Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary NeoLiberalism Debates
Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication, Creative
Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Australia
ABSTRACT
Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original
reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the “Chicago School” or authors such
as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose descriptor, explanatory
device and basis for social critique. This presentation evaluates Michel Foucault’s 1978-
79 lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he used the term neoliberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural theory.
It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology
in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of
liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation
of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and more comparative than more recent
contributions, and points towards an attempt to theorise comparative historical models of
liberal capitalism.
KEYWORDS
Neo-liberalism; Foucault; governmentality; markets; enterprise.
WORD COUNT: 9,154 words (excluding front-matter, footnotes and bibliography).
PDF https://eprints.qut.edu.au/39575/3/39575.pdf
Saturday, July 11, 2020
The Count of Psyche : The birth of bio-politics and bio-ethics in early modern China
Joyce C. H. Liu
P LONG READ THIS IS AN EXCERPT
Plan
Texte intégral
[Vitalpolitik is] “a policy of life, which is not essentially orientated to increased earnings and reduced hours of work, like traditional social policy, but which takes cognizance of the worker’s whole vital situation, his real, concrete situation, from morning to night and from night to morning,” material and moral hygiene, the sense of property, the sense of social integration, etcetera, being in his view as important as earnings and hours of work.
Rüstow, quoted by F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 106; re-quoted by Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 157n.
Rüstow, quoted by F. Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale, p. 106; re-quoted by Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 157n.
Political economy … is not a system for controlling men’s actions, but for discovering how men are induced by their natural propensities to act.
John Hill Burton’s Chambers’s Educational Course: Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction, p. 49, emphasis mine.
John Hill Burton’s Chambers’s Educational Course: Political Economy for Use in Schools, and for Private Instruction, p. 49, emphasis mine.
1This essay examines the complicit hidden ties between the rise of liberalist economic subject and the discursive mode of domination of bio-ethical life in modern China. In late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there emerged a wide spread nexus of discourse related to the formulation of a powerful psyche-force of the new people for modern China. This mode of discursive formulation presents on the one hand the psyche that is an autonomous and free agent in the line of production for the individual’s own interest, while at the same time the psyche force is described as a countable, calculable, correctable, controllable and utilizable moral force or capital for the interest of the nation and the coming civil society. The individual at this converging point both as the liberalist political economic agent and as the ethical-calculable nationalist moral subject is then placed within the nationalist project of cultivation, training and correction. The aim of this essay is to answer the question why, in the Chinese context historically and culturally, the modern subject is so prone to the domination of the nationalist sentiments. I would like to argue that, long before the May Fourth intellectuals’ efforts to awake the enlightenment movement in the 1919, the mode of a governable and calculable modern subject had been established through the revolutionary intellectuals’ discursive responses to the contemporary world. It is what I called the moments of the birth of ethical-bio-politics in early modern China. In order to probe effectively into the complexity of this issue, I need to first run through the main argument in Foucault’s book The The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. I consider Fouault’s lectures of this year a significant link to his later lectures on the ethical subject and the hermeneutics of subject that point to the ambiguous problems of bio-politics of today.
1. The crossroads of political economy and the rise of new civil society
2In Foucault’s lectures during 1978-1979 on the birth of biopolitics, the double movement of the mechanism of liberalist political economic is closely studied and localized: on the one hand, it relies on the individual’s volunteering and autonomous commitment with his free will to work and to exercise his potential; one the other hand, it takes the entire life of the individual, including the physical and moral hygiene, into account for the management and production for the enterprise. According to Foucault, starting from the eighteenth century, there is the attempt in the discourse of political economy to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population. Foucault takes liberalism as a principle and method of the rationalization of the exercise of government, a rationalization that obeys “the internal rule of maximum economy.” (Foucault 2008: 318) Even though liberal thought starts from the civil society instead of the state, the question behind it is how to govern. In this line of thought, government becomes necessary and the justification of its existence defines the ends it pursues with regard to the particular society. The technology of a particular government and its forms of schematization is actually derived from the rationalization of the composition of that society. When the logic of political economy is superimposed on the logic of social governmentality, it gives rise to what Foucault called the “birth of biopolitics.”
3The intriguing problem about the liberalist economic subject or the economic man, homo oeconomicus, is that, although it is let alone to do his own work in the economic system, following the principle of laisser-faire, his is “eminently governable.” (Foucault 2008: 270) The individual would pursue his own interest, but his interest has already been posited in the way that it would converge spontaneously with the interest of others. Homo oeconomicus, according to Foucault, is actually the person “who accepts reality” and therefore “someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment,” and consequently “the correlate of a governmentality.” (Foucault 2008: 270-271) The paradox of the liberalist economic man Foucault presents in his studies points to the fact that, instead of an atom of freedom, the home oeconomicus is already a certain type of subject who precisely enable an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy. This problem of home oeconomicus leads Foucault to reconsider the concept of subject introduced by English empiricism, that is, a subject not defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of body and soul, or by the presence of something marked by the Fall or sin, but a form of subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable. This irreducible and non-transferable point is the “regressive end point” of the rationality, judgment, reasoning, or calculation of the individual choices and is referred to the subject himself as “interest.” This “subject of interest,” whether it is related to self-preservation or to sympathy, is primarily based on “subjective will.” Even though subjected and constrained by the contract, the “subject of interest” remains, subsists and continues up to the time of the juridical contract and overflows the “subject of right.” (Foucault 2008: 272-274)
4The different logic governing the subject of interest and the subject of right is that the subject of right is by definition a split subject who acknowledges some natural and immediate rights but also agrees to the principle of self-renunciation, as what law and the prohibition function in the juridical system, but the subject of interest, according to the economists, never has to relinquish his interest. Foucault points out that in the eighteenth century, the figure of home oeconomicus and the figure of homo juridicus or homo legalis are heterogeneous and cannot be superimposed on each other. Foucault refers to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and stressed the importance of the “invisibility” of the hand of the “totality” which eludes the individual while at the same time founds the rationality of his egoistic choices and, Foucault adds, “if the totality of the process eludes each economic man, there is however a point where the whole is completely transparent to a sort of gaze of someone whose invisible hand, following the logic of this gaze and what it sees, draws together the threads of all these dispersed interest.” The invisibility of the collective good is essential to the process because the collective good “must not be an objective” and “cannot not be calculated.” (Foucault 2008: 278-280) No economic agent or political agent should or could account for the totality of the process of the collective good. Foucault writes:
Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It is originally and definitively constituted from a multiplicity of points of view which is all the more irreducible as this same multiplicity assures their ultimate and spontaneous convergence. Economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; economics is a discipline without totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state that he has to govern. Economics steals away from the juridical form of the sovereign exercising sovereignty within a state precisely that which is emerging as the essential element of a society’s life, namely economic processes. Liberalism acquired its modern shape precisely with the formulation of this essential incompatibility between the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign. (Foucault 2008: 282, emphasis mine)
5To Foucault, the heterogeneity and incompatibility of the economic world and the political-juridical world of the eighteenth century could serve as a critique of governmental reason. The basic function of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand is to disqualify the political sovereign. But, throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, different forms of socialism, state socialism and the state-controlled economy, all tried to work out some kind of definition of the economic sovereignty. The principle of laissez-faire in the physiocrats, for example, is to establish the correspondence between the sovereign and the economic processes or the economic agents, basing on the evidence and the Economic Table they constructed. It is here, Foucault says, that we find the idea that “economic agents must be allowed their freedom” and that “a political sovereignty will cover the totality of the economic process with a gaze in the uniform light, as it were, of evidence.” (Foucault 2008: 285-286)
6What Foucault offers is a very complex picture of the intersection and crossroad of the political economic and the political governmentality. According to Foucault, Adam Smith’s theory from the start was not meant to serve as governmentality rationality. “Economic science cannot be the science of government and economics cannot be the internal principle, law, rule of conduct, or rationality of government.” (Foucault 2008: 286) But, when the two incompatible worlds collate and superimposed on one another, the questions arises: how is the theory of the invisible hand served as the governmental rationality? How is the theory of civil society served as the converging point of political economic and governmentality rationality? The governability or governmentability of the economic subject is made possible through a “new ensemble” which makes him both subject of right and subject of economic agents, and this convergence brings in what Foucault calls “the liberal art of governing,” the field where such liberalist governmentality could exercise is “civil society.” (Foucault 2008: 294-295)
7Here is the crucial question that Foucault proposes in his seminar, and it is also the central concern of my current study: what is the rationality and the technology to govern, according to the rule of right, the civil society, a space of sovereignty which is inhabited by economic subject? Foucault points out that civil society is not a philosophical idea, but a concept of governmental technology, and the problem of civil society is “the juridical structure of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure.” Foucault writes:
And I think that civil society—which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation—makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology. … An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social. (Foucault 2008: 296)
8How should the subject be managed so that he can be left alone, laisser-faire, and work for his own interest while the whole nation or the civil society can benefit according to the rationality of the government? The omnipresent government is built upon these autonomous economic subjects. “Homo oeconomicus is, if you like, the abstract, ideal, purely economic point that inhabits the dense, full, and complex reality of civil society. Or, alternatively, civil society is the concrete ensemble within which these ideal points, economic men, must be placed so that they can be appropriately managed.” (Foucault 2008: 296) It is in this same ensemble of the technology of liberal governmentality that homo oeconomicus and civil society belong.
9The irony is clear here. The civil society invoked to resist against the government or the state, the state apparatuses or institutions, turns out to be the very thing that forms part of modern governmental technology. Foucault demonstrates how Adam Smith’s economic analysis is transformed in Furgerson’s text as the theories of civil society, combining Smith’s concept of nation, including viewing civil society as an historical-natural constant, with spontaneous synthesis of individuals, a permanent matrix of political power and that it constitutes the “motor of history.” The civil society or the nation is the motor of history precisely because it is not only the spontaneous synthesis and subordination but it also carries the element of dissociation, that is, the egoism of homo oeconomicus. The multiplications and modifications of the blind initiatives of the egoist interests and individual calculations are infinite, and the transformation of civil society is endless. This never-ending generation of history makes the formation of new social fabric possible. Also, civil society calls for a government as an organic component of the social bond as an organic feature of the form of authority. These characteristics make the civil society in Furguson’s text very different from that of Hobbes, Rousseau and Montesquieu because the economic problems are introduced into new technologies of government. (Foucault 2008: 298-308)
10The crossroads Foucault analyzes in Furguson’s text reveal a domain opening up of collective and political units which go beyond the purely economic bond, and yet without being purely juridical, and that this space cannot be superimposed on the structures of the contract and the game of rights. But, the demand for a new form of civil society gives rise to new forms of sovereign individuality basing on the strategy of interests of the individual sovereign, and to new forms of truth that is manifested through the rationality of history. Just as what Foucault points out, since the sixteen and seventeenth century in the West, the exercise of power has been adjusted according to calculation of force, relations, wealth and factors of strength. Rationality becomes the foundation of modern forms of governmental technology. Different forms of rationality, the rationality of the sovereign state, of economic agents, of the governed, speak about different ways of calculating and regulating the art of government. The principle of rationality of the nationalist and statist politics as well as the rationality of the truth regime continue in spite of the transformations of the technologies of governmentality. The birth of the new forms of calculation and regulation of the civil society or the nationalist state in the twentieth century, ways of governing the population, including health, hygiene, birth, race, and so on, is founded precisely through the long process of the discourse of political economy since mid-eighteenth century down to the nineteenth century.
11To me, the problem lies more in how in such crossroads and intersections, with the cleaving up and opening of new space for civil society, even though the juridical system and economic bond has not been established yet, the discursive modes of new ways of calculation and regulation has already infiltrated in the same texts. The crucial question is: how the individual in the society, a society in the making, a society that is invoked to rebel against the present government, is accounted for the rise either of a new civil society or a new nation state, and through what irreducible rationality and reasoning these individuals are posited. The texts that I would like to examine in this current essay point to what I called the moments of the birth of ethical-bio-politics in modern China. I would like to argue that, in late Qing China, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the republic’s revolution, and twenty years before the May Fourth Enlightenment Movement, the emerging new mode of discourse on the “count” of psyche among the intellectuals gives rise to the rationality of psyche ruling for later governments. With the borrowed Western knowledge of modern physics and chemistry on the one hand, and the theories of political economy and the civil society/nation state on the other hand, Chinese intellectuals, through the aids of the missionaries in China and the translated texts from Japan, build up a mode of hermeneutics on psyche that stresses on the countable, utilizable, controllable, accumulative, and correctable nature of psyche. Psyche force was described as the force, using the metaphor of electricity, to be tamed and directed so that it can serve the aims of the State. Moreover, the individual’s psyche force was accounted as part of the national capital and as a share that is responsible for the production of the national interest, in Benthamian reasoning. Liang Qichao’s essay on the “New People” was an exemplary text that demonstrated how the ethical subject was constructed in the way that the bio (life) and the ethics of the individuals were discursively formulated in an ethico-political-economic to contribute to the collective good defined in the name of nation.
The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
Reviewed by Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
Numerous social theorists and political philosophers, including Thomas Lemke in his recent advanced introduction to biopolitics (2011), describe the formation of a new domain of politics surrounding the question of biological life. While this new domain of inquiry is still contested, its proponents announce nonetheless that it has attained a significant level of internal consistency. The goal of Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter's collection is to challenge this premise and thereby to resist delivering a definite answer to the question "what is the government of life?" Rather, it offers a fresh variety of essays with perspectives and conclusions that not only question a (more or less) unified conception of biopolitics but also, by endorsing a plurality of approaches, help us to better understand the connection between biopolitics and governmentality. The approach adds a considerable amount of subtle thinking to this field, and this project naturally inscribes itself within the process of examining how political power takes biological life as its privileged object of management and control.
The book opens with a particularly useful introduction, where the editors set the stage by providing a synthetic overview of the topic and how each chapter highlights different aspects of the biopolitical debate. Given the recently completed publication of the Foucault's last two courses at the Collège de France, the 1971-1972 Théories et Institutions Pénales and the 1972-1973 La Société Punitive, the editors are right to point out the profound ways in which the publication of Foucault's lectures has altered the common understanding of his corpus as, supposedly, ordered under three main headings: "discourse," "power," and "subjectivity or ethics." More importantly, Foucault's courses shed new light on some of the crucial claims that often remained underdeveloped in his books but, thankfully, received more attention in the lectures. The issue of biopower and biopolitics is the perfect case in point.
One of the first places where Foucault employs the concept of biopower is in the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976). In part V, "Right of Death and Power over Life," Foucault notes that beginning in the seventeenth century, a series of political technologies came to be organized around two central poles -- one around the body as machine and another around the population as the "species body" (HS1, 139). Thus, procedures of power were either meant to discipline the human body, to optimize its capabilities, to extract its force while rendering it more docile; or to regulate a series of biological processes, such as birth rates, mortality, or life expectancy, that would strongly influence and provide control over a population. So, for Foucault, biopower consists in "an anatomo-politics of the human body" and "a biopolitics of the population."
In spite of the prominent place Foucault gives to the question of biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, the concept receives scarce attention in his subsequent books. Without the publication of his courses at the Collège de France, especially the three years of lectures from 1976 to 1979 (Society must be defended, Security, Territory, and Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics), we would have been left with a significantly underdeveloped concept. On the other hand, the multitude of nuances and directions of inquiry that Foucault explores during these years significantly complicates the picture of biopolitics to the point of a possible dissolution. In the lectures, Foucault reads the concept of biopolitics through a multiplicity of other concepts (including normalization, security, control, governmentality). Due to developments of medicine, capitalism, sovereignty, and neoliberal governmentality, and also more broadly to biohistory (Mendieta 2014), each of these concepts tracks specific political transformations. Given this multiplicity, the editors have chosen as their guiding thread the underdeveloped need "to understand why liberalism and neoliberalism is a government of life." (2)
Part 1, "The Nomos of Neoliberalism," includes essays from three well-known Foucault scholars and biopolitical thinkers: Frédéric Gros, Melinda Cooper, and Thomas Lemke. The central theme of Gros's essay is to address the question of biopolitics through the lens of what he calls the four ages of security (17). The four ages of security stand as historical problematizations and can be observed in different discursive formations, the political and ethical effects of which are not negligible.
The spiritual age is the first age of security. Etymologically speaking, security is a derivate from the Latin securitas and could be understood as living trouble free. Thus, from the Skeptics and Epicureans to Seneca's Letters to Lucius , security entails a series of highly codified exercises that are meant to help the wise man attain "a perfect mastery of oneself and of one's emotions" (19). The second age is an imperial period that functioned under the Christian logic of "pax et securitas." The third age corresponds to the development of political accounts of the state of nature and the promotion of the social contract as a political solution to the "war of all against all" (Hobbes). Gros rightly points out that for thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, security is not simply public order. Security is meant to achieve more than the possibility of a political space. As such, it is not supposed to just codify the simple existence of political subjects, but also to consistently organize their interactions through ascriptions of rights. Biopolitics is the fourth, and last, age of security. Security as biopolitics takes on a new political object: human security, understood both at the levels of the individual and the population. Security is no longer merely a question of defending the state's territorial integrity or the citizens' rights. Biopolitics produces a series of political transformations meant to control mechanisms of circulation (e.g., human migration), to protect political subjects from the risk of death, to incorporate traceability in order to be able to recognize unauthorized movements, and to alter the nature of the threat. In this age of security, political figures like the worker and the citizen tend to fade away in order to make room for new, non-locatable and less predictable categories: the suspect and the victim. Thus, for Gros, our present time is biopolitical to the extent that our security is a direct function of forms of decentralized flow control (human movements, communications, etc.).
Melinda Cooper develops a provocative connection between Foucault's 1979 preoccupations with the Iranian revolutions and his lectures on neoliberalism from the same year. Cooper's argument does not rely alone on the temporal coincidence of Foucault's preoccupations in 1979. Instead, she argues that by being sensitive to the "rapid conceptual move from neoliberalism" (33) as an economic, social and political movement to the Iranian revolution, one can find a common thread between those radically different political regimes: a certain economy of pleasure. In the neoliberal case, this economy of pleasure is governed by the law of the market; in the Iranian case, by the household law.
Thomas Lemke's contribution leads us back to the question of security. Rather than delimiting various ages of security, Lemke focuses on specific technologies of security -- these form the machinations of the regulations that help control and manage a population. Lemke further connects security with freedom and fear, which for Foucault represent central aspects of a liberal form of governmentality. The originality of this contribution does not consist in setting up a relationship between security and neoliberalism, but in showing us how a critical understanding of our present conditions can become a source of political resistance and transformation.
In Part 2, the editors have gathered a series of genealogies of biopolitics. This series opens with Maria Muhle's essay, the goal of which is to motivate the claim that a genealogy of biopolitics cannot be fully accomplished without tracing the central conception of 'life' that influenced Foucault. Here, one could easily think of Bichat or Pasteur, but Muhle rightly shows that Georges Canguilhem's On the Normal and the Pathological had the most significant effect on Foucault's understanding of the notion of life. Foucault's interest is not so much in the dynamic aspect of life as it is in showing how "life becomes thinkable as dynamic" (80). The benefit of grasping the epistemic conditions for a dynamic conception of life makes possible the recognition of operations of biopower and the possibility for developing modes of resistance.
Francesco Paolo Adorno explores the relationship between biology, medicine, and economics. The management of a population, and consequently the stability of the state, is intimately related to the economic evaluation of standards of living. This process of political calculation extends beyond the supply of material and labor conditions to regulatory health mechanisms that promote the physical and moral development of a population. Given this configuration of biopower, Adorno raises the question of whether forms of resistance are still possible. For example, can death become a form of resistance to biopower? If thanatopolitics is implicitly anti-economical, maybe such a reconceptualization could help one "construct a form of resistance to the hegemony of political economy" (110).
Part 2 closes with Judith Revel's contribution concerning three biopolitical deconstructions: identity, nature, and life. Revel's search for an affirmative biopolitics passes through the realization that sometimes "certain Foucaultian readings of biopolitics produce the exact inverse of what Foucault attempted to do" (113). This is frequently the case whenever readers simply assume, for example, that Foucault's critique of identity is merely a correlate of his notion of biopolitics. For Revel, the Foucaultian critique of modern identity already present in History of Madness is a critique of the power of the same and a realization that difference (or the non-identical) is conceived through an act of violence. For Revel, to think of biopolitics as an affirmation implies the possibility for transformation and invention of new spaces of subjectivation.
The question of liberalism returns in Part 3, but this time with a special emphasis on legality and governmentality. For Roberto Nigro, one cannot entirely make sense of why Foucault in 1978 claims that liberalism is the "general framework for biopolitics" (BB, 22) unless one traces this intellectual itinerary back to the History of Sexuality vol. 1 (129). Foucault's strong critique of Marxism and Freudianism, or maybe more accurately of Freudo-Marxists like W. Reich (SMD 16), is a critique of a form of political power conceived only through the lens of repression (what Foucault calls "the repressive hypothesis" (HS1, 15-50)). Nigro shows that Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism is not an endorsement of liberalism (130), but rather a way "to expand his analyses of mechanisms of power to the whole society" and a way to emphasize the peculiar notion of freedom functioning at the heart of neoliberal governmental practices.
Paul Patton, brings Foucault and John Rawls into a creative dialogue. While Foucault's work focused on delimiting and exposing various strategies and mechanism of power, Rawls' political philosophy sought to define the principles of justice that should inform any just society. Patton's goal is to show that "the distance between them is less extreme than might be supposed" and that ultimately the differences that emerge are instructive as to how these political thinkers conceive the role of government and public reason in politics (141).
Miguel Vatter offers a particularly interesting analysis of Foucault's understanding of the "biopolitical core of neoliberalism" (164). Vatter stresses two central points emerging from the Birth of Biopolitics. First, a neoliberal political innovation consists in setting up "the economic rule of the law" (163). Hayek's writings serve as solid evidence for this claim. Second, Foucault argues that neoliberalism is the general framework of biopolitics. And, we certainly know since (at least) Discipline and Punish that power individuates. Vatter successfully shows how ultimately the "neoliberal economic rule of law introduces a new form of individuation that requires that everyone become an 'entrepreneur' of their own biological lives." (164)
The last section is titled "Philosophy as Ethics and Embodiment." The essays here explore ethical tools that Foucault develops during his final courses at the Collège de France.
Simona Forti pays attention to the ways in which Foucault describes and employs the concept of parrhesia. She points out that Foucault's interpretation is in direct correspondence with Jan Patocka's Plato and Europe. However, when he distances himself from Patocka's reading of "care of the self" as "care of the soul," Foucault ends up overlooking the important connection between Patocka's concept of "dissidence" and his own concept of "counter-conduct." Forti's goal is to show how those two concepts are interrelated: when they are brought into dialogue, "Patocka no longer appears as the thinker of a new Platonic-Christian humanism," nor does Foucault appear as "the bearer of a nihilistic relativistic aestheticism of life" (188).
Vanessa Lemm closes this section with a central question: "how can truth be incorporated or embodied?" (208) Lemm shows that Foucault finds in the writings of the Cynics the idea that "truth is revealed or manifest in the material body of life" (209). When this life is understood from a community perspective, biology and politics are not mutually exclusive (according to the immunitarian paradigm of politics as argued by Roberto Esposito), but rather complete one another in a more inclusive cosmopolitan way. Thus, according to Lemm, Foucault discovers in the Cynics an ideal of a philosophical life that could inspire potential forms of political resistance against a neoliberal governmentality.
Having surveyed each of the essays, I would like to briefly raise a single minor concern about the collection. Although Foucault in the late 1970's certainly migrated away from sexuality and toward governmentality as the framing locus for his inquiries into biopolitics, this volume nonetheless would have benefited from an analysis of sexuality in the age of neoliberalism. For Foucault in 1976, sexuality is the anchoring point of biopolitics precisely because it functions "at the juncture of the body and the population" (HS1, 147). In later years, the question of sexuality is not explicitly taken up in the analysis of the neoliberal context. A contribution that would have explored, through the lens of sexuality, this new mode of biopolitical individuation emerging within neoliberalism would have been a particularly productive addition. Indeed, the intensification of sexuality in the most recent dynamics of neoliberalism (i.e., hyper-sexualized celebrity culture) only confirms this. This being noted, the true success of this volume is its continuous exploration of the problematic relation between government and biopolitics by emphasizing "the irreducible plurality of approaches to biopolitics" (3). We are facing an explosion of research on biopolitical questions today, and this volume certainly represents a welcome addition to this growing literature.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Colin Koopman, Chris Penfield, and Ted Toadvine for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this review. In the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this review has also a forthcoming co-edited collection on biopower and biopolitics and would like to acknowledge a limited overlap of contributors with the volume under review.
REFERENCES
Foucault, Michel. 1977 (1975). Discipline and Punish, (NY: Pantheon Books).
Foucault, Michel. 1978 (1976). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, (NY: Random House) (HS1).
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society must be Defended, Lectures at College de France 1975-1976, (NY: Picador) (SMD).
Foucault, Michel. 2009. Security, Territory, and Population, Lectures at College de France 1977-1978, (NY: Picador).
Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at College de France 1978-1979, (NY: Picador) (BB).
Foucault, Michel. 2014. La Société Punitive, Cours au Collège de France 1972-1973, (Paris: Seuil).
Foucault, Michel. 2015. Théories et Institutions Pénales, Cours au Collège de France 1971-1972, (Paris: Seuil).
Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Bio-Politics An Advanced Introduction, (NY: New York University Press).
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2014. "Biopolitics", in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, (eds.)
L. Lawlor & J. Nale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
L. Lawlor & J. Nale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Medicine, Citizenship, and Race
Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference
In what follows, I attempt to pull out of Anne Pollock’s 2012 text “,Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference”, certain aspects of Pollock’s project that I believe shed critical insights into analyzing difference specifically in the U.S. today through biopolitics. Using my own research interests and analytic struggles as a guide, I identify the critical connections forged by Pollock in her focus area of African American medical/biological citizenship that carry significant implications for other types of potential research one might carry out in the U.S. today. Ultimately, I also critique the book itself as a text, by identifying certain aspects of it that I believe amount to shortcomings, but which I also find to be productive in highlighting the type of work left to be done in advancing projects like the one Pollock takes up here, ethnographically.
To briefly summarize “Medicating Race”, this book studies the “durability of preoccupations with race in medicine” (p.1) through the racialization of hypertensive heart disease in the United States. Pollock argues that “medicating is an excellent analytical framework for the STS [science and technology studies] critique of race because medicine intervenes on the boundaries between social and biological, material and semiotic” (p.5). That is, as she demonstrates through her first several chapters, negotiations of “Americanness” and belonging today have very long histories rooted in the fields of medicine and biology, which have all always been discussed in fundamentally racial terms. She shows that the durability of race in the U.S. lies in the category’s capacity to travel between, mediate, and co-articulate social and biological truths about belonging and inclusion. The recent failure of BiDil, a heart disease medication marketed for “self-identified African Americans”, is ultimately taken up as the field of debate representative of race’s durability in negotiating biological citizenship, and the challenges it poses to individuals and doctors alike, today.
One of the first significant texts covered in this seminar on biopolitics, for me and my research interests specifically, was Elizabeth Povinelli‘s 2011 book, “Economies of Abandonment”. This book offered a critical theoretical framework for helping understand biopolitical projects of inclusion/belonging in late liberal governmentality and its crises in cultural recognition. In many ways, I felt Pollock’s book was deeply inspired by Povinelli, though Pollock never cites or directly references her. Significantly, there seems to be a connection between Pollock’s emphasis on the durability of race and Povinelli’s work on endurance in late liberal governmentality in the biopolitics of making live, making die, and letting die. Yet there is also something qualitatively different in their uses of these terms, ‘durability’ and ‘endurance’. Pollock, unlike Povinelli, is looking at the endurance of race as a category that is inextricably tied to the shaping of projects of recognition and inclusion in late liberal governmentality. While Pollock does not reference D.T. Goldberg’s work on the Racial State, one might read her project as one that mediates between and productively merges and extends the work of Goldberg and Povinelli into the context of racialized medicine and biological citizenship today.
Pollock identifies an “American form” of A. Petryna‘s biological citizenship concept, in which “the damaged biology of a population has become the grounds for social membership and the basis for staking citizenship claims” that are simultaneously “democratic and deeply racialized” (p.40). Similarly in my own research into racialized educational outreach programs for minority inclusion into STEM, race as a stake in both social and biological life today constitutes grounds for new types of membership claims that tie belonging and Americanness to participation in a new STEM workforce of post-racially racialized STEM citizen subjects. The ability to participate in the STEM production of knowledge has been newly opened to non-white claims for citizenship in the U.S., and is increasingly marketed as a democratizing effort in and by the sciences through categories of race, just as Pollock suggests of medicine. Indeed, as chapters one and two point out, the scientific fields of medicine- which is integrally included under the STEM umbrella today -have historically been shaped by racial discourses of modernity that determine who can access and participate in the knowledge and healthcare productions of these fields, and who are viewed as bioscience’s objects and subjects. Racializing medicine is a biopolitical strategy that emerges out of this history of science and citizenship in the U.S., in a very similar way to the strategy racializing STEM education outreach constitutes.
“Medicating Race” is arguably my new favorite text, because of the numerous developments it produces in moving along biopolitical analyses of race in the U.S. that parallel many of the types of STS questions I hope to explore as well. However, Pollock is not trained as an anthropologist but a history and STS scholar. As such, her text is dominated by her own authoritative voice more than I believe would be suitable for a truly ethnographic account of the same social context, which I believe would have to spend substantial time on the subjective voices and experiences of African American heart disease patients and activists- something Pollock does not do at all. This possible shortcoming notwithstanding, where her project might be seen as methodologically intervening the most is in her mediations between biological/genetic determinist anti-racism arguments among medical professionals and academics, and sociocultural and environmental determinist anti-racism arguments among the same types of experts. Her concluding discussions about race as the many-headed hydra underscore her particular positionality in a most productive way. That she argues for taking as a starting point the shared interest in improving the welfare of underserved populations, for nurturing understanding between the two counter-productively oppositional views on race in medicine, marks out the space in which she is attempting to intervene as an ethically-engaged researcher committed to positive social change.
In “Medicating Race”, Pollock gets to some deeper issues about race and difference through a biopolitical approach that integrates the work of science and technology studies (STS), medicine, race, capital, and citizenship, in a way that I believe speaks with an as-yet unmatched degree of salience to debates that are specific in characterizing the U.S. today. For any critical scholar struggling to position themselves, ethically and analytically, within research efforts focused on analyzing biopolitical projects of racial redlining and inclusion through various market-based forms of outreach, Pollock’s book will likely be an important text. I have attempted here to draw out some of the key areas Pollock might usefully be advanced for other research areas, as well as to situate her contributions within other prominent discussions that relate to her work within the body of literature included as the anthropology of biopolitics.
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REFERENCES CITED
Pollock, Anne
2012 Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
2012 Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
The phenomenon of what is known as “sick building syndrome” (SBS) provides the context for Michelle Murphy‘s 2006 published biopolitical history of knowledge/power/subjectification.
Through (re)materializing processes of truth-making and uncertainty advanced by feminist, labor, environmentalist, and civil rights organizing in the U.S., the history of SBS illustrates the gendering and racializing processes of producing what Murphy calls “normal science”. Additionally, by analyzing “regimes of perceptibility”, she reveals how the politics of knowledge production and the process of materialization involve obscuring awareness of certain things in order to make others more pronounced, known, and thus controllable. In the following post, I review some of the major components of Murphy’s work that, ultimately, I suggest help frame a particular mode of analysis that is especially useful for anthropological studies of biopower.
The challenge of SBS as an assemblage of uncertainty is that its very materialization in mainstream perception depends upon its continuing immateriality. That is, it has only come to exist as a known ‘syndrome’ because “normal science” (or white male dominated, corporate-controlled science, especially under neoliberalism) is unable to trace its symptoms back to a normative and measurable chemical cause. This seems particularly significant in regards to the biopolitically calculated body which, although it is claimed modern science is making medicine and biology increasingly individualized, is also increasingly diagnosed with countless new disorders according to standards of ‘normal’ body chemical measurements. SBS represents a sort of counter-example in this regard, because while pharmaceutical companies increasingly develop treatments for things that have never before been considered illnesses, SBS remains untreatable so long as its causes remain unmeasurable. Moreover, as Murphy points out, once a measurable cause for SBS symptoms can be determined, it is no longer considered “sick building syndrome”.
Race, class, and gender in this context are shown to be spatially-significant markers of difference in enacting regimes of perceptibility and making them powerful. Thus, it is through race, gender and class that new knowledges and new regimes of perception become materialized in built environments and lived experiences. From the
“universal subject” of the young white male engineer “in a box”, to the white middle-class female office worker/activist and the “alley-dwelling African American” neighbors of the EPA headquarters, bodies and spaces are co-materialized and rematerialized through shifting regimes of knowledge that are themselves raced, classed, and gendered anew.
Potentially dialogic with theories of social movements that conceptualize group-actor projects as “alternative knowledge practices” (see Casas-Cortes et al. 2008), Murphy demonstrates how the power-laden raced/classed/gendered regimes of perceptibility also create “domains of imperceptibility” that may be acted upon as an inventive space. For instance, the domination of technoscientific knowledge over Western medical ways of knowing health and the body leave unknown a number of ways to measure, experience, and act upon perceptions of health and unhealth that go unchecked and indeterminate. Individuals who experience such indeterminate forms of suffering thereby come into a domain of imperceptibility in which alternative forms of self-care and self-understanding can be experimented with and perfected as coping regimes, outside of dominant regimes of knowledge/power/subjectivity.
While in one sense this may be understood as two or more competing separate epistemologies, as Murphy illustrates with the case of ecology-centered perspectives, competing regimes of knowledge, when contextualized temporally, are in fact fundamentally inseparable. They are equivalent to Hegemony-Counterhegemonies that dialectically shape one another. And, as seen in various ways with the ecological perspective, counterhegemonic regimes of knowledge/practice are usually captured by the dominant regime and rematerialized in new ways.
The toolkit developed by Murphy in this book, which is made up of “assemblages”, “materializations”, and “regimes of perceptibility”, I believe is very useful for constructing a more complex biopolitical analysis because it allows anthropological researchers to “study up” and study grassroots lived experience at the same time in very revealing ways. By showing the generative interactions between the three key terminological frameworks in practice, we can gain a deeper understanding of how knowledge/power/subjectivity may also be seen as interrelational dialectic processes of hegemony/counterhegemony that are performed, contested and materialized in and on bodies, spaces, and time. Discipline, self-care, and “massified” populations under regimes of knowledge and power ultimately come together quite tidily through the messiness explored by Murphy in this book. It seems, in all its complexity, to represent an analytic method that could be applied to a range of diverse and messy study contexts with great effect for the anthropologist of biopower.
___________________________________
REFERENCES
Murphy, Michelle
2006 Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Casas-Cortés, Maria, Michael Osterweil, and Dana Powell
2008 Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements. Anthropological Quarterly 81(1):17-58.
Posted in Cultural Anthropology | Tagged science and race, sick building syndrome, women workers and science
The challenge of SBS as an assemblage of uncertainty is that its very materialization in mainstream perception depends upon its continuing immateriality. That is, it has only come to exist as a known ‘syndrome’ because “normal science” (or white male dominated, corporate-controlled science, especially under neoliberalism) is unable to trace its symptoms back to a normative and measurable chemical cause. This seems particularly significant in regards to the biopolitically calculated body which, although it is claimed modern science is making medicine and biology increasingly individualized, is also increasingly diagnosed with countless new disorders according to standards of ‘normal’ body chemical measurements. SBS represents a sort of counter-example in this regard, because while pharmaceutical companies increasingly develop treatments for things that have never before been considered illnesses, SBS remains untreatable so long as its causes remain unmeasurable. Moreover, as Murphy points out, once a measurable cause for SBS symptoms can be determined, it is no longer considered “sick building syndrome”.
Race, class, and gender in this context are shown to be spatially-significant markers of difference in enacting regimes of perceptibility and making them powerful. Thus, it is through race, gender and class that new knowledges and new regimes of perception become materialized in built environments and lived experiences. From the
“universal subject” of the young white male engineer “in a box”, to the white middle-class female office worker/activist and the “alley-dwelling African American” neighbors of the EPA headquarters, bodies and spaces are co-materialized and rematerialized through shifting regimes of knowledge that are themselves raced, classed, and gendered anew.
Potentially dialogic with theories of social movements that conceptualize group-actor projects as “alternative knowledge practices” (see Casas-Cortes et al. 2008), Murphy demonstrates how the power-laden raced/classed/gendered regimes of perceptibility also create “domains of imperceptibility” that may be acted upon as an inventive space. For instance, the domination of technoscientific knowledge over Western medical ways of knowing health and the body leave unknown a number of ways to measure, experience, and act upon perceptions of health and unhealth that go unchecked and indeterminate. Individuals who experience such indeterminate forms of suffering thereby come into a domain of imperceptibility in which alternative forms of self-care and self-understanding can be experimented with and perfected as coping regimes, outside of dominant regimes of knowledge/power/subjectivity.
While in one sense this may be understood as two or more competing separate epistemologies, as Murphy illustrates with the case of ecology-centered perspectives, competing regimes of knowledge, when contextualized temporally, are in fact fundamentally inseparable. They are equivalent to Hegemony-Counterhegemonies that dialectically shape one another. And, as seen in various ways with the ecological perspective, counterhegemonic regimes of knowledge/practice are usually captured by the dominant regime and rematerialized in new ways.
The toolkit developed by Murphy in this book, which is made up of “assemblages”, “materializations”, and “regimes of perceptibility”, I believe is very useful for constructing a more complex biopolitical analysis because it allows anthropological researchers to “study up” and study grassroots lived experience at the same time in very revealing ways. By showing the generative interactions between the three key terminological frameworks in practice, we can gain a deeper understanding of how knowledge/power/subjectivity may also be seen as interrelational dialectic processes of hegemony/counterhegemony that are performed, contested and materialized in and on bodies, spaces, and time. Discipline, self-care, and “massified” populations under regimes of knowledge and power ultimately come together quite tidily through the messiness explored by Murphy in this book. It seems, in all its complexity, to represent an analytic method that could be applied to a range of diverse and messy study contexts with great effect for the anthropologist of biopower.
___________________________________
REFERENCES
Murphy, Michelle
2006 Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham and London: Duke UP.
Casas-Cortés, Maria, Michael Osterweil, and Dana Powell
2008 Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements. Anthropological Quarterly 81(1):17-58.
Posted in Cultural Anthropology | Tagged science and race, sick building syndrome, women workers and science
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