Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
But if it is impossible to make politics into a mode of autonomous
action, it is also impossible to separate politics from what Foucault calls the
microphysics of power.
In Rancière, the “distribution of the sensible,” which organizes the
distribution of parts (the division of classes that separates the bourgeois—
who have speech—and the proletarians—who only express themselves
through noises—as well as the mode of subjectivation (“they / we”), does
not seem to allow for this type of relations. The distribution of the sensible
is a division of functions and roles, modes of perception and expression,
and it is produced in a double way where micropolitical relations play a
fundamental role. The division of society into “classes” (or parts) is produced
by an assemblage of discursive practices (knowledge), by techniques
of governing conducts (power), and by modes of subjection (subject). But
this “dualist” distribution is not only the result of the transversal action of
these three apparatuses (knowledge, power, subject), it is itself traversed by
relations of micropower that make it possible and operational. The relations
between men and women, father and children in the family, teacher and
student in the school, doctor and patient in the health system etc., which are
developed within what Guattari called “public facilities” of subjection, are
transversal and constitutive for the division into parts. There is a
“molecular” distribution of the sensible, a microphysics of power that also
traverses those that have no part (and divides them according to different
lines than those of the great dialectical distribution of us and them). It is
impossible to understand contemporary capitalism without interrogating
the relation between the molar (the great dualist oppositions between
capital and labor, rich and poor, those who command and those who obey,
those who are entitled to govern and those who are not) and the
microphysical (the power relations that even find support, pass through,
and take shape within those that have no part).
“Bios,” “existence,” and “life” are not vitalist concepts to which one could
oppose the concepts of the political division of the demos. They are rather
domains of microphysical power, in which we find struggles, disputes,
subjections, and subjectivations.
The reflection on how the Cynics understood bios, existence, and life,
can provide us with the armature to resist the powers of contemporary
capitalism, for which the production of subjectivity is one of the most
important features. In a certain way, we are obliged to use the Foucauldian
methodology because, in contemporary capitalism, it is impossible to
separate “ethics” from “economy” and “politics.”
170