Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
rights, etc), his method is “nominalist,” as he said on many occasions. 21 The
point here is that the doctrine of liberty, when seen within the strategic field
of political economy, is a way to extract utility, a material and intellectual
surplus value, from the individual, or rather, to extract this value through
the individual as a grid for the interpretation and governing of reality. In
biopolitical terms, this means that the activities of the state will be related to
a “life” that always precedes and overflows it, and where this surplus has its
origin. On this level there is no contradiction, rather a strategic complementarity,
so that freedom (the spontaneity of acting that must be left to
itself) and the deployment of apparatuses of security (which themselves
include and even multiply disciplinary technologies) increase and reinforce
each other: the individual can be discovered as the locus and source of
rights and actions, as a new type of political subject that must be given a
calculated latitude in order for there to be an increase in productivity. Such
a situation comes about through the involuntary interplay of freedoms—the
doctrine of “laissez faire,” which as its correlate has an “invisible hand” that
guides them. 22
This is the form of governing that provides the impetus for modern
industrial societies, and Foucault underlines that we are still within its grip.
After the initial summaries of the preceding lecture courses, Foucault then
makes a leap into the twentieth century, as if to demonstrate the continued
relevance of his earlier discussion; the transition however remains somewhat
abrupt, and whether the move into the present is an aside that leads
him astray, or in fact provides the ultimate verification of the earlier
historical analyses, is a matter of dispute. 23
21 See for instance “Questions of Method” (1980) in Burchell, Gordon and Miller (eds.)
The Foucault Effect, where he speaks of “the effect on historical knowledge of a
nominalist critique itself arrived at by way of a historical analysis” (86).
22 In his analysis of Adam Smith, Foucault rejects the quasi-theological interpretation
often given of the invisible hand, and instead stresses its invisibility, which points to the
”naturally opaque and non-totalizable quality of economic processes” as a way to “disqualify
the political sovereign” (BB, 282-83); economics is a ”discipline without God” (282).
23 We could note that the whole of the nineteenth century and all of neoclassical economics
disappear from Foucault’s view, and Keynesianism and the welfare state are
treated solely as enemies of liberalism, which provides a picture that is far too selective
even if liberalism as such is the main issue. For a critique of these elisions, see Francesco
Guala’s review of The Birth of Biopolitics, in Economy and Philosophy 22 (2006). On the
other hand, Guala notes, “economics looks more like a Foucauldian discipline now than
it did when these lectures were delivered at the Collège de France” (439). See also the
comments by Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in
Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” Theory Culture Society, Vol. 26, No. 6 (2009): 247.
In fact, the welfare state, especially in its Social-Democratic versions, in many respects
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