What is biopower?
Biopower, or biomass power, is the use of biomass to generate electricity, or heat and steam required for the operation of a refinery. Biopower system technologies include direct-firing, cofiring, gasification, pyrolysis, and anaerobic digestion. Most biopower plants use direct-fired systems. They burn biomass feedstocks directly to produce steam. This steam drives a turbine, which turns a generator that converts the power into electricity. In some biomass industries, the spent steam from the power plant is also used for manufacturing processes or to heat buildings. Such combined heat and power systems greatly increase overall energy efficiency. Paper mills, the largest current producers of biomass power, generate electricity or process heat as part of the process for recovering pulping chemicals.
“Biopower” is a phrase first coined by the French social theorist Michel Foucault. Foucault believed that the modern state has come to see itself, not so much as controlling a territory within certain borders, but as that which governs populations and bodies. The population is seen less as a mass of citizens than as a purely biological, physical “mass” that can be measured by life expectancy, fertility rates, and so on (and controlled and monitored through a host of “disciplinary institutions”). Further still, biopower can be thought of as the process of reducing human beings to a state in which they are little more than “bare life”, that is, separating the person from the body, so as to do with the body that which capitalism does so well; commodify. The power of the state is ultimately “biopower”, a power over life itself. Many in the Italian Ya Basta! see their organization as representing the opposite principle: biopower as life, rising up against the state, on its own behalf.
