The Rise of Corporate Biopower

Anyone who follows any kind of media in this day and age is besieged on all sides by a plethora of

images. From the unnaturally effusive employees at Wal-mart to the off-road tough-guy vehicles of

Ford and the mindless dancing silhouettes of Apple; from sunny Sunday picnics by the lake with

your favorite flavor of Nutriday yogurt to wise-cracking Chihuahuas and soft-spoken British lizards.

Online you will find advertisements tailored specifically to your interests, with every new page

immediately declaring to you the comparative advantages of StateFarm Insurance and MasterCard;

videos will play of their own accord, your only option whether or not turn on the audio. Billboards on

lonely country roads direct passers-by on where to eat, what to worship and who to go to for the

news, where even more images assail them.

The images are not just advertisements, however. Political campaigns are drenched in patriotic color

and images of noble-looking square-jawed politicians staring down destiny itself through eyes of

liquid wisdom; pleas for disaster relief come in the form of haunting photographs of misery; the news

is incomplete without its myriad images manipulated to bring the greatest shock value, sometimes at

the expense of accuracy. Of particular importance in this image-driven culture is the tendency for

people to live their lives according to the images. Customs and cultural practices closely mirror

events on the screen (life imitating art imitating life?); the ideals of the nuclear family are modeled

after the ideals of the television family. In his essay, “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and

Sniping in the Empire of Signs”, Mark Dery describes the U.S. as a “TV democracy whose prime

directive is social control through the fabrication and manipulation of images,”1 before going on to

say that, “[we] can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video.“2

How did images get to be so powerful? Part of the answer lies in the concept of biopower.

Formulated my French social scientist Michel Foucault, biopower is a term referring to the set of

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techniques used by the state to manage individuals and populations. Distinct from the ancient power

of the sovereign, which operated through the “right to kill”, biopower, which emerged during the

seventeenth century, emphasizes the right to life and promotes it, dictating how one should live.

Control of the individual body comes in the form of discipline in the military, schools and workplace;

it creates productive efficiency. Population control emerges as ideology, demography and other

statistical regulations. Biopower manifests as the regulation of habits, customs, reproduction and

other areas of life, and did so gruesomely in the eugenic programs of the twentieth century

(particularly in Nazi Germany).

Biopower, being concerned with efficiency and control, was conducive to the birth of capitalism.

Foucault notes, “Biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of

capitalism. . .”3 Capitalism, through time, gave rise to corporations, which were solely concerned

with profit maximization. At the same time, the government became less and less important, and

would preferably be absent in the laissez-faire free market capitalism promoted by many of the 19th

and 20th centuries’ emerging capitalists. With the rise of private ownership and the reduced power of

government, there came a shift in the biopolitical landscape. (Bio)power was transferred from the

government to corporations, and with biopower came the ability to control how individuals and

populations behaved.

Evidence for this shift, which isn’t mentioned by Foucault in his work, can be found in a variety of

sources. Governmental biopower originally had as one of its primary objectives the optimization of

the human body as a machine (what Foucault describes as the “subjugation of bodies”4). Through

time, the usefulness of this machine came to be expressed solely in terms of economic productivity.

The concept of homo economicus (economic man) which Foucault introduces in “The Birth of

Biopolitics” can also shed light on the economic nature of biopower. Homo economicus, an integral

concept in biopower, is the concept of man as a rational self-interested being. Foucault describes

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homo economicus as being “eminently governable,”5 and the “tangible partner of laissez-faire

[i.e.,industry free from state intervention ]”6. That government non-interference forms a part of the

conception of biopower under capitalism is important in seeing the shift of power from government

to corporations.

Over the course of the development of biopower, corporations have come to be seen as vessels for

growth in society, particularly among the proponents of Social Contract Theory. Buchholz and

Rosenthal write, in “Business Ethics: The Pragmatic Path Beyond Principles to Process”, that

“economic growth was the source of all progress, social as well as economic.” And of course,

economic growth was brought about primarily through corporations. Today, the role of corporations

has grown to such an extent, especially in the U.S., that traditional government activities have been

taken over by corporations. In “The Corporation in Modern American Society”, Charles Denny and

Paige Evans write, “Corporations, today, are accountable for unemployment insurance, contributions

to workers’ Social Security, and worker’s compensation in event of an injury on the job. . .

Corporations voluntarily have undertaken to fill basic societal needs, needs that in other developed

nations have been the responsibility of government programs or mandates.”7

In this way, corporations have come to play a government-like role in society while the government

has been relegated to the duty of merely regulating corporations. In this way, corporations have come

to acquire the power to control populations, i.e. biopower. This is what I call corporate biopower (the

use of various tools by corporations and the capitalistic system to cause people to behave in such a

way as to maximize corporate profits).

In what ways does corporate biopower manifest itself? As stated above, governmental biopower is

expressed through the regulation of people’s habits. This happens in two ways: anatomo-politics and
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biopolitics. The former involves the control of individual behavior in the regular Foucaultian

disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, etc.). Foucault writes, “with regard to discipline,

[anatomo-politics] was embodied in institutions such as the army and schools. . .”8. The biopolitics of

the population involves control through “demography, the evaluation of the relationship between

resources and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth and its circulation.”9

Corporate biopower functions in more or less the same way. It uses advertisements, powerful

technology and the control of labor to turn individuals and populations into profit-maximizing

drones. For instance, the sequencing of the Human Genome represents a direct control of life at the

molecular level, and has turned the female body into a “pre-eminent laboratory for a lucrative

pharmaceutical industry.”10 The same article (“What is Biopower?”) describes higher education as a

“university/corporate/industrial machine.”11 Of all the ways in which corporations attempt to control

individuals and populations, however, commercial advertising is one of the most powerful. Through

its very nature, advertising finds itself at the intersection of both forms of biopower (anatomo-politics

of the individual and biopolitics of the population): by influencing individual behavior, it controls the

behavior of the entire population. And just like government biopower, corporate biopower in the

form of advertising regulates habits by monitoring and influencing trends. In applied sociology, the

academic discipline of marketing research (or consumer research) is dedicated solely to this end. The

prevalence of this half-a-trillion dollar per year industry in all areas of society and all throughout the

world make advertising a formidable component of the new biopower. But how does advertising

control day to day life?

The story begins with the industrial era, when the world began to see excess for the first time in the

items that were being produced. A world previously defined by scarcity was now witnessing huge

amounts of surplus product being sold at low prices. With this shift in production came a shift in
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producer behavior. Industrialists like Henry Ford began to link mass production with mass

consumption. And with mass consumption came the cultural phenomenon of consumerism, a social

order predicated upon the creation of a desire to consume. An important aspect of 20th and 21st

century consumerism is what sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen termed “conspicuous

consumption”, manifested through emulation. Attempting to imitate the wealthy, people of limited

means will “purchase something new that will speak of their place in the tradition of affluence.”12 In

a neat summary of the need to display affluence in society, Veblen writes, “The basis on which good

repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the

means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a

conspicuous consumption of goods.”13

What advertising manages to do is align people’s desires for affluence with the corporate need to sell

products. In this way, almost regardless of what the product actually is, whether it is chemically-

enhanced toilet paper or a luxury vehicle, gourmet cat food or an intelligent soccer ball, people

almost always respond positively to advertisements simply because the products being promoted will

build on the consumer’s reputation. The obsession people have with name brand products (which are

sometimes worse, and more often than not more expensive than less popular supplements) speaks to

the need people have to purchase only those products that others know about. The images referred to

earlier are the most important tool in the advertiser’s shed.

The average television commercial is less than thirty seconds long. Yet in that time it manages to

convey enough information to permanently influence the viewer’s habits. As diverse as commercials

are, they all function at the same level psychologically: they all draw the viewer in by appealing to

the desire people have to be better. As one commentator put it, commercials want us to say, “Yes I

want it, yes I need it, yes I want to be the right kind of person, yes I’ll buy it.”14 Playing on people’s
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inherent need to own more (Veblen’s conspicuous consumption), commercials manage to serve as

vehicles of corporate biopower by influencing behavior. The techniques that commercials use include

reciprocation, which is the feeling people have that they have to do something in return for someone

who has done something for them. Scarcity is another tool: commercials which contain phrases like

“limited time only” or “only three of these exist in the entire world” make us more likely to buy the

product. Using celebrity endorsements not only employs the principle of authority (which makes us

follow figures we believe to be more knowledgeable on the matter, such as scientists or athletes) but

also the principle of liking, by which we purchase something because of positive feelings we have for

the person endorsing it. The principle of uniqueness makes us pay more attention to something if it

looks different, while the principle of consensus causes us to buy something that we feel those

around us will probably buy, and finally, the sexualization of advertising media tugs on more primal

interests.

Online media make people even more susceptible to these techniques; with sophisticated algorithms,

websites can now deliver individualized advertisements on the basis of user’s interest. All of these

techniques and the millions of dollars in research that go into marketing every year are all for one

reason: to get people to buy specific products. Corporations mold behavior in this way, and in doing

so control populations.

How does this control influence life? The culture of consumption that corporate biopower has helped

breed has had a number of effects on Western lifestyles (and as we will soon see, lifestyles all around

the world). On the one hand, the whopping 67% of GDP that consumer spending represents in the

United States has helped run not only the U.S. economy but economies all across the world.13 More

spending has also meant more pressure from corporations to differentiate their products from the

herd and innovate, leading to new technologies. But the excessive consumption in the United States
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has been damaging the environment (human society currently consumes approximately 30% more

resources than can be sustained with the world’s resources14), highlighting income gaps, breeding

resentment of the American lifestyle in some parts of the world (while in other parts encouraging it)

and generating a certain perceived emptiness in the modern way of life. German historian Oswald

Spengler writes, “Life in America is exclusively economic in structure and lacks depth.”15 What is

important here is not the question of whether consumption is good or bad (convincing arguments can

be made from both sides), but rather the realization of how immensely important consumption has

become in life.

This trend is not restricted to the United States. China, a country both geographically and

ideologically on the opposite side of the world as the U.S., is slowly coming around to the capitalistic

consumerist way of life displayed in U.S. advertisements. A study of the comparative effects of

advertisements in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China found that Hong Kong

already had advertisements that supported the American lifestyle, Taiwan’s advertising industry was

quickly converging on to that of Hong Kong’s and that the PRC, though distinct from the two had

made huge leaps in their direction. As Russel, Belk and Zhou (1989) write, “Since 1978 the country

has changed sharply. . .from having no advertising to having a contemporary advertising

superstructure. “ They go on to say that the PRC has had a “rapidly increasing variety of consumer

goods. Luxury goods have changed from being hated symbols of decadent capitalism to being touted

as consumption incentives. . .”16 What all of this shows is that corporate biopower is the major force

in global activity and lifestyles, and that it is supported partly through the use of advertisements. The

“subjugation of bodies and control of populations” that Foucault referred to when speaking of the

state have now become the domain of multinational corporations.

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But how do these techniques represent a control of bodies by corporations. To answer this question,

we return to the idea of emulation. Oftentimes, the images portrayed on screen (especially in

advertisements) are meant to be representative of some ideal. The following list of examples from the

article, “I Wanna Be Like . . . : Imitation and Advertising” illustrates this point:

“Michael Jordan races about the basketball court, flying through the air and dunking the ball over and

over again. It must be the shoes.

Christy Brinkley pirouettes in a high fashion gown, fussed over by hairdressers and make-up artists

as she extolls the virtues of Cover Girl make-up. She is ready and takes her place before the camera,

the image of wholesome beauty and innocent sexuality.

"I'm pretty good now, but I could be better," the man says to his reflection in the mirror. He decides

to check the possibility that there is something that will restore his thinning hair.

A beautiful woman dances erotically in front of a man dressed in jeans. As the commercial

progresses they get closer together, finally ending in an embrace.”17

Through imitating the users of the products on-screen, people and entire populations come to live

their lives (in a very physical sense) according to corporate advertisements. Whether it’s through the

latest fashion trends, the hottest new diets, the best non-prescription medicine or even major life

decisions such as where to live and how many children to have, the almost clinical observance of

commercial values by the population makes itself clear. Images manage to convey characteristics that

people take, for a variety of reasons, to be of the utmost quality and desirability. The control of

bodies in the Foucaultian sense is no more than the ability of the government to control how people

lived their day to day lives. This very same control is now practiced by corporations.

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To give one example of an almost direct transfer of biopower, take the current health campaign.

Speaking of biopower, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) write, “There is a tremendous focus in culture

now on “health”; we are told everyday how to eat, sleep, exercise, and basically live our lives in

order to extend them.”18 This used to be the domain of government, but today we have corporate

interests dictating the guidelines of these everyday practices. The food industry, with its “Big Macs”

and “organic” stamps, controls what we eat; the ever-expanding weight loss industry takes over by

telling how and when to exercise to burn the calories that we just put on. The nascent technology of

genetic enhancement, to be brought to you soon by Big Pharma, may completely revolutionize how

people reproduce, altering lifestyles and the meaning of identity. Corporations exercise a level of

control over human life (biopower) that has never been enjoyed by any government.

The order of causation in the growth of corporate biopower is worth noting. Governmental biopower

helped give rise to capitalism, which in turn birthed the modern concept of the corporation. The

corporation, as with all capitalistic institutions, seeks only to maximize profits. To achieve this end,

corporations began to use advertisements, which, because of people’s inherent need to consume (part

conspicuous consumption, part evolution) and through techniques aimed at people’s psychological

weak spots, have completely changed the ways in which people live. The images of success and

freedom and other ideals contained under the umbrella of “personal sovereignty” helped accelerate

the effects of advertisements, and the influence of corporations. Corporations have by now developed

more or less complete control over how people live: what they eat, where they work, when they

retire, etc., essentially usurping the government from its dominant position. Corporations have thus

developed biopower, and this new biopower is more powerful and wider reaching than the old. The

advertisements corporations use cause people to purchase more goods and services, making the

corporations even more powerful, more influential. Corporate biopower is in this way self-

perpetuating. Under the corporate biopolitical landscape, the world will develop along profit-

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maximizing paths. New technologies in social networking, genetics, transportation, entertainment,

and in virtually all areas of life will be built to encourage consumption. Life will be lived at the

margin.

Notes

1. from “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”, Mark Dery.

Open Magazine. (p. 2)

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2. ibid. (p. 2)

3. from “The History of Sexuality”, Michel Foucault. Vintage Books. (pp 140-141)

4. ibid. (p. 140)

5. from “The Birth of Biopolitics”, Michel Foucault. (pp. 270-2710

6. ibid (pp. 270-271)

7. from “The Corporation in Modern American Society”, Charles Denny and Paige Evans. Grotto

Foundation. (p. 16)

8. from “The History of Sexuality”, Michel Foucault. Vintage Books. (p. 140)

9. ibid. (p. 140)

10. from “What is Biopower.” Biopower Unlimited.

11. ibid.

12. from “Attracting the Affluent”. Eric Miller. 1991

13. from “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, Thorstein Veblen (p. 51)

14. from Video: “Advertising: What Psychological Tricks do they Use?”

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtvHNfomZL8)

15. from “Consumerism in World History”. Peter Steams. Routledge

16. from “Becoming a Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-cultural Content Analysis of

Print Ads from Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan”. David Tse, Russell Belk

and Nan Zhou. Journal of Consumer Research. 1989

17. from “I Wanna Be Like . . . : Imitation and Advertising”. Richard Taflinger. Taking ADvantage.

May 1996.

18. from “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics” Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul

Rabinow. University of Chicago Press. 1983.

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References

Academic Sources

- “The History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault, Vintage Books, 1990

- “The Corporation in Modern American Society” by Charles Denny and Paige Evans, Grotto

Foundation, 2008

- “Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen, Penguin, 1994

- “Becoming a Consumer Society: A Longitudinal and Cross-cultural Content Analysis of

Print Ads from Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan” by David Tse,

Russell Belk and Nan Zhou, Journal of Consumer Research, 1989

- “Consumerism in World History”, Peter Steams, Routledge, 2006

- “The Birth of Biopolitics”, by Michel Foucault, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

- “Attracting the Affluent”, Eric Miller, Financial Sourcebooks, 1991

- “Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics”,Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul

Rabinow. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Articles

- “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs by Mark Dery,

Open Magazine

- Video: “Advertising: What Psychological Tricks do they Use?”

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtvHNfomZL8)

- “What is Biopolitics?”, Biopolitics Unlimited

(http://www.cyberfeminism.net/biopower/bp_aboutbp.html)

- “I Wanna Be Like . . . : Imitation and Advertising”. Richard Taflinger. Taking ADvantage.

May 1996

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