Biopower, Wagner, and the Future

                Foucault’s discourse on biopower brings a new twist to the concept of technology.  For me, and probably most other people, I think of technology as the development of physical objects that can benefit or advance human life.  Technology, even as it’s defined in the dictionary, is almost always associated with things that people can touch and feel and use.  The development of ideas and thoughts is delegated to theory and philosophy.  But Foucault makes the argument that the politics of the body (and therefore power through controlling of life) is intricately intertwined technology through the development of increasingly complex “techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations,” aka biopower (140). 

                I immediately was reminded of last week’s readings by Wagner.  The techniques developed by the Serbs during the Bosnian genocide are a very discrete example of biopower.  Although the systematic secondary burials makes up the physical aspects of their technology, much of the power laid within the politics of feigned ignorance by the global community and perpetuating ethnic cleansing propaganda.  The atrocities committed during this time were a direct form of biopower, of managing (in this case by killing) various populations. 

                Of course, the war crimes are very extreme examples of biopower.  Foucault discusses much more common phenomena like the development of capitalism, subjugation of various forms of sexuality (explained much better in part 1 which I read for my Queer Theory class), and various other laws and regulations.  Although I agree with many of Foucault’s points, I wonder which ones are still relevant today.  Just as technology is constantly refined and reinvented, how has biopower changed over time?  War, for example, is always being advanced, but what of capitalism or new laws?