Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

BIOPOLITICAL LIFE
Foucault suggests that normalisation works in opposing ways in discipline
and a biopolitics of population. In the former, infractions of the norm are
produced as a consequence of the prior application of the norm, insofar as
the phenomenal particularity of an individual is itself identified and calibrated
through the application of a norm. Normalisation produces individuals
as the necessary mode and counterpart of the operation of norms, that
is, as a material artefact of power. 43 In a biopolitics of population, Foucault
suggests that norms are mobilised in exactly the opposite way, insofar as
“the normal comes first and the norm is deduced from it.” The biopolitics
of populations, and the apparatuses of security that Foucault identifies as
crucial to it, involves “a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different
curves of normality, and the operation of normalisation consists in
establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality
and in acting to bring the most unfavourable into line with the most
favourable.” 44 Given these different accounts of the modes of operation of
normalisation at work in biopower, detailed studies of the mobilisation of
norms in regard to specific instances of the management of life processes
today are required. How, for instance, are norms formulated and applied in
relation to human reproduction, including contemporary uses of genetic
and reproductive screening technologies such as pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis and ultrasound?
A precept of such detailed studies should be that in the case of ourselves
as living beings, social and vital norms are simultaneously inseparable and
irreducible; they do not determine each other, but neither can one be
determined in the absence of the other. This condition of living in two
worlds at one and the same time points to the ambivalence in the concept of
life, where its meaning is often determined in its accompanying qualification,
as, for instance, biological or social. As I noted earlier, Agamben sees
such qualifications as themselves part of the operation of biopolitics, and
because of this he resists any engagement with biological conceptions of life.
Aristotle provides his starting point and target for thinking about life,
especially the distinction between nutritive life (zoe) and political life (bios).
However, this reveals a certain anachronism on Agamben’s part. In
Foucault’s view, biopower is intimately related to the appearance of the
biological in the sphere of politics; but biology, as a “discipline” or regime of
for Foucault, see Mary Beth Mader, Sleights of Reason: Norm, Bisexuality, Development
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
43 See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184.
44 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 63.
87