The linking of control and political command with the risk factors of statistically produced populations is a form of power that Michel Foucault called biopolitics. In contrast to disciplining, biopolitics turns power's grasp from the individual subject to ‘life itself:' As Foucault put it: ‘So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species’ (2003, 243). But biopolitics is not without any interest in the individual; biopolitics individualizes as it massifies. In linking biopolitics to biomedia, Thacker argues that 'biopolitics accounts for 'each and every' element of the population, the individual and the group, and the groups within the group (the poor, the unemployed, the resident alien, the chronically ill)' (Thacker 2005b, 25). However, if populations, in this gradated approach, ‘can exist in a variety of contexts, defined by territory, economic class groupings, ethnic groupings, gender based divisions, or social factors: they do so ‘all within a framework analyzing the flux of biological activity characteristic of the population’ (25). What makes the biopolitics of the biomediated body a political economy, then, is the break into biology or 'life itself' by carving out various populations in order to estimate the value of their capacities for life, or more precisely, their capacities to provide life for capital. Foucault described this deployment of populations as racism (see Mbembe 2003).
Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies” from The Affect Theory Reader pg. 222-23