Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
the maxim of “fostering life or disallowing it,” and signals for Foucault the
threshold of our modernity. It entails new forms of government and social
regulation, such that power no longer operates through a violence imposed
upon subjects from above, but through a normalising regulation that
regularises, administers and fosters the life of subjects. In this new regime of
power, power incorporates itself into and takes hold of the body of the
citizen through the “normalisation of life processes.” 37 Foucault concludes,
[f]or the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected
in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible
substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of
death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control
and power’s sphere of intervention. 38
The field of biopower, then, is marked out by “the body [of the individual]
as one pole and the population as the other,” in a continual circuit of
mutual presupposition and reference. 39 This characterisation of the emergence
of biopower is perhaps so well known that some of its peculiarities are
obscured through familiarity. In the following discussion, I want to call
attention to some aspects of Foucault’s account of biopower that may open
ways of thinking beyond the current lacunae and confusions of the
literature on biopolitics.
One of the key features of Foucault’s account of biopower is the central
role he gives to normalisation as a form of social and political regulation,
suggesting at one point that “[a] normalizing society is the historical outcome
of a technology of power centered on life.” 40 As a technique of biopower,
41 normalisation is irreducible to the institutions and force of the law,
and arises from the socio-political authority of statistics. 42 Interestingly,
use biopower in the discussion of Foucault to specifically indicate a technology of power
that incorporates both discipline and a biopolitics of population.
37 Georges Canguilhem, “On Histoire de la folie as an Event,” in Arnold I. Davidson
(ed.), Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 32.
38 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 142.
39 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 253.
40 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 144.
41 Normalisation is involved in both discipline and a biopolitics of population, though
norms are mobilised differently, with different purposes, in each case. See Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:
Penguin, 1979), 177-83, and Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 57-63.
42 On the history of statistics, see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990). For a compelling account of the importance of statistics
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