Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ROUNDTABLE
what could the referent to “bio” be, if we take it in a different and more
affirmative way than just as a technique of management? So, this is to offer
one reason. And in this sense, I think the question “what is life” is actually
an impossible question to really take on and answer in the sense of giving an
ontological response. I want to take the kind of epistemological paradox,
which arises from our ineluctable being-in-language, very seriously (that is,
that we can’t know the world separately from what we say about it and consequently,
what we know of the world is discursively “constituted”), but,
from here, the important question for me is how one might respond to this
paradox. You can make claims about the nature of the world, but of course
we’re always operating within language and there’s a disjunction between
language and the world. Do we then respond by trying to withdraw
altogether from ontology, saying that we can’t make ontological claims, or
we can’t say anything about the world? Or do we rather respond and say,
well, we have to make these claims in some way, because they are actually
politically important claims to make? This latter approach seems more
compelling to me, though always with the caveat that the claims we may
make are culturally and historically located claims, they are limited by and
have to be understood within their own location (and where that location
may not be exactly the same as the location of the speaker). So in that sense,
I think, the point for me is not to answer the question “what is life?” but
rather to answer the question: what does the “bio” reference? What political,
social, or theoretical work is that prefix doing? And, furthermore, what
other tools are there for thinking about the “bio” that might actually give us
a more affirmative way of thinking politics than those mobilized within
biopower? It may also be worth noting here that I am not suggesting some
kind of valorization of “natural” life over and against “political” life. My
point is not about a return to the “natural,” as if that were even possible.
The question of biology and referent of the “bio” is, then, not a question of
the natural as opposed to the cultural, for example.
And as for Johanna’s point about politics: another reason for looking at
the question of the bio, is actually to try to identify what is in fact specific
about biopolitics. I mean, I think you’re right, I think the question of politics
is extremely important and I would not suggest for one moment that we
should turn to the idea of life as opposed to politics, or that we should
reduce politics to a science, and so on. But it seems to me that if we use biopolitics
without any understanding of what the “bio” actually means, then
biopolitics simply collapses into politics and the concept itself becomes
meaningless. There’s no reason to use a concept of biopolitics unless the bio
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