THIS IS NOT A HORSE231usually unacknowledged idea of construction and materialism—the body
is metaphorically and biologically constructed by discourses and prac-
tices just as much as it is shaped by the power that defines all the rela-
tionships intertwined in such discourses and practices.^28 On the social
register, Foucault is interested in disciplinary power, technologies of power
institutionally regulated and regulating through the means of spatial-
ization: panopticism, invigilation, self-invigilation, confinement, and
punishment—these entail a demarcated unbalance in the power relation-
ships at play. Foucault refers to this register as being centered on the body
as a machine (“the anatomo-politics of the human body”)^29 rationalized
in its functionality, as well as spatially constricted in its physicality.
On the individual register, Foucault focuses on the technologies of the
self: relational instances in which individuals are conceded a perimeter of
freedom granting a level of self-operated choices based upon restricted
biological interventions on their own bodies and souls—a form of keen
supervision in which the individual retains some levels of self-forming
powers.^30 The operations of disciplining and regulating enacted on the
registers of the anatomic and the biological constitute two polarities
through which power is generally organized and exercised over life. This
configuration, which according to Foucault emerged in the classical age,
replaced the sovereign’s absolute power of inflicting death, the ancient
right to “take life or let live” (in some cases implemented as the “fostering
of life and let die” paradigm).^31 Through this shift, Foucault’s conception of
biopower emerges as an anthropogenic configuration of power relations
characterized by a problematization of the discursive and the institutional
through social organization and supervision strategies shaped by the ulti-
mate aim of enhancing productivity.^32 Capitalist growth, therefore, with
its necessity to insert bodies into the machineries of production, relies
entirely on this power/knowledge paradigm to substantiate itself despite
its destructive ecological impact. This modern conception of power as
biopower—that which capitalizes on the living as intrinsically intertwined
to the sphere of economic processes—can be more productively reconfig-
ured to include human/animal relations in Foucault’s conceptualization
(something he did not consider in his body of work).
It follows that human/animal relationships tend to be equally shaped by
“anatomo-politics of the human body” as operated by disciplinary power
and the technologies of the self. The specificities of the multiple dispositifs