Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
actually references something that makes it distinct from other forms of
politics. So in that sense we ought to try and make sense of the term, or stop
using it. I personally think it’s a valuable way of thinking about some of the
things that happen today, so I think it’s worth trying to make some sense of it.
Finally, let me make one last point in relation to the question of
freedom, which in any case is not unrelated to the issue of the meaning of
“bio.” I agree with some of the points that have been made so far. Parenthetically,
Nikolas Rose makes some nice points about the difficulty of
enforced freedom in his book Powers of Freedom; there he develops the idea
of being obliged to be free under neoliberalism. Given this obligation to be
free, the question, it seems to me, is not “how do we resist freedom?” but
what work does “freedom” do, why this freedom and not that, and how can
the concept be mobilized differently? So the question is not “how do we
resist freedom?” but “how do we rethink what freedom can be?,” such that
we can enact freedom in a different way. And it seems to me that there are
actually resources even within the liberal tradition that might help in this
regard. I’m thinking, for example, of Isaiah Berlin and the distinction he
draws between negative and positive freedom. Of course, Berlin’s
distinction is confused and problematic in various ways, but it might nevertheless
be useful. Negative freedom is typically seen as a lack of external
restraint that relates both to property and choice, and positive freedom is a
kind of autonomy or mastery. But positive freedom can be turned towards a
kind of practice of the self, if you like, a kind of making of oneself. This is
essentially what positive freedom would entail. Understood in this way,
freedom has to be something other than just the supposed expansion of
choice—which is often little more than a form of abandonment—and a
correlative insecurity; this demands that conditions are in place to allow
people the space and capacity for self-formation.
So I think there are ways of appropriating concepts, and doing so even
from within those traditions that one might actually want to oppose; sometimes
one can find tools for that opposition as well. This would be quite in
line with Foucault’s “rule” about the “tactical polyvalence of discourse.”
Finally, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that biology is very much part of
biopolitics. But the point is to look at the tradition of biology and try to find
resources there for thinking about life in a different way. Or, perhaps to
look at the tradition of liberalism and try to find resources there for a
different kind of freedom from the one enforced upon us.
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