Historically, the forms of surveillance attending episodes of militarization, warring violence, and internal surveillance are part of a more general biopolitics. They are articulated with other political functions aimed at accepting, rejecting, or managing bodies. The concept of biopolitics, which is increasingly invoked in critical political analyses, originates with Michel Foucault’s discussion of the “biopolitics of the population,” an exercise of governance that “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” in the nineteenth century.1 Whereas previously states contained a “people” who were subject to the sovereign’s prerogatives, by the mid-nineteenth century, governance involved more than merely extracting obedience from its subjects. It became involved in managing a “population,” understood in terms of the energy and cooperation that could be expected from bodies that work, serve in the army, or, at a minimum, maintain the coherence and positive functioning of the family.
