Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ENUNCIATION AND POLITICS
Foucault tells us that the gradual shift of parrhesia from the “political”
domain to individual ethics “is nevertheless useful for the city. In inciting
you to care for yourself, it makes you useful for the whole city. If I protect
my life, it is precisely in the interest of the city.” 26
The techniques for the formation of bios (the techniques for governing
oneself and others), which were integrated and reconfigured by the pastoral
power of the Christian church, have constantly become more important in
the actions of the welfare state.
In capitalism, the “great chain of care and solicitude,” the “care for life”
of which Foucault speaks in relation to ancient Greece, is assumed by the
state, at the same as it sends packing the population for the slaughter in war.
To take care of oneself, to perform a work on oneself and one’s own life,
means to care for the ways of doing and speaking that are necessary for us
to occupy the places to which we are assigned in the social division of labor.
To take care of oneself is an injunction to become a subject responsible for
that function to which power has assigned us. These techniques of constitution
and control over conducts and forms of life are primarily
experienced by the “poor” today (the unemployed, those with minimal income,
poor workers etc.) The question posed by the concepts of bios,
existence, and life is not that of vitalism, but how to politicize these relations
of micropower by a transversal subjectivation. If not everything is political,
as Rancière affirms—since “in this case politics would be nowhere”—then
everything “can be politicized,” Foucault adds.
At the level of a theoretical definition of politics, Rancière seems to
neglect that which he analyzes from a historical point of view: the work on
the self, the formation of an ethos that he elsewhere describes so magnificently
in the case of the workers of the nineteenth century.
The formation of ethos, bios, and existence practiced by the cynics is not
a version of “moral discourse.” It does not constitute a new pedagogy or the
vehicle of a moral code. The formation of an ethos is at the same time a
“focal point of experience” and a “matrix of experience,” where different
forms of possible knowledge, the “normative matrices for individual
behavior,” and the “modes of virtual existence for possible subjects” are
articulated in relation to each other.
In Rancière, politics is not primarily an experience, but above all a
question of form. “What makes an action political, is not its object or the
place in which it occurs, but solely its form, which inscribes the verification
26 Ibid, 83.
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