican Parties

    2150 Words  | 5 Pages

    Why do we have government? Government may be defined as a set of institutions that regulate behavior within territorial boundaries thru the legitimate use of force. Go...

    Read More

  • A New Type of Warfare in Max Weber's Essay, Politics as a Vocation

    819 Words  | 2 Pages

    The art of war has been a vital aspect of state-making throughout history. Max Weber contends in his essay, Politics as a Vocation, that the State is a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 77), a definition that political experts cite to this day. However, many scholars today believe that we have created a new type of warfare, one that questions the validity of the statehood of current international powers as well as Weber’s own precedent for identifying States.

    Read More

  • VFX Financial Difficulties

    1228 Words  | 3 Pages

    Curtin, Michael. "A Vanishing Piece of the Pi: The Globalization of Visual Effects Labor." A Vanishing Piece of the Pi: The Globalization of Visual Effects Labor. Television and New Media, 2014. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

    Read More

  • Realist View Of The International System

    1342 Words  | 3 Pages

    Rulers of countries are constrained by the system as a manifestation of the state in which they operate but also have a degree of autonomy as individuals. The quote "In the international environment rulers constantly scan for resources material and ideologies, that will enhance their ability to stay in power and promote the interests of their supporters. Rulers are calculators, not agents manifesting some deeper international institutional structure although they may be firmly embedded in the in well-established domestic arrangements". This quote discusses some of the limitations rulers operate under, and represents much of the realist argument of how the international system works.

    Read More

  • Far East

    2007 Words  | 5 Pages

    The geographic depiction offered in the book gives the reader unfamiliar with this region of the world a 1) starting point on a world map and a 2) sense of not only where but the density covered by the book. With this sense the reader can better understand why there is demographic, cultural, and language differences within and among the many countries as well as the root similarities.

    Read More

  • Nelson Mandela And The Media Analysis

    2357 Words  | 5 Pages

    In the translated Marxist article titled “Society of the Spectacle” by Greg Adargo, he states that in societies where contemporary media prevails, people’s opinions and speculations are formed on a daily basis. Every first hand experience has been objectified into his or her own representation. Images on a digital or concrete media platform are shared through a common stream in which one perceives it. People interact almost hourly every day regardless of if the setting is a billboard, TV or Internet media. The media is presented as a spectacle in which society sees as a part of itself, and as a tool for unification and serves as the center of all speculation. This subdivision is the common ground of which an ocean of premeditated notions achieves an official language of generalized separation. The collection of media is a social interaction of culture among mediated images. Media that creates a significant impact on one’s realization of interpretation among the common cultural media is more significant than other media.

    Read More

  • Connecting With Reality

    1066 Words  | 3 Pages

    The novel Image world demonstrates how people adopted spectacles then preferred spectacles in many prospective. Life has become a fancy presentation with manipulations and illusions, just in order to keep people interested and hypnotically responsive. One of the ways Image World proves this point is through theme, which is the central idea revealed through a literature work. In the novel Image world, Michael Posner describes popular places in the world like: Broadway, Cannes, Pairs, Milan, New York, London, Las Vegas, even theme parks in everyday life are all surround by spectacles and illusions. It’s all built and designed in a common ground of spectacle. Those places are sublime, but it is also part of fraudulence and people enjoin it. Michael Posner proves a fact ...

    Read More

  • Theories on the Origin of the State

    1916 Words  | 4 Pages

    The State is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, emerging somewhere between 6000-3500 B.C. (Ember, Ember, Peregrine, 2005.) Thus a critical issue for anthropology must be: what is the state and why and how did it appear? The most widely accepted definition of the state is an organization which attempts to maintain a monopoly on the use of force and violence in a given territorial area (Rothbard, 2009, p. 11). These powers include the ability to collect taxes, draft men for work or war, and direct and enforce laws (Carneiro, 1970). Another way of looking at the state is by distinguishing the way it acquires wealth. According to Franz Oppenheimer, there are two means for acquiring wealth – the political means and the economic means. The state uses the political means which is the “unrequited appropriation of the labor of others”. The economic means is the exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, for the satisfaction of needs (Oppenheimer, 1922, p. 30). States are not to be confused with chiefdoms – which is “a society with centralized but not internally specialized authority” (Spencer, 2010, p. 1). The purpose of this paper is to describe the three frequently discussed theories on the origin of the state: hydraulic theory (irrigation), circumscription, and territory expansion model (local and long-distance trade). I will discuss, critique, and implement all three theories in my own view of the state.

    Read More

  • Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

    1358 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mason, Deborah. “The Cross-Culture Wars.” New York Times Book Review. Apr. 28, 2002. Vol 151 Issue 52102.11.

    Read More

More about Function of Biopower

Open Document