Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

Neuropower: Is Resistance Fertile?
Warren Neidich
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception
changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which
human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is
accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances
as well. The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the
birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there
developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new
kind of perception. [---] They did not attempt – and, perhaps, saw no way –
to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception.
The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present.
And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended
as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
The three facets of neuropower
Neuropower constitutes the new focus of power to administer difference in
order to sculpt a people. 1 It consists of three key concepts. First and foremost
it acts upon the neural plastic potential of the brain in a living present,
especially during what are referred to as the critical periods of development,
all the time being guided by the desire to produce a conscripted and en-
1 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7.
The passage from the disciplinary society to the society of control and noo-politics, that
is to say, the administration in the closed and wide-open spaces, previously focused on
the condition of the individual and the dividual in relation to the past and the present.
They described the focus of power as that which organized the interruptions and
undulation of flows of time and space in the disciplinary society and society of control,
respectively, in the context of a “present condition of the now,” even if, for instance, as in
the society of control Deleuze suggests future kinds of gadgets of control, such as an
“electronic card that raises a given barrier.”
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