Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, POLITICS, AND FAILURE
technical arrangements points to another shortcoming of governmentality
studies. While this theoretical perspective has been extremely helpful in
displacing the idea of the state as the natural and coherent center of power
so as to study the plural and heterogeneous character of governmental
rationalities and technologies, it is mostly the territorially sovereign nation
state that serves as the implicit or explicit frame of reference in the governmentality
literature. There is rarely any consideration given to how transformations
of government on a national level are linked up with international
developments or to how the appearance of new actors on a global
or European scale is paralleled by a shift of the competences of the nation
state. 54 The limits of this approach make it difficult to investigate new forms
of government, indicated by the increasing significance of international,
supranational and transnational organizations like the UN, IMF and World
Bank. Furthermore, the approach does not appear to account for the new
role of transnational alliances in Nongovernmental Organizations. As James
Ferguson and Akhil Gupta rightly stress, it is necessary to extend an
analytics of government to include modes of government constituted on a
transnational and global scale. They criticize the way in which
institutions of global governance such as the IMF and the WTO are
commonly seen as being simply “above” national states, much as states
were discussed vis-à-vis the grassroots. Similarly, the “global” is often
spoken of as if it were simply a superordinate scalar level that encompasses
nation-states just as nation-states were conceptualized to encompass
regions, towns, and villages. 55
Since the turn of the century, recent discussions surrounding “transnational”
or “global governmentality” show scholars to be already rethinking and
questioning spatial as well as scalar framings of sovereign states—too often
taken for granted in the literature on governmentality. 56
54 For a notable exception to this general tendency, see Andrew Barry, “The European
Community and European Government: Harmonization, Mobility and Space,” Economy
& Society 22(3) (1993): 314-26, and Political Machines.
55 James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of
Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29(4) (2002): 981-1002, cit. at 990.
56 See Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing International
Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004), and “Globalization as Governmentality,”
Alternatives 29 (2004): 495-514; Richard Warren Perr and Bill Maurer (eds.),
Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity (Minneapolis:
University of Minneapolis Press, 2003); Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds.), Global
Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004); Stuart Elden, “Governmentality, Calculation, Territory,” Environment
49