Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

INTRODUCTION
them as residual and marginal, which underestimates the dynamic of
resistance, just as it overlooks that programs always contain fissures and
inconsistencies. Failure can in this sense be taken not as a clash with reality,
but as the very condition of existence for such programs (as Foucault shows
to be the case with the prison system in the nineteenth century). The third
problem is that the reluctance to engage in a purely negative critique often
leads to a complete lack of an evaluative perspective, and therefore to a
“technical” theory that duplicates its object of study; inversely, governmentality
studies have been reluctant to integrate analyses of technical and
non-human networks. Finally, the focus on the territorially sovereign
nation state, and particularly Western liberal societies, tends to underestimate
global developments and exclude thereby the possibility for the
theory itself to be altered by the inclusion of non-Western cases. All of these
problems notwithstanding, Lemke however locates a specific strength of
governmentality studies in their very heterogeneity and diversity. He
concludes by suggesting that the above problems can be overcome by a
closer connection to postcolonial theory, gender studies, and science and
technology studies.
Johanna Oksala discusses neoliberal governmentality as a specific
political ontology. The Birth of Biopolitics, she argues, should be interpreted
neither as an historical account of the rise of neoliberalism nor as an
instance of ideology critique, but rather as an analysis of how neoliberalism
constructs a particular kind of reality, with a particular regime of truth, with
its own modes of power and subjectivity. The Left, she suggests, has in a
particular way been defeated by “truth,” since any kind of extra-systemic
critique today appears as wholly irrational.
Neoliberal governmentality must be seen as both a continuation and
intensification of earlier biopolitics—the health of the markets implies the
health of the population—and, along with a new way of exercising power, it
also produces a new type of subject, with an entrepreneurial relation to the
self, extending throughout all the spheres of experience. Any effective
resistance to this regime, Oksala concludes, must therefore question the
traditional instruments of politics and proceed along all three axes of
“truth,” “power,” “subjectivity,” if, that is, it is to fundamentally change the
structure of our present governmentality.
Catherine Mills notes how the increasingly divergent accounts of biopolitics
threaten to dilute its critical power. The concept should be preserved,
she argues, but only on the condition of further clarification that bears
on what the prefix “bio” signifies. As Foucault stated, life always exceeds the
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