Gomez, Renelyn Charisse A.

AB Politiccal Science

Relevance of Biology to Political Science

When Political Science and Biology was combined there was this thing called
Biopolitics. A neologism (a newly invented word or phrase ) coined by Michel Foucault,
the term "biopolitics" or "biopolitical" can refer to several different yet compatible
concepts.

The concept of biopolitics marks the introduction of a new element within judicial
powr and disciplinary techniques. The theory of sovereign right functioned on the basis
of the pre-determined and complementary notions of individual and society, which, at the
outcome of the sovereign constitutive process, are transformed into the contracting
individual and the social body constituted through the contract (whether voluntary or
implicit).

Much of the literature that still constitutes the mainstream and hegemonic
paradigm in the teaching of political theory in our times, adopts notions of the workings
of power such as sovereignty, right, duty and contract as the foundation of any possible
reflection and advancement on the idea of government and its exercise.

It is the notion of population: biopolitics is concerned with population as a

political and scientific problem, as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Biopower
does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse forms
of rehabilitation, normalization and institutionalization. Rather, it acts on the population
in a preventive fashion. Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation with optimizing life
chances, and biopower operates through surveys for the prevention of epidemics and
scarcity. Its government works through management and the regulative mechanisms that
are able to account for aleatory (of or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance;
unpredictable) phenomena on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium and keeping
events within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a
global scale, it is ‘the power to make live. Power won’t make die, but it will regulate
mortality.

The series of body-organism-discipline-institution is eventually juxtaposed (to

place close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast) and substituted by
the series of population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-state, even though
some elements such as the police are part of the first and the second, both of discipline
and security. The system has changed to incorporate the new needs of a post welfare
state/pastoral power. From surveillance on criminality we have moved towards the
control of the population. This is due to the endorsement by the system of resistances and
its adoption of their techniques, which creates a new function for power. It is the state of
'executive power' or policing, monitoring, or recording that constitutes the excess which
is the reality of the norm. This political state of permanent exception is tightly linked to
the ideology of government ability and of security. The way a society of control functions
is no more based on the individuation and subjectifying of individuals as 'types', it doesn't
work on individuation of the marginalized finalized to their subsequent 'inclusive
rehabilitation'. Statistics now come to dissect the individual and fragment it to its smallest
components. This is most evident in the division of labor into skills and of the body into
genes. Therefore, control can be exercised in virtue of its own creation 'positive'
determination of multiple subjectifications within the same individual. The role of law
itself changes with it in so far as instead of functioning as the arbiter or regulator of
incompatible interests, it abdicates its ambition to social integration and with the crisis of
welfare it is forced to reduce its scope to that of only representing negotiable interests
while neutralizing and silencing the rest.

With the help of the biological science, solving or managing some cases would be
much easier, convenient and will not consume more time in solving the case and satisfies
the costumers wants for it states on the Philippine Constitution 1987 Article III, Sec.16
“All persons shall have the right to a speedy disposition of their cases before all judicial,
quasi-judicial, or administrative bodies.”

Source/s:
http://www.dictionary.com
http://www.generation-online.org/c/cbiopolitics.htm