Biopolitics and Womanhood in the TV Series Orphan Black

The Birth of Biopolitics

In his historical studies of European power systems, Foucault distinguishes between three general modes of power: sovereignty, discipline, and biopower. In sovereignty, dominant mainly during the Middle Ages, the power of the king was summarized in his “power of life and death” or more precisely in his “right to take life or let live” (Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life” 259). This meant that the sovereign prince could both wield a direct power over his subjects’ lives (e.g. punish a political offender) and indirectly expose their lives (e.g. command them to fight in a war) (258), and all this would be justified in terms of the prince’s keeping his “principality” (Foucault, “Governmentality” 205). (Foucault)

The sovereign power was supplanted by a disciplinary power at the beginning of the seventeenth century which “functions as a calculated but permanent economy,” by which Foucault means, “hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and their combination” (“The Means of Correct Training” 188). As a result, institutions (penal, mental, educational, etc.) along with “techniques of power” formed which “allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and ‘individualized’ throughout the entire social body” (“Truth and Power” 61). These were and continue to be practiced through different types of institutions including but not limited to the penal, mental, and educational institutions.

From the eighteenth century on this discipline or “administration of bodies” was complemented by a “calculated management of life” to form what Foucault calls “bio-power” (“Right of Death and Power over Life” 262). Death lost the crucial position it used to hold in sovereignty and life itself became important; no longer was it a matter of putting to death, but of “distributing the living in the domain of value and utility” (266), of “foster[ing] life or disallow[ing] it to the point of death” (261).

This was achieved through constant observation of such issues as birth rate, sanitation, longevity, health, housing, rate, migration, etc. (“Right of Death and Power over Life” and “The Birth of Biopolitics”). It is important to note, however, that we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty—discipline—government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. (“Governmentality” 219) That is, rather than being a historical succession, these modes function simultaneously with one mode being dominant.

Biopower in Orphan Black

Nowhere, perhaps, could biopower be seen more obviously at work than it is in the BBC America’s Orphan Black: a capitalist world of mega-corporations examining on and producing human clones for profit. As opposed to the sovereign power, thus, which is ultimately summarized in the right “to take life or let live,” biopower is the power to make live or let die. And as distinguished from disciplinary power which aims to produce useful and docile (individual) bodies, biopower is centered upon life, regulating, manipulating, engineering bios itself. Bioengineered for improved efficiency (e.g., the Leda clones are purposely infertile, a priceless asset in the military/intelligence black market) and closely monitored, the clones are patented too: in other words, life is customized, engineered, fostered, manipulated, and finally patented and rendered as property—or more precisely as commodity. Capital employs biopolitical mechanisms and apparatuses to commodify life.

Neolution, Eugenics, and Bio-hacking

A couple of quotes will suffice.

-Rachel: “What is it, Mother? What is our greater good?”

-Susan: “To control human evolution, darling. To create a more perfect human being.” (S04E03)

From Dr. Aldous Leekie’s Neolution: The Science of Self-Directed Evolution:

“The individual can only begin the journey to the extraordinary by casting off the genetically-mandated human shell.”

Make Live or Let Die

In Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden ask a pertinent question: “Each time a new technological development is hailed the same question arises: is this liberation or oppression in a new guise?”

Discipline, (Self-)Monitoring, and Automated Control

“There’s been eyes on the house all morning. It's like we're in a bloody panopticon.”—Felix:

One of the important apparatuses—as well as emblems—of a disciplinary age is the panopticon: an invention dating back to the eighteenth century when British philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed an architectural prison device which enabled extremely efficient one-way monitoring whereby the observer (i.e., a one-man post) could possibly be watching each and every single prisoner—or at least so did the prisoners have to assume. Panopticon becomes an indispensable pillar of a disciplinary society where “inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere” (Foucault, “Panopticism” 2).

As more of a conceptual device than architectural, panopticon is even more frightening. Foucault uses Bentham’s architectural model as a way to understand a much larger “system” which “is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power” and is at the service of discipline (“Panopticism” 7). A panopticon, as Foucault observes, necessarily features two characteristics: first, it is a system of “surveillance” based on “permanent registration”; second, it dissociates “the see” from “the being seen” (“Panopticism” 2, 6). Clones, too, had to constantly consider the panopticon-like possibility that they might be under observation. Felix realizes this: “It’s like we’re in a bloody panopticon.”

Aldous Leekie’s first name suggests the author of Brave New World, a dystopian novel in which designer babies are grown in bottles. The last suggests Dr. Louis Leakey (1903–1972), a Kenyan paleoanthropologist and archaeologist who helped prove that humans evolved in Africa. Leekie is moving beyond the latter and trying to bring evolution toward the former. Manson says, “I think there’s a fundamental human hubris in trying to play God. That’s a trope of a lot of great sci-fi.” He adds that in the case of DYAD, the story has “got the banality of evil, because once you’ve done that, you have to administrate the whole thing” (Bernstein 101). Traditional gothic “centers of the transgressions of a male over-reacher who defies social taboos, and includes graphically detailed violence, often sexual and directed against objectified women” (Hughes et al. 234). This archetypal Frankenstein plot certainly mirrors Leekie’s actions. His followers mutilate and remake themselves in Island of Doctor Moreau fashion, hurling themselves into the lifestyle (Zoe, “Replication, Regeneration or Organic Birth”).

Bio-Capital Patenting Life

The episode “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” (1 Jun 2013) concludes the first season with Delphine and Cosima’s discovery that, among other things, the clones are patented: “It’s a patent,” says Cosima. ‘We’re property. Our bodies, our biology, everything we are, everything we become belongs to them. Sarah, they could claim Kira.” The role and significance of bio-capital in Orphan Black is such that it cannot be ignored. Siobhan succinctly articulates bio-capital’s agenda: “Neolution want to sell curated commercialized evolution to the one percent who can afford it so they can live forever, grow a bloody tail if they want to.” And they are ready to eliminate anything that might ever pose a threat to their objective. After relating that, “We shared the same goal once: to control human genetics and the species,” Virginia Coady goes on to reveal that:

Our very first human subject: P. T. Westmoreland's obsession. But too many mistakes were made. […] A child. A beautiful child. A unique genome. We tried to unlock it, but it was early days, the science was crude. […] He started growing tumors, brain damage, physical deformities. Susan wanted to stop, but I've never been squeamish. So, we pushed forward. And we created a monster.