Final Essay

Beatriz Preciado's concept of the pharmacopornographic era is an attempt to reformat Foucault's ideas about governmentality. Foucault argues that modernity has brought about a new type of power that is distinctly different from sovereign power (sovereign power being the traditional “wack 'em over the head, throw 'em in jail, chop of their heads” sort of power), which Foucault calls biopower (this is often a point of confusion among Foucault scholars. In this paper, I use sovereign power to refer to all forms of pre-Westphallian power, including mass killings that arguably occur at the level of the population. I use biopower to refer to the often-subtle applications of social policy to encourage self-regulation of individuals at the level of the population). Biopower, Foucault argues, is a distinct form sovereign power in that it does seek to rule by brute force, but by encouraging individuals to self-govern. Foucault uses the example of the panopticon, a prison in which every cell is observable by a single guard tower, but the guard is not visible by any of the prisoners; Foucault argues that, in a biopolitical regime, the presence or absence of a guard in the tower is irrelevant. Prisoners will essentially self-govern. A more contemporary example might be a traffic signal in a sparsely populated area at two in the morning: even if the light is red, and there is absolutely no consequence to running the light, most drivers will wait for the signal to change.

Foucault argues that both of these phenomena are explainable through the lens of biopolitics. Since it is no longer feasible to enforce order on a population via sovereign means, governments instill notions of “the rule of law,” giving members of the population an axiological ...

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...re is no longer – nor has there ever been – an “outside” to technology. The oldest telos of childbirth itself – “be fruitful and multiply” – is technological. There can never be a “natural childbirth” because there really is no “nature”: only a socially defined notion of what is natural or what is unnatural. And that line is not arbitrarily drawn: it is situated carefully to enforce patriarchal hierarchies, as discussed above.

Technologies that challenge our conception of what is “normal” conception or child-raising are revolutionary precisely because they force us to come to terms with the arbitrary nature of the nature/unnatural divide. These technologies help us realize that our conception of “natural” and “unnatural” do not provide any actual material benefit; they simply augment hierarchies that oppress the majority for the benefit of the minority. (1629 words)