Biopolitics, governmentality and the banopticon [Chapter 6]

This chapter proposes that further critical theories of the state are necessary to engage with security discourse. The first of these, governmentality, is a dispersed means of exercising power upon populations, informed by political economy and articulated through security apparatuses. Power is also exercised over populations through the control of human life which is carried out by technologies of disciplinary power, or ‘biopower’. Additionally, the tendency for states to increasingly assert special powers of emergency represents the outworking of the principle of the ‘state of exception’, through which the sovereign power of the state is totalised by suspending normal juridical procedures. Finally, the contemporary episteme of (in)security has led to the establishment of a ‘banoptic dispositif’ within late capitalist societies (after Bigo in Terror, Insecurity and Liberty. Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 10–48, 2008)