The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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provided a technical ground for a more refined, mathematically based
regulation and monitoring of the population.
However, far from a reductivist, homogenizing strategy, this modern
regulative form of governmentality is predicated, for Foucault, on
a dual approach, which both universalizes as well as individualizes
the population. Populations can exist in a variety of contexts (defined
by territory, economic and class groupings, ethnic groupings, genderbased
divisions, or social institutions)—all within a framework analyzing
the fluxes of biological activity characteristic of the population.
Such groupings do not make sense, however, without a means of
defining the criteria of grouping, not just the individual subject (and
here “subject” may also be a verb) but a subject that could be defined
in a variety of ways, marking out the definitional boundaries of each
grouping. As individuated subjects, some may form the homogeneous
core of a group, others may form its boundaries, its limit cases.
The methodology of biopolitics is therefore informatics, but a use of
informatics in a way that reconfigures biology as an information resource.
In contemporary biopolitics, the body is a database, and informatics is the
search engine.
One important result of this intersection of biology and informatics
in biopolitics is that the sovereign form of power (the right over death
and to let live) gives way to a newer “regulative power” (the right to
make live and let die). In other words, biology and informatics combine
in biopolitics to make it productive, to impel, enhance, and optimize
the species - population as it exists within the contexts of work,
leisure, consumerism, health care, entertainment, and a host of other
social activities.
3. After defining its object (the biological species - population) and its
method (informatics/ statistics), biopolitics reformulates the role of governance
as that of real - time security.
If the traditional sovereign was defined in part by the right to condemn
to death, biopolitics is defined by the right to foster life. The