From Security to Population

In his first lecture, Foucault defines three types of security: the legal code (code légal), the disciplinary mechanism (mécanisme disciplinaire), and the devices of security (dispositifs de sécurité).  The first two types are quite straightforward; it is the last that poses the most difficulty and that occupies Foucault's attention.  The devices of security hold within them a more totalizing power because they transcend the binary oppositions to which the other types of security so rigidly adhere.  Ostensibly, the devices grant greater autonomy to a population, allowing a wider scope of acceptable action.  But because they operate more subtly to enforce the regulative norm, their influence permeates the territory in which they are enacted.

Foucault describes the sociopolitical function of these devices as bio-power (bio-pouvoir), a term that links security and population.  Security is immanent in population, and the population is at once subject and object of its controls.  Moreover, insofar as the human being exists as part of the population, the human sciences cannot be separated from the dynamics of power.