Biopower: Foucault and Beyond

Biopower

Biopower

Foucault and Beyond

Edited by

Vernon W. Cisney

Nicolae Morar

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Vernon W. Cisney is visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Derrida’s "Voice and Phenomenon": An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide, as well as coeditor or cotranslator of several other books. Nicolae Morar is assistant professor of philosophy and environmental studies and an associate member with the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. He is coeditor or cotranslator of several books, including Perspectives in Bioethics, Science, and Public Policy.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-22659-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-22662-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-22676-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226226767.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biopower : Foucault and beyond / edited by Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-22659-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-22662-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-22676-7 (e-book) 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. 2. Philosophy, French—20th century. 3. Biopolitics I. Cisney, Vernon W. II. Morar, Nicolae, 1979–

B2430.F724B483 2015

194—dc23

2015011975

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Biopower? Why Now?

VERNON W. CISNEY AND NICOLAE MORAR

Part I: Origins of Biopower

ONE / The Literary Birth of Biopolitics (translated by Christopher Penfield)

JUDITH REVEL

TWO / At the Origins of Biopolitics (translated by Diana Garvin)

ANTONIO NEGRI

THREE / Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers

IAN HACKING

FOUR / Biopolitics and the Concept of Life

CATHERINE MILLS

FIVE / Power and Biopower in Foucault

PAUL PATTON

Part II: The Question of Life

SIX / Foucault, Cuvier, and the Science of Life

MARY BETH MADER

SEVEN / The Archaeology of Biopower: From Plant to Animal Life in The Order of Things

JEFFREY T. NEALON

EIGHT / The Biotechnological Scala Naturae and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism: Patricia Piccinini, Jane Alexander, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña

EDUARDO MENDIETA

Part III: Medicine and Sexuality: The Question of the Body

NINE / Patient Activism and Biopolitics: Thinking through Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs

CARLOS NOVAS

TEN / The Biopolitics of HIV Prevention Discourse

DAVID M. HALPERIN

ELEVEN / Precarious Life: Butler and Foucault on Biopolitics

JANA SAWICKI

Part IV: Neoliberalism and Governmentality: The Question of the Population

TWELVE / Who’s Being Disciplined Now? Operations of Power in a Neoliberal World

TODD MAY AND LADELLE McWHORTER

THIRTEEN / Is There a Biopolitical Subject? Foucault and the Birth of Biopolitics (translated by Samantha Bankston)

FRÉDÉRIC GROS

FOURTEEN / Discordant Practices of Freedom and Power of/Lives: Three Snapshots on the Bank Effects of the Arab Uprisings

MARTINA TAZZIOLI

Part V: Biopower Today

FIFTEEN / Biopower Today

PAUL RABINOW AND NIKOLAS ROSE

SIXTEEN / A Colonial Reading of Foucault: Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves

ANN LAURA STOLER

SEVENTEEN / Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century (translated by Timothy Campbell)

ROBERTO ESPOSITO

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Nicolae and Vernon would like to express their gratitude to the following people, without whom this project would never have been possible.

First, we would like to thank our contributors for their excellent essays. They have continually supported our ambitious project and truly shaped this volume. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers. Their generous advice and suggestions for topics and contributors were indispensable in strengthening this work into a solid and rounded collection.

In addition, there are three people to whom we are deeply indebted. To Arnold Davidson, we greatly appreciate your support. You expressed faith in this project from its inception and helped us secure outstanding contributors whom, let’s face it, we otherwise would not have gotten. Thank you. Next, Daniel W. Smith, you have been with us since this project’s inception. In addition to your guidance, you have been and remain a genuine friend and an inspiration. Thank you. To Leonard Lawlor, few words can capture the gratitude that we feel for your constant support and friendship. You introduced Vernon to the concept of biopower and have advised us through the development of this project. Thank you.

Thank you to the editorial staff at the University of Chicago Press. To Elizabeth Branch Dyson, thank you for your willingness in 2010 to take a chance on two graduate students from Purdue University. Thank you also to Nora Devlin, Kelly Finefrock-Creed, Lisa Wehrle, Ryo Yamaguchi, and the countless typesetters, designers, marketers, and folks behind the scenes who have helped us bring this project to fruition.

Nicolae would like to thank Ted Toadvine, Colin Koopman, and all the members of the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory for their constant encouragements and feedback on early drafts of this book project. Special thanks also to Sebastian Big for having initiated me into reading Michel Foucault.

Vernon would like to thank Steve Gimbel, Kerry Walters, Lisa Portmess, Gary Mullen, Dan DeNicola, and Carol Priest for their support, encouragement, and friendship.

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to thank our families. Vernon would like to thank his wife, Jody, and their two children, Jacob and Hayley. Jody, for your strength, your unwavering encouragement, love, and support, I thank you; I would not be me without you. Jacob and Hayley, in addition to being two amazing people, you give me countless reasons to smile and are my constant reminders as to why I do what I do; thank you.

Nicolae is always reminded that few things in his life would have been possible without Anca’s love and endless support. Words are often poor and bounded to capture my wholehearted thank you.

Introduction: Why Biopower? Why Now?

Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar

Biopower, a phrase coined by Michel Foucault,¹ is timely in the sense that it characterizes what Foucault calls the history of the present² (which is always, at the same time, a thought of the future). Biopower exposes the structures, relations, and practices by which political subjects are constituted and deployed, along with the forces that have shaped and continue to shape modernity. But it is untimely in that its relevance is necessarily dissimulated and masked—the mechanisms of power always have a way of covering their tracks. Before we can elaborate on this concept of biopower—the very etymology of which already points us toward the emergence of life into politics—it would behoove us to look at what power itself is, or what we typically think power itself is. For the traditional model of power is precisely what Foucault’s concept of biopower assimilates and ultimately surpasses.

An Analytics of Power

What comes to mind when we think of power? Traditionally power was conceived as a commodity or a badge of honor supervening on life and the living, something one either has or lacks. Operating in a top-down manner, the bearer of power dictates, on possible penalty of death, what those not in power may and may not do. In other words, power is strictly delimiting, the conceptual model being that of the sovereign who rules over his (or her) subjects with greater and lesser degrees of legitimacy and severity. To guarantee its legitimacy, power must produce its own bodies of knowledge, its truths. Power, Foucault claims, cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.³ During the mid- to late middle ages, as tensions between the limits of secular authority and those of religious authority began to escalate, the rediscovery of the Corpus Iurus Civilis in about 1070 CE reanimated the Roman codes of juridicality and right, and served to adjudicate matters regarding the expanses and limitations of sovereign power. But whether the concepts of law and right were employed for the purposes of justifying the absolute power of the sovereign or drawing strict limits to it, and whether the sovereign is one, as in a monarchy, or many, as in a representational government, what is never in question is the nature of power relations themselves as a form of delimitation or deduction.

On this model, the relation between the sovereign and the life of his subjects is a dissymmetrical one of permissiveness and seizure. The sovereign is in a position to endanger the lives of his subjects—in cases when society is threatened, he may put them in harm’s way to defend its (or his) security; and he is also in a position to terminate their lives—in extreme cases when they blatantly transgress the laws of the sovereign or directly (or indirectly) threaten his life and the lives of his subjects. The sovereign’s power over life is thus the power to let live or to make die: "The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live [‘de faire mourir ou de laisser vivre’]. Its symbol, after all, was the sword."⁴ All of this operates under a perceived economy of subtraction, where the most visible manifestation of authority resides in the sovereign’s power to take whatever possessions he wants or needs from his subjects, up to and including their very lives: Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.⁵ The question of right, on this model, is thus always a question of how far this deductive power extends and what, if anything, constitute the rights of the subjects. However, it is always in relation to the delimiting sovereign that this question is posed: The system of right is completely centered on the king; it is, in other words, ultimately an elimination of domination and its consequences.⁶ Thus the question of power is supplemental to or supervenient on, rather than constitutive of, the question of life: For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence.⁷

The question of power, then, is traditionally one of domination, or the overextension of power’s reach. However, as Foucault rightly notes, domination occurs in myriad ways, at all levels of society: not just between de facto political rulers and subjects, but between lovers, spouses, parents and children, teachers and students, ministers and congregations, managers and employees, store clerks and customers—in short, in all relations of life. To truly get at the heart of power, therefore, requires not a general and totalizing interrogation of established systems of power, but rather close and particular analyses of the fundamental, constitutive relations and mechanisms at work in localized settings, which make the establishments of domination possible in the first place. Foucault writes, As I see it, we have to bypass or get around the problem of sovereignty . . . and the obedience of individuals who submit to it, and to reveal the problem of domination and subjugation instead of sovereignty and obedience.⁸

Against the traditional understanding of power, Foucault demonstrates that relations of power are not homogeneous commodities that one either simply has or lacks; on the contrary, power pulses and reverberates through all areas of life; he who is dominant in one situation (as perhaps a father over his children) is, in a different situation, subject (as employee and citizen). Thus, rather than power being an external force that impinges on the lives of individuals (conceived as static and atomistic elements in the system), power flows through the lives of human beings, constituting the individuals themselves: Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.⁹ In question, then, are the mechanisms through which domination and subjectivation, in all their various forms, take place.

The Emergence of Biopower

At this level of analysis emerges a remarkable shift, according to Foucault. The sovereign, deductive model of power becomes no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others.¹⁰ A more insidious and expansionary model appears (or is invented): a new mechanism of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment. It was, I believe, absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty.¹¹ This new mechanism of power applies directly to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it produces.¹² Power now appears not to limit but to provoke, purify, and disseminate force for the purposes of management and control, ramified throughout all areas of life, the expansion of which is now its raison d’être. This new form of power is working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.¹³

In this model of power, the expansion and efficiency of life, not its deduction, becomes the primary function of power, and deduction is merely an instrument in the service of expansion. Death, in and of itself, is anathema to a system of life: death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.¹⁴ Death therefore must become strictly instrumental, a sometime necessity in the service of life, a purgation of impurity or threat. Foucault calls this new form of power bio-power: "one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.¹⁵ And if, for Aristotle, human beings fundamentally are political animals, Foucault shows us that an important shift occurs with the emergence of biopower; the modern man becomes an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question."¹⁶

Biopower operates around two poles, according to Foucault. The first, arising in the seventeenth century, functions at the micro level, what Foucault calls "an anatomo-politics of the human body."¹⁷ It manifests in a host of disciplinary mechanisms and institutions: militarily, pedagogically, medically, and at the level of labor. The human body comes to be seen as a machine, complete with functions and utilities, inputs and outputs, predictabilities and precisions. Disciplinary power, as Foucault already calls it in 1975 in Discipline and Punish,¹⁸ demands and guarantees of the body its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.¹⁹ No longer does power emphasize the law as the product of an arbitrary dictate of the sovereign. Rather it functions under a different type of rule, one located in the natural realm, a norm, legitimated by the sciences.

The birth of this disciplinary form of power thus coincides historically with the multiplication and expansion of the human sciences, which are made to serve as the legitimating discourses of this new form of power: They are extraordinarily inventive when it comes to creating apparatuses to shape knowledge and expertise, and they do support a discourse, but it is a discourse that cannot be the discourse of right or a juridical discourse . . . a discourse about a natural rule, or in other words, a norm. Disciplines will define not a code of law, but a code of normalization, and they will necessarily refer to a theoretical horizon that is not the edifice of law, but the field of the human sciences.²⁰ Beneath the banner of the anatomo-political, the concepts of law and right do not disappear or cease to function; rather, the law itself increasingly serves the role of controlling, regulating, correcting, disciplining—in short, normalizing.²¹

The other pole around which biopower is organized arises later, emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century: a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary.²² This second pole incorporates the elements of disciplinary power but uses them in a new way, and to a slightly different end, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.²³ During this point in history, Foucault claims, emerges a host of disciplines and bodies of knowledge whose task is to calculate, interpret, and predict the overall health of the society writ large. The regulation and tracking of birthrates, death rates, fertility rates, economic and poverty statistics, infant mortality, average longevity, and disease, as well as all of the various factors that influence these aspects, operate within a power centered not on the individual living body but on the species-body. This Foucault identifies as a "bio-politics of the population."²⁴ These two aspects, according to Foucault, the disciplinary power mechanisms of the body and the regulatory mechanisms of the population, constitute the modern incarnation of power relations, labeled as biopower.

It is for this reason that sexuality, situated at the juncture of these two domains, becomes such a politicized issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, arguably, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well). It is something of a nexus in which these two, the health of the body and the health of society, discipline and regulation, fuse into one: whence the four great lines of attack along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries.²⁵ The first two lines of attack are summed up with the dictum in the name of regulation, discipline. The premature sexualization of children is seen to corrupt their development and thus their ability to healthily integrate into the world; therefore, it harms the very health of society itself. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was one of the more well-known and impassioned critics of childhood masturbation, famously recommending all manners of psychological manipulation and genital mutilation for both boys and girls as processes of normalization. Likewise, in the name of the overall health of the familial institution (as the cornerstone of a healthy society) came a massive increase in diagnoses of female hysteria, a broad designation assigned to nearly any ailment that troubled a woman, especially one that was considered detrimental to the female reproductive capacities. This diagnosis brought with it an invasive medicalization of the woman’s body and sexuality, including physician-prescribed pelvic massage as a regular treatment and, in some cases, a forced hysterectomy if the woman failed to be cured. The other two lines of attack accord with the inverse of the above declaration, in the name of discipline, regulation: here the intervention was regulatory in nature, but it had to rely on the demand for individual disciplines and constraints.²⁶ Birth control became a highly controversial topic of public discourse in the late seventeenth century, continuing into the twentieth, as women more widely and effectively began to use barrier methods of birth control. The dissemination of information about birth control as well as the legality of its methods fluctuates in tandem with societal attitudes toward population as a whole. For the majority in this debate, a robust population (for reasons such as economic or moral) is seen as integral to the overall health of society; hence, numerous legal restrictions regulated birth control information or means during this period.²⁷ Finally, the psychiatric pathologization of sexual perversions emerged as the study of sex in the form of a psychological phenomenon, but this brings the individual sexual practices of human beings directly into the domain of abnormality and corrective intervention.

These two poles of biopower (discipline and regulation), however, remain somewhat distinct throughout the eighteenth century, Foucault claims. When they finally unite, it is not in the form of a totalizing theory but in the form of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power in the nineteenth century.²⁸ A new form of political and social organization emerges in the nineteenth century, one dependent on the pushing to the limits of all human capacities. It demands social hierarchy, the machinization of bodies, and a vast crop of willing subjects. Its name—industrial capitalism: the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both of these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.²⁹ Biopower seeks the consistent and ongoing increase in the forces of life without thereby suffering the loss of control over these forces—power in the service of vitality. All the societal institutions, therefore—the family, the church, the education system, the university, the military, and so on—normalize, structure, optimize, and subordinate the forces of individuals to enter them into the machine of the economic system, to make them productive members of society who will happily defend it to the death if necessary. Life, as both subject and object, has thereby emerged into the political.

Population, Security, and Governmentality

Interestingly enough, it is Foucault’s more in-depth engagement with the concept of population that will ultimately result in a significant terminological shift on his part. It is important to note—given the tremendous dissemination of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics by theorists following in the footsteps of Foucault—the durational brevity of Foucault’s own engagement with and employment of these terms specifically. By 1978 he drops the language of biopower and of biopolitics, or rather resituates their conceptual apparatuses within the context of the broader notion of what he calls governmentality. This concept he understands primarily as the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as it essential technical instrument.³⁰ As noted above,³¹ Foucault introduces the concept of biopolitics in a 1974 lecture in Rio de Janeiro, and the concept of biopower first appears in the context of his final lecture of the Spring semester, 1976, delivered at the Collège de France on March 17; this is followed by the somewhat extended treatment of the concepts of biopolitics and of biopower in part 5 of The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Foucault then took a sabbatical in the 1976–77 academic year, returning to lecturing on January 11, 1978, and giving to his lectures for the 1977–78 year the title of Security, Territory, Population. The very first line of the opening lecture begins in the following way: This year I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power.³² This announcement therefore heralds explicitly the reopening of the question of biopower, which he had launched for the first time in his last lecture almost two years prior as if to suggest that the lecture series on which he was about to embark was conceived as a direct continuation of a problematic that had been merely announced and whose substance had yet to be plumbed. This suspicion is further provoked by the fact that he takes up, point by point, what he considers to be five guiding intentions of the analyses to follow, many of which circulate around his earlier articulation of the concept of biopower itself: (1) the analysis does not propose to offer a general theory of what power is, as such; (2) relations of power are not supervenient upon relations of production, relations of family, sexual relations, etc.; rather, mechanisms of power are an intrinsic part of all these relations, and, in a circular way, are both their effect and cause³³; (3) given the extent and domains of these analyses (economics, historical formations, etc.), they may branch into the framework of a general analysis of society, but ought not be confused with history or with economics, as Foucault’s analyses concern, he says, only the politics of truth,³⁴ which, he claims, is the primary recognizable definition of philosophy for him; (4) the analyses are meant to offer only a conditional imperative³⁵—if resistance is sought, here are the trajectories along which it may be pursued; that is, the analysis is meant to propose merely avenues, not particular directives, for political resistance; (5) the one and only categorical imperative he offers—never engage in theoretical polemics, as this serves only to severely exhaust the relation between struggle and truth. These five threads, specifically when they speak of the pervasive relationality of power that would subvert any theorization of power as such, echo quite closely the earlier formulation of the concept of biopower.

It is in the context of these five general threads that Foucault introduces in the lectures the notion of security, which he understands as the structured efforts to rigorously study and manipulate the probabilities and statistics having to do with the phenomena detrimental to the overall health of a society. Generally speaking, these apparatuses determine what are tolerable and intolerable levels of these phenomena, to assess what are the tipping points at which the costs of restricting the phenomena outweigh the benefits, and ultimately, to stabilize these probabilities within acceptable ranges. In short, the strategies of security, Foucault says, aim to manage forces and circulations (pathological, economic, sexual, pedagogical, disciplinary, etc.) in a society, by way of direct intervention on the given milieu occupied by the individuals of the society. In this way, instead of a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, one establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded.³⁶ Foucault articulates the distinction between the three specific models of power relations: let’s say then that sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework.³⁷

By all appearances, therefore, in the inaugural lecture of Foucault’s returning semester, he is on track to continue with a more thorough explication of the radical concept of biopower that he had, by this time, merely introduced, doing so within the framework of an analysis of security (which at this time sounds quite close to the description of, or at least a component of, the biopolitics of the population, discussed above). Yet, following the opening declaration of intent of the 1978 lectures, the terms biopower and biopolitics are almost entirely absent from the remainder of the lectures. Furthermore, just three weeks after the opening lecture, on February 1, 1978, Foucault makes the following startling claim: Basically, if I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title, I certainly would not have chosen ‘security, territory, population.’ What I would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of ‘governmentality.’³⁸ What then, we should ask, happens in these interim weeks? Why does Foucault announce on January 11 that he intends to study biopower, but then suggest on February 1 that the title for the lectures he is currently giving is no longer appropriate and should be replaced with an emphasis on governmentality, a concept that he has only just introduced? There are a couple of important points to make in response to these inquiries.

A tremendously significant, albeit subtle, shift occurs in Foucault’s terminology between the first and second lectures from the 1977–78 year, regarding the relation between the individual, multiplicity, and population. In the context of cursory comments on the spatiality of the three specific models of power relations, Foucault suggests that one might perhaps be tempted to differentiate the spatiality of the three in the following way: sovereignty acts on territory, discipline acts on bodies, and security acts on populations. This schematization, though tidy and neat, does not quite hold together, and Foucault dismisses it at the end. While sovereignty, it is true, is a model that is through and through inscribed with territoriality, it is nevertheless the case, Foucault thinks, that the effective, real, daily operations of the actual exercise of sovereignty point to a certain multiplicity, but one which is treated as a multiplicity of subjects, or [as] the multiplicity of a people.³⁹ Sovereignty therefore, though it is essentially inseparable from a notion of territory, nevertheless operates on the multiplicity of the sovereign’s subjects. In an analogous way, the same can be said, Foucault thinks, of the disciplinary mechanisms discussed above. Discipline, it is true, intervenes directly on the forces of the body itself to challenge and optimize them. At the same time, it does so precisely to the end of situating that particular body within a hierarchy that precedes it. Thus the disciplinary model as well operates on a group of individuals as on a multiplicity: The individual is much more a particular way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material from which it is constructed.⁴⁰ Hence, the basic spatial distinction that would say that sovereignty acts on territory while discipline acts on individuals simply does not hold up, as both, Foucault argues, act on multiplicities—a multiplicity of subjects in the case of the sovereign and a multiplicity of hierarchically organized individuals in the case of discipline. What then of security?

It is here that the major shift between the lectures of January 11 and January 18 takes place. On January 11, Foucault claims, So sovereignty and discipline, as well as security, can only be concerned with multiplicities.⁴¹ Therefore, the population, which is the object of security, is in this first lecture considered a multiplicity, or an organization of the multiple as the multiple. By the following week of January 18, however, Foucault comes to characterize the population as precisely not a multiplicity—the multiplicity in the model of security comes to be that inconsequential group that falls outside the population, while the population itself will be seen as a newly emergent political subject unto itself, an individual we might say, of a different sort. Foucault makes this discovery in the context of an analysis of the phenomenon of, and of the discursive engagements surrounding, scarcity.

In the January 18 lecture, Foucault writes, I would like now to resume this analysis of apparatuses of security with another example in order to pick out something that is no longer the relationship to space and the milieu, but the relationship of government to the event. I will take straightaway the example of scarcity.⁴² This mention of government announces the avalanche of terminological usages of concepts having to do with government, governing, and ultimately, governmentality. The phenomenon of scarcity, the insufficiency of food resources to meet basic subsistence needs, is problematic in the context of the discussion of population, for a number of reasons. First, scarcity is a phenomenon such that it tends toward self-perpetuation. As it worsens, the phenomenon of scarcity becomes also a problem for the strategies of power, inasmuch as these heightened moments of crisis and need tend to produce the inevitable outcome of revolt: So it is the scourge of the population on one side, and, on the other, catastrophe, crisis if you like, for government.⁴³ Thus, scarcity comes to be seen as an event that the government of population must prepare for and avoid. However, to do so, government through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will employ a system of legality and a system of regulations, which was basically intended to prevent food shortage, that is to say, not just halt it or eradicate it when it occurs, but literally to prevent it and ensure that it cannot take place at all.⁴⁴ The strategies and measures employed impose strict regulations on the prices of grain, on the amount of land that can be cultivated, on the exportation of grain, and on its storage. The hope in the use of these strategies is to produce enough food to feed the townspeople (but only enough), such that the peasants (who produce the grain) are paid as little as possible (but not so little that they can no longer afford to plant a sufficient amount of grain) and the townspeople can be fed for as low a cost as possible, thereby staving off in advance the phenomenon of scarcity and, more important, the revolt that would be sure to follow.

This is the theory behind the system, but unfortunately, the contingency and intervention of natural forces will ensure, historically, that the theory does not go as planned. The actual effect of the implementation of these strategies is that the minimization of prices in fact severely impedes the planting of grain on the part of the peasantry. When there is a surplus of grain, the already-low prices are driven further down—a contingency that the power structure cannot anticipate or prevent—thus, the peasantry who produce the grain do not break even financially, which thereby further limits the amount of grain they can afford to plant the following season. This effect is intensified when, due to unpredictable climatic variations, however seemingly slight they may be, the harvest yields less than was predicted. In short, the very limitations and restrictions designed to prevent scarcity constantly run the risk of producing the very scarcity it sought to prevent.

But the very reason that scarcity was seen as the intolerable event that must be prevented in advance by legislative means was the governmental fear of revolt in the face of widespread famine. With the emergence of political economists of the eighteenth century, the tendency toward revolt will come to be seen as engendered precisely by the abrupt widespread recognition of pervasive scarcity: it was precisely this kind of immediate solidarity, the massiveness of the event, that constituted its character as a scourge.⁴⁵ Therefore, with the freedom of commerce, proposed by these political economists, there will no doubt, indeed necessarily, be periods of scarcity. But the scarcity that occurs will not be like the scarcity that arises, severely and abruptly, under the conditions of a strictly regulated market. Rather, the scarcity that will arise under the freedom of commerce will be more gradual, gaining slowly in intensity and severity over time, as opposed to the abrupt sort of events that produce mob mentality. Before it gets too extreme, the scarcity will be ameliorated by the very forces that helped produce it. The loss of the unlucky few who succumb to the scarcity is natural and necessary, and it secures the avoidance of scarcity by the population writ large. By allowing these naturally occurring periods of scarcity to take hold of a small number of individuals, the scarcity for the population itself can be, by and large, drastically reduced. Foucault writes, So there will no longer be any scarcity in general, on condition that for a whole series of people, in a whole series of markets, there was some scarcity, some dearness, some difficulty in buying wheat, and consequently some hunger, and it may well be that some people die of hunger after all. But by letting these people die of hunger one will be able to make scarcity a chimera and prevent it occurring in this massive form of the scourge typical of previous systems.⁴⁶

Hence the terminological shift—where in the previous week, Foucault had suspected that the power models of sovereignty, of discipline, and of security had all operated on multiplicities, with the birth of the population, Foucault now thinks, a new political subject/object is born. It is no longer a multiplicity because it is not at all the individual, nor is it groups of individuals, who matters under the model of security; rather it is the population itself. The multiplicity is precisely the name given to those individuals who fall outside the population, the unlucky ones who are its byproducts. Hence under the model of security, we

have two levels of phenomena therefore. Not a level of the collective and a level of the individual, for after all it is not just an individual who will die, or at any rate suffer, from this scarcity. But we will have an absolutely fundamental caesura between a level that is pertinent for the government’s economic-political action, and this is the level of the population, and a different level, which will be that of the series, the multiplicity of individuals, who will not be pertinent, or rather who will only be pertinent to the extent that, properly managed, maintained, and encouraged, it will make possible what one wants to obtain at the level that is pertinent. The multiplicity of individuals is no longer pertinent, the population is.⁴⁷

Therefore the population emerges as a political being unto itself, and it is at the level of the population that the strategies of security intervene, while the multiplicity, though a necessary component of the strategies of security (inasmuch as its exclusion makes possible the security of the population), is not its direct object.

We could perhaps suggest (and this will be one of the topics addressed in this volume), that when Foucault comes to in fact analyze the biopolitics of the population, which had previously been subsumed beneath the general banner of biopower (along with its companion pole of the anatomo-politics of the body), that what he discovers is that there is a more drastic difference between the objects of the disciplinary model and the model of security than he had perhaps previously thought. Hence Foucault perhaps no longer believed it obvious that the models of discipline and security fit so tidily and comfortably together beneath the general banner of biopower, that the object of anatomo-politics and the object of biopolitics were so distinct as to justify a terminological shift such that, while the disciplinary model is no doubt still operative (as we should remind ourselves that for Foucault, a new regime of power always subsumes and incorporates the strategies of previous models), it is so only in support of the health and well-being of the population, now understood as its own sort of political animal.

The language of governmentality to which Foucault turns at this point is discovered in what he characterizes as a flourishing development of a significant series of treatises that do not exactly present themselves as advice to the prince, nor yet as political science, but which, between advice to the prince and treatises of political science, are presented as arts of government.⁴⁸ It is in the sixteenth century, Foucault claims, in the shift between the sovereign model and the model of security, that the general problem of government arises, and this in a multitude of forms: (1) the government of oneself, in the form of a return to an emphasis on Stoic thought;⁴⁹ (2) the government of souls and of human conduct, in the form of pastoral power; (3) the government of children, apparent by an explosion of texts centered on pedagogical strategies; (4) finally, the government of the state. How to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept to be governed, how to be the best possible governor?⁵⁰ It is important to note that the literature on government from this period does not treat the concept of government from the standpoint of sovereignty, according to Foucault. Even when it is ostensibly discussing the administration of the sovereign, it does so nevertheless in terms of the right arrangement of things—resources, wealth, the people, and so on. The art of government, therefore, presupposes a multitude of various ends, each suited specifically to their unique objects: the government will have to ensure that the greatest possible amount of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population can increase.⁵¹ These discourses on governmentality operate within a framework that accords quite naturally with the delimitations of the sovereign model of power that had helped shape the language of biopower for Foucault. In addition, the areas over which government functions (economy, resources, health, security, population, crime, etc.) are well suited to the analyses of the statistical model, burgeoning in the eighteenth century and central to Foucault’s earlier articulation of the biopolitics of the population. Thus, even as Foucault continues to promise an analysis of biopolitics and biopower through the 1977–78 and 1978–79 lectures, his terminology shifts progressively to the language of governmentality.

Objections and Replies

At the same time, the discoveries that Foucault makes with the concept of biopower have resulted in conceptual apparatuses that occupy his work for the remainder of his life. Some of these discoveries are as follows: (1) a model of power relations that is essentially expansionary of the forces of life, rather than delimiting; (2) the ubiquity of power relations throughout all other modes and types of relations; (3) the persistence with which new models of power employ the fear of sovereign power for the purposes of maintaining insidious control. All in all, these conceptual apparatuses, as the diversity of contributions in this volume attests, have not gone away—they continue to operate to this day throughout all areas of life.

Obvious objections present themselves to us. First, why does sovereign power, now for the most part relegated to a subordinate role, continue to guide our understandings of the political? Put otherwise, if biopower has indeed become the pervasive modern model of power, as Foucault claims that it has, why is it not recognizable as such? Foucault provides two responses. The first is that the very persistence of the conceptual model of sovereignty continues to serve as a critical tool against the reemergence of sovereign power itself. In other words, if biopower, first in its disciplinary form and subsequently in its regulatory form, is indeed to supplant sovereign power, it needs a critical apparatus to ever keep sovereignty at bay, and this apparatus is the very concept of sovereignty itself, serving as the constant reminder of the dangers of the excesses of power. Second, above we stated that the relevance of biopower is necessarily masked, for the sake of its preservation. In modern, liberal forms of government, the understanding of power as sovereignty persists, but in a dispersed form. The state is a sovereign, but one in which its subjects, by virtue of their being free citizens or self-governing agents of the polis, are themselves understood to be sovereign. Sovereignty as the perceived model of power continues, but it is democratized such that each participant is rational, reasonable, responsible, and capable of making good decisions, of exercising one’s own sovereignty, so long as she does not impose her will on another sovereign individual within the system. Thus, believing ourselves free, or sovereign, in this manner, the de facto mechanisms of domination elude us, and we do not recognize our own subjugation; or, put otherwise, we do not recognize the ways in which our desires and our very choices are constituted by the relations within the system itself.

Second objection: if this model of power is bent on generating forces, expanding and monitoring life, how is it that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period in which the two poles of biopower were actively concretizing into an organic whole, exemplifies the most extreme nationalistic discourses that would produce the most totalizing slaughters the world has ever seen? Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and so on are all embodiments of this so-called modern form of power focused on life. Is this not problematic for Foucault’s argument? On the contrary, Foucault will claim that this economy of death is merely the dark underside of a power over life, its logical extension. With the emergence of the modern nation-state following the Peace of Westphalia in the twilight of the middle ages, the bellicosity that had permeated the daily relations of society is relatively marginalized. Warfare becomes more centralized, and a permanent, professional military comes to be formed. Furthermore, the state apparatus itself provides a more consistent level of stability, such that bellicose violence, when it does occur, does so at the limits or frontiers of the state. Paradoxically, this marginalization of the role of warfare in daily life is contemporaneous, Foucault claims, with the emergence of a new form of discourse, one that sees war as the constitutive element of established institutions: we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war.⁵² In the throes of this war, one must choose sides: A binary structure runs through society.⁵³ This war is believed to be a permanent one, stretching back to a social organization’s origins, extending through the modern age in an insidious and subterranean form, and culminating in a decisive final battle that is yet to come and for which we must prepare. This discourse is thus motivated by mythical elements, imbued with glorious notions of good and evil, and heroic notions of sacrifice, bloodshed, and ultimate triumph. The binary structure of society is one in which the good, or the pure is threatened from within by the bad or impure, and in this struggle there can be only one victor. It is not difficult to see, then, where this line of reasoning leads Foucault: The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war.⁵⁴

Whether in its explicitly biological form or its socially (or even culturally or religiously) motivated form, the interpretation of the whole of a society’s history in terms of internal struggle, between the true and the impostor, who would seek to usurp the