Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, POLITICS, AND FAILURE
marginal. However, opposition and struggles do not only take place in an
interval “between” programs and their “realization”; they are not limited to
some kind of negative energy or obstructive capacity. Rather than “distorting”
the “original” plans, they are instead always-already part of them, actively
contributing to “compromises,” “fissures” and “incoherencies” constitutive of
such programs. Thus, an analytics of government must take into account the
“breaks” or “gaps” interior to programs—viewing them not as signs of their
failure but as the very condition of their existence. 31
There is a second tendency in the governmentality literature that
contrasts and complements the first. Many authors have stressed the importance
of “failure,” regarding government as a permanently failing operation.
32 Failure stands here for the collision between program and reality.
While this reading rightly subverts the idea of a closed and coherent
program or idealized scheme—in the stress that it places on the fragility and
the dynamic aspect of government—the focus on failure is nonetheless
somewhat ambivalent. As Pat O’Malley remarks, failure is “not an intrinsic
property of an event so much as it is a property of a program. To think in
terms of failure puts the emphasis on the status of the collision from the
programmer’s viewpoint, and consequently reduces resistance to a negative
externality.” 33 While “failure” points to the incompleteness and contingencies
of governmental programs, it inadvertently reduces the role of
opposition, struggle and conflict to that of obstruction and refusal. For
many studies of governmentality contestation is not part of the programs—
and its role remains purely negative and limited to resistance. As a consequence,
the constructive (and not only obstructive) role of struggles, and
the ways in which opposition and rule interact, tend not to be analyzed. 34
31 See Lorna Weir, “Recent Developments in the Government of Pregnancy,” Economy &
Society 25(3) (1996): 373-92; Pat O’Malley, “Indigenous Governance,” Economy &
Society 25(3) (1996): 310-26; Thomas Lemke, “Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien”;
Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve.
32 See Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham, Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as
Governance (London: Pluto Press 1994); Jeff Malpas and Gary Wickham, “Governance
and Failure: On the Limits of Sociology,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology
31(3) (1995): 37-50; Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (2008) Governing the Present, 35
33 Pat O’Malley, “Indigenous Governance,” 311.
34 Andrew Barry notes that the notion of “resistance” provides only an impoverished
idea of the dynamics of contestation and opposition: “Following Foucault’s own work,
there has been a lack of interest in the analysis of study of political conflict, and a
tendency to resort, in the absence of any developed account, to the notion of ‘resistance’
to understand such conflicts.” Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological
Society (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 199.
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