Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

THOMAS LEMKE
The principal focus of the governmentality literature on the governing of
humans (and the simultaneous analytical lack of interest in technical
artifacts and non-human nature) as well as the “social” as the unquestioned
plane of reference goes back to Foucault’s work, where government is
mostly understood as the guidance of human conduct. 51 However, once
again a more fruitful reading is possible. In the 1978 lecture series from the
Collège de France, Foucault refers to a definition of government provided
by Guillaume de la Perrière in an early modern tract on the art of government.
Here, government is conceived of as the “right disposition of
things.”It is concerned with a “complex of men and things”: “men in their
relationships, bonds, and complex involvement with things like wealth,
resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its borders, qualities,
climate, dryness, fertility, and so on.” 52 From this perspective, government
not only focuses on governing humans and the relations that exist between
humans. It also refers to a more comprehensive reality that includes the
material environment and the specific arrangements and technical networks
that relate the human and the non-human. This conceptual shift not only
makes it possible to extend the territory of government, multiplying the
elements and the relations it consists of; it also initiates a reflexive
perspective that takes into account the diverse ways in which the boundaries
between the human and the non-human world are negotiated, enacted
and stabilized. Furthermore, this theoretical stance makes it possible to
analyze the sharp distinction drawn between, on the one hand, the natural
and technical from the social on the other, as itself a distinctive instrument
and effect of governmental rationalities and technologies. 53
The fact that the boundaries between bodies, collectives and institutions
are permanently undermined, reconfigured and transformed by socio-
technical arrangements, there are some important links to the work of STS scholars,
especially to actor network theory and Callon’s and Latour’s idea of a sociology of
translation; see Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, 49; Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose,
Governing the Present, 33-4. Furthermore, there exist some innovative projects to
combine science and technology studies and an analytics of government: see e.g. Andrew
Barry, Political Machines; Lene Koch and Mette Nordahl Svendsen, “Providing Solutions
– Defining Problems: The Imperative of Disease Prevention in Genetic Counselling,”
Social Science and Medicine 60 (2005): 823-32; Kristin Asdal, “On Politics and the Little
Tools of Democracy: A Down-to-Earth Approach,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of
Social Theory 16 (2008): 11-26.
51 See e.g. The Birth of Biopolitics, 2.
52 Security, Territory, Population, 96
53 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
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