Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
Discipline and after
The major shift that occurs, first in the 1977–78 lectures on Security,
Territory, Population, and then in the lectures from 1978–79 on The Birth of
Biopolitics, 3 is the move away from the idea of discipline as the prevalent
structure of modern societies (another important and related change would
be the abandonment of the Nietzschean “war” model for social relations in
“Society Must Be Defended” from 1976–77; see Julian Reid’s discussion of
this below). It would be too hasty to see this move as already connected to
the later work on subjectivation; in fact, after the abandonment of the
disciplinary model, it seems as if Foucault increasingly came to distrust any
overarching theory. What we find is a spectrum of questions, or multiple
guidelines for further research. They intersect and resonate with each other,
but also diverge in different directions. Without claiming to be exhaustive,
it is maybe helpful to mention at least four of the major issues that traverse
his work from 1976 to the end, of which biopolitics is only one, and by no
means the predominant one.
1) Biopolitics. The concept is first presented in the final chapter of the
introductory volume to The History of Sexuality (1976), and it also appears
in the final section of “Society Must Be Defended” from the same year. A
“society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached,” Foucault famously
says, “when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies.
For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living being with
the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.” 4 In this
conception, biopolitics—or biopower, as Foucault more often says here—is
understood as the other side of an “anatomico-politics of the human body,”
in a way that remains closely connected to discipline. Here, the structure of
biopower seems in fact to be a result of, or even an aside within, the
genealogy of the sex. Piecing together the various parts of this initial presentation,
we can see that biopower has a three-tier structure. On the lower or
micro-level it works by individualization, or more precisely by producing
individuality as the focal point of all the different techniques for monitoring
3 Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel
Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The Birth of Biopolitics:
Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham
Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Henceforth cited as STP and BB.
4 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage, 1978), 143.
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