Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges

Governmentality Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought For a full list of titles in this series, please vi...

Author: Ulrich Bröckling | Susanne Krasmann | Thomas Lemke

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Governmentality

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

31. Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas Austin Harrington

41. Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought New Liberalism M.R.R. Ossewaarde

32. Methodological Individualism Background, History and Meaning Lars Udehn

42. Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order Craig Smith

33. John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression The Genesis of a Theory K.C. O’Rourke 34. The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation From Terror to Trauma Michael Humphrey 35. Marx and Wittgenstein Knowledge, Morality, Politics Edited by Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants 36. The Genesis of Modernity Arpad Szakolczai 37. Ignorance and Liberty Lorenzo Infantino

43. Social and Political Ideas of Mahatma Gandi Bidyut Chakrabarty 44. Counter-Enlightenments From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Graeme Garrard 45. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell A Reassessment Stephen Ingle 46. Habermas Rescuing the Public Sphere Pauline Johnson

38. Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Thoburn

47. The Politics and Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott Stuart Isaacs

39. The Structure of Social Theory Anthony King

48. Pareto and Political Theory Joseph Femia

40. Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society Deborah Cook

49. German Political Philosophy The Metaphysics of Law Chris Thornhill

50. The Sociology of Elites Michael Hartmann 51. Deconstructing Habermas Lasse Thomassen 52. Young Citizens and New Media Learning for Democractic Participation Edited by Peter Dahlgren 53. Gambling, Freedom and Democracy Peter J. Adams 54. The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science Amos Morris-Reich 55. Frankfurt School Perspectives on Globalization, Democracy, and the Law William E. Scheuerman 56. Hegemony Studies in Consensus and Coercion Edited by Richard Howson and Kylie Smith 57. Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life Majia Holmer Nadesan 58. Sustainability and Security within Liberal Societies Learning to Live with the Future Edited by Stephen Gough and Andrew Stables 59. The Mythological State and its Empire David Grant 60. Globalizing Dissent Essays on Arundhat Roy Edited by Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro-Tejero

61. The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault Mark G.E. Kelly 62. Democratic Legitimacy Fabienne Peter 63. Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World Edited by Ranjan Ghosh 64. Perspectives on Gramsci Politics, Culture and Social Theory Edited by Joseph Francese 65. Enlightenment Political Thought and Non–Western Societies Sultans and Savages Frederick G. Whelan 66. Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education Mark Olssen 67. Oppositional Discourses and Democracies Edited by Michael Huspek 68. The Contemporary Goffman Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen 69. Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion Edited by Lauretta Conklin Frederking 70. Social Theory in Contemporary Asia Ann Brooks 71. Governmentality Current Issues and Future Challenges Edited by Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke

Governmentality Current Issues and Future Challenges

Edited by Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Governmentality : current issues and future challenges / edited by Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 71) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. State, The. 3. Foucault, Michel, 1926– 1984—Political and social views. I. Bröckling, Ulrich. II. Krasmann, Susanne. III. Lemke, Thomas. JA71.G6737 2010 320.01—dc22 2010004575

ISBN 0-203-84647-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-99920-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84647-6 (ebk)

Contents

1

From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of Governmentality: An Introduction

1

ULRICH BRÖCKLING, SUSANNE KRASMANN AND THOMAS LEMKE

2

Relocating the Modern State: Governmentality and the History of Political Ideas

34

MARTIN SAAR

3

Constituting Another Foucault Effect: Foucault on States and Statecraft

56

BOB JESSOP

4

Governmentalization of the State: Rousseau’s Contribution to the Modern History of Governmentality

74

FRIEDRICH BALKE

5

Government Unlimited: The Security Dispositif of Illiberal Governmentality

93

SVEN OPITZ

6

The Right of Government: Torture and the Rule of Law

115

SUSANNE KRASMANN

7

Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border

138

WILLIAM WALTERS

8

Beyond Foucault: From Biopolitics to the Government of Life THOMAS LEMKE

165

viii Contents 9

Coming Back to Life: An Anthropological Reassessment of Biopolitics and Governmentality

185

DIDIER FASSIN

10 The Birth of Lifestyle Politics: The Biopolitical Management of Lifestyle Diseases in The United States and Denmark

201

LARS THORUP LARSEN

11 Biology, Citizenship and the Government of Biomedicine: Exploring the Concept of Biological Citizenship

225

PETER WEHLING

12 Human Economy, Human Capital: A Critique of Biopolitical Economy

247

ULRICH BRÖCKLING

13 Decentering the Economy: Governmentality Studies and Beyond?

269

URS STÄHELI

14 The Economic beyond Governmentality: The Limits of Conduct

285

UTE TELLMANN

15 Constructing the Socialized Self: Mobilization and Control in the “Active Society”

304

STEPHAN LESSENICH

Contributors Persons Index Subject Index

321 323 327

1

From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of Governmentality An Introduction Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke

1. FOUCAULT AND GOVERNMENTALITY In Foucault’s writings, the term “governmentality” (gouvernementalité) fi rst surfaces in the Collège de France lectures of 1978 and 1979. The term is derived from the French adjective gouvernemental, and already had some currency before Foucault made it into a central concept in his work. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes used what he referred to as this “barbarous but unavoidable neologism” (1989: 130) to denote a mechanism inverting cause and effect and presenting the government as the author of social relations: as “the Government presented by the national press as the Essence of efficacy” (ibid.: 130). Foucault took up this “ugly word” (2007: 115), freeing it from its semiological context. For Foucault, governmentality thus does not stand for a mythic practice of signs depoliticizing and masking those relations, but rather for a range of forms of action and fields of practice aimed in a complex way at steering individuals and collectives (2007: 122; 2000c: 295). Foucault’s interest in studying government signals a far-reaching correction and refi nement of his analysis of power. Up through the publication of Discipline and Punish (1978), in order to investigate social relationships he had used “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” (2003: 14–19) against the juridical concept of power, approaching power above all in terms of struggle, war, and confrontation (see for example 1978: 26). But in the mid-1970s, it became clear that in its initially conceived form the “micro-physics of power” (ibid.: 26) had two serious problems. On the one hand, the analytic accent lay mainly on the individual body and its disciplinary formation, and there was no consideration of more comprehensive processes of subjectification. As a result, the analysis of power could not do justice to the double character of this process as a practice of subjugation and a form of self-constitution. On the other hand, in the critique of state-centered approaches, focusing only on local practices and specific institutions like the hospital and

2

Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke

prison turned out to be insufficient. It was, it seemed, necessary to analyze the state’s strategic role in the historical organization of power relationships and the establishment of global structures of domination. What was needed, then, was a double expansion of the analytic apparatus, in order to appropriately account for both processes of subjectification and state formation (see Foucault 2008: 358). As a “guideline” (2007: 363) for Foucault’s work over the coming years, the concept of government stood at the center of his new theoretical orientation. With this concept, he introduced a new dimension into his power analysis, allowing him to examine power relations from the angle of the “conduct of conduct” (2000b: 341) in order to distance himself simultaneously from the paradigms of law and war. In this manner, the governmentality concept was introduced for the sake of a “necessary critique of the common conceptions of ‘power’” (1997a: 88). Its significance in Foucault’s work lies in the mediating function he ascribes to it: in the fi rst place, it mediates between power and subjectivity, making it possible to study how techniques of rule are tied to “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) and how forms of political government have recourse to “processes by which the individual acts upon himself” (1993: 203); in the second place, the problem of government allows systematic scrutiny of the close relationship—repeatedly underscored by Foucault—between techniques of power and forms of knowledge, since governmental practices make use of specific types of rationality, regimes of representation, and interpretive models. Foucault fi rst presented his new “direction for research” (2000a: 323) in the framework of the above-mentioned lectures. Their subject was the “genealogy of the modern state” (2007: 354)—Foucault being less interested theoretically in a historical reconstruction of the emergence and transformation of political structures than in the long-term processes of coevolution of modern statehood and modern subjectivity. For that reason, in the Collège de France lectures he uses the concept of governmentality with a “very broad meaning” (2000b: 341), taking up a range of meanings it had into the eighteenth century (Sellin 1984; Senellart 1995). Foucault now distinguishes “the political form of government” from the “problematic of government in general” (2007: 89). The latter is concerned with leadership in a comprehensive sense: self-government, heading a family, raising children, guiding the soul, but also leadership of a community or business (see 2000b: 341). Within this framework, Foucault examines processes of state formation in close connection with the development and changing forms of subjectification. For this reason, the “governmentalization of the state” (2007: 109) investigated in the lectures is simultaneously a “history of the subject” (ibid.: 184). Foucault does not understand the modern state fi rst of all as a centralized structure, but rather as a “tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures” (2000b: 332).

An Introduction 3 In his lecture series, Foucault considers the “genesis of a political knowledge” (2007: 363) of governing humans from ancient Greek and Roman ideas on the subject to early modern reason of state and “police science,” and onward to relevant liberal and neoliberal theories. In the process, he opens up the following historical argument for discussion. The modern (Western) state is the result of a complex linkage between “political” and “pastoral” power. Where the former is derived from the ancient polis and is organized around law, universality, the public, and so forth, the latter represents a Christian religious conception centered upon the comprehensive guidance of the individual. Pastoral power conceives the relationship between the shepherd and his flock and between leaders and those they lead along the lines of a government of souls: their individual instruction and guidance takes place in view of otherworldly salvation, pastoral authority thus complementing the authority of moral and religious law (2007: 115– 190; 2000a: 300–311). Unlike the ancient Greek and Roman approach to government, that of the Christian pastorate is characterized by the development of analytic methods, techniques of reflection and supervision intended to secure the knowledge of the “inner truth” of the individuals. Alongside obedience to moral and legal norms appears the authority of a pastor, who permanently controls and cares for individuals in order to set them on the road to salvation (Foucault 2000b: 333; see Foucault 2007). Foucault observes that such pastoral guidance techniques experienced an expansion and secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The gradual dissolution of feudal structures and the development of large territories and colonial empires, together with the reformist and counterreformist movements, led to a broadening of pastoral power beyond its original ecclesiastical context. Foucault’s analysis of government is thus based on the assumption that the pastoral techniques eventually produced forms of subjectification from which the modern state and capitalist society could in turn develop. The particular quality of this specifically modern form of government—of human beings rather than “souls”—lies, to begin with, in the need for reflection on its premises, object, and goals. “Political reason” represents an autonomous rationality derived neither from theological-cosmological principles nor from the person of the prince. At the same time, the earlier goals of happiness, salvation, and well-being are now secularized and re-articulated in the framework of the “political” problematic of the state. Foucault speaks here of the modern state’s simultaneous tendency towards totalization and individualization, this itself constituting both a legal-political structure and “a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power,” “a modern matrix of individualization, or a new form of pastoral power” (2000b: 334). If we follow Foucault’s interpretation, the innumerable treatises about the arts of government emerging at the start of the Early Modern period indicate that political reflection was separating itself from the problem of

4


sovereignty and extending to all conceivable activities and fields of action. Standing at the center of the art of government is “a sort of complex of men and things. The things government must be concerned about [ . . . ] are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. ‘Things’ are men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationships with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death.” (Foucault 2007: 96) Potentially, every human realm and activity, from spiritual confl icts to military maneuvers, from guidance of the family to questions of wealth, now falls within the purview of government. Foucault is, however, less interested in diagnosing an extension of the realm of government as such than in identifying the specific rationalities allowing an ordering of the various areas covered by governing and orienting them towards its different goals. In the framework of this “history of ‘governmentality’” (2007: 108), Foucault examines three forms of government in particular: reason of state, police, and liberalism. But these governmental rationalities do not, for the most part, mark historical stages on the way to a continuous “modernization” of the state; rather, the difference and discontinuity between a range of technologies of power—law, discipline, security techniques—stand at the center of Foucault’s analysis. Interestingly, departing from the position he took in his previous work, Foucault here no longer juxtaposes sovereign right with the mechanisms of discipline but demarcates both from “apparatuses of security” (2007: 108). In his earlier work on discipline and the juridical model of power, he described a process through which disciplinary techniques have accrued validity and “colonized” law both within the interstices and against the mechanisms of legal norm-setting (2003: 38–39). These techniques, he argued, install hierarchizing separations between the useful and useless, normal and abnormal, functioning by way of a set value and its operationalization; in other words, procedures are established orienting and aligning individuals to such predetermined standards (2007: 44–47; 56–57). The technology of security represents the exact opposite of the disciplinary system: where that system presumes a prescriptive norm, the starting point of security technology is the empirically normal, serving as a second-order norm and allowing further differentiations. Instead of orienting reality toward a previously defined should-be value, it takes that empirical reality—as defi ned by the statistical distribution of frequency, rates of disease, birth, and death, and so forth—as a benchmark. The “mechanisms of security” (2007: 7) draw no absolute line between the permitted and the forbidden, but rather specify an optimal medium within the range of

An Introduction 5 variations. For his further work, Foucault thus distinguishes analytically between the legal norm, disciplinary normation, and the normalization of security technology (2007: 56–79). As Foucault sees it, the development of security mechanisms is closely tied to the emergence of liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century. He understands liberalism not as an economic theory or political ideology, but as a specific art of government oriented toward the population as a new political figure and disposing over the political economy as a technique of intervention. Liberalism, he indicates, introduced a rationality of government unknown to either medieval notions of rule or Early Modern raison d’état: the idea of a nature of society forming both the basis and limits of governmental action. For Foucault this idea was no remainder of tradition (or premodern relic), but rather marked an important break in the history of political thought. In the Middle Ages, a good government was part of the God-willed natural order: an idea that integrated and limited political action within a cosmological continuum. Reason of state broke with the idea, replacing it with the artificiality of the “Leviathan,” which earned it the reproach of atheism. With the physiocrats and political economy, nature resurfaced as an orientation point for political action—but another, previously unknown nature, having nothing to do with a divine plan of creation or cosmological principles. This nature was the outcome of altered relations of production and conditions of living: the “second” nature of developing bourgeois society (2007: 87–110; Meuret 1988). Foucault sees the distinctive feature of liberal forms of government as their replacement of external regulation by inner production. Liberalism does not limit itself to a simple guarantee of freedoms (market freedom, private ownership, freedom of opinion, and so forth) existing independently of governmental praxis; it goes beyond that, and organizes the conditions under which individuals can make use of these freedoms. In this sense the subject’s freedom does not stand opposed to liberal government but forms its necessary reference; it is no natural resource but an effect of governmental praxis (2008: 62–64; Bonnafous-Boucher 2001). Freedom is an indispensable instrument of the liberal art of government. This consists of a more or less systematized and calculated form of exercising power, not directly affecting individual and collective agents and their options for action, but rather intervening indirectly in order to structure fields of possibility: “it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less [ . . . ] but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions” (Foucault 2000b: 341). Nevertheless, as a result of the “free play” of power, liberal government permanently endangers the same freedoms that it engenders, necessitating ever new “protective” or “stabilizing” interventions to prevent power monopolization or concentration. Mechanisms of security are both the fl ip side and existential precondition of liberal freedom. The

6


problem of liberal government thus involves determining the “production costs” of freedom: to what degree does the pursuit of one’s own interests pose a structural danger to the general interest? With the extension of mechanisms of control and compulsion in response to this problem, something akin to Bentham’s panopticon emerges as a central element of liberal policy. But the liberal relation between freedom and security is more complex than that image suggests. Liberal government not only produces a freedom threatened by its own dynamic, but the danger or permanent threat of “insecurity” (in the form of poverty, unemployment, disease, etc.) is an existential premise and basic element of that very freedom. For this reason, the danger needs to be subjected to an economic calculus that weighs its benefits against its costs: “[E]verywhere you see this stimulation of the fear of danger which is, as it were, the condition, the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism. There is no liberalism without a culture of danger” (2008: 66–67). This culture of societal danger supplies the key to the “morals” of the liberal art of government. When exposed to such danger, individuals are expected to cope with them and their entrepreneurial activities and individual responsibility are what decide social ascent and descent. Consequently, social inequalities are not the result of a mistakenly organized society but an indispensable element of its well-arranged daily functioning. At the end of the lecture series, Foucault discusses the further development of twentieth-century liberal positions, focusing on two forms of neoliberalism: German postwar liberalism (“ordoliberalism”1), and American human-capital theory as associated with the Chicago School. 2 Both approaches are opposed to state intervention and direction; in the name of economic freedom, both criticize an uncontrolled growth of bureaucratic apparatuses and the concomitant threat posed to individual liberties. Foucault nevertheless observes profound differences between the approaches, involving both conceptions of the social and proposals for political solutions. Ordoliberalism was grounded in the idea of a “social market economy,” which is to say of a market permanently supported by political regulation and necessarily framed by social intervention (currency policies, unemployment and health insurance, and so forth). In contrast, the Chicago School’s program involves a systematic expansion of the economic sphere into the social, in order to eventually eliminate the difference between the two. Rational economic calculation serves here as a principle for grounding and limiting governmental action, with government itself becoming a sort of enterprise, its task being to universalize competition and invent marketlike systems for the actions of individuals, groups, and institutions (2008: 322–324; Burchell 1993: 274; Senellart 2007). The basis for this strategic operation is an epistemological displacement: the systematic, comprehensive expansion of the economy from a single social realm with its own laws and instruments into a process governing all human behavior (2008: 222–223; Gordon 1991: 43). According to the

An Introduction 7 Chicago School, what characterizes human behavior is the allocation of scarce resources for competing goals. The central question the neoliberals pose is that of the calculation that motivates people to invest their scarce resources in pursuit of one goal rather than another, a model generally grounded in a principle of individual maximization of benefits. Crucially, the calculation applies not only to the analysis of individual and social action but also to governmental practices: against the standard set by the market, these practices can be scrutinized for excess and misuse, filtered through the interplay of supply and demand. Where, then, classical liberalism expects the government to respect the form of the market, within this concept the market no longer serves as a principle of governmental self-limitation but rather as a “principle turned against it: It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government” (Foucault 2008: 247). Although in the context of this lecture Foucault is concerned above all with liberal and neoliberal theories, in one passage he comments on the question of socialist governmentality. “Real” socialism, he argues, has employed many elements that liberalism and the police state used without being able to invent an autonomous form of government: a problem revealed in all its acuity by the constant posing of the questions of “true” socialism and the significance of central texts (ibid.: 91–95). Although Foucault’s lectures on ancient and early Christian-pastoral techniques of guidance and control, reason of state, police science, mercantilism, and liberal and neoliberal forms of government are undoubtedly thought-provoking, they leave us with a number of unresolved problems. One of the most serious of these is an indistinct and inconsistent use of central concepts—including, above all, the concept of governmentality itself, which Foucault applies in a double sense (see Lemke 1997: 188–194). In the fi rst place, it has the general sense of the emergence with raison d’état of an independent art of government. In the second place, Foucault uses the notion of governmentality in a more limited sense to refer to the emergence of liberal government in the eighteenth century. The demarcation from adjacent concepts also often remains unclear. This is the case, for instance, with the concept of biopower (see Foucault 1990: 135–145) as situated within the framework of governmentality: is modern biopower one of its aspects or elements, or is Foucault simply here using two words for the same thing (Garland 1997: 193–194)?3

2. STUDIES OF GOVERNMENTALITY Foucault was only able to carry out his ambitious project of a “history of governmentality” in rudimentary form. The lectures are inherently provisional and fragmentary, and were not meant for publication. In the context of his “history of sexuality” (a project that was also only partly realized), Foucault focused on the genealogy of the subject of desire and the

8


transformations of ancient techniques of self-guidance. But an empirical study of the relationship between technologies of the self and of domination largely remained an unfulfi lled programmatic demand. Foucault died before his planned concretizing and deepening of the problems discussed in the lectures could be realized. There was also an editorial problem. For a long time, the only relevant material Foucault authorized for publication was the talk of February 1, 1978 entitled “Governmentality” (1991) and the summaries he prepared of his fi ndings (1997b: 67–71; 1997c: 73–9). The lecture series from 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France were only published in 2004; these have recently appeared in English. Despite this difficult publishing situation and Foucault’s sketchy development of the governmentality concept, it has inspired a great deal of work in history and the social sciences since the 1970s. The fi rst such work stemmed from Foucault’s fellow researchers, much of it emerging from research projects undertaken in connection with the 1978–79 Collège de France lectures and focusing on a historical period Foucault had largely neglected in his “genealogy of the modern state” (2007: 354): the alteration of governmental technologies in the nineteenth century and the constitution of the modern welfare state. François Ewald (1996) thus reconstructed the use of insurance technology, initially developed and tested in the private realm, for societal regulation. Focusing on the problem of industrial accidents, he argued that the category of social risk increasingly suppressed the principle of individual responsibility, contributing to a transformation of power relations within society and undermining the separation between law and morality constitutive for liberalism. Daniel Defert (1991) and Jacques Donzelot (1984) aimed to demonstrate that insurance technology was set in play against extant forms of solidarity within the workers’ movement, leading eventually to a depoliticizing of collective struggles and class confl icts. Such social antagonisms were thus replaced by a homogenization of the social field, by way of probability calculations, quantitative derivations, and variable risk distribution. The work of Giovanna Procacci (1991; 1993) on the origins of the social question and Pasquale Pasquino (1991) on the rise of the idea of defending society against the threat of “dangerous individuals” likewise stemmed from the context of the seminars that accompanied the lectures. Foucault’s interest in government was not limited to the lecture series of 1978 and 1979. In 1981 he delivered a series of talks at the Catholic University of Louvain, and in the accompanying research seminar he led an interdisciplinary study of the “genealogy of social defense in Belgium” concentrating on the years leading up to the start of the twentieth century. The results would later appear in book form (Tulkens 1988; 1986). The “welfare state” and governmentality in the early twentieth century were meant to be examined in another book project Foucault proposed to some students and lecturers during a period of teaching at Berkeley in 1983. But

An Introduction 9 the project went unrealized, as did plans for a research center working on modern governmental concepts (Gandal and Kropkin 1985). In the 1990s, the question of governmentality attracted a great deal of interest beyond the circle of Foucault’s direct associates. With the founding of the History of the Present network in London in 1989 and the publication of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991), a collection of programmatic articles, the center of research in this area shifted from the Francophone to the Anglophone world: in universities in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Canada, more and more use was being made of Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Rather than being genealogically-historically oriented, most of this work used Foucault’s instruments to analyze processes of contemporary social transformation. This growing Anglo-American interest was grounded in both theory and politics. Many radical intellectuals had become increasingly dissatisfied with orthodox Marxist critique and analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, dogmatic political-economic approaches emerging from a simple base and superstructure schema and equating ideology with false consciousness were losing their persuasive power. While some theorists tried to tie Marxist concepts to poststructuralist ideas, others understood their interest in processes of cultural appropriation, forms of subjectification, and discursive patterns as reflecting a post-Marxist orientation (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006: 85–89). Alongside such altered intellectual and theoretical constellations, interest in Foucault’s governmentality concept also stemmed from the collective experience of dramatic political upheaval starting in the 1980s: the replacement, above all in the United Kingdom during the Thatcher era and the USA during the Reagan era, of (welfare) state regulatory models and steering instruments by neoliberal governmental forms. Against that backdrop, one reason why the concept was now taken up was that it did not force processes of social transformation into an economic analytical template or one centered on critiquing ideology. In this manner, the introduction of market-driven solutions and entrepreneurial patterns could be interpreted not as a diminishing or reduction of state sovereignty but as a restructuring of governmental techniques. Attention was now directed at the emergence of new political strategies and programs (for instance the introduction of mechanisms for self-organization and empowerment strategies) and the re-articulation of identities and subjectivities. In the Anglo-American political and intellectual world, from the 1990s onward, studies of governmentality have formed an independent research field in a series of disciplines within the social and political sciences and cultural studies. What is at play here is less a coherent research program or a homogeneous approach than a loose network of researchers using the concept in various ways and with divergent theoretical interests. The disciplinary range here extends from criminology and “policing” (O’Malley 1992; Smandych 1999; Dubber and Valverde 2006; Simon 2007)

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and education (Hunter 1994, Marshall 1996, Besley 2002; Masschelein et al. 2007; Peters et al. 2008) to organizational sociology and critical management studies (Krieken 1996; Miller and O’Leary 1987; Townley 1994), postcolonial theory (Gupta 1998; Inda 2005) and historical geography (Hannah 2000), and onward to research on spatiality and the city (Robins 2002). The concept has also made its way into cultural history (Shore and Wright 1997; Rimke 2000; Bratich, Packer and McCarthy 2003) and political ecology (Rutherford 1999; Luke 1999), and was drawn on in a critical study of international refugee policies (Lippert 1999); at the same time, it is manifest in the study of the historical conditions behind the emergence of medical practice and its social implications (Osborne 1993; Greco 1993; Nadesan 2008). Additional fields and themes have included the role of psychology and psychiatry in both governmental steering and individual self-guidance (Rose 1989; 1996) and the establishment of empowerment strategies in state programs for combating poverty (Cruikshank 1999).4 At the end of the 1990s the governmentality concept began to attract a great deal of interest outside the Anglophone world, especially in Germany, with the appearance of many books and collections (Lemke 1997; Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2000; 2004; Krasmann 2003; Pieper and Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2003, Kahl 2004; Opitz 2004; Reichert 2004; Kessl 2005; Michel 2005; Bröckling 2007; Krasmann and Volkmer 2007; Lemke 2007a; Gertenbach 2007; Purtschert, Meyer and Winter 2008) and a large number of articles. The disciplinary spectrum here extends from media studies (Stauff 2005; Holert 2008) to political science (Wöhl 2003; Lessenich 2003; Peripherie 2003), history (Finzsch 2002; Caruso 2003; Rüdiger 2005; Bohlender 2007), education and social work (Ricken and Rieger-Ladich 2004; Weber and Maurer 2006; Dzierzbicka 2006; Anhorn, Bettinger and Stehr 2007), theology (Ruhstorfer 2001) and organizational sociology (Türk, Lemke and Bruch 2002; Weiskopf 2003; Bruch and Türk 2005). Studies in this field have now spread to Scandinavia and to other countries on the continent such as Belgium and the Netherlands (see for instance Koch 2002; Masschelein and Simons 2005). Even in France, where for a long time work on Foucault was extremely rare in the social sciences, increasing interest in this research perspective has been apparent in political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology over recent years. For example, a working group directed by Jean-François Bayart has studied the significance of corporeal representation in political processes (Bayart and Warnier 2004). Another group at the École des Mines has used the governmentality concept for organizational theory (Pesqueux and Bonnafous-Boucher 2000). A third group led by Didier Fassin and Dominique Memmi has worked on contemporary forms of governing bodies (Fassin and Memmi 2004). In addition, the concept has made its way into analyses of present-day security and immigration policies (Bigo 1998; Bigo and Guild 2005) and has been applied to questions of state theory (Lascoumes 2004; Meyet 2005) and health policy (Vailly 2006).

An Introduction 11 3. GOVERNMENTALITY AS AN ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE Though studies of governmentality are marked by diverse disciplinary orientations and focus on different empirical objects, they are nevertheless informed by a common analytic perspective. They inquire into the “art of government” in Foucault’s broad sense of the term. Studies of governmentality investigate mechanisms of the conduct of “people, individuals, or groups” (Foucault 2007: 102, 120–122), extending from management of company employees to the raising of children and daily control practices in public spaces to governing trans-national institutions such as the European Union and the United Nations. The main focus here is on the technologies and rationalities of (self-) government in distinct fields. The knowledge incorporated in governmental practices is always practical knowledge. For this reason, analyses of governmentality are centered on the question of how practices and thinking about these practices constitute themselves mutually, or more precisely: how they translate into each other. The programs of (self-) government are both descriptive and prescriptive: they always presume a reality that they describe and problematize on the one hand, and in which they intervene—trying to change or transform it—on the other hand. At the same time, confronted with forces removed from their access or blocking it, deflecting it, or neutralizing it, these programs also consistently go astray. Hence the description and prescription always involves elusion in that knowledge of government is always also an erring, inadequate, or failing knowledge. As Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose state: “Governing is not the ‘realization’ of a programmer’s dream. The ‘real’ always insists in the form of resistance to programming; and the programmer’s world is one of constant experiment, invention, failure, critique and adjustment” (Miller and Rose 2008: 39; see Malpas and Wickham 1995). In reconstructing local orders of knowledge and regimes of practice of varying scope, studies of governmentality deconstruct the idea of universal reason, or of rationalization in the sense of an optimized means-endrelation—but also the model of the rational actor who arranges his actions according to the calculus of utility maximization. Unlike Max Weber or Jürgen Habermas, they do not assume a single form of rationality but insist on a plurality of governmental rationalities. What is considered rational depends on which assumptions about starting points, means and goals can claim plausibility; which criteria of legitimacy and acceptability are established; and which authorities and inventories of knowledge are evoked to defi ne statements as true and practices as rational. Consequently, rationality is understood in relational terms. Rationalities are ways of thinking that render reality conceivable and thus manageable, which is to say subject to calculation and transformation (see Gordon 1980: 248). This means that rationalities and technologies of government, modes of thinking and forms of intervention, are inextricably interconnected and co-produce one another (see Miller and Rose 2008: 16).

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Five methodological principles follow from this analytical perspective: First, studies of governmentality do not operate with dichotomies such as power and subjectivity, state and society, structure and action, ideas and practices, but look for the systematic ties between forms of rationality and technologies of government. In this manner not only political programs, everyday practices, and modes of shaping the self come into view, but also the significance of knowledge production and its connection with mechanisms of power. Second, this analytical perspective follows the principle of an “ascending analysis” (Foucault 1980: 99) starting with local patterns of rationality and governmental practices. Globalizing theoretical concepts such as “risk society,” “neoliberalism,” and “state” do not form the opening but at most the endpoint of the analysis. The focus is on micropractices whose connection, systematization, and homogenization only allows for a description of macro-phenomena. Hence there is no single, specific neoliberal governmentality, but studies of governmentality can show for example how the role-model of the enterprising self is connected with theory of human capital in an elementary way, and how this role-model is diffused and becomes hegemonic within present-day regimes of subjectification. Third, studies of governmentality open up an epistemological-political field that Foucault defi ned as “politics of truth.” In contrast to the critique of ideology, they do not describe ideas or theories in terms of a true-false distinction and imply no opposition between power and knowledge. Rather, they investigate the discursive operations, speakers’ positions, and institutional mechanisms through which truth claims are produced, and which power effects are tied to these truths. Studies of governmentality trace the contours of this productive power, which produces a specific (and always selective) knowledge and in this way generates defi nitions of problems and fields of governmental intervention in the fi rst place. Fourth, this research perspective emphasizes the technological aspect of government. The concept of technology here includes technical artifacts, strategies of social engineering, and technologies of the self; it refers to both arrangements of machines, medial networks, recording and visualization systems, and so forth, and to a range of procedural devices through which individuals and collectives shape the behavior of each other or themselves. These involve sanctioning, disciplining, normalizing, empowering, insuring, preventing, and so on. Studies of governmentality do not understand such technologies as the expression of social relations; nor, inversely, is society seen as a result of determinant technological factors. Rather, what is at play here is a complex of practical processes, instruments, programs, calculations, measures, and apparatuses making it possible to form and control forms of action, structures of preference, and premises for decisions by societal agents in view of certain goals (see Miller and Rose 2008: 61–68; Inda 2005: 9–10).

An Introduction 13 Fifth and fi nally, studies of governmentality center on an analytics of the political. In contrast to a political sociology or political science that presumes its objects as a given, the concern here is with the ways in which the realm of the political is produced in the fi rst place. The focus is on how divisions and distinctions are established, for instance between public interests and the private sphere; how problems are defi ned as political and possible solutions are conceptualized; how subjects are invoked as autonomous, emancipated, responsible, citizens in technologies of government, which unfold their effects straight across the usually distinct fields of state, society, and the economy. Studies of governmentality do not assume that everything is a political activity, but political activities are also not reducible to the trinity of politics, policy, and polity. Governmental practices rarely operate by direct command and control. Both the principle of obedience and—even more so—the exercise of constraint are very costly and tied to great risk. It seems more effective to guide individuals and collectives “through their freedom,” in other words to prompt them to govern themselves, to give them positive incentives to act in a certain way and understand themselves as free subjects. Governing means creating lines of force that make certain forms of behavior more probable than others. Measuring these lines of force does not mean asking how people actually move within them. Studies of governmentality are more interested in how people are invoked to move within these lines. The focus is on the interrelations between regimes of self-government and technologies of controlling and shaping the conduct of individuals and collectives, not on what human beings governed by these regimes and technologies actually say and do. In contrast to scientific policy advice, studies of governmentality proclaim no ideal norm of good governance against which real practice is meant to be measured. Instead, they investigate the criteria established for good governance and the arguments used to make them plausible (Lemke 2007b). The central question is thus not how effective governmental activities are and how they should be optimized, but how they unfold their effects. What is at stake, then, are programs of (self-) government, neither reconstructions of collective histories nor diagnoses of shifts in the social structure. To express this in terms of an image: what is being scrutinized here are the currents drawing people in specific directions—and not the distance they let themselves be drawn, or how they use the currents to advance more quickly, or how they try to evade them or swim against them. However, such an analytic perspective in no way results in a normatively abbreviated reality: mapping of government regimes makes visible the confl icting forces, the breaches and modes of resistance provoking governmental efforts. It is rationalities and practices of government that generate subjects in the fi rst place, subjectivating by invoking and legitimizing certain images of the self while excluding others. People are thus addressed, for example, as citizens aware of their rights, as political activists concerned about the

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societal future, or as artists who realize themselves through their creativity; and they also articulate themselves as citizens, activists, artists, and so forth. To become a subject always means actualizing certain subject-positions and dispensing with others; it means being addressed in a certain way as a subject, understanding oneself as a subject, and working on oneself in alignment with this self-understanding. Studies of governmentality avoid the hypothesis of an antecedent, autonomously acting subject, employing instead a minimalistic anthropology. They know nothing about the constitution of human beings going beyond the human capacity to be formed of about form itself (Rose 1996). But this dual capacity is what makes people governable in a fundamental way. Subjects are not merely effects of the exercise of power, but also possess self-will and agency—this is already at work conceptually in the copresence of power and freedom in the idea of government. Terrorists being targeted by the security authorities, students being evaluated by professors, employees supervised by their superiors—all of them are not merely objects of government, nor are they fully determined by technologies of control. Their manner of operating rather resembles a relay: in articulating themselves as subjects they take part in power relations, thus reproducing and transforming them (Foucault 2003: 29–30). Processes of subjectification are always tied to a social a priori: subjects can only understand themselves and act within a historical field of possible experiences (see Macherey 1992: 181–182). They generate themselves performatively, but their performances are bound into orders of knowledge, lines of force, and power relations. Thus subjectification designates a potential for action, but always a form of adherence as well—to ideas, and to manners of articulation and recognition. Subject-positions empower individuals, while subjecting them at the same time (Butler 1997). If the subject is only conceivable in terms of this double movement, then we have to dispense with the traditional opposition between liberation and domination—the basis for both Marxist and anarchist critiques of rule, as well as liberal movements toward freedom. But this does not mean abandoning the telos of freedom and the claim to self-determination and self-realization; it does, however, problematize these concepts. Movements for freedom and emancipation are not located outside or beyond power relations, but themselves produce regimes of subjectification (Cruikshank 1999). They not only place extant orders of truth in question but also inaugurate counter-truths centered on the question of how liberated, emancipated subjects are to understand and to shape themselves and others. Studies of governmentality are aimed neither at a history of ideas nor at a variant of psychohistory or a historical-genetic psychology tracing the evolution of corporeality, emotions, conceptual worlds, cognitive schemas, and pathologies. They do not focus on individual life histories and selfimages, as is the case in biographically oriented social research. Instead, what is at stake here is a “genealogy of subjectification” (Rose 1996: 23).

An Introduction 15 Studies of governmentality do not retrace transformations of subjectivity, but the way in which the subject has become a problem at certain historical moments and which solutions have been arrived at. To put this another way: they do not ask what the subject is but which forms of subjectivity have been invoked, which modes of knowledge have been mobilized to answer the question of the subject, and which procedures laid claim to. The reception of Foucault’s concept of governmentality and the research program of a “genealogy of subjectification” is linked to the neoliberal restructuring of society in terms of market orientation and individual freedom. In neoliberalism especially, the figure of the enterprising self (Bröckling 2007), defi ning itself as free, self-responsible, and ready for risk, has figured as a protagonist in this political project to promote the self-caring and self-provision of society’s members and to measure the investment of state resources to this end. Concepts such as creativity, lifelong learning, participation, and empowerment have become synonyms for technologies establishing a new relation between the citizen and the state: the activating state, the activated subject. Contemporary technologies of government encourage people to understand themselves and act as if they are autonomous and self-determined subjects. Thanks to the market’s invisible hand, the readiness for risk and utility maximization are meant to promote not only the individual’s happiness but also the general welfare.

4. PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES In the reception of the concept, and even in the work of some of the protagonists in the field, governmentality is often (mis-) understood as a social-scientific approach. When it is seen in this light, studies of governmentality compete with sociology by claiming to comprehensively describe and explain social phenomena. Foucault himself formed each of his analytic instruments with reference to concrete historical objects (madness, delinquency, sexuality, and so forth) without developing a general theory from this; in contrast, “governmentality” has often served as a theoretical passepartout for arbitrary research goals and objects—without correction or further development of the concept. In the face of such overload we need to emphasize that analysis in terms of governmentality is not an attempt to formulate a sweeping social theory, and it does not have a distinct methodological inventory at its disposal. It signifies a research perspective in the literal sense: an angle of view, a manner of looking, a specific orientation. As such, studies of governmentality can unfold their analytic potential when they both poach on social theory and call theoretical certainties into question—when they function as a critical corrective to them and activate the irritative potential of their disciplinary marginality. Taking up Foucault’s nominalistic impulse, studies of governmentality would need to repeatedly distance themselves from their own answers and from the

16


mechanisms of power identified earlier. In other words: heuristic experimentation instead of neat “how to” manuals, local cartography instead of general theory. Thomas Osborne (2004: 35) appeals in this sense for a use of the concept of governmentality: “as a kind of soft, if not provocative, effective conceptual lever to develop new ways of thinking, leave behind familiar ways, dismantling some and renewing others. Thus instead of establishing a new empire, this kind of research should very consciously remain provisional. Here sense for the untimely, for anthropological interruption, is everything: what is at play is speculative thinking about governing our capacities and emotions and not production of didactic statements about the functioning of societies in general.”5 Parallel to the strengthened reception and academic grounding, two tendencies can be discerned that are moving in opposite directions. Either studies of governmentality sketch in a sweeping historical narrative subjecting “the history of governmentality to a veritable evolutionary logic mechanically advancing in a sociological manner from study of the Polizei to liberalism and the welfare state to neoliberalism” (Osborne 2004: 35); or in increasingly small-format empirical studies they distill the always identical rationalities, strategies, and technologies of neoliberalism. In both variants they threaten to become repetitive, with the idea of where the argument is heading present so to speak before the reading. What is discovered is what one already knows. This, not least of all, protects scholars against any possibility the phenomena they are studying will force them to rethink their approach. And this represents a paradoxical development: precisely because studies of governmentality possess high potential for a diagnosis of the present, they encounter resonance; but to the extent they do so, they run a danger of diminishing that diagnostic potential by repetition. As the critique itself rather than what is being criticized becomes common sense, the gesture of critical unveiling becomes obsolete. In both variants, the regimes of government are characterized by a closure and clarity suppressing the simultaneous effects of various governmental lines of force—effects that overlap with, modify, and possibly contradict each other. A homogeneity of rationalities and technologies of government on the one hand, and of forms of subjectification on the other hand, is presumed both in the effort to reconstruct a single modern history of governmentality and in that to defi ne, through analyses of micro-regimes, its totalizing contemporary form. The result is an inability to account for the constitutive hybridity of discursive patterns and mechanisms of power (Reckwitz 2008). Another problem to be noted is an implicit finalism, presuming a continual rationalization and optimization of governmental technologies. In its critical turn, this fi nalism suggests an increasing difficulty—or even

An Introduction 17 the impossibility—of evading or opposing governmental strategies. From this perspective, techniques of disciplining and mechanisms of sovereign power are simply of accidental and residual character and are replaced by more economic forms of exercising power. The history of governmentality then appears as an increasingly fateful correlation of mobilization and selfmobilization, optimization and self-optimization, control and self-control. This account overlooks both the persistence of violence in power strategies and the systematic linkage between supposedly “rational” and “irrational” moments of government (Lemke 2000). In fact, separating what is rational qua capable of truth from what is not rational qua merely subjective or affective, and fi xing the borders between the two spheres, is an elementary move in technologies of government. Another aspect of the “rationalization problem” is that studies of governmentality frequently scrutinize programs as if these were blueprints, thereby tending to mask the breaches, dislocations, and rejections emerging with their appropriation and execution. This neglect is due, in no small measure, to the specific perspective of the empirical analysis: studies of governmentality focus neither on the regularities and probabilities nor on the non-calculable moments of individual and collective behavior, but rather on attempts to steer and affect them. The analysis only refers to actual behavior and “real life” to the extent these are catalysts, effects or resisting elements of governmental strategies. Examining syllabuses, school textbooks, or the architecture of classrooms is not the same as reconstructing individual learning processes. The focus is less on the “development of real governmental practice” than on “government’s consciousness of itself” (Foucault 2008: 2), which is to say “the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing” (ibid.). To extend the school image further: studies of governmentality do not inquire into what pupils do or refrain from doing, but investigate which institutions and persons (including the pupils themselves) induce them to do something and refrain from other things—and in what way and with what intention. The criticism that studies of governmentality simply duplicate neoliberal governmentality, misappropriating it in a kind of intellectual identification, points to a methodological quandary: regimes of government and self-government follow a more or less polished program, often documented and supported by scholarly research, giving rise to carefully planned procedures. It only makes sense to speak of regimes when patterns of governing become manifest. Studies of governmentality are aimed above all at such programs and procedures. By contrast, the forms of resistance and counterconducts (Foucault 2007: 201) are contingent. They have to be accounted for, but they are not calculable. There is a science of government, but there cannot be one of the art of not being governed. To take up an elementary distinction made by Jacques Rancière (1998): together with governmental regimes, science belongs to the order of police, executing the division of the

18 Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke sensible (le partage du sensible) and assigning things and people to certain positions. Resistance to this is political, marking an interruption—a disturbance also affecting the order of scientific classification and explanatory models. In this way every study of counter-action, and hence of the phenomenon of dissent, disobedience, rebellion, denial, or more simply, of agency, faces a threefold danger. Either it seeks out rules and regularities precisely where they are violated and transgressed—the perspective of criminology; or it aligns heterogeneous stories, without being able to say much more about them than that they exist—an ethnographic approach also present in broad areas of cultural studies; or it itself argues from the commander’s vantage point, promising oppositional knowledge of government in order to lead united forces of resistance into battle—the Leninist position, still echoing in the post-operaist invocations of the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2004). Are we left, then, with the aporia of either remaining silent about forms of resistance since speaking about them would mean making them accessible to governmental intervention, or speaking about them since silence would mean playing into the hands of those hoping to keep resistance invisible? Obviously not. But how, then, are we to evade the traps of the criminological gaze, anecdotal narration, or the oxymoron of “revolutionary theory”? Surely not with critique as a kind of science of warfare, exhausting itself in identification of the enemy, exposing his cunning, unmasking his disguised agents while bringing its own battalions into position and trying to present them with marching routes and operational plans. And not with critique as a celebration of obstinacy, revolt or indifference, as a hymn to Marcuse’s “great refusal” (1964) or the small “I prefer not to” in the wake of Herman Melville’s Bartleby (1853/1997). Such critiques already know what they will discover, and so simply look for additional evidence. Because they only know antagonisms (or the one great antagonism) or absolute indistinction, they remain blind to ambivalence. Their protagonists are certain that the critique’s subject and object can be clearly distinguished—that in any event they themselves are in no way contaminated by what they abhor. In the face of such approaches, an understanding of critique as problematization would need to be strengthened. Instead of constructing either a single history of the process of rendering something governable or many histories of the process’s failure, the emphasis would be on making a performative relation visible in which governmental strategies and patterns of resistance encounter and defi ne each other. Both governmental and resistant practices have to be considered in terms of a complex of questions: how they defi ne problems to which they respond; which subject positions and modes of subjectification they engender; which fields of intervention they constitute and which strategies they enact to make their interventions plausible; and fi nally, which promises they articulate and which goals they hope to achieve in this way.

An Introduction 19 In such a context, the concept of resistance signifies very disparate things. For one thing, it refers to what stands opposed to governmental efforts—passively as inaction, a capacity for persistence, or inaccessibility, and actively as counterforce, interruption, or confrontation. For another thing, it refers to the tension between oppositional orders of government and a subversion of government—between strategies and tactics forming countervailing regimes of government and practices articulating the will “not be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them.” (Foucault 1997: 28, emphasis in original) The relationship between governmental strategies (or strategies of power in general) and resistance is thus contradictory, resistance marking both a boundary and a constitutive moment of government: “Resistance is not merely the counterstroke to power, it is also that which directs and shapes power. But insofar as resistance can also be seen as a certain manifestation of failure, so too can failure then be seen as itself serving to direct and shape the process of governing.” (Malpas and Wickham 1995: 43) Jacques Rancière has also drawn attention to the contradictory significance of the word “resistance.” In connection with the question of the inherent resistance in art, he observes that resistance is referred to both “in the sense of a thing that perseveres in its being” and “in the sense of people who refuse to remain in their situation” (2008: 9). Resistance thus designates both the given, to reformulate Rancière, the persistence of what is to everything trying to reshape it, and something relinquished—the claim to change and the practice of negation. This signification is always normatively loaded—as a justification or abhorrence of the impulse to no longer accept the status quo. Finally, a third meaning, proposed by neither Foucault nor Rancière, brings psychoanalysis into play: resistance as the withdrawn, as a force unavailable to the control of consciousness—government of the self—but emerging as a slip, repetition compulsion, or another form of manifestation (Derrida 1998). Not least because it is constantly confronted with resistances in the threefold meaning of the given, the relinquished, and the withdrawn, government is always a precarious affair: it must always take account of the unforeseen and crises of governability. It thus realizes itself as crisis prevention and management, performs continual reinterpretations, produces unintended effects, and necessarily falls short of its own goals. This cleft between the programs and their realization can cause regimes of government to collapse or come to nothing, or else to function as the catalyst for intensified, modified, or entirely new governmental efforts. For this reason, to govern by no means amounts to drafting and realizing a master plan but demands constant experimentation, invention, correction, criticism, alignment. The adjustments of government here follow the fault-lines of becoming governed. This is self-evidently also the case for forms of resistance, insofar as they move beyond the mere instance of a no, the spontaneous

20 Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke moment of indignation, towards strategic or tactical intervention. The effort to force crises and use them to transform constellations of power is itself a precarious enterprise; counter-regimes themselves fail to attain their goals and produce unintended effects. Until now, studies of governmentality have often failed to pay sufficient attention to such singularities, ruptures, and disturbances of government. Describing the dislocations, translations, subversions, and collapses of power with as much meticulousness as their programs and strategic operations; that is a challenge they are only now beginning to address.

5. ABOUT THIS VOLUME The present volume explores the analytical potential of studies of governmentality in terms of three thematic focal points, each of which takes up ongoing social changes and more recent theoretical discussions. The contributors discuss transformations of statehood and security regimes and the biopolitical dimension of government, and fi nally critically consider the thesis of an “economization of the social” under the sign of neoliberal governmentality. The volume offers a kind of interim critical assessment of the reception of Foucault’s lectures on the history of governmentality and of the studies of governmentality. At the same time, it is meant to open up new perspectives and both promote and deepen a critical analysis of political and social processes.

The State and Mechanisms of Security Critiques leveled at the concept and studies of governmentality have often pointed to the neglect of mechanisms of state rule (Curtis 1995; Frankel 1997; Garland 1997; O’Malley, Weir and Shearing 1997; Brunnett and Graefe 2003; Schild 2003). With the complete publication of the lectures at the latest, it became clear that Foucault’s talk of “state phobia” (2008: 187) was by no means a reflection of an aversion to analyzing the state. To the contrary, Foucault indicates that “The problem of bringing under state control, of ‘statification’ [étatisation] is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address” (ibid.: 77). But he did object to the idea of developing an abstract and in his view generalizing theory of the state (see 2007: 144; Mitchell 1999; Lemke 2007b; Saar 2007). He rather understands the state’s existence as involving an enduring process of formation, unfolding through an analysis of both forms of rationality and technologies of government. However, in studies of governmentality the modern nation-state has usually been, implicitly or explicitly, the point of reference, with “sovereign power” often standing for an archaic and repressive form of exercising power. In contrast, the essays in this section of the volume are concerned,

An Introduction 21 on the one hand, with the question of how contemporary statehood can be conceived if—as clearly is the case—analyses of technologies of government are not limited to the borders of nation-states and “globalization” is itself to be understood as a form of governmental rationality (Larner and Walters 2004; Perry and Maurer 2003). On the other hand, they examine the extent to which violent and exclusionary effects of power characterize a present defined as much by a neoliberal restructuration of the social as by far-reaching state intervention carried out in the name of security. Foucault’s concept of governmentality has had an enormous, productive resonance in sociological and political theory, with the methodological challenges it poses still needing a great deal of exploration. For this reason Martin Saar reads the history of governmentality less as a genealogy of government and a history of the emergence of the modern concept of the state than as a new historical-political analytics and a research program needing to be developed and made useful. By connecting Foucault’s analysis with similar, already established perspectives (e.g., Gerhard Oestreich, Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Kossellek), Saar brings out the innovative potential of a history of the present to be read and written anew. A critical understanding of the history of political thinking—and of the political future—can only emerge from insight into the historicity, the radical contingency, of the Western (late) modern self-understanding. Bob Jessop sketches the contours of a critical analysis of the modern state as laid out in Foucault’s lectures, distinguishing between various actual and possible lines of reception. Jessop sees an Anglophone reading as tending to focus on apparently “soft” forms of exercising power that try to mobilize and exploit potential for action. Here freedom is itself understood as a technology of power whose effects cannot be explained within the classical border demarcations between the state and civil society, public and private, repression and liberation, but which is at the same time localizable “beyond” state power. By contrast, Jessop favors a perspective rendering Foucault’s reception and modification of central Marxist insights productive for an analysis of the contemporary state and present-day rule. Through a close reading of the lectures on governmentality and earlier texts by Foucault, he distills a concept of state power beyond dichotomies such as micropower and macropower or state and economy. Using the prism of Foucault’s analyses, Friedrich Balke undertakes a fresh reading of the political theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and deciphers its contribution to the modern history of governmentality. The significance of law for society’s social formation here comes into focus; and at the same time, with reference to the political theory of Carl Schmitt and his student Ernst Forsthoff, Balke sheds light on our contemporary perception of a transformation of “sovereign power.” Under present-day neoliberal governmental regimes, Rousseau’s volonté générale experiences a displacement of meaning. The social order rests on individual acts of will, allowing affiliation and participation to become manifestations of the self’s rule

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over itself. In this context Forsthoff’s distinction between the social-welfare state—Sozialstaat—and the constitutional state—Rechtsstaat—is instructive: through the neoliberal subsumption of services of general interest to the proviso of freedom, the latter becomes a productive element of power— at the expense of freedom as a right in the face of state power. The interplay of the apparent oppositions of freedom and subjection, of mechanisms of activation and of intervention, of involvement in government and exclusion, is also considered in Sven Opitz’ essay. For, Opitz indicates, where studies of governmentality have been mainly concerned with indirect mechanisms of guiding the “conduct of conduct” as a characteristic of liberal regimes, in recent years it has become clear that they are not limited to such mechanisms. But under what condition, Opitz asks, does a liberal regime become illiberal? The contemporary perception of one form of catastrophic risk, he argues, has brought specific mechanisms of securitization into play; these render visible a systematic linkage, as it were inherent in liberal government, with sovereign acts of direct violence and exclusion. In an extension of Foucault’s analytic perspective, Opitz observes that early liberalism consolidated itself through a promotion of governmental restraint: governments could not intervene, both because they promised to respect civil rights and because of the opacity of market mechanisms. In contrast, securitization poses an imperative of mandatory knowledge inverting the original relationship: liberal governments must intervene precisely because they do not know about catastrophic threats and in the end are thus not able to guarantee the citizen’s right to freedom. The essay by Susanne Krasmann likewise addresses the contemporary analysis of securitization mechanisms, in the course of demonstrating the productive potential of Foucault’s concept of state formation for understanding the transformation of liberal democracies. Using the example of the ongoing debate over the legalization of torture and a practice of torture that arguably has found its place in liberal democratic societies, Krasmann analyzes the dynamic interactions between security and law. Government in the name of security unfolds a distinctive game of truth and produces specific forms of visibility, rendering not only an extension of state interventions acceptable. Indeed, security mechanisms can embed themselves systematically within the law itself—thus undermining traditional constitutional principles. In his study of migration control, William Walters develops an analytics of the government of borders and frontiers. Foucault hardly touched on the theme of state border controls in his lectures on governmentality and biopolitics, but this issue has played a significant role in the reception of these texts, for example in examinations of the political logic of new forms of border control at airports and the application of new technologies at inter-state borders. But for the most part, Walters argues, such a logic is read as a specific form of rationality, conceived as global and homogeneous, say of Neoliberalism or Sovereign Power. This contrasts with his own focus on border regimes as hybrid, locally specific and extremely mutable configurations

An Introduction 23 whose way of taking effect cannot be split into forms of state control on the one hand and humanitarian engagement on the other hand. Rather, in Walters’ view, border regimes are consistently the result of previous political conflicts, with the emergence of a “humanitarian border.” Nevertheless, strategies of state control, legal regulations, the use of surveillance technology, and the engagement of humanitarian organizations together form an assemblage in which political counterstrategies are always woven into the control strategies. In this manner political actors, while helping to diminish the suffering of migrants, perhaps also contribute, unwillingly and in an unanticipated fashion, to an extension and refi nement of controls.

Biopolitics and the Government of Life The two central Foucaultian notions of government and of biopolitics have generated separate lines of reception. As a result, studies of governmentality have tended to bypass the question of how the government of individuals and populations interacts with biological categories and concepts of life and death, health and disease, normality and pathology. This section thus focuses on convergences between questions of embodiment and concepts of nature and life on the one hand and an analytics of government on the other hand, seeking to defi ne the ways in which biological constructions have changed the perception of, for example, social inequalities, identity, and citizenship. In his contribution to the volume, Thomas Lemke distinguishes between two important lines of reception emerging from Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. The fi rst line has its home in philosophy, sociology, and both social and political theory, and is oriented toward the question of the mode of politics: how does biopolitics function, and what counterforces does it mobilize? How is it different analytically and historically from other epochs and political forms? The second line has its starting point in science and technology studies, medical sociology, the history of science, cultural anthropology, and feminist theory. Its focus is on the substance of life: how have the representation of, and intervention in, life forms been altered by the conception of living bodies as texts that can be read and rewritten? Lemke suggests tying the two research perspectives more closely together— a theoretical combination that, while present in Foucault’s writings, was never systematically explored there. The proposed project is thus aimed at a systematic linkage of the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to an analytics of biopolitics—and this in a manner illuminating the connections between physical being and moral-political forms of existence, together with the correspondences between liberal modes of government and ideas of biological self-regulation. In the next essay, Didier Fassin argues that both Foucault himself and, for the most part, those exploring the problem of governmentality in connection with his work have concentrated on individuals and populations while

24


neglecting the dimension of life’s substance—what Fassin, in reference to both Georges Canguilhem and Hannah Arendt, terms “life itself.” Starting with Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoé, he differentiates between the “meaning” of life and its “matter,” exploring the relation between the two on the basis of empirical research on asylum applicants in France and the AIDS problem in South Africa. The outcome of this discussion is a moral anthropology tracing the social inequalities and normative values steering the politics of life in contemporary societies. An effort to bring the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality into dialogue is also at the center of Lars Thorup Larsen’s contribution. Larsen’s focal point is the re-orientation of health policies in many Western states starting in the 1970s, with prevention playing an increasingly important role. Larsen compares changes in U.S. and Danish health programs over the past three decades. His main conclusions: in these programs, “lifestyle” and “lifestyle diseases” are understood as empirical problems consciously aimed at influencing state policy for the sake of motivating individuals to behave in health-promoting ways. But the concepts involved have been applied in different ways in the two states, while in both countries the specific connection between lifestyle and health-related behavior has increasingly receded in favor of general moralization. The theoretical linkage between biopolitics and governmentality proposed by Larsen allows the contours of a “lifestyle politics” to emerge clearly: an approach going beyond the traditional juxtaposition of individualistic and social lifestyle concepts, which always have to presuppose what is generated by political technologies in the fi rst place. Over recent years, the concept of “biological citizenship” has been introduced by a range of authors in order to describe a new step in the development of civil rights. As a rule, what is at issue here are claims to participation in social and political processes and a recognition of individual and collective identities constitutively grounded in certain biological and genetic features. Peter Wehling’s essay draws attention to some problems and blind spots in this debate. The concept of biological citizenship, he indicates, is often used one-sidedly or selectively; what needs to be observed is not only the emergence of new rights and possibilities for participation, but also the emergence of previously unknown normative obligations and possibly undesired side effects or consequences. Beyond this, Wehling makes it clear that patient and self-help groups in the health sector, while representing an important catalyst for and articulation of biological citizenship, nevertheless reveal varying structures and interests and, frequently, tense relations with biomedical research. Wehling concludes by pointing to some basic problems and ambivalent effects that can surface when civil rights are tied to biological characteristics. He argues that the concept of “biological citizenship” should not be understood normatively, but should be seen as a tool for analyzing present-day developments in the field of biomedicine and biopolitics.

An Introduction 25

Economization of the Social and Decentering of the Economy Foucault took up the formation of a “political economy” as a starting point for his consideration of liberal practices of government, with studies of governmentality accommodating the theme in their analyses of present neoliberal regimes. These studies have tended, however, to neglect the question of how to relate current transformations in governmental rationalities and technologies to changes in the capitalist economy. The contributions in this section seek to examine the differences and parallels between contemporary accounts of “the” economy and efforts directed towards “decentering the economy” (Walters 1999) put forward in the governmentality literature. In his essay, Ulrich Bröckling provides a bridge between the section on the government of life and the following analyses of economization of the social. Bröckling’s starting point is a gap in Foucault’s and even more in Agamben’s discussion of biopolitics, which analyzed efforts to bring about political regulation of the population as a biological entity but did not focus on the specific economic rationality of biopolitics. The contribution highlights this dimension by studying two different approaches to an economic theory of human life: first the concept of Menschenökonomie as formulated by the Austrian social philosopher and sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid in the years before World War I and second the theory of human capital, whose most famous exponents are the US economists Theodore W. Schultz and Gary S. Becker. Where Goldscheid called for an economic rationalization of life by the state that would cultivate human resources in a planned way and increase them through preventive care, effective utilization, and mutual protection, the theory of human capital relies on self-regulation through the market, modeling individuals as entrepreneurs, and conceiving of their actions as investments or disinvestments in their own lifespans and quality of life. The concern in studies of governmentality with economic questions is characterized by an idiosyncratic ambiguity. On the one hand, we fi nd an insistence—not least in demarcation from the economic determinism of Marxist orthodoxy—that the economy is not an autonomous sphere, and certainly represents no totality, but rather needs to be analyzed as a bundle of truth claims and mechanisms of power, so that it is always seen as political economy. On the other hand, studies of governmentality diagnose an “economization of the social,” showing how contemporary regimes of government and self-government generalize the demand to act in an entrepreneurial manner. The essay by Urs Stäheli focuses critically on this indecisiveness. Taking up concepts from both deconstruction and systems theory, Stäheli underscores the self-referentiality of economic processes and the constitutive mistakes made by strategies for “governing economic life.” Where studies of governmentality identify a ”logic of the market” and trace its translation into governmental programs, Stäheli points to the self-disembedding, excessive moments of self-regulatory markets and the inherent contradictoriness of the figure of the entrepreneur.

26


Ute Tellmann likewise critically examines a basic category in studies of governmentality, demonstrating that Foucault’s repeatedly cited defi nition of government as the “conduct of conduct” falls short of describing the complexity of economic processes (and theories). Tellmann argues that Foucault’s reinterpretation of the economic as governmental rationality and the alignment in the “conduct of conduct” formula with concepts of indirect management remain within the horizon of liberal economic discourse and, in particular, are unable to adequately scrutinize the significance of money. Hence, as an alternative to simply applying that general interpretative key, she appeals for its historical localization. She argues that work on governmentality, like research in actor-network-theory, which is concerned with the socio-technical arrangements through which, for instance, markets are created, needs to provide a historical-conceptual analysis of the technologies of power constituting the economic field. In the volume’s closing contribution, Stephan Lessenich examines the “liberal paradox” of a welfare state located between an economic logic of commodification and a political logic of inclusion. On the one hand, individuals are liberated from traditional ties and mobilized for the capitalist production process; on the other hand, they are immobilized in institutions for risk protection and control organized within the nation-state. In the present transformation of the welfare state into an activating state, this paradox is displaced into that of a simultaneous self-mobilization and self-control. Policies of activation are flanked by generalized strategies of prevention. Both are accompanied by a process rendering individuals responsible: they are addressed, Lessenich observes, equally as active, innovative, and flexible market subjects, ready for risk, and as “social selves” civically engaged for the common good. Instead of concentrating, like a majority of studies in governmentality, on the “political power beyond the state” (Miller and Rose 2008: 53), Lessenich fi nally calls for an analysis of political power within the (welfare) state. This book has emerged from a conference on “The State of Governmentality” held in Leipzig on September 14–15, 2007. It was organized by the Research Center on Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the University of Constance, the Institute for Political Science at the University of Leipzig, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and the Institute for Criminological Research at the University of Hamburg. Both the conference and the realization of this volume were made possible by generous support from the Research Center on Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary, to which the editors express their warm thanks. Joel Golb translated the essays by Friedrich Balke, Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke from German, together with this introduction; Gerard Holden was responsible for correcting the essays; Julia Eckert, Robert Feustel, Jonas Helbig, Ulrike Spohn, Ulrike Wagner, and particularly Kristina Patzelt helped with preparing both the manuscript and the index. We extend heartfelt thanks to all of them.

An Introduction 27 NOTES 1. The source of this term lies in the journal Ordo, where most of the relevant authors were published. Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow and Alfred Müller-Armack were among the ordoliberals. 2. Although in his lectures Foucault also concerned himself with other thinkers from among the ranks of US neo-liberalism (von Mises, Hayek, Simons, Schultz and Stigler), he focused above all on the thought of Gary S. Becker, whom he felt to be the most radical exponent of that movement (see 2008: 269). 3. See the chapter by Thomas Lemke in this volume. 4. For a good overview, see the articles in the collections edited by Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991; Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Dean and Hindess 1998; see also Dean and Henman 2004. For a general description see Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Lemke 2000. 5. In order to avoid an ontologization and sociologization of this research perspective, Osborne (2004) prefers the term “studies of governmentality” instead of “governmentality studies.”

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An Introduction 31 Lessenich, Stephan. (2003). Soziale Subjektivität. Die neue Regierung der Gesellschaft, Mittelweg 36 12(4): 80–93. Lippert, Randy. (1999). Governing Refugees: The Relevance of Governmentality to Understanding the International Refugee Regime. Alternatives 24(3): 295– 328. Luke, Timothy. (1999). Environmentality as Green Governmentality, pp. 121–151 in Eric Darier (ed) Discourses of the Environment. Oxford: Blackwell. Macherey, Pierre. (1992). Towards a Natural History of Norms, pp. 176–91 in Michel Foucault Philosopher, ed. T. Armstrong. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Malpas, Jeff and Gary Wickham. (1995). Governance and Failure: On the Limits of Sociology. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 31(3): 37–50. Marcuse, Herbert. (1964). One-dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon. Marshall, James D. (1996). Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Masschelein, Jan and Maarten Simons. (2005). Globale Immunität oder Eine kleine Kartographie des europäischen Bildungsraums. Zürich/Berlin: diaphanes. Masschelein, Jan, Maarten Simons, Ulrich Bröckling and Ludwig Pongratz. (2007). The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality. Oxford/ Malden: Blackwell Publishers. McKinlay, Alan and Ken Starkey (eds). (1998). Foucault, Management and Organization Theory. From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Melville, Herman. (1997[1853]). Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street. New York: Simon & Schuster. Meuret, Denis. (1988). A political genealogy of political economy. Economy & Society 17(2): 225–250. Meyet, Sylvain. (2005). Les Trajectoires d’un Texte: La “gouvernementalité” de Michel Foucault, pp. 13–36 in Sylvain Meyet, Marie-Cécile Naves and Thomas Ribemont (eds) Travailler avec Foucault. Retours sur le Politique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Michel, Boris. (2005). Stadt und Gouvernementalität. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Miller, Peter and Ted O’Leary. (1987). Accounting and the construction of the governable person. Accounting, Organizations and Society 12(3): 235–265. Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. (2008). Governing the Present. Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity. Mitchell, Timothy. (1999). Society, Economy, and the State Effect, pp. 76–97 in George Steinmetz (ed) State/Culture: State-formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Nadesan, Majia Holmer. (2008). Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life. London/New York: Routledge. O’Malley, Pat. (1992). Risk, power and crime prevention. Economy and Society 21(3): 252–275. O’Malley, Pat. (1996). Risk and Responsibility, pp. 189–207 in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason. Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. O’Malley, Pat, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing. (1997). Governmentality, Criticism, Politics. Economy & Society 26(4): 501–517. Opitz, Sven. (2004). Gouvernementalität im Postfordismus. Macht, Wissen und Techniken des Selbst im Feld unternehmerischer Rationalität. Hamburg: Argument Verlag.

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Osborne, Thomas. (2004). Techniken und Subjekte: Von den ‘Governmentality Studies’ zu den ‘Studies of Governmentality’, pp. 33–43 in Wolfgang Pircher and Ramón Reichert (eds) Governmentality Studies. Analysen liberal-demokratischer Gesellschaften im Anschluss an Michel Foucault. Münster: Lit-Verlag. Osborne, Tom. (1993). Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and the Liberal Profession of Medicine. Economy & Society 22(3): 345–356. Pasquino, Pasquale. (1991). Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge, pp. 235–50 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordin and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Perry, Richard Warren and Bill Maurer (eds). (2003). Globalization under Construction. Governmentality, Law, and Identity. Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis Press. Pesqueux, Yvon and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher. (2000). La Réception deL’œuvre de Michel Foucault en Gestion. Cités (2): 109–115. Peters, Michael A., Susanne Maurer, Susanne Weber, Mark Olssen and A.C. (Tina) Besley (eds). (2008). Governmentality and Beyond: Education and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pieper, Marianne and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez (eds). (2003). Gouvernementalität. Ein sozialwissenschaftliches Konzept im Anschluss an Foucault. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus. Procacci, Giovanna. (1993). Gouverner la Misère. La Question Sociale en France 1789–1848. Paris: Seuil. Purtschert, Patricia, Katrin Meyer and Yves Winter (eds). (2008). Sicherheitsgesellschaft. Foucault und die Grenzen der Gouvernementalität. Bielefeld: transcript. Rancière, Jacques. (1998). Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. (2008). Ist Kunst widerständig?. Berlin: Merve. Reckwitz, Andreas. (2008). Generalisierte Hybridität und Diskursanalyse: Zur Dekonstruktion von ‘Hybriditäten’ in spätmodernen Subjektdiskursen, pp. 17–39 in Britta Kallscheuer and Lars Allolio-Näcke (eds) Kulturelle Differenz begreifen. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus. Reichert, Ramón and Wolfgang Pircher (eds). (2004). Governmentality Studies. Analysen liberal-demokratischer Gesellschaften im Anschluss an Michel Foucault. Münster: Lit-Verlag. Ricken, Norbert and Markus Rieger-Ladich (eds). (2004). Michel Foucault: Pädagogische Lektüren. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Rimke, Heidi Marie (2000). Governing Citizens through Self-Help Literature. Cultural Studies 14(1): 61–78. Robins, Steven. (2002). At the limits of spatial governmentality: A message from the tip of Africa. Third World Quarterly 23(4): 665–689. Rose, Nikolas. (1989). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. (1996). Inventing our Selves. Psychology, Power, Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences 2(1): 83–104. Rüdiger, Axel. (2005). Staatslehre und Staatsbildung. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Rutherford, Paul. (1999). The Entry of Life into History, pp. 37–62 in Eric Darier (ed) Discourses of the Environment. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Saar, Martin. (2007). Macht, Staat, Subjektivität: Foucaults “Geschichte der Gouvernementalität” im Werkkontext, pp. 23–45 in Susanne Krasmann and Michael

An Introduction 33 Volkmer (eds) Michel Foucaults “Geschichte der Gouvernementalität” in den Sozialwissenschaften: Internationale Beiträge. Bielefeld: transcript. Séglard, Dominique. (1992). Foucault et le Problème du Gouvernement, pp. 117–40 in Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié (eds) La Raison d’état. Paris: PUF. Sellin, Volker. (1984). Regierung, Regime, Obrigkeit, pp. 361–421 in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Volume 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Senellart, Michel. (1993). Michel Foucault: ‘gouvernementalité’ et raison d’Etat, Penseé Politique (1): 276–303. Senellart, Michel. (1995). Les arts de gouverner. Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement. Paris: Seuil. Senellart, Michel. (2004). L’ordo-libéralisme allemand dans la problematisation foucaldienne du libéralisme contemporain, pp. 271–294 in Jean-François Kervégan and Heinz Mohnhaupt (eds) Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftstheorien in Rechtsgeschichte und Philosophie. Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann. Sfez, Gérald. (2000). Les Doctrines de la Raison d’Etat. Paris: Armand Colin. Shore, Cris and Susan Wright (eds). (1997). Anthropology of Policy. Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. London/New York: Routledge. Simon, Jonathan. (2007). Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press. Smandych, Russell. (1999). Governable Spaces. Readings on Governmentality and Crime Control. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stauff, Markus. (2005). “Das neue Fernsehen.” Machtanalyse, Gouvernementalität und digitale Medien. Münster: Lit-Verlag. Townley, Barbara (ed). (1994). Reframing Human Resource Management. Power, Ethics and the Subject at Work. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Tulkens, Françoise (ed). (1988). Généalogie de la défense sociale en Belgique (1880–1914). Brüssel: E. Story-Scientia. Tulkens, Françoise. (1986). Généalogie de la défense sociale en Belgique (1880– 1914), Actes: les cahiers d’action juridique (54): 38–41. Türk, Klaus, Thomas Lemke and Michael Bruch. (2002). Organisation in der modernen Gesellschaft. Eine historische Einführung. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Vailly, Joelle. (2006). Genetic Screening as a Technique of Government: The Case of Neonatal Screening for Cystic Fibrosis in France, Social Science and Medicine 63(12): 3092–3101. Weber, Susanne and Susanne Maurer (eds). (2006). Gouvernementalität und Erziehungswissenschaft. Wissen-Macht-Transformation. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Weiskopf, Richard (eds). (2003). Menschenregierungskünste. Anwendungen poststrukturalistischer Analyse auf Management und Organisation. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Wöhl, Stefanie. (2003). Individualisierende Verantwortungszuschreibungen. Perspektiven des Gouvernementalitätsansatzes von Michel Foucault, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Sozialforschung (14): 120–146. Zarka, Yves-Charles (ed). (1994). Raison et déraison d’Etat. Paris: PUF.

2

Relocating the Modern State Governmentality and the History of Political Ideas1 Martin Saar

1. INTRODUCTION: HISTORICIZING POLITICS There is nothing predictable about the direction the reception of a major thinker will take, and the huge success of the work of Michel Foucault is no exception. It would have been utterly impossible to foresee, at the time of their publication, which of his writings would catch the attention of his readers for years to come and which of his projects and concepts would become major references in a variety of disciplines. The fate of the notion of governmentality is particularly instructive. It is undeniable by now that Foucault’s two lecture courses at the Collège de France on the overall project that he himself called “the history of ‘governmentality’” (Foucault 2007: 108) have produced an enormous echo in sociology, political theory, and even in cultural anthropology.2 But the challenge his suggestions pose to the historiography of politics and history of political thought has hardly been the object of any comparable debate. This is surprising, especially given the fact that Foucault’s original project at the end of the 1970s was mainly a historical enterprise. The 1977–1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population, and the 1978–1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, are both devoted to a genuinely historiographical task, namely the rewriting of the history of the (European, modern) state and of the arts and technologies of government. The current debate on governmentality has, for good reasons, focused on the diagnostic and conceptual value of Foucault’s project for contemporary social and political analysis and has therefore mainly given priority to the relationship between government, security, and power and to the problem of “liberalism” in its various forms. This discussion has helped to clarify how Foucault’s historical analysis might bear on the question of how contemporary societies (and their subjects) are governed. 3 But it has overshadowed the methodological and historical presuppositions of his approach. So, given that the full version of this material is now available, it might be fruitful to start again from the question of what function the project of a “history of governmentality” was meant to play, and how it relates to more established theoretical and empirical perspectives on the

Relocating the Modern State 35 very same subject, namely the history of the changing conceptions of the Western state and politics. Seen in this way, Foucault’s project is not only a toolbox for contemporary criticisms of the state or variants of political sociology or political anthropology, but also (and maybe first and foremost) a form of political historiography that competes with and refutes traditional and more dominant forms of political history and the history of political ideas. In order to provide a preliminary contribution to such a discussion on historiographical method, I will proceed in four steps, followed by a general conclusion. I will fi rst give a brief survey of Foucault’s—not too explicit— general methodological clarifications, as they appear in the governmentality lectures, and relate them to his earlier methodological programs (2). I will then, more specifically, try to reconstruct the methodological and historiographical implications of Foucault’s unorthodox history of Western politics and political thought and especially the historiography of the state and statehood (3). The specificity of Foucault’s historiographical practice can then be usefully compared to some of the more established perspectives in the same field, fi rst to the “traditional” version of the history of political ideas (4) and then to more recent, more sophisticated versions of it (5) which might be said to constitute the most important, not to say “hegemonic” perspectives in the methodology of the history of political thought. Foucault’s approach can be shown to provide a markedly different, and for some purposes even superior, type of analysis of state formation and the transformations of statehood which nevertheless shares many telling features with these competing accounts. The history of governmentality should, in sum, not be read as a radical refutation or replacement of intellectual political history, but as a radical methodological challenge to it (6). Telling the history of the state and the conceptions and ideas of the state “after Foucault” means to raise the methodological stakes of such an enterprise and to revise its very form.

2. FROM THE ANALYTICS OF POWER TO THE HISTORY OF GOVERNMENTALITY Surprisingly, Foucault starts the lectures we have come to read as a major turning point in his work by assuring his audience that he will continue an analysis “that we began some years ago” (Foucault 2007: 1), namely an analysis and historical survey of power mechanisms. As he insists, this perspective does not amount to any “general theory of power” (ibid.), but rather consists in a set of empirical and historical studies of power, what in the History of Sexuality: Volume 1, he had called an “analytics of power” (Foucault 1978: 109). The five “indications of choice or statements of intent” (Foucault 2007: 1) he offers are, in a way, nothing less than methodological conclusions derived from his earlier work on the mechanisms and historical

36

Martin Saar

forms of power. Power is, fi rst, not to be seen as a “substance” but as an umbrella term for specific mechanisms. It is, second, not an autonomous entity but “an intrinsic part of” other social relations (Foucault 2007: 2). Power is, third, a proper object of philosophical analysis in the sense of a “politics of truth” (ibid.: 3) that is concerned with the “knowledge effects” (ibid.) of power.4 The analysis of power, fourth, is committed to a “tactical” but not to an “imperative” (one might say “normative”) implication: the study of power cannot step back to any neutral ground from which to judge or assess power as such. And fifth and fi nally, undoubtedly scarred from a series of theoretical confrontations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Foucault warns against the engagement in polemics within and instead of theoretical discourses. This rather elliptic list of opening remarks presupposes quite a lot of knowledge on the part of Foucault’s audience, because he is doing nothing less here than invoking the basic principles of his earlier research, starting with “The Order of Discourse,” his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970. It can be argued that all of his subsequent work, from his early Collège de France lectures on the “Will to Knowledge” (1970–1971), “Penal Theories and Institutions” (1971–1972), “The Punitive Society” (1972–1973) or “Psychiatric Power” (1973–1974) up to Discipline and Punish (1975) and the fi rst volume of the History of Sexuality (1976) followed these basic principles and interests: an interest in a nominalist conception of power; a theoretical attention to the implications and interwovenness of power with other spheres of the social; an elaboration of the intrinsic connection between power and knowledge; a serious attempt to develop a form of historical inquiry that makes it possible to describe and critically analyze the normative elements in a given discourse; the intention not to intervene polemically into the theoretical and political debate but rather to develop perspectives that permit a redescription and transformation of existing self-understandings and an opening up of new ways of thinking.5 To this list one might add two more elements not explicitly mentioned in Foucault’s opening remarks in 1978, but implied in them: an interest in discontinuity and historical breaks as a major heuristic orientation (Foucault 1998a; 1998b),6 and fi nally the deliberate use of unusual stylistic devices and rhetorical features that allow him to produce the very effect of defamiliarization and creative redescription, many of which can be traced back to Nietzsche’s genealogical writings.7 Approaching the bulk of historical material and its systematic elaboration in the lectures on the history of governmentality with these principles in mind, it will come as no surprise to see that Foucault, despite the many new and innovative material elements he is about to elaborate, presents his new work mainly as a continuation along the chosen path, leading to an extension and modification of the basic methodological concepts (Saar 2007b). In most of the generally rather few methodological passages, Foucault insists on his adherence to the fundamental guidelines that have

Relocating the Modern State 37 guided his research so far. But, of course, the historical objects are new ones. The term “apparatuses (dispositifs) of security” (Foucault 2007: 11) is introduced and explained in contrast to the mechanisms and institutions of sovereignty and discipline, which were mainly elaborated in Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality: Volume 1 and the lecture course Society Must Be Defended (1975–1976). Similarly, like the notion of “bio-power,” which was also introduced and elaborated in the two works immediately following Discipline and Punish, “security” is used to refer to a new mode or historical form of power, a new way to regulate society with a logic and effectiveness of its own.8 Early eighteenth-century liberalism and its theoretical formulation in the science of political economy are shown to be the discursive expressions of this new form of power, one that insists on every human being’s “freedom” and “naturalness” and restrains the actions of political authorities to acts that respect the autonomous laws of self-regulating societies. For this reason, the early liberal conception of government is “not exactly, fundamentally, or primarily an ideology. First of all and above all it is a technology of power” (Foucault 2007: 49). This is why practical texts like edicts on trade and commerce, the political tracts of the physiocrats, and programmatic statements of jurists and economists are the best material from which to draw conclusions about the specifics of this new thinking and the new practice of liberal government. The prominence of the population as the main target of the new form of power can only be established against the background of “a completely different economy of power” (ibid.) than the one centered on the law (i.e., sovereignty) or the dressage of individual bodies (i.e., discipline). The term “governmentality” is not introduced by Foucault before the fourth session of his lectures, but already by then, speaking on the level of methodology, one can say that his approach is more or less in line with what he has done before. He tries to expand and refi ne the results of the historical analytics of power for the historiography of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by introducing a new historical configuration in which new practices of political regulation emerge that conform to a new logic of power. These practices are accompanied by new theoretical (discursive) articulations (liberalism, political economy), and they relate to new (material) objects (the population). The new historical object, called “biopolitics” in some of his earlier work, is now called “apparatus of security” in the fi rst lectures of the new series, and then this term is also dropped and is replaced by the vocabulary of governmentality. It is easy to see that Foucault does not think that the project of a history of governmentality demands any major methodological innovation except a change of focus. The approach remains genealogical in relating discourse and history, the textual and the social. This is why the history of governmentality is no mere history of political thinking about government. While it has some symptomatic value to trace the intellectual history of certain

38 Martin Saar philosophical motives like the various theories about the “art of government” and the furious rejection of Machiavelli (cf. Foucault 2007: 87–108), his main interest lies in the fact that a conception like “economy,” “through a series of complex processes that are absolutely crucial for our history,” can acquire the status of “a level of reality and a field of intervention for government” (ibid.: 95). Submitting the theme of the Christian pastorate to the perspective of a history of power “enables us,” Foucault explains, “to take up these things and analyze them, no longer in the form of reflection and transcription, but in the form of strategies and tactics” (Foucault 2007: 216). What this requires us to do is to see that intellectual and social changes are not to be seen apart from each other, as two different realms of social reality, but as parts of a conglomerate. A mere history of ideas, on the one hand, would decouple these two levels completely; a reductive history of ideology, on the other hand, would collapse the one into the other. Foucault’s own approach tries to assess the tactical value of intellectual and theoretical moves, but does not reduce the discursive elements to their non-discursive “base.” It sees both spheres as sides of social reality.9 Such a history of power is less concerned with what there is in the realm of supposedly neutral historical “facts,” and more interested in the processes and procedures that “make” and produce facticity and normativity in a given historical, epistemological and social field.10 The “history of governmentality” is therefore neither history of politics (or of political institutions) nor history of political ideas (or of ideologies), but history of politics-as-reality, a historical tracing of the many ways in which what people can do effectively as political agents and what people can actually think about politics is shaped by institutional and epistemic conditions.

3. DE-INSTITUTIONALIZING THE STATE If the preceding reconstruction is plausible, Foucault can be said to follow in the “history of governmentality” a similar path as in his historiographies of the penal system, the early psychiatric institutions, or certain juridical concepts and their administrative functions. In comparison to these rather limited projects, however, the “history of governmentality” seems rather broad in scope. Because in this case, Foucault not only presents alternative historical accounts of the nature and functions of certain institutions, concepts and practices, but also offers a complete redescription of a whole field that also covers “governmental reason,” as he calls it (Foucault 2007: 287).11 But this is more than a history of political ideas, because it reflects on the concrete and material form of political rule, i.e., the acts of governing. Foucault’s introduction of the neologism “gouvernementalité” in the fourth session of Security, Territory, Population is meant to refer to nothing

Relocating the Modern State 39 other than this unusual level of analysis. Semantically, the term aims at the whole sphere that can be said to be “gouvernemental,” i.e., relating to the instance and the act of government as it was conceived and exercized in early modern Europe. The three-fold quasi-defi nition Foucault offers (Foucault 2007: 108–109) should be read cum grano salis. It is defi nitely an ad hoc defi nition, since it is hard to see how something can meaningfully be said to be an “ensemble” of something, a temporal “tendency” and the “result of a process” at the same time, the last of these only explained with the help of the term to be defined. But the main intention is clear: governmentality structurally refers to the material and epistemic basis of state action, and it historically places the specific form of governmental activity in question in a specific context, namely the gradual evolution of the administrative state in which “governing the population” on the basis of new forms of knowledge became the fundamental mode of the exercise of political power. Foucault immediately flags what he sees as the advantage of this perspective: the focus on governmentality can help avoid “overvaluing the problem of the state” (Foucault 2007: 109). This is because the very term “state,” in most historical and theoretical accounts, refers to an assumed entity and identity that is to be called into question. The very idea of governmentality decenters this entity/identity in a double way: fi rst, by dissolving the assumed fi xed entity of the state into the multiplicity of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” (ibid.: 108) that secure its activities; and, second, by thoroughly historicizing the assumed transtemporal identity of the state. It is in these formulations that it becomes most explicit that Foucault’s suggestions are meant to react to and replace the then dominant variants of state theory that had emerged out of French Neo-Marxism during the 1960s and 70s. His comment on the reduction of the state to “the reproduction of the relations of production” (ibid.: 109) explicitly refers to the position of his former teacher and friend Louis Althusser and his conception of the “ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser 1971). His repeated insistence on the need “to do without a theory of the state” (Foucault 2008: 76) confi rms this double stance: the need to transgress the confi nes of the institutions-centered approach to government, and the need to address differently the questions the “theory of the state” was meant to answer.12 The decentering or decomposition of the state into the processes that constitute and stabilize it helps us to see that it is not a natural given, but a “composite reality and a mythicized abstraction” (Foucault 2007: 109). There is no “state-thing as if it was being developed on the basis of itself and imposing itself on individuals as if by a spontaneous, automatic mechanism” (ibid.: 277). Rather: “The state is a practice,” it is “inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things” (ibid.). One might call this a radical political constructivism, a radical constructivist perspective on the state.

40 Martin Saar Such a constructivist account of the state treats it not as an eternal identity but as an ever-changing formation, done and redone by the multiplicity of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” (Foucault 2007: 108). In short, it treats it as an “effect” (Foucault 2008: 77) within a history of multiple causes and influences. The enormous mass of historical knowledge about the ancient idea of government as pastoral (cf. Foucault 2007: 123–226) and about the early modern reconception of government as art of governing and raison d’état (cf. ibid.: 237–312) is put together by Foucault in order to give plausibility to one major historical claim: there is a decisive break during the sixteenth century when the former conception of “pastoral government,” justified in a theological fashion, gives way to a more immanent conception of “sovereignty over men” (ibid.: 237) that corresponds to different laws and needs. It is only here, Foucault claims, that “the new problematization” in the form of “the res publica, the public domain or state” (Foucault 2007: 237) can emerge. So the historical claim is twofold. The modern state of statehood is only intelligible on the basis of its emergence out of Christian pastoral power. But one must also grasp the radical transformation the idea of government undergoes, after this breaking away of pastoral power and new techniques and practices of governing and of administering societies have emerged. It is only with these new forms of governmental knowledge and practice that the modern territorial nation state, governing its population by means of political economy or other forms of knowledge, will become possible during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The historian of governmentality can therefore account for the emergence of modern statehood itself, and must refrain from reifying the state form into some historical invariant. This form-of-state, the state of governmentality, was not the only one and it might prove not to have been the last. One might call this approach a radical political historicism, a radical historicist perspective on the state. Compared to state history and state theory on the methodological level, Foucault’s project of a “history of governmentality” therefore proves to be an inquiry sui generis. It disassembles the assumed ideality of the state and historicizes its form at the same time. And both procedures, dissolving the entity/identity of the state into practices and into historical processes, transfigure the object of political inquiry. The originality of the “history of governmentality” therefore lies in the specific level on which it operates: neither exclusively on the level of ideas and conceptions of the state (as in intellectual history), nor on that of the mere techniques and procedures of government and the exercise of political power (as in some sort of social or political Realgeschichte). For this kind of historiography, the state is fi rst and foremost a solution to a problem, the problem of government; or, to put it in the words of the later works of Foucault, this history is in itself the tracking of how something became a problem, it is therefore a history of a “problematization.”

Relocating the Modern State 41 4. THE HISTORY OF GOVERNMENTALITY VS. THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS Having outlined the methodological profi le of Foucault’s approach, it is now possible to more clearly assess its relationship to other perspectives. As already indicated, Foucault’s “history of governmentality” could be understood as his critical response to the French Neo-Marxist theory of the state prominent in his days and intellectual context.13 As his many remarks on “state phobia” (Foucault 2008: 76, 187, 191) show, he accuses this tradition (not always correctly) of relying on an essentialist and basically a-historical conception of the state, and his response consists in a thorough historicization of the assumed entity and identity of the (modern, liberal) state. This historical contextualization brings to light a multiplicity of forms, conceptions and materializations of statehood. But this move, of course, brings his approach rather close to the academic discourse at the intersection of political theory and history commonly called the “history of political ideas” or “political intellectual history”. This is where concerns similar to Foucault’s, about the emergence and development of modern Western statehood, are on the agenda. This is where the question of how the modern conception and reality of the state emerged fi nds its place. So is Foucault’s “history of governmentality” nothing more than another version of the history of political ideas, and if not, why not? One might, following Rorty’s use of the term (1984: 61), call the traditional conception in the history of political ideas “doxographic”: it describes the history of the state as a history of different theories and conceptions of the state attributed to authors or schools of thought. Doing the history of the state in such a framework consists in nothing more than writing the history of different authors’ conceptions of the state, without or only occasionally asking about its relation to the realm of social and political history. One might trace the inspiration for such a—slightly caricatured—conception back to such grand authors as Leo Strauss or Eric Voegelin, Ernst Cassirer or Friedrich Meinecke, to Benedetto Croce, Isaiah Berlin or Michael Oakeshott; and obviously the significance of these godfathers varies widely in the different national contexts (Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk 2003). But the traditional conception has gained a life of its own in the academic institutionalization of the history of political ideas as an academic sub-discipline with textbooks, curricula and a canon of great texts. It is easy to construe the Foucaultian reaction to such an enterprise, since it is implicit in the rejection of the history of ideas in his “archaeological” works, most prominently in the Archaeology of Knowledge,14 and also in his methodological remarks on the “analytics of power” and the “history of governmentality,” which have already been discussed. The history of ideas, Foucault claims, remains too fi xated on documents rather than “monuments” (Foucault 2002: 153), and on the quest for essential meaning. It is therefore unable to grasp the materiality of discourse. It remains tied to the

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idea of continuity and development, and misses out on the discontinuity and amorphic quality of emerging fields of knowledge. It remains obsessed with the identity-conferring categories of “work” and “author” and omits the other and far more formative “types and rules for discursive practices” (ibid.: 156). And, fi nally, the history of ideas remains within the realm of restitution or recovery: it seeks to “bring back, in all its purity, the distant, precarious, almost effaced light of the origin” (ibid.). It is, in other words, an ideological enterprise, powered by a desire for tradition and identity, and is unwilling to confront the heterogeneity and strangeness of history. These general objections to the intellectual history approach as such are bolstered by Foucault’s methodological remarks on the historical theory of the state. The whole emphasis on the state as an “effect” and “practice” as discussed previously, and the concern with the two sides of statehood, are right on target here. The state, Foucault claims, can be reduced to neither its conceptual or ideological shape nor its material form, i.e., the acts, arts and techniques of government. On the contrary, it is the intertwining and intersection of these two realms that constitute the state-as-reality, discursive and material at the same time. The traditional history of political ideas, criticized from such a perspective, will never be able to grasp this reality, because it will never fully articulate the practical side, the material element of the state or government. The exclusive focus on what is said and thought about the state, on the discourse on the state, fails to see that the very state in question is at the same time effective and an effect of a great many processes in the political field. This discourse of the state, as one might call it, cannot be reduced to its explicit formulation in theories, it is equally embodied in political programmatics, administrative structures and patterns of very concrete governmental practices. The history of political ideas in its traditional version therefore lacks the methodological orientation to even contribute to what Foucault’s project of a “history of governmentality” is trying to achieve.

5. THE “NEW” HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS It would be grossly unfair, however, to reduce the history of political ideas to the scarecrow here dismissively called its “traditional version”. On the contrary, it was precisely this sub-field of academic work that was undergoing major methodological reformulations around more or less the same time as Foucault was envisioning—and rather soon letting go again—his version of a historicized account of modern statehood. One could even argue that some of the scholars involved, working quite independently from his approach, were responding to the same methodological predicament: how to relate the history of the state, or how to write political history, nondoxographically and non-idealistically?

Relocating the Modern State 43 At least three tendencies, arguably the most influential and methodologically innovative versions of a “new” history of political ideas, should be mentioned here: variants of intellectual history that are integrating social history, as practiced by political theorists and historians such as Gerhard Oestreich, Herfried Münkler, and Maurizio Viroli, to name but a few; the “Cambridge School” approach to political history, mostly connected to the material studies and methodological texts of Quentin Skinner, John Pocock and others; and conceptual history (in the sense of the German Begriffsgeschichte), associated with the work of Reinhart Koselleck and his colleagues.15 The turn from a “pure” intellectual history of politics to a form of integrated approach is a movement that has happened within the sub-discipline of the history of political ideas itself. At least from the late 1970s on, a rapprochement of intellectual and social history is clearly visible. And it will come as no surprise that thematic concerns similar to Foucault’s contributed to the call for such a move. Let us take just two prominent examples, mainly from the German context. In his research on early modern political regimes, Gerhard Oestreich developed the notion of “social disciplining [Sozialdisziplin]” to describe the then new concepts of social order and new forms of political regulation, and on this basis contributed to a different understanding of the internal logic of early modern sovereignty. Methodologically, this meant integrating classical political history and intellectual history with research on local and regional developments and everyday life. This was taken up by a whole generation of social historians in the 1980s, and became a fruitful area of research that could combine historical perspectives on social polities and political concepts alike (Sachße and Tennstedt 1986). Similarly, most of the historians working on the “reason of state” (raison d’état) doctrine fully realize that this crucial trope of early modern political thought cannot be reduced to a theory. Therefore, tracing “reason of state” in historical developments from the mid-fi fteenth to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also means detecting its effectiveness where it is not named but practiced. The “elements of reason of state” are therefore present even after its discourse has largely vanished, since “they found their way into the structural composition of the new political order” (Münkler 1987: 299, my translation). The study of the main conceptual innovations (Viroli 1992) cannot abstract from the concrete basis of political action that becomes thinkable through them. One might summarize the main thesis of this important historical discussion as follows: the reason of state as an element of political discourse has become one of the most effective modern political “imperatives” (Münkler 1987: 328), it has become a practical schema that started out as a new way of justifying governmental action but has now become a major practical orientation of most modern state action.16

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This approach helps to reformulate the efficacy of discourses about the state in a new way that is not unlike Foucault’s insistence on the material side of the state. It urges us to incorporate all the social and institutional factors that accompany, and sometimes produce, new discursive solutions and new patterns of action. Seen in this way, “the state” ceases to be a historical given; it can now be seen as a mobile point of intersection between ideas and practices (Chartier 1982). To fully achieve such a form of “double vision,” intellectual and social history not only have to become friendly neighbors but must also work hand in hand (Münkler 2003). A quite similar impulse to relate intellectual history to social and institutional history might be said to be one of the aims of the many authors working within the tradition of the so-called “Cambridge School.” Their shared methodological imperative, the project of placing political ideas in their historical context, has immunized them against any temptation to follow a pure or primarily textualist approach to political ideas (Pocock 1962; Tully 1993; Skinner 2002a). In their perspective, every theoretical position can only be adequately understood when it is situated in the field of historical, political and ideological controversy. Any proper historical reconstruction of a political theory will therefore presuppose a thorough assessment of these contextual factors, many of which are the proper objects of social and institutional history. If this form of comprehensive historical contextualism is still called an approach “centered [ . . . ] on the history of ideologies” (Skinner 1978: xi), this is meant to indicate that “context” here is used to explain and to help make intelligible the “text” in question and not for its own sake. This form of historiography is a far cry from the “traditional” approach outlined earlier. The individual authors, as well as the individual texts, have lost their autonomy and become elements of a wider contextual historical picture. Political history, as it appears in the searchlight of this “new” history of political thought, will be readable on different levels which intersect on the level of political struggle and confl ict, fought with the sword and the pen at the same time (Tully 1988; Skinner 2002b: 177; Bevir 1999). It is in respect of this deeply conflictual or antagonistic view of history that many authors belonging to or close to the “Cambridge School” conform to many of Foucault’s historical suggestions, as some of them have openly acknowledged (Tully 2002). For them, too, as for Foucault, the reality of the state cannot be a neutral given; it is in itself an element and a product of political struggle. And this calls for a radical methodological revision of political historiography. The approach of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte has only recently been recognized in the international discussion as a major methodological innovation (cf. Richter 1995: 5; Skinner 2002b: 177–180). Originally developed in the framework of material studies on conceptual change and historical semantics in the early 1970s, most prominently in the handbook Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Historical Keywords) and

Relocating the Modern State 45 the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts), Reinhart Koselleck and his colleagues have searched for a new way to approach social reality via conceptual history and to treat language as the reservoir of political and historical experiences. In his many methodological reflections, Koselleck has convincingly argued that such an approach cannot be reduced either to hermeneutics, with which it shares some basic principles, or to linguistic history (Wortgeschichte).17 The realm of the concept is rather the history of meaning and self-understanding in a given historical time, one that can be traced by tracking frequency and modifications in usage and by mapping the transformation of entire semantic fields. But to do so requires not only seeing concepts in their theoretical context or intellectual history. It also means treating the formation and modification of abstract terms as a site of the elaboration and expression of lived historical and political experience, something that only becomes visible when the extra-theoretical context is taken into account.18 It is this convergence of social history and conceptual history (Koselleck 2004a) which gives this historical methodology its distinctive form. Unsurprisingly, it has proven its productivity for the historiography of political concepts (such as sovereignty, constitution, revolution, the people etc.). It is non-idealististic in that it never hypostatizes the reality of concepts and ideas, but places them fi rmly on the ground of political and social history. In asking what kind of political self-understanding was made possible and expressible by conceptual change or innovation, conceptual history explicitly acknowledges that political ideas (like certain doctrines about the legitimacy of the state) only gained their sustainability and plausibility against the background of certain social and institutional realities. Processes of conceptual innovation and transformation have in themselves a political dimension, and they document developments in the political realm. Political institutions are therefore not external to political theories, but their very environment. Starting from this assumption about the intertwining of political language and political reality, conceptual historians of the political are immune to the “state phobia” and state fetishization Foucault accused his contemporaries (from the Left and the Right) of; for conceptual historians, the state is always already part of historical reality and experience. And the history of political terms and doctrines is, for them, the best material trace, the connection between the conceptual and the institutional dimension. But none of these general similarities and convergences can overshadow the serious differences that remain between these approaches within a “new” history of political ideas and Foucault’s conception of a “history of governmentality.” Of course, even the most sophisticated models of intellectual history open to assistance from social history remain primarily focused on ideas and will never travel all the way along the road leading to a history of discourses and practices, where authors and texts are not the primary referent any more. On the one hand, there still remains a tendency to follow a certain “heroism” and to continue to write about great authors

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of great texts in difficult times. This is sometimes even accompanied by a certain urge to revitalize or recuperate the original motives of these great thinkers.19 On the other hand, one can see a certain tendency to reinterpret the history of political ideas teleologically and to give the impression that modern statehood is best understood not as a contingent product, but as the outcome of a quasi-rational historical process. 20 Both tendencies, however, seem utterly incompatible with Foucault’s historical nominalism and post-Nietzschean emphasis on historical contingency. The emphasis on the historical and strategic-ideological context of political theories found in authors like Skinner, Pocock and Tully should also not obscure the fact that for them, this does not mean retreating from the project of a history of theories. Knowledge and data about the material forces and administrative causes that have led to a certain type of statehood are, for them, mostly relevant as elements of a interpretative story; the main enterprise remains an intellectual or hermeneutic approach, and the history of the modern state remains mainly a history of an idea of the state that can be traced back to the controversies surrounding absolutism in the seventeenth century (Skinner 1989). The “history of governmentality,” however, seems to be far more “materialist” on this point in taking a comprehensive perspective that includes theoretical and social developments and which therefore shares many features with historiographies of the state inspired by Neo-Marxist theorizing (Tilly 1990). It is only the convergence and mutual reinforcement of the theoretical discourse on the state and the practical, administrative discourse of the state that gave rise to the process of “governmentalization” (Foucault 2007: 109) that ended up in the modern, late liberal state as we know it. Foucault’s strategy of historical contextualization, in other words, seems to go much further than that of most authors from the “Cambridge School”. A similar reservation should be made with respect to the approach of conceptual history. While some commentators have convincingly argued for the comparability of Koselleck’s and Foucault’s methodology regarding the historicity of discourse and meaning (Busse 1987; Åkerstrøm Andersen 2003; and Rosanvallon 2003), the most obvious difference remains the latter’s implicit insistence on the need to refrain from subjective (and hermeneutical) categories such as experience, expectation or horizon, notions dear to practitioners of conceptual history (Koselleck 2004b). Both approaches insist on the need to seriously work on the discursive surface of a given time without reducing the complexity and ambivalence of meaning that is being circulated. But while the similarity consists in thoroughly historicizing notions and conceptions of the political, there seems to be no obvious way for conceptual historians to incorporate Foucault’s theses about biopolitics, the role of statistics and political economy, arguments which refer not to the self-understanding of political actors but to the institutional and administrative facts about the transformation of European societies. There remains a tendency on the side of conceptual history to remain enclosed in

Relocating the Modern State 47 a mostly archival mode of historiography, for which the dynamics of social realities are mere references in the process of making linguistic expression intelligible. The “history of governmentality,” in other words, seems to disclose and give more weight to other realms of historical reality than the ones conceptual history tends to explore.

6. CONCLUSION: POLITICIZING HISTORY The aim of this essay has been to clarify the methodological stakes of Foucault’s “history of governmentality.” For this reason, the two Collège de France lecture courses were treated less as substantial contributions to a history of the emergence of the modern state and more as a programmatic statement and methodological promise. Foucault offers a new form of historical-political inquiry, and provides the methodological outline of a research agenda he himself had only started to follow. Such a methodological reading cannot, of course, explain, let alone exhaust, the potential this perspective holds for contemporary discussions of the state and the concept of politics. But it can shed some light on the fact that the very form of telling the history of the state can vary widely, and this might motivate us to apply the governmentality framework more directly to the history of political thought than is commonly practiced. I have tried to argue for the specificity and attractiveness of such a nonstandard way of doing the history of the state, and I have suggested imagining a controversy on method between this approach and various forms of the history of political ideas. Foucault’s program, I have claimed, can be seen as a crucial alternative to a traditionalist form of intellectual history. There is no reason, however, to overstate the differences between his approach and more recent and methodologically sophisticated versions of a “new” history of political ideas. These new forms of political intellectual history integrate the insights of social history, and account for the tactical and ideological context of political theories and for the interrelation between political concepts and socio-historical reality. Many profound differences in method notwithstanding, the “history of governmentality” as well as these approaches might be said to be contributing to a highly innovative history of political thought and practice and therefore should be taken as a major challenge for anyone interested in the future of the study of the history of political ideas. But still, from a strictly Foucaultian perspective all of the three competing approaches referred to here might be criticized for remaining too fi rmly in the grip of the “ideational” approach to politics that implicitly or explicitly presupposes some essence or essential Gestalt of the state which only has to be conceived in the right way. Needless to say, many open questions remain for this attempt to draw up a comprehensive historical research agenda on modern statehood and state ideas. Two omissions are obvious and have been noted repeatedly, but

48 Martin Saar they should not be taken to be internally linked to Foucault’s approach. The absence of any perspective on the gender-specificity of political conceptions and actions is surprising; and interestingly enough, some of the best work on contemporary governmentality has highlighted exactly this aspect (Cruikshank 1999), which Foucault evidently did not consider relevant at the time. Similarly, it seems impossible to even grasp the formation of the modern European state and its biopolitical dimension without accounting for its colonial dimension. But this aspect also remains largely absent from Foucault’s discussion (Stoler 1995). Once again, though, as some of the most interesting work in the contemporary anthropology of the state has shown, statehood in itself can materialize in various forms and functions, and the inter-national and inter-state distribution of power is a major factor in determining which pattern of state action will prevail (Randeria 2007). There is no need to faithfully follow Foucault’s own exclusive focus on modern European or Western governmentality. Many current discussions on the variety of statehood and the variability of the relationship between populations, more or less sovereign political bodies and the law have successfully proven the point that the idea that there is just one historical trajectory of political modernization is nothing more than a eurocentric fiction. 21 But this just underlines the fact that Foucault’s suggestions and his fragmentary “history of governmentality” are less a sacred ground than a methodological point of departure, from which one can move in many directions he himself never imagined. While the need to diverge from Foucault’s own original concerns applies to all sorts of projects that try to remain faithful to a certain legacy of Foucault’s work, this is especially true for the kind of work that has been the focus of my discussion here, the historiography of political ideas and political practice. It is evident that Foucault, in his courses on liberalism, security, biopolitics and neo-liberalism never even toyed with the ambition to be exhaustive. What he was providing, however, was a perspective, a schema in which the history of Western politics could be told and re-told and which might provide a novel view of the emergence of political modernity. It is only just now beginning to become clear what such a perspective could imply for the narratives in which the history of Western political thought is commonly told, “traditionally” or otherwise. Just how far political historiography guided by the perspective of a “history of governmentality” can go has been convincingly illustrated by the many historical works inspired by Foucault’s example. While the work of his original collaborators in Paris in the 1970s, scholars such as François Ewald, Pasquale Pasquino, Giovanna Procacci and Jacques Donzelot, on the history of the welfare state, security, or poverty has in itself influenced a whole range of research projects, more recent work on the history of political ideas has also benefited from this perspective. 22 Brilliant studies have proven that the transition from medieval political thought to early modern conceptions of the political can be productively rethought with the help of Foucault’s

Relocating the Modern State 49 suggestions (Senellart 1995), and that the founding texts of liberalism and the famous eighteenth-century debates on civil society appear in a radically new light when placed in the context of new policies to govern the poor (Bohlender 2007). One can only imagine what might be brought to light by studies that, to use Michel Senellart’s phrase, “put” other chapters of the Western canon “to the test of governmentality” (Senellart 2001). One could imagine readings of Hobbes, Rousseau or Kant, and also of the many “minor” figures, that seriously relate their respective political theories to the context of actual political regulation in their time. This would not denigrate the importance of these authors, but it would contextualize them in the political rationality of their time. But treating these theorists (and their theories) as part of a larger picture of the political conditions of a given period, reducible neither to mere epistemic nor to mere institutional factors, would contribute to understanding history differently. One might even say that only such a reading would provide a real political view of the history of political thought, since it insists on the internal relation between theory and practice, between the ideality of concepts and the reality of the state. Bringing governmentality as a methodological framework to bear on the history of political thought would therefore provide a systematic way to politicize intellectual history and to historicize the concept of politics. For all of such (past and future) studies, Foucault’s main contribution lies in providing a point of departure for new and original perspectives on politics and political thinking: the state (and the political in general) is not a given, but the product and effect of discursive and practical negotiation. The modern state has neither a single origin nor a single fi xed identity; it is constantly made and remade. This unsettling, dislocating gesture enables us to gain a form of critical distance we can only have towards something which is neither natural nor necessary. Recognizing the radical historicity and radical contingency of “our” (late modern, Western) form of statehood may give rise to a new and critical understanding of its future. NOTES 1. Discussions with Mark Bevir, Thomas Biebricher, the students of a course on governmentality, the participants in the Leipzig workshop and, on several occasions, with Thomas Lemke were major inspirations for this chapter. I am also grateful to David Owen and Frieder Vogelmann for their comments and to Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke for many very helpful written suggestions. 2. See Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991; Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Lemke 1997; Dean 1999; Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2000; Bratich, Packer and McCarthy 2003; and Inda 2005. 3. See particularly Rose 1999 and Dean 2007. 4. On the topos of a “history of truth” see Foucault 1978: 60; Foucault 1985: introduction; Lemke 1997: 327–339; Davidson 2002; and Saar 2007a: 217–220. 5. For an exposition of several of these elementary methodological principles, see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, for “power/knowledge” and science Rouse

50 Martin Saar

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

1987, for excellent discussions of Foucault on power in general Patton 1998 and Nealon 2008: 24–53. For more on historical nominalism and Foucault’s historical method(s), see Veyne 1997; Veyne 2008; Davidson 2002; and Hacking 2002. For the profound relationship between Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s work, see Mahon 1992; Visker 1995; Saar 2007a; and Saar 2008; for discussions of Foucault’s and Nietzsche’s genealogical method and style, see Mahon 2002; Saar 2002; Owen 2007: 45–59; and Biebricher 2008. See Lemke 1997: 134–143; Dean 1999: 98–112; and Lemke 2007a: 47–70. For different readings of Foucault’s rejection of the orthodox version of the Marxist theory of ideology, see Barrett 1991; Veyne 2008: 22–27; and Nealon 2008. For interpretations of Foucault’s historiographical method along these lines, see Davidson 2002 and Veyne 2008. For discussions of the concept of “governmental reason” or “political rationality”, see Gordon 1991; Dean 1999: 31–32; Rose 1999: 24–28; and Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2000: 20–24. See also the remarks Foucault included in the manuscript but did not read on “de-institutionalizing and de-functionalizing relations of power” (Foucault 2007: 119–120). These correspond closely to Foucault’s methodological statement in the fi rst two sessions of Society Must Be Defended, his lecture course given one year earlier (Foucault 2003: sessions of January 7 and 14, 1976). To be clear, Foucault’s pejorative reference to the critique of ideology amounts to nothing more than a caricature. It is far from obvious that the more refi ned and non-reductivist theories of ideology put forward by Althusser or Poulantzas would fit his description; for discussions of Foucault’s own indebtedness to and departure from the Marxist tradition, see Barrett 1991 and Hoy 1994. See Lemke 2007b; Biebricher 2007; and Jessop 2007: ch. 6. For Foucault’s relationship to Althusser see Eribon 1994: ch. 10; and for a current version of a critical and historical theory of the state Bartelson 2001. See the section on “Archaeology and the History of Ideas” in the Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 2002: 151–156). This list is far from complete, of course. One could also include variants of neo-institutionalism, historical functionalism and certain strands of NeoParsonian political sociology among the important alternatives; for a classic discussion see Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985. The methodologically most ambitious project is obviously Niklas Luhmann’s program of a sociological-historical semantics, which covers many of the traditional political concepts (Luhmann 1990, 1993) and is a direct counter-project to the intellectual history perspective (see especially Luhmann 2008). However, it has so far arguably been less influential in the methodological discussions on the concept and history of the state. For comparisons to Foucault’s approach, see Åkerstrøm Andersen 2003 and Stäheli 2004. For this discussion see Oestreich 1969; Münkler 1987; and Viroli 1992. For methodological issues and the French case, see Chartier 1982. For this program, see the preface (Ritter 1971) and the entry on Begriffsgeschichte (Meier 1971) in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Melvin Richter (1995: 15) rightly points to the fact that this description is more accurate as a characterization of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe than of the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, in which a more philosophical form of conceptual history was practiced. For symptoms of this “heroic” tendency, see Viroli 2002 and Münkler 2003.

Relocating the Modern State 51 20. In one of the most prominent recent contributions from this school of thought, Klaus Roth refers to Foucault’s genealogical method even in the title of his impressive book. However, he goes on to characterize his own project in a quasi-Hegelian, teleological as well as idealistic fashion as an “attempt to grasp and illustrate the emergence, the change and dissemination of the idea of the state as rational” or as the “reconstruction of a realm of ideas [Vorstellungswelt] that was materialized in the institutions of modern states and that has reached its limits only today” (Roth 2003: 72, my translation). 21. These and related issues have been at the center of recent discussions in political anthropology; see Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Krohn-Hansen and Nustad 2005; and Steinmetz 1999. 22. See their contributions in Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991.

REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation), pp. 127–188 in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Åkerstrøm Andersen, Niels. (2003). Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann. Bristol: Policy Press. Barrett, Michèle. (1991). The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds). (1996). Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bartelson, Jens. (2001). The Critique of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bevir, Mark. (1999). The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biebricher, Thomas. (2007). Governmentality and State Theory. Paper presented at the Western Political Science AssociationMeeting, March 8th, Las Vegas. Biebricher, Thomas. (2008). Genealogy and Governmentality, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2(2): 363–396. Bohlender, Matthias. (2007). Metamorphosen des liberalen Regierungsdenkens: Politische Ökonomie, Polizei und Pauperismus. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Bratich, Jack, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy (eds). (2003). Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds). (2000). Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart: Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds). (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Busse, Dietrich. (1987). Historische Semantik: Analyse eines Programms. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Castiglione, Dario and Ian Hamsher-Monk (eds). (2003). The History of Political Thought in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chartier, Roger. (1982). Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories, pp. 13–46 in Dominick LaCapra and Steven K. Kaplan (eds) Modern Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

52 Martin Saar Cruikshank, Barbara. (1999). The Will to Empower: Technologies of Citizenship and other Subjects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davidson, Arnold I. (2002). On Epistemology and Archeology: From Canguilhem to Foucault, pp. 192–206 in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Dean, Mitchell. (2007). Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule. London: Open University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eribon, Didier. (1994). Michel Foucault et ses Contemporains. Fayard: Paris. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. (1985). Bringing the State Back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1972 [1970]). The Discourse on Language, pp. 215–37 in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel (1978 [1976]). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. (1985 [1984]). The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1997a [1983]). On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, pp. 253–280 in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works, Volume 1, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (1997b [1983]). What is Enlightenment?, trans. C. Porter, pp. 303–319 in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works, Volume 1, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (1998a [1971]). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, trans. D. F. Brouchard and S. Simon, pp. 369–391 in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works, Volume 2, ed. J. Faubion. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (1998b [1972]). Return to History, trans. R. Hurley, pp. 419– 432 in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works, Volume 2, ed. J. Faubion. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (2002 [1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London/New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (2003 [1997]). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. D. Macey, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2007 [2004]). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave. Foucault, Michel. (2008 [2004]). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave. Gordon, Colin. (1991). Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, pp. 1–51 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hacking, Ian. (2002). Historical Ontology, pp. 1–26 in Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat (ed). (2001). States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Hoy, David C. (1994). Deconstructing Ideology, Philosophy and Literature 18: 1–17.

Relocating the Modern State 53 Inda, Jonathan Xavier (ed). (2005). Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality and Life Politics. London: Blackwell. Jessop, Bob. (2007). State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity. Koselleck, Reinhart. (2004a [1972]). Begriffsgeschichte and Social History, pp. 75–92 in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. (2004b [1975]). ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories, pp. 255–275 in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Krohn-Hansen, Christian and Knut G. Nustad (ed). (2005). State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto. Lemke, Thomas. (1997). Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg: Argument. Lemke, Thomas. (2007a). Biopolitik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Lemke, Thomas. (2007b). An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory, Distinktion 15: 43–65. Luhmann, Niklas. (1990). The ‘State’ of the Political System, pp. 165–174 in Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. (1993 [1989]). Staat und Staatsräson im Übergang von traditionaler Herrschaft zu moderner Politik, pp. 65–148 in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, Volume 1. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. (2008 [1980]). Ideengeschichte aus soziologischer Perspektive, pp. 234–252 in Ideenevolution: Beiträge zur Wissenssoziologie, ed. A. Kieserling. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Mahon, Michael. (1992). Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject. Albany: State University of New York Press. Meier, Helmut G. (1971). Begriffsgeschichte, pp. 788–808 in Joachim Ritter (ed) Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Volume 1. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe. Münkler, Herfried. (1987). Im Namen des Staates: Die Begründung der Staatsraison in der frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Münkler, Herfried. (2003). Politische Ideengeschichte, pp. 103–131 in Politikwissenschaft: Ein Grundkurs. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Nealon, Jeffrey T. (2008). Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Oestreich, Gerhard. (1969). Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates: Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Owen, David. (2007). Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morality’. Stocksfield: Acumen. Patton, Paul. (1998). Foucault’s Subject of Power, pp. 64–77 in Jeremy Moss (ed) The Later Foucault. London: Sage. Pocock, John G. A. (1962). The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Inquiry, pp. 182–202 in Peter Laslett and Walter G. Runciman (eds) Philosophy, Politics, and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Randeria, Shalini. (2007). The State of Globalization: Legal Plurality, Overlapping Sovereignties and Ambiguous Alliances between Civil Society and the Cunning State in India, Theory, Culture & Society 24(1): 1–33. Richter, Melvin. (1995). The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ritter, Joachim. (1971). Vorwort, pp. v–xi in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Volume 1. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe. Rorty, Richard. (1984). The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres, pp. 49–76 in Richard Rorty, Jerome B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds) Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rosanvallon, Pierre. (2003). Towards a Philosophical History of the Political, pp. 189–203 in Dario Castiglione and Ian Hamsher-Monk (eds) The History of Political Thought in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth, Klaus. (2003). Genealogie des Staates: Prämissen des neuzeitlichen Politikdenkens. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Rouse, Joseph. (1987). Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Saar, Martin. (2002). Genealogy and Subjectivity. European Journal of Philosophy 10(2): 231–45. Saar, Martin. (2007a). Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus. Saar, Martin. (2007b). Macht, Staat, Subjektivität: Foucaults ‘Geschichte der Gouvernementalität’ im Werkkontext, pp. 23–45 in Susanne Krasmann and Michael Volkmer (eds) Michel Foucaults ‘Geschichte der Gouvernementalität’ in den Sozialwissenschaften: Internationale Beiträge. Bielefeld: transcript. Saar, Martin. (2008). Understanding Genealogy: History, Power, and the Self. Journal of the Philosophy of History 2(2): 295–314. Sachße, Christoph and Florian Tennstedt. (eds). (1986). Soziale Sicherheit und soziale Disziplinierung: Beiträge zu einer historischen Theorie der Sozialpolitik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Senellart, Michel. (1995). Les Arts de Gouverner: Du Régime Médiéval au Concept de Gouver nement. Paris: Seuil. Senellart, Michel. (2001). Machiavel à l’Épreuve de la ‘Gouvernementalité’, pp. 211–229 in Gerald Sfez and Michel Senellart (eds) L’enjeu Machiavel. Paris: PUF. Senellart, Michel. (2007). Course Context, pp. 369–401 in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart. New York: Palgrave. Skinner, Quentin. (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 1: The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin. (1989). The State, pp. 90–131 in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin. (2002a [1969]). Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas, pp. 57–89 in Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin. (2002b [1999]). Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change, pp. 175–187 in Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stäheli, Urs. (2004). Semantik und/oder Diskurs: ‘Updating’ Luhmann mit Foucault?, KultuRRevolution: Zeitschrift für angewandte Diskurstheorie 47: 14–20. Steinmetz, George (ed). (1999). State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Stoler, Ann L. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Tilly, Charles. (1990). Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990. Oxford: Blackwell. Tully, James. (1988). The Pen Is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner’s Analysis of Politics, pp. 7–25 in James Tully (ed) Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. London: Polity.

Relocating the Modern State 55 Tully, James. (1993). Governing Conduct, pp. 179–241 in Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tully, James. (2002). Political Philosophy as a Critical Activity, Political Theory 30(4): 533–555. Veyne, Paul. (1997 [1971]). Foucault Revolutionizes History, pp. 146–182 in Arnold I. Davidson (ed) Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Veyne, Paul. (2008). Foucault: Sa Pensée, sa Personne. Paris: Albin Michel. Viroli, Maurizio. (1992). From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viroli, Maurizio. (2002). Republicanism. New York: Hill and Wang. Visker, Rudi. (1995). Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique. London: Verso.

3

Constituting Another Foucault Effect Foucault on States and Statecraft

1

Bob Jessop In the two volumes of his lectures of 1978 and 1979, we see Michel Foucault making a major intellectual change of direction, moving away from an analysis of power as the formation and production of individuals towards an analysis of governmentality, a concept invented to denote the ‘conduct of conducts’ of men and women, working through their autonomy rather than through coercion even of a subtle kind. Out of this concept and the extended analysis of political economy which provides the material for its elaboration, Foucault never produced a published work. [ . . . ] This however did not prevent this concept of governmentality from meeting with great success in the English-speaking world, in many ways stimulating there an intellectual dynamic more intense than in the case of his published works, which rapidly became classics and were treated as such and with the deference that status entailed, but not with the excitement which met the lectures on governmentality. In 1991 [ . . . ] The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991) set off this dynamic by centring the ‘effect’ in question precisely on this notion of governmentality. But in France Foucault’s lectures on the subject were not published until 2004 and without at fi rst arousing great interest. (Donzelot and Gordon 2008: 48)

As Jacques Donzelot, a one-time collaborator of Foucault, notes, the Foucault effect has been particularly strong in the Anglo-phone world. Indeed the impact of his work on governmentality in this specific context might more properly be termed the “Anglo-Foucauldian effect” in order to distinguish it from the many other ways in which the work of Foucault and his French associates has affected philosophy, history, geography, and other branches of the arts, humanities, and social sciences at many times and places. As such, this effect refers to a particular mode of reception and appropriation of Foucault’s work on governmentality to generate a distinctive theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approach2 to empirical studies, both historical and contemporary, of various technologies and practices oriented to “the conduct of conduct.” Even in regard to this one aspect of his work, however, there are other “Foucault effects” grounded in

Constituting Another Foucault Effect

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different readings and appropriations of the French scholar’s work on governmentality in various countries (for work within this broader field, see, for example Agrawal 2006; Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2000; Dean 1999; Krasmann and Volkmer 2007; Meyet, Naves and Ribmont 2006; Opitz 2004; Sanyal 2007; Walters and Larner 2004; and the many contributions to Foucault Studies). This chapter offers another version of the Foucault effect based on closer attention to his later work on the state, statecraft, and the macro-physics of social power (for a fi rst major contribution in this regard, see Lemke 1997; for an anticipation of some of these results, see Jessop 1990: 220–247). Such work reveals another Foucault effect in the broad field of governmentality studies but one that is interested in his significant contributions to the reconstruction of state theory and not merely to its deconstruction (see, for example, Corbridge et al. 2005; Dean 1999; Frauley 2007; Lemke 1997; Mitchell 1988, 1991, 2002; Walters and Haahr 2004). Accordingly my chapter fi rst summarizes some key features of the Anglo-Foucauldian approach and the theoretical and political conjuncture in which it formed and notes that one of its effects has been to justify rejecting Marxist political economy and, more generally, to invalidate any “state theory” that takes the state for granted as its theoretical object. While there is some limited basis for this in some of Foucault’s work, this interpretation overlooks Foucault’s continued, if often unstated, adoption of key Marxian insights and his concern with the state as a (if not the) crucial site for the “institutional integration” of power relations (cf. Foucault 1979b: 96; on Foucault and Marx, see Jessop 2007; Marsden 1999; Nigro 2008; Paolucci 2003; Schärer 2008). 3 I then locate this more state-theoretical Foucault effect in his work on the role of the state in different periods in the strategic codification and institutional integration of power relations and on his insights into the art of government considered as statecraft and show how they can be integrated into critical but non-essentialist accounts of the state as a site of political practice (1980: 122; 1979b: 96; 2003b: 30–31, 88; 2008a: 108–109; 2008b: passim).

1. THE ANGLO-FOUCAULDIAN EFFECT AND ITS CONJUNCTURE The self-described Foucault effect identified by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (1991b) is associated with scholars from Australia, Canada, and the USA as well as the United Kingdom who have been described as forming an “Anglo-Foucauldian school.” Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, two of its key fi gures, write that it comprises ”an informal thought community that seeks to craft some tools through which to understand how our present had been assembled” (2008: 8). AngloFoucauldians do not aim to be Foucault scholars but selectively4 apply

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his initial insights on governmentality to new areas. They draw on Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977) and the lecture on government from his 1977–1978 course at the Collège de France, which appeared in English in 1979 (Foucault 1979a; also 1991). This shared Anglophone appreciation is reflected in the rise of a distinctive academic field: governmentality studies. The coherence of this field in the Anglophone world rests on its narrow understanding of governmentality and resulting neglect of its place in Foucault’s intellectual and political reflections. Elsewhere even this field has a somewhat broader scope. In particular, the pioneers of the Anglo-Foucauldian effect approved of Foucault’s apparent rejection of the state as a decisive political agent and interpreted governmentality as a decentered rather than centered process (cf. O’Malley, Weir, and Shearing 1997: 501). This is reflected in Rose and Miller’s claim that the governmentality perspective focuses empirically on “forms of power without a centre, or rather with multiple centres, power that was productive of meanings, of interventions, of entities, of processes, of objects, of written traces and of lives” (2008: 9). This involves a principled refusal to equate government with the state, understood as a centralized locus of rule, and focuses instead on how programmes and practices of rule are applied in micro-settings, including at the level of individual subjects. In short, government is the decentred but “calculated administration of life” (Rose and Valverde 1998). Thus adherents of the AngloFoucauldian approach seek to decompose power into political rationalities, governmental programmes, technologies and techniques of government (Miller and Rose 1990; O’Malley 1992; Rose 1999). This is consistent with Foucault’s critique of theoretical and political concern with the State as an originary, central institution in the exercise of political power (see subsequent text) and led the Anglo-Foucauldians to call for studies of the art and techniques of governmentality (for two good overviews, see Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006; Rose and Miller 2008). These concerns reflect the specific theoretical and political conjuncture in which the Anglo-Foucauldian school formed. Theoretically, this was marked by the general turn against the “structural Marxism” associated with Althusser, Balibar, Pêcheux and Poulantzas; and with the structural semiotics derived from Saussure, Bakhtin and Barthes (Rose and Miller 2008: 2–4). The former was criticized for its economic reductionism, its functionalist account of “ideological state apparatuses”, its neglect of the relative autonomy of the many institutional orders and fields that shape political and social life, and its neglect of the specific modalities of ideological struggle and identity formation (Rose and Miller 2008; Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006). In general, then, according to their own accounts, the early Anglo-Foucauldian authors shared Foucault’s disillusion with the “Marx effect”, i.e., the institutions and practices associated with official Marxism, and also explicitly rejected structural Marxism and other structuralist approaches (e.g., in the field of semiotics and Ideologiekritik). It


59

seemed to them that Marxism, if it had ever been useful, was certainly now obsolete, because it could not address the new forms of liberal governmentality, their associated technologies of power, and new forms of subjectivation.5 Politically, the “Anglo-Foucauldian” conjuncture was marked by the crisis of the post-war institutional settlement and class compromise based on the mass-production-mass-consumption economic dynamics in Western Europe, Canada and the USA, Australia and New Zealand. This crisis was associated with a proliferation of new social movements that were irreducible to class politics and that engaged in struggles on many sites of resistance (hospitals, housing, social work, prisons, universities, racial segregation, nuclear power, war, and the environment) and, just as importantly, by the fi rst stirrings of neo-liberal critiques of big government, big unions, collectivism, bureaucracy, self-regarding professional monopolies, paternalism, and so on (Rose and Miller 1992). These critiques were linked to calls to expand individual freedom and autonomy in all spheres of society. A Californian slogan expresses the political climate well: “get the state off our backs, out of our pockets, and away from our beds.” This was the period that saw the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, Reaganism in the USA, “Rogernomics” in New Zealand, the “Common Sense Revolution” of the Progressive Conservative Party in Ontario, the neo-liberal regime shift of the Australia Labor Party, and neo-liberal turns in Continental Europe. It was also a time of challenge to the centralized “party states” in Central and Eastern Europe (ibid.: 172). These same trends, notably the rise of neo-liberalism in France, Germany, and the USA, led Foucault himself to refocus his 1978–1979 lectures from biopolitics to liberalism and its transformation into neo-liberalism. While Anglo-Foucauldians shared the neo-liberal critique of the social state, i.e., the state forms and political practices that sought to create subjects with social claims on a national territorial sovereign state that were exercised at the expense of individual freedom and autonomy, they rejected neo-liberalism’s fetishistic market fundamentalism and some preferred to talk of “advanced liberalism” to signify the wide range of governmental practices extending beyond both market and state involved governing the habits of the people in this variant of liberalism. Accordingly they investigated neo-liberalism in terms of the range of techniques that would enable the state to divest itself of many of its obligations, devolving those to quasi-autonomous entities that would be governed at a distance by means of budgets, audits, standards, benchmarks, and other technologies that were both autonomizing and responsibilizing. (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006: 91) They aimed to show the complex costs and benefits of those rationalities and technologies that sought to govern in the name of freedom rather

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than in the name of collective social rights to be upheld by the state’s discretionary authority (Rose 1999: 176; Rose 1996; Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006: 93).

2. BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power and governmentality represent one step in an evolving intellectual project. Yet Anglo-Foucauldians tend to interpret them as a defi nitive statement of his opposition to macro-theorization and, relatedly, to any concern with how micro-powers were assembled into bigger programmes and projects (cf. Kempa and Singh 2008: 340). Yet Foucault (2008b: 2) himself noted: I have not studied and do not want to study the development of real governmental practice by determining the particular situations it deals with, the problems raised, the tactics chosen, the instruments employed, forged, or remodelled, and so forth. I wanted to study the art of governing, that is to say, the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing. That is to say, I have tried to grasp the level of reflection in the practice of government and on the practice of government. [ . . . ] to grasp the way in which this practice that consists in governing was conceptualized both within and outside government, and anyway as close as possible to governmental practice. [ . . . ] In short, we could call this the study of the rationalization of government practice in the exercise of political sovereignty. This comment from 1978 seems to indicate that Foucault was unwittingly distancing himself in advance from governmentality studies, especially as he also linked the emergence of governmentality or governmental practices to the macroscopic organization of the state and reflection on the government of government. He also argued for a combination of micro- and macro-analyses, presenting his later work on liberalism as a scaling up of his previous micro-analytics of power to macro-level questions about the state and political economy (2008b: 186). For good or ill, the Anglo-Foucauldian approach took shape in the early 1990s when many of Foucault’s later texts on governmentality were unavailable in English, encouraging its early adherents to adopt a more micro-focus in their development of Foucauldian insights than might seem justified in the light of a broader understanding of his work in this area. Foucault himself explored not only the generalization of the conduct of conduct across diverse spheres of society but also studied how specific governmental practices and regimes were articulated into broader economic and political projects. Thus he continued to argue into the late 1970s that


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capitalism had penetrated deeply into our existence, especially as it required diverse techniques of power to enable capital to exploit people’s bodies and their time, transforming them into labor power and labor time respectively to create surplus profit (see, for example, 1977: 163–164, 174–175, 218–223; 1979b: 37, 120–124, 140–141; 2003b: 32–37; 2008a: 338, 347; 2008b: 220–222). On this basis, one might expect Foucault to differ from Anglo-Foucauldian work on the import of changes in governmentality in terms of the logic of capital accumulation as well as on the nature of political domination as exercised in and through the state. This is exactly what we fi nd. Thus, as Foucault’s theoretical interests shifted from the micro-physics of the disciplinary society and its anatomo-politics of the body to the more general strategic codification of a plurality of discourses, practices, technologies of power, and institutional ensembles around a specific governmental rationality concerned with the social body (bio-power) in a consolidated capitalist society, we can fi nd a space opening up for Foucauldian analyses of sovereignty, territorial statehood, and state power and for less well-substantiated claims about their articulation to the logic of capital accumulation.6 As Kelly (2009: 61–62) notes: The concept of government appears in Foucault’s thought as an attempt to deal with what his earlier analysis of power relations had deliberately bracketed, namely state power, as well as the other kinds of power which can be called governmental [ . . . ] Having removed the state’s status as the central concern of political thought in his earlier work, Foucault now moves towards understanding the state in the specific role that it actually does have in networks of power. The scope for integrating the study of sovereignty, statehood, and state power is reinforced when we recall Foucault’s announcement that, if he could alter the title and theme of his 1977–1978 course, he would no longer refer to “security, territory, population” but to the “history of governmentality.” He would concentrate on “government, population, political economy,” which “form a solid series that has certainly not been dismantled even today” (2008a: 108). Thus sovereignty-territory-security moved to the margins of Foucault’s theoretical concerns even though he acknowledged the continued importance of this complex into the twentieth century. It is replaced by interest in: (a) government as a relatively new and certainly more important mode of exercising power than sovereignty, discipline, etc.; (b) population as the specific object of governmental practices (in contrast to the body as the anatomo-political object of disciplinary power);7 and (c) political economy as the overarching object of inquiry and reference point for veridiction that frames governmental rationality in the transition from the administrative state in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries towards the self-limiting governmentalized state in the eighteenth century and beyond.

62 Bob Jessop Foucault then suggests that, while the state has been overvalued as a cold monster and/or as a unified, singular, and rigorously functional entity, it should remain an important object of study. Accordingly, it should be approached as a “composite reality” and “mythicized abstraction” that has survived into the present because it has been governmentalized. He then elaborates this claim: it is likely that if the state is what it is today, it is precisely thanks to this governmentality that is at the same time both external and internal to the state, since it is the tactics of government that allow the continual defi nition of what should or should not fall within the state’s domain, what is public and what private, what is and what is not within the state’s competence, and so on. So, if you like, the survival and limits of the state should be understood on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality. (Foucault 2008a: 109) Foucault’s interest here and in related work is different from that imputed to him by Anglo-Foucauldian scholars. He insisted in the so-called “lecture on governmentality,” in earlier work, such as the fi rst volume of the History of Sexuality (1979b), and in the three courses that directly or indirectly address the governmentalization of the state (Society Must be Defended, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics) (2003b; 2008a; 2008b), not only that the state apparatus had a continuing importance as part of the general economy of power but also that its overall form, its specific organization, and its activities were shaped by the distinctive combination and the relative primacy of different forms of exercising power within and beyond the state. In this regard he argues that the intelligibility of a given social phenomenon does not depend on the search for a cause but on the study of “the constitution or composition of effects.” Thus we should ask “[h]ow are overall, cumulative effects composed? [ . . . ] How is the state effect constituted on the basis of a thousand diverse processes?” (2008a: 239; cf. ibid. 247–248, 287; 2003b: 45; and, on the Napoleonic state, 1977: 169, 217). In short, Foucault was concerned with the “state effect.” He wanted to explain how the state can act as if it were unified, as if it had a head even though it is headless (Dean 1994: 156; cf. Kerr 1999). In contrast, governmentality studies tend to focus on the logic, rationalities, and practices of government or governmentality in isolation from this broader concern with the state’s role as a major site for the institutional integration of power relations within the more general economy of power (Foucault 1979b). At issue here is not the value of specific studies of governmentality but their capacity to grasp the bigger picture that guided Foucault’s work when he realized the limits of his earlier concern with disciplinary techniques, anatomo-politics, and the micro-analytics of power. In short, whereas Foucault was increasingly concerned to put the state in its place within a general economy of power and went on to explore


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how government is superimposed on preceding forms of state, including sovereignty over territory as well as disciplinary power and biopolitics (2003b: 36–39), governmentalists have been more concerned to take it off the agenda entirely in favor of specific questions about specific techniques of power and, at best, their position within successive or at least, different forms of liberalism (cf. Curtis 1995; Deacon 2002; Dean 1994: 153–159; Lemke 2007; Meyet 2006). In his 1977–1978 lecture course, Foucault argues that the investigation of liberalism required movement beyond the microphysics of power to more macro-analyses. He explains this shift in relation to his earlier concern with power relations as follows: What I wanted to do—and this was what was at stake in the analysis—was to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or of procedures of governmentality, is not confi ned by defi nition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size. In other words, the analysis of micro-powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of sector, it is a question of a point of view. (2008b: 186) In other words, the study of governmentality and the art of government need not be confi ned to the microphysics of power nor should microphysics be privileged. His initial interest in micro-powers reflected his concern with anatomo-politics and did not exclude alternative entry points into other topics (cf. Gordon 2001: xxv). Foucault’s approach is scalable and can be applied to the state, statecraft, state-civil society, or state-economy relations just as fruitfully as to the conduct of conduct at the level of interpersonal interactions, organizations, or individual institutions. Thus The Birth of Biopolitics is mainly concerned with macro-institutional issues and questions of government rather than specific governmental practices. Foucault traces the development of state projects and the general economic agendas of government over four centuries, noting how the problematic of government shifts during this period and poses different problems at each turn about the limits of state power as well as about the rationales and mechanisms of such (self-)limitation. Thus Foucault notes, for example, that, whereas political economy leads to non-intervention in the economy but strong legal intervention in the field of Ordnungspolitik, totalitarianism subordinates the state to the governmentality of the party (2008b: 106–117). Commenting on this shift in perspective, Senellart (2008: 382) argues that “the shift from ‘power’ to ‘government’ carried out in the 1978 lectures does not result from the methodological framework being called into question, but from its extension to a new object, the state, which did not have a place in the analysis of the disciplines.”

64 Bob Jessop In contrast to the warm embrace by Anglo-Foucauldians of a decentred account of the state, Foucault proclaimed “the problem of bringing under state control, of ‘statification’ (étatisation) is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address” (2008b: 77, my emphasis). In practice this translated into concern with the statification of government and the governmentalization of the state (2008a: 109). Foucault initially argued that the study of power should begin from below, in the heterogeneous and dispersed microphysics of power, explore specific forms of its exercise in different institutional sites, and then move on to consider how, if at all, these were linked to produce broader and more persistent societal configurations. One should study power where it is exercised over individuals rather than legitimated at the centre; explore the actual practices of subjugation rather than the intentions that guide attempts at domination; and recognize that power circulates through networks rather than being applied at particular points (Foucault 1979b: 92–102; 2003b: 27–34). All of these microphysical themes are repeated by the Anglo-Foucauldian school. However, after this initial move, Foucault argued that, whilst starting at the bottom with the micro-diversity of power relations across a multiplicity of dispersed sites, three further interrelated issues required attention. First, whilst he did once celebrate the infinite dispersion of scattered resistances and micro-revolts, he later conceded the need for resistances to be readjusted, reinforced, and transformed by global strategies of transformation (Foucault 1979b: 96; cf. 1980: 143, 159, 195, 203; 1979c: 60). Foucault noted that resistances needed co-ordination in the same way that the dominant class organized its strategies to secure its political preponderance in diverse power relations (ibid.). And he criticized the French socialists for their failure to develop a coherent account of socialist governmentality (2008b: 91f.). Second, Foucault suggests that the overall unity of a system of domination must be explained in terms of the strategic codification and institutional integration of power relations. This process is both intentional and nonsubjective. It is intentional because no power is exercised without a series of aims and objectives, which are often highly explicit at the limited level of their inscription in local sites of power (Foucault 1979b: 94). He refers here to explicit programmes for reorganizing institutions, rearranging spaces, and regulating behavior (1980: 9). But it is also non-subjective because the overall outcome of the clash of micro-powers cannot be understood as resulting from the choice or decision of an individual, group, or class subject (cf. Foucault 1979b: 94f.). Things never work out as planned because there are different strategies which are mutually opposed, composed, and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects which can perfectly well be understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don’t conform to the initial programming; this is what gives the resulting apparatus (dispositif) its solidity and suppleness. (Foucault 1980: 10)


65

Or, as Foucault (1979b: 95) expressed it elsewhere: “the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few can be said to have formulated them.” And, third, Foucault will suggest that power can be exercised at different scales and that the question of whether one focuses on micro-powers or the organization of the state as a whole is a question of perspective. Thus The Birth of Biopolitics applies the same nominalist analytics to the succession of forms of state and forms of the limitation or self-limitation of state power. This course explores the import of political economy and the emergence of the notion of homo economicus as an active entrepreneurial subject rather than as the bearer of exchange relations (Foucault 2008b: 225–294).

3. WITH FOUCAULT BEYOND FOUCAULT Some of the ambiguities and confusions surrounding Foucault’s analyses of power and its significance in social life can be resolved if we distinguish three moments in the development of power relations. These are variation in the objects, subjects, purposes, and technologies of power; selection of some technologies and practices rather than others; and retention of some of these in turn as they are integrated into broader and more stable strategies of state and/or class (or national or racial) power. These three moments overlap and interact in real time but they receive more or less attention at different times and in different texts in Foucault’s work. Ignoring these differences for the moment, we can connect the three moments to his genealogical remarks on invention and innovation (variation), then on the emergent convergence of various technologies of power to delineate general conditions of domination as they are seen to have economic or political utility for an emerging bourgeoisie (selection), and, finally, on the strategic codification and retention of these practices of government to produce a global strategy oriented to a more or less unified objective (retention and institutionalization) (Foucault 2003a: 270). The fi rst step in this trajectory introduces the familiar notion of genealogy and can also be related to the notion of the event or eventalization. This refers to the irruption of chance in social development so that the analysis must focus not on Ursprung (origin, initial source) but on Erfindung (invention, innovation) and discontinuous Herkunft (provenance, descent) (cf. Kelly 2009: 13f., 22). In this sense Foucault notes how elements that will prove central to the formation of the modern state often emerged through separate innovations away from the centres of power. Thus, following his more general rejection of totalizing accounts of social events, Foucault noted that the modern state’s disciplinary techniques had a prehistory: they originated as inventions in response to particular needs in dispersed local sites far from the centers of state power in the Ancien Régime

66 Bob Jessop and emerging sites of capitalist production and had their own distinctive disciplinary logics (cf. 1977: 137–138, 224). In this sense they could also be seen as pre-adaptive, i.e., as prior inventions that can be mobilized, instrumentalized, extended, and intensified in response to crises, challenges, or needs that emerge at a later date. Thus disciplinary normalization initially focused on the conduct of persons who were not directly involved in capitalist production (e.g., in asylums, prisons, schools, barracks). Such innovations can be seen as sources of local variation (each with its own forms of contestation and resistance) and would only later be selected and combined in trial-and-error experimentation to produce more global ensembles of power (Foucault 1977). The second step re-introduces social classes, capital, and the state after the micro-analytics of power had dismissed them as significant social forces. Foucault recognized that some technologies and practices were selected and integrated into other sites of power. Not all new technologies succeed in inserting themselves into the network of power relations (Kelly 2009: 44). On the contrary, some techniques are “doomed to immediate failure and abandonment” (Foucault 1977: 123). As Foucault (1977: 131) asked in Discipline and Punish: The problem, then, is the following: how is it that, in the end, it was the third [technology of power] that was adopted? How did the coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representative, scenic, signifying, public, collective model? Why did the physical exercise of punishment (which is not torture) replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the prolix festival that circulated them? In short, why do some technologies of power, some governmental practices, tend to disappear and others get selected? This has something to do with tactics that turn everything to account (1977: 139), to practices that accelerate some innovations, rescale them, and given them more precise instruments (ibid.: 139, 144). Thus Foucault notes that the state intervenes, directly or indirectly, to annex operations of disciplinary power through “selection, normalization, hierarchicalization, and [pyramidal] centralization” (2003b: 181). He also showed how, for example, how the disciplinary techniques fi rst developed on the margins of the economy and the state later came to be deployed closer to the centres of power. Thus disciplinary techniques that were invented elsewhere were introduced in factories to control the division of labor and aspects of the new anatomo-politics were deployed to bind men to the productive apparatus and facilitate a capitalist political economy of time based on abstract labor.9 Foucault also observed that the rise of the modern state was bound up with the problem of “population” in its relation to territory and wealth as reflected in the new science of “political economy” (cf. 1980: 161; 1989: 217–219; 2008b).


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The shift of attention from variation to selection can be seen in the transition between Discipline and Punish (1977) and the fi rst volume of the History of Sexuality (1979b). Whereas the former mostly emphasized the dispersion of power mechanisms (whilst still noting the correlation between forms of punishment and modes of production),10 the latter began to explore more explicitly how different mechanisms were combined to produce social order through a strategic codification and institutional integration that made them more coherent and complementary. In particular, when addressing the problem of selection, Foucault notes the role of interest in influencing the adoption of some inventions rather than others. At this stage, it seems, “the interesting thing is to ascertain, not what overall project presides over all these developments, but, how, in terms of strategy, the different pieces were set in place” (1980: 62). Foucault often remarks that the perceived interests of an emerging bourgeois class in social cohesion or the anarchic, profit-oriented, market-mediated logic of capital accumulation guide the selection of some forms of sovereign, disciplinary, or governmental power in preference to others. But he never regards the bourgeoisie, capital, or the state as pre-constituted forces, treating them instead as emergent effects of multiple projects, practices, and attempts to institutionalize political power relations. The third step concerns the retention and institutionalization of some practices, programmes, and projects and their integration into broader ensembles of power relations. Foucault typically rejected any a priori assumption that different forms of power were connected to produce an overall pattern of class domination and argued that any post hoc integration cannot be derived from the functional needs of the economy or explained in terms of formal isomorphism. But this did not mean that he rejected the possibility of such global configurations as terminal forms of domination. Quite how this works remained unclear. Thus, in seeking to explain how a general strategic line emerges, Foucault resorts to a wide range of terms: these include “social hegemonies,” “hegemonic effects,” “hegemony of the bourgeoisie,” “meta-power,” “class domination,” “polymorphous techniques of subjugation,” “sur-pouvoir” (or a “surplus power” analogous to surplus value), “global strategy,” and so forth (1979b: 92–94; 1980: 122, 156, 188; 1977: 29, 80, 223; 1979c: 60). The range of metaphors deployed here indicates that Foucault was struggling to fi nd an adequate explanation for what is occurring in this third stage in the development of power relations. He nonetheless highlighted in general terms how the immanent multiplicity of local, indeed infi nitesimal, relations and techniques of power are “colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination [ . . . ] and, above all, how they are invested or annexed by global phenomena and how more general powers or economic benefits can slip into the play of these technologies of power” (2003b: 30–31; cf. 1977: 223; 1980: 195; 2008a: 239).

68

Bob Jessop

Heterogeneous elements with their own pre-histories are thereby reworked and readjusted to produce “phenomena of coagulation, support, reciprocal reinforcement, cohesion, and integration” (2008a: 239; see also 2003b: 14). For example, in the fi rst volume of History of Sexuality and the roughly contemporary lecture course, Society Must be Defended, Foucault links the retention of particular forms of disciplinary and governmental power explicitly to bourgeois recognition of their economic profitability and political utility (1979b: 114, 125, 141; 1980: 41; 2003b: 30–33). Similar ideas were presented earlier in Discipline and Punish (1977: 174f., 206– 207, 218–223; see also Marsden 1999: 157f., 190f.). Foucault did identify one key factor in this complex process of consolidation, and institutionalization. He gave a privileged role to the state as the point of strategic codification of the multitude of power relations and as the apparatus in which the general line formed meta-power (e.g., 2003b: 27f., 31–35; cf. 1979b: 92–96; 1980: 122, 156, 189f., 199f.; 1982: 224; 2008a: 238f., 338). Foucault argues, for example, it was the rise of the population-territory-wealth nexus in political economy and police that created the space for the revalorization and re-articulation of disciplines that had emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth century, i.e., schools, manufactories, armies, etc. (2008a: 217–219). Likewise, in discussing the development of Ordo-liberalism, the Chicago School, and neo-liberalism, the state once again figures prominently both as a site of struggle for hegemony (even including efforts to limit the role of the state itself vis-à-vis the market and society) and as the central apparatus in and through which codified practices are rolled out in the wider society (2008b: passim). It is in this way that the “state effect” is produced and in turn has its own “state effects.” In short, the State invests and colonizes other power relations in a conditioning-conditioned relationship to generate a kind of “meta-power” that renders its own functioning possible (2008b: 122f.).

4. CONCLUSION In approaching Foucault’s work in these terms, we can escape the dichotomy of micro- and macro-power, the antinomy of an analytics of micropowers and a theory of sovereignty, and the problematic relation between micro-diversity and macro-necessity in power relations (cf. Jessop 1990; Kerr 1999: 176). This is something that Foucault himself indicated was both possible in principle (because micro-powers have no ontological primacy) and necessary in practice (to understand the successive but subsequently overlapping arts of government in the exercise of state power beyond the state) (2008a: 15, 109; 2008b: 186, 313; cf. 2003b: 36–39, 173, 242, 250). For Foucault’s insistence on the complexity, diversity and relative autonomy of local, everyday relations of power overturns neither Marxist accounts of the state nor liberal theories of popular sovereignty; it only exposes them


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as limited and inadequate (Deacon 2002). The challenge is to show how they might, in some circumstances, in some contexts, and for some periods of time, be linked. The idea of government as strategic codification and institutional integration of power relations provides a bridge between micro-diversity and macro-necessity and, as Foucault argues, a focus on micro-powers is determined by one’s choice of scale but involves analytical insights that can be applied across all scales. It is a perspective, not a reality delimited to one scale (Foucault 2008b: 186; cf. 1977: 222; 2003b: 28–31). Foucault still argued for the dispersion of powers, insisted that the state, for all its omnipotence, does not occupy the whole field of power relations, and claimed that the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. Indeed, “power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions” (ibid.: 345). This is why Barret-Kriegel (1992: 192) could note that “Foucault’s thought opened the way to a return to the study of the State and the law.” The difference between the Foucauldian and Anglo-Foucauldian approaches to the state and governmentality can be explained in part in terms of Foucault’s distinction between “the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties—strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others—and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power” (1997: 299). He adds that: between the two, between games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies [ . . . ] The analysis of these techniques is necessary because it is very often through such techniques that states of domination are established and maintained. There are three levels to my analysis of power: strategic relations, techniques of government, and states of domination. (Foucault 1997: 299) In these terms, it seems that the Anglo-Foucauldians are uninterested in interpersonal power games and little interested in states of domination (in part because they reject essentialized notions of economic or political interests) and seem to prefer an empirical analysis of techniques of government, types of governmental practice, and forms of liberalism. Thus they focus more or less exclusively on governmental technologies. In this sense, the so-called Foucault effect identified in by the “Anglophone community of thought” is the product of a rather one-sided reading of his work shaped by the same conjuncture in which Foucault operated but with different theoretical and political consequences. I do not deny that the AngloFoucauldian paradigm has proved powerful and productive. But there are other ways of developing Foucault’s approach to governmentality. This can be seen in his contributions to political economy, his parallel critiques of the changing forms and functions of state power, and the production of the “state effect” (cf. Dean 1994; Mitchell 1991). In arguing for an alternative Foucault

70 Bob Jessop effect, I do not pretend to have revealed the true essence of Foucault’s interest in governmentality but to offer an alternative reading to “governmentalist” accounts of his work. For one can also see his work on governmentality as a contribution to a “critical and effective history” of the state considered not as a universal or as a self-identical political formation but as the site of practices that produce different forms of state, each with their own historical specificities, agendas and typical forms of governmental practice.

NOTES 1. This chapter has benefitted from numerous detailed comments and editorial inputs from Susanne Krasmann, Ulrich Bröckling and Thomas Lemke. Eventually I accepted most of them and the argument is much improved as a result. Nonetheless I remain responsible for the fi nal form of the analysis and its claims about the Anglo-Foucauldian school and Foucault. 2. For an insider’s view on the heterogeneity of the Anglo-Foucauldian school, see Donzelot and Gordon (2008: 51–52). 3. In referring to the state’s role in the institutional integration of power relationships, Foucault draws an analogy with the “strategic codification” of points of resistance than enable a revolution to occur (1979b: 96). 4. Rose and Miller declare themselves “pickers and choosers” rather than Foucault scholars (2008: 8). 5. Recalling their views during the rise of the new perspective, Rose and Miller note that it was felt essential, at a minimum, to go beyond the accumulation and distribution of capital to explore, in addition, the accumulation and distribution of persons and their capacities (2008: 2; cf. Foucault 1977: 220–221, 1979b: 140–141). 6. One source of Foucault’s difficulties in linking capital and the state is his tendency to reduce the economy to exchange relations in line with liberal thought: this rendered invisible the contradictions and substantive inequalities in the capital relation. Likewise, when he introduces the logic of capitalism, he does not ground it in a detailed account of the social relations of production as opposed to transferable techniques or technologies or both for the conduct of conduct (Tellman 2009; cf. Marsden 1999). 7. On the emergent properties of population as an object of government, see also Foucault (1979b: 24–26, 139–146; 2003b: 242–251, 255–256; 2008a: 67–79, 109–110, 352–357). 8. Cf. Foucault, 1977: 222–223; 1979b: 99–100; 2003b: 32, 32–34 9. Discipline was also used to control workers’ bodies: “it was not just a matter of appropriating, extracting the maximum quantity of time but also of controlling, shaping, valorizing the individual’s body according to a particular system” (Foucault 2001: 82). 10. Initially in relation to the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer, then in his own name (Foucault 1977: 24–26, 77, 84, 122–123, 163–164).

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Barret-Kriegel, Blandine. (1992). Michel Foucault and the Police State, trans. T.J. Armstrong, pp. 192–197 in Timothy J. Armstrong (ed) Michel Foucault, Philosopher. London: Routledge. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds). (2000). Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds). (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmental Rationality, trans. C. Gordon. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Corbridge, Stuart, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastra and René Veron. (2005). Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, Bruce. (1995). Taking the State Back Out: Rose and Miller on Political Power. Canadian Journal of Sociology 46(4): 575–589. Deacon, Roger. (2002). Why the King has Kept His Head: Foucault on Power as Sovereignty. Politeia 21(3): 6–17. Dean, Mitchell. (1994). Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault’s Methods and Historical Sociology. London: Routledge. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Donzelot, Jacques and Colin Gordon. (2008). Governing Liberal Societies—the Foucault Effect in the English-speaking World. Foucault Studies 5: 48–62. Foucault, Michel. (1977 [1975]). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (1979a). Governmentality, trans. C. Gordon. Ideology & Consciousness 6: 5–21. Foucault, Michel. (1979b). History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (1979c). Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. M. Morris and P. Patton. Sydney: Feral Publications. Foucault, Michel. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Interviews 1972–1977, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper. Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Foucault, Michel. (1982). How is Power Exercised?, trans. L. Sawyer, pp. 216–226 in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, Michel. (1989 [1978]). Clarifications on the Question of Power, trans. J. Johnston, pp. 179–192 in Sylvère Lotringer (ed) Foucault Live: Interviews 1966–84. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel. (1991 [1978]). Governmentality, pp. 87–104 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmental Rationality, trans. C. Gordon. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Foucault, Michel. (1997 [1984]). The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, trans. P. Aranov and D. McGrawth, pp. 281–301 in Paul Rabinow (ed) Michel Foucault: Ethics. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (2001). Power: Essential Writings, trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (2003a). Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974– 1975, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2003b). Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2008a). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

72 Bob Jessop Foucault, Michel. (2008b). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Frauley, Jon. (2007). The Expulsion of Foucault from Governmentality Studies: Towards an Archaeological-Realist Retrieval, pp. 258–271 in Jon Frauley and Frank Pearce (eds) Critical Realism and the Social Sciences. Heterodox Elaborations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gordon, Colin. (2001). Introduction, pp. xi–xlii in James D. Faubon (ed) Power: the Essential Writings. New York: New Press. Jessop, Bob. (1990). Poulantzas and Foucault on Power and Strategy, pp. 220–247 in State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place. Cambridge: Polity. Jessop, Bob. (2007). State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity. Kelly, Mark G.E. (2009). The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. Kempa, Michael and Anne-Marie Singh. (2008). Private Security, Political Economy and the Policing of Race. Theoretical Criminology 12(3): 333–354. Kerr, Derek (1999) Beheading the King and Enthroning the Market: A Critique of Foucauldian Governmentality. Science and Society 63(2): 173–202. Krasmann, Susanne and Michael Volkmer (eds). (2007). Michel Foucaults “Geschichte der Gouvernementalität” in den Sozialwissenschaften. Internationale Beiträge. Bielefeld: transcript. Lemke, Thomas. (1997). Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg: Argument. Lemke, Thomas. (2007). An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15: 43–64. Marsden, Richard. (1999). The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault. London: Routledge. Meyet, Sylvain. (2006). Les Trajectoires d’un Texte: La Gouvernementalitè de Michel Foucault, pp. 13–36 in Sylvain Meyet, Marie-Cécile Naves and Thomas Ribemont (eds) Travailler avec Foucault. Paris: Presses de Sciences po. Meyet, Silvain, Marie-Cécile Naves and Thomas Ribmont (eds). (2006). Travailler avec Foucault: Retours sur le Politique. Paris: Presses de Sciences po. Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society 19(1): 1–27. Mitchell, Timonthy J. (1988). Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Timothy J. (1991). The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics. American Political Science Review 85(1): 77–96. Mitchell, Timothy J. (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nigro, Roberto (2008) Foucault, Reader and Critic of Marx, pp. 647–662 in Sebastian Budgen and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds) Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Leiden: Brill. Opitz, Stefan. (2004). Gouvernementalität im Postfordismus. Macht, Wissen und Techniken des Selbst im Feld unternehmerischer Rationalität. Hamburg: Argument. O’Malley, Pat. (1992). Risk, Power and Crime Prevention. Economy and Society 21(3): 252–275. O’Malley, Pat, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing. (1997). Governmentality, Criticism, Politics. Economy and Society 26(4): 501–517. Paolucci, Paul. (2003). Foucault’s Encounter with Marxism. Current Perspectives in Social Theory 22: 3–58. Rose, Nikolas. (1996). The Death of the Social? Refiguring the Territory of Government. Economy and Society 25(4): 327–356.


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Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller. (1992). Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government. British Journal of Sociology 43(2): 173–205. Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller. (2008). Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity. Rose, Nikolas and Mariana Valverde. (1998). Governed by Law? Social and Legal Studies 7(4): 541–551. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 83–104. Sanyal, Kalyan. (2007). Rethinking Capitalist Development. Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. London: Routledge. Schärer, Alex. (2008). Theoretisch keine Brüder: Marx und Foucault als Antagonisten. Prokla 151: 221–236. Senellart, Michel. (2008). Course context, pp. 369–401 in Michel Foucault Security, Territory, Population. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tellmann, Ute. (2009). Foucault and the Invisible Economy. Foucault Studies 6: 5–24. Walters, William P. and Jens Henrik Haahr. (2004). Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London: Routledge. Walters, William P. and Wendy Larner (eds). (2004). Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces. London: Routledge.

4

Governmentalization of the State Rousseau‘s Contribution to the Modern History of Governmentality Friedrich Balke

In the course of his exploration of the concept of governmentality, Michel Foucault comes to speak of Rousseau’s role—and this at an especially important point, in that Foucault here poses the question of what remains of sovereignty after the art of government has a new political subject. This subject is the population, whose guidance and management is the central task of modern power: the sort of power whose goal is not in an imposition of death but an intensification and elevation of vital force. Foucault here refers to Rousseau’s article on “Political Economy,” where the philosopher aims at “defi ning an art of government.” He then continues: Then he writes The Social Contract in which the problem is how, with notions like those of “nature,” “contract,” and “general will,” one can give a general principle of government that will allow for both the juridical principle of sovereignty and the elements through which an art of government can be defi ned and described. So sovereignty is absolutely not eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government that has crossed the threshold of political science. The problem of sovereignty is not eliminated; on the contrary, it is made more acute than ever. (Foucault 2007: 107) Foucault’s remarks on the particularity of Rousseau’s theory—a theory offering a place for both the art of government and the principle of sovereignty—are all too scattered and cursory. They nevertheless offer an excellent starting point for the following effort to more precisely determine the form this compromise between juridical and governmental power takes in Rousseau’s discourse, and why it can be considered exemplary for the conceptual and institutional history of modern govermentality.1 To this end I will fi rst move past Foucault’s comments to describe the field in which the explosion of an art of government can be observed

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in Rousseau’s writing, together with the conclusions he draws into the rendering governable of individual subjects, as applied to the connected political field of the government of a people. In the second section, I will discuss what Foucault may have meant in arguing that in signifying “the emergence of a new sort of art of governing,” Rousseau’s discourse nevertheless not only fails to eliminate the problem of sovereignty but even increases its virulence. In Rousseau, Foucault indicates, the problem of sovereignty, being no longer centered around the prince but rather the collective subject, the people, “is made more acute than ever.”2 Finally, in the third section I will scrutinize Foucault’s claim that “[w]e live in the era of a governmentality discovered in the eighteenth century” (Foucault 2007: 109) against the example of what Ernst Forsthoff has termed the “new-style social orders”: those prevalent since 1945 and towards which Foucault steers his history of governmentality in the framework of his preoccupation with “model Germany.” When Foucault asserts that “this governmentalization of the state” is the phenomenon that “allowed the state to survive,” governmentality here being defi ned as something “at the same time both external and internal to the state,” (ibid.) what he is suggesting—and what needs to be shown—is that with Rousseau’s theory of government, the entire ambivalence of its relationship to the sovereign volonté générale can be described for the fi rst time.

1. THE AMPHIBOLY OF GOVERNMENT As Rousseau argues in the Contrat social, republics are compatible with any number of forms of government because the “acts of the general will” to which they owe their political emergence are distinguishable in a basic way from acts of governing. The legislative power “belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone”; but this means “that the executive power cannot belong to the generality as legislature or sovereign,” “because this power consists only of particular acts falling outside the competency of the law, and consequently of the sovereign, all of whose acts can only be laws” (Rousseau 1979a: 395–396). For Rousseau’s political theory, what is decisive is that the government not be confused with the sovereign, being “only its minister” (ibid.). Since sovereignty is not transferable and always rests with the people, the government can only act under “contract” to the sovereign; but the sovereign nonetheless also depends on the government, because in its absence it would be behaving like a will actually lacking the means to realize itself: “When I walk towards an object, it is fi rst necessary that I want to move towards it; and second that my feet carry me there” (ibid.). Nothing in the body politic can take place without the regulated “cooperation” (concours) of “force” (force) and “will” (volonté), or “executive” and “legislative.” At fi rst glance everything seems to suggest that Rousseau’s political theory is played out between the poles of sovereignty

76 Friedrich Balke and government, will and strength; and that everything has been said about this relationship when we designate the government as the instrument of the sovereign or of the volonté générale. But importantly, Rousseau aims all of his suspicion at the prince, who as the bearer of executive authority is always inclined to usurp the general will, always wishes “to draw forth some absolute and independent act from himself” (ibid.: 399). Everything depends, then, on neither the government nor the sovereign— both designated “artificial bodies”—transgressing the borders of their particular spheres. The government should never be more than the “agent” of “public force”; as such it “brings into play the directives of the general will.” But readers of the Social Contract may quickly begin to doubt that such “directives” really involve directives of the general will—since, so it seems, for the latter silence is essential, rather than pursuing representative discourse. In the course of further argumentation, Rousseau comes to the conclusion that the sovereign manifestly not only lacks feet but eyes, and, beyond that, language as well, hence the very “organ” allowing him to share or promulgate his will: Does the body politic have an organ to declare its wishes? Who will give it the foresight necessary to formulate and announce its acts in advance, or how will it announce them at the moment he needs to? How is a blind multitude, which often does not known what it wants because it rarely knows what is good for it, to carry out an enterprise as great and difficult as a legislative system? On its own, the people always wants good, but on its own it does not always see it. The general will is always right, but the judgment guiding it is not always enlightened. One needs to have it see things as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear to it; one needs to show it the correct path it seeks, protected from the seductions of the particular will. (ibid.: 380) The “purity” and “ideality” of the general will evidently demands supplementing by authorities that Rousseau has previously banished from its sphere. 3 This supplementation’s outcome is nothing less than the introduction of a specific governmental activity that does not simply amount to the government as the simple executive authority of the will. It is clear that Rousseau models this activity in terms of pedagogic intervention; placed alongside the volonté générale, its role is to organize the preliminary process of the will’s formation or education—for Rousseau the indissoluble reference-point of his argumentation, but at the same time an object of unceasing problematization. Despite its sovereignty, the volonté générale is subject to educational and protective interventions whose agents Rousseau has disappear into the anonymity of a “one needs” (an il faut). The “general will,” albeit “always right,” still needs both guidance by enlightened judgment and an attentive leadership that makes use of demonstrative technique: the “correct path” needs to be “shown” to that will, it needs to


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be “protected” from “seduction” by the powerful particular will, the organized interests of bourgeois society; but above all, it has to be brought to see things “as they are”: this because—and I will return to this point—in respect to the sovereign’s will, objects can by no means be postulated as if they were limitlessly plastic. Since the absolutistic politics that Rousseau opposes was grounded “within the relationship of the sovereign’s will to the subjected will of the people” (Foucault 2007: 70) democratic politics cannot simply reproduce the relation between the sovereign will and the people’s submissiveness. Rousseau wrote the Social Contract in the historical moment when “the population no longer appears as a collection of subjects of right, as a collection of subject wills who must obey the sovereign’s will through the intermediary of regulations, laws, edicts, and so on.” The population now appears in its specific physis or in its “naturalness” (ibid.); it no longer has the status of a mere “vis-à-vis the sovereign,” (ibid.: 71) for whose actions it is by no means transparent. Consequently, presenting the general will with objects “as they are” means fi rst of all opening its eyes to its own “naturality”—for the democratic sovereign is characterized by a confluence between the legal voluntarism to which the sovereign people owes its formal-legal existence (social contract) and such naturality on the part of the population; this “depends on a series of variables” whose influence by the sovereign is preconditioned on a break with the logic of command and obedience. For “[I]f one says to a population ‘do this,’ there is not only no guarantee that it will do it, but also there is quite simply no guarantee that it can do it” (ibid.). In the Discours sur l’économie politique, which fi rst appeared in the Encyclopédie in 1755 and then in 1758 as a separate text, Rousseau, according to Foucault, offered his defi nition of a specific art of government. In this text, we can observe a relation of mutual intensification between the general will and governmentality. Rousseau here ascertains, as the “fi rst and most important maxim of legitimate or popular government,” that it “wholly pursues the general will” (Rousseau 1979b: 247). The government, previously consistently tempted to realize a will set against the people, gains unimagined power by not limiting itself to “force” that “makes everyone tremble” but disposing over means encouraging them to “adore” the law (ibid.: 250). Namely, the capacity to rule does not consist of “administering laws” and certainly not of their incessant proliferation. The law, which republican Rousseau appears to limitlessly admire, can unintentionally be transformed into a means “for eluding law or escaping punishment” (ibid.: 252; italics mine). The goal of “governmental” government—in contrast to so-called executive power—is thus not a forcing of simple obedience by citizens, a securing of their conformity to its laws, but a modification of what they are or can be. Instead of making use of them “as they are,” the government has to try to “form them into what one needs them to be.” And Rousseau adds: “The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into the person’s very interior, and effects his will no less than his actions. It is

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certain that in the long term peoples are what government makes of them” (ibid.: 251). This last statement once again makes clear that what is at work in Rousseau is an amphiboly of the governmental concept: on the one hand, we have the government that is commissioned with “executing laws” and receives its orders exclusively from a sovereign who can “limit, modify, and take back the government’s power when it pleases” (Rousseau 1979a: 396); on the other hand the government, which in a sense is internal to the sovereign,4 hence does not stand in an instrumental relation to the general will but contributes to its production and direction. In this context, I can only point to the pedagogic structure of this governmental art. In order to answer the question of how to govern a people, Rousseau fi rst relocates it from the field of the body politic to that of education of the individual body. With this strategic shift, he inserts his political theory into the history of the art of government—of the techniques involved in rendering individuals and collectives governable. Importantly, the field of pedagogy does not only cover education of the individual (including privileged individuals such as kings and princes); the collective, moral constituency, and thus a politics no longer identified with the state, is itself subject to a specific pedagogic problematization. Like the people in the political realm, in the pedagogic relationship children take the position of the sovereign and can only be brought to transfer their will to that of the educator, thus losing their own will, at the price of their own destruction. But as in the case of politics, the interdiction of abandoning one’s own will does not result in powerlessness on the part of those who have to govern. The government can dispose over everything not belonging to the will of the governed—and that is doubtless enough to bring about circumstantial changes heading in the direction of modifying the relevant environment. The paradox of Rousseau’s educational enterprise becomes clear in the concept of leadership or direction, playing a central role throughout the art of government. This concept stands in a particular, tense relationship with the law: “Young teacher, I am preaching a difficult art to you; this is to govern without precepts and do everything without doing anything at all” (Rousseau 1969: 362).

2. CORSICA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE DOUBLE “CONSTITUTION” If the constituted political body as envisioned in the Social Contract constantly has to be on guard against usurpation by a government upon whose attentive steering the volonté générale at the same time completely depends, then at least the act of original legislation itself, hence the founding of the collective will moving towards a contract of all with all, should not be troubled by any mixing with the government’s singular acts. But now what emerges is that Rousseau qualifies the very act of constitutional legislation to an extreme degree as a singular act, and this in a double sense: not the


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people itself but only the person of the legislator is in a position to formulate the articles of the constitution, which in fact makes possible the establishment or founding of a people in the fi rst place. Yet not only the subject of legislation but its object as well is bound in a striking way to a distinctive characteristic making it necessary to anchor the legislative act in something other than the will that will emanate from it. From this perspective it is no coincidence that Rousseau ties the legislative process to the existence of exceptional individuals (the wise legislators) and exceptional territories. One such territory is the island of Corsica, for which, as is well known, Rousseau drafted a “Project of a Constitution” in 1763, its forward declaring that “The Corsican people is in the happy state [heureux état] rendering a good institution [une bonne institution] possible,” (Rousseau 1979c: 902) with the happy state enjoyed by the Corsican people here specified as the precondition for “a good institution,” that term also pointing back, in French as in English, to the word “state.” The legislator’s function goes beyond the sphere of legalistic voluntarism in two respects: on the one hand, in respect to religion, because a people will only let itself be convinced of the legislative work’s rationality as a result of the “divine pronouncement” to which the legislator lays claim; on the other hand, in respect to concrete, empirical knowledge concerning “land and people,” which brings into play the specific dimension of a governmental rationality that by no means only takes effect following the people’s successful institutionalization, which is to say as an outcome of a constitutive act. It already becomes clear from the manner Rousseau formulates the logical paradox of the legislative work in the Social Contract that his problem is no longer the people, understood as a mass of legal subjects— as the problem was the prince and his rivals for Machiavelli—but rather the governability or rendering governable of a people possessing a specific “naturality” or “physis”5 that can be differentiated into a series of historical, geographical, climatic, demographic, cultural, and other variables (Foucault 2007: 70–71). Such variables, on which the population depends, results in its removal “to a very considerable extent” from “the sovereign’s voluntarist and direct action in the form of the law” (ibid.: 71). In order to successfully conclude his work, the legislator thus has to abandon the level of law in two respects, instead scrutinizing the people’s “constitution.” To give a people a constitution requires determining its “constitutive point,” hence clarifying the question of whether and if applicable when a population is in the position to make these laws its own. Rousseau places the legislator in the midst of the ambivalence of the two meanings assigned the term “constitution” in the course of the seventeenth century. In this period, it ceases to exclusively mean a “totality of laws” and begins to also signify a measurable “relationship of forces”: As long as in the historical-legal literature, which has essentially been that of the parliamentarians, “constitution” essentially meant the basic

80 Friedrich Balke laws of the kingdom, which is to say a legal apparatus, something in the order of a convention, it was clear that this return of the constitution could only mean the in a way decisionistic reestablishment of laws brought into the light of day. To the contrary, from the time when the constitution is no longer a legal scaffolding, an ensemble of laws, but a relationship of force, it is clear that this relationship cannot be reestablished from nothing; it can only reestablished when in any event something such as a circular movement of history exists, when something exists permitting its return to its starting point. (Foucault 2003: 193) The ambivalences of Rousseau’s political discourse—this is my main argument—result from an overlapping of these two understandings of “constitution.” The title of the Social Contract situates politics in a “realm of convention”; but Rousseau constantly tries to reduce the arbitrariness of the foundational act by inquiring into the conditions of its possibility, defi ning this a priori as having an empirical and historical-cultural character. People pass from a state of nature to a civil state because at a certain point the former state becomes untenable (Rousseau 1979a: 359). The transition itself is a fundamentally ambivalent event: while under certain circumstances it is unavoidable, the body politic emerging from it nevertheless plunges into a historical movement making possible both an intensification and perfection of forces and an “abuse” meaning that human beings are “often” brought beneath the “condition” at which they started (ibid.: 364). For this reason, Rousseau cannot understand the constitution or institution” simply as a “legal scaffold” or “totality of laws”; rather, he poses the question of the forces that have to be present for the laws to take hold. Jean Starobinski ignores the ambivalence of Rousseau’s constitution when he argues that the social contract materializes “not along the evolutionary line described in the second Discourse but in another dimension, purely normative and located outside historical time. A legitimate beginning is once more the starting point, ex nihilo, without the question being posed of the conditions required to realize the political ideal” (Starobinski 1971: 45). Precisely the opposite is the case. The legislator’s decisive work does not lie in compiling a constitutional text, because a constitution cannot be established upon a “bottomless foundation.” The “act through which a people is a people” (Rousseau 1979a: 359) cannot be reduced to the process of assent regarding the constitution framed by the legislators.6 It also comprises the preliminary examination of the premises that are either present or absent with the existence of the population as a pre-legal or extra-legal entity: In the same way that before constructing a large building the architect observes and probes the ground to see if it can bear the weight, the wise instructor does not begin by compiling good laws for their own sake, but rather examines whether the people for whom they are meant is capable of bearing them. (Rousseau 1979a: 384f)


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Against this backdrop we can understand why in 1764 Rousseau formulates a “Project of a Constitution for Corsica” but, when asked by the Corsican leader to help with “constructing the republic,” retroactively gets hold of the information allowing him “to acquaint myself with the history of the people and the state of the country.” The texts he is delivered do not render the Corsican trip superfluous, since the legislator is meant to closely study “the people that is to be instituted” (le peuple à instituer) in the country itself (Rousseau 1976: 648). The legislator has to know the history of the people for whom he wishes to compile laws because he needs to identify what Foucault calls the “constituting point,” (Foucault 2003:192)7 which is to say the moment in that history when a people fi rst becomes receptive to the rule of laws. As conceived by Rousseau, the people owes its existence to a process that we can describe, with Foucault, as the entry of the human race into the “field of the defi nition of all living species” (Foucault 2007: 75). This biopolitical anchoring of a people represents a history of the evolutionary sort running below that of political and diplomatic events. If the body politic were meant to be understood as the result of juridical genesis alone, it would be hard to understand how Rousseau can write as follows at the start of Chapter 10, Book 2 of the Social Contract as follows: “A body politic can be measured in two ways: namely, according to territorial extension and according to the number of people, and between one and the other of these measurements there is a relationship suitable for producing the true size of the state” (Rousseau 1979a: 388). But how, we may ask, can a political body—which means, indeed, a moral body—in fact be measured? The two fundamental variables that Rousseau introduces, size of population and territory, are removed from the will of those who come together to found the body politic. Hence proper measure does not become manifest to the state through the normative specifications of its formation, but through specific conditions that are the result of a development or “history.” The legislator must become familiar with this history, because these conditions are subject to neither his will nor that of the individuals who decide to found a body politic. Such a body, furnishing itself with a basic law and thus manifesting its will to have a single will, can only survive if it at the same time realizes “a maximum of force,” (ibid.; italics in original) which it cannot, however, produce and guarantee for the future through the act of constitutional grounding. In an intrinsic manner, the problem of the art of government is tied to the normative mechanism of the social contract, for the two fundamental variables that need to be brought into a “suitable relationship” point to a number of factors and conditions, difficult to overlook, that simply cannot be transformed into constants. At first view, the circumstances at work here indeed seem clearly laid out: “Human being make the state and the land nourishes human beings: consequently, this relationship thus involves the land being sufficient to maintain those dwelling on it and there being as many inhabitants as the soil can nourish” (ibid.: 389). But

82 Friedrich Balke land and human beings are not simply objects or facts that can be placed in a stable relationship through sovereign decree; rather, they turn out to consist of a highly complex and dynamic conglomerate of factors: It is impossible to calculate a fi xed relation between the expanse of land and the number of mutually sufficient human beings, both on account of the differences that are found in the quality of the land, in its degrees of fertility, in the nature of its production, in the influence of climate, and of what can be observed in the temperament of the men who dwell on them [sic] among whom some consume a small amount in a fertile country while others a great deal on barren soil. (ibid.) Concerning all these matters, the legislator “must not base his judgment on what he sees but on what he foresees” (ibid.). He has to reconstruct developmental processes and extrapolate them into the future. Writing the history of a people is anything but a peripheral activity—a diversion from the work of legislation: such work can only succeed when it takes account of the people’s relation to its environment, hence to all the factors and circumstances that cannot be the object of contractual stipulations.

3. SOCIAL ORDERS OF A NEW SORT When Foucault indicates that “this governmentalization of the state”—a process “simultaneously internal and external to the state”—was the phenomenon making its survival possible, it becomes clear that with Rousseau’s theory of government the entire ambivalence of its relationship to the sovereign volonté générale can be formulated for the fi rst time. Within European legal theory, consideration of the phenomenon of governmentality has unfolded under the rubric of “measures” and in particular—Maßnahmegesetze—the term that in German refers to legal measures created for specific occasions and singular cases. The particularity of the measure [die Maßnahme], states Carl Schmitt, “consists of the dependence of its aim on the concrete situation,” (Schmitt 1978: 248) so that the process it designates “has no legal form of its own.” For Schmitt sovereignty is no longer defi ned by the will to law but by a juridically unchecked “power of disposal” (Verfügungsgewalt). In this way he locates his concept of the “measure” on the same level as does Foucault his concept of modern government, which, by citing La Perrière’s own defi nition, he defi nes as “the right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end” (Foucault 2007: 96). This formulation in fact does without any reference to legal concepts, replacing them with a determination of aims. In the political situation of the European interwar period, Carl Schmitt and his student Ernst Forsthoff understood the formation of a “total state” to be the result of a defi nitive “turn to the administrative state,” annulling


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any legal provisos of a constitutional nature. Appearing in 1933, Forsthoff’s book on the Total State was a juridical welcoming salutation to the Nazi regime; but on an analytic level, the concept encapsulated a diagnosis to the effect that a state’s action was no longer reducible to punctual interventions in a society but was directed at “the life” of a population in its entirety. Forsthoff’s work on administrative law merits special attention in research on governmentality, because from the juridical side it confirms Foucault’s description of the development of modern biopower, its growing importance signified in a diminished role for both the law and constitutional guarantees: “We have entered a phase of juridical regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century societies we are acquainted with” (Foucault 1978: 144). For both Schmitt and Forsthoff, in twentieth-century conditions, the motto of the rule of law in a constitutional state is simply an anachronism. Forsthoff’s response to this diagnosis involved developing a new concept of productive administration—a form of administration no longer limited to occasional societal interventions or police-work to counter threats. In his reflections on the modern administrative state, Forsthoff’s opening assumption is “the fact that since roughly the start of the previous century, individual Daseinsführung [management of life or existence] had decisively altered” (Forsthoff 1976a: 50). Even more than the concept of Daseinsvorsorge (provisions for existence, in the current EU context “services of general economic interest”), for whose coinage and detailed application to administrative law Forsthoff became well known, the term Daseinsführung (the German term could be translated literally as “conduct of existence”) used here is of special interest: it reflects an analysis of present-day governmentality as the result of an increasing expropriation of possibilities for managing one’s own “existence.” Nineteenth-century human beings emerge as persons “without a life space they control”; they are in need of “organized provisions, extensive arrangements for sustenance, in order to be able to enjoy the necessities of life” (ibid.: 51). Although the knowledgebased analysis and administrative planning of both individual and collective facts of human life began long before the nineteenth century, political control of this life was strengthened by the loss of what Forsthoff named Daseinsreserven, “reserves for existence.” Now Forsthoff’s work in both the pre-1945 period and after the war is characterized by an understanding of modern administration, in its status as a comprehensive form of Daseinsvorsorge, “provision for existence,” as something alien to constitutional law. Before 1945, he sees this administrative form as leading to the breakdown of the system of constitutional limitation on the state’s executive authority; and he understands and justifies the total state as an adequate expression of a situation in which individuals are ever less in a position to provide themselves with vital goods;8 after 1945, a dualism of administrative and constitutional law, maintained against all critique, replaces the totalitarian monism of the administrative state. Forsthoff insists on the

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essential incompatibility between an administrative law oriented around facts and goals and a freedom-guaranteeing constitutional order, because he continues to see the latter as grounded in an idea of the legal subject as depending primarily or even exclusively on his or her accomplishments, hence not “in need,” and precisely in that way immune to what is either granted or imposed by public-service administration. In the theoretical discussion of this approach, what has been stressed, alongside this refusal to derive administrative from constitutional law, is above all that the central concept of Daseinsvorsorge, however much it has meanwhile become an integral concept in administrative law,9 “only has functions in legal dogma to a limited extent,” rather designating a “political postulate” (Schütte 2006: 81). In any case, from the perspective of an analysis of the forms taken by present-day art of government on the level of state action, taking Forsthoff’s reflections and terminology as a starting point would appear potentially productive: Forsthoff’s ideas regarding the relevant governmental practices point to the difficulty of continuing to grasp them entirely in a legal framework. This is the case, for instance, with plans and planning as a form for administrative action; and also with the so called “physical act,” designating “non-official administrative action” (suggestions, instructions, preparatory administrative measures) that cannot be understood in terms of either contracts or planning. With his study of The State in Industrial Society (1971), Forsthoff demonstrates the analytical productivity of an admittedly conservative doctrine of state, since he expressly inquires into the question of the “massive changes in human existential circumstances [Daseinsverhältnisse] to be expected through the coming decades’ technological development.” As an example, Forsthoff chooses—alongside “protection of the environment from destruction by industry”—the threat posed to the “integrity of the human being himself, after he has become an object of genetic research” (Forsthoff 1971: 25). Forsthoff does not credit a state long-since developed into a complementary function of industrial society with the capacity to protect us from these new sorts of existential risks; at the same time he excludes the possibility of fi nding non-state actors for the task, meaning that his analysis turns out aporetic. Nevertheless the “Forsthoffian rule” (Neumann 1984: 95)—a rule in debt to a certain reading of Rousseau—to the effect that within corporate states the chances of an interest being realized decrease to the extent that the number of those who share the interest increase (Forsthoff 1971: 25) has been taken up by liberal and left-wing authors.10 In general, then (and this is the problem I will be discussing below), Forsthoff is concerned with the legal-historical development of modern democracies as an increasing distancing from a conceptual matrix Rousseau laid out in exemplary fashion: a matrix within which, in the act of obedience to state directives, political subjects in the end only obey themselves. From the beginning, Forsthoff’s analysis of the precarious constitutional state stands under the sign of historical events Foucault paid great attention


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in his lectures on the history of governmentality: events emerging from Germany’s zero-hour of 1945 and its overcoming “without steering and authoritative participation by the state,” (Forsthoff 1976b: 90) hence, to use Rousseau’s terminology: the new foundation of a social order with circumvention of the constituting power. Conformed once again in this act of paradoxical new foundation is Rousseau’s insight into the différance of the foundational event, which—corresponding to the significance of that term (Latin differre) as delay or detour, (Derrida 1982: 1–27) in a certain sense is postponed until later. In a Realanalyse of West Germany published in 1960, Forsthoff characterizes the object of his work as a “new style of social order” that although continuing to defi ne itself as a state, owes neither its existence nor its stupendous success to a genuinely sovereign act of state (Forsthoff 1976c: 1). Instead of allowing themselves to be led by experiences from the Weimar Republic, in the 1945 zero-hour situation those involved in the timetable for reconstruction had to refrain from giving precedence to restoring the state, thus demonstrating the falsity of a particular dogma of constitutional law: “without an orderly state, no orderly economy” (ibid.: 3). Forsthoff summarizes the phenomenon of constitutional deferral with words highly similar to those Foucault will use at the end of the 1970s in his above-mentioned lectures, where he will subject the same phenomenon to a detailed analysis “Economic reconstruction did not follow that of the state but took place simultaneously with it; it even overtook the state’s reintegration” (ibid.). For Foucault as for Forsthoff, after 1945 Germany again steps unto a special path, a Sonderweg, but this time one admired on all sides being based on the idea of the state’s “real foundation in the existence and practice of economic freedom” (Foucault 2008: 85–86). Because, as Forsthoff writes, West Germany “preceded all other states in its surrender to the exigencies of economic activity,” (Forsthoff 1976d: 36) the country is a paradigmatic object of study for the historian of the neo-liberal art of government. Forsthoff sees the specific constitutional history of the German Federal Republic as founded on a “capacity for self-direction and self-discipline; (Forsthoff 1976c: 3) the subject of this foundation is precisely not the state but rather the entirety of the individuals and collective actors who know how to govern or steer “themselves.” Alongside the governmental dimension of this founding he also underscores the disciplinary dimension of the reconstruction, in the process reinforcing Foucault’s thesis that governmental practices and tactics do not replace disciplinary authority, but together with it compensate for the absence of the classical state. For Forsthoff, the economy’s restoration “was by no means merely the fruit of freedom and a free play of forces set into motion with it, in the liberal sense; rather, it was sustained by new sorts of collective discipline on a grand scale [neuartigen kollektiven Disziplinierungen großen Stils], upon which the survival of the economy largely depends even today” (ibid.: 4). On the level of governmental techniques, Forsthoff cites the “constant cooperation between the state

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and society’s arrayed forces,” by which he means, alongside the parties, above all the associations; the cooperation renders itself concrete in “contracts, agreements to silence, understandings, recommendations, warnings” (ibid.: 4f.), hence, in “para-legal” speech-acts, not bound to either the form or functional mode of the law, and arrangements with political effect. These cooperative forms “degrade” the state to one participating actor among others; in doing so they presage the debate about government and new society-wide negotiating mechanisms that will only emerge in the academy decades later. Alongside these forms, above all new scientific methods, developed through the “modern national economy,” “make it possible to already recognize critical aberrations at their starting points, when their regulation is still possible using limit defensive means” (ibid.: 13). This explains why West Germany needs to be understood as a polity that no longer anticipates the state of exception, understood as a critical escalation of mistaken developments leading to the collapse of a society or conjuring up civil war—“and this not from myopia or a fear of responsibility” (ibid.). Conceived according to the sovereign logic of the state of exception, the classical form of eminent political danger is replaced by the conception of a social susceptibility to risk that—as the present example of the fi nancial crisis shows—brings the state onto the scene as an economic moderator. Forsthoff’s analysis of the capacities of modern “industrial society” (Industrie-Gesellschaft), of which West Germany is an “example”, breaks off prematurely, because he can only conceive the subject’s relation to this order in categories of subjugation and disciplining. Although he insists, very similarly to Foucault, that “nothing would be more mistaken” than “continuing to conceive the postwar reality of modern industrial society “in the categories of the Weimar period,” both his notion of Daseinsvorsorge and the juridical instrument of the Maßnahmegesetz are nonetheless characterized by adherence to a model entrusting the public authorities, now as before, with an ability to project itself above the totality of economic processes and prescribe their goals. Daseinsvorsorge is a concept pointing back to the tradition of the police state as reconstructed by Foucault: “The police state establishes an administrative continuum that, from the general law to the particular measure, makes the public authorities and the injunctions they give one and the same type of principle, according it one and the same type of coercive value” (Foucault 2008: 168f.). For Forsthoff the state as manifest in industrial society embodies this administrative continuum, in that it is based on an exchange between the social demand of discipline at work in the productive sphere and the guarantees offered by the welfare state’s apparatus. Obedience in the economic sphere, to which the post-1945 German model owes its success, is the precondition for a social stability that until the time of the “students’ revolt,” which Forsthoff only denigrates despite its politicizing power, excluded political experiments: “The factors assuring stability of the social whole are distributed


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between the state and industrial society but have the latter as their center of gravity” (Forsthoff 1971: 163). Albeit only hesitatingly and with gritted teeth, Forsthoff accepts the disciplinary order of the economy as, in a sense, a formation replacing now absent sovereign authority. He thus sees the new order as standing or falling with the “social redistribution that can only be realized with state means” (ibid.). Forsthoff juxtaposes this social formation comprised of industrial society and administrative state with his ideal of a constitutional state, in the process fully ignoring the significance of the principle of the constitutional state “in the economic order,” as underscored by Foucault (Foucault 2008: 171). In ordoliberal conceptions of an “individual social policy,” (ibid.)11 which Forsthoff basically neglects, law not only comes into play as a means for the state to intervene in the economy or as an instrument of protection against the dehumanizing effects of capitalism; its significance also lies in the invention of ever-new rules generating and allowing the modification of the institutional framework for economic processes. For both the state and other participating actors, law transforms the economy into a game, a “regulated set of activities” (ibid.: 163). In contrast, Forsthoff’s conception of the administrative state is along the lines of a plan pursuing specific economic goals. According to Forsthoff the plan is the form in which the state can still serve as an asymmetric decision-maker—albeit one acting by proxy—in the conditions imposed by an industrial society. Within economic legislation, rule of law has the sense of treating all participating actors equally, whatever their institutional status or capacity to mobilize power-resources, and holding them to the game’s commonly shared rules. Through its goal of increasing the number of economic subjects and widening their scope for play, such law also increases the possible points of friction between the actors, thus producing an intensified demand for legislation. “To the extent that you free economic subjects and allow them to play their game, indicates Foucault, “the more you detach them from their status as virtual functionaries of a plan” (ibid.: 175). Because Forsthoff locates the constitutional state’s domain fundamentally outside the economic-social sphere, he ignores the extent to which this legal technology participates in transforming internal economic circumstances and their institutional implementation: a transformation irrevocably breaking down the stabilizing connection between the disciplinary order of production and readiness for political obedience. At the same time, Forsthoff’s reflections confi rm Foucault’s thesis that governmentality is “simultaneously internal and external to the state.” In respect to Rousseau we can say that governmentality is external to the state—understood as the institutional embodiment of the volonté générale: the process through which a society becomes governable is aimed at a readiness to follow and in this sense at the subject’s obedience, Rousseau making clear to the contrary that the sovereign can never promise to obey. But that such a process does not succeed through force, subjugation, or discipline

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alone, that it is also “interior” to the volonté générale, demonstrates precisely the manner in which governmentality is aimed at nothing less than redemption of the idea of the state as a “phenomenon of will”—an idea Forsthoff sees as “anything but self-evident,” but characteristic for Rousseau (Forsthoff 1976b: 95): The identity of those governing and the governed—the shortest formula for describing the democratic principle—was meant to be an identity of will. With this the citizen of the state, who obeyed the will of the state, was meant to be following his own will, which he encountered in the will of the state, the volonté générale. Rousseau was the fi rst to transform the simple object-relation of those subordinated to the state into a subject-relation. (ibid.: 96) It is interesting to see that Forsthoff understands this basic idea of Rousseau—his famous-notorious identity-centered conception of democracy— exclusively in terms of constitutional law, hence can only speak of it in the past tense. His conclusion is clear: “We fi nd ourselves in a development that is on the point of changing this constitutional order, grounded everywhere in a genuine or fictitious act of will” (ibid.). And as an example, he offers the growing importance of experts in political decision-making: such experts, he indicates, although exercising no executive authority and standing outside the bureaucratic hierarchy, nevertheless take on a position that in legal respects as much as in other respects can hardly be challenged. Now recent research on governmentality has strongly suggested that the highly prominent position of experts in the process of political decisionmaking is by no means to the clear-cut detriment of the “subject’s relationship” to the state. In accord with their pastoral origins, governing practices are focused precisely on the steering and conducting of individuals, just as originally they were aimed at the individual’s conscience and personal salvation. When Rousseau’s identity-centered vision is conceived—as often happens—merely as a pre-totalitarian vision of democracy sacrifi cing the individual’s will to that of the generality, his theory’s decisive point has been missed: the volonté de tous is here only rejected when its effectiveness overlayers the “large number of small differences” with one “unique difference” (say that between rich and poor) that, as the generator of extreme social inequality, structurally hinders a common formation of will (Rousseau 1979a: 371). Over recent years, research on governmentality has convincingly mapped out the extent to which our present art of government has developed technologies through which “individuals in the most varied social realms are, as Althusser has put it, invoked “as active and free citizens, members of self-managing associations and organizations, autonomously acting persons who are or should be in the position to rationally calculate their own life risks” (Bröckling, Krasmann Lemke 2004: 13). Current governmentality actually models the political relationship on the


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matrix developed by Rousseau: Whatever impositions and subjugations may be tied to the provision of certain state or public services, individual citizens need to consistently have the impression they are encountering their own will in the bureaucratically manifest volonté générale, of which each of them is also a part. And for their part, governmental practices and tactics are duty-bound, through the use of new means, to the project begun by Rousseau of transforming the citizen’s simple object-relation to the authorities and institutions providing public service in the welfare state, as standing before Forsthoff, into a “subject relationship.” In this context, “activation,” as a central concept in the new governmental technologies, refers to a “social model that tries to enforce the autonomous engagement of the population,” (Kocyba 2004: 20) and is anchored in what Forsthoff terms the “problem of will.” For Forsthoff, “freedom and participation are the cardinal concepts today determining the relation of the individual to the state” (Forsthoff 1976e: 75). Where, he argues, participation—Teilhabe— designates the state in its capacity to “offer services, [leisten] apportion [zuteilen] deploy [verteilen], and divide [teilen],” freedom imposes limits on the state and leaves “the individual to his social situation.” A governmentality tying a guarantee of social services to a readiness of those receiving them, not to surrender themselves to their situation, but rather to embrace and apply measures to change it, is breaking precisely with this clear-cut distinction between the welfare state and the constitutional state. Hence if Forsthoff could still maintain that “In their intentions the constitutional state and the welfare state are thoroughly different, not to say opposites,” (ibid .) then this assessment must itself be supplied with a historical index to the extent that the welfare state renders its “guarantees” dependent on proof of freedom by those benefiting from it. What Forsthoff could not foresee was the emergence of a welfare-state culture appropriating the pathos of the constitutional state’s concept of freedom and transforming it into a criterion for guaranteeing services. Forsthoff’s concern was entirely focused on a welfare state that endangered the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutional state, relativizing them into mere values and thus delivering them to a jurisprudence relying on techniques of interpretation directly taken from the humanities. However, neo-liberal governmentality has dislocated the relation between both “states” in such a way that a constitutionally originating reserve of freedom is built into the principle of Daseinsvorsorge, thus advancing freedom from its negative, segregating function in the classical constitutional state to a positive, socially constitutive quantity.12 Under the conditions of neo-liberal governmentality, the social order in general is newly grounded in “genuine or fictitious” acts of will. Both the economy and the authorities tied to Daseinsvorsorge are called on to organize labor and the distribution mechanism so that they together guarantee subjects their freedom, in that way transforming—in the manner outlined previously— the citizen’s object-relation to the institutions of the modern preventive

90 Friedrich Balke state into a subject relation. The danger of such a governmental arrangement, in which Rousseau’s social contract has achieved undreamt of eminence, lies in the unfolding on a subtle level of what Forsthoff correctly defi ned as the conversion of social functions into functions of rule: “Whoever is cared for by the state feels dependent on it and is inclined to bow before it” (Forsthoff 1976a: 56). In our contemporary context, this statement can be reformulated as follows: Those cared for by the state can bow before it far more easily because they bow before themselves. NOTES 1. For this reason the following discussion is indebted to Cassirer’s observation that “for us [ . . . ] Rousseau’s doctrine is no object of mere scholar’s curiosity; no object of pure philological–historical consideration. Rather, it is manifest [ . . . ] as a thoroughly contemporary and living problematic. The questions Rousseau posed to his century—today as well these are not at all antiquated, for us, as well, they have not been simply ‘taken care of’.” See Ernst Cassirer (1989: 8). 2. Rousseau’s “people” (peuple) oscillates between the two basic meanings of the German word Volk: on the one hand, in the framework of constitutional law it designates a democracy’s constitutive political subject, who replaces the monarch as the constituent authority; on the other hand it designates the totality of poor and excluded “folk,” members of the “lower classes,” the “ordinary people” contrasting with the rich and noble and meriting “pity” by the revolutionaries, who act in their name. Hannah Arendt notes that “the very defi nition of the word was born out of compassion, and the term became the equivalent for misfortune and unhappiness—le peuple, les malheureux m’applaudissent, as Robespierre was wont to say” (Arendt 1963: 65). The term le peuple is a key to understanding both the French Revolution and Rousseau’s political theory, which aims at transforming the immense class of the poor and unhappy into a new, democratic, and sovereign entity. Hence, importantly, for Rousseau le peuple does not have a national or ethnic tenor, rather designating the political task of grounding the new political order in the “general interest” of those who have been excluded from that order. There is no argument in Rousseau restricting affi liation to the people to those of an identical “national” descent. 3. It is no coincidence that Jacques Derrida uses Rousseau to exemplify the grammatological dimension of supplementary logic, involving appendage to a thing in order to strengthen or protect it. See Derrida (1997[1967]: 141–164). 4. On the “immanence of practices of government” see Foucault (2007: 93). 5. See Foucault (2007: 47): “Politics has to work in the element of a reality that the physiocrats called, precisely, [physis], when they said that economics is a [physis . . . ]. Only ever situating oneself in this interplay of reality with itself is, I think, what the physiocrats, the economists, and eighteenth-century political thought understood when it said that we remain in the domain of [physis].” (Translation modified) 6. In his analysis of the theoretical “displacements” unfolding in the Social Contract, Louis Althusser already suggested that under the juridical title of a contract, in Rousseau’s case we are facing an extraordinary contract with a paradoxical structure: “Rousseau’s contract does not correspond to his concept. In fact his Social Contract is not a contract but the act of constitution,”


7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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through which the individuals forming the contract transform themselves into a body politic on the way to “aliénation totale”—a total transfer of goods and property. That “everything” has to be invested in this contract means precisely that the act of forming the contract does not leave the contracting parties unaltered but to the contrary alters their existence in a fundamental way. The “aliénation totale” of which Althusser speaks in relation to Rousseau’s contract is possible “because it is purely interior to the liberty of individuals: it is possible because human beings give themselves completely, yet to themselves.” This combination of an extreme degree of freedom and an unlimited readiness for self-renunciation or self-revelation represents the paradoxical basic figure at work in Rousseau’s pedagogic project. See Louis Althusser (1966: 5–42). This constituting point does not belong to the realm of law and convention; Rousseau shows this with the example of Peter the Great’s forcible modernization of the Russian Empire: Peter failed to see that his nation was not mature enough for civilized behavior (as Rousseau puts it, pour la police) (Rousseau 1979a: 386). The czar ignored the physis of the Russian population, which he understood as “that kind of original datum, that kind of material on which the sovereign’s action is to be exercised, that vis-à-vis of the sovereign” (Foucault 2007: 71). See Schütte (2006: 44): “The supply of services such as water, gas, electricity, and transportation make his existence possible, especially in the city. Existential provisions have thus become a necessity of human life.” See (ibid.: 103): “Disregarding the difficulties of endowing the concept of Daseinsvorsorge with fi rm contours, it can demonstrate an extremely successful career, hardly comparable to another term in recent administrative history.” See for example Claus Offe (1973: 368ff.). “In short, it does not involve providing individuals with a social cover for risks, but according everyone a sort of economic space within which they can take on and confront risks” (Foucault 2008: 144). “The dismantling of forms of welfare-state intervention is accompanied by a reconstruction of techniques of government that displaces the steering capacity of state apparatuses and authorities to ‘responsible,’ ‘circumspect,’ and ‘rational’ individuals” (Lemke, Krasmann and Bröckling 2000: 30).

REFERENCES Althusser, Louis. (1966). Sur le “contrat social” (Les décalages). L’impensé de JeanJacques Rousseau. Cahiers pour l’ Analyse 8: 5–42. Arendt, Hannah. (1963). On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke. (2004). Einleitung, pp. 9–16 in (eds) Glossar der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Cassirer, Ernst. (1989). Das Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 7–78 in Ernst Cassirer, Jean Starobinski and Robert Darnton Drei Vorschläge, Rousseau zu Lesen. Frankfurt a.M: Fischer. Derrida, Jacques. (1982). Différance, pp. 1–28 in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Boss. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1997[1967]). That Dangerous Supplement, pp. 141–164 in Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Forsthoff, Ernst. (1971). Der Staat der Industriegesellschaft. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Munich: Beck.

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Forsthoff, Ernst. (1976a). Verfassungsprobleme des Sozialstaates, pp. 50–64 in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1954–1973. Munich: Beck. Forsthoff, Ernst. (1976b). Strukturwandlungen der Modernen Demokratie, pp. 90–104 in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1954– 1973. Munich: Beck. Forsthoff, Ernst. (1976c). Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Umrisse einer Realanalyse, pp. 1–13 in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1954–1973. Munich: Beck. Forsthoff, Ernst. (1976d). Verfassung und Verfassungswirklichkeit der Bundesrepublik, pp. 25–38 in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1954–1973. Munich: Beck. Forsthoff, Ernst. (1976e). Begriff und Wesen des Sozialen Rechtsstaates, pp. 65–89 in Rechtsstaat im Wandel. Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1954–1973. Munich: Beck. Foucault, Michel. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. D. Macey. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. G. Burchell. New York/Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kocyba, Hermann. (2004). Aktivierung, pp. 17–22 in Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds) Glossar der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Lemke, Thomas, Susanne Krasmann and Ulrich Bröckling. (2000). Gouvernementalität, Neoliberalismus und Selbsttechnologien. Eine Einleitung, pp. 7–40 in Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds) Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Neumann, Volker. (1984). Der harte Weg zum sanften Ziel. Ernst Forsthoffs Rechts- und Staatstheorie als Paradigma konservativer Technikkritik, pp. 88–99 in Alexander Roßnagel and Peter Czajka (eds) Recht und Technik im Spannungsfeld der Kernenergiekontroverse. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Offe, Claus. (1973). Das pluralistische System von organisierten Interessen, pp. 368–371 in Heinz Josef Varain (ed): Interessenverbände in Deutschland. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1969[1762]) Emile, ou de l’education, in Oeuvres complètes, Volume 4. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1976[1782]). Les Confessions, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 1. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1979a[1762]). Du Contrat Social, ou, Principes du Droit Politique, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 3. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1979b[1755]). Discours sur L’Économie Politique, in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 3. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1979c[1763]). Projet de Constitution pour la Corse in Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 3. Paris: Gallimard. Schmitt, Carl. (1978[1921]). Die Diktatur. Von den Anfängen des Modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum Proletarischen Klassenkampf. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Schütte, Christian. (2006). Progressive Verwaltungswissenschaft auf konservativer Grundlage. Zur Verwaltungsrechtslehre Ernst Forsthoffs. Schriften zur Rechtsgeschichte, Heft 128. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Starobinski, Jean. (1971). Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La Transparence et L’Obstacle. Suivi de Septs Essays sur Rosseau. Paris: Gallimard.

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Government Unlimited The Security Dispositif of Illiberal Governmentality Sven Opitz

1. THE STATE OF GOVERNMENTALITY In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault repeatedly claims that the liberal governmentality that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century still defi nes the political rationalities of the present. Following Foucault, governmentality studies have dwelt upon this persistence of liberal governmental reason and the indirect, entrepreneurial forms of conduct that it employs (Bröckling 2007; Rose 1999). These (neo)liberal rationalities of conduct have been explored in areas as diverse as economic organizations (Miller and Rose 1990; Opitz 2004), welfare programs (Cruikshank 1999; Dean 1995), health care (Greco 1993; Lemke 2006), and criminal policy (Smandych 1999; Krasmann 2003). With a few exceptions (Dean 2001; Valverde 1996), governmentality studies have thereby primarily focused on the extent to which liberal practices are preoccupied with the limitation of direct intervention. This contribution, in contrast, takes a slightly different approach. Instead of investigating the logic of “conduct of conduct” (Foucault 1982) in a further societal domain, it focuses on its limits. More precisely, this text examines how liberal rationality organizes the boundaries of the “powers of freedom” and establishes modes of “illiberal rule.” How does governmentality, as a form of rule based on the logic of limited government, allow for the unlimited and excessive exercise of power? How is the exertion of direct and physical violence strategically integrated into the modern regime of governmentality? How does liberal government switch to an illiberal mode in its own name and on its own grounds? These are the questions that guide this contribution. It suggests reworking and strengthening the notion of security within the conceptual apparatus of governmentality studies, in order to provide better tools for analyzing the intertwining of liberal and illiberal forms of power. The notion of security is central to Foucault’s lectures and to modern political theory in general, but it has not been systematically discussed within governmentality studies. Instead, faced with the difficulty of explaining the exercise of direct violence in the age of governmentality, leading scholars in the field have hitherto resorted to the concept of biopolitical racism

94 Sven Opitz sketched out by Foucault in the last lecture of his course Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003a; cf. Dean 2001; Lemke 2003). But, as will be shown, the notion and logics of security are indispensable if we wish to understand the contemporary forms of illiberal practices such as shoot-tokill policies or methods of interrogation involving torture. The concept of bio-racism alone does not render these political rationalities intelligible. As will be demonstrated, a careful reconstruction and discussion of security helps us to understand how it constitutes the decisive governmental hinge that translates between different types of intervention. The argument proceeds in four steps. The chapter starts with an examination of the public discourses surrounding contemporary illiberal practices. It shows that the logics and claims of security, which undergird these practices, cannot be reduced to classical “reason of state” arguments (2). Hence, it seems appropriate to inquire into the governmental rationality of these measures. In order to elucidate this rationality, a close reading of Foucault’s lectures will demonstrate how Foucault, while accounting for the novel discourse on security, only sowed the seeds of an account of the logics of direct intervention fuelled by a liberal culture of fear (3). To further explore the tipping point between the “powers of freedom” and the coercive forms of liberalism prevalent today, this chapter suggests drawing on the securitization approach as developed by the Copenhagen School. According to this approach, extraordinary and exclusionary political measures are activated through the invocation of an existential threat. The contribution ties this specific rhetoric of security to a re-inscription of sovereign logics of power into governmentality as liberal practice (4). The last section shows how such liberal-cum-sovereign governmental rule leads to a prominent reemergence of technologies of police. The example of preventive and potentially extra-legal interventions of police power within the logic of security makes it possible to show how liberal forms of rule are twisted into illiberal forms of knowledge collection, spatial regulation and de-subjectivation (5). This chapter thus argues that illiberal governmentality is an inherent potentiality of liberal reason—haunting it, corrupting it and pushing it forward at the same time.

2. CONTEMPORARY INVOCATIONS OF SECURITY As contemporary discourses and practices show, the notion of security allows for the problematizing of various political and social questions in quite specific ways. In general, invocations of security promote the implementation of novel measures of intervention. However, a broad range of cases can be identified. The following cursory overview of exemplary appeals to the problem of security serves to illuminate the breadth and effects of the current transformations in political discourse.

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In December 2006 the German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, reintroduced a legislative proposal that allowed the shooting down of passenger flights by the German Air Force, in cases where these might be used as weapons by terrorists. The killing of innocent passengers is justified in the name of national security—even though earlier that year, the Federal Constitutional Court had already declared § 14 (3) of the 2005 German Aviation Law, which was intended to provide the legal basis for such acts, to be unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Schäuble insisted on the possibility of ordering pre-emptive strikes against civil aircraft in case of an impending “elementary attack on community assets,” such as nuclear power stations. The Minister of the Interior’s legislative proposals fit into the government’s broader objective of deploying the armed forces within Germany. His proposals question the clear separation between the police and the armed forces, that is, between the domestic or international use of state violence. Almost simultaneously, in early 2007, the US Department of the Interior submitted a handbook to Congress containing rules for trials by special tribunals. These rules granted judges the power to recognize forced testimonies and hearsay as evidence. The handbook established the legal guidelines for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” outlined in the Military Commissions Act. Six months earlier, Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, had already argued that the establishment of systematic “politics of torture” in the so-called war on terror was a proven fact. Together with Joshua Dratel, she supported her claim with 1,200 pages of material entitled “The Torture Papers” (Greenberg and Dratel 2005). Among other things, the documents disclose how the politics of torture rely on “extraordinary renditions”—the practice of transferring prisoners to countries that apply torture.1 Such legitimization of the uses of interrogation techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation or prolonged standing in “stress positions” in the name of security requirements is not a phenomenon restricted to US policy. The director of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Heinz Fromm, has declared that information from foreign sources must be used even if it was extracted by torture. Such arguments justify torture as a technique of intelligence gathering that responds to a purportedly new security environment. They seek to establish a difference between torture in the name of security, on the one hand, and torture as punishment or as a means of terrorizing people into submission on the other (Lubon 2006). The effects of security discourses are not limited to such extreme cases. Rather, they disseminate into nearly every social sphere. They transform train stations, football stadiums and city centers. In the name of security, individuals are to abandon their stance as passive bystanders and become part of a proactive community vigilantly gathering information and taking measures against potential dangers. On the American online portal ready.gov, the “war on terror” assumes interactive forms: via the Internet,

96 Sven Opitz citizens are interpellated as alert participants in a “war on terror” to be fought from their homes. They shall no longer be mere spectators of media coverage but are called upon to turn into soldiers stationed at their desks (Andrejevic 2006). The desk is not always a safe place, however, as a student at the University of California in Los Angeles experienced in 2006. He was caught using a computer in the library without his student ID, and when he refused to vacate the building the security forces shot him repeatedly with a so-called “taser.”2 In extreme cases, even the targeted killing of individuals in urban environments has become a permissible police measure. Traditionally limited to classical warfare, targeted or “extra juridical” killing has been established as a “limit case” of security management (Kessler and Werner 2007). Thus, in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in London 2005, journalists discovered that the Anti-Terrorist Branch of London’s Metropolitan Police deployed “shoot-to-kill” tactics under the code-name “Operation Kratos.” This enumeration of instances in which security concerns currently bear on policies could be continued. They indicate not only a quantitative proliferation of security discourse, but also a qualitative shift: the very notion of security starts to change meanings, epistemic structures, and political effects. The cases point to the erosion of distinctions such as civil/military, legal/illegal, domestic/international, private/public and—above all—internal/external security (Bigo 2001). The difficulties that traditional disciplines like International Relations or criminology have when trying to grasp these logics by applying their usual categories of security are symptomatic for the impending transformations of the meaning and implications of security. As the examples show, security no longer refers—as the neorealist perspective in International Relations assumes (e.g., Walt 1991)—exclusively to questions of deterrence and the deployment and control of the armed forces of a state. But contemporary invocations of security fit neither the criminological understanding of security as obeying the law, nor controlled delinquency. The simple breach of a law by a subject does not circumscribe the issues raised by the invocations of security today—a development which is paradoxically accompanied by the extended use of categories like “criminal” and “rogue” on the international stage (Derrida 2004). Hence, the logic of the examples mentioned previously cannot be grasped within the boundaries of the two disciplines that have defined conventional notions of security up until now. The present calls for security reveal a simultaneous decentralization, de-limitation and multiplication of security strategies amongst sub-national, national and supranational players. Politics in the name of security spreads rhizomorphically, uses novel technologies and thus disperses its dynamics. Faced with such prevalent and far-reaching invocations of security in the justification of illiberal measures, it seems worthwhile to analyze their underlying political rationale more closely. The question, therefore, is not how political or non-political actors make use of the notion of security


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within already existing institutional settings; rather, the question is how the domain and logics of the political are shaped by invocations of security. In short: how are specific power relations and institutional forms established through mechanisms of security?

3. RATIONALITIES OF SECURITY: FROM SOVEREIGNTY TO GOVERNMENTALITY For an understanding of the political rationalities centered on security, it is important to recognize that references to questions of security are neither a peripheral nor a recent phenomenon. Security is not just a subject of popular discourse, but points us to the core of the modern political tradition. In the opening section of his seminal work, Politics of Security, Michael Dillon (1996: 12) notes: “Security [ . . . ] saturates the language of modern politics. Our political vocabularies reek of it and our political imagination is confi ned by it.” This is an accurate statement indeed: modern politics is preoccupied by the question of how to provide security. The question of whether to provide security is not posed—it lies outside the parameters of the debate. Thus, security determines the political imagination of modern times; but, pace Dillon, it does so in a variety of ways, as the following few paragraphs will demonstrate. Early modern theories of sovereignty, for which Hobbes’ Leviathan is paradigmatic, place the relation between politics and security at center stage. For Hobbes, security is a founding principle as it provides the basis of sovereignty. Security is everything at once: cause, aim and legitimation of the modern state. The “security of a mans person” (Hobbes 1985 [1651]: 192) is “lastly the motive, and end” (ibid.) for the erection of the Leviathan, the “Mortall God” (ibid.: 227). In this respect, security functions as the lever that makes the “transcendental apparatus” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 83) of sovereign power work. According to Foucault, the emergence of governmental power in the eighteenth century constitutes a break in this political order of sovereignty. While the problematization of security continues to defi ne the rationality of this new form of power, it changes its form: liberal security differs fundamentally from a sovereign’s relation to security. In his lectures, Foucault stresses time and again that liberalism places the logic of limitation at the center of governmental rationality. Taking Foucault’s analytics of liberalism seriously provokes the question of how liberal governmentality can selectively un-limit its exercise of power and organize a direct, domineering and violent grasp on specifics. Does Foucault provide the conceptual instruments to theorize this tipping-point, where the illiberal power of the sovereign is deployed under the historical conditions of governmental rationality? Foucault shows that liberal governmental rationality, unlike its historical predecessors, does not demand the waiving of individual rights for the

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purpose of transforming an anarchic state of nature into political order. Instead, it discovers natural processes whose immanent logic generates order. “This sudden emergence of the ‘naturalness’ of the species within the political artifice of a power relation” (Foucault 2007: 22) manifests itself in the birth of population and political economy. The population is a physical entity whose immanent regularities—such as birth rates, illnesses or accidents—are rendered visible through statistical apparatuses. In order to increase the strength of the population, governmental activity must not hinder these natural processes. Rather, it has to ally itself with them: it has to take into account their inherent dynamics and allow them to become productive. In this respect, population assumes decisive features of economy, which in the eighteenth century appeared as a field of reality functioning according to “natural” laws. While population forms the government’s sphere of intervention, economy provides for the rationalization of the exercise of power. “To exercise power in the form, and according to the model, of economy” (Foucault 2007: 95), hence, means more than simply weighing costs against benefits. It means recognizing the immanent logic of economy and bringing to bear its dynamics. A case in point is the mechanism of interest: interest is nothing that has to be restrained or relinquished. On the contrary, interest has to be given free reign for it to generate order. Confidence in the liberal play of interest, therefore, amounts to a critique of intervention and of sovereign knowledge of the whole. Individual interests act blindly towards the totality; they must unfold within the boundaries of selfishness to promote the common good. Consequently no position of sovereign transcendence, from which everything can be seen, known and reacted to, exists. Political economy is an “atheistic discipline, [ . . . ] a discipline without God” (Foucault 2008: 282). It replaces the centered perspective of an economic sovereign with the “natural” market, as a mechanism of verification and falsification of governmental action (Tellmann 2003; 2009). But does this assumption of a self-organizing social reality offer points of intervention at all? Why does self-generation require a governmental rationality? The previously mentioned points seem to indicate only a limitation and a critique of intervention in the name of a laisser-faire attitude. Again, how is the necessity of regulation (Foucault 2007: 47) argued for, given such an understanding of reality? According to my reading of Foucault’s lectures, the condition of possibility for regulation is established by a calculation of security that organizes new forms of exercising power: problematizing the security of self-regulating spheres marks the tippingpoint that makes it possible to navigate the paradoxical relation of nonintervention and intervention within liberal rule. It is instructive to have a closer look at this paradoxical relation and its mediation through calculations of security. In order to do so, it is helpful to recall how Foucault himself has fleshed out both the intervening and non-intervening logics of liberal rule.


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On the one hand, Foucault explains, liberal government shapes specific structures of contingency in which it acts as a manager of freedom: “It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it” (Foucault 2008: 63). As indicated before, studies of governmentality have investigated these forms of liberal power in depth. Seen through this lens, liberal government avoids destructive relations of violence and direct coercion. Instead, “it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult” (Foucault 1982: 220). Correspondingly, security technologies are “environmental technologies” (Foucault 2008: 261) that function indirectly and ensure that individuals make use of specific freedoms. On the other hand, security technologies also address practices and subjects which do not fit into the play of transactional freedom. They focus on heterogeneous practices, forms of conduct and modes of being that threaten to corrupt the “powers of freedom” from within. Identifying these elements, technologies of government determine a threshold beyond which governmental power ceases to induce and incite, but draws on compulsory measures to secure the productive use of freedom elsewhere. This significant variation in the logic of intervention manifests itself clearly in the historical treatment of poverty. In the nineteenth century, liberal government bracketed the continuum of poverty into various moral segments. It strove to establish subsidiary plays of freedom by providing caring and incentive schemes for the good, able-bodied poor. This served the purpose of extending as far as possible the productive dynamics of interests. At the same time, it isolated the pauper and identified him as a dangerous subject: “Pauperism is [ . . . ] poverty intensified to the level of social danger” (Procacci 1991). In this respect, security is the “principle of calculation for the cost of manufacturing freedom” (Foucault 2008: 65). The “dangerous subject” pays the price for not being able to be governed through the simultaneous production and consumption of freedom. He embodies the constitutive outside of a wide field of liberally governable subjects and thus requires special, disciplinary, or even authoritarian treatment. In order to understand more precisely how security calculations mediate the relation between these two operational modes of liberal security, it is important to emphasize—more than Foucault himself does—the paradoxical and unstable character of this relation. It is paradoxical, as the security dispositif justifies intervention only in terms of non-intervention: governmental intervention is necessary because the processes in which it must not intervene are permanently threatened. At the same time, intervention only intends to make non-intervention possible and feasible. According to governmental reason, intervention always already refers back to non-intervention and vice versa. The crucial point is that this paradox is not an error or a flaw to be dispelled for the sake of smooth governmental functioning. Quite the opposite, it is the key mechanism of liberal governmentality. Metaphorically speaking, the paradox of (non-)intervention works as a kind of “generative disquiet” in the fabric of governmental power: it demands to

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be reproduced time and again, without ever being dissolved. One governs always already too much, and has to continue governing in order not to govern too much. Governmental power is therefore never fi xed, but in a constant process of calibration mediated through calculations of security. Against this background, it is the constant problematization of security that transforms liberal reason into an unstable and wavering rationale of government. Calculations of security mark the tipping-point that navigates between intervention and non-intervention, negotiating the conditions and subjects of both. To specify this crucial governmental tipping-point, one might qualify the aporia at the centre of governmental reason as a social mechanism of immunization. As Roberto Esposito (2009) has pointed out at length, this immunization works in the same way as its biological model: it reproduces the evil from which it is supposed to protect, adding a smaller ill in order to ward off a greater danger of the same kind. Hence, via the problematization of security interventions are not simply excluded from the governmental scene—in this case there would be no governmental scene at all—but they are included in order to be excluded. The phármakon (Derrida 1981: 61 et seq.) of security measures is induced on the basis of a permanent calculation: which practices of freedom are desirable, despite possible negative consequences, what kind of intervention may be conducted, to what extent and with which secondary effects? What are the sources of potential dangers? In what form and to what degree can danger be tolerated, and how can it be neutralized? Governmentality faces the challenge of securing a circulation of interests, goods, and information against dangers without halting this circulation. But in his analysis, Esposito also shows that social mechanisms of immunization may develop an excessive drive—with ruinous effects. They tend to accelerate, increasing the means designed to protect against their own ends in ever shorter time-spans. Not surprisingly, Esposito sees the contemporary security apparatus as paradigmatic for such a hypertrophic dynamic in which a heightened perception of insecurity goes hand in hand with the implementation of more draconic measures against perceived threats. Pushed forward by its own affect production of fear and anxiety (Massumi 2005), the security dispositif is liable to expand its illiberal mode and to be turned over by this expansion. In the last consequence, it dissolves its constitutive aporia and inverts into a sovereign machine. Foucault does not completely neglect this potential for escalation in his analysis of the modern security dispositif. While emphasizing liberal restraint, he realizes at the same time that governmentality—as the political rationality that limits direct intervention—does not lead to an overall reduction in political interference. On the contrary, the calculation of security guarantees the “conditions for the creation of a formidable body of legislation and an incredible range of governmental interventions” (Foucault 2008: 64 et seq.). The liberal art of governing is not “the suppression, obliteration, abolition, or [ . . . ] Aufhebung of the raison d’État” but rather


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constitutes the “principle for maintaining it, developing it more fully” (ibid.: 28). But what explanation does he himself offer in order to account for this liberal ability to encompass raison d’État that exceeds bounds and tends towards such a hypertrophic dynamic? Although this is not his main concern, Foucault identifies at least two moments of governmental un-limitation. The inclusion of considerations of utility in the interior of the security calculation provides the first entry point for governmental excess. While the legal conception of inalienable human rights sets an external limit to the exercise of power, the criterion of utility has the potential to ”un-limit” the exercise of power from the inside. A “radicalism of utility” (Foucault 2008: 43) that is freed from the criterion of legitimacy, and is evaluated solely in regard to its effectiveness, looms on the horizon of government. Even more decisive, however, is the second moment Foucault identifies. He shows that on the flipside of security calculations, a culture of danger emerges. Whether in relation to public services, illness or crime: “everywhere you see this stimulation of the fear of danger which is, as it were, the condition, the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism” (ibid.: 66 et seq.). This culture of danger activates subjects to strive after self-control and to accept external control. Simultaneously, the determination of danger defi nes boundaries beyond which governmental interventions switch to an authoritarian mode, into “a mode of government that acts in the best interest of those who cannot act in their own interests” (Dean 2002: 48). In extreme cases, governmental power bases the right to be “unjust and murderous” (Foucault 2007: 263) on the dangers it has identified. The charitable, caring pastorate turns into a “pastoral [ . . . ] of selection and exclusion” (ibid.). I now want to elaborate further this question of “danger.” In order to do so, the next section introduces the concept of securitization. As the subsequent paragraph will argue, this concept refers to a specific moment in the problematization of security. It designates a specific discursive-rhetorical structure that organizes the switch from an indirect regulation to a direct mode of violent intervention. Securitization renders the illiberal moment of the security dispositif dominant, and thus functions as the decisive hinge that allows the intersection of liberal and sovereign modes of power.

4. THE RHETORIC OF SECURITIZATION AND THE ILLIBERAL SECURITY DISPOSITIF The concept of securitization has been developed by Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde since the 1990s (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998). Today it stands for a major research paradigm known as the Copenhagen School (C.A.S.E. 2006). This paradigm is mostly used in studies of international relations, but recently it has attracted the attention of neighbouring branches of research such as criminology and migration studies.

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It furnishes a perspective on security that departs from purely military and state-centered defi nitions of the term. Discussing phenomena such as international crime, fi nancial crises and environmental pollution since the 1980s, the (inter-)discipline of security studies was faced with a need to adapt its notion of security. The Copenhagen School met this challenge by offering a “nominalist approach” to security (Wæver 1995: 57). This directs attention to socially scattered acts of securitization and thus performs a methodological shift towards a genuinely sociological analysis. In order to understand how the theory of securitization can amend an analytics of governmentality, the following brief outline of the approach is helpful. The Copenhagen School effects epistemological and theoretical changes in respect to the study of security on two main levels. Most importantly, it abandons a scientifically predetermined notion of what security “really is” and which problems “really” belong to the security agenda. Security is not regarded as an objective factor, independent of context, but refers to a specific discursive operation whose context-specific social applications render problems first and foremost into problems of security. Accordingly, security becomes a question of performative acts of securitization and their respective success or failure. Epistemologically the Copenhagen School promotes a constructivist approach, informed by current theories of communication: as second-order observers—that is, as observers observing other observers (Luhmann 1993)—scholars have to map discursive operations of securitization in their respective contingency. Since a security situation does not exist a priori but is constituted through the discursive treatment of a theme within a “security mode,” Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde find themselves confronted with the further task of defining the act of securitization more precisely. According to these authors, the mere use of the terminology of security is not enough to identify the discursive operation as securitization. In their view, the term by itself is too unspecific and multifaceted to transform social facts into security concerns. Only speech acts which exhibit the following rhetorical structure are capable of this: speech acts that present an issue as an existential threat to a designated referent object (e.g., the state, the well-being of the population, certain constitutional principles) which therefore has to be protected by resorting to extraordinary means. Thus, the authors of the Copenhagen School do not focus on security solely as a signifier—however “thick” (Huysmans 1998) or “empty” (Laclau 1996) it may be. Rather, the act of securitization is always already distinguished by a certain dramatization of the relationship between a threat, its referent object and the measures taken. In this sense, securitization remains tied to the language of military warfare. The designation of an existential threat postulates an urgency that tends to suspend daily routines and pushes politics beyond normal procedures. How can the theory of securitization contribute to an understanding of present invocations of security within the framework of governmentality studies? Even though the speech act theory of securitization does not


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have the analytical means at its disposal, fi rst, to reflect upon the historical conditions of possibility for securitization acts or, second, to investigate their social materialization, it offers an important complementary perspective on how security discourse functions to call upon illiberal modes of governing. Importantly, this approach helps to re-inscribe the question of sovereignty into the analysis of contemporary practices of governmentality. In fact, Foucault advocated investigating the transformation of sovereign power through governmental security mechanisms, instead of merely maintaining that various forms of power—from sovereignty via discipline to governance—chronologically succeeded one another. However, to all intents and purposes not only Foucault, but also the majority of studies applying his concepts, use the sovereign logic of power simply as a foil. Consequently, the mechanisms of illiberal governmentality are much less well explored than neo-liberal technologies of the self (Rose 1999) or conduct in postfordist organizations (McKinlay and Starkey 1998). Mariana Valverde (2007) attributes this lack of research to the silent substitution of the term “security” by the term “governmentality” in the course of Foucault’s lectures. In her view, this substitution has erased connotations of police, authoritarianism, and social exclusion. The concept of securitization provides for a way of remedying this. It draws attention to a floating rhetorical structure that calls for direct interventions which ignore the bounds of law and install a sovereign exception to liberal rule. Under conditions of modern governmentality, the concept targets the point at which liberal regulation—in the name of liberality—becomes illiberal. As will be outlined subsequently in greater detail, it marks the threshold at which governmentality is rearticulated in the classic terms of sovereign power. Reading the Foucauldian account of the liberal security dispositif in conjunction with the concept of securitization proves to be fruitful in at least three respects. First and foremost, it helps us to understand how governmental rule allows itself to resort to sovereign acts of exception, namely through acts of securitization. When securitization takes over, the governmental security calculus reflects on the limits of liberal government. In this view, securitization marks a particular moment in the problematization of security. However, Wæver underestimates how far securitization always remains a possibility within the liberal dispositif: he takes securitization as simply detached from “normal politics” (Wæver 1995: 54 et seq.). Wæver’s conception of securitization as free-floating speech acts chosen by particular actors renders securitization independent of the regime of governmentality; it leads him to assume that an absolute “desecuritization” (ibid.) of liberal politics is possible. But within the perspective of governmentality, securitization is part and parcel of the liberal dispositif that weighs the costs of freedom. As Jef Huysmans (2006: 94) has noted, the “government of excessive freedom delimits the sphere within which practical freedom is realized.” Hence, acts of securitization draw the line that makes it possible to exclude those considered to be beyond governmental rule.

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Secondly, conjoining a Foucauldian analytics of government with the Copenhagen School sheds more light on processes of desubjectivation. The existential threat figured by the overheated and impassioned rhetoric of securitization determines how those who are taken to be outside of the game of liberal conduct will be treated. Securitization stages an antagonistic drama between a threatened object and its inimical subject. Almost anything can take the position of the threatened object: the population, the infrastructure, even the “liberal way of life” or the “civilized world” itself. Accordingly, the position of the threatening subject might be occupied by a variety of dangers. But more often than not it refers to a personalized enemy. Within acts of securitization the inimical subject is denied the standing of a person, someone who would be capable of acting reasonably. Securitization sets up a boundary between the “level of the interplay of differential normalities” (Foucault 2007: 63) and the dangerous abnormal (Foucault 1978). The latter cannot be normalized and needs to be confronted illiberally. Thus the erection of a barrier, beyond which government can grant no latitude for freedom, correlates with a discrimination of possible and impossible subject positions. Via the act of securitization, governmentality effects a rupture in the continuum of subjectivation by separating the realm of intelligible subjects from the field of impossible, fundamentally excluded, deconstituted, subjects. Finally, combining an analytics of government with the concept of securitization makes it possible to tie the latter to a political rationality and its technological apparatus. While proponents of the Copenhagen School are only able to see isolated speech acts, the governmentality perspective traces these acts to their horizon of intelligibility. They treat them as belonging to a more encompassing rationalization of conduct which includes rules of judgment, legitimate goals, and elaborate procedures for reaching these goals. The means, objects and agents of intervention are thus not considered as a-historical entities but refer back to an epistemic regime set up by specific problematizations of security. This politico-epistemic regime determines the subsidiary justifications, the qualifications and the conditions of possibility for securitization. Moreover, situating processes of securitization within governmental regimes makes it possible to understand their material foundation in technologies of power. 3 Governmental technologies assemble scientific knowledge, technical apparatuses, anthropological assumptions, and architectural forms in strategic ways to configure relations of conduct. The implementation of illiberal governmental measures depends on material devices such as passports (Torpey 2000), databases (Amoore and de Goede 2005), and checkpoints (Weizman 2007: 139 et seq.). Securitization either reconfigures the logic of how these devices are used, or introduces or adapts previously banned forms of intervention—the acceptance of torture as a “technology of intelligence gathering” in the “war on terror” is a case in point (Krasmann 2007). Hence, although acts of securitization are not synonymous with the actual implementation of illiberal measures and their technologies, they are


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constitutively involved in their material exercise. But how are we to specify the mode of this power? Where does it fit in Foucault’s menu of sovereign, disciplinary and liberal power? As the following will show, illiberal governmentality consists of folding these modes of power into a new constellation.

5. ILLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY AND SOVEREIGN POWER Securitization opens the political space for the exertion of illiberal power within liberalism. But if we want to understand the specific rationales of illiberal power, it is necessary to re-visit the notion of sovereignty as parts of governmentality. The remainder of this chapter shows how a re-articulated notion of sovereignty provides the clues needed for an understanding of illiberal governmentality. Introducing the notion of sovereignty into the frame of governmentality qualifies Foucault’s own accounts of sovereignty. Although sovereign power figures prominently in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977: 3 et seq.), in The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990 [1978]: 133 et seq.), and in Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2003a: 239 et seq.), Foucault considers it a historically outdated form of power. It remains under-theorized in his work, compared to disciplinary power and biopower (Singer and Weir 2006). To put it polemically, Foucault’s analysis of sovereignty has never decapitated the imaginary of the king. The countenance of Louis XIV flickers through Foucault’s characterization of sovereignty as a power which emanates from a center, celebrates its greatness in public spectacles and acts through decree. This figure of the sovereign as a unitary subject which represents, possesses, and exercises power from a unique position in a universally binding way is clearly at odds with contemporary social theory with its stress on the complexity and multiplicity of differentiated social logics. Therefore, Foucault’s theory of decentered power must be used against his own account of sovereign power in order to analyze its mechanisms. How can one theoretically account for a logic of power that disrupts liberal practices and norms fundamentally, without resorting to an omnipotent subject in possession of that power? Foucault recognized that the problematization of security creates a vector at the center of liberalism that potentially violates the principles of liberality. When Klaus Croissant, the lawyer of the imprisoned members of German Red Army Faction, was refused asylum in France in 1977, Foucault (2001a: 367) tersely remarked: “Désormais la sécurité est au-dessus des lois”—From now on, security is above the law. Measures of security frequently claim, Foucault aptly points out, to be extraordinary measures that are not bound by law. Taking this statement as a clue, one might say that securitization organizes a governmental practice of legal exemption. And legal exemption is, without any doubt, a classical prerogative of

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sovereignty: as Carl Schmitt (1934) famously put it, sovereign is “he who decides on the exception.” An unorthodox interpretation of Schmitt’s definition can be used here to reformulate the relationship between sovereignty, the subject of power, and the law. The characterization of sovereignty as a “Grenzbegriff” (Schmitt 1934: 11) or “limit concept,” emphasizes that sovereignty, while heterogeneous to the legal norm, still refers to the law, even in transgressing it. As a relation of power, sovereignty is neither inside nor outside the legal realm—it confuses the boundaries of law by occupying a zone of indistinction (Agamben 1998). In other words, the sovereign breaches the law by legal means. It is essential for him to claim proto-legal authority in suspending the law. Otherwise, the sovereign would just be an outlaw. At the same time, the figure of the sovereign subject remains remarkably undetermined in Schmitt’s famous formula, as Friedrich Balke (2005: 77) has noted. Whoever decides on the exception is sovereign. Extrapolating this indeterminacy, one can say that sovereignty is the governmental function of transgressing the bounds of law from within the law. In principle anyone, irrespective of qualification, can occupy this function. Therefore, sovereignty is not tied to a singular subject that occupies a center of power. Instead, it is a type of power relation characterized by an empowerment to act beyond normal legality. The extraordinary measures instantiated through acts of securitization (torture, hyper-surveillance, “shoot-to-kill” policies) rest upon this paralegal detachment from law. And it is precisely the governmental security calculus that determines the threshold beyond which this sovereign detachment can usurp liberal forms of power at multi-various points within the social body. Ultimately, this means that sovereign subjects are constituted in relation to a certain governmental rationality, just like the “destituted” subjects who are submitted to a sovereign power. Judith Butler’s (2004: 50 et seq.) analysis of “indefinite detention” shows this proliferation of sovereign acts vis-à-vis the “precarious,” i.e., legally abjected life. Corroborating the perspective developed here, she locates the exercise of prerogative power within the field of modern governmentality. She depicts the military tribunals appointed by the US government as part of its “War on Terror” as “petty sovereigns” (ibid.: 56). As administrative agencies, they are part of a thoroughly governmental executive function that applies the law in an instrumental and tactical fashion: “The result is a production of a paralegal universe that goes by the name of law” (ibid.: 61). The transgression of legally bounded rule from within the law has been problematized by Walter Benjamin (1965) as the logic of the police. Within the logic of modern police, two forms of power coincide that liberal political theory sees as separate: the power of making laws (rechtsetzende Gewalt) and the power of maintaining the law by executing it (rechtserhaltende Gewalt). While the intellectual architects of modern democracy since Montesquieu attribute these powers to different institutional branches, according to Benjamin the logic of the police criss-crosses this neat separation as


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it creates law by enforcing it. Hence, the police is a limit-figure actualizing a sovereign relation: it is a spectral force that contaminates the law in mundane governmental practice. Correspondingly, a form of government follows the logic of police if it transcends the law by applying it. In the name of public order and security the law is violated and, through this act, reestablished. Police Science in the seventeenth century knew already that the police was not an extension of the judiciary, because it had to use sub-legal techniques like decrees and edicts to penetrate into the narrowest gaps of the social. Consequently, Foucault sees in the police an instrument for the production of “petty” states of exception: “police is the direct governmentality of the sovereign qua sovereign. Or again, let’s say that police is the permanent coup d’État [ . . . ] that is exercised and functions in the name of and in terms of the principles of its own rationality, without having to mold or model itself on the otherwise given rules of justice” (Foucault 2007: 339). This approach complements and exceeds the law at the same time. Moreover, it has characterized the police up to the present day and is based on two structural attributes (Dubber and Valverde 2006). First, it acts as a technology of the future, concentrating on practices of prevention that lie beyond the codified criminal laws regulating the prosecution of offenders. Second, it applies a kind of situational knowledge that is not legally codified and culminates in decisions of “discretion.” At present, following Giorgio Agamben (2000: 104), we are witnessing the introduction of sovereignty into the figure of police, which manifests itself in an “almost constitutive exchange between violence and right.” The form of government that comes into being through a relation of contiguity between sovereignty and police can, thus, be termed illiberal. It uses the realm of possibilities created by acts of securitization to allow powers detached from the law to waver as “forces of law” (Agamben 2005: 32 et seq.). The following paragraphs seek to outline—however cursorily—how this legal/extra-legal logic of sovereign police might make it possible to capture the current modus operandi of illiberal governmentality. The technologies of illiberal governmentality that constitutively rest upon the “petty sovereignty” of the police will be explored in terms of three aspects: its rationalization of space, its specific will to knowledge, and its order of subjectivities. Illiberal Rationalizations of Space: As recent border studies suggest, liberalism not only exhibits a de-territorializing vector but also moves towards re-territorialization. It aims not only at enabling circulation, but also at securing and regulating such mobility (cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2008). Foucault has described the enabling of circulation. Liberalism, he argues, confronts the segmented economic space of mercantilism with the idea of the world as a market without limits. It marks “a new type of global calculation in governmental practice” (Foucault 2008: 56). Liberal government, in contrast to the inclusive, “centripetal” disciplines (Foucault 2007: 44), constantly expands its radius, integrates ever more elements, and thus

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appears “centrifugal” (ibid.: 45). However, the liberal problematization of security also entails substantial re-territorialization, as recent works on the mechanisms of control show (Walters 2006). Foucault (2001b: 385) prematurely assumed that the problem of borders in “security societies” will disappear over time. A theoretical understanding of sovereignty as a power that is inscribed into the field of governmentality serves as a corrective here, as it directs the theoretical focus towards the production of territorial barriers and thresholds dedicated to the deployment of police forces. Despite all the hollowing out of the territorial logic of the national state, national borders still serve as important regulators within the global calculation of (neo)liberal governmentality (Andreas 2003). In addition to this, spatial boundaries are drawn both “above” and “below” this level. The flexible multiplication of spatial thresholds multiplies the occasions for the spatial inclusion and exclusion of bodies: “Borders are no longer by defi nition the limits between national sovereignties; rather they are erected wherever there is a need to solve and to organize social space and political governance” (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007: 152). The Schengen Agreement, as depicted by William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr (2005: 91 et seq.), is a case in point. EU borders have shifted far beyond the continent of Europe toward the Mediterranean and North Africa, as well as to the interior of the territories of the member states. The problematization of security goes hand in hand with the project of “rezoning sovereignty” (Perry and Maurer 2003: XIII), in which global policing follows the model of a city whose traffic flows have to be regulated. Governmental calculations of security create a continuum of inclusion and exclusion by granting or denying various strata of the population access to different areas at various times. The detention camp, as the spatial embodiment of a state of emergency (Agamben 1998: 166 et seq.), forms the end point of this continuum. Beyond the manifold caesuras of the present security dispositif, the detention camp corresponds to a “pure” securitization, which is being implemented by applying policing instruments such as protective custody (Schutzhaft) or preventive detention. Will to Knowledge: Illiberal governmentality does not only operate by parcelling out spaces of liberal and illiberal power. The problematization of security affects governmental rationality in its entirety. An “encyclopaedic will to knowledge” animates a boundless logic of suspicion that covers the whole population. A good example is the Data Retention Directive passed by the EU parliament in March 2006 (Leistert 2008). This instructs member states to pass laws that obligate each provider of telecommunication services to store the telephone and internet data of all 450 million EU citizens for at least six months. An all-encompassing, total archive of traffic and location data is to be created “for the purpose of the investigation, detection, and prosecution of serious crime” (EU directive 2006/24/EC: 56). This data is to be collected and reassembled irrespective of whether an individual is under investigation. In the same way, routine practices


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such as road usage and bank transfers can be condensed into data profi les that are potentially useful for policing. Toll systems, bonus programs and laws allowing access to account information function as parts of a modular “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) that connects seemingly remote purviews for security reasons. Not least, it cuts across the old division between public and private: several investigations have found that information from customer relationship management has already been used as a source in the “war on terror” (e.g., Cameron 2005: 115 et seq.). On the basis of the universal language of the digital code, technologies can be potentially linked so that their informational capacities enhance each other on an event-driven basis. Because the contemporary problematization of security shifts the emphasis from the prosecution of criminal acts that have already been committed to preventive measures against possible future dangers, the constitutional assumption of innocence is overridden. In principle, every citizen is under suspicion. Thus, as much knowledge as possible has to be collected about each and every one of them, irrespective of the past occurrence of potentially illegal deeds. This results in a reactivation of the epistemological capacities of all-seeing and all-knowing sovereign power, for which the installation of surveillance technology in remote-controlled drones during the European Soccer Championship 2008 in Switzerland is only emblematic. This process does not amount to the restoration of a singular, unified sovereign subject in the early modern sense of the term. Rather, the epistemological pretensions of an all-seeing and all-knowing power are achieved through diverse technological means deployed across multiple sites. Consequently, on a symbolic level, the signs of sovereign power are no longer sun and eagle, but the small icons of video cameras and body scanners. Correspondingly, on a practical level, the “unlimited presumption of the police state” (Foucault 2008, 17) is to gather the “dust of events” (Foucault 1977: 213) by means of “thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attention ever on the alert,” authoring an “immense police text” (ibid.: 214). The creation of a comprehensive data bank for data mining, the installation of CCTV systems, and the projected online search powers for private computers, which are to be implemented by the German government in 2009, seem to re-establish the logic of police that liberal governmentality purportedly replaced. Order of Subjectivities: Finally, the modus operandi of technologies of control such as automatic face recognition shows how the organization of knowledge and space by the police is linked to an order of subjectivities. According to a recent analysis of political communication after the attacks of 9/11, the problematization of security—especially in the USA—was conducted in such a way as to make biometric identification technology, in particular, seem like an appropriate solution (Gates 2006). This technology operates as follows: a face is photographed with a camera, isolated against the background of the picture and transformed into a digital “face print” that can be run through databases of archived photographs. The goal is an

110 Sven Opitz immediate identification that does not hinder the circulation of mobile subjects. Although biometric technology is also included in passports (Bonditti 2004), technologies like automated face recognition promise to render the time-consuming process of checking an identity document against its referent, i.e., the “real person,” unnecessary. Instead, it purports to read bodies directly from a distance. In this way, the technology aims to identify threats and remove them from circulation in real-time, according to previously established criteria and margins of risk. Face recognition embodies the promise of assigning a clear identity to a new, opaque and fleeting enemy. This identified enemy is potentially to be excluded from the liberal order of subjectivity. It is an extremely moralized, demonized enemy—or, to put it in Schmittean terms, an “absolute” enemy (Prozorov 2006: 79 et seq.). Maybe the term “enemy” is even misleading in itself, because the figure at stake is neither a criminal nor an enemy in the legal sense. The process of securitization turns it into an existential threat or danger that cannot be fought according to the rules of criminal law or the laws of war. Foucault’s (1978) genealogy of the dangerous individual contributes to a better understanding of this form of subjectivity. He points to the emergence of a specific type of criminal in nineteenth-century forensic medicine, who was convicted not for his deeds but for his whole mode of being which was, at least at the beginning of the century, considered to be monstrous (Foucault 2003b: 53 et seq.). In terms of subjectivation, this monstrous figure is best characterized as bound to a paradoxical subject-position. It is forced to occupy a discursive “nonposition” that captures the subject completely and, at the same time, denies it the status of an intelligibly speaking subject. In the words of classical political theory, the deconstituted subject possesses only phoné, not logos. But under governmental rule, this de-subjectivation process also includes an economically coded dimension. Whereas the subject of liberalism has to follow his interests by taking reasonable risks, the deconstituted, dangerous subject is portrayed as a deeply uneconomic subject. It is a subject overwhelmed by an excess of interest that cannot be normalized. Confronted with the dangerous subject, governmentality encounters an interest that consumes the rational subject entirely—and turns it into an irrational, unintelligible, destructive agent outside the bounds of humanity. Consequently, the subject marked as “abject” cannot be governed by granting it freedom. It finds itself placed in a governmental relation beyond the conduct of conduct.

6. EPILOGUE In recent years, Governmentality studies have traced in detail the extent to which the elimination of freedom in liberal governmentality is not merely tantamount to an infringement of rights, but signals a fundamental ignorance of how to govern adequately. Against this background, this chapter is an exploration of the thresholds at which the parameters of this


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adequacy get inverted. The problematization of security, which culminates in the martial logic of securitization, is rooted in the tradition of modern politics. At the same time, my elaborations point to a specifi c mutation of the modern “ontotheology” (Der Derian 1995: 25) of security. One can dramatize this mutation by adding a scene to a theatrical governmental scenario found in Foucault (2007b: 282–283). In this scenario, the legal subject says to the sovereign: “You must not, because I have rights and you must not touch them.” The economic subject, however, says to the sovereign: “You must not because you cannot. And you cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.” In the field of current security politics, the second critique has become hushed. Instead, there seems to be a readiness for an authorization: “You must, because nobody knows. You must, because although nobody knows, you are most likely to have the means to know and you are capable of acting.” This authorization can be extended to the point of saying: “You are allowed, although we have rights.” At that stage the limits of liberality have been reached, without any doubt. NOTES 1. In her article for New Yorker in February 2005, journalist Jane Mayer coined the now infamous term “Outsourcing Torture.” 2. The disturbing scene can be seen on You Tube (accessed May 10, 2009): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs. A “taser” belongs to a group of supposedly non-lethal weapons that incapacitates the victim with a charge of 50,000 volts, without leaving any marks on the body. Although a number of people have died after being shot with a “taser,” these devices continue to be used to fi ll the strategic gap between a warning cry and the use of fi rearms. 3. For the distinction between technologies and techniques of power, see Foucault (2007: 8 et seq.) and Barry (2006).

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (2000). Means Without End. Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (2005). State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Amoore, Louise and Marieke de Goede. (2005). Governance, Risk, and Dataveillance in the War on Terror. Crime, Law and Social Change 43(2–3): 149–173. Andreas, Peter. (2003). Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the TwentyFirst Century. International Security 28(2): 78–111. Andrejevic, Mark. (2006). Interactive (In)Security. The Participatory Promise of Ready.Gov. Cultural Studies 20(4–5): 441–458. Balke, Friedrich. (2005). Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty. German Law Journal 6(1): 71–85.

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Barry, Andrew. (2006). Technological Zones. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 239–253. Benjamin, Walter. (1965). Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze. Mit einem Nachwort von Herbert Marcuse. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Bigo, Didier. (2001). The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies), pp. 91–116 in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson and Yosef Lapid (eds) Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bonditti, Philippe. (2004). From Territorial Space to Networks: A Foucauldian Approach to the Implementation of Biometry. Alternatives 29(4): 465–482. Bröckling, Ulrich. (2007). Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Butler, Judith. (2004). Indefi nite Detention, pp. 50–100 in Precarious Life. The Politics of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde. (1998). Security. A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Cameron, Heather. (2005). The Next Generation. Visuelle Überwachung im Zeitalter von Datenbanken und Funk-Etiketten, pp. 106–121 in Leon Hempel and Jörg Metelmann (eds) Bild-Raum Kontrolle. Videoüberwachung als Zeichen gesellschaftlichen Wandels. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. C.A.S.E. Collective. (2006). Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto. Security Dialogue 37(4): 443–487. Cruikshank, Barbara. (1999). The Will to Empower. Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dean, Mitchell. (1995). Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society. Economy and Society 24(3): 559–583. Dean, Mitchell. (2001). ‘Demonic Societies’: Liberalism, Biopolitics and Sovereignty, pp. 41–64 in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds): States of Imagination. Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Dean, Mitchell. (2002). Liberal Government and Authoritarianism. Economy and Society 31(1): 37–61. Der Derian, James. (1995). The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard, pp. 24–25 in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed) On Security. New York. Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1981). Dissemination. London: The Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques. (2004). Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dillon, Michael. (1996). Politics of Security. Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought. London/New York: Routledge. Dubber, Markus D. and Mariana Valverde. (2006). Introduction. Perspectives on the Power and Science of Police, pp. 1–16 in The New Police Science. The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Esposito, Roberto. (2009). Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (1978). About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry. Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1(1): 1–18. Foucault, Michel. (1982). The Subject and Power, pp. 208–226 in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.


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Foucault, Michel. (1990 [1978]). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. (2001a [1977]). Désormais, la sécurité est aus-dessus des lois, pp. 366–368 in Dits et Écrits II 1976–1988. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. (2001b [1977]). Michel Foucault: la sécurité e l’État, pp. 383– 388 in Dits et Écrits II 1976–1988. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. (2003a). Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2003b). Abnormal. Lectures at the College de France 1974– 1975. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Gates, Kelly. (2006). Identifying the 9/11 ‘Faces of Terror’. The Promise and Problem of Facial Recognition Technology. Cultural Studies 20(4–5): 417–440. Greco, Monica. (1993). Psychosomatic Subjects and the “Duty to be Well”: Personal Agency within Medical Rationality. Economy and Society 22(3): 229–259. Greenberg, Karen J. and Joshua L. Dratel. (2005). The Torture Papers. The Road to Abu Ghraib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. (1985 [1651]). Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, edited with an Introduction by C. B. Macpherson. London: Penguin. Huysmans, Jef. (1998). Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier. European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 226–255. Huysmans, Jef. (2006). The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. London/New York: Routledge. Kessler, Oliver and Wouter Werner. (2008). Extrajuridical Killing as Risk Management. Security Dialogue 39(2–3): 289–309. Krasmann, Susanne. (2003). Die Kriminalität der Gesellschaft. Zur Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Konstanz: UVK. Krasmann, Susanne. (2007). Folter im Ausnahmezustand?, pp. 75–96 in Susanne Krasmann and Jurgen Martschukat (eds). Rationalitäten der Gewalt. Staatliche Neuordnungen vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: transcript. Laclau, Ernesto. (1996). Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?, pp. 36–46 in Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Leistert, Oliver. (2008). Data Retention in the European Union: When a Call Returns. International Journal of Communication 2(1): 925–935. Lemke, Thomas. (2003). Rechtsubjekt oder Biomasse? Reflexionen zum Verhältnis von Rassismus und Exklusion, pp. 160–183 in Martin Stingelin (eds) Biopolitik und Rassismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Lemke, Thomas. (2006). Die Polizei der Gene: Formen und Felder genetischer Diskriminierung. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus. Luban, David. (2006). Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb, pp. 35–83 in Karen J. Greenberg (ed) The Torture Debate in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massumi, Brian. (2005). Fear (The Spectrum Said). Positions 13(1): 31–48. McKinlay, Alan and Ken Starkey. (1998). Foucault, Management and Organization Theory. London: Sage. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. (2008). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Transversal, special issue on Borders, Nations, Translations.

114 Sven Opitz http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en (accessed May 10, 2009). Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society 19(1): 1–31. Opitz, Sven. (2004). Gouvernementalität im Postfordismus. Macht, Wissen und Techniken des Selbst im Feld unternehmerischer Rationalität. Hamburg: Argument. Papadopoulos, Dimitris and Vassilis Tsianos. (2007). How to Do Sovereignty Without People? The Subjectless Condition of Postliberal Power. Boundary 2 34(1): 135–172. Perry, Richard Warren and Bill Maurer. (2003). Globalization and Governmentality, pp. ix–xxi in Globalization und Construction. Governmentality, Law, and Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Procacci, Giovanna. (1991). Social Economy and the Government of Poverty, pp. 151–168 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Prozorov, Sergei. (2006). Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism. Millenium 35(1): 75–99. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). The Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salter, Mark B. (2005). At the Threshold of Security: A Theory of International Borders, pp. 36–50 in Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter (eds) Global Surveillance and Policing. Borders, Security, Identity. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Schmitt, Carl (1934). Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. München/Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Singer, Brian C.J. and Lorna Weir. (2006). Politics and Sovereign Power. Considerations on Foucault. European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 443–465. Smandych, Russell (ed). (1999). Governable Places. Readings on Governmentality and Crime Control. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tellmann, Ute. (2003). The Truth of the Market. Distinktion 4(2): 49–63. Tellmann, Ute. (2009). Foucault and the Invisible Economy. Foucault Studies 6: 5–24. Torpey, John. (2000). The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valverde, Mariana. (1996). ‘Despotism’ and Ethical Liberal Governance. Economy and Society, 25(3): 357–372. Valverde, Mariana. (2007). Genealogies of European States: Foucauldian Reflections. Economy and Society, 36(1): 159–178. Wæver, Ole. (1995). Securitization and Desecuritization, pp. 46–86 in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed) On Security. New York. Columbia University Press. Walt, Stephen. (1991). The Renaissance of Security Studies. International Studies Quaterly 35(2): 211–239. Walters, William. (2006). Border/Control. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 187–203. Walters, William and Jens Henrik Haahr. (2005). Governing Europe. Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration. London/New York: Routledge. Weizman, Eyal. (2007). Hollow Land. Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.

6

The Right of Government Torture and the Rule of Law Susanne Krasmann In the search for a liberal technology of government, it emerged that the juridical form was a far more effective instrument of regulation than the wisdom or moderation of governors. [ . . . ] Regulation has not been sought in the “law” because of the supposedly natural legalism of liberalism, but because the law defi nes forms of general intervention excluding particular, individual, and exceptional measures, and because participation of the governed in drawing up the law in a parliamentary system is the most effective system of governmental economy. (Foucault 2008: 321)

Since the Enlightenment, the legal and moral ban on torture has been part of the self-understanding of Western societies. Following World War II, the ban was legally anchored in many international treaties and legislatively updated. Its inviolability is presently considered an international norm.1 But in reality, as the literary scholar and researcher on violence Jan Philipp Reemtsma has indicated (1991: 256), torture “was never abolished.”2 Torture and mistreatment surface repeatedly, both in crisis situations like the Algerian and Northern Ireland confl icts and in constellations of “total institutions” (Goffman 1961) such as police custody, the prison, and military training. Most recently, there has even been talk of torture’s “return” (Beestermöller and Brunkhorst 2006)—of that practice as something that since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 has again become evident and discussible. Photos from the Abu Ghraib prison, surfacing in 2004, thus not only presented people with the human potential for ugly behavior but also the functioning of a “chain of command” (Hersh 2004; Sands 2008) authorizing torture and mistreatment in the name of combating terrorism (Danner 2004; Greenberg and Dratel 2005; Mayer 2008). Apparently unaffected by these revelations, a debate has simultaneously been unfolding concerning the legitimacy and even legalization of torture in certain circumstances. It has occupied both literary supplements and scholarly publications and has donned an honorable cloak, articulating itself in the name of saving lives.3 Concern about this development, equally manifest in the debate, is not only focused on the victims of torture; on a more abstract level the question of the validity of the principle of the rule of law and the endurance of the

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constitutional state itself has moved to the forefront. For an absolute ban on torture is such a basic element in the constitutional order of liberal-democratic societies that its revocation would in a sense be the same as their selfdissolution. In the words of David Luban (2006: 38): “The self-conscious aim of torture is to turn its victim into someone who is isolated, overwhelmed, terrorized, and humiliated. Torture aims, in other words, to strip away from its victims all the qualities of human dignity that liberalism prizes.” From such a perspective, any discussion of the use of torture would not only have to be forbidden but would actually be superfluous (see Levinson 2004a: 23). How, then, are we to explain the apparent inconsistency between torture’s persistence, even its open legitimation, and a system of law that contradicts this in an absolute sense? To answer this question, a look at “progressive” international legislation and jurisprudence reinforcing and differentiating the categorical prohibition of torture over recent years would be insufficient. Despite a widespread justificatory strategy, the concrete episodes at issue here have by no means been exceptional cases—the notorious rotten apples (Brown 2005). Rather, within the conceptual framework of governmentality, it becomes clear that torture can become a rationale of power even against established law and in a sense make itself acceptable. In this chapter I will thus argue that in the context of certain security imperatives, torture is rationalizable and can even inscribe itself into law. Unlike other, relatively conventional theories of state and law emerging from the social sciences and legal theory, the perspective of governmentality can account for the interplay between torture and the constitutional state (section 1). This can be exemplified through the ongoing debate concerning the legitimacy and legality of torture (section 2). Importantly, the promise of security evident in this debate does not take merely rhetorical form. Rather, torture rationalizes itself performatively in the construction of a specific security imperative (section 3).

1. THE RATIONALITY OF TORTURE Protagonists of a legalization of torture press their claim in terms of special threats that require extraordinary measures. Here a common foundational figure is the so-called ticking-bomb scenario: a person in police custody knows the hiding place of a ticking bomb that directly threatens many lives—and remains stubbornly silent. Would you not (this is the overt moral message) yourself torture this person if it were necessary to save these lives?4 As the argumentation has it, the emergency law implemented in such cases would in no way lead to a normalization of the exception. To the contrary: it would serve to keep the established legal system intact. Within this reading law itself offers the mechanism for preventing a hollowing out of the principle of the rule of law. The democratic constitutional state is its own guarantee.

The Right of Government 117 According to Giorgio Agamben (1998), such assurances are doubtful. The “state of exception,” he argues (his starting point being Carl Schmitt), is an integral element of law. It is not the response to a chaotic situation preceding the juridical order but, conversely, the result of a suspension of the rule to which it remains tied—law is abrogated through law. The state of exception does not mark a zone beyond law but a legally defi ned zone where the rule is suspended, giving sovereign power direct access to “bare life.” However, Agamben de-historicizes the state of exception in defi ning this potency of sovereign power as the political realm’s originary element and in deciphering the state of exception as an ever pervasive feature of liberal democratic societies. 5 Guantánamo thus appears not as a historically specific phenomenon but as a result of a logos of modernity. Biopolitics and sovereign power here merge into one “dispositif” of power eventually reduced to its repressive function—in contrast to Foucault’s perspective (1978) on productive power over life as a distinct historical feature. In that Agamben understands the state of exception as something like a structural element of law, 6 his analysis deprives itself of the possibility of thinking in terms of social forces, and of law as a political instrument (Huysmans 2008). In contrast, the concept of governmentality allows us to provisionally separate an analysis of law and constitutionality from a logic of law—and of the exception—as a way of relating such an analysis to the exigencies of “governing societies” (Dean 2007). Unlike Agamben, this perspective does not see torture as a practice of sovereign power obtaining access to biological life at the moment of the suspension of law and constitutionality. Rather, torture surfaces in the horizon of a liberal government operating in the name of security—and produces law along this path. Torture is the rationale of a biopolitical power that promises to protect the life of the population, in the process assigning itself the right to dispose over human life. But to what extent can a governmentality perspective actually be productive here when Foucault himself seems to have elided the question of violence from the concept of government,7 when he furthermore conceives sovereignty, in his lectures on the history of governmentality, as a type of juridical power limiting itself to binary operational mode of law (allowed vs. forbidden; see Foucault 2007: 4–6),8 and when, fi nally, he accuses socialscientific theory of having a phobia regarding the state (see Foucault 2008: 187), while for his part describing the state as “nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities” (Foucault 2008: 77)? For Foucault’s critics, his analysis of power not only has a very limited array of instruments at its disposal for examining the societal significance of law, but also contains distinct dangers in this respect: Foucault, the critique would have it, fails to recognize the protective function of law; he lacks due respect for law as guarantor of freedom and security, and finally of a realm of the political (see Wickham 2006: 598).

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This critique, though, has itself been shown to have weaknesses: for instance, Foucault does not identify juridical power with law, but recognizes in it a specific, prohibitive form of power.9 And with his distinction between sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality as three types of power, Foucault is not trying to show that law has historically lost significance but rather that it has taken on a new significance as an instrument for effectuating norms and normalization (Foucault 1977; 2003; see Biebricher 2006; Ewald 1990; Friedrich and Niehaus 1999; Rose and Valverde 1998). For Foucault (2003: 38–39; 1978: 144; see also Valverde 2003), law begins to itself operate as a norm; it produces forms of subjection and subjectification. It takes on no power-limiting function but—and this will need to be clarified—functions as an instrument of government in the name of security (see Foucault 2008: 64–65). A fi rst question that needs to be posed is thus whether, in the framework of security policies understood in this sense, law can actually guarantee constitutional principles and with them the civilizing self-understanding of democratic societies. To this extent, under the auspices of security imperatives, torture exemplarily marks the vulnerable borders of democratic constitutionality. “Torture is reason,” declared Foucault (2003c) in an interview—but without any cynical undertone. His use of “reason” here was not an allusion to the German ethical concept of Vernunft, but to the traditional Western idea of a rule of reason—and the reason of rule, in the sense that regimes and techniques of rule shaped by violence can unfold a specific rationality. In Foucault’s words (2005: 49; see 1991: 79; 1981), “the most dangerous thing about violence is precisely its rationality. Naturally violence per se is horrible. But violence receives its fi rm basis and endurance from the type of rationality we insert in it. It has been said that if we lived in a rational world we could free ourselves of violence. That is completely false. Violence and reason are not irreconcilable.” The question thus emerges of how torture can integrate itself into a rationality of power and consequently surface systematically (see Foucault 1991: 75). In regards to the theme of torture in liberal democratic societies, the framework of governmentality emerges as helpful in relation to three topics: 1). The question of the significance of law—security stands “above the law” (Foucault 2003a). In the social sciences and legal theory, a normative understanding prevails of the modern constitutional state as a guarantor of its own principles and quite often as a historically necessary figure. In contrast, Foucault presents the modern state’s formation as above all a contingent and precarious process (see Jessop and Saar in this volume); the constitutional state’s way of functioning is to be understood in such terms as well. In this manner the history of governmentality is not markedly stamped by the idea of a continuous movement towards either ever-strengthening state structures or juridification. In fact, the contrary is the case: the

The Right of Government 119 “governmentalization of the state” (Foucault 2007: 109) describes a process through which a broad range of apparatuses, laws, and procedures crystallize in thinking and action into a more or less unified entity, the state thus fi rst taking on its specifically modern form. It here becomes an interpretive principle, and a principle of “the purpose of the state” (Foucault 2007: 277). As a result, the modern constitutional state could become a normative figure—not one existing once and for all, but rather needing to be repeatedly produced anew. Foucault (2007: 276) identifies the crisis of the reason of state as the starting point for this “reflexive event.” With the rise of liberalism, a new objective domain appears in the governmental field: the population becomes the organizing principle of a biopolitical economy of power oriented towards the advancement of both life and general prosperity. Within this reading, the modern state emerges as a continuous formation-process decipherable in terms of the exigencies of governing societies, and we also fi nd a shift in the significance of classical concepts within the theory of the state. Hence freedom and security are not only conceived as antagonistic though, by necessity, mutually complimentary elements of functioning constitutionality; and the political function of freedom is not reduced to a legal guarantee. Rather, for liberal government freedom becomes a power resource (Rose 1999) that for its part demands that security mechanisms be brought into play: freedom is to be secured as both a central value of Western societies (Butler 2008) and for the sake of the unfolding of productive forces. If liberal government has asserted itself historically through an exhortation to governmental restraint, then security is at the same time its principle of intervention (see Foucault 2007: 48–49; 2008: 65). Security is constitutive for freedom and vice versa. On the one hand, freedom is consequently the basis for the political rights of citizens vis-à-vis the state; on the other hand it is the basis for security mechanisms that themselves instrumentalize the law. These mechanisms are not elements of a law they abrogate, but rather produce law. In the form of security laws, security needs can successively make their way into the law. Here the basis of government is not the social contract—society does not constitute itself by way of law (Ewald 1990). Instead a kind of “security contract” takes effect (Foucault 2003b: 504) that, understood in both a biopolitical framework and that of democracy theory, produces a relationship between governors and the governed (see Foucault 2008: 63). In this way security policy no longer represents a hierarchal operational mode in which political interests and state power spell themselves out from the top down. Governing in the name of security rests on participation, on the generation of consensus and assent; but at the same time it operates on the basis of exclusion: namely, of dangers threatening the population, which explains the tendency towards stepping beyond the legally prescribed borders of state intervention and the use of violence (see Dillon and Reid 2001: 41–42; Dean 2001).

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Although liberal government no longer articulates itself in the language of reason of state, it can nevertheless evoke its logic: at the moment when protection of individual freedom and the life of the population self-evidently calls for state intervention—and mutates into a kind of security imperative. And this represents the precise point where torture is rationalized and the conditions are present for its acceptance, a point that remains inconceivable as long as this relationality is dismissed and the constitutional state simply postulated as a normative reference point for analysis. 2). The rationalization of government both enables and limits specifi c forms of visibility. Analyses of governmentality do not focus on the classical question of the foundations of governmental practice—that would be the question of legitimacy, or of which means are suitable for which ends— that would amount to postulating a substantial concept of rationality in Max Weber’s sense and, juridically, to normatively assessing the legitimacy of various measures according to a principle of proportionality. In contrast, the question being posed here is how objects and goals, means and ends, themselves vary within different rationalities. Analyses of govermentality center on how ways of thinking shape the perception of problems, how appropriate defi nitions for solving problems are attached to their defi nition, and how tied to this, in turn, are certain techniques and procedures that for their part produce entirely new objects and subjects. Rationalities of government mark specific forms of epistemic access to reality that renders certain measures and ways of governing plausible in the fi rst place. In other words, they produce specific regimes of visibility and articulation. Within this perspective, what needs to be examined is not only whether and how the illegal practice of torture is justified and legitimized, but also whether and how it becomes manifest in society in the fi rst place. A central question of legal sociology, that of the relationship between the law’s receptivity and stability (Fitzpatrick and Joyce 2007), here comes into focus. On the one hand law, we are informed, has to be open to social changes and hence adaptable to what points beyond itself; on the other hand, it has to offer dependability in that—speaking in terms of systems theory—it follows its own procedural logic and rules of codification and thus itself determines what law is. If we start with the presumption that a rigid, as it were autistic law that blinds itself to social developments will at some point sink into meaninglessness (see ibid.: 69–70), then the question of the difference between “book law” and “real law,” i.e., law as it is practiced—as if law embodied objectivized norms for measuring reality,—turns out to be relatively unimportant. Rather, the salient problem becomes that of what constitutes “the social” forming the law. What reality, or more precisely what kind of perceptions, constructions, and forms of reality, determine law? The thesis of rationalization in the name of security can be further concretized as follows: present-day discourse on torture fits into the calculation of a basically continuous development of criminal and security policies

The Right of Government 121 in which the terror attacks of 9/11, rather than presenting themselves as an exception, mainly take on a catalyzing function. Hence in many Western countries over recent decades, terrorism, or organized crime, or the problems of sexual crime and juvenile delinquency, have been served up to justify a preemption-oriented expansion of the state’s capacity for intervention (Ericson 2007; Hörnqvist 2004). Within this movement, the ongoing discourse concerning dissolution of the constitutional state by the preemptive state (Huster and Rudolph 2008) marks a shift from the classical policing concept of danger, tied to concrete action or disturbance, to abstract risks and diffuse situational threats that must be countered preemptively (see Lepsius 2004: 454–455). This abstraction from concrete dangers and individualizable actions is what threatens principles connected to the rule of law such as determinability, proportionality, and not least all justice. And the same abstraction is what allows a consolidation of security imperatives within the law—in the end potentially opening the way for torture. This does not have to mean that torture has to immediately be considered legal, against prevailing national and international law and as the Bush administration’s legal advisors intended.10 It can also mean that torture is simply implicitly accepted in the name of national security, as in the practice of the illegal delivery of terror suspects to third states where it is assumed they will be tortured.11 3). Constitutionality is a performative practice. With his critique of state phobia, Foucault was not appealing for a neglect of state theory but for a differentiation of the concept of the state (Foucault 2008: 187–189; 2003, lecture of January 14, 1976). With the historical and locally specific rationalities and technologies of government as his starting point, his analysis focuses on the phenomenon of the state in its historicity and mutability. If the practice of torture can place the legal and social constitution of Western democratic societies on hold, at what point can we speak of a fundamental transformation, one that affects the “basic structural features of these states” (Steinmetz 1999a: 8)? It is the case that isolated incidents are insufficient to raise serious doubts about the ongoing general validity of the ban on torture; such doubts require an appearance of its systematic application. Normally this is fi rst measured juridically in terms of a disregard for legal principles and then, against this backdrop, fi xed quantitatively (as the number of incidents) or structurally in light of the enabling conditions established by total institutions. But a perspective measured against an already existing norm is misleading. In the fi rst place, it fails to see that every legal interpretation possesses an instance when law is created, and that every application of a rule potentially contains both a repetition and a deferral (Derrida 1990). Law is generated performatively, and is thus only readable as an “effect” of a series of pronouncements (Butler 1995; 2004) that for their part—and this is decisive—are always bound up with practices. Strictly speaking, then,

122 Susanne Krasmann there is only “real law,” and “book law” in the end consistently revealing itself as a practice meant to be examined on the surface of its historical and locally specific emergence (Foucault 1991; Rose and Valverde 1998). Law needs to be enforced,12 becoming relevant and effective at the moment of its societal negotiation (Hunt and Wickham 1994; Walby 2007). Hence it not only reproduces itself along its own rules of codification, but as the case of the practice of torture suggests can be understood, inversely, as an element of legal practice materializing in legislation and jurisprudence, and also in actions of the executive—in brief, in interactive processes. And this element in turn forms and deforms the constitutional state; the (de)forming itself must be measured recursively, in relation to previously posited constitutional principles. Let us now connect this governmentality-oriented reading more concretely to the debate over the legitimacy and legalization of torture.13

2. THE ABSOLUTE BAN ON TORTURE AND LIMITLESS SECURITY Classical, normatively focused sociology of law sees its main task as gauging the difference between “book law” and “real law,” and between universal standards on the one hand and injustice or lack of rights on the other hand. But in fact the difference between “book law” and “real law” is not per se a problem, the former being able to live very nicely with a markedly different manifestation of the latter. A look at the theory of penal law makes this very clear: such law exists precisely on account of the difference between an interdiction and real actions, its function being to render the norm apparent. As already maintained by sociologists working in the tradition of Émile Durkheim and—in particular—within systems theory, law operates with a symbolic generalization of expectations, the symbolic validity of norms, not “real law,” here being the decisive factor. In the debate on torture, defenders of an absolute interdiction of the practice recite this argument when they recognize the danger of a deviation from the interdiction. What counts for them are thus not so much actual incidents and the factual existence of the practice as the discourse itself. They are concerned with the symbolic validity of the norms that have their expression in the law. But if we understand the emergence of torture in Foucault’s sense, as a question of the rationalization of techniques of government, then this normative focus is necessarily inadequate. One of the most prominent defenders of the legalization of torture under certain circumstances, Alan Dershowitz (2004), has in fact altered the normative argument. Since torture is in any event practiced in extreme situations, bringing it under control through a “torture warrant” is called for. The legal regulating promises a de facto limitation of the practice. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2002) has argued against what he terms “liberal

The Right of Government 123 Dershowitz’s honesty” and in favor of “apparent ‘hypocrisy’”: in an emergency situation we should do what we consider right, but the use of torture should under no circumstances be elevated “into a universal principle.” Only its interdiction preserves our “sense of guilt, the awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done.” The symbolic order has to remain intact. The hollowing out of norms, and thus of law, already sets in with the acceptance of the use of torture as a legitimate topic for discussion (ibid.: 103). Žižek’s concern about the discursive softening of the ban on torture is understandable for two main reasons. In the fi rst place, the foundational ticking-bomb scenario repeatedly introduced into the torture debate, and invoked by Dershowitz as well, is both extremely suggestive and profits from a high degree of recognition value: that scenario involves an emergency situation that is extremely improbable in such a clear-cut way, but is extremely easy to imagine and transfer to other experiences and expectations precisely because it is unambiguous. In this manner, torture becomes both a conceivable practice and an acceptable instrument. The persuasive force at work here already unfolds in the imaginary construction’s anticipation of the desired solution as, already, the only proper and possible solution. At the same time, the scenario incorporates a promise of rationality into its conceptual structure. For in contrast to its historical predecessors, in this case torture serves neither to force a confession nor to torment, punish, subjugate, or debase human beings. Rather, it is meant to produce information, hence to serve as an instrument of knowledge, legal provisions in this way being already incorporated into the structure: “it is a rightbased justification, which recognizes that information obtained by torture can never be presented as evidence in court” (Halvorsen 2009: 244; italics in original). For this reason, the scenario can be presented as an “ethical thought-experiment” applicable to “real life situations” (ibid.). In addition, it is guided by a motive as honorable as it is existential: saving lives. In its linkage of imperatives of morality and security with the promise of rationality, the ticking-bomb scenario functions as both a legitimating template for legalizing torture when the circumstances call for it and a blueprint for taking concrete measures. The extreme example makes normalization possible by becoming part of the very instrument of liberal government: “To speak in a somewhat perverse and paradoxical way, liberalism’s insistence on limited governments that exercise their powers only for instrumental and pragmatic purposes creates the possibility of seeing torture as a civilized, not an atavistic, practice, provided that its sole purpose is preventing future harms” (Luban 2006: 42). In the second place, the normative absoluteness of the ban on torture also seems called for because contrary to Dershowitz’s suggestion, law can never tame the practice, which is simply not as clean as the ticking-bomb scenario implies (McCoy 2005). Handing out a license to torture means attracting torturers and establishing a “torture culture” (Luban 2006: 48).

124 Susanne Krasmann Furthermore, inscribing torture into law for the ostensible sake of saving lives would nonetheless still involve abandonment of a basic civilizational norm, arguing in favor of torture thus undermining the “specific status that the ban on torture has struggled to establish” (Blumenrath 2007: 321); it ignores the complex evaluative processes grounding the ban on torture in the relevant normative documents, from the Declaration of Human Rights to various authoritative national constitutions. As the constitutional specialist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (2006: 416) has observed, recourse “to the pre-positive fundament” of such documents is “nothing else than a necessary part of an appraisal of the contents” of “positive law.” Taking the latter seriously by no means implies isolating it from “its historical-political context.” In view of this reality, it would appear that the absolute interdiction on torture actually marks an absolute boundary-line to the discussion (Weßlau 2004). Nonetheless, the arguments in favor of torture will not be silenced; rather, we may expect that under the sign of existential peril, it will repeatedly beckon, moving forward a conceptual matrix of “them or us” that renders the unthinkable thinkable in the name of self-defense. This is another source of the imaginative force of the ticking-bomb scenario, varying a historical figure of argumentation: if in Hobbes the violence of a state of emergency already serves to ground the state as Leviathan, legally legitimizing itself through it as the guarantor of security, this highly real figure by no means limits itself to a foundational act. Rather, it became a symbolic element within an enduring process of state formation (see Steinmetz 1999a: 9), inscribed in the history and constitution of the modern state. Carl Schmitt (1963: 32) accurately defi ned the state of emergency as a “real possibility”—as a threat that is present and absent at once. Inserting this formulation into the perspective of governmentality, we can say that security laws do not originate in a sovereign’s act of decision but rather need to be understood as the effect of a rationalization of threats—as a response to such threats through a body of security measures. But the ticking-bomb scenario’s performative force unfolds on more than a symbolic level. The interplay between government and the governed not only results from rhetorical truth-games but is already interwoven into specific forms of rationality representing and actively producing empirical reality. This epistemic access to the world develops equally from ways of thinking and acting that have become historical and are context-dependent and institutionally anchored; these in turn generate specific modes of visibility and articulation. In this way the implementation of laws itself does not amount to a simple double game of staged insecurity and guaranteed security, the interest-led generation of anxiety on the one hand, fearful submission on the other hand (Bigo 2008b). Rather, the conditions for accepting exceptional security measures should be examined on the epistemological level of implicit forms of knowledge inscribed into practice and capable of eluding political discourse.

The Right of Government 125 According to Agamben (2005), the problem of the state of exception does not consist in the fi rst place of the exception becoming a rule but of the norm having nothing to do with “reality.” The norm not only does not stipulate its application: as a symbolic abstraction subtracted from any reality it cannot be harmonized with reality, but exists as it were independently from it (see ibid.: 40)—and the reverse is true as well. Within the present context, then, the ban on torture is untouched by the existence of torture; and conversely the practice of torture by the ban. We can respond to this by confi rming, with the legal theorist Dieter Simon (2008), that “the constitutional state is an illusion”—also an implicit argument against Agamben. For Simon, law does not operate the way it is sketched by the principles of constitutionality. Hence the judiciary already makes decisions “about confl icts before the legislator has even noticed that they have developed.” The principle of separation of powers, Simon indicates, of control over the executive by the legislative branch, has always been an “illusion”—precisely an abstract principle, not reality (ibid.: 5–6). But—and this is crucial—this insight is not alarming once we understand the illusion less as the opposite of truth, namely as a deception, than as contrasting with reality in an ontological sense. The constitutional state does not exist “in itself,” but it exists in our imagination, and it is this illusion that makes the state’s realization possible according to the Kantian principle of the “as if.” Legal validity and perception of law as pertaining to subjects are set in play performatively and “verified” in this manner (Rancière 2004). The difference between a symbolic norm and perceived “real law” is not overcome here—Agamben is correct in arguing that this cannot be so. But only an appeal to norms can allow them to become “real” (Foucault 2003: 28)—to that extent, strictly speaking we only have “real law.” Reemtsma’s observation in his essay (2005: 129) that “we are what we do, and we are what we promise never to do” has clear implications for the debate on torture. The insight that law and the constitutional state only exist in practice is an extension of that observation. An exclusive orientation towards the symbolic force of norms fails to see that either as part of the practice of law or as a practice that thwarts the law, the use of torture has to be accounted for in the framework of the force of law. Hence as an “extralegal” practice (Gross 2003; 2004), torture places a question mark over the constitutional state, even in cases of “outsourcing” (see Mayer 2008: 101–138) seeming to take place “elsewhere,”14 as do legal regulations that legitimize and make possible practices which are in confl ict with international legal guidelines. In line with this reasoning, the unease would need to focus not only on the possibility that, for instance, “life-saving torture” will be incorporated into law. To be sure, there would be little place for a sense of ease in either law or the deliberations of higher courts that could block such efforts (Denninger 2008).15 The questions now becoming urgent would be how torture

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ever becomes a perceptible praxis, and against what backdrop it appears to be rational. In light of the images from Abu Ghraib, the American journalist Mark Danner (2004: 9) has posed the following question: “Is what has changed only what we know, or what we are willing to accept?” Is what we see precisely what we have already accepted? This could be the question understood within an epistemological perspective on the forms of torture’s rationalization. Its acceptance would rest here less on legitimation and conscious decision, rather being the result of inscribed and also, just so, nondiscursive procedures. Until now, the observation that executing security measures rests, in a very essential way, on a specific form of problematization of security managing without special legitimation-oriented rhetorical expenditure has above all been put forward in discussions by political scientists (Buzan, Wæver and Wilde 1998; Wæver 1995). With the concept of “securitization,” the theory taking its name from this concept describes a process in which existential threats are intersubjectively identified, with extraordinary measures seeming inevitable as a consequence. Securitization tends to exclude political disagreement, since the measures appear inherently justified. Events such as 9/11 can thus directly catalyze security measures; but they can also become a horizon for the reading of a permanent threat limiting, as if it were self-evident, the space of political discussion. But securitization theory fails to appreciate that such depoliticizing mechanisms are not only manifest in a rhetorical structure. In fact, they only reveal themselves through a pursuit of the implicit logic—including the non-discursive logic—playing a deciding role in security-centered government. Such governing thus consistently mobilizes a mechanism of division. In actualizing the implicit, historically authenticated promise of security, it establishes a relationship between governors and the governed, in this way also producing an inside and an outside. It distinguishes between those meant to be protected and the threat or danger meant to be banished or eradicated. Securitization is excluding, and thus exclusive. At present a specific rationality of preemption is unfolding that renders talk of a preventive state deceptive (Eckert 2008). For what is being debated here is neither prevention in the welfare-state sense of solving social problems nor the management of calculable risks in the sense of an actuarial justice that intervenes preventatively and, when needed, compensates for incurred damages (Feeley and Simon 1994). Rather, in play are threats and risks that are incalculable and that, on account of their expected magnitude, appear intolerable, hence the need to neutralize them in advance. For that reason, what is characteristic of the preemptive state is not a rationality of prevention but a rationality of precaution (Ewald 2002),16 which can be directly tied to mechanisms of exclusion and repression. These mechanisms can be observed above all in present anti-terrorism strategies, which approach international terrorism as a flexible organization

The Right of Government 127 of territorially unaffiliated or scattered networks with shifting national but pronouncedly ascribable religious affi liations (Lepsius 2004; Eckert 2008). Where the earlier fight against terror, for instance in Germany in the 1970s, was concerned with “known unknowns,” which is to say with knowledge of specific political groupings and their political aims, today it is focused, as Christopher Daase and Oliver Kessler (2007) put it, on “unknown unknowns”—a pithy formulation of Donald Rumsfeld’s. As a phenomenon that is simultaneously highly actual and highly diffuse, terrorism seems to represent the arrival of a non-calculable and no longer insurable catastrophe, for whose identification both stable empirical reference points and suitable instruments are lacking (Bougen 2003). And this is the precise point where “the logic of preemption” comes into play, “established as a new paradigm for dealing with uncertainty, as something distinct from quantifiable risks” (Halvorsen 2009: 245; Bigo 2008b; Massumi 2007). The paradigm of preemption thus unfolds a logic of pressing risk that can be described in terms of four stages of escalation. It contains options and imperatives for action that offer space for the rationalization of torture.

3. SECURITY AND TRUTH As François Ewald (1991: 199) has famously emphasized, “[n]othing is a risk in itself,” but “anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the event” (italics in original). Technologies of risk operate like programs; they are performative. In anticipating undesired events, they profess to describe a reality that they simultaneously manufacture. They defi ne problems that are rendered apparent in this way and whose solution they call for (see Gordon 1980: 248). At the same time, these technologies do not necessarily make such events calculable—although in a certain way they do make them manageable. For the calculation of risk not only rests on knowledge but also produces knowledge, identifying relevant subject areas (combating terrorism) and fields of intervention (for example securing borders through the introduction of biometric passports). In this way identifying risks produces fields of intervention, thus opening certain options for action (Aradau and Munster 2007; O’Malley 2004). Such options objectify themselves in the calculation of risk. Hence the empirical data—past experience—that, in conjunction with expected future events, offers a basis for prognoses is in itself neutral: that someone buys a one-way fl ight ticket, pays his rent in cash, or has contacts with Islamist groups is not per se dangerous. But if we understand such phenomena as indicating risk, when taken together they serve as “risk factors” placing the individual concerned under suspicion. This can of course be extended to all individuals engaged in such actions; they are subsumable into a “high-risk group,” with measures then taken and—if called for—momentous decisions made, regardless of the concrete actions and real plans of the suspected parties.

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The justification for these measures is offered by the applied risk schema itself, the prognosis thus manufacturing its own evidence (Harcourt 2007; Simon 1998). In this manner, however, what is objectified is not only the suspicion being aimed at a specific social group (see Castel 1991: 288; Bigo 2008a) but the question of security itself, which is thus removed from the field of political negotiation. Becoming an empirically receptive dimension, security loses the binding force of a norm meant to be weighed against freedom (see Lepsius 2004: 459). In the framework of preemption, threat, functioning as a real possibility, is simultaneously impalpable and enormous: it can manifest itself—this is the “ontological premise”—at any time, without notice, under an entirely new signature (Massumi 2007); and as anticipated catastrophe, it is intolerable. But for just this reason, it is open to explanation as an incontrovertible fact: existential menace defi nes the need for extraordinary measures as irrefutable (Buzan, Wæver and Wilde 1998). The rationality of preemption thus circulates as a sort of “realism” that, in Jacques Rancière’s (1998: 132) words, absorbs “all reality and all truth in the category of the only thing possible.”17 But law loses its delimiting function to the extent that it is characterized by uncertainty and insecurity. Inversely, security becomes the measure for producing laws.18 Because the rationality of preemption dispenses with both solid empirical evidence and suitable analytic instruments in identifying potential catastrophes, it must rely on anticipation—on imagining encounters with “the worst possible” scenarios (Ewald 2002: 286). But because no certainty can be gained in this way, an absolute will to know has to be activated. Consequently the shift from danger and prevention to preemption is accompanied not only by a temporal moving forward of the threshold for intervention and a spatial extension of the fields of intervention, but also by a displacement of the object itself. The clarifying of suspicion manifest in averting danger becomes creation of suspicion within the rationality of preemption (Pütter, Narr and Busch 2005). “Enacting catastrophe” (Collier 2008) means confronting this dystopic vision preemptively. What is here at work is a form of knowledge generation no longer justifying its expectation of a crime through concrete evidence or moments of suspicion and that, in its basic tendencies, knows no boundaries. Because the concrete threat is unknown, enormous, and intolerable, the failed search for evidence amounts to a call to continue the search all the more urgently and absolutely. Sven Opitz (Chapter 5, this volume) has identified the transition point at which a liberal government becomes intervenistic. Briefly put: because beneath the imperative of defense against catastrophe, not knowing and the obligation to know are interlinked, intervention becomes an absolute right annulling the subject’s right to freedom. At issue here is fi rst of all the right to freedom of those “other” individuals who see themselves placed under suspicion of terrorism and identified as a menace: one that, such is the premise, very defi nitely can be presumed (Cole 2002; Krasmann 2007).19

The Right of Government 129 In respect to the logic of torture a strange analogy here suggests itself that anticipates the ticking-bomb scenario, precisely because in view of the perceived existential threat it reveals itself as unimpressed by any uncertainty: in torture, the interrogation is structured by an absolute will to know aimed at forcing out the “truth.” What is decisive here is the resulting statement itself, and in this respect the early coercive practice leading to “confession” shows little difference from that producing “information.” In order to appear plausible, the statement has to follow certain performative rules. As a performative practice torture produces its own truth (Rejali 2007b)—thus confi rming and justifying itself.

4. CONCLUSION: THE RIGHT OF GOVERNMENT IN THE NAME OF SECURITY The reemergence of torture is of course not unique to liberal democratic societies of the twenty-fi rst century, but recent events have underscored how easily it can fi nd its place here. The perspective of governmentality allows us to show how torture incorporates itself into a rationality of preemption, and how through the identification of threats it becomes a ratio no longer needing to justify itself, fitting into a performative schema instead. In the process, torture can override the law or even enter into a pact with it. It can also embed itself in democratic constitutional states. The fact that judicial torture has returned shows, in Karen Greenberg’s words (2006a: 6), that it “was repressed rather than eradicated, that law exists together with torture in a dance between good and evil.” In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration politically and legally instituted torture and mistreatment in a more or less blatant fashion. The isolation and public exhibition of, in particular, detainees in Guantánamo may be read as a disciplinarian measure as well as something aimed at demonstrating sovereign power. But, to be sure, the administration did not really act here like a sovereign power. With Dershowitz’s argumentation in mind, Elaine Scarry has observed that “the act of torture requires no courage (the aversiveness is wholly borne by someone else), whereas the forfeit of one’s future liberty requires that some portion of the severe adversity be endured by the actor himself” (2004: 283). The security policies of the Bush administration systematically produced insecurity, but, to agree with Greenberg (2006a: 6–7), this should be read as nothing other than a sign of uncertainty. It reflected a reluctance to make do with a law requiring exhaustive proceedings and that found for the accused in cases of doubt. If we are to conclude from this that “the judicial system and the American government and public will need to learn once again to trust itself even in the face of uncertainty” (ibid.: 7), this would in any event also mean the following: law is only an appropriate political instrument under that condition.

130 Susanne Krasmann As Claude Lefort’s (1988: 17) famous dictum would have it, in modern democracies the locus of power circumscribes “an empty place.” For unlike under the ancien régime, no one may exclusively represent and possess power. Rather, in principle power is equally accessible to everyone, its distribution a question of political argument. If law can here be understood as a central instrument for keeping this democratic void free and allowing political space to emerge (see Fitzpatrick and Joyce 2007: 73), this also means only enjoying any appearance of absolute truth with caution. “The power of the correct interpretation—something true and accurate that torture is always waiting to grasp—that is what we need to fear,” is the way the historian Rainer Maria Kiesow (2003: 108) has put it. “As long as this and that opinion holds, as long as science only produces precarious truths, as long as the fi xing of meaning does not govern, as long as law remains law, neither truth nor law will have become a horrible, violent instrument.” Acknowledging this insight, in the prism of a governmentality perspective we can understand how security imperatives can assert themselves as a truth within whose logic torture asserts itself as a practicable, and acceptable, tool.

NOTES 1. At the same time, adhering to the ban on torture is often shaped by secondary considerations such as the political or economic advantages it offers states in the context of international relations (Hathaway 2004). 2. On the continuity of the practice of torture into the present see for example Peters (1985); Rejali (2007a); Robin (2005); regarding the CIA in particular McCoy (2005); on the analysis of “the conditions for the possibility” of torture see Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte (2007). 3. See especially the collection edited by Levinson (2004); Greenberg (2006); for the German debate see for example Beestermöller and Brunkhorst (2006). 4. See for example Dershowitz (2002; 2004); Brugger (1996; 2000). The ticking-bomb scenario is itself not new, but already surfaces as an argumentative figure in Jeremy Bentham (1973 [1777–1779]; see Morgan 2000). 5. “Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element.” (Agamben 1998: 55) Within the logic of the modern nation-state, sovereign power over bare life receives a biopolitical twist: “Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state.” (ibid.: 75) In this way every living being is potentially bare life (ibid.: 81). 6. According to Butler (2004: 60), “Agamben, in a different vein, argues that contemporary forms of sovereignty exist in a structurally inverse relation to the rule of law, emerging precisely at that moment when the rule of law is suspended and withdrawn.” 7. “A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it. In contrast a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements [ . . . ]: that ‘the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly

The Right of Government 131

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (Foucault 1982: 789). On the critique of an “imperativistic legal concept” in Foucault that narrows law to criminal law and conceives of it in Austin’s sense as an avowal of will or “order of the sovereign,” resulting in negative sanctions in the case of nonadherence”: Biebricher (2006: 141); Hunt (1992); Keenan (1987). Tadros (1988), for instance, makes clear that for Foucault juridical power denotes a specific arrangement, form, and representation of power. Not all law has to be “juridical,” and juridical power does not manifest itself through law alone (ibid.: 76). Every form of power that uses the threat of a sanction (either legal or social) for the sake of preventing a way of acting is juridical (ibid.: 78), but modern law does not operate in that mode (ibid.: 80). The position of these advisors had momentous consequences: they denied the applicability of the Geneva Convention in the case of men captured in Afghanistan defi ned as members of al Qaeda and its allies; and they wished to see the defi nition of torture limited to extreme forms of the application of violence and infl iction of pain (U.S. Department of Justice, Offi ce of Legal Council, memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, August 1, 2002; memorandum for James B. Comey, December 30, 2004). On the involvement of EU member states in rendition on the basis of “diplomatic assurances,” see Human Rights Watch (2005), the report of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights (2007), and that of Amnesty International (2008). Police action confronted with legally uncertain situations is not only maintenance of the law but also creation of law, as Derrida (1990) argues in reference to Benjamin (1996). It thus actualizes the violence of lawmaking. In their analyses of “indefi nite detention” in Guantánamo, Aradau (2007) and Butler (2004) argue similarly, showing how constitutionality changes through administrative practices and performative acts abrogating the law. My own argument is not so much aimed at specific realms of exception as at the transformation of the established legal system in general. In my understanding of the emergence of forms of state from a process of performative generation, I draw on studies of the “ethnography of the state” (Krohn-Hansen and Nustadt 2005; Steinmetz 1999). When discussions of torture refer to Foucault, this is usually in relation to Surveiller et punir, with some considering the concept of biopolitics (see Mutimer 2007), in order to examine the shift in significance of sovereign power. For a differentiated technological genealogy drawing on Foucault see Rejali (2003; 2007a). When it comes to “rendition,” European states have thus been content with diplomatic assurances in face of both the ban on deportation (the “nonrefoulement obligation”) in the case of likely torture and hair-raising evidence of the practice in relevant “third states” (see Human Rights Watch 2005: 16ff.; Grey 2006). In fact international law clearly holds transferring states responsible for ensuing torture. David Luban (2006: 51) even concludes, in view of the interplay between jurists and the Bush government after 9/11, that “[p]oliticians pick judges, and if the politicians accept torture, the judges will as well. Once we create a torture culture, only the naive would suppose that judges will provide a safeguard. Judges don’t fight their culture. They reflect it.” The term “preemption” is mostly used in a military context; it is more precise in that it emphasizes the moment of anticipatory intervention (Freedman 2004) and not, like “precaution”, an association with “care taken to avoid danger.” Nevertheless, I treat the terms as synonyms here.

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17. “Indefi nite detention,” as practiced in Guantánamo or in incommunicado fashion elsewhere in the world as a result of “extraordinary rendition” (see Butler 2005; Mutimer 2007), has been rationalized in this way, with those affected granted no right to take legal countermeasures. As late as August 2008, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell emphasized that Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan, who was pronounced guilty of assisting terrorism by a military court at Guantánamo, was to be indefi nitely held as an “enemy combatant” after serving his sentence. 18. We thus find constitutional-legal guidelines regarding the state’s authority to intervene in a security context regularly converted into legal regulations without any effort to clarify the vague concepts in play. The measures’ political aim is simply translated into a rhetoric of law, into “if . . . then” conditional clauses (Pütter, Narr and Busch 2005: 10), thus being delivered to the discretionary authority of the police. This “practice of the ‘constitutionality check-up’ is not so much the submission of the legislative and the executive” to the law, but the law’s accommodation to the state’s requirements and the potential undermining “of the political practice of litigation” (Ranciére 1998: 109). 19. According to Julia Eckert (2008), in the present-day struggle against terrorism the focus on certain religious groups is marked by a tendency to culturalize, ethnicize, and thus also socially externalize what is considered dangerous. We can understand this as a condition for the social acceptance or toleration of a border-crossing extension of the state’s authority to intervene. On the significance of the construction of the other and a closed world as a premise for the exercise of torture, see Crelinsten (2003).

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The Right of Government 137 Rejali, Darius. (2007a). Torture and Democracy. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rejali, Darius. (2007b). Wahrheit, Erinnerung und die Erzwingung von Information, pp. 295–315 in Karin Harrasser, Thomas Macho and Burkhard Wolf (eds) Folter. Politik und Technik des Schmerzes. Munich: Fink. Robin, Marie-Monique. (2005). Countersurgency and Torture. Exporting Torture Tactics from Indochina and Algeria to Latin America, pp. 44–54 in Kenneth Roth and Minky Worden (eds) Torture. Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?: A Human Rights Perspective. New York: The New Press. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas and Mariana Valverde. (1998). Governed by Law? Social and Legal Studies 7(4): 541–551. Sands, Philippe. (2008). Torture Team. Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scarry, Elaine. (2004). Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz, pp. 281– 90 in Sanford Levinson (ed) Torture. A Collection. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Schmitt, Carl. (1963 [1932]). Der Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. [(1996) The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] Simon, Dieter. (2008). Der Rechtsstaat. Paper presented at the International Conference Die Wahrheit der Illusion, Einstein Forum, Potsdam: February 7–9. Simon, Jonathan. (1998). Managing the Monstrous. Sex Offenders and the New Penology. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 4(1–2): 452–467. Steinmetz, George (ed). (1999). State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Steinmetz, George (ed). (1999a). Introduction: Culture and the State, pp. 1–49 in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Tadros, Victor. (1998). Between Governance and Discipline: The Law and Michel Foucault. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 18(1): 75–103. Valverde, Mariana. (2003). Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wæver, Ole. (1995). Securitization and Desecuritization, pp. 46–86 in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed) On Security. New York: Columbia University Press. Walby, Kevin. (2007). Contributions to a Post-Sovereigntist Understanding of Law: Foucault, Law as Governance, and Legal Pluralism. Social & Legal Studies 16(4): 551–571. Weßlau, Edda. (2004). Die staatliche Pfl icht zum Schutz von Verbrechensopfern und das Verbot der Folter, pp. 390–410 in Norman Paech, Alfred Rinken, Dian Schefold and Edda Weßlau (eds) Völkerrecht statt Machtpolitik. Beiträge für Stuby. Hamburg: VSA. Wickham, Gary. (2006). Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment. Journal of Law and Society 33(4): 596–614. Žižek, Slavoj. (2002). From Homo Sucker to Homo Sacer, pp. 83–111 in Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso.

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Foucault and Frontiers Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border William Walters What I produce [ . . . ] are instruments, utensils, weapons. I would like my books to be a kind of toolbox in which others could dig around to fi nd a tool that they can use however they wish in their own area. (Foucault 1994: 523; my translation)

1. INTRODUCTION The single word “border” conceals a multiplicity and implies a constancy where genealogical investigation uncovers mutation and descent. Historical research reveals that diverse political rationalities have framed the political means and objectives of state frontiers and borders, just as the difficult work of making borders actual has drawn upon a great variety of technologies and heterogeneous administrative practices, ranging from maps of the territory, the creation of specialized border officials, and architectures of fortification to today’s experimentation with bio-digitalized forms of surveillance. This chapter argues that we are witnessing a novel development within this history of borders and border-making, what I want to call the emergence of the humanitarian border. While a great deal has been written about the militarization, securitization and fortification of borders today, there is far less consideration of the humanitarianization of borders. But if the investment of border regimes by biometric technologies rightly warrants being treated as an event within the history of the making and remaking of borders (Amoore 2006), then arguably so too does the reinvention of the border as a space of humanitarian government. Under what conditions are we seeing the rise of humanitarian borders? The emergence of the humanitarian border goes hand in hand with the move which has made state frontiers into privileged symbolic and regulatory instruments within strategies of migration control. It is part of a much wider trend that has been dubbed the “rebordering” of political and territorial space (Andreas and Biersteker 2003). The humanitarian border emerges once it becomes established that border crossing has become, for thousands of migrants seeking, for a variety of reasons, to access the territories of the global North, a matter of life and death. It crystallizes as a way of governing this novel and disturbing situation,

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and compensating for the social violence embodied in the regime of migration control. The idea of a humanitarian border might sound at fi rst counterintuitive or even oxymoronic. After all, we often think of contemporary humanitarianism as a force that, operating in the name of the universal but endangered subject of humanity, transcends the walled space of the international system. This is, of course, quite valid. Yet it would be a mistake to draw any simple equation between humanitarian projects and what Deleuze and Guattari would call logics of deterritoralization. While humanitarian programmes might unsettle certain norms of statehood, it is important to recognize the ways in which the exercise of humanitarian power is connected to the actualization of new spaces. Whether by its redefinition of certain locales as humanitarian “zones” and crises as “emergencies” (Calhoun 2004), the authority it confers on certain experts to move rapidly across networks of aid and intervention, or its will to designate those populating these zones as “victims,” it seems justified to follow Debrix’s (1998) observation that humanitarianism implies reterritorialization on top of deterritorialization. Humanitarian zones can materialize in various situations—in conflict zones, amidst the relief of famine, and against the backdrop of state failure. But the case that interests me in what follows is a specific one: a situation where the actual borders of states and gateways to the territory become themselves zones of humanitarian government. Understanding the consequences of this is paramount, since it has an important bearing on what is often termed the securitization of borders and citizenship. The chapter offers a preliminary survey of the humanitarian border. I focus on two aspects in particular: the materialization of the humanitarian border within particular regimes of knowledge, and the constitutive role which politics plays in making and changing humanitarian borders. But the chapter has a second purpose in addition to this mapping exercise. This is to examine more broadly the contribution which Foucauldian studies, and especially studies in governmentality, have made to the critical and genealogical investigation of borders and frontiers. Here I observe that Foucault actually had relatively little to say about the relationship of state borders to modern regimes of power. However, this is not the case for many of those who have explored the possibilities for political analysis that he opened up: border studies has been a significant area of interest for governmentality studies. In the fi rst part of this chapter, and as a prelude to my discussion of humanitarianization, I argue that for all its important insights, Foucauldian writing about borders has often stuck rather rigidly to the concepts which Foucault left us. But is this Foucauldian vocabulary of power adequate to the mapping of emergent and unusual formations of power—in border studies or elsewhere? I don’t think so. The chapter argues it is not a matter of dispensing with concepts like neoliberalism, biopolitics, sovereign power, and so on. But there is a need to supplement these terms with new concepts. One challenge for future studies in governmentality, then, is

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that of overcoming the attitude that all the tools we need are already there, in Foucault’s toolbox. It is with this aim of adding to the toolbox that I take up the question of the humanitarian border.

2. FOUCAULT AND FRONTIERS It is probably fair to say that the theme of frontiers is largely absent from the two courses that are today read together as Foucault’s lectures on “governmentality” (Foucault 1991; 2007; 2008). This is not to suggest that frontiers receive no mention at all. Within these lectures we certainly encounter passing remarks on the theme. For instance, Foucault speaks at one point of “the administrative state, born in the territoriality of national boundaries in the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries and corresponding to a society of regulation and discipline” (Foucault 1991: 104).1 Elsewhere, he notes how the calculation and demarcation of new frontiers served as one of the practical elements of military-diplomatic technology, a machine he associates with the government of Europe in the image of a balance of power and according to the governmental logic of raison d’état. “When the diplomats, the ambassadors who negotiated the treaty of Westphalia, received instructions from their government, they were explicitly advised to ensure that the new frontiers, the distribution of states, the new relationships to be established between the German states and the Empire, and the zones of influence of France, Sweden, and Austria be established in terms of a principle: to maintain a balance between the different European states” (Foucault 2007: 297). But these are only hints of what significance the question of frontiers might have within the different technologies of power which Foucault sought to analyze. They are only fragmentary reflections on the place borders and frontiers might occupy within the genealogy of the modern state which Foucault outlines with his research into governmentality. 2 Why was Foucault apparently not particularly interested in borders when he composed these lectures? One possible answer is suggested by Elden’s careful and important work on power-knowledge and territory. Elden takes issue with Foucault for the way in which he discusses territorial rule largely as a foil which allows him to provide a more fully-worked out account of governmentality and its administration of population. Despite the fact that the term appears prominently in the title of Foucault’s lectures, “the issue of territory continually emerges only to be repeatedly marginalized, eclipsed, and underplayed” (Elden 2007: 1). Because Foucault fails to reckon more fully with the many ways in which the production of territory—and most crucially its demarcation by practices of frontier marking and control—serves as a precondition for the government of population, it is not surprising that the question of frontiers occupies little space in his narrative. 3


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But there is another explanation for the relative absence of questions of frontiers in Foucault’s writing on governmentality. And here we have to acknowledge that, framed as it is previously, this is a problematic question. For it risks the kind of retrospective fallacy which projects a set of very contemporary issues and concerns onto Foucault’s time. It is probably fair to speculate that frontiers and border security was not a political issue during the 1970s in the way that it is today in many western states. “Borders” had yet to be constituted as a sort of meta-issue, capable of condensing a whole complex of political fears and concerns, including globalization, the loss of sovereignty, terrorism, trafficking and unchecked immigration. The question of the welfare state certainly was an issue, perhaps even a metaissue, when Foucault was lecturing, and it is perhaps not coincidental that he should devote so much space to the examination of pastoralism. But not the border. The point is not to suggest that Foucault’s work evolved in close, unmediated correspondence with shifts in the political issues of his day. But it is to observe that any genealogy of the state will inevitably bear the traces of its political time. Foucault may have lacked the inclination or the political motivation to offer anything like a systematic analysis of frontiers and their relationship to modern rationalities and technologies of rule. Nevertheless, this has not inhibited the emergence of a sizeable body of work which has begun to ponder the government of borders, and found in Foucault’s work, and subsequent studies in governmentality, a series of concepts and analytics to advance this theoretical project.4 Not the least significant accomplishment of this work has been to advance current debates about the securitization of borders, and the governance of migrations and mobilities more generally. Securitization has typically been understood in terms of the social construction of threat, and the legitimation of exceptional administrative measures (e.g., Buonfino 2004). Foucauldian and governmentality-inspired research has opened up a different angle. It has done this largely by examining the particular rationalities, technologies and strategies which currently rationalize and invest the space of borders in western states. Yet a glance over this impressive body of work reveals that its accomplishments are somewhat uneven. There are two things in particular which stand out. The fi rst concerns the temporal scope of many of these investigations. It is overwhelmingly the case that studies in the governmentality of borders and bordering have trained their attention on the immediate present. While investigations of biometrics, smart cards, and detention abound, we know very little about, say, historical practices of quarantine in ports or the techniques of partitioning that were used in the demarcation of colonial and postcolonial territories (but see Crampton 2007). Perhaps a certain “9/11” effect has been at work here, drawing research into the orbit of very contemporary and highly visible concerns at the expense of those that seem more remote. But whatever the specific causes, the outcome is that thinking about borders has yet to profit from historical and genealogical framing in

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the way that studies in the governance of, say, poverty (Dean 1991; Procacci 1991), certainly have. Of course, this obsession with the immediate present is hardly inconsistent with main currents in the social sciences where a certain presentism is the norm. But it is at odds with the tenor of much work in governmentality studies where a commitment to historical work has been important. Nevertheless, it is not this point but a second criticism of Foucauldian studies of borders that will form the basis for the remainder of this chapter. This concerns what I take to be a somewhat restricted analytical imagination at play in this body of work. If they have been overwhelmingly confi ned to the immediate present, these studies have also been at times conservative in the range of concepts they have employed to make sense of practices and logics of power. To develop this point I want to turn to the quote with which I started. Here we fi nd Foucault musing, somewhat modestly perhaps, that he would prefer his work to be treated like a toolbox. Rather than a philosophical relationship where his works would operate within games of interpretation and explication he proposes a far more pragmatic, even utilitarian relationship. Not concepts that might be debated as to their precise meaning, as many would in the world of professional political theory, but tools (others can use them “however they wish”) to be put to work in the study of different phenomena. In a vaguely Nietzschean sense, whatever value they might possess would follow from their application and effects. Now it could be said that the literature on borders has been quite faithful to Foucault in this regard. If anything, it could be accused of being too faithful. For it has sometimes proceded as though the only tools necessary or even available for the job of investigating borders were already at hand. It is as though most of the necessary concepts were already there—in the toolbox. It is just a matter of reaching in and taking a few. It is perhaps this attitude which explains why so many studies have rather similar and familiar conceptual coordinates such as discipline, sovereign power, biopolitics and governmentality. This is not to say there have been no attempts to connect Foucault with other strains of thought. Indeed, there have been creative fusions and dialogues. The use of Agamben to make sense of the exceptional character of detentions and controls springs to mind (Butler 2004; Isin and Rygiel 2006). Nevertheless, it remains the case that on the whole this literature has proceeded as though most of the concepts needed to do the work of a genealogy of bordering were already in existence. Given the fact that Foucault commenced the critical investigation of neoliberalism long before it had become a theoretical concern for most leftists, it could be argued that he offers a more than passable guide to themes that continue to frame our politics today. At the same time, it has to be said that the world we inhabit has changed in countless and profound ways from the world that Foucault confronted up until his untimely passing. While we should avoid the epochalist stance which posits the birth of an entirely new


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order, we can nevertheless not adequately capture new forms, identities, and power relationships if we work with the unexamined assumption that all the terms we need are already in existence. This is of course true in a general sense, but it is particularly true in the area of borders and migration, an institutional domain that has undergone rapid expansion, experimentation and complex transformations in recent years. As such, there is a strong case to be made that future research in the area of borders, territory, security, etc. might start with a question about its relationship to Foucault’s toolbox. In short, we can only get so far with the contents of Foucault’s toolbox. It is not a matter of throwing out the toolbox, but of recognizing its limits. Since it was never assembled with the intention of being an all-purpose set of instruments, it seems prudent to consider more explicitly in what ways and in what circumstances it is necessary to craft new tools. With this point in mind I turn to the question of borders and humanitarianism.

3. HUMANITARIAN GOVERNMENT Before I address the question of the humanitarian border, it is necessary to explain what I understand by the humanitarian. Here my thinking has been shaped by recent work that engages the humanitarian not as a set of ideas and ideologies, nor simply as the activity of certain nongovernmental actors and organizations, but as a complex domain possessing specific forms of governmental reason. Fassin’s work on this theme is particularly important. Fassin demonstrates that humanitarianism can be fruitfully connected to the broader field of government which Foucault outlined, where government is not a necessary attribute of states but a rationalized activity that can be carried out by all sorts of agents, in various contexts, and towards multiple ends. At its core, “Humanitarian government can be defi ned as the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action” (Fassin 2007: 151). As he goes on to stress, the value of such a defi nition is that we do not see a particular state, or a non-state form such as a nongovernmental organization, as the necessary agent of humanitarian action. Instead, it becomes possible to think in terms of a complex assemblage, comprising particular forms of humanitarian reason, specific forms of authority (medical, legal, spiritual) but also certain technologies of government—such as mechanisms for raising funds and training volunteers, administering aid and shelter, documenting injustice, and publicizing abuse. Seen from this angle humanitarianism appears as a much more supple, protean thing. Crucially, it opens up our ability to perceive “a broader political and moral logic at work both within and outside state forms” (ibid.). If the humanitarian can be situated in relation to the analytics of government, it can also be contextualized in relation to the biopolitical. “Not

144 William Walters only did the last century see the emergence of regimes committed to the physical destruction of populations,” observes Redfield, “but also of entities devoted to monitoring and assisting populations in maintaining their physical existence, even while protesting the necessity of such an action and the failure of anyone to do much more than this bare minimum” (2005: 329). It is this “minimalist biopolitics,” as Redfield puts it, that will be so characteristic of the humanitarian. And here the accent should be placed on the adjective “minimalist” if we are not to commit the kind of move which I criticized previously, namely collapsing everything new into existing Foucauldian categories. It is important to regard contemporary humanitarianism as a novel formation and a site of ambivalence and undecideability, and not just as one more instance of what Hardt and Negri (2000) might call global “biopolitical production.”

4. THE BIRTH OF THE HUMANITARIAN BORDER In a press release issued on June 29, 2007, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) publicized a visit which its then Director General, Brunson McKinley, was about to make to a ”reception centre for migrants” on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa (IOM 2007). The Director General is quoted as saying: “Many more boats will probably arrive on Lampedusa over the summer with their desperate human cargo and we have to ensure we can adequately respond to their immediate needs. . . . This is why IOM will continue to work closely with the Italian government, the Italian Red Cross, UNHCR and other partners to provide appropriate humanitarian responses to irregular migrants and asylum seekers reaching the island.” The same press release observes that IOM’s work with its “partners” was part of a wider effort to improve the administration of the “reception” (the word “detention” is conspicuously absent) and “repatriation” of “irregular migrants” in Italy. Reception centers were being expanded, and problems of overcrowding alleviated. The statement goes on to observe that IOM had opened its office on Lampedusa in April 2006. Since that time “Forced returns from Lampedusa [had] stopped.” Lampedusa is a small Italian island located some 200 km south of Sicily and 300 km to the north of Libya. Its geographical location provides a clue as to how it is that in 2004 this Italian outpost fi rst entered the spotlight of European and even world public attention, becoming a potent signifier for anxieties about an international migration crisis (Andrijasevic 2006). For it was then that this Italian holiday destination became the main point of arrival for boats carrying migrants from Libya to Italy. That year more than 10,000 migrants were reported to have passed through the “temporary stay and assistance centre” (CPTA) the Italian state maintains on the island. The vast majority had arrived in overcrowded, makeshift boats after a perilous sea journey lasting up to several weeks. Usually these boats are


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intercepted in Italian waters by the Italian border guards and the migrants transferred to the holding center on the island. Following detention, which can last for more than a month, they are either transferred to other CPTAs in Sicily and southern Italy, or expelled to Libya. A particularly notorious instance of these expulsions occurred during the fi rst week of October 2004. Using military airplanes to move more than 1,000 migrants from Lampedusa to Libya, Italy undertook what many critics have labeled an illegal act of collective expulsion. This expulsion remains one of the most notable fruits to be born from a bilateral readmission agreement signed between the Italian and Libyan governments, an accord aimed at fostering collaboration in matters of irregular migration. It came in the context of an improvement in political relations between Libya, Italy and Europe. It is perhaps no coincidence that, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported, very shortly after the expulsion, the EU’s eighteen-year long arms embargo on Libya was lifted (HRW 2007: 107). But there is, as one might expect, another side to the story which the IOM press release does not communicate. Ever since Lampedusa fi rst became a new front in the EU’s “fight against illegal immigration,” the practices of the Italian government had been the subject of sustained scrutiny and outcry from a range of NGOs, delegations and inquiries. In addition to protesting the expulsions, these interventions also condemned the conditions suffered by migrants in the center and expressed alarm at the difficulties they faced in registering claims for asylum. The IOM presents its expansion of services as a matter of providing “humanitarian assistance for many exhausted migrants who arrive after perilous journeys on unseaworthy vessels.” As such, it reproduces key elements of a humanitarian script in which intervention is mobilized as an act of charity and protection (Aradau 2004). A more politically conscious reading would see it as, at least in part, a response to negative publicity generated by the NGOs. It would perhaps regard the enhanced presence of the IOM, along with other humanitarian agencies, not simply as a gesture of care, but as an instance where humanitarianism was being operationalized in an attempt to manage a political crisis and neutralize some of the controversies which Europe’s ongoing confrontation with mass migration is now facing (Albahari 2006; Aradau 2004). One might even say that the outcome of IOM’s intervention was a certain normalization of this border practice. Holding together in an uneasy alliance a politics of alienation with a politics of care, and a tactic of abjection and one of reception, the case of Lampedusa offers in microcosm a series of elements, contradictory processes and events that I am calling the birth of the humanitarian border. Lampedusa is of course not an isolated case. While it exhibits certain unique features, it also contains many elements that are being repeated at other sites and on other scales. Much has recently been written concerning the securitization of borders. Among other things, this has highlighted their renewed function as nodes

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which fi lter and distribute (im)mobility, sorting population in terms of risk profi les (Sparke 2006). Highlighting the extensive bureaucratic investments which have been made in digital technology and surveillance, Amoore (2006) identifies such developments with the appearance of a new kind of frontier, an event she calls the biometric border. Bonditti (2004) goes further, suggesting that the advent of new surveillance systems, coupled with data-sharing between national security agencies, points us away from a regime of borders based on territorial space to an order of “pixellated” borders actualized in digital networks. In speaking of humanitarian borders my point is not to take issue with the tendencies which such arguments identify. On the contrary, it strikes me that biometric and other surveillance technologies are extremely important and troubling, even if the nature of the relationship of this biodigital technology to the Foucauldian idea of biopower requires further theoretical attention (Epstein 2007). My point is a different one. It is to register a note of caution. To focus only on new developments in surveillance and control risks a rather linear and developmentalist narrative about borders, an argument in which we go from lines to points, from contiguous territories to distributed networks, from the material to the immaterial, etc. If I speak of a humanitarian border it is not just to insist on the emergence of a domain which deserves to be taken seriously in its own right. It is also to complicate the linear narrative; to suggest that at the same time that borders seem to become more like this, they are also taking other forms, materializing along other lines whose trajectory is difficult to predict. It is for the aforementioned reasons we need to think more carefully about the humanitarian border. With this end in mind, I want to make four points which are intended to clarify my understanding of the humanitarian border. First, the humanitarian border does not present us with a general process that is acting to transform all borders. It is not something universal but quite specific. The humanitarian border is materializing only in certain places under quite specific circumstances. It is tempting to speculate that geography is an important factor here. The humanitarian government of migration is becoming common at what Freudenstein (2000) calls the world’s “frontiers of poverty.” These are the zones like the US–Mexico borderlands (Doty 2006), or the complex space formed by the Mediterranean, North Africa and the southern European states of the EU (Pugh 2004). These spaces can be likened to faultlines in the smooth space of globalization where it seems that the worlds designated by the terms Global North and Global South confront one another in a very concrete, abrasive way, and where gradients of wealth and poverty, citizenship and non-citizenship appear especially sharply. Yet it would be wrong to treat the humanitarian border as merely a second order phenomenon determined by this primary reality because there are all sorts of other elements that are critical in accounting for the emergence and the variation in the humanitarianization


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of borders. One is, of course, the political agency of NGOs. As important studies are beginning to show, there is a political and a moral economy to the NGO world (Dezalay and Garth 2006; Ron, et al. 2005). Possessing scarce resources, NGOs have to make strategic decisions as to which issues they will publicize, which situations of injustice they will politicize, and which experiences of human suffering they will seek to aid. For such reasons it is fair to say that the humanitarian border is a complex, overdetermined phenomenon. Second, the humanitarian border is the effect of a particular governmental strategy, but one that can only be understood when situated alongside other ongoing strategies. If certain border zones are becoming spaces of humanitarian engagement, this is only because border crossing has been made, for certain segments of the world’s migratory population, into a matter of life and death (Albahari 2006). And if border crossing has become a matter of life and death, this is because we have a situation where military tactics, advanced surveillance technology, naval patrols, armed guards and guard dogs, watchtowers, razor wire, and much else are all deemed politically necessary and legitimate elements in the “defense” of the borders of the Global North faced with an “invasion” of migrants and asylum seekers. As research in migration consistently shows (Sassen 2003), it is the need to circumnavigate this vast, costly and often brutal apparatus of control that drives migrants to risk their lives, taking their chances with an underground economy which sells false identity, or a place on a rickety boat. But if humanitarian government operates on a space that appears to be already securitized, militarized, fortified, etc., it should not be understood as a simple two-step process, a matter of action and response—as though fi rst there is securitization and then humanitarianization, which comes along to sweep up the human collateral damage. While such a view is not without justification, it fails to capture the way in which tactics and counter-tactics play themselves out at a more molecular level. For instance, there are frequently occasions on which security practices and effects materialize within the institutions and practices of humanitarian government. For example, Albahari (in press) documents the way in which there was a politics of “reception” concerning irregular migrants arriving on Italy’s southeastern shores from nearby Albania. The Catholic diocese of Otranto and the local branch of the charity Caritas had offered to host migrants with families in the region. However, the local police prefect of Lecce rejected this offer because it implied a dispersal of the migrants. Instead, he welcomed the offer of the diocese of Lecce which proposed to assemble the migrants on a single site, a former seaside resort for children called the “Regina Pacis.” Here it would be much easier to manage and monitor this population. In this way we see that the humanitarian sector is certainly not a monolithic space but one traversed by its own politics and even rivalries. But we see also how security practices and effects can materialize in

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different ways—more intense here, less so there—depending on the ways in which humanitarian assistance is structured. Third, the humanitarian border is not a fi xed border but something which fluctuates. Its geography is determined in part by the shifting routes of migrants themselves. It has to be remembered that their movements constitute an irreducible social element in making and unmaking global borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2003: ¶ 8). To return to the case of Lampedusa, if the humanitarian border appears here, it is in part because migrants and their facilitators have targeted this outlying fragment of Italian/EU territory not least because of its geographical proximity to the Libyan coast. But if the humanitarian border is not fi xed, then neither is it contiguous. Rather than imagining it as a line resembling the political borders of cartographic space, it might be more useful to liken it to the distributed space Barry has called a technological zone. One form of the technological zone is a “zone of qualification.” This exists when “the qualities of objects or practices are assessed in order that they meet more or less common standards or criteria” (Barry 2006: 240). Zones of qualification have been discussed in relation to the governance of environmental standards and food products circulating within, and at the margins, of a European economic space (Dunn 2005). But there is an element of the zone of qualification at stake in the formation of humanitarian space, and in my case, the humanitarian border. As we will see, one of the primary modes of action of humanitarian NGOs is to investigate particular sites such as detention centers, airport waiting zones and reception practices in order to reveal precisely the extent to which they fail to meet more or less commonly recognized, and sometimes legally encoded standards and norms for the treatment of migrants and refugees. Like other zones of qualification, it becomes apparent that the humanitarian border is contentious for it “generates active and passive forms of resistance to [its] construction” (Barry 2006: 241). Finally, there is a point to be made about humanitarianism, power and order. Those looking to locate contemporary humanitarianism within a bigger picture would perhaps follow the lead of Hardt and Negri. As these theorists of “Empire” see things, NGOs like Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) are, contrary to their own best intentions, implicated in global order. As agents of “moral intervention” who, because they participate in the construction of emergency, “prefigure the state of exception from below,” these actors serve as the preeminent “frontline force of imperial intervention.” As such, Hardt and Negri see humanitarianism as “completely immersed in the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 36). There is certainly no shortage of evidence for the view that humanitarianism is susceptible to co-option and capture by official strategies of policing and control. However, it would be rash to assume this is always the case. Here it might be better to rethink the relationship between humanitarianism and the state, much as earlier Foucauldian research examined the


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government of the social (e.g., many of the essays in Burchell, Gordon and Miller et al. 1991). This literature revealed how social knowledges, techniques and strategies were invented across a great variety of institutional sites—whether by trade unionists, industrialists, cooperatives, amateur surveyors and moral reformers, etc.—and for multiple ends. Certainly the crystallization of this social field would offer a set of rationalities and technologies by which the state would, at the start of the last century, reinvent itself as a welfare state. But such acts of colonization and appropriation did not exhaust the social field, if for no other reason than the fact that social knowledges would continue to provide a standard by which the state could be criticized and reformed. Perhaps it would be more insightful to approach humanitarianism in this way as well—as a field which exists in a permanent state of co-option, infi ltration but also provocation with the state (but also with other supranational and international entities as well).

5. BORDERS, HUMANITARIANISM, KNOWLEDGE Certainly there exist a number of excellent studies exploring the idea and the transformation of frontiers in history (Anderson 1996; Febvre 1973; Maier 2002). Yet the genealogy of the border, understood as a technology of power, remains largely unwritten. Such a genealogy would surely accord a central place to the study of the changing regimes of knowledge in terms of which borders have been marked out and accorded particular aims and functions, and which projects to govern (through) borders have been pursued. For instance, it is known that what we understand as a modern frontier—that is, “not a disputed region or a zone of control, but a line” (Hirst 2005: 37)—only became widely established in the eighteenth century. The fact that it became a common and defining feature of statehood and modern territoriality might be attributed to the inception of a “Westphalian” system of international relations. But more concretely the linear frontier was only able to emerge once states began to acquire particular forms of knowledge, and administrative capacity which allowed them to survey, map and mark their frontiers (Hirst 2005: 37; cf. Black 1997: ch. 5). Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel was quick to claim the invention of this new kind of frontier as yet one more mark of European civilizational superiority, made possible by its mastery of sciences like cartography and geodesy (Cuttitta 2006: 34). Particular knowledges also play an integral and constitutive role in making up the humanitarian border. What are these knowledges? What kind of territory do they mark out and how do they populate it? What plane of reality do they help to constitute? A quick survey of the vast output of reports and inquiries generated by human rights groups and humanitarian agencies offers some answers to these questions. Clearly we are dealing not with knowledges which aim at drawing borderlines themselves, as did

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earlier cartographic practices. Nor are these knowledges which, as in the case of risk management approaches, make it their aim to optimize the movement of population across borders while securing against the mobility of dangerous agents. Instead, they are knowledges which problematize the border as a site of suffering, violence and death, and a political zone of injustice and oppression. As we noted previously, Redfield uses the term “minimalist biopolitics” to describe the kind of medical humanitarianism associated with MSF operating in disaster zones. There are certainly grounds for seeing aspects of a similar minimalist biopolitics in operation at the humanitarian border as well. This significantly attenuated biopolitics perhaps fi nds its saddest and starkest expression in those projects that make it their sober task to document the death of each border crosser and its circumstances. 5 It is here, in this grim reckoning of loss, that the theme of the border as a threshold of life and death is given hard empirical form, both quantitatively and qualitatively. If certain governments now regard deportation ratios as a privileged index of the effectiveness of their border control strategies (Fekete 2005: 66), the death rate has emerged as the number which is frequently used in criticism of such projects. As with the current wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan one sees the counting of the nameless, the faceless, the collateral damage of the game of security, as emergent within a politics which aspires to call political government to account for its actions.6 However minimalist, this biopolitics nevertheless does in fact, extend some way beyond the grim empirics of fatality because there is also a concerted attempt to document the medical condition of the migratory space. This is both for the purposes of rationalizing the provision of medical aid, and protesting the political regime which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, visits such suffering on the individual and collective migratory body. In certain circumstances this knowledge offers clues about shifting tactics of border transgression. For instance, there is the case of those particular physicians who tend to migrants on the coastguard jetty, immediately as they disembark the boats that have ferried them from North Africa to Europe’s shores. An International Red Cross bulletin cites the case of one such physician working on the island of Lampedusa who keeps a careful record, and notes how he hasn’t had to use an intravenous drip for months. He speculates that the absence of dehydration amongst migrants may be a sign that people-smugglers are using larger vessels to cover the bulk of the distance from Libya, then transferring migrants to smaller boats which are too fragile to be turned back by the Italian authorities (Red Cross 2006). Yet it is not only the shadowy world of people-smuggling which is glimpsed by the medical gaze. It is not just the shifting tactics of border transgression which are being diagnosed from the migrant body. Perhaps more significant is the way in which the documentation of physical and psychological trauma will be mobilized as medical evidence of systemic violence perpetrated against migrants by various agencies of border control, migrant detention,


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and deportation. For instance, a recent MSF (2005) report documents the situation in Morocco. Focusing on ”illegal sub-Saharan immigrants” who have tended to see this country as a transit stage en route to Europe, this report itemizes not just the various forms of illness suffered, often resulting from poor living conditions and exposure during epic trans-Saharan journeys. Crucially it also serves as a record, including many personal testimonies, regarding the violence inflicted on migrants by Moroccan and Spanish security forces. In the case of the former it is alleged that violence is in fact a strategic and systematic component in its policing activity. If medical expertise provides one axis for knowing the humanitarian border, a second axis is constituted by certain forms of legal know-how. This is manifested in the numerous ways in which the border is documented as a regime which is violating certain norms of treatment and denying certain rights to migrants; a regime where political authorities fail to exercise or even recognize their legal and/or moral responsibilities. This might take the form of observations that particular immigration officials and justices of the peace, responsible for authorizing expulsions, are not properly trained or qualified in the relevant human rights situation of the countries of origin/destination of certain deportees (HRW 2006: 108). It might take the form of observations that interpretation and translation services at a given reception centre are not “in conformity with international and regional standards,” thereby undermining the ability of migrants and asylum seekers to register claims for protection (HRW 2002: 4). And it might also fi nd expression in the work of undercover journalism when this fi nds, for instance, that the phone booth in a particular detention center was frequently out of order; that, contrary to the relevant Charter for detained migrants, the authorities had failed to provide detainees with a telephone card worth five euros every ten days; and that a clandestine market whereby such cards were sold at inflated prices was operating in the center—all of which obviously hinders the detainee in her ability to remain in touch with relatives and legal assistance (Gatti 2005; cited in Andrijasevic 2006: 5). These are but a few of the ways in which the humanitarian border is configured as a sociolegal space, and its subjects governed if not as, then certainly in the image of rights-bearing individuals. Two points should be made in this respect. First, these few examples reveal that although human rights are frequently discussed as a philosophical issue, they also take a governmentalized form. If this issue has been framed as a matter of elevated ideals, it will nevertheless also configure itself around what might seem the most mundane details of institutional life. This governmentalization fi nds expression in the meticulous anatomization of abuse and denial. I noted before that the humanitarian border is dynamic in the sense that it moves geographically. But it is dynamic in another sense: one can observe how knowledge spreads out across its surfaces, documenting facilities, authorities, procedures, and practices; conferring a certain discursive depth and volume to the border.

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Second, these few examples suggest that it would be insufficient to treat the birth of the humanitarian border as but one more instance of an everwidening regime of biopower. As we have seen, there certainly is a concern with the migrant as a living subject/population. But if terms like biopolitics and biopower are to have any critical purchase, we should also note all those instances where they combine with other forms of power and other specifications of the subject. Foucault once noted how the “welfare state problem” involved the “tricky adjustment” between a pastoral power exercised over living individuals and a political power wielded over legal subjects (1988: 67). This tricky adjustment between different powers and subjectivities is not confi ned to the welfare state; it is also evident in the humanitarian border. The overall thrust of humanitarian intervention is certainly towards the protection of subjects understood as vulnerable groups. But as the seemingly minor case of the phone cards makes evident, this move is also cross-cut with the presumption of subjects who are able, or are to be capacitated, to mobilize for themselves. To suppose that the humanitarian border is configured only around the identity of the victim, as some have for humanitarianism more generally, is perhaps too simple (Debrix 1998).7 In discussing the ways in which the humanitarian border is constituted as a field of knowledge, as a positive domain, I have been at pains to stress that we need to avoid the reflex action that treats contemporary forms of border regime as one more expression of a given repertoire of powers. Indeed, my use of the term humanitarian border is designed in part to emphasize that we are dealing here with a singularity, something new. This is not to suggest that the kinds of analytics which have proven so useful in studies of power and governmentality have no place. Clearly they do. Instead, the task is always one of specifying how they might combine, mutate, transform in specific circumstances. With this point in mind, I want to raise one more point concerning the relationship of knowledges to borders. This concerns what we might call its dominant modes and styles of truth production. As we have already seen, the inscription of the humanitarian border into discourse involves a specific production of truth. Not unlike the production of truth in other domains, it is buttressed by various forms of modern expertise, principally medical, legal, and social, as we have seen, but also psychological and spiritual.8 But our case is qualitatively different from the production of truth concerning, say, industrial productivity or unemployment. For one thing, the production of humanitarian knowledge takes place in highly-situated ways, structured by the temporality of unfolding crises, moving in fits and starts which shadow the shifting geography of migratory control strategies. This is not the systematic gaze within which social and economic fields are mapped, on the basis of permanent statistical apparatuses and routinized reporting procedures. Instead, it is a knowledge which depends much more upon the work of ad hoc missions, delegations, and visits whose task it is to gather data and testimony in the field. In this


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respect, it is interesting to note how the practice of missions and visits to places of detention, or islands and coastlines of migrant arrival, comes to be a site of careful governance in its own right, whether in the form of manuals advising on methods of visiting detained refugees (Gallagher, Ireland and Muchopa 2006) or the documentation of the levels and degrees of “transparency” which surround specific border control practices.9 But it is different in another sense for we are dealing here with projects whose aims are more complex than merely expanding the realm of social knowledge. What is at stake here is the making visible of a world that is understood as being hidden, a “space of nonexistence” (Coutin 2003) where the very fact of opacity is deemed a constitutive and integral element in the perpetuation of injustice and suffering.10 It is this condition that requires that any attempt to know this sphere acquires a high degree of ethicality. It entails a labor of bearing witness, and its style is typically that of a “motivated truth” (Redfield 2006) forged in the heat of politics.11 As one of their epistemic strategies, humanitarian inquiries frequently incorporate personal testimony and eyewitness accounts from migrants. The move is significant both in that it accords “voice” to subjects who are presumed to have no place as political subjects in official debates (Nyers 2003), and that it acts as a tactic of empathy. But it could be said that humanitarian reporting of borders is also an act of testimony in its own right. As such it could profitably be situated in terms of the wider “witnessing fever [that] has taken hold in a variety of fields of intellectual endeavour” (Kurasawa 2007: 24).

6. HUMANITARIANISM, BORDERS, POLITICS Foucauldian writing about borders has mirrored the wider field of governmentality studies in at least one respect. While it has produced some fascinating and insightful accounts of contemporary strategies and technologies of border-making and border policing, it has tended to confi ne its attention to official and often state-sanctioned projects. Political dynamics and political acts have certainly not been ignored. But little attention has been paid to the possibility that politics and resistance operate not just in an extrinsic relationship to contemporary regimes, but within them.12 To date this literature has largely failed to view politics as something constitutive and productive of border regimes and technologies. That is to say, there is little appreciation of the ways in which movements of opposition, and those particular kinds of resistance which Foucault calls “counter conduct,” can operate not externally to modes of bordering but by means of “a series of exchanges” and “reciprocal supports” (Foucault 2007: 355). The humanitarian border is interesting because it presents us with a domain where it is especially clear that governmental practices emanate not from a given centre of official authority but in contexts of contestation

154 William Walters and politicization. Political contestation and governmental invention frequently proceed hand in hand. It offers a promising site where the observer can follow what O’Malley has called—in a somewhat different context— “indigenous governance” (O’Malley 1996). This is to say that the policing of borders today cannot be understood solely on the basis of the study of official schemes and inventions, be these emergent technologies like biometrics or novel institutions like Homeland Security. For humanitarianism, insofar as it operates as a source of governmental innovation, has made the policing of borders a much more complex, polymorphous and heterogeneous affair. Fassin has written of a militaro-humanitarian moment (Fassin 2007: 155), a term succinctly expressing the fact that at a certain point one sees war and humanitarian action, typically presumed to be forces opposed to one another, enter into a tense but mutually supportive relationship. My point is that the humanitarian border involves similar transactions and imbrications between official governance and certain moves which contest it. Let us examine a particular case. One area where this emerging imbrication can be studied quite clearly is in the management of detention and reception centers for migrants. The field of NGO activity is quite diverse, with different agencies specializing in different areas. In this context the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) has made the question of the conduct of detention and the condition of the detainee into one of its specialist domains. For instance, it has initiated and/or participated in a series of major crossnational research projects examining detention practices and conditions. These studies are notable for the way they combine strong criticism of particular national practices with highly specific recommendations for improvement. So, in one report on detention in Belgium, the Belgian government is taken to task for such things as the lack of transparency in its detention and deportation practices, and the lack of autonomy of doctors working in the detention system (JRS 2006). And yet the overall thrust of JRS’s intervention in this area is not to condemn the practice of detention and deportation as such, as might be the case with radical activism. Instead, it is a more reformatory end which aspires to “provide essential services to this population [detainees], raise awareness of their plight and lobby for improved treatment in line with human rights standards” (JRS 2007: 1). A series of practical steps as to the latter are offered in one report on detention in the new member states of the EU (JRS 2007). The instrument of “best practice” may have originated within business management circles, but here we see it transposed to the world of the management of human suffering. Here we encounter the itemization of various detention “best practices”: these range from encouragement for monitoring and reporting activities by “civil society actors” to the free provision of psychological care where needed. Elsewhere, JRS is involved in training social workers to better equip them for work with asylum seekers and irregular migrants in detention. For instance, with funding from the EU’s own European Refugee


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Fund, its Reception and Detention Centre Training Project has run training sessions in such places as Bucharest, London, Valetta and Rome. It has also published a specialist handbook targeted at visitors and social workers in detention centers (Gallagher et al. 2006). In these and no doubt other ways, it can be said that JRS constitutes a source of expertise on migrant detention. While it is critical of existing practices, it is at the same time not outside the institutional matrix of the contemporary border regime. On the contrary, insofar as it subjects the latter to critical and technical scrutiny, receives funding from the EU, and participates in the training of authorities, it is a partner, however uneasily, in this state of affairs. Of course, NGOs and humanitarians occupy a range of political and ethical positions. Many would refuse to take state funding, or participate in matters of day to day administration. With that said, many others do participate. As a consequence, we cannot understand contemporary border regimes without recognizing their agonistic character. This is partly due to the irreducible subjectivity of the migrants themselves, as those who write of migration as an autonomous movement and a “struggle for the border” rightly insist (Rodriguez 1996). But it is also due to the presence of the NGOs and others. Border regimes are composed not just at the level of strategies and technologies of control, but also at the level of strategies which combine elements of protest and visibilization with practices of pastoral care, aid and assistance. Politics is therefore immanent to the border regime and not something which merely comes to it from outside. Colin Gordon has clarified what is at stake in Foucault’s argument that liberalism is founded on “a notion of society as a ‘transactional reality’, a mobile surface of engagement between the practices of government and the universe of the governed which constantly tends to escape their grasp” (Donzelot and Gordon 2008: 51; see also Foucault 2008: 297). It is just this sense of a transactional reality which is at issue here, and which future explorations of the governmentality of borders would do well to take more seriously. The theme of politics is important to the study of the humanitarian border because of the fact that politics is generative and immanent to it. But politics is important in a second sense: it serves to defi ne the very boundaries of the humanitarian. Thus far we have proceeded as though the meaning of humanitarianism were relatively clear, and the identity of humanitarian actors relatively settled. But this is far from always being the case. In my fi nal comment on the theme of the humanitarian border, I want to suggest that the very boundaries of the humanitarian are determined by political struggles. We should not assume that the humanitarian exists only as a settled terrain on which politics takes place. It is also possible to speak of political struggles which delimit the scope and the limits of the humanitarian. This is evident in a number of recent confl icts which are ongoing. The limits of the humanitarian are often drawn in very minor and perhaps barely perceptible ways. In some respects they could be said to be set from within. Take the case of the following reflection on the problem

156 William Walters of providing aid offered in a recent International Red Cross bulletin. It notes that while there is an urgent need to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in their quest to reach Spanish territory, “no one wants to create a ‘pull factor’ that attracts more irregular migrants into making deadly voyages” (Red Cross 2006). For this reason, it observes, “National societies—especially Red Crescent Societies in the Maghreb—have to think carefully before doing anything beyond providing basic humanitarian services to migrants.” Humanitarian reason may embody a critique of the existing border regime, a critique it will level in the name of its commitment to protecting all human life. Yet this little remark reveals the way in which this universalist ambition is cross-cut by a logic of liberal government. In this little expression “pull factor,” it is just possible to detect the distant echo of those older debates about the poor law and charity which so dominated the nineteenth century’s encounter with poverty (Dean 1991; Procacci 1991): how to offer aid without creating a regime that would “demoralize” the poor. If humanitarianism practices a minimalist biopolitics, confi ning itself to the provision of bare necessities, this is not solely out of expedience, or a reflection of the scarcity of resources. As the Red Cross seems to suggest, it is also out of liberal political calculation. In other circumstances the delimitation of the humanitarian by politics is more visible and pronounced. Such is the situation with ongoing legal cases which see the captains and crews of ships being prosecuted under Italian law on charges of assisting illegal immigration or even human trafficking. In some cases these are vessels operating under the auspices of humanitarian movements like Cap Anamur (Statewatch 2007). In others they are Tunisian fishermen who picked up shipwrecked migrants and landed them in Italian harbors (No Racism 2007). While the circumstances may vary, the common thread is that the practice of humanitarian intervention is revealed to be contestable. It is contested under law, where the prosecution seeks to redefi ne humanitarian action as “trafficking.” It is contested in political and media realms when, for instance, reputable German newspapers allege that Cap Anamur’s activities are not so much rescue missions as publicity stunts undertaken to raise the organization’s profi le and attract donations (Kreickenbaum 2004). In the latter instance, one sees the attempt to neutralize the moral and political charge of humanitarian action: by emphasizing its immersion within the grubby world of commercial selfinterest and organizational self-promotion, the humanitarian claim to be acting according to “higher moral purpose” is undermined. A recurring theme in my discussion has been the fluidity of the humanitarian border. It is not fixed or given once and for all. But the aforementioned cases reveal a different aspect of this fluidity. If the humanitarian border can be said to be an assemblage, it is a precarious one. In these instances logics of security, policing and law seek to eclipse and neutralize its presence. They seek to deactivate its elements, and contest their field of operation.


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My last point concerns the question of the contested identity of humanitarian agents. If the status of particular acts as “humanitarian” is not beyond politics then neither is the identity of particular agents. In other words, there is the question of who can act in the name of the humanitarian and how. One place such disputes have come into view is with the ongoing conflict between HRW and IOM. The latter is conventionally defi ned as an intergovernmental organization which specializes in the management of migration. Yet as we saw in earlier discussions of its growing profile in Lampedusa, IOM has come to describe key aspects of its own activities in the language of humanitarian assistance. Yet HRW has challenged such attempts to reposition and rebrand the IOM. For instance, it alleges that “IOM has no formal mandate to monitor human rights abuses or to protect the rights of migrants and other persons, even though literally millions of people worldwide participate in IOM-sponsored schemes and projects” (HRW 2003: 1). Not only is the IOM charged with lacking such a mandate, it is accused of participating in activities which actually violate the human rights of migrants. These range from its participation in the asylum determination process “imposed” on Haitian asylum seekers (HRW 2003: 1) to its facilitation of “voluntary-assisted returns” from closed detention centers, returns which are alleged to be less “voluntary” than the name suggests (HRW 2003: 7). Elsewhere, IOM pressure has seen HRW move to retract some of its criticisms. For instance, in one report on the situation facing migrants in Ukraine, HRW alleged that IOM was receiving funds from the EU to develop migrant detention centers in the north of the country, despite the weakness of Ukrainian law in this field (No Border 2006). But following complaints, the original report was removed and a revised version, acknowledging certain errors, released in January 2007. In the latter the section on IOM has been excised (HRW 2007). Such controversies can no doubt have a basis in certain entrenched patterns of inter-organizational rivalry. But the bigger point here is that, to return to a remark made in an earlier section, like the zones of qualification which Barry (2006) has theorized, the humanitarian border is a contentious space. Some would no doubt see humanitarianism as a kind of antipolitics which obscures the reality of social and global inequality. While there is no doubt whatsoever that the humanitarian crystallizes in the midst of complex relations of inequality, far from neutralizing political confl ict it should be seen as an emergent zone of politics in its own right.

7. CONCLUSION There is a certain paradox involved when we speak of Foucault and frontiers. In certain key respects it could be said that Foucault is one of our most eminent and original theorists of bordering. For at the heart of one of his most widely read works—namely Discipline and Punish—what does one

158 William Walters fi nd if not the question of power and how its modalities should be studied by focusing on practices of partitionment, segmentation, division, enclosure; practices that will underpin the ordering and policing of ever more aspects of the life of populations from the nineteenth century onwards. But while Foucault is interested in a range of practices which clearly pertain to the question of bordering understood in a somewhat general sense, one thing the reading of his lectures on security, governmentality and biopolitics reveals is that he had little to say explicitly about the specific forms of bordering associated with the government of the state. To put it differently, Foucault dealt at length with what we might call the microphysics of bordering, but much less with the place of borders considered at the level of tactics and strategies of governmentality. Recent literature has begun to address this imbalance, demonstrating that many of Foucault’s concepts are useful and important for understanding what kinds of power relations and governmental regimes are at stake in contemporary projects which are re-making state borders amidst renewed political concerns over things like terrorism and illegal immigration. However, the overarching theme of this chapter has been the need for caution when linking Foucault’s concepts to the study of borders and frontiers today. While analytics like biopolitics, discipline and neoliberalism offer all manner of insights, we need to avoid the trap which sees Foucault’s toolbox as something ready-made for any given situation. The challenge of understanding the emergent requires the development of new theoretical tools, not to mention the sharpening of older, well-used implements. With this end in mind the chapter has proposed the idea of the humanitarian border as a way of registering an event within the genealogy of the frontier, but also, although I have not developed it here, within the genealogy of citizenship. What I have presented previously is only a very cursory overview of certain features of the humanitarianization of borders, most notably its inscription within regimes of knowledge, and its constitutive relationship to politics. In future research it would be interesting to undertake a fuller mapping of the humanitarian border in relation to certain trajectories of government. While we saw how themes of biopolitical and neoliberal government are pertinent in understanding the contemporary management of spaces like the detention center, it would seem especially relevant to consider the salience of pastoralism. Pastoral power has received far less attention within studies of governmentality than, say, discipline or liberal government (but see Dean 1999; Golder 2007; Hindess 1996; Lippert 2004). But here again, I suspect, it will be important to revise our concepts in the light of emergent practices and rationalities. For the ways in which NGOs and humanitarians engage in the governance of migrants and refugees today have changed quite significantly from the kinds of networks of care, self-examination and salvation which Foucault identified with pastoralism. For instance, and to take but one example, the pastoral care of


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migrants, whether in situations of sanctuary or detention, is not organized as a life-encompassing, permanent activity as it was for the church, or later, in a secular version, the welfare state. Instead, it is a temporary and ad hoc intervention. Just as Foucault’s notion of neo-liberalism was intended to register important transformations within the genealogy of liberal government, it may prove useful to think in terms of the neo-pastoral when we try to make better sense of the phenomenon of humanitarian government at/of borders, and of many other situations as well. NOTES 1. In the more recent English translation of this lecture Burchell omits the reference to national boundaries (see Foucault 2007: 110). For still another translation of this passage, see Elden (2007: 567) who phrases it as “the administrative state, born in the frontier [de type frontalier] (and no longer feudal) territoriality . . .” 2. But see Foucault’s comments on military ports in Discipline and Punish (1977: 144), which could be read as pertaining to the disciplinary power of borders. He describes a special space characterized by the quest for circulation and the danger of “smuggling, contagion . . . [and] dangerous mixtures.” As such, the port, and especially the military port, would become a key node in the development of disciplinary spaces and techniques. Not the least of these was the invention of the naval hospital, as at Rochefort in northern France. 3. Foucault may have written little that explicitly addresses the matter of state frontiers, and more broadly, as Elden suggests, does not explore questions of territory with anything like the attention he would devote to the tactics of governmentality and biopower. That said, Foucault does offer us some intriguing observations about the history of territoriality, and more specifically, the function of knowledge and expertise in making space. For example, see his remarks about “the technicians or engineers of the three great variables—territory, communication, and speed” (Foucault 1984: 244). These experts are the engineers who built railways, bridges, roads and viaducts. If the political dream of governing the state in the image of the city found its exemplary figure in the architect, then the project of liberal governmentality was to affi rm the engineer as one of its most important experts. 4. Key works here include Bigo (1998; 2002; 2006) who skillfully combines a Foucauldian concern with technologies of security with Bourdieu’s notion of socio-institutional fields; a series of studies which examine the governance of borders in terms of neoliberal rationalities of risk and regulation (Epstein 2007; Gilbert 2007; Inda 2006; Muller 2004; Sparke 2006); research which examines particular sites of control such as airports (Salter 2007) and places of sanctuary (Lippert 2004); and more geographically-oriented work exploring the changing spatiality of borders and security practices (Barry 2006; Amoore 2006; Bonditti 2004; Walters 2002; 2006). Mention should also be made of Huspek’s (2001) study which adroitly uses the Foucauldian conception of strategy to challenge the statism of conventional accounts of border control. 5. Amongst the most extensive is the work of UNITED for Intercultural Action, which describes itself as a “network against nationalism, racism, fascism and in support of migrants and refugees.” As of 6 May 2008 it documents the

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

William Walters staggering number of 11,105 persons (it identifies all of them as “refugees”). The incidents of death include those who commit suicide while awaiting refugee hearings, those who perish during sea crossings, and those who die in detention due to a lack of medical attention. See http://www.unitedagainstracism.org/pdfs/actual_listofdeath.pdf. E.g., see http://www.iraqbodycount.org. One reason to question the assumption that the subjects of humanitarian government are powerless victims is that such a view entirely neglects those circumstances and occasions when these subjects generate what Rancière (2004) calls “dissensus”; when they act as subjects ”who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not” (2004: 302). On the dissensus of refugees see Nyers (2006). I am grateful to the editors for alerting me to this connection to Rancière. For example, see the work of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. This is the arm of the Vatican tasked with providing “pastoral care to ‘people on the move’” a constituency which embraces a wide assortment of subjects including fishermen, circus people, pilgrims and refugees. The exercise of pastoral care within detention centers and airport waiting zones is identified as one of its particular challenges. See http://www. vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/index.htm. For example, note how the Jesuit Refugee Service documents the highly discretionary way in which Cypriot police regulate the access of NGOs to detention facilities. But note also how JRS will mobilize the principle of the EU’s European Transparency Initiative as a norm to contest such practices; see JRS (2007: 168–169). But see the history of governing poverty, which is marked by episodes where the investigation of the poor displays many of these features, whether at the end of the nineteenth century or with the ”rediscovery” of poverty in the midst of the postwar boom (e.g., with the publication of Harrington’s The Other America). On the place of witnessing and spectacle within humanitarian politics, see Boltanski (1999: ch.3), Chakrabarty (2000), and Kurasawa 2007 (ch.2). On the problematic place of politics within governmentality studies, see Hindess (1997) and O’Malley, Weir and Shearing (1997).

REFERENCES Albahari, Maurizio. (2006). Death and the Modern State: Making Borders and Sovereignty at the Southern Edges of Europe, Working Paper 137, The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California at San Diego. Albahari, Maurizio. (in press). Charitable Borders? Religion, Policing and Belonging on the Italian Maritime Edge, in Jutta Lauth Bacas and William Kavanagh (eds) Asymmetry and Proximity in Border Encounters. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Amoore, Louise. (2006). Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror. Political Geography 25(3): 336–351. Anderson, Malcolm. (1996). Frontiers. Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. Andreas, Peter and Thomas Biersteker (eds). (2003). The Rebordering of North America. New York: Routledge. Andrijasevic, Rutvica. (2006). How to Balance Rights and Responsibilities on Asylum at the EU’s Southern Border of Italy and Libya. Brussels: Centre for Policy Studies.


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Andrijasevic, Rutvica. (2006). Lampedusa in Focus: Migrants Caught between the Desert and the Deep Sea. Feminist Review 82(1): 120–125. Aradau, Claudia. (2004). The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitization of Human Trafficking. Millennium 33(2): 251–277. Barry, Andrew. (2006). Technological Zones. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 239–253. Bigo, Didier. (1998). Frontiers and Security in the European Union: The Illusion of Migration Control, pp. 148–64 in Malcolm Anderson and Eberhart Bort (eds) The Frontiers of Europe. London/Washington DC: Pinter. Bigo, Didier. (2002). Border Regimes, Police Cooperation and Security in an Enlarged European Union, pp. 213–39 in Jan Zielonka (ed) Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of Europe. London: Routledge. Bigo, Didier. (2006). Protection: Security, Territory and Population, pp. 84–100 in Jeff Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik (eds) The Politics of Protection. New York: Routledge. Black, Jeremy. (1997). Maps and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boltanski, Luc. (1999). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonditti, Philippe. (2004). From Territorial Space to Networks: A Foucauldian Approach to the Implementation of Biometry. Alternatives 29(4): 465–482. Buonfi no, Alessandra. (2004). Between Unity and Plurality: The Politicization and Securitization of the Discourse of Immigration in Europe. New Political Science 26(1): 23–49. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Calhoun, Craig. (2004). A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41(4): 373–395. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (2000). Witness to Suffering: Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Modern Subject in Bengal, pp. 49–86 in Timothy Mitchell (ed) Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coutin, Susan B. (2003). Illegality, Borderlands, and the Space of Nonexistence, pp. 171–202 in Richard Perry and Bill Maurer (eds) Globalization under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crampton, Jeremy. (2007). Maps, Race and Foucault: Eugenics and Territorialization following World War I, pp. 223–244 in Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cuttitta, Paolo. (2006). Points and Lines: A Topography of Borders in the Global Space. Ephemera 6(1): 27–39. Dean, Mitchell. (1991). The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. NY: Routledge. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Debrix, François. (1998). Deterritorialised Territories, Borderless Borders: The New Geography of International Medical Assistance. Third World Quarterly 19(5): 827–846. Dezalay, Yyves and Bryant Garth. (2006). From the Cold War to Kosovo: The Rise and Renewal of the Field of International Human Rights. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 231–255. Donzelot, Jacques and Colin Gordon. (2008). Governing Liberal Societies—The Foucault Effect in the English-Speaking World. Foucault Studies 5: 48–62.

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Doty, Roxanne. (2006). Fronteras Compasivas and the Ethics of Unconditional Hospitality. Millennium 35(1): 53–74. Dunn, Elizabeth. (2005). Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe, pp. 173–193 in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Elden, Stuart. (2007). Governmentality, Calculation, Territory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25: 562–580. Epstein, Charlotte. (2007). Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders. International Political Sociology 1(2): 149– 164. Fassin, Didier. (2007). Humanitarianism: A Nongovernmental Government, pp. 149–160 in Michel Feher (ed) Nongovernmental Politics. New York: Zone Books. Febvre, Lucien. (1973). Frontière: The Word and the Concept, pp. 208–218 in Peter Burke (ed) A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Fekete, Liz. (2005). The Deportation Machine: Europe, Asylum and Human Rights. Race and Class 47(1): 64–91. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: A. Lane. Foucault, Michel. (1984). Space, Knowledge, and Power, pp. 239–257 in Paul Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1988). Politics and Reason, pp. 57–85 in Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed) Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. (1991). Governmentality, pp. 87–104 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. (1994). Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir, pp. 521– 25 in Dits et Ecrits II: 1954–1988, Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freudenstein, Roland. (2000). Río Odra, Río Buh: Poland, Germany, and the Borders of Twenty-First-Century Europe, pp. 173–184 in Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder (eds) The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Gallagher, Anna Marie, Helen Ireland and Naboth Muchopa. (2006). Handbook for Visitors and Social Workers in Detention Centres. Brussels: Jesuit Refugee Service. Gatti, Fabrizio. (2005). Io, Clandestino a Lampedusa, L’espresso, October 6. Gilbert, Elizabeth. (2007). Leaky Borders and Solid Citizens: Governing Security, Prosperity and Quality of Life in a North American Partnership. Antipode 39(1): 77–98. Golder, Ben. (2007). Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power. Radical Philosophy 10(2): 157–176. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hindess, Barry. (1996). Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford// Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hindess, Barry. (1997). Politics and Governmentality. Economy and Society 26(2): 257–272.


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Hirst, Paul. (2005). Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity. Human Rights Watch. (2002). The Other Face of the Canary Islands: Rights Violations against Migrants and Asylum Seekers. Human Rights Watch 14(1)(D). Human Rights Watch. (2003). The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Human Rights Protection in the Field: Current Concerns. A Submission to the IOM Governing Council Meeting, 86th Session, November 18–21, Geneva. New York: Human Rights Watch. Available online at: www. hrw.org/backgrounder/migrants/iom-submission-1103.htm (accessed October 2, 2008). Human Rights Watch. (2005). Ukraine: On the Margins. Rights Violations against Migrants and Asylum Seekers at the New Eastern Border of the European Union. Human Rights Watch 17 (8D). Available online at: www.hrw.org/sites/ default/fi les/reports/ukraine1105webwcover.pdf (accessed October 2, 2008). Human Rights Watch. (2006). Stemming the Flow: Abuses against Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees. Human Rights Watch 18 (5E). Available online at: www.hrw.org/sites/default/fi les/reports/libya0906webwcover.pdf (accessed October 2, 2008). Huspek, Michael. (2001). Production of State, Capital, and Citizenry: The Case of Operation Gatekeeper. Social Justice 28(2): 51–68. Inda, Jonathan. 2006. Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell. International Organization for Migration. (2007). Director General Visits Reception Facility on Island of Lampedusa. IOM Press Briefi ng Notes, June 29, Archived by Migreurop. Available online at: http://archives.rezo.net/migreurop. mbox/200706.mbox/%3C9CA3DF28–7E56–4E87–9A91–425503490845@ kein.org%3E (accessed October 2, 2008). Isin, Engin and Kim Rygiel. (2006). Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps, pp. 181–203 in Elizabeth Dauphinee and Christina Masters (eds) The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jesuit Refugee Service. (2006). Belgium: Detention Centres not Transparent. Available online at: www.jrs.net/reports/index.php?lang=en&sid=1443 (accessed October 2, 2008). Jesuit Refugee Service. (2007). Detention in the 10 New Member States (summary). Available online at: www.jrseurope.org/publications/10%20NMS%20 report%20summary.pdf (accessed October 2, 2008). Kreickenbaum, Martin. (2004). European Governments Make an Example of Cap Anamur Refugees. Available online at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/ jul2004/anam-j22_prn.shtml (accessed October 2, 2008). Kurasawa, Fuyuki. (2007). The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lippert, Randy. (2004). Sanctuary Practices, Rationalities, and Sovereignties, Alternatives 29: 535–555. Maier, Charles. (2002). Does Europe Need a Frontier? From Territorial to Redistributive Community, pp. 17–37 in Jan Zielonka (ed) Europe Unbound. Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union. London: Routledge. Médecins sans Frontières. (2005). Violence and Immigration: Report on Illegal Sub-Saharan Immigrants (ISSs) in Morocco. Available online at : http://www. msf.org/source/countries/africa/morocco/2005/morocco_2005.pdf (accessed October 2, 2008). Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. (2003). Né qui, né altrove—Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue. borderlands e-journal 2(1). Available online at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/mezzadra_neilson.html (accessed October 2, 2008).

164 William Walters Muller, Benjamin. (2004). (Dis)Qualified Bodies: Securitization, Citizenship and “Identity Management.” Citizenship Studies 8(3): 279–294. No Border. (2006). IOM Watch. HRW Report on IOM Role in Ukraine. Available online at: http://www.noborder.org/iom/display.php?id=367 (accessed October 2, 2008). No Racism. (2007). Trial in Agrigento: No to the Criminalization of Solidarity. Available online at: http://no-racism.net/print/2254/ (accessed October 2, 2008). Nyers, Peter. (2003). Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement. Third World Quarterly 24(6): 1069–1093. O’Malley, Pat. (1996). Indigenous Governance. Economy & Society 25(3): 310– 326. O’Malley, Pat, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing (1997) Governmentality, Criticism, Politics, Economy and Society 26(4): 501–517. Procacci, Giovanna. (1991). Social Economy and the Government of Poverty, pp. 151–168 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pugh, Michael. (2004). Drowning Not Waving: Boat People and Humanitarianism at Sea. Journal of Refugee Studies 17(1): 50–69. Rancière, Jacques. (2004). Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2–3): 297–310. Redfield, Peter. (2005). Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis. Cultural Anthropology 20(3): 328–361. Redfield, Peter. (2006). A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement. American Ethnologist 33(1): 3–26. Rodriguez, Nestor. (1996). The Battle for the Border: Notes on Autonomous Migration, Transnational Communities, and the State. Social Justice 23(3): 21–37. Ron, James, Howard Ramos and Kathleen Rodgers. (2005). Transnational Information Politics: NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986–2000. International Studies Quarterly 49(3): 557–588. Salter, Mark. (2007). Governmentalities of an Airport. International Political Sociology 1(1): 49–66. Sassen, Saskia. (2003). A Universal Harm: Making Criminals of Migrants. OpenDemocracy, August 20. Available online at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ people-migrationeurope/article_1444.jsp (accessed October 2, 2008). Sparke, Matthew. (2006). A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship at the Border. Political Geography 25(2): 151–180. Statewatch. (2007). Criminalising Solidarity—Cap Anamur Trial Underway. Available online at http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/apr/03italy-cape-anamur. htm (accessed October 2, 2008). Walters, William. (2002). Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalizing the Border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(5): 561–580. Walters, William. (2006). Border/Control. European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 187–203. Wynter, Alex. (2006). Deadly Passage. Magazine of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Available online at: http://www.redcross.int/EN/ mag/magazine2006_2/12–14.html (accessed October 2, 2008).

8

Beyond Foucault From Biopolitics to the Government of Life Thomas Lemke Only when we know what is this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is. (Foucault 2008: 22)

The concept of biopolitics has had a remarkable career. Until recently only a small number of specialists were familiar with it, but at present it is enjoying ever-greater resonance. The spectrum of its uses now extends from refugee policies to AIDS prevention and onward to questions regarding population growth.1 The concept has become a universal cipher for encapsulating the general results of biological knowledge and bio-technical innovation; it designates a diffuse mix composed of ethical concerns, political challenges, and economic interests (see Anderson 1987; Gerhardt 2004). That the concept has a century-old history is not so well known. It already surfaces in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, initially in organistic concepts of the state (Kjellén 1920; Roberts 1938), and later in Nazi texts in which the regulation of life and race took a prominent role (von Kohl 1933; Reiter 1939).2 In the 1960s, a new research field called “biopolitics” emerged in Anglo-American political science, its basic tenet being that political action rests on biological laws that consequently need to be taken account of by political scientists and social scientists. For this approach, the analysis of political structures and processes demands application of knowledge from the behavioral sciences, social biology, and evolutionary theory (Somit and Peterson 1998; Masters 2001; Alford and Hibbing 2008). In face of this naturalism, Michel Foucault proposed a relational and historical concept of “biopolitics.” In his work, the term in fact denotes an explicit break with the effort to derive political processes and structures from biological determinants. To the contrary, Foucault analyzes the historical process within which “life” emerges as the “object” of political strategies. Instead of presuming originary and timeless laws, he diagnoses a historical caesura—a discontinuity of political praxis. In this respect, biopolitics signifies a specifi c modern form of the exercise of power. Historically and analytically, Foucault distinguished between two dimensions of this “life”-oriented power: on the one hand, the

166 Thomas Lemke disciplining of the individual body; on the other hand, regulation of the populace (1990a: 139; 141–145). Foucault viewed the combination of these two dimensions as the essential premise for establishing capitalism and constituting the national state. That combinatory process, he argued, allowed the creation of economically productive, militarily useful, and politically obedient bodies, a separation of the “birth of biopolitics” from the emergence of capitalism thus being impossible (Foucault 2000: 137). Within this biopolitical constellation, modern racism is of central significance. It establishes an analytic grid distinguishing “what must live” from “what must die,” good, higher, and ascending races from those deemed bad, inferior, and descending, thus allowing a hierarchization and fragmentation of the social sphere (2003: 254).3 Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is complex and has been assessed in highly varied ways. Very schematically, two central lines of reception can be distinguished. The first has its home in philosophy and social and political theory; it focuses on the mode of politics. How does biopolitics function and what counterforces does it mobilize? How is it to be distinguished historically and analytically from “classical” forms of political representation and articulation? The extreme poles of the relevant debate represent its most prominent contributions: the writings of Giorgio Agamben on the one side, those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the other. The second line of reception has its starting point in the sociology of science and technology, the history of science and medicine, and cultural anthropology, together with feminist theory and gender studies. Its main interest is the substance of life. If as a result of biotechnical developments the living body is now understood as a readable and rewritable text, then the question of biopolitics is posed in a new way: what is the meaning of life within such a political-technical constellation? In the fi rst two sections of this contribution, I will trace revisions and refi nements of the concept of biopolitics that have been formulated in these two lines of reception. In the third section, I suggest tying the two research perspectives closer together—an approach already embedded in Foucault’s work but not systematically developed. My main argument is that Foucault pursues the question of biopolitics further within a “grid of governmentality” (Foucault 2008: 186). Initially, his analysis of biopolitical mechanisms in Discipline and Punish and the Will to Knowledge fell short, since it concentrated on disciplinary processes and ways of regulating the populace, thus being broadly reduced to a kind of body politics. In contrast, the concept of government directs our attention to the relation between forms of self-direction and government by others, allowing an investigation of moral-political modes of existence. In total, the project outlined here is aimed at a systematic linkage between two central concepts from Foucault’s work—biopolitics and governmentality—and an analytics of biopolitics whose dimensions will be described in the last section of this article. Such an analytics will make it possible to formulate a series of questions that usually remain outside the pertinent academic and political discussions; it

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also allows an exploration of the systematic ties between liberal forms of government and biopolitical problems.

1. BARE LIFE OR LIVING MULTITUDE: WHAT IS POLITICS? Giorgio Agamben (1998) has outlined one of the most important revisions of the concept of biopolitics. Agamben, in fact, presumes that all Western politics since antiquity should be characterized as biopolitics. In order to justify this thesis, he takes up ideas from Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Georges Bataille, along with Foucault. According to Agamben, the main difference within the realm of the political is not that between friend and enemy (pace Schmitt) but that between “bare life” (zoé) and political existence (bíos), natural being and a human being’s legal existence. In this light, the inclusion into a political community seems only possible by the sumultaneous exclusion of some human beings who are not allowed to become full legal subjects. According to Agamben, we fi nd at the beginning of all politics the establishment of a borderline and the inauguration of a space that is deprived of the protection of the law: “The original juridico-political relationship is the ban” (ibid.: 189). In this manner, for Agamben the present period is the catastrophic endpoint of a political tradition that originated in Greek antiquity and led to the death camps. In Homo Sacer and subsequent work, Agamben declared the camps to be the “biopolitical paradigm of the West” (1998: 181), since they were the locus of a disappearance of the border between rule and exception. However, his discussion of the camps is not primarily related to past horror but to present sites marked by the state of exception: places where law and fact, rule and exception indistinguishably intermesh. Here not legal subjects but “bare life” can be encountered; the state of exception is permanently in play. Alongside death camp inmates, the examples Agamben introduces are stateless people, refugees, and comatose patients. However, Agamben is less interested in life than in its “nakedness”; at the center of his reflections stand not drills and discipline, life’s normalization and endowment with norms, but rather the threat of death as the establishment and materializing of a border. For Agamben, biopolitics is thus above all “thanatopolitics” (1998: 122; 1999: 84–86; see Fitzpatrick 2001: 263–265; Mbembe 2003).4 In their work, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri arrive at entirely different conclusions. They try to give the concept of biopolitics positive meaning, tying their arguments to the Italian movement for workers’ autonomy, ideas from classical political and legal theory, poststructuralist critiques centered on identity and the subject, and the Marxist tradition. Where Agamben criticizes Foucault for failing to see that modern biopolitics rests on the solid foundation of a premodern sovereign power, Hardt and Negri criticize the French thinker for having failed to recognize the transformation of modern into postmodern biopolitics.

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For Hardt and Negri, biopolitics does not involve an intermeshing of rule and exception but rather a dissolution of the boundaries between economics and politics, reproduction and production, thus marking nothing less than a new stage of capitalism. Here, in their view, the creation of “life” is no longer something both limited to the realm of reproduction and subordinated to the labor process; to the contrary, “life” now determines production itself. With biopolitics, they designate the constitution of a political regime that in the end embraces the totality of the individual’s existence, thus preparing the way for a new revolutionary subject: a creative and living entity, the “multitude.” Hence the biopolitical order that Hardt and Negri delineate possesses the material requirements for forms of associative cooperation potentially going beyond the structural constraints of capitalist production: “Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 392). For these two authors, “biopolitics” stands for an entire series of fractures and border displacements. It signifies the transition from modernity to postmodernity, imperialism to empire, and also marks a new relation between nature and culture (ibid: 187). It signifies a “civilization of nature,” nature here meaning everything previously external to the production process. This diagnosis is the basis for the immanent perspective defi ning the analysis of Hardt and Negri. Once economics and politics, societal production and ideological legitimation become more or less conflated, we no longer have an external standpoint of life or truth to be set against Empire. Empire creates the world in which it lives: “Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord” (ibid: 23–24). According to Hardt and Negri all of society is subsumed under capitalism, but these authors tie this seemingly gloomy diagnosis to a revolutionary promise. If biopower represents power over life, this very life forms the terrain upon which counterforces and modes of resistance are constituted. The same competences, affects, and forms of cooperation promoted by the new order of production and rule undermine that order by barricading themselves against cooption and exploitation, while awakening the desire for autonomous and egalitarian forms of life. In this way biopower reacts to a living and creative biopolitical force external to it, which it regulates and forms without, however, being able to completely control and rule it. From this perspective, biopolitics stands opposed to biopower and points to the possibility of new associative forms emerging from the body and its own powers.5

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The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has developed his own concept of biopolitics at a critical distance from both Agamben’s project and the analysis of Hardt and Negri. Bíos. Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008) is the last part of a trilogy taking up and developing ideas from the two previous books.6 Esposito’s main thesis is that is that modern Western political thinking is ruled by the “paradigm of immunization” (2008: 45). Through a reconstruction of political theory since Hobbes, he argues that modern concepts of security, property, and freedom can only be properly understood within a logic of immunity: a logic characterized by an inner connection between life and politics, in which immunity preserves and develops life by limiting its expansive and productive force. At the center of political action and thinking stands the safeguarding and protection of life: an objective that in the end produces (self-)destructive effects. To the degree that the logic of immunization protects and preserves, it negates the singularity of life processes, reducing them to biological existence. The “immunitary dialectic” (2008: 56) leads, Esposito argues, from a project to preserve life, to a negative form of protecting life, and onward to its negation. The paradigm of immunity allows an understanding of the opposing aspects and dimensions of biopolitics—promotion and development of life on the one hand, its destruction on the other, as two constitutive moments of a shared problematic. Esposito views the Nazi racial program as the most radical expression of an “immunatory” rationality in which a lifecentered politics becomes inverted into its negative, a politics of death (a “thanatopolitics”). Like Foucault and Agamben, he insists that Nazism is part of a continuum of modern political thought; but unlike them he locates its specific characteristics neither in a principle of sovereignty nor in the primacy of a state of exception. Rather, Esposito (2008: 137–138) underscores the medical-therapeutic aims of Nazism, the programmatic significance it ascribes to the struggle against illness, degeneration, and death. Esposito (2008: 3–7; see also Campbell 2008) sees this “thanatopolitics” as by no means disappearing with the defeat of Nazi Germany, but continuing to shape the present. As a counter-model, he presents an affi rmative “biopolitics”; its points of reference include the idea of a non-completed, open individual and collective body that resists any efforts at unification and closure, and that of an immanent normativity of life standing opposed to the project of an external control of life processes. This vision of an affirmative biopolitics is meant to be “capable of overturning the Nazi politics of death in a politics that is no longer over life but of life” (2008: 11; italics in original). In place of a self-destructive logic of immunity, it presents a new concept of communality—a concept recognizing the individual/collective body’s constitutive vulnerability, openness, and fi nitude as the very foundation for the community, instead of permanently struggling against such qualities as a perceived threat to it.

170 Thomas Lemke 2. MOLECULAR POLITICS, ANTHROPOPOLITICS, THANATOPOLITICS: WHAT IS LIFE? The second line of reception tied to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics addresses recent research in the biosciences, analyzing technological developments that allow access to “life itself” (Franklin 2000). It starts with the observation that as a result of biotechnological practices, the idea of a natural orgin of all living beings is beginning to be replaced by the idea of an artificial plurality of living beings that are more technical artifacts than natural entities. Various technological innovations such as—to name only a few—the redefi nition by molecular biology of life as a text, biomedical progress involving new techniques extending from brain scans to DNA analysis, and transplantation medicine and technologies of reproduction, have broken with the idea of an integral body. The body is increasingly viewed not as an organic substrate but as a kind of molecular software that can, as suggested, be both read and rewritten. Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock succinctly describe this transformation of bíos as follows: “Genealogical succession is to the new biology what a live orchestra is to digital recording” (Franklin and Lock 2003: 14). Molecularization and digitalization mark a “recombinant biopolitics” (Dillon and Reid 2001: 44; see also Dillon and Reid 2009) operating both inside and outside the human body’s boundaries. It opens a new level of intervention within that body, at the same time allowing new combinations of heterogeneous elements into previously unknown life forms. The art of molecular engineering differs in a distinct way from traditional forms of biological and medical intervention in that it is aimed not only at modifying metabolic processes but at reprogramming them as well. No longer control of outer nature, but a transformation of inner nature stands at the center of this political epistemology of life. As a consequence biology can no longer be defi ned as a discovery-based science registering and documenting life processes; rather, it operates as a transformational science that creates life and alters living beings (Rheinberger 2000; Rabinow 2001; Clarke et al. 2003; Rose 2007). This instrumentalization of life cannot be separated from its capitalization. Instead of functioning as a supplier of raw material for production, in the age of genetic diversity “nature” can be understood as a source and creator of values. The reproduction and transformation of life processes can create what Catherine Waldby (2000) has called “biovalue,”7 which forms the basis for developing new products and services within a capitalist economy. Biological knowledge and life forms can be patented and marketed. In that way a political economy of life emerges in which biological life-value and capitalist exploitation establish an organic connection (Andrews and Nelkin 2001; Sunder Rajan 2005; Cooper 2008). When it comes to the Foucaultian concept of bioethics, these alterations of bíos suggest three lines of criticism and suggestions for improvement.8

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In the fi rst place, it is clear that the Foucaultian concept largely adheres to the idea of an integral body; Foucault’s analysis of techniques of power aimed at forming and dividing up the body itself postulates a self-contained and enclosable body. Today, biotechnologies allow a dismantling and recombination of the body that Foucault could not have foreseen.9 The body no longer appears as a self-evident starting point and organic substrate to which technologies attach themselves in order to form it, but as the effect of techniques of embodiment (de Lauretis 1987; Haraway 1995; Butler 1993).10 The new level of intervention established by the aforementioned techno-scientific advances is located beneath the classical biopolitical poles of “individual” and “population.” Anatomo-politics and population regulation are complemented by a “molecular politics” whose regard for individual persons is no longer anatomical or physiological but genetic, and which simultaneously locates them within a “gene pool” (Flower and Heath 1993; Lemke 2004). In the second place, this expanded grip on the body has led to a new relationship between life and death. Although in his Birth of the Clinic (1973) Foucault treats death as an integral aspect of modern medicine, in other texts he seems to see it as the outer border or other side of biopolitics. At present living and dying are more closely and systematically interconnected than Foucault assumed. For one thing, “human material” transcends the living human being. Humans who die are often no longer “really” dead, with portions of their bodies, their cells or organs, blood, marrow, and so forth, continuing to exist in the bodies of others, whose “quality of life” is thus improved or whose life is prolonged. Life material is not subject to the same biological rhythms as the organic body—it can be stored as information in DNA databases and in blood banks or cultivated in potentially immortal stem-cell lines. And the death of one person can guarantee the life and survival of another, in a productive cycle (Iacub 2001; Franklin and Lock 2003). Furthermore, death has been both broken up and rendered flexible. The defi nition of “brain death” and the emergence of reanimation techniques, together with the subsequent splitting of death into various corporeal regions and points in time, have allowed a development and expansion of transplantation medicine. Not so much state sovereignty, but rather medical-administrative authorities, now make decisions about life and death: they defi ne what (human) life is, when it begins and when it ends. In an entirely new way, thanatopolitics has become a part of biopolitics. And fi nally: despite his diagnosis of the “death of man” (Foucault 1970), for Foucault biopolitics remains oriented toward human individuals and populations, which results in two problems. On the one hand, this approach fails to illuminate the ways in which ecological management and environmental discourse insert themselves into the (re)production of the human species. It seems necessary to extend the concept of biopolitics to take in the administration and control of the conditions of life in general. As Rutherford (1999: 45) has put it, “Foucault did not adequately deal with

172 Thomas Lemke the way in which the political and ecological problematization of populations also gave rise, in more recent times, to a similar problematization of nature and environment.” On the other hand, the reconfiguration of bodies as texts tends to also dissolve the epistemological and normative borderline between humans and non-humans. If life can be reduced to genetic structures, then the differences between humans and nonhumans are gradual, not categorical. The human being aimed at by bio-medical optimization strategies, less frequently ill and living longer, is at the same time an animal—otherwise the biological discourse about “model organisms” would make no sense, since it is mice and cats, apes and other animals upon which human diseases are researched and pharmaceutical substances tried out. In this light, being human no longer presents itself as the solid result of evolutionary-natural processes, but rather as the precarious product of technology and the object of both social negotiation and patterns of cultural interpretation: biopolitics as anthropopolitics (Rabinow 1996; Haraway 1997; Calarco 2008).11

3. VITAL POLITICS: THE GOVERNMENT OF LIFE This brief overview points to the various lines of reception of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as having been deepened and further developed in important respects. A new biopolitical level is clearly present both beyond and beneath the levels of the individual and the populace; it is grounded in an expanded knowledge of the body and biological processes. Within this altered representational regime, the body is less a physical substrate or anatomical machine than an informational network. At the same time, in analyzing biopolitical mechanisms a range of modes of subjectification need to be considered, in order to understand the impact of the control and direction of life processes on individual and collective actors, resulting in new forms of identity. Over recent years, the Foucaultian notion of biopolitics has served as a starting point for a focus on the significance of knowledge production and processes of subjectification. Important and necessary though such an expansion of the analytical horizon is, it is important to keep in mind that for the most part the two lines of reception have developed their problems independently and hardly touch on each other. This leads not only to a danger of mutual blindness, but also to the risk of reproducing and renewing an outdated division of labor. Where one side is interested in the political sphere or macro-level, formulating questions of power and resistance, subjectification and subjugation, the other side investigates technologies on a micro-level, often at a distance or even cut off from political questions. Here the fi rst line tends to analyze political processes without considering material technologies, and the second concentrates on technological developments while often isolating them from political strategies.12

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In this light, I would now like to propose a third perspective, focusing neither on processes of subjectification nor on forms of knowledge, but rather resituating the biopolitical problematic within an analytics of government. Biopolitics is here meant to be understood as an “art of government” (Foucault 2008: 1) that takes account of the relational network of power processes, practices of knowledge, and forms of subjectification. This suggestion is tied to the project that Foucault formulated while summarizing his lecture of 1979 on “the birth of biopolitics” as follows: The theme was to have been “biopolitics,” by which I meant the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race. . . . (Foucault 2008: 317) There is a widespread view that in the framework of his analytics of government, Foucault did not concern himself further with the theme of biopolitics. I believe this view is mistaken: the theme was not abandoned but experienced a “theoretical shift” (Foucault 1990b: 6). Foucault places the question of biopolitics in a more general theoretical framework meant to allow a systematic linkage between processes of power, knowledge practices, and forms of subjectification comprising the relational network referred to previously. Within this perspective biopolitics has more to do with techniques of (self-)government, going beyond practices aimed at corporeal discipline and regulating the populace. The “birth of biopolitics” is closely tied to the emergence of liberal forms of government. Foucault understands liberalism as a specific art of leading human beings which is oriented toward the population as a new political figure, and disposing over the political economy as a technique of intervention.13 Liberalism introduces a rationality of government that differs from both medieval concepts of rule and early modern raison d’état: the idea of a “nature” of society forming both the basis and boundaries of governmental action. The eighteenth century emergence of political economy, and of the population, cannot be separated from the constitution of modern biology. Liberal concepts of autonomy and freedom are closely connected to biological concepts of self-preservation and self-regulation that came to prevail over the previously dominant physical-mechanistic model for investigating the body. Originating around 1800, biology was based on an organizational principle understanding the visible phenomena of life as emerging essentially at random, without a set plan. Internal organization thus replaced an external order corresponding to the plans of a higher authority beyond life, with “life” functioning as an abstract and dynamic principle equally inherent in all organisms. Categories such as self-preservation, reproduction, and development now came to characterize living bodies, placed at

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a greater distance from artificial creations than had been the case before (Foucault 1971). When in the lectures of 1978 and 1979 Foucault defi nes “liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics” (2008: 22), this signals a shift of accent from his previous work, resulting not least from self-critical insight: to the effect that his previous analyses of forms of biopolitical power were one-sided and unsatisfactory, since they focused mainly on processes involving population regulation and corporeal disciplining. Foucault’s analytics of government forms a contrast to this, expanding body politics with the perspective of “vital politics.” This concept stems from Alexander Rüstow, one of the most important representatives of postwar German liberalism, whom Foucault briefly touches on in the 1979 lecture (ibid.: 148; 157). By “vital politics,” Rüstow means a form of politics “that considers all factors upon which happiness, well-being, and satisfaction in reality depend” (1955: 70). This politics is, he indicates, by no means limited to action by the state, but “is politics in the broadest possible sense . . . , all social measures and experimental arrangements” (1957: 235); it relies on social ties and spiritual cohesion and reactivates moral values and cultural traditions, its goal being to insert an “ever more dense net and weave of living ties [lebendiger Bindungen] into the entire social realm” (ibid.: 238). This is a task of integration and innovation needing to take in all societal elements and levels while simultaneously acknowledging their self-directing competencies. Foucault’s analytics of government takes account of these vital-political ambitions of (neo-) liberal governmental practice, tying the analysis of physical-biological being to an examination of subjectification processes and moral-political modes of existence. Following a suggestion by Lars Thorup Larsen (2003), not only two subject forms of biopolitics—individual and populace—can here be distinguished, but also, taking up Agamben’s own distinction, two forms of life: zoé and bíos. This analytic distinction makes it possible to scrutinize the ways the two biopolitical dimensions are intertwined. In Discipline and Punish and The Will to Knowledge, Foucault’s concept of biopolitics remains centered on individual disciplining and regulation of the populace; the analysis of subjectification processes essentially limits itself to subjugation and corporeal dressage, hence to the dimension of zoé, with techniques of self-constitution receiving little notice.14 With the problematic of government, the perspective broadens, with the question of moral and political existence now also emerging: the problem, then, of bíos. Analysis of disciplinary and regulatory processes is now supplemented with analysis of another form of power, a form that “categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him” (Foucault 2000: 331). Beyond technologies of bodily disciplining and the regulation of the population, attention is now also focused on the self-constitution of individual

Beyond Foucault Table 8.1

175

Different Biopolitical Technologies15 Subject form

Individual

Collective

Life form zoé (physical being)

Technologies of the Body Technologies of the Population

bíos (moral and political being)

Technologies of the Self

Technologies of the Social

and collective subjects. Accordingly, Foucault now distinguishes between “political technologies of individuals” and “technologies of the self.” The fi rst of these leads us “to recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of a nation or of a state” (Foucault 2000: 404). Such technologies can be designated more generally, and perhaps more precisely, as “technologies of the social,” a phrase here not meant to suggest here that technologies have social applications but rather referring to practices that generate society as an imaginary totality and fictive collective body in the fi rst place.15 In distinction to “technologies of the social,” “technologies of the self” allow individuals “to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power” (Foucault 1997: 177). In this manner four interconnected biopolitical dimensions can be analytically differentiated; they are presented in the Table 8.1.

4. GOVERNMENTALITY AND BIOPOLITICS The linkage of these four dimensions allows to treat the problem of biopolitics in a more complex theoretical framework. For Foucault, modern biopolitics is a historical form of articulation of a much more general problem: the linkage between pastoral and political power extending back into Christian antiquity.16 With the advent of liberal government, this problem took on a specific form. For one particular question first surfaces with liberalism: how are free subjects—subjects of law—governed when they are simultaneously understood as living beings? Foucault focuses on this problem when he insists that the issue of biopolitics cannot be separated from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity. This means “liberalism,” since it was in relation to liberalism that they assumed the form of a challenge. How can the phenomena of “population,” with its specific effects and problems,

176 Thomas Lemke be taken into account in a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and individual free enterprise? In the name of what and according to what rules can it be managed? (Foucault 2008: 317) Liberal government, Foucault observes, developed a specific political knowledge and made use of disciplines like statistics, demography, epidemiology, and biology, analyzing life processes at the level of population groups in order to “govern” individuals through correcting, excluding, normalizing, disciplining, and optimizing measures. Foucault emphasizes that in the framework of the government of living beings, nature represents no autonomous realm in principle free of intervention, but itself depends on governmental action: no material substrate upon which governmental practices might be applied, but rather their constant correlative. The peculiar subject-object status of the political figure of the “population” plays an important role here. On the one hand, that figure stands for a collective reality essentially independent of political intervention and distinguished, as outlined previously, by its own dynamic and self-directing competency; on the other hand, this autonomy does not represent any absolute boundary for political intervention, but rather its privileged reference. The discovery of a population’s “nature” (for instance through birth rates, death rates, and rates of disease) is the precondition for the possibility of its deliberate direction. But with liberal governmentality, not only does biological life emerge as an object and reference of government, but “political life” does so as well. Liberalism is tied to the constitution of a bourgeois society and a public sphere that reflects about governmental practices, inquires into their pros and cons, and criticizes their possible excesses.17 For this reason Foucault understands liberalism not only as a political theory or an economic doctrine, but also as a form of critical reflection on governmental practice . . . The question of liberalism, understood as a question of “too much government,” has been one of the constant dimensions of that recent European phenomenon which seems to have emerged fi rst of all in England, namely: “political life.” It is even one of its constituent elements, if it is true that political life exists when the possible excess of governmental practice is limited by the fact that it is the object of public debate regarding its “good or bad,” its “too much or too little.” (Foucault 2008: 321–322) Beyond Foucault, the various correctives and refinements of the concept of biopolitics allow us to sketch in an “analytics of biopolitics” taking account of the interplay between power relations, knowledge practices and forms of subjectification. In turn, we can differentiate three dimensions of this analytic perspective (see also Rabinow and Rose 2006: 197–198).18

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First, biopolitics requires systematic knowledge of “life” and “living beings.” Systems of knowledge provide cognitive and normative maps that allow an opening of biopolitical spaces in the fi rst place and specify objects for intervention. They render the reality of life understandable and calculable, so that it can be shaped and transformed. We thus fi rst need to understand the regime of truth forming the backdrop of biopolitical practice (and we need to understand the selectivity inscribed in this regime): what knowledge of bodies and life processes is considered especially relevant, and which alternative interpretations of reality are demoted or marginalized? Which scientific experts and disciplines dispose over legitimate authority to tell the truth regarding life, health, the populace, and so forth? Which cognitive and intellectual instruments and which technological procedures are available for the production of truth? What proposals and defi nitions of problems and objectives regarding processes of life obtain social recognition? Second, as the problem of the truth regime cannot be separated from that of power, the question arises of how power strategies mobilize knowledge about life (and how power processes produce and disseminate forms of knowledge). This perspective enables us to take into account structures of inequality, hierarchies of value and asymmetries that are (re)produced by biopolitical practices: which forms of life are considered valuable, which “unworthy of life”? Which existential plights, which forms of physical and psychological suffering receive political, medical, scientific, and social attention and are understood as intolerable, relevant to research, and in need of therapy—and which are ignored or neglected? How are forms of domination and exclusion, and experiences of racism and sexism, inscribed in the body and how do they transform it (in respect to state of health, life expectancy, physical appearance, and so forth)? The “economy” of the politics of life also comes under scrutiny: who profits from the regulation and optimization of life processes (through fi nancial gain, political influence, scientific reputation, social prestige, and so forth) and in what form, and who bears the costs and suffers as a result (through poverty, disease, premature death, and so forth)? What forms of exploitation and commercialization of human and non-human life can we observe? Third, an analytics of biopolitics also has to take account of the various forms of subjectification—the way subjects are brought to work on themselves guided by scientific, medical, moral, religious and other authorities and on the basis of socially accepted arrangements of bodies and sexes. Here as well, we can identify a complex of questions by way of a cross-section of the relevant themes: How are people called on, in the name of (individual and collective) life and health (one’s own health and that of the family, nation, “race” and so forth), in view of defi ned goals (health improvement, life extension, higher quality of life, amelioration of the gene pool, population increase and so forth) to act in a certain way (in extreme cases even to die for such goals)? How are they brought to experience their lives as

178 Thomas Lemke “worthy” or “unworthy” of living? How are they called on as members of a “higher” or “lower” “race,” a “stronger” or “weaker” sex, an “ascendant” or “degenerate” people? How do subjects take over and modify scientific interpretations of life for their own conduct and conceive of themselves, for instance, as gene-steered organisms, neuro-biological machines, assembled bodies whose organic elements are in principle exchangeable? How do we comprehend this process as an active appropriation and precisely not as one of passive-receptive acceptance? The reformulation of the concept of biopolitics within an analytics of government has a number of theoretical advantages. Such a perspective allows us, in the fi rst place, to break with biologistic concepts and confront a still enduring tendency in the social sciences to treat bodies, biology, and nature as pre-social objects (Benton 1991; Dickens 2001). Bodies of human beings or the nature of the population are not external or ontological premises for (political) government; to the contrary, the art of government represents a “sudden emergence of the naturalness of the [human] species within the political artifice of a power relation” (Foucault 2007: 22).19 Beyond this, such a research perspective allows us to explore the connections between physical being and moral-political existence: how do certain objects of knowledge and corporeal experiences become a moral, political, or legal problem? This is the theme of the last volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, at its center stands moral problematizations of physical experiences and forms of self-constitution (Foucault 1986; 1989). Contemporary examples are the figure of the human being and the legal construct of human dignity, both of which are coming under increasing pressure as a result of biotechnical innovation (Rabinow 1999: 14–17). The problem has thus emerged, for example, of whether embryos possess human dignity and can claim human rights. Furthermore, which biological presumptions and prejudices stamp ongoing conceptions of citizenship, in that they implicitly or explicitly determine membership rules, premises of participation, and criteria for entry, in this way determining who can even become a candidate for citizen status, on the basis of what biological features—sex, ethnic origins, “racial” affiliation, and so forth (Rose and Novas 2005)? Finally, this perspective focuses our attention on the relation between technologies and governmental practices: how do liberal forms of government make use of corporeal techniques and forms of self-guidance, how do they form interests, needs, and structures of preference? How do present technologies model individuals as active and free citizens, as members of self-managing communities and organizations, as autonomous actors who are in the position—or at least should be—to rationally calculate their own life risks? In neoliberal theories, what is the relationship between the concept of the responsible and rational subject and that of human life as human capital? Foucault’s writing did not so much systematically pursue as offer promising suggestions for this analytic perspective. He never concretized his

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remarks on the relation between biopolitics and liberalism—something meant to stand at the center of the 1979 lecture (see 2008: 21–22; 78). Regrettably, what we have is the “intention,” as Foucault conceded selfcritically in the course of the lecture (ibid.: 185–186). Filling out this program, developing it, and making it useful for contemporary theoretical debates and political struggles, is the challenge facing current research on the concept of biopolitics. NOTES 1. See, for instance, the essays in the Italian Encyclopaedia of Biopolitics (Brandimarte et al. 2006). 2. A brief survey of the concept’s history can be found in Esposito 2008: 16–24. 3. For a more detailed look at Foucault’s analysis of racism see Stoler 1995; Forti 2006. 4. Katia Genel (2006) offers an instructive comparison of the concept of biopower in Foucault and Agamben. For an extensive analysis and critique of Agamben’s theses, see Lemke 2005. 5. Such reflections can fi nd support in Foucault’s assessment of biopolitics’ confl ictual field (Foucault 1990a: 172–174; 187). For a further development of the distinction between biopolitics and biopower laid down by Foucault, see Lazzarato 2000. 6. See Esposito 1998; 2002. On the place of Roberto Esposito and his concept of biopolitics within contemporary philosophy, see Campbell 2008 and the articles in the special edition of Diacritics (2006). 7. “My term biovalue . . . specifies ways in which technics can intensify and multiply force and forms of vitality of ordering it as an economy, a calculable and hierarchical system of value. Biovalue is generated wherever the generative and transformative productivity of living entities can be instrumentalized along lines which make them useful for human projects—science, industry, medicine, agriculture or other arenas of technical culture. Currently the most productive forms of biovalue emerge from the calibration of living entities as code, enrolling them within bio-informatic economies of value which converge with capital economies” (Waldby 2000: 33; see also Waldby and Mitchell 2006). 8. For a more comprehensive discussion see Lemke (2007: 120–123). 9. See, for instance, the diagnosis of Dillon and Reid (2001: 56): “Biohistory seems to have very much extended Foucault’s concern with bodies and with the social, since the life sciences, delving deep into the structure of the soma itself, are reconstituting what it means to be embodied.” This critique points to a more basic problem. Foucault limited his critical analysis to the “dubious” human sciences and repeatedly revealed respect for the logical rigor and sharp “epistemological profi le” of the natural sciences (see Foucault 2000: 111). The result was that Foucault underestimated the social power of knowledge production in the natural sciences. However, Joseph Rouse (1987; 1993) has convincingly argued that the Foucaultian perspective can also be drawn on to examine the conditions for the emergence and acceptance of such knowledge. 10. See also the observation of Donna Haraway (1991: 163): “No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for

180

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Thomas Lemke processing signals in a common language. . . . The cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.” Gesa Lindemann (2003: 27) criticizes Foucault from the perspective of a reflexive anthropology. She argues that Foucault’s theoretical anti-humanism displays an inherent weakness: since for him the only relevant social bodies are those of human beings, he remains “naively anthropocentric.” See also Lindemann 2002, 24–25. Referring to work of Bruno Latour, Paul Rutherford (2000: 210–213) for his part argues that Foucault remained attached to the idea that human beings alone are endowed with the capacity for action, while objects are passive. Compare the observation of Andrew Barry (2001: 12): “Science and technology studies have tended to be dominated by the study of cases which become the objects of theoretical arguments about the character of the scientific and technical, but whose significance for the study of politics is obscure. In this way, the connections between science, technology and politics are not interrogated but reproduced.” For a similar critique, see Gottweis (1998: 11). This critique is aimed at mainstream work; much of this work should in any case be appreciated for its rigorous inquiry into the difference between micro- and macro-levels, politics and technology. See in this respect the classical text of Callon and Latour (1981). Not only Foucault’s concept of biopolitics changes after The Will to Knowledge; his view of liberalism also undergoes a shift of emphasis. Whereas in a text of 1977 he still understands political economy rather traditionally as an external limitation on power by law, in the lecture on governmentality it stands for an inner self-limitation on power (Senellart 2004). Michel Pêcheux criticizes Foucault’s work from this period for not being able to “work out a coherent and consistent distinction between processes of material subjugation of human individuals and the process of domesticating animals,” and for engaging in a “hidden biologism of Bakunin’s sort” (Pêcheux 1984: 64–65; similarly McNay 1994: 100–104; Barrett 1991: 145–155; see also Lemke 1997: 112–117). In this regard compare, for instance, Barbara Cruikshank’s concept of “technologies of citizenship” (1994; 1999) and Benedict Anderson’s work on nations as “imagined communities” (1983). The table is a slightly altered version of one appearing in a published lecture by Lars Thorup Larsen (2003: 5). Larsen correctly indicates that an analytic rather than an ontological differentiation is at play here: the individual and society, body and population, exist as an instrument/effect of biopolitical strategies and are not external to them. “We can say that Christian pastorship has introduced a game that neither the Greeks nor the Hebrews imagined. It is a strange game whose elements are life, death, truth, obedience, individuals, self-identity—a game that seems to have nothing to do with the game of the city surviving through the sacrifice of the citizens. Our societies proved to be really demonic since they happened to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call the modern states” (Foucault 2000: 311). See Habermas’ analysis of the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). The following considerations are based on Lemke (2007: 149–151). With their concept of a “government of bodies” (gouvernement des corps), Didier Fassin and Dominique Memmi (2004: 22) propose a similar analytic perspective: “Multiplicity of forms of both the exercise of power and places

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of its application, diversity of paths of production of subjects through multiple procedures of population regulation: these are the elements interesting us in the heritage of the later work of Michel Foucault (much more than the work generally invoked in the literature on biopower) when we speak of government of the body.”

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Alford, John R. and John R. Hibbing. (2008). The New Empirical Biopolitics. Annual Review of Political Science 11: 183–203. Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Refl ections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Walter Truett. (1987). To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal. Boston: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Andrews, Lori and Dorothy Nelkin. (2001). Body Bazaar. The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnological Age. New York: Crown Publishers. Andrieu, Bernard. (2004). La Fin de la Biopolitique Chez Michel Foucault: Le Troisième Déplacement. Le Portique (13–14): 191–203. Barrett, Michèle. (1991). The Politics of Truth. From Marx to Foucault. Oxford: Polity Press. Barry, Andrew. (2001). Political Machines. Governing a Technological Society. London/New York: Athlone Press. Benton, Ted. (1991). Biology and Social Sciences. Why the Return of the Repressed Should be Given a (Cautious) Welcome. Sociology 25(1): 1–29. Brandimarte, Renata, Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, Pierangelo Di Vittorio, Ottavio Marzocca, Onofrio Romano, Andrea Russo and Anna Simone (eds). (2006). Lessico di Biopolitica. Rom: manifestolibri. Butler, Judith. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London/New York: Routledge. Calarco, Matthew. (2008). Zoographies. The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Callon, Michel and Bruno Latour. (1981). Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So, pp. 277–303 in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (eds) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology. Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. Boston/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Campbell, Timothy. (2008). Bios, Immunity, Life. The Thought of Roberto Esposito, pp. vii–xlii in Roberto Esposito Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis/London: Minnesota University Press. Clarke, Adele E., Janet K Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket and Jennifer R. Fishman. (2003). Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and US Biomedicine. American Sociological Review 68: 161–194. Cooper, Melina. (2008). Life as Surplus. Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press. Cruikshank, Barbara. (1994). The Will to Empower. Technologies of Citizenship and the War on Poverty. Socialist Review 23(4): 29–55. Cruikshank, Barbara. (1999). The Will to Empower. Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.

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Diacritics. (2006). Bios, Immunity, Life. The Thought of Roberto Esposito 36(2): 1–116. Dickens, Peter. (2001). Linking the Social and Natural Sciences: Is Capital Modifying Human Biology in Its Own Image? Sociology 35(1): 93–110. Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid. (2001). Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War. Millennium—Journal of International Studies 30(1): 41–66. Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid. (2009). The Liberal Way of War. Killing to Make Life Live. New York: Routledge. Esposito, Roberto. (1998). Communitas: Origine e Destino Della Comunità. Turin: Einaudi. Esposito, Roberto. (2002). Immunitas: Protezione e Negazione Della Vita. Turin: Einaudi. Esposito, Roberto. (2008). Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. and with an introduction by T. Campbell. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Fassin, Didier and Dominique Memmi. (2003). Le Gouvernement de la Vie, Mode d’Emploi, pp. 9–33 in Le Gouvernement des Corps. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Fitzpatrick, Peter. (2001). These Mad Abandon’d Times. Economy & Society 30(2): 255–270. Flitner, Michael, Christoph Görg and Volker Heins (eds). (1998). Konfliktfeld Natur. Biologische Ressourcen und globale Politik. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Flower, Michael J. and Deborah Heath. (1993). Micro-Anatomo Politics: Mapping the Human Genome Project. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 17: 27–41. Forti, Simona. (2006). The Biopolitics of Souls. Racism, Nazism, and Plato. Political Theory 34(1): 9–32. Foucault, Michel. (1970). The Order of Things. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. (1990a). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. (1990b). The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. (1997). Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. R. Hurley and others, ed. P. Rabinow. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (2000). Power, trans. R. Hurley et al. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans D. Macey. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Franklin, Sarah. (2000). Life Itself. Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary, pp. 188–227 in Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (eds) Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage. Franklin, Sarah and Margaret Lock. (2003). Animation and Cessation: The Remaking of Life and Death, pp. 3–22 in Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (eds.), Remaking Life and Death. Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Genel, Katia. (2006). The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben. Rethinking Marxism 18(1): 43–62. Gerhardt, Volker. (2004). Die angeborene Würde des Menschen. Aufsätze zur Biopolitik. Berlin: Parerga. Gottweis, Herbert. (1998). Governing Molecules. The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and the United States. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

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Habermas, Jürgen. (1989[1962]). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haraway, Donna. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Haraway, Donna. (1997). Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets Oncomouse. New York/London: Routledge. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire: The New World Order. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press. Iacub, Marcela. (2001). Les Biotechnologies et le Pouvoir sur la Vie, pp. 127–132 in Didier Eribon (ed) L’infréquentable Michel Foucault. Renouveaux de la Pensée Critique. Paris: EPEL. Kjellén, Rudolf. (1920). Grundriß zu einem System der Politik. Leipzig: Hirzel. Larsen, Lars Thorup. (2003). Biopolitical Technologies of Community in Danish Health Promotion. Available online at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/ pdf/LarsThorupLarsen.pdf (accessed December 5, 2009). Lauretis, Teresa de. (1987). Technologies of Gender. Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lazzarato, Maurizio. (2000). Du Biopouvoir à la Biopolitique. Multitudes 1(1): 45–57. Lemke, Thomas. (1997). Eine Kritik der Politischen Vernunft—Foucaults Analyse der Modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg/Berlin: Argument. Lemke, Thomas. (2004). Disposition and Determinism—Genetic Diagnostics in Risk Society. The Sociological Review 52: 550–566. Lemke, Thomas. (2005). ‘A Zone of Indistinction’—A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics. Outlines. Critical Social Studies 7(1): 3–13. Lemke, Thomas. (2007). Biopolitik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag. Lindemann, Gesa. (2002). Die Grenzen des Sozialen. Zur sozio-technischen Konstruktion von Leben und Tod in der Intensivmedizin. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Lindemann, Gesa. (2003). Prinzipiell sind alle verdächtig. Michel Foucaults Vorlesungen über die Bestrebungen der Psychiatrie, der Justiz das Verbrechen zu entwinden, Frankfurter Rundschau August 19: 27. Masters, Roger D. (2001). Biology and Politics: Linking Nature and Nurture. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 345–369. Mbembe, Achille. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40. McNay, Lois. (1994). Foucault. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pêcheux, Michel. (1984). Zu rebellieren und zu denken wagen! Ideologien, Widerstände, Klassenkampf, German transl. E. Töller and P. Schöttler, kultuRRevolution 5 and 6: 61–65; 63–66. Rabinow, Paul. (1996). Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality, pp. 91–111 in Essays in the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul. (1999). French DNA. Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas Rose. (2006). Biopower Today. Biosocieties 1(2): 195– 217. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. (2000). Beyond Nature and Culture: Modes of Reasoning in the Age of Molecular Biology and Medicine, pp. 19–30 in Margret Lock, Allan Young and Alberto Cambrosio (eds) Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Morley. (1938). Bio-Politics. An Essay in the Physiology, Pathology and Politics of the Social and Somatic Organism. London: Dent.

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Rose, Nikolas. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rose, Nikolas and Carlos Novas. (2005). Biological Citizenship, pp. 439–463 in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds) Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell. Rouse, Joseph. (1987). Knowledge and Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rouse, Joseph. (1993). Foucault and the Natural Sciences, pp. 137–161 in John Caputo and Mark Yount (eds) Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Rüstow, Alexander. (1955). Wirtschaftsethische Probleme der sozialen Marktwirtschaft, pp. 53–74 in Patrick M. Boarman (ed) Der Christ und die soziale Marktwirtschaft. Stuttgart/Cologne: Kohlhammer. Rutherford, Paul. (1999). Entry of Life into History, pp. 37–62 in Eric Darier (ed) Discourses of the Environment. Oxford: Blackwell. Rutherford, Paul. (2000). The Problem of Nature in Contemporary Social Theory (PhD Thesis), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra. Senellart, Michel. (2004). La Question du Libéralisme. Le Magazine Littéraire 435: 55–57. Senellart, Michel. (2007). Course Context, pp. 363–401 in Michel Foucault Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Somit, Albert and Steven A. Peterson. (1998). Review Article: Biopolitics after Three Decades—a Balance Sheet. British Journal of Political Science 28: 559– 571. Stoler, Ann Laura. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. (2006). Biocapital. The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Waldby, Catherine. (2000). The Visible Human Project. Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London/New York: Routledge. Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell. (2006). Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

9

Coming Back to Life An Anthropological Reassessment of Biopolitics and Governmentality Didier Fassin Forming concepts is a way of living and not a way of killing life; it is a way to live in a relative mobility and not a way to immobilize life; it is to show, among those billions of living beings that inform their environment and inform themselves on the basis of it, an innovation that can be judged as one likes, tiny or substantial: a very special type of information. (Foucault 2003: 14–15)

The idea I wish to develop here is that in putting forward the concept of biopolitics, Michel Foucault opened up a major area of study, founded on a brilliant intuition, but that paradoxically, he perhaps failed to address the core of the issue—life itself. This was not for lack of time, his own untimely death depriving him of the space to take it on, but through a form of avoidance—for no sooner had he opened up this arena than he turned quickly away from it to address himself to other questions and produce other concepts, notably that of governmentality. This concept forms the substance of what we might consider his third intellectual phase, after archaeology and genealogy: the “government of the self and others,” to cite the title of his penultimate course at the Collège de France (Foucault 2008). What the author of The History of Sexuality did was effectively to shift “biopolitics,” in the sense that it is—literally, or at least etymologically—a politics of life, that is to say a politics which takes existence as its object and the living as its subject, turning it into what is in essence a politics of populations, a politics which measures and regulates, constructs and produces human collectivities through death rates and family planning programs, health regulations and migration controls (Foucault 1979). With “anatomopolitics,” conceived as the set of disciplines practiced on the body, which constrain and encompass behavior, design and determine a social “order of things,” biopolitics constitutes biopower—in other words, a normalizing power over life, which Foucault fleetingly but decisively theorized around 1976, notably in the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge. Let us return to the text of that famous lecture, given in 1976 at the University of Bahia, and entitled “The Meshes of Power.” In this lecture, Foucault asserts: “Life has now become an object of power. Once, there were only subjects, juridical subjects from whom one could take goods, life too,

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moreover. Now, there are bodies and populations” (Foucault 2007: 161). Thus life dissolves into these two objects, bodies and populations. In terms of an analysis of power, these translate into discipline and regulation, anatomopolitics and biopolitics. The question of life itself, as form and as value, as that which constitutes the substance of existence and that which forms the experience of the living—life in its scientific significance and its commonsense understanding—seems to disappear as we enter into what Foucault starts out by calling “normalizing power” (Foucault 1979: 144), for which he reserves a Marxian critique, and later transforms into the more positive “political technology” (Foucault 1988: 145) in order to encompass both the reason of state and the care of the self, the restrictive and the productive forces of power. To some extent we could say that, rather than life qua life, Foucault’s interest at this time was in the social practices operating on bodies and populations, which of course influence the course of individual lives and collective histories: in short, he was focusing on the government of bodies and the government of populations, rather than the government of life—of existence and of the living. In fact, from then on, his interest in governmentality even concentrated almost exclusively on populations. Having announced in his 1975–1976 course that “one of the most fundamental phenomena of the nineteenth century was the consideration given to life” (Foucault 1997: 213), he admitted at the beginning of his 1977–1978 course that he should have entitled it “a history of governmentality,” by which he meant the “set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections which make it possible to exert this specific form of power the main target of which is the population” (Foucault 2004a: 111). He thus moved from the idea of “staticization of the biological” (1997: 213) to the “governmentalization of the state” (2004a: 112). In the meantime, life had disappeared from his thinking and would never appear again. Contrary to what is often believed, governmentality is not about life but only about populations. However, the perspective opened up on biopower and governmentality was certainly a fertile one for the social sciences, particularly for sociology, paving the way for investigations into medicalization (Pinell 1996, Conrad 1992), psychologization (Castel 1981, Rose 1989), risk management (Ewald 1986, Beck 1992), the management of the poor (Donzelot 1984, Dean 1991), the control of bodies (Vigarello 1978, Turner 1992), and practices around birth and death (Memmi 2003, Lock 2002). My hypothesis is that, amidst this great collective enterprise, we may have been letting the substance of life slip away. And the proposition I draw from this is that a different politics of life is possible (Fassin 2009). The present contribution discusses this hypothesis and this proposition.

1. ABSENCES Countering the representation made of his work at the time, Foucault offered his famous statement: “It is not power, but the subject, which is the

Coming Back to Life 187 general theme of my research” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 209). However, the question may be raised of a third term, present just beneath the surface, always there but never fully addressed—that is, life. In fact he gave this concept sufficient importance to make it the subject of the last text he completed before his death—“La vie: expérience et science,” published in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale a year later (“Life: Experience and Science” in Foucault 1998). Admittedly, he wrote this text as a contribution to a collective homage to his teacher Georges Canguilhem, to be published in a philosophical journal. But this article offers at least circumstantial evidence of an ongoing concern to which he continually returned without ever devoting himself entirely to it. In this last article, he reconstructs the thought of his time around a distinction he ascribes to two different readings of Husserlian phenomenology: on the one hand, “a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject” represented by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; on the other, “a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept” developed by Cavaillès and Bachelard, for example (Foucault 1989: 8). Although he does not say so explicitly, and despite the fact that he openly declares his human and political affi nity with the latter rather than the former, Foucault’s work can be read as an attempt to bring the two sides together: the “archaeology of knowledge” (1972), which includes life sciences, falls into the rationalist tradition, while the “hermeneutics of the subject” (2005), which proposes an ethics of life, forms part of a subjectivist lineage. The fact that he was unable to create a synthesis between the two (which is perhaps in any case impossible) is probably due to the intellectual—not just chronological—distance separating The Birth of the Clinic (fi rst published in 1963) from The Use of Pleasure (fi rst published in 1984). It is nevertheless the case that throughout his work, the question of the constitution of the subject is indissociable from his investigation of the construction of knowledge. In this sense, while one may concur with the subtitle Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow gave to the French translation of their exegesis of Foucault’s work—“Au-delà de l’objectivité et de la subjectivité” (“Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity”)—it must immediately be added that Foucault’s thought is driven by the dual concern to bring to light the technologies of both objectification and subjectivation, and not just to move beyond them. Life, being simultaneously the product of existence and the expression of the living, is located on the dividing line between the two. Foucault brushes against it and moves around it rather than truly engaging with it, perhaps because he senses the risks of such a course. In doing this, he also distances himself from two philosophers whose thought everything might suggest would be more strongly manifest in his work—the fi rst, Georges Canguilhem, for reasons of personal acquaintance and also intellectual heritage, and the second, Hannah Arendt, because of the apparent closeness of their themes and her growing influence at the time. On the one hand, Canguilhem, whose writings Foucault of course knew well—saying of his work that it was “austere, intentionally and carefully limited to a particular domain in the history of sciences” (Foucault

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1989: 7–8)—focused all his energies, particularly in The Normal and the Pathological (1989) and above all in Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie (1968), on studying what constitutes the materiality of life, i.e., life as biological existence, and what links that existence to the experience of life, i.e., life as it is lived. As Rabinow (1996) notes, Canguilhem’s view is that existence (expressed in French as le vivant, using the present participle of the verb “to live”) controls experience (expressed by the past participle, le vécu). On the other hand Arendt, whose work Foucault must have known, but whom he never quotes (asked about her work on one occasion, he carefully distanced himself from a theory of power and domination that he deemed “somewhat verbal”) also placed life at the center of her work, from her typology of the three forms of the “vita activa” in The Human Condition (1958) to her critical analysis of the “life process” in On Revolution (1962). And indeed, it was on the basis of his recognition of this unrealized encounter between the two thinkers, and their essential complementarity, that Giorgio Agamben (1998) built his own theory of “homo sacer” and “bare life.” The absence of these two philosophers in Foucault’s work is thus remarkable, given that for both life was central—in Canguilhem’s case to an epistemological reflection, in Arendt’s to a moral theory. Foucault drew on neither when he constructed his concept of biopolitics. Moreover, despite the distance between them, there are surprising convergences between Canguilhem and Arendt. Firstly in their wording: both heighten the signifying intensity of the word by adding a strengthening pronoun, speaking of “life itself” (Canguilhem 1989, Arendt 1962). Secondly in their references: both derive the substance of their theory from Aristotle, Canguilhem in order to link the concept to life (Canguilhem 1968), Arendt to reflect on meaning and life (Arendt 1958). Foucault barely ventures onto either of the paths they opened up—Canguilhem’s science of existence, or Arendt’s politics of the living. Given the crucial role that biology has played in the construction of the human subject since the nineteenth century and the radicalization of a form of what we could call a “biohistory” during the twentieth century, this fact is remarkable. But there is one exception to this amnesia: Foucault’s course at the Collège de France entitled “Society Must Be Defended” (2002). The only phase of his work which could be considered tragic, this cycle of lectures brings together the biological and the political around the theme of “race war.” For a brief moment, biopolitics as Foucault posits it acknowledges violence, eugenics and genocide, the biology of racism and the politics of Nazism, the exclusion and the extermination of others on the grounds of essentialization of their difference in both the Western and the colonial worlds; in other words, it addresses the inscription of the zōē at the heart of the bios. This is a distinction which Aristotle (1905) merely implies, but which Arendt and later Agamben would render explicit and above all heuristic: zōē, the physical life of the living being, whether human or animal, is opposed to bios,

Coming Back to Life 189 life articulated within a social space, which is the property of the human as political animal. It is a shadowy path, one that is followed by Michael Taussig (1987) on his journey to the Amazonian heart of darkness and by Achille Mbembe (2003) in his antonymic exploration of African necropolitics, and which I have myself explored (Fassin 2008a) in South African society caught between the apartheid past and the present-day reality of AIDS. However, a marked slippage very quickly saw Foucault’s subsequent lectures return to the themes of government of populations (and goods)— security, liberalism—and then to government of bodies (and souls)—sexuality, pleasure. The journey ultimately arrives at the “care of the self” as an ethical arena in which politics becomes absorbed (Foucault 1986): indeed, when questioned about this relationship between ethics and politics, Foucault replied that it is the government of the self that ultimately becomes the model for the government of others—not through a transposition of identical procedures, but by creating the primary prerequisite for it (2005). Life is subsumed in living ethically, as politics is subsumed in ethics, a reduction that Foucault never moved beyond. To put it in Aristotelian terms, we are here in the arena of the good life.

2. POSITIONS What I would like to return to here is that initial tension between zōē and bios, between bare life and social life, that Foucault grasped in his famous assertion that “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1998: 143). What we must strive to comprehend is the continuing relevance of this question. Since Foucault himself moved away from this issue after broaching it, it is perhaps a necessity for social science to recast the terms of the question. For both sociology and anthropology this would be only right, a response to the criticism of these scientific disciplines—substantially justified at the time that Foucault formulated it—that they addressed power in our own societies through a sociology which conflated power with the law, and in other societies via an ethnology of rule linking power to prohibition; I have attempted to reconstruct the trajectory of French political anthropology from a similar point of view (Fassin 2008b). Just as Foucault strove to reproblematize power, I argue that today we need to reproblematize biopolitics, or more precisely and more explicitly, the politics of life—a formula which is obviously close to that recently proposed by Nikolas Rose (2001), who speaks of “the politics of life itself.” But what is the life that is at issue here? Or more precisely, what is the extent of the territory that might be covered by the term “politics of life”? If we return to the dual tradition I alluded to previously, we can say that this territory extends from the life of existence examined by Canguilhem, as a biological and material given, with the representations and practices

190 Didier Fassin associated with it, to the life of the living analyzed by Arendt, a social and experiential reality, together with the representations and practices this concept generates (Fassin 2000). The field on one side is the laboratory and bioinformatics, clinical immunology and genetic sequencing, medically assisted reproduction and cancer treatment, as studied by Paul Rabinow (1999), David Napier (2003), Rayna Rapp (2000) and Ilana Löwy (1996); on the other it is the housing estate and the refugee camp, asylum seekers and displaced persons, social protection and security programs, as analyzed by Giorgio Agamben (2003), Zygmunt Bauman (1998), Liisa Malkki (1995) and Didier Bigo (2007). A vast, heterogeneous landscape, which extends, in short, from zōē to bios. The identification of this distinct territory of the politics of life is justified not by the dual etymology and the founding ambiguity of life that it reveals, but much more directly by empirical observations which call for a theoretical formulation of the sort of politics which is involved around life. Clearly, the “politics of life” has been understood by most social scientists who have utilized the expression as being related to the “biosciences.” For Nikolas Rose (2007), who significantly opens his book with a discussion of Canguilhem, the politics of life has to do with the discovery of DNA and the reinvention of race, the development of genomics and neurochemistry, disputes around stem cells and the practices of eugenics. It is about what other authors have phrased in terms of biosociality (Rabinow 1996), biovalues (Waldby 2002) and biocapital (Franklin 2003). This perspective has opened up innovative fields of research on the new subjectivities. My point is that it is restricted to only one aspect of life, life as biology, thus neglecting another dimension—life as biography. If, as Hannah Arendt writes, what differentiates man from other animals is not life as a phenomenon which starts with birth and ends with death but life as a lapse of time full of events that can be narrated, then an anthropology of the politics of life must account not only for the former but also for the latter. And even as far as the biological reality of life is concerned, it is not just about cells and genes, it is also about the wearing away of bodies, which is closely linked to inequalities of living conditions. Life as matter and life as meaning is what I will try to defend and illustrate here. However, it is important to underline that the domains defined by this polarization are far from being hermetically separated—in fact, they are perhaps less so than ever. We could even say that life is never more fully grasped than when the two aspects, existence and the living, come together. This is revealed in a range of recent writings, particularly in anthropology, constructed on the basis of shifting between the sites of biomedical science and the spaces of everyday life. Adriana Petryna’s study of the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, significantly entitled Life Exposed (2002), reveals, through the differential social attitude towards individuals depending on their level of exposure to toxic radiation, the constitution of a “biological citizenship.” João Biehl’s research on a marginal district of Porto Alegre,

Coming Back to Life 191 with the equally resonant title of Vita (2005), uncovers the conditions of diagnosis and care for a hereditary degenerative disease between “gene expression and social abandonment.” These works, in their linking of biological life and social life, their shift between zōē and bios, sit at the heart of contemporary politics of life, the place where it is continually being redefi ned. Both studies reveal the central role of biomedicine in the articulation of the different dimensions of life. It is from this perspective that I have developed my own work on the management of foreigners in France (Fassin 2005a), moving between restrictions on legal immigration and the development of humanitarian reason, between cutbacks in political asylum and the demand for medical expert opinion, and on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa (Fassin 2007a), oscillating between the international polemic on the viral origins of the disease and the suffering of victims relegated to the former homelands, between the battle over treatment and the violence of the townships, between research into a vaccine and accusations of genocide. Such an investigation, on the border between bare life and social life, existence and experience, where biology meets politics, perhaps calls for a new orientation in the exploration of biopolitics. I would term this a moral orientation, not in the sense of defining norms and values, distinguishing good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and untruth, but in the sense of examining how, within a particular historical and geographical context, these norms and values, these divisions between good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and untruth are constituted (Fassin 2008c). It is worth noting, moreover, that the project of a moral anthropology thus proposed remains profoundly coherent with Foucault’s thinking, particularly in the way it extends Nietzsche’s critical reflection on the genealogy of morals, moving far away from the moral discourse of philosophy (Nietzsche 1996). But let us make no mistake: the restoration of a moral reflection does not in any way imply a renunciation of a political analysis—on the contrary, the former completes and enriches the latter. So what are the norms and values underlying the politics of life in contemporary societies? How do they inform the production and reproduction of the category of “humanity” as it was constituted in the eighteenth century, both as species (a biological collective sharing the same characteristics) and as sentiment (the political recognition of a common belonging to the world)? I would like to offer elements of a response to these questions, a response which I believe extends Foucault’s thought toward territory into which it seems reluctant to venture. And on this journey we can take the same two philosophers, Canguilhem and Arendt, as our companions.

3. MATTER In a remark few have taken up, Canguilhem draws attention to a paradox which I think is crucial to the analysis of the politics of life: “Everything

192 Didier Fassin happens as if a society had ‘the mortality that suits it,’ the number of the dead and their distribution into different age groups expressing the importance which the society does or does not give to the protraction of life. In short, the techniques of collective hygiene which tend to prolong human life, or the habits of negligence which result in shortening it, depending on the value attached to life in a given society, are in the end a value judgment expressed in the abstract number which is the average human life span. The average life span is not the biologically normal, but in a sense the socially normative, life span” (Canguilhem 1989: 161). This reflection articulates the essential fact that the measured quantity of life, as a demographic reality, indicated by life expectancy, implies and exposes an estimated quality of life as social production, in other words, a quality dependent on the choices made by society in relation to the preservation of life. From this point of view, to adapt an expression—“statistique morale”—forged in the nineteenth century but abandoned in the twentieth, statistics always involves morality. From this point of view too, the question of life can never be considered separately from the question of inequality. This argument was made, with the rhetorical talent and ideological position he is renowned for, by then South African president Thabo Mbeki in his famous speech at the opening of the international AIDS conference in Durban in July 2000, when he offered this powerful image: “In the space of a day passengers flying from Japan to Uganda leave the country with the world’s highest life expectancy—almost 79 years—and land in one with the world’s lowest—barely 42 years. A day away by plane, but half a lifetime difference on the ground” (Fassin 2002: 317). Such distances are apparent not just between countries: they can be observed between different social categories within the same country. Thus in France, where life expectancy is one of the lowest in Western Europe, a 35-year-old unskilled laborer has on average nine years less left to live than an engineer or a teacher of the same age. This has little to do with inadequate medical care, since France has one of the best-performing health care systems, but is rather the result of the politics of social justice, France being one of the Western countries with the widest disparity in incomes (Leclerc et al. 2000). Both on the global level and within a given society, the length of life of the living is largely determined by collective choices. These choices are usually implicit, and it is rare today for a democratic government to declare publicly that it has decided to allow some to live less long than others, or even to sacrifice some to save others. But such decisions are occasionally made explicit. This is increasingly the case in war situations. As Michael Ignatieff (2000) showed in relation to the NATO— effectively US—intervention in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999, in order to safeguard the lives of the American pilots, the decision was taken to have them fly high enough to be protected from enemy anti-aircraft fi re. The result was that the bombing of the chosen targets was much less accurate: there

Coming Back to Life 193 were no NATO casualties, but 500 civilians were killed. To adopt the military terms in use at the time, the “zero death” doctrine inevitably implied “collateral damage.” During both Gulf Wars the same principles—and the same language—were put into operation, with much more serious consequences, although the total number of deaths was never precisely known because nobody was interested in counting them. It will perhaps be objected that these are extreme, and specific, situations. But it would not be difficult to show that even in a pacified Western world, governing means—through a multitude of decisions, small and large, on employment and social security policy, on health care and education, on immigration control and humanitarian aid—making choices which could be described as “tragic” in the sense used by sociologists studying organ transplants (Calabresi and Bobbit 1978): choices about the allocation of scarce resources, the distribution of which directly or indirectly influences the length and quality of life of individuals. Thus I have shown (Fassin 2003a) how administrative agents of the French state found themselves in the position of having to evaluate not only what they called the “minimum living expenses,” the difference between resources and irreducible expenses, but also the “life needs” in terms of food, heating, etc., of unemployed people seeking emergency fi nancial aid. Considering that most families had a negative economic balance when expenses were subtracted from resources, the politics of life of the state was nothing more than a politics of survival. And this expression is not a cynical appreciation or a hypothetical construction posited by a remote social-scientific gaze. It is the everyday experience lived by, or at least expressed in the discourse of, refugees in France and people with AIDS in South Africa, those who observe daily how little value their life has for the society in which they are living. The fact that Foucault, who was so aware of the way in which power is expressed in the technologies of governance of living beings, and so committed himself in social struggle to the side of the dominated, never recognized the theoretical relevance of the question of inequality to his conceptualization of biopolitics probably says much about his often-expressed desire to distance himself from Marxist thinking. In fact, a broader theoretical issue is at stake: the introduction of materialism into the analysis of the politics of life, where Foucault gives a reading which we would rather see today as constructivist. This materialism is not simply, in the Marxian sense, that of the structural conditions which effectively largely determine the conditions of life of the members of a given society; it is also, in Canguilhem’s sense, that of the very substance of existence, its materiality, its longevity, and the inequalities that society imposes on it. To accept this materialistic orientation of our investigation of the politics of life is not a merely theoretical issue. It is also an ethical one. It recognizes that the matter of life does matter.

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4. MEANING But there is another moral dimension to the politics of life, an approach which no longer distinguishes between lives—between the lives of the poor and rich, the dominated and the dominant, the weak and the powerful—on the basis of quantity and quality. This approach distinguishes between the different meanings of life itself. Thus Arendt (1958) emphasizes the shift from life as a biological reality to life as biographical reality: “Limited by a beginning and an end, it follows a strictly linear movement whose very motion nevertheless is driven by the motor of biological life which man shares with other living beings and which forever retains the cyclical movement of nature. The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography, it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zōē, that Aristotle said that it ‘somehow is a kind of praxis.’” Therefore life as one just lives it is distinguished from the life one can truly say one has lived. Between the two lie both language, which is what makes the human, and the polis, the space of politics. In Arendt’s view, the danger of both totalitarianism and imperialism was that the other—the enemy, the colonized, the immigrant, the Jew—was reduced from bios to zōē, from social life to biological life. Camps, from the Nazi extermination camps to contemporary refugee camps, would thus represent the end-point of this process of reduction, not because they share the same aims, but because they have in common that they recognize only the bare life of the individual—in one case in order to kill them, in the other to save them. However, in contrast to Agamben (1997: 144), who speaks of “the separation of politics and humanitarianism that we are witnessing today,” I would argue that humanitarianism has become the supreme form of the contemporary politics of life. Indeed, “humanitarianism” is not limited to the field self-defi ned by the agents of large non-governmental organizations, but has become a category resting on the principle of an ethical approach to human life which is placed above other values and is the object of arguments between actors who seek to appropriate the symbolic benefits associated with it (Fassin 2007b). The evolution of French immigration control practices is revealing in this respect. During the 1990s, two concomitant phenomena emerged: on the one hand, the number of asylum seekers awarded refugee status fell to one-sixth of its former level, owing partly to a drop in the number of applications submitted but particularly to a reduction in the proportion granted asylum; on the other, the number of foreigners seeking residence on the grounds of serious illness which could not be treated in their country of origin increased sevenfold (Fassin 2001). This dual development, which is of course interdependent, since some of those whose applications for asylum were rejected were able to obtain residence on the basis of a medical expert opinion, clearly marks a shift of

Coming Back to Life 195 legitimacy in the politics of life. It has moved from recognition of the life of a citizen who has suffered the ordeal of violence, often as a result of campaigning activity, to recognition of the life of a patient sick in body— in other words, from political to biological life, from a life recounted by a refugee to attest to a history of persecution, to a life testified by a doctor to demonstrate a pathology. It is worth noting that the procedure for granting residence on health grounds, introduced in practice and subsequently into the law in the last decade, was fi rst termed “humanitarian reason,” and thus won the consensual support of all members of parliament, from all parties. There is no shortage of examples of this penetration of humanitarianism into politics. The extent to which this reconfiguration of the moral space was the central issue in the controversies which tore apart South African society, pitting the government against activists around the question of AIDS, has probably not been sufficiently understood (Fassin 2003b). The violent polemic that opposed the government and the activists over a period of several years, with the patients as hostages, has been seen as a simple clash between unorthodox theories (poverty causes AIDS) and medical knowledge (the viral explanation of AIDS), between heretical error and scientific truth, between bad faith and good science. In reality, while the issue was indeed one of epistemology and ideology, it was even more one of ethics and politics. The confrontation was between two conceptions of the best approach to life. On one side, activists, doctors, researchers and even the pharmaceutical industry highlighted the risk of transmission of the virus from mother to child, and championed the simple, powerful idea that drugs could prevent infection of newborn babies. On the other, the ministers of health and of social development, specialists in public health and social work, but also dissident scientists pointed out the huge disparities and inadequacies in the care system inherited from apartheid, and stressed the danger of increasing inequality through premature introduction of antiretroviral drugs. In the view of the former, every life saved was of value in and of itself. For the latter, the issue was to ensure justice, to make the health system equitable and efficient, and fi rst and foremost to provide social support for the neediest victims. The politics of sacred life upheld by the former was everywhere acclaimed. The politics of just life espoused by the latter was largely condemned. Ultimately, humanitarian reason won out over the concern for equity, but once the government had been instructed to distribute treatment, activists and doctors realized to what extent access to antiretroviral drugs remained difficult and unequal. The administration of refugees in France and the management of AIDS in South Africa, which I have briefly analyzed, bring into play politics of life which, beyond the obvious differences between the nature of the problems and contexts, form part of the same moral configuration, in which physical life emerges as a superior value and humanitarian reason as the ethical ideal. Thus the study of contemporary society invites us to consider

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not biopower, which is power over life, but biolegitimacy (Fassin 2004), which would be the legitimacy of life—in other words the recognition of being alive as the supreme good. This shift from biopower to biolegitimacy indicates a new “problematization” of life, understood not only as the way society constitutes and treats the problem of life—this is the sense Foucault (1994: 544) gives to the word—but also as the way we may interpret and formulate it: problematization is both a social and a conceptual move. Within this new problematization, the issue is not to grasp how life is fashioned, regulated and normalized—what governmentality is about. It is to comprehend, through a very different and almost inverse approach, the complex, uncertain and ambiguous articulation of life at the heart of our systems of values and actions, of our moral and political economies.

5. CONCLUSION My intention here was to clear up what I would call a heuristic misunderstanding. In 1976, in the last lectures of “Society Must Be Defended” and in the fi nal chapter of The Will to Knowledge, Foucault opens a theoretical black box which he names “biopower” and, as a part of it, “biopolitics.” He prophetically announces that “a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies” and that “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1979: 143). This idea that life is linked to our modernity has given rise to a new field of research within the social sciences, mainly around life sciences and biomedicine, but also about public health and social engineering, both in the Western and, to a lesser degree, the Third World. However, interestingly, Foucault himself abandoned this promising track. When one reads the summaries of his courses at the Collège de France (1989b), it is noticeable that the word “life” does not even appear in the 1975–1976 lectures (as if the questions of power and war were much more relevant for him), and that after a suspension of his teaching for one year he returns with a new intellectual project on governmentality developed in the 1977–1978 and 1978–1979 lectures. Here, “life” is completely absent—even from the exhaustive thematic indexes (2004a; 2004b). At the beginning of Sécurité, Territoire, Population (2004a) he seems to give life a last chance, in an unnecessarily modest way: “This year I would like to begin the study of something that I have called, in an idle way, biopower.” In fact, he rapidly moves toward something else: governmentality. Two years later, he concludes the summary of Naissance de la Biopolitique (2004b) by saying: “What should be studied now is the way in which the specific problems of life and population have been posed within the technology of government.” However, in the following courses, he will never come back to life, so to speak. Even Le Gouvernement des Vivants in 1979–1980 is not, contrary to what the title suggests, about life and living

Coming Back to Life 197 beings, but about confession and regimes of truth. So the intellectual move from biopower to governmentality is not only a shift from a centralized conception of power to a fragmented vision of technologies, it is also a shift from life to populations. One could thus say that a whole tradition of works on biopower and biopolitics is based, if not on an erroneous, at least on a divergent reading of Foucault’s project. This is probably what is meant by the recent change of wording from “biopolitics” to “politics of life itself” (Rose 2007). Under this new heading, however, the main trend is toward the life sciences (Franklin 2000) and thus life as “le vivant,” in Canguilhem’s words—cells and genes, to put it simply. My point here is that governmentality (Dean 1999) could help us revisit the politics of life by introducing two very different questions: What is being done to living beings through different forms of government? What sort of life is implicitly taken for granted in this process? The fi rst question has to do with the matter of life, and implies an interrogation on inequality. The second question has to do with the meaning of life, and involves an interrogation on biolegitimacy. Prolonging Canguilhem’s syntactic investigation, one could thus say that the explorations I suggest actually concern “les vivants” (living beings), on the one hand, and “l’être en vie” (being alive), on the other hand. Both meanings cannot be separated from the last term: “le vécu” (lived experience)—at least if we do not renounce listening to the “voices” (Das 2007) of the people whose life we study. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This text is a revised and adapted version of an earlier paper published by the Department of Sociology at the University of Montreal as “La Biopolitique n’est pas une Politique de la Vie,” Sociologie et Sociétés, 2006, 38(2): 32–47. I am grateful to Marcelo Otero and the editors of the journal for authorizing its republication in this volume, with extensive modifications, and to Thomas Lemke and his co-editors for their suggestions.

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Coming Back to Life 199 Fassin, Didier. (2009). Another Politics of Life is Possible. Theory, Culture and Society 26(5): 44–60. Foucault, Michel. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (1982). Two Essays on the Subject and Power, pp. 208–226 in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds) Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, Michel. (1985). The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (1986). The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley. London: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. (1989a). Introduction, pp. 7–24 in Georges Canguilhem The Normal and The Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett. New York: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel. (1989b). Résumé des Cours 1970–1982. Paris: Collège de France-Julliard. Foucault, Michel. (1994). Dits et Ecrits, Volume 4. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. (1997). “Il Faut Défendre la Société”. Cours au Collège de France 1976. Paris: Hautes Etudes—Gallimard—Seuil. Foucault, Michel. (1998). The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Volume 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. J.D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel. (2003). Life: Experience and Science, pp. 6–17 in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (eds) The Essential Foucault. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. (2004a). Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978. Paris: Hautes Etudes—Gallimard—Seuil. Foucault, Michel. (2004b). Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979. Paris: Hautes Etudes—Gallimard—Seuil. Foucault, Michel. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2007). The Meshes of Power, trans. G. Moore, pp. 153–162 in Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Foucault, Michel. (2008). Le Gouvernement de Soi et des Autres. Cours au Collège de France 1982–1983. Paris: Hautes Etudes—Gallimard—Seuil. Franklin, Sarah. (2000). Life Itself: Global Nature, Global Culture, pp. 188–227 in Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (eds) Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage. Franklin, Sarah. (2003). Ethical Biocapital, pp. 97–127 in Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (eds) Remaking Life and Death. Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Ignatieff, Michael. (2000). The New American Way of War. New York Review of Books 47(12). Available online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12 (accessed November 11, 2009). Leclerc, Annette, Didier Fassin, Hélène Grandjean, Monique Kaminski and Thierry Lang (eds). (2000). Les Inégalités Sociales de Santé. Paris: Inserm-La Découverte. Lock, Margaret. (2002). Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: University of California Press.

200 Didier Fassin Löwy, Ilana. (1996). Between Bench and Bedside: Science, Healing and Interleukin-2 in a Cancer Ward. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Malkki, Liisa. (1995). Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mbembe, Achille. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture 215(1): 11–40. Memmi, Dominique. (2003). Faire Vivre et Laisser Mourir: Le Gouvernement Contemporain de la Naissance et de la Mort. Paris: La Découverte. Napier, David. (2003). The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1996[1887]). On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Petryna, Adriana. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pinell, Patrice. (1996). Modern Medicine and the Civilizing Process. Sociology of Health and Illness 18(1): 1–16. Rabinow, Paul. (1996). Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul. (1999). French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rapp, Rayna. (2000). Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. (1989). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas. (2001). The Politics of Life Itself, Theory, Culture and Society 18(6): 1–30. Rose, Nikolas. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taussig, Michael. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Bryan. (1992). Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London: Routledge. Vigarello, Georges. (1978). Le Corps Redressé: Histoire d’un Pouvoir Pédagogique. Paris: Delarge. Waldby , Catherine. (2002). Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalve. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Studies of Health, Illness and Medicine, 6 (3): 305–323.

10 The Birth of Lifestyle Politics The Biopolitical Management of Lifestyle Diseases in the United States and Denmark Lars Thorup Larsen

From the 1970s onwards, most Western countries began to amend their health care policies to give a much higher priority to preventive efforts. Although this preventive turn initially aimed to limit the need for medical treatment technology, whose advance was thought to have stopped, most countries have now developed public health policy into a parallel field of intervention alongside the medical system. This major shift from treatment to prevention is typically referred to as the “New Public Health” (Petersen and Lupton 1996), and includes a whole new range of targets, approaches, knowledge forms and professions involved in health care provision. Constant across these multiple policies and contexts, however, is the overall goal. Practically all contemporary public health policies target the connection between the rise in lifestyle diseases, primarily cancer and coronary heart disease, and forms of human behavior, i.e., smoking, drinking, poor diet and a lack of physical exercise. The objective in this chapter is to characterize how lifestyle diseases have come to be seen as a political problem, which is more than a simple reflection of the underlying epidemiological phenomenon. Instead of looking at the statistical prevalence of various diseases, the chapter focuses on the political interpretation by which governments attempt to make the problem manageable. Most countries struggle to turn the problem of lifestyle diseases into specific policies, and in order to document the implicit rationalization of this process the contribution looks at how the category of lifestyle is conceptualized in the relevant policy documents. The article focuses on Denmark and the United States, because their health care systems are sufficiently different to produce an interesting comparison in the field of public health. The main question is: how do Danish and American public health programs choose to conceptualize the essential category of lifestyle? How do these documents define what lifestyle is in terms of health, and how do the different conceptions of lifestyle interact with technologies designed to

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influence individual lifestyle behavior? Answering these empirical questions should give us an indication of what I tentatively term “lifestyle politics,” which can be defi ned as the strategies employed by political authorities to counter the rise in lifestyle diseases, including their understanding of the lifestyle category and the technologies employed. Another reason for focusing on lifestyle conceptions is theoretical. The category of lifestyle in public health policy provides a good entry into some of the essential conceptual debates surrounding the work of Michel Foucault, in particular regarding biopolitics and governmentality. This chapter draws upon both concepts, and explains how they can be analyzed and understood today. Both concepts are extremely broad, not only in Foucault’s various treatments but also in the complex bodies of literature they have given rise to. Instead of trying to tie all the loose ends together, it is necessary to indicate their specific association with the chapter’s main argument about the political management of lifestyle. The structure of the chapter is as follows. The next section presents the theoretical concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, though it does not attempt to provide a thorough account of their historical backgrounds and dedicated bodies of literature. The question is rather how biopolitics and governmentality have related to the problem of managing lifestyle diseases since the 1970s. The theoretical section ends with a short discussion on the concept of lifestyle and with a few methodological reflections on what guides the empirical study. The empirical section is broken into three successive phases, corresponding to the intervals at which the public health programs were published. The Danish documents date from 1977, 1989 and 1999, while their American counterparts are from 1979, 1990 and 2000 respectively. Both countries reveal a similar development of a more sophisticated conception of lifestyle. As the analysis will demonstrate, the development of elaborate conceptions of lifestyle and the techniques to regulate lifestyles often come at the expense of a dedicated focus on health matters. In both countries, the more comprehensive lifestyle conceptions in the later stages tend to become more and more detached from the question of health and instead turn into moral issues around general problems concerning the conduct of life.

1. BIOPOLITICS, GOVERNMENTALITY AND LIFESTYLE While they originate in the same period of Foucault’s work and even in some of the same books (Foucault 2007; 2008a), the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality are rarely used directly together for empirical purposes. They also have slightly different functions in this contribution. Biopolitics is a descriptive term for policies and technologies aiming to optimize the biological life of the population, whereas governmentality takes aim not at the population as such but at the modes of governing including forms of

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 203 subjectivation. This is not to say that there is only one form of biopolitics and only one type of governmentality, but rather that even if they share some parts of their genealogy as outlined in Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures, they are nevertheless distinct theoretical perspectives. One focuses on optimizing the biological life of the population, and the other reflects on the best way to govern subjects, not just in health matters but in general. At the empirical level, biopolitics and governmentality are bound to intersect at several points. This is because, for example, the so-called “medical police” was pivotal in the development of both rationalities—albeit for different reasons. Similarly, comprehensive public health programs such as those analyzed in this chapter are bound to contain both biopolitical strategies of optimization of life and governmental rationalities for how to get individuals to live a healthier life. At the outset, public health policy is mainly a biopolitical regime, but as the analysis will demonstrate, its development in recent decades has been intersected by new governmental technologies. In themselves, these may have very little to do with health in a strict sense, being principally about the way the welfare state regulates the behavior of individuals and affects the responsibility of subjects. In other words, the politicization of lifestyle diseases might not only reflect a biopolitical ambition to improve the health status of the population, but also a governmental technology concerned with the way individuals govern their own lifestyle. The latter often takes the form of critical normative reflections on how society and its moral character should be governed, which may or may not involve a conflict or tension with the biopolitical imperative to optimize life. It is difficult, if not impossible, to regulate individual lifestyles directly, and this complication illustrates the theoretical tension between the two poles. One can perhaps explain the empirical disconnect between lifestyle diseases and lifestyle-oriented health policy by looking at the connection between biopolitical strategies and governmental technologies. Most of the empirical section is thus devoted to describing how the lifestyle conceptions in Danish and American public health programs indicate the influence of specific biopolitical or governmental technologies. If we look at the initial formulation of the two main theoretical concepts, an obvious starting point for theorizing the political nature of public health policy is Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, or biopower as it was initially termed (Foucault 1998). The concept itself has now become a focus of some debate (Rabinow and Rose 2006; Larsen 2007), not least because of its uneasy adoption in the theoretical frameworks proposed by Giorgio Agamben (1998; cf. also Lemke 2005) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). Using the concept of biopolitics to understand public health policy is not a big leap in itself, since the initial concept almost sounds like a defi nition of public health. In Foucault’s original presentation, biopolitics designates the way in which the biological life of the population has been made the

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object of power relations, beginning in the eighteenth century, and always with the objective of optimizing life in the physical or bodily sense of the term. In contrast to sovereignty centered on the protection of territory and discipline aimed at the individual body, biopolitics targets the population of bodies at a macroscopic level and aims to optimize its biological properties. Foucault sometimes also characterizes discipline as one pole of a biopolitical continuum between the individual body at the micro level and the population or species at the macro level (1998: 139). Foucault’s main historical claim is that modern welfare states have been pervaded by a vast array of biopolitical strategies, ranging from urban development and health care to working-class living conditions (Foucault 2000a). Since the concept was originally used to characterize the population-centered power mechanisms of governmental health administrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a few qualifications will be needed in relation to its present use. First, a contemporary audience might conflate the term “biological properties” with more or less concrete entities such as genes, embryos or neurotransmitters. What defi nes biopolitics, however, are biological properties on a statistical level such as fertility, mortality, demographics and sickness rates. Second, the objective of optimizing the life of the population should not only be understood in sheer quantitative terms, such as when the aim was only to create a large army or working population. In the course of the twentieth century, the quantitative form of biopolitical optimization became balanced by concerns about the quality of the population such as in the various forms of eugenics (Schmidt and Kristensen 1986). Parallel with his interest in biopolitics Foucault also developed the concept of governmentality, beginning in his 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France (2007, 2008a). While aiming to decenter the stale institutional categories of the period’s state theories (Lemke 2007), he coined the term governmentality to characterize the various ways in which the process of governing men has been rationalized over time. In order not to confuse this perspective with the actual institutions of government, Foucault defi ned the activity of governing as the “conduct of conduct” (2000b). This indicates a fundamental homology between the government of the self and of others (Foucault 2008b), although both the specific ideas that have occupied these categories and their relative significance have varied considerably throughout the genealogy of governmentality. Much has been written on the various historical stages in the long genealogy of modern governmentality (Senellart 1995; Lemke 1997), but the concept has also led to a considerable body of literature on recent changes in governmentality, in particular in analyses of neoliberal reforms of Western welfare states (Foucault 2008a; Rose 1999; Dean 1999; Barry et al. 1996). The most important aspect of governmentality in this chapter is not neoliberalism, but rather the underlying crisis of governmentality in the 1970s to which neoliberals also responded. Foucault used the term “state

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 205 phobia” to characterize the critical attitude towards state regulation and planning in the postwar period (2008a: 76–78). He originally ascribed this phobia to critics who associated the state with totalitarianism in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but he then skipped forward to the welfare state critique of the 1970s. He thus ignored the decades in between, during which the growth and rationality of the welfare state was practically undisputed across Western Europe. State phobia is nevertheless an essential characteristic of welfare rationalities beginning in the 1970s, and it is not identical to welfare retrenchment as such but designates a situation where state hierarchy is no longer seen as a legitimate or effective mode of governing. In a European context, this has typically been framed as the crisis or even several different crises of the welfare state (Donzelot 1991; 1996), but the underlying critique of state-based governmentality is similarly applicable in the context of American politics. Whether the welfare state crisis was ever “real” is less important in this context, because the main point is to notice how public health policies have been influenced by some of these governmental ideas about how to govern as well as the by the critiques involving arguments about how not to govern (Foucault 1996). It is mainly in this context that tensions can occur between the biopolitical imperative to optimize life and governmental critiques of paternalism. Biopolitics and governmentality share much of their genealogy, however, and are not necessarily in confl ict with each other. In fact, in both the 1978 and the 1979 lectures Foucault said that modern governmentalities are characterized by a complex interplay between freedom and security, which he discusses in relation to the problem of scarcity in the eighteenth century (2007: 48–49; 2008a: 65–66). This dynamic still exists in the period analyzed here (since the 1970s), but rather than scarcity, lifestyle diseases are now related to the opposite problem of affluence, which gives the interplay between freedom and security a different edge. It creates a potential tension between the state-phobic affi nities of contemporary governmentalities and the biopolitical ambitions of public health programs to regulate individual lifestyles in detail. It is fi nally necessary to clarify the concept of lifestyle, which is the subject of the chapter and does not function as an analytical term like biopolitics or governmentality. There is a historical background to the concept and its integration into the field of public health, which is also part of the background to the present focus on lifestyle conceptions in public health documents. Although some have identified the invention of the lifestyle concept with the epidemiological phenomenon of lifestyle diseases and unhealthy behavior, its real origin is to be found in classical sociological reactions to the Marxian assertion that life patterns are determined solely by economic position.1 Partly based on Veblen’s critique of Marx on this point, the birth of the lifestyle concept is typically attributed to Weber’s theory of class and status. Economic class position does have an impact upon people’s way of life, Weber argues, but so does their belonging to a particular status group

206 Lars Thorup Larsen that share valorizations of honor and social esteem partly based on education. By bringing together considerations of income, occupation, education and status, Weber formulated a holistic conception of lifestyle which was later developed into a broader sociology of education and social status, probably most clearly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. After the early conceptual development in sociology, a much more individualized concept of lifestyle emerged in the 1920s in the personality psychology of Alfred Adler, who understood it as the subjectively determined goal-directedness of a person’s action. During the 1950s and 1960s both the psychological and the sociological concepts existed alongside each other, with the latter being applied descriptively to characterize specific social groups, as in “working-class lifestyle,” “suburban lifestyle,” and so on. Common to all these lines of development is a more or less holistic conception of man, in the sense that the scholarly interest in lifestyle serves to reject a purely mechanical view in which human motivation plays no role. It was not until the 1970s that the lifestyle concept entered the sociomedical field and became synonymous with individual risk factors such as smoking, drinking, indulgence and a sedentary way of life. During this relatively brief period, the meaning of the term was transformed from its holistic and social uses to designate instead certain forms of irresponsible individual behavior. Since then, the field of public health has been dominated by various types of individualistic conceptions of lifestyle as exemplified in the following analysis, but a more socially oriented counter-stream has persisted within the subdiscipline of social medicine. This tendency criticizes public health policies for reducing complex social patterns of lifestyle to an atomistic understanding of individual behavior in which everything is perfectly modifiable. 2 It is worth specifying the added value of a Foucauldian analysis as something distinct from the juxtaposition between individualistic and social conceptions of lifestyle. Both of these camps seem to take for granted that lifestyle is a thing in itself which can be unambiguously defi ned, and they also share the identification of lifestyle with health and prevention. Seen from the point of view of Nietzschean genealogy, however, historical concepts have no essence, which means that an analysis of the association between lifestyle and public health policy should focus on strategies employed to change lifestyles in a “healthy” direction. The dual Foucauldian perspective of biopolitics and governmentality stresses the importance of political technologies in the formation of such lifestyles, which means that a whole layer of health-promoting technologies need to be dissected to extract their built-in conception of lifestyle and health. It is not only a question of choosing a position on a continuum between individualistic and social conceptions of lifestyle, but of demonstrating that the complexity of technologies employed to regulate lifestyle is much more informative that a simple continuum would suggest.

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 207 The analytical strategy that I will employ in the following analysis of public health programs draws on the general concept of genealogy (Foucault 2000c), and specifically on its use in the history of sexuality (Foucault 1998). Both sexuality and lifestyle are objects that appear to have a material foundation, but as soon as you try to dissect the historical development of meanings behind them, their substance disintegrates into a web of social relations and technologies. As such, the epistemological point here is not to reveal what a “real” lifestyle is, healthy or unhealthy, because it is not a thing in itself. The key methodological question, then, is not if the documents used here reveal the true nature of a healthy lifestyle or how it can be achieved, but instead whether they represent conceptions of lifestyle politics in a public health context. Not that we should expect to fi nd a single, uniform concept of lifestyle at the core of these health documents. The argument, on the contrary, is that public health policy in this period is bursting with inner tensions and loose ends between different conceptions of lifestyle, which makes the general identification of lifestyle diseases and preventive policy seem all the more conspicuous. In other words, the variation between the lifestyle conceptions in the different policy documents is perhaps less important, because its epistemological function is essentially to reject a perceived identity. The same can be said about the use of cross-country comparison. The idea is not to uncover any deeply hidden truths about the health of Danes and Americans, but to argue that if two vastly different countries in terms of health care system and demographical composition experience similar ideas of lifestyle politics, these policies are unlikely to be a direct reflection of the actual health situation. It is worth adding that since this chapter focuses on the conceptions and intended function of lifestyle technologies, it is not possible to say anything on this basis about how they actually work in practice. The data material comprises all the major public health programs in each country over the past three decades, but the analysis mainly focuses on passages that clearly express the underlying lifestyle conception. While the chronology of public health programs is very similar in the two countries, the documents are very uneven in length. The American documents are in some cases almost ten times as long as their Danish counterparts, which accounts for a slight imbalance in the following presentations.

2. LIFESTYLE CHOICE AS THE ANTIDOTE TO AN AFFLUENT SOCIETY (1977–1988) Beginning in the mid-to-late 1970s, Denmark and the United States (like other Western states/countries) launched their fi rst policy programs to counter the surge in lifestyle-related complications such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. A major source of inspiration behind these initiatives was the document titled A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians

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authored by the Canadian Health Minister, Marc Lalonde, in 1974. This document argued that because the advance of medicine had come to a halt, governments needed to “get into the business of modifying human behavior” (Lalonde 1974: 36). Within the broader framework of what he called the “health field” approach, Lalonde urged health policy to focus on lifestyle defi ned as “ . . . the aggregation of decisions by individuals which affect their health and over which they have more or less control.” At another point in the publication, lifestyle is also associated with “destructive habits” and especially the term “self-imposed risks” (Lalonde 1974: 16). Lifestyle is thus seen as something falling under the choice, control or at least decision-making of the individual, but other than that, the category in itself is pretty vague.3 The belief in the potential of individual lifestyles also has a general function in the broader biopolitical strategy of public health policy. Both Lalonde and almost all of the early public health documents from Denmark and the US express a diminished belief in the progress of science in general, and of course of medicine in particular. Instead, their hope is that any progress in the population’s health will come from the healthy choices of individuals. They are remarkably optimistic about individual lifestyles, while at the same time they often mention how individuals lead “destructive lifestyles” in practice. The focus on individual choice should not be seen in isolation, since it clearly has a connection to the macroscopic statistical view of the population’s health. There is a general belief that individuals will be able to bring about improvements in the nation’s health, and the fi rst American Healthy People program from 1979 directly praises the Lalonde report for bringing attention to the importance of individual lifestyle in that context (DHEW 1979a: Ch. 1: 9–10). It is not without significance that an American public health program gives direct credit to its Canadian counterpart, given that the latter country has a universal health care system while the US does not have an integrated national health care system for all its citizens. The political context for this homage might be that in the late 1970s, the US government was planning to introduce some version of universal health care. For example, the forward plans for health for the years 1976 and 1978 both contain major sections entitled “Preparing for National Health Insurance” and also mention that prevention is necessary for cost containment in the future (DHEW 1974: 1, 7; 1978). Apart from the brief association between prevention and the health care system, there are surprisingly few references to the political context in practically all the documents examined. In most cases, it is argued that the prevention of unhealthy lifestyles is “an idea whose time has come” (DHEW 1979a: Ch. 1: 5) or something similarly vague. Much more attention is generally given to the “how” of lifestyle management than to the “why,” not only on the individual but also on the population level. Like the Lalonde report, the American Healthy People program says that it is in fact not the

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 209 individual lifestyle choice itself, but the “aggregation” of individual choices that public health policy should be concerned with. Regulating the aggregation of individual lifestyle choices is not a simple gesture, but requires a thorough understanding of the population and its internal composition. The following passage indicates the general approach adopted in Healthy People as a way of making the lifestyles of Americans an object of regulation. Simply by adopting the lifestyle of Seventh-day Adventists and moving to the Rocky Mountain States, US citizens could ensure for their children an incidence of cancer that was little more than half the national average, and they could do almost as well as this by becoming Mormons and migrating to Utah, or by migrating to Israel. It is perfectly reasonable for us to assume, therefore, that we could achieve as much reduction of cancer by appropriate steps in preventive medicine as our forebearers [sic] achieved for infectious diseases by improving public health. And the exercise is really to find out exactly which ingredients in our environment distinguish the Seventh-day Adventists, the Mormons in Utah, or the Jews and Arabs in Israel, from their counterparts in California, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. (DHEW 1979b: 165; cf. also DHEW 1979a: Ch. 10: 3) This quotation is remarkable, not only because it establishes a general connection between lifestyle and health conditions, but also because it understands lifestyles as being almost infinitely modifiable. The population’s lifestyle appears almost like an integrated statistical matrix that public health administrators can analyze by extracting each individual characteristic and then change as they see fit. This passage does not say much about how to actually do this, but the fi rst word, “simply,” indicates that such changes are within reach. In theoretical terms, one could even argue that despite the ambition to change the lifestyles of Americans, this conception of lifestyle lacks a substantial governmental rationality saying how to accomplish such changes. For example, it does not address the basic question of how to govern the lifestyle choices of individuals. Another thing to note in this essential passage is that it is not an entirely atomistic approach to lifestyle, as the standard critique of public health policy claims. It actually expresses the ambition to understand or at least identify the lifestyles of various subgroups within the population, depending on geographical location and religious denomination. While lifestyles are identified with specific social groups having either a healthy or an unhealthy way of life, the strategies employed to change lifestyles are solely oriented towards individuals. Healthy People thus attempts to change differences in lifestyle among social groups by using individualized health promotion instruments. A later passage in the same document goes into more detail about what technology might be used to influence individual lifestyles. It characterizes the desired healthy lifestyle as a sort of dietetic regime that consists of several simple living rules:

210 Lars Thorup Larsen A series of studies in Alameda County, California, showed substantial increases in the life spans of people who exercise vigorously and regularly, maintain normal weight, eat breakfast, do not snack between meals, avoid smoking, limit alcohol consumption, and sleep at least seven hours a night. A 45-year-old man who followed three or fewer of these seven health habits could, on the average, expect to live to age 67. If he followed six or seven, he could expect to live to age 78. Women who had such habits also lived longer than women who didn’t. (DHEW 1979b: 425–426) As this passage demonstrates, the Healthy People program approaches the management of lifestyles in the form of simple and healthy living rules. These living rules should be seen in the context of their negative counterparts, i.e., the detrimental lifestyle characteristics said to have caused the rise in lifestyle diseases. The problematization of unhealthy lifestyles is sometimes spelled out in very specific forms of behavior, in particular smoking, drinking, overeating and a lack of physical exercise. In other contexts, such as a passage immediately following the one quoted previously, a broader, cultural dimension is blamed. The document lists the major obstacles of improving one’s health, and in second place comes: “ . . . the affluent, self-indulgent, frequently violent American lifestyle” (DHEW 1979b: 426). Here, the term lifestyle is clearly used in a derogatory sense to critique ”American” lifestyle as such, and this type of implicit cultural critique has also been the target of critical remarks in the public health literature due to its reductionist approach (Coreil, Levin and Gartley Jaco 1985: 428). Although the reference to American lifestyle expands the perspective of lifestyle management beyond the individual, it does not provide much more in terms of what governmental technology can be applied to govern such aspects of the national lifestyle. For example, it does not really specify how the government should get individuals to move from self-indulgence to the simple living rules, nor for that matter does it say how individuals are supposed to live according to such rules. The healthy living habits advocated here might not sound particularly demanding compared to many health philosophies that exist today and can be much more stringent, but consider how much it would take for them to be adopted by an entire population. For example, can any parent justifiably demand seven hours of sleep every night or forbid their children to ever eat between meals when they are really hungry? Even a short list of guidelines can be extremely difficult to uphold and monitor if everyone has to live by them all the time, and how do you design a public policy intervention to regulate sleep or snacking between meals? Apart from brief remarks about passing out information, lifestyle counseling and teaching the individual what is healthy, the lack of actual governmental technologies is quite remarkable; indeed, the public health programs of each country seem to recognize this (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 30; DHEW 1979b: 431).

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 211 The Danish public health program from 1977 is even less concrete than its American counterpart when it comes to devising specific initiatives. Part of this is due to the limited knowledge base on prevention, since the Danish document mainly recognizes what is known not to work (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 277). Another reason is that the program was drafted in response to a parliamentary mandate focused on the overall priorities of the health care sector. Although lifestyle and prevention was absent from the original, parliamentary mandate, the document focuses most of its attention on how the Danish health care sector can take a major leap towards a preventive approach (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 11). The shift is mainly presented as a new choice of instruments, since the overall biopolitical strategy is said to be similar to that of the rest of the health care sector: The objective of the previous development of the health care sector has been to better the health condition of the population as much as possible and to provide the best possible means of aid to the individual in case of illness, for example by means of advanced medical or technical assistance. The proposals of this commission have no intention to change that, but merely suggest an adjustment of the means to continuously realize this natural objective for the efforts of the health care sector. (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 52)4 The shift towards the prevention of lifestyle diseases is motivated by two factors. First, the document says that previous efforts in the area of prevention have been much too modest. Second, and somewhat in contrast with the fi rst point, it claims that previous “experience” seems to suggest that no major health gains can be achieved through treatment technology, although it is unclear what this experience consists of (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 51). The commission merely “assumes” that the greatest health gains can be achieved by means of preventing lifestyle diseases, but despite their initial commitment to build on a fi rm evidence base, this principle is subsequently abandoned due to the very nature of preventive action in the area of lifestyle (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 26). The commission report discusses two epistemological problems related to the preventive approach to lifestyle diseases and health policy in general. First, there is a “dilemma of prevention,” which is that no one can ever fully document the efficacy of preventive action in the area of lifestyle (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 265). Intervention and results are often so far apart that it is impossible to judge whether changes in health status were actually caused by the chosen form of prevention. Second, the document also discusses the so-called “paradox of prevention,” which is characterized as follows: “only when the possibilities of treatment seem to have dried up does a growing interest in prevention arise” (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 264). The paradox lies in choosing a preemptive

212 Lars Thorup Larsen strategy as the very last instance, but the alleged paradox also appears to be in conflict with a later argument saying that “ . . . at all times, there has been agreement that it is better to prevent than to cure” (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 272). One thing stands out clearly from this discussion, even if the connection to individual lifestyle changes is relatively remote. A general association is made between the general shift towards prevention and societal changes over time, which is also present in the contemporary American document—albeit in a slightly different fashion. In the US, the officially stated reason for shifting health policy priorities from treatment to prevention was also the rise in lifestyle diseases. The rise in lifestyle diseases is understood as a descriptive characteristic of the average population’s way of living after World War II. As we can see in both the long passages from the American program (on Seventh-day Adventists and on simple living rules), the distinction between lifestyles characterized as healthy and those deemed unhealthy corresponds to a difference in modernization. The idealized subcultures are precisely the ones where the typical characteristics of middle-class post-industrial urban America have not yet undermined the simple life, i.e., a way of living with less convenience, affluence and self-indulgence than in the big cities and suburbia. In a similar passage, Healthy People also says that lifestyle diseases are caused by the many “excesses” of American life ranging from overeating to driving too fast (DHEW 1979a: 2–3). We saw the same idealization of simple lifestyles in the descriptive view quoted previoulsy, but now it comes with a built-in choice. This gives the impression that the development of lifestyle diseases in the entire population can easily be reversed by means of a biopolitical strategy where individuals make healthy choices almost automatically. The focus on simple living rules is underdeveloped technologically on another main point, because it gives the impression that a healthy lifestyle is chosen once and for all. Later and more comprehensive developments in lifestyle politics have underlined the importance of a continuous mode of health education where individuals are brought to reevaluate a lot of elements in their life continuously, weigh healthy elements against unhealthy ones, and make healthy choices again and again. This is only vaguely recognized in the fi rst Healthy People program, it seems, but becomes important later. One must not only live a healthy life and do so by choice, but the choice must be the result of a conscious and rigorous process where the individual weighs information and is able to express the healthy choices in a rational fashion. Leading a healthy lifestyle thus requires the individual to have a certain critical attitude toward his/her own actions. This passage from the fi rst Danish public health program, the 1977 commission report on new priorities in health care, indicates this aspect more clearly than its American counterpart:

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 213 It is remarkable how poorly most people are able to express themselves and recognize that what happens to them [e.g., diseases] is also a response to something; [it is likewise remarkable] how poorly they are able to make decisions and adjust to the changes that seem to go along with a prosperous society. Such human qualities appear to be decisive for the preservation of health. (Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget 1977: 275) While the previous quotations focused mostly on the content of a healthy lifestyle, this passage indicates a different orientation that focuses on certain human qualities seen to be required of an individual in order to achieve and maintain a healthy lifestyle. It is a more general and formal conception of lifestyle than both the simple descriptive view and the focus on choice, because it does not tell you what is healthy and what is not. Leading a healthy lifestyle now involves a form of subjectivation, since it boils down to a question of who you are or can become with the help of this policy. The main point here is not that public health policy in this early period is split between entirely separate paradigms. What is perhaps most significant about the management of lifestyle in these early public programs is how few and underdeveloped ideas they have about lifestyle and lifestyle management. As the previous passages indicate, the documents only contain very few general reflections on what lifestyle is, plus a strategy to counter the rise in lifestyle diseases. Reflections on how to put these strategies into practice are almost non-existent and perhaps this is the most significant characteristic of these documents. Neither the Danish nor the American program develop any technology for how to govern the lifestyles of individuals or population subgroups. Apart from a few negative ideas about the deficiencies of the traditional treatment-based system, these documents seem to build on an unarticulated biopolitical idea which says that health improvements will follow once the underlying problem of lifestyle diseases has been identified in statistical terms.

3. INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE LIMITS TO GOVERNING LIFESTYLE (1989–1998) If we move forward a decade to the next set of major public health programs, the field of preventive health policy has developed into a more comprehensive set of measures and indicators. There is a clear refinement in the conceptual approach to lifestyle in both the Danish Regeringens forebyggelsesprogram from 1989 (Sundhedsministeriet 1989) and the American Healthy People 2000 published in 1990, but they still display some internal tensions and complexities. One thing to notice fi rst about the second generation is that although they build on the previous documents analyzed

214 Lars Thorup Larsen previously, it is not very clear what has been achieved in practice. Both second-generation documents claim that previous policies have failed and look to correct previous mistakes, but they do not specify the failures in much detail (Sundhedsministeriet 1989: 8; DHHS 1990: vii). In other words, the development of a more comprehensive technology of regulating lifestyle is not based on practical experience. It is rather a new interpretation of the lifestyle concept and its place within a regime of political regulation that is the context of lifestyle politics at the end of the 1980s. The American document Healthy People 2000 stresses the need for personal responsibility much more emphatically than its predecessor. It sounds like a classic Enlightenment argument, saying that the individual should use knowledge to take control of his or her own “health destiny” (DHHS 1990: v). The subsequent chapter on “shared responsibilities” in public health emphasizes that the political management of lifestyle is the responsibility of the individual: The individual is both the starting point and the ultimate target of the campaign towards Healthy People 2000 ( . . . ). The fi rst role we must all undertake is responsibility for own personal health habits ( . . . ). Measurable decreases in risks to health can result from changes in diet, exercise, tobacco use, alcohol and drug use, injury prevention behavior, and sexual habits, but each of us must choose to make these changes a personal priority.(DHHS 1990: 85) As in the previous passage about simple living rules, this text does not clarify what should be given a lower priority in order to give fi rst priority to health, such as social relations or taking responsibility for others. There are sections on the responsibilities of family, community, professionals, media and government in the same chapter of the 1990 program, but these appear to be secondary to the responsibility of the individual (DHHS 1990: 85–88). The obvious paradox is of course that this form of lifestyle management depends so strongly on individual choice, but leaves little or nothing for the individual to decide since it is decided in advance what the outcome of the choice should be. The quoted passage not only obliges us to consider healthy change, it requires us to make precisely these changes, which is in fact a very restricted defi nition of what constitutes a healthy lifestyle. Both the American Healthy People 2000 and its Danish counterpart draw inspiration from the 1980s debates between liberalism and communitarianism, where social problems were associated with individual lack of commitment towards the community (cf. for example Bellah et al. 1985). As mentioned earlier, the overall strategy of the new public health policy is to get individuals to take more responsibility for their own health and wellbeing again after a period of excessive convenience and luxury. This experience of loss fits perfectly with some of the communitarian critiques of

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 215 an imbalance between individual and community, although the imbalance is also sometimes underplayed, for example in the following statement: “While the responsibility for change lies with each of us, it also lies with all of us” (DHHS 1990: 58). Such statements serve to make responsibility a key aspect of the lifestyle conception, but it is also rather vague and definitely removes the lifestyle category from health matters in a strict sense. It is not clear how individuals are supposed to increase their commitment to the community while at the same time prioritizing their own health, unless of course the latter is defined as being properly committed to the community. Since it is technically possible to be responsible for one’s community in some respects and still have unhealthy habits, the conception of lifestyle as responsibility must have a more specific target. In order to realign individual lifestyles with the healthy values of the community, the document thus calls for a new “culture of character” among the most vulnerable groups of the population. This could indicate the advent of a more comprehensive governmentality, because the realization of health policy objectives is presented as being dependent upon a stricter moral conduct of subjects. The culture of character is defi ned as “ . . . a way of thinking and being that actively promote[s] responsible behavior and the adoption of lifestyles that are maximally conducive to good health” (DHHS 1990: v). The focus on culture continues the previous decade’s tendency to break down the idea of a healthy lifestyle into general, underlying “human qualities,” i.e., to focus more on who the person is than what he or she does in terms of health behavior. The subjective orientation comes at the expense of a dedicated orientation to health, however, as a few examples will clearly illustrate. The 1990 program explains the connection between culture and lifestyle by referring to problems such as school failure, early pregnancy and “lifestyles conducive to violence” (DHHS 1990: 18). While clearly loosening its connection to the biopolitical optimization of the population’s health status, the culture focus assigns blame to some population subgroups whose lifestyle poses the greatest danger to public health. In the more detailed parts of the 1990 program, the initial responsibility of “all of us” quickly turns to blaming health stagnation on “ . . . blacks, blue-collar workers, and people with fewer years of education” (DHHS 1990: 136; cf. also pp. 594–605). As in the earlier period, it is not exactly accurate to criticize this program for having an entirely individualistic or even atomistic lifestyle conception. On the one hand, the document clearly associates the prevalence of unhealthy lifestyles with specific social groups who allegedly have a deficient character. The solutions to what looks like a social problem of lifestyle are still entirely individualistic, on the other hand, and here the standard critique from the public health community seems to apply. If we look at the 1989 Danish prevention program, it is not as elaborate as its American counterpart regarding individual responsibility, but this

216 Lars Thorup Larsen may just reflect the briefness of the document itself. It does, however, retain a very similar communitarian argument blaming the poor state of health on an uneven moral balance between individual and community (Sundhedsministeriet 1989: 8). As the document subsequently argues, prevention must proceed from the idea that society cannot solve health problems stemming from the lifestyle of the individual (Sundhedsministeriet 1989: 11). In this understanding, individual responsibility for one’s own lifestyle is not only a normative obligation, but formulated as a necessity if prevention is to function. Echoing the American observations on responsibility, the Danish program begins by assigning blame for governmental failure to the individual, but then extends this into a simple principle of governmentality, albeit a negative one. It simply says that since society cannot solve individual lifestyle problems, it should refrain from even trying to do so. What makes this principle interesting theoretically is not that it is fully developed, but that it defi nes the reality of individual lifestyles as a barrier to governmental regulation. This negative principle also raises a broader question regarding the overall purpose of the government’s public health program if it neither can nor should try to make people healthy. In this situation, one could argue that the governmental critique of how issues like health and lifestyle can and should be governed comes into confl ict with the biopolitical ambition to optimize the population’s health status. If lifestyle is conceived as falling outside the limits of governmental reach, it also sets limits to the exercise of biopolitical power and the prospects of using it to achieve a healthier population. As these examples demonstrate, the concept of a healthy lifestyle is somewhat more elaborated in the middle period, particularly regarding the political function of lifestyle for integrating individual and community. Much attention is paid to the moral side of lifestyle in this period, for instance in the strong focus on promoting individual responsibility, character and a moral balance between individual and community. Little, however, is said about the actual content of a healthy lifestyle and even less about the process of realizing such a healthy state. There seems to be a general tension in this period between, on the one hand, a set of critical governmental principles urging health authorities to let communities improve their own health and, on the other hand, a continued biopolitical ambition to improve the general health status dramatically. It is remarkable that the documents are most concrete on the issues of culture and moral character, while these have only a vague relationship with the initial problem of lifestyle-related diseases. In other situations, the focus on lifestyle diseases is intact, but with no clear ideas on how to improve anything. It is as if the “what” and the “how” are never really in perfect accordance, which again boils down to a mismatch between biopolitical ambitions and governmental techniques.

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 217 4. GOVERNING THE DETAILS OF EVERYDAY LIFE (SINCE 1999) The most recent period marks a big step in the creation of comprehensive lifestyle policies, or at least in the recognition that such an approach is needed. It also indicates that previous public health policies have experienced very little success in getting citizens to adopt a healthy lifestyle, much less in countering the rise in lifestyle diseases at the population level. Other adjustments have obviously been made in the meantime, such as a general rise in cigarette taxes across most Western countries and the slow introduction of smoking restrictions, but the main idea is still to improve health by way of individual lifestyles. Both American Healthy People 2010 (DHHS 2002 and the contemporaneous Danish public health program (Sundhedsministeriet 1999) maintain a hard line on individual responsibility. They do so, however, with a much more elaborate governmental rationality for how to intervene in individual lifestyles. Almost all of these techniques target individual motivation and decisiveness just as much as they concern health issues directly, in a similar fashion to the earlier discussion of “human qualities” and “culture of character,” but now in a more focused way. A key example is the ABC of good nutrition that Healthy People 2010 draws from the 2000 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. It is a simple analytical model designed to help individuals focus on three successive phases of a lifestyle change, especially with regard to the prevention of obesity: “ . . . to stay healthy, persons aged 2 years and older should follow these ABCs for good health: Aim for fitness, Build a healthy base, and Choose sensibly. To aim for fitness, aim for a healthy weight and be physically active each day. To build a healthy base, let the Pyramid guide food choices; choose a variety of grains daily, especially whole grains; choose a variety of fruits and vegetables daily; and keep food safe to eat. To choose sensibly, choose a diet that is low in saturated fat and cholesterol and moderate in total fat; choose beverages and foods to moderate intake of sugars; choose and prepare foods with less salt; and if consuming alcohol, do so in moderation” (DHHS 2002: ch.19: 3, emphasis in original). Several countries, including the US and Denmark, use the food pyramid as a general guide for nutrition, but the quoted passage extends the pyramid rationale to other lifestyle factors such as physical exercise. More importantly, it adds a whole new dimension to the actual content of the pyramid, i.e., what should be consumed in what proportions, etc. The model initially assumes that the individual already has comprehensive information on health and nutrition, but since the content of this information is subject to change, it is essential to get the individual to do something active with it.

218 Lars Thorup Larsen The individual is supposed to analyze and evaluate a wide range of details in his or her daily nutrition, almost to the extent that a nutrition expert or counselor would do. Governing healthy lifestyles thus involves an attempt to improve the self-governing capacities of individuals dramatically, but since these are difficult to specify in detail, the ABC model falls back on general human qualities as a proxy for a healthy lifestyle. As in the previous programs, it is still relatively unclear how individuals can really use this model to guide their normal daily life. Not only is it difficult for an individual to navigate between many types of fruit colors, fats and grains, but Healthy People 2010 is not very clear on how to reach its biopolitical goal on the macro level either. Instead, it breaks everything down into an endless list of partial goals with corresponding monitoring devices and indicators. It is clearly inspired by New Public Management or similar management instruments designed to monitor the goal-achievement of public policies, but here applied to the detailed living habits of the entire population. Here are two typical examples of policy goals, of which there are literally hundreds: [Goal No.] 19–5. Increase the proportion of persons aged 2 years and older who consume at least two daily servings of fruit (target: 75 percent) [Goal No.] 19–6. Increase the proportion of persons aged 2 years and older who consume at least three daily servings of vegetables, with at least one-third being dark green or orange vegetables (target: 50 percent). (DHHS 2002 ch.19: 18–20) The content of these goals is not radically different from campaigns in other countries, such as the British “5 a day” or the Danish “6 om dagen”, so the problem is not necessarily that the bar is set too high. It is just fundamentally unclear how the government is going to affect and later monitor each individual’s daily choice of fruit color, not to mention what individual knowledge has gone into the process. The development from the earliest descriptions of healthy lifestyle to Healthy People 2010 demonstrates the infi nite possibilities for future refi nements. Before it was less fat, more grains and all the fruit you could eat, but now you have to consider what type of fat, prepared how, what color of fruit to pick and avoid, etc., and still we have not even begun to consider the overall food intake against metabolism, or differences between individuals and between groups. Does it really make sense to argue that all individuals over the age of two have exactly the same needs and should be subject to identical guidelines? Probably not, and this is the real problem of Healthy People 2010 in terms of how to govern healthy lifestyles: that it is too general and too specific at the same time. It elaborates tons of specific details on both the “what” and the “how” of regulating lifestyle, but the integration of all these aspects seems to get lost under the heavy load of endless indicators and monitoring devices.

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 219 The Danish contemporary Regeringens folkesundhedsprogram from 1999 takes its point of departure from a critique of existing lifestyles. Although he announces that he will stop moralizing and blaming the victim (Sundhedsministeriet 1999: 110) the Minister of Health, Carsten Koch, openly declares that “ . . . our lifestyles are to blame” (Sundhedsministeriet 1999: 5). What lifestyle is to blame for is the stagnation of Danish median life expectancy compared with similar populations, especially due to a higher consumption of tobacco and alcohol. The Danish program takes a slightly different approach than its American counterpart, because where the latter tries to monitor lifestyle in its statistical detail, the former intends to use the surroundings of everyday life as a new policy instrument. The approach builds on two basic ideas from the international community of health promotion expertise. The fi rst returns to the identification of lifestyle with choice and says that public health policies should “make the healthy choice the easier choice,” an idea from the WHO’s Ottawa Charter (WHO 1986). The previous Danish program had already mentioned this ambition, but not really put it into practice. The second new idea is the so-called “setting approach” widely discussed in the international health promotion literature (Carlsson 1998: 47; Højlund and Larsen 2001: 80). An offshoot from the idea of making healthy choices easier, this involves a more systematic ambition to reform key institutions in the individual’s everyday life. Typically, the approach involves a four-track strategy for interventions in public schools, workplaces, local communities, and the health care sector. There is an interesting theoretical digression to the selection of precisely these four settings. Apart from prisons, these settings are identical to the four cornerstones of the so-called “disciplinary society,” governing individuals from cradle to grave through the disciplinary precautions embedded in schools, hospitals, cities and factories (Foucault 1977; Larsen 2002: 286). Deleuze has become famous for his study of Foucault, in which he argues that disciplinary power relations have now transformed themselves into a new control form beyond the limits of traditional civil society institutions (Deleuze 1995; Hardt 1995). The present case seems to suggest that disciplinary institutions are still important but with a new purpose, because they are being used to reach individuals in a social setting more conducive to behavioral change. One could even say that the surroundings of everyday life have become the object of governmental rationality because of the pivotal role assigned to these institutions in lifestyle politics. Contrary to its American counterpart, the Danish approach focuses less attention on each singular object of healthy choices, such as fruit color or grain types. More reflection goes into how individual lifestyles are embedded within the selected settings of policy intervention. It is important not to confuse the focus on healthy surroundings with the question of social living conditions, because the only redistribution mentioned in the 1999 program is a normalization of disadvantaged groups with an “accumulation of unhealthy lifestyles” (Sundhedsministeriet 1999: 21). Sometimes the

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critique of existing lifestyles is directed at Danish culture as such, e.g., for being too liberal in bringing up children, or by romanticizing about the time when alcohol was only served on rare occasions and never directly from the bottle, and women were not allowed to smoke in public (Sundhedsministeriet 1999: 110–111). The cultural critique is only a sideshow to the general lifestyle approach, however, which focuses on a long list of healthy surroundings “ . . . whose coherence is governed by the realities of everyday life” (Sundhedsministeriet 1999: 28). The category of “reality” is paradoxical here, of course, because the whole effort aims to reform and reorganize every little detail in a health-promoting direction. It is the “reality” of using the social surroundings of everyday life as procedure for how to govern individuals that is at stake, and this also involves an effort to improve citizens’ receptivity to future health knowledge, motivation and decisiveness (WHO 1986). The lifestyle policies of the most recent period are thus characterized by a duality between the health-conducive surroundings of everyday life on the one hand, and a more traditional apparatus of social intervention to handle unhealthy individuals and especially parents on the other. The unifying aspect of the Danish and American policies in this period is the rigorous and systematic approach to rationalizing every little detail of the individual’s life. There is no guarantee human conduct will foster a healthy life in this sense, because the development of much more comprehensive governmental rationalities in this period often comes at the expense of a clear focus on health. It easily turns into a generalized project of creating better people with the ability to make healthy choices themselves, but the association with the underlying problem of lifestyle diseases crumbles under the attempt to prescribe an overambitious reorganization of social life as such.

5. CONCLUSION It is quite easy to demonstrate that public health policy aimed at the individual’s lifestyle is not a simple response to the statistical rise in lifestyle diseases. An alternative way to study this dubious association between lifestyle politics and lifestyle diseases would have been to examine the epidemiological research on the actual incidence of these diseases. Given the multiplicity of lifestyle conceptions, however, it is difficult to imagine what coherent statistical risk profile this would correspond to. In the initial use of the term lifestyle as something related to health, it was a descriptive term designating whatever way-of-living was typical of either healthy or unhealthy people and regardless of whether it was based on a deliberate choice. Although they often romanticize the supposed healthiness of this imagined pre-modern life, all the documents examined also conceptualize lifestyle as something related to individual choice. The typical critique of public health policy targets precisely this reduction of a social problem to individual choice, and while there is some truth to these

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 221 allegations, the documents in fact reveal a more complex interaction of individual and social aspects of lifestyle. The lifestyle conceptions analyzed here do not fit into a simple continuum between individual and social aspects. Instead, they should be read as various attempts to associate a set of living conditions with different techniques to create change. Some of the early documents imagine a set of simple living rules to curb the rise of lifestyle diseases, while other documents require individuals to reflect and express themselves about the way they lead their daily life. Later, there is much focus on strengthening individual responsibility, although it is mainly focused on the problematic lifestyles of underprivileged groups in terms of class, race, and education. The most recent variations of lifestyle politics include a comprehensive rationalization of everyday life. The Danish version tries to reorganize the settings of everyday life to produce a healthy result, while the American plan puts all the details of individual lifestyle into numbers, indicators, and detailed recommendations. The main point is that today’s public health policies include a multifaceted political technology of how to identify and rationalize individual lifestyles, but not necessarily one that is very effective in regulating lifestyle diseases. The gradual development of a more comprehensive technology for governing lifestyle seems to be emerging at the expense of something else. The more sophisticated the techniques we see in terms of rationalizing the individual’s life, the less these seem to concern health in a strict sense. In many cases, public health policies turn into very general reflections on motivation psychology rather than a realistic strategy for what it means to regulate individual health behavior in practice. One could ask why policies should even concern “health” in a strict sense when this is obviously a very flexible term. It is only in the process of devising new strategies and technologies for regulating healthy lifestyles that the conception of health becomes so broad, however. The success criteria of public health programs, on the other hand, are still defi ned according to the statistical prevalence of lifestyle diseases as well as the population’s performance on the four behavioral factors of smoking, alcohol, diet and exercise. The gradual disconnect between lifestyle politics and health is thus problematic, because it undermines the documents’ own ambitions to counter the problem of lifestyle diseases. This chapter has used the dual theoretical lens of biopolitics and governmentality to magnify and analyze the complex problems involved in assigning governmental techniques to biopolitical problems. If one looks at the different conceptions of the individual with respect to lifestyle choices, for example, it is quite obvious that no real individual could reasonably fit into these different categories at the same time. It is not so much that public health programs set the bar too high, i.e., imagine that individuals will become incredibly healthy, but rather that these individuals are expected to be infi nitely modifiable, to retain absolute sovereignty while being highly embedded in healthy everyday surroundings at the same time. Three decades of public health policies have not been able to establish a clear connection between the biopolitical instruments aimed at improving

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healthy lifestyles and the underlying problem of lifestyle diseases. However, the reason for the persistent mismatch between lifestyle diseases and lifestyle politics lies not only in the choice of biopolitical strategy, but perhaps even more in the government of healthy lifestyles. Although one cannot separate biopolitics from governmentality completely, the biopolitical ambition to reduce the incidence of major lifestyle diseases seems to lack a clear idea about how to get individuals to conduct a healthy lifestyle. A possible reason for the mismatch is that biopolitics was invented to counter the problem of scarcity, although not exclusively, while considerable parts of Western populations are now troubled by the opposite problems of overeating, overconsumption and excess convenience. On the other hand, governmental rationalities have developed quite substantially during the past 50 years, especially in the various critiques of existing governmentalities. It is mainly the state-phobic characteristics of contemporary governmentality that become an obstacle to improving lifestyle, because they force authorities to always drape their biopolitical interventions in the vocabulary of individual choice. The impact of governmental rationality on lifestyle policies appears to be almost exclusively negative. Health programs are clearly written against the backdrop of state-phobic critiques saying that state-based health policies have undermined the responsibility of both individuals and communities, but this generally leaves us in the dark about a positive alternative. Returning to the broader question of governmentality, this case can be seen as testimony that state-phobic arts of government are not only found in the neoliberal attempts to implement market-like mechanisms in public management. Common to both the neoliberal strategies and the use of governmental techniques in public health policy is a movement away from seeing the state as the general vehicle for regulating individuals. It is quite paradoxical to fi nd such examples in what is in effect a set of highly centralized official government programs, but again this only underlines the analytical strength of the governmentality perspective; it is able to see governing even where governments claim not to be able to do so. The statephobic turn of governmentalities since the 1970s makes it very difficult to create a successful biopolitical government of lifestyle diseases, but perhaps it also makes it easier to hide the deficiencies of a governmental technology in the dense undergrowth of status indicators and monitoring devices.

NOTES 1. The following argument draws on the thorough review by Coreil et al. (1985). 2. For example, the editorial of the very fi rst issue of the Journal of Public Health Policy was dedicated to the “Lifestyle Approach to Prevention,” which is criticized for an ideology of blaming the victim and compared to the scapegoating of immigrants in the nineteenth century (1980). References such as these constitute a standard critique of lifestyle conceptions in the

The Birth of Lifestyle Politics 223 public health community, which criticizes most public health policies for reducing lifestyle to an atomistic view of individual choice. 3. In the same period Lalonde’s policy influence was also controversial as he was criticized of blaming the victim, see previous note (Journal of Public Health Policy 1980: 6). This critique is not reflected in the policy documents, however, where his ideas are presented as matters of fact. 4. Quotations from Danish policy documents translated by author.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1998 [1995]). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds.). (1996). Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton. (1985). Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row. Carlsson, Monica. (1998). Miljø, sundhed og demokrati. Copenhagen: Danmarks Lærerhøjskole. Coreil, Jeannine, Jeffrey S. Levin and E. Gartly Jaco. (1985). Life Style—An Emergent Concept in the Sociomedical Sciences. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 9: 423–437. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Deleuze, Gilles. (1995). Post-script on the Societies of Control, pp. 177–182 in Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. DHEW (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). (1974). Forward Plan for Health for Fiscal Years 1976–80. Available online at: http://rmp.nlm.nih. gov/RM/A/A/E/U/_/rmaaeu.pdf (accessed January 1, 2009). DHEW (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). (1976). Forward Plan for Health for Fiscal Years 1978–82. Washington DC: Public Health Service. DHEW (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). (1979a). Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Washington DC: Department of Health, Education and Welfare. DHEW. (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). (1979b). Healthy People: The Surgeon General’s Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention: Background Papers. Washington DC: Department of Health, Education and Welfare. DHHS. (US Department of Health and Human Services). (1990). Healthy People 2000. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett. DHHS (US Department of Health and Human Services). (2002). Healthy People 2010. McLean, VA: International Medical Publishing. Donzelot, Jacques (1991). The Mobilization of Society, pp. 169–180 in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Donzelot, Jacques. (1996). L’Avénir du Social. Esprit 219: 58–81. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (1996). What Is Critique?, pp. 382–398 in James Schmidt (ed) What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Foucault, Michel. (1998). The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2000a). The Birth of Social Medicine, pp. 134–156 in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2000b). The Subject and Power, pp. 326–348 in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 3. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2000c). Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, pp. 369–392 in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008a). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008b). Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France 1982–1983. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Hardt, Michael. (1995). The Withering of Civil Society. Social Text 45, 14(4): 27–44. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Højlund, Holger and Lars Thorup Larsen. (2001). Det sunde fællesskab. Distinktion 3: 73–90. Journal of Public Health Policy. (1980). Editorial. Journal of Public Health Policy 1(1): 6–9. Lalonde, Marc. (1974). A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians. A Working Document, Ottawa, Government of Canada, Minister of Supply and Services. Larsen, Lars Thorup, (2002). Staten, det er ikke mig. Politica 34(3): 281–295. Larsen, Lars Thorup. (2007). Speaking Truth to Biopower. Distinktion 14: 9–24. Lemke, Thomas. (1997). Eine Kritik der Politischen Vernunft. Foucaults Analyse der Modernen Gouvernementalität. Berlin/Hamburg: Argument. Lemke, Thomas. (2005). “A Zone of Indistinction”—A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics. Outlines 1: 3–13. Lemke, Thomas, (2007). An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory. Distinktion 15: 43–64. Petersen, Alan and Deborah Lupton. (1996). The New Public Health. Health and Self in the Age of Risk. London: Sage. Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas Rose. (2006). Biopower Today. Biosocieties 1(2): 195– 217. Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, Lars-Henrik and Jens Erik Kristensen. (1986). Lys, Luft og Renlighed— Socialhygiejnens Fødsel. Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag. Senellart, Michel. (1995). Les Arts de Gouverner. Du Regimen Médiéval au Concept de Gouvernement. Paris: Seuil. Sundhedsministeriet. (1989). Regeringens Forebyggelsesprogram. Copenhagen: Sundhedsministeriet. Sundhedsministeriet. (1999). Regeringens Folkesundhedsprogram 1999–2008. Copenhagen: Sundhedsministeriet. Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget. (1977). Betænkning fra Sundhedsprioriteringsudvalget (Commision report No. 809). Copenhagen: Statens Trykningskontor. World Health Organization. (1986). Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. Geneva: World Health Organization.

11 Biology, Citizenship and the Government of Biomedicine Exploring the Concept of Biological Citizenship Peter Wehling

There is little controversy among social scientists that the rapidly evolving biosciences and biotechnologies possess the power to fundamentally transform social relations and identities, both collective and individual, within contemporary societies. Yet this consensus raises a number of questions which are being less unanimously answered in current debates on biopolitics and biopower. How are these transformations to be adequately understood, what will their likely social, political and cultural consequences be, and what regimes of governing the implementation of the new biotechnologies and their social impacts will emerge? With regard to such questions, a number of scholars have recently, and almost simultaneously, begun to conceive of the dynamic relationships between bioscience and society in terms of an emerging new kind of citizenship, namely biological citizenship (Petryna 2002; Rose and Novas 2005; Rose 2007a; Gibbon 2007; Fitzgerald 2008; Flear 2008; Lora-Wainwright 2009; Hughes 2009) or genetic citizenship (Kerr 2003; Heath, Rapp and Taussig 2004; Schaffer, Kuczynski and Skinner 2008). In a more or less systematic way, most of these conceptual developments refer to the idea of “biosociality,” which was introduced by Paul Rabinow (1996) during the 1990s in order to denote new social identities and practices referring to human nature as culturally understood and technically re-formable (see also Rabinow 1999, 2008; Gibbon and Novas 2008).Since biological or genetic citizenship is held to indicate new forms of activism and sociality as well as new relationships between lay social actors, biomedical knowledge and scientific experts, it is important to explore in greater detail how these new concepts might contribute to and develop our understanding of the current government of biomedicine. While the concepts of biological or genetic citizenship are used with somewhat different meanings by the individual authors, in a very broad sense they are to be understood in terms of the articulation of claims to participation in social and political life and to the recognition of certain individuals’ or

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groups’ identities, expertise and specific needs based on their (supposedly) biological or genetic conditions. In particular, patient associations, mostly understood as biosocialities, are highlighted as important examples of the activities of biological and genetic citizens because they successfully challenge the demarcations between experts and lay people. While the novelty and importance of such phenomena are beyond doubt, what is surprising, still, is the emphasis placed on optimism and hope for better medical therapies and health care as key elements of biological/genetic citizenship: According to Deborah Heath et al. (2004: 152), genetic citizenship evolves in correspondence with an “ethics of care,” whereas Nikolas Rose (2007a: 135) states that “contemporary biological citizenship operates within the field of hope.” In addition, while they generally acknowledge that biological citizenship1 is linked with responsibilities and obligations as well, many of the current accounts focus on the rights and opportunities presumably resulting from this new form of citizenship. However, since in this chapter I want to analyze the emergence of biological citizenship as a new element in the current governmental regime of biomedicine, it seems indispensable to explicitly address the obligations biological citizens confront (see also Kerr 2003) as well as the social contexts in which claims for biological citizenship are made and the potentially undesirable side-effects they might have. Thus, instead of straightforwardly taking biological citizenship as an evolving social reality, in this chapter I would like to ask a question similar to the one posed by Alan Irwin (2001: 4) with regard to the concept of scientific citizenship: how are “biological citizens” constructed within current social struggles, political debates and social science discourses? And how does the idea of biological citizenship contribute to contemporary forms of government? In what follows, I focus on two closely related aspects of these issues. I point to some conceptual limitations and biases in current debates on biological citizenship, biosociality and biopolitics, and I argue that biological citizenship is not just another citizenship project promoting new rights for new categories of citizens but constitutes an arena in which both rights and obligations are negotiated and social identities reconfigured in often rather ambivalent ways. In the following section, I explore in greater detail how the concept of biological citizenship has emerged, how it has been understood in recent debates, and what conceptual ambiguities can be identified. In section 2, I argue that biological citizenship and biosocialities are not simply based on “biology itself” but on scientific defi nitions of certain conditions as biological and genetic, with such definitions at least sometimes being keenly contested. Thus, the question arises of what is biological about biological citizenship. Given this background, I would like to demonstrate, mainly using the example of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement in the USA, that the relations between patient groups and health movements on the one hand, and mainstream science, business fi rms and political institutions on the other hand are shaped by tensions and confl icts to a much greater extent than most accounts of biological citizenship suggest (section

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3). Referring to recent debates around transplant medicine and organ procurement, I would like to illustrate in section 4 how new responsibilities and moral duties of biological citizens emerge while at the same time new institutional arrangements such as markets for human organs are proposed within biopolitical and bioethical discourse. It is sometimes claimed that in the twenty-fi rst century biopolitics is entering an era of “optimization”, or “enhancement” as it is termed in bioethical debates. This means that the use of biomedicine and biotechnologies no longer seems to be restricted, if it ever was, to the therapy of diseases; instead, these technologies are increasingly employed in order to enhance the human body and its capacities even beyond what hitherto has been deemed “normal” or “natural.” In section 5, I explore the implications of this shift from therapy to enhancement for the concept of biological citizenship. Does the latter “merely” aim at unrestricted access to adequate medical treatment for individuals or groups suffering from certain diseases? Or does it include a more problematic right—and possibly even a moral duty—to optimize “healthy” bodies and minds as well? In my conclusion, I argue that we should understand the emergence of the active biological citizen as a highly ambivalent key element in the formation of a governmental regime fostering and regulating the implementation of new biotechnologies.

1. THE EMERGENCE AND CONTOURS OF A NEW BIOPOLITICAL CONCEPT In recent years we have been witnessing the somewhat inflationary proliferation of citizenship concepts and projects. 2 Among these are, for instance, “multicultural citizenship” (Kymlicka 1995) and “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999), or, closer to the issues of biopolitics, biomedicine and biotechnologies, “technological citizenship” (Frankenfeld 1992), “scientific citizenship” (Irwin 2001), “pharmaceutical citizenship” (Ecks 2008), and “therapeutic citizenship” (Cataldo 2008). This pluralization of citizenship concepts reflects the rather uncontroversial fact that claims to social inclusion, political participation and recognition of social identities both transgress the boundaries of the nation-state and refer to citizens’ needs and demands in a greater variety of social spheres (culture, science and technology, health,sexuality, etc.) beyond the “classic” triad of civil, political and social citizenship (Marshall 1950). Nevertheless, due to the rapid multiplication of citizenship claims the meaning of the concept has become “quite diffuse,” as Andreas Fahrmeir has recently remarked: “(C)itizenship has come to mean anything and nothing: the nationality indicated by a passport, participation rights in various public and private contexts, entitlement to benefits, commitment to a particular political or social order, even decent behavior towards one’s colleagues on university campuses” (Fahrmeir 2007: 1).

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Against this background, it is far from evident what the ideas of biological and genetic citizenship actually mean. Closer inspection of how and in what contexts these concepts have been used and defi ned therefore seems justified. According to Rose (2007a: 283–284, endnote 2), the notion of biological citizenship was introduced at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century almost simultaneously but with different accentuations by the anthropologist Adriana Petryna (2002) as well as by Carlos Novas and himself (Rose and Novas 2005). The related notion of genetic citizenship has been referred to by Anne Kerr (2003) in a rather critical perspective, and more systematically elaborated by Heath et al. (2004). One can reasonably assume that the emergence of these novel concepts results from the growing importance of biomedical and genetic categories not only in medicine and health care, but also with respect to social identities and relations, to rights, responsibilities and claims for recognition. However, the question remains of how such a “biologization” and/or “geneticization” of social contexts is to be adequately understood and evaluated. Petryna (2002), in her study of life politics in post-Soviet and postChernobyl Ukraine, understands biological citizenship in a historically, geographically and politically rather specific way. As she argues, the postsocialist Ukrainian state used the Chernobyl disaster and its consequences in order to support its claims to national autonomy and international political legitimacy by devaluing the former Soviet responses to the accident as insufficient and establishing new social welfare institutions for the affected population (Petryna 2002: 5). Given this background, she describes biological citizenship as “a massive demand for but selective access to a form of social welfare based on medical, scientific, and legal criteria that both acknowledge biological injury and compensate for it” (Petryna 2002: 6). Rose and Novas (2005) and Rose (2007a), by contrast, use the term in a wider sense in order “to highlight the ways that citizenship has been shaped by conceptions of specific vital characteristics of human beings, and has been the target of medical practices since at least the eighteenth century in the West” (Rose 2007a: 24). 3 Given this long history of interrelations between politics, citizenship and biology, Rose identifies a recent shift in the social and political construction of biological citizenship (Rose 2007a: 131), arguing that the former obsession with eugenics and health of the national population has not simply come to an end but is increasingly being replaced by a concern with individual health and well-being within an “economy of hope” (Rose 2007a: 136). Thus we are currently witnessing “the emergence of an innovative new ethics of biological citizenship and genetic responsibility. Our somatic, corporeal, neurochemical individuality now becomes a field of choice, prudence, and responsibility” (Rose 2007a: 39–40). Heath et al. (2004) link the emergence of genetic citizenship to the fi ndings of the Human Genome Project and the subsequent “geneticization” of biomedical practices and popular perceptions. As these authors argue,


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genetic citizenship is part of a “genetic governmentality” and “surely has the potential to call forth eugenic practices at the individual level. Yet it is at the same time a site of new forms of power, knowledge, and embodied discipline, along with novel rights and responsibilities” (Heath et al. 152). However, these authors primarily focus on the benefits of genetic citizenship; the dangers, although mentioned (Heath et al. 158), remain relatively unexplored.4 They argue that “it is precisely the breaching of divides between the genetically disordered and their scientific, medical and political allies that beckons us to develop the idea of ‘genetic citizenship’” (Heath et al. 156). Furthermore, as the authors themselves remark, the examples of the emergence of genetic citizenship they give in their paper “all concern extremely rare single-gene disorders” (Heath et al. 165), and the activities of such patient groups consequently focus on supporting research to fi nd “their” respective genes (Heath et al. 162). The notion of genetic citizenship therefore appears to refer to the very specific needs of a relatively small number of “genetically disordered” patients’ and parents’ groups rather than to a universalist claim to appropriate medical treatment for all humans affected by diseases and impairments. Nevertheless, Heath and her colleagues argue in favor of “genetic citizenship for us all” (Heath et al. 166), because “to the extent that the widespread and chronic diseases of ‘advanced civilization’ are increasingly understood to have a genetic basis, we all have ‘screenable futures’” (Heath et al. 165–166). Heath and colleagues thus seem to underestimate the price to be paid for such an extension, which would consist in a far-reaching, questionable geneticization of diseases, conditions and identities. 5 According to Rose (2007a: 134), biological citizenship is both individualizing and collectivizing. On the one hand, individuals are increasingly expected to be responsible for their own health and illnesses, not only with respect to their physical bodies but also to their statistical genetic risks. On the other hand, biological citizenship is seen as closely linked to new “biosocialities” (such as patient associations), understood as social communities and collective identities based on a shared somatic or genetic status. Rabinow describes biosociality as a biologization of identity “different from the older biological categories of the West (gender, age, race) in that it is understood as inherently manipulable and re-formable” (Rabinow 1999: 13).6 What is constitutive of active biological citizens are especially such forms of biosociality, as Rose (2007a: 144–147) emphasizes, and frequently biological or genetic citizenship is put on a level with participation in an Internet-based biosocial community (see for instance Schaffer et al. 2008: 155). Although these accounts of biological or genetic citizenship differ in important respects, they have in common an “emphasis on transformation” (Kerr 2003: 44) which, as Anne Kerr critically remarks, risks fostering a selective view of current developments. The crucial point is not that older forms of eugenics and coercive biopolitics will simply return, but

230 Peter Wehling that, in line with biological citizenship and biosociality, a new governmental regime is emerging in which biological identities might be ascribed to or imposed on individuals or groups, new forms of inequality and discrimination might develop, and freedom of choice might subtly be transformed into an obligation to act as an active, responsible and prudent biological citizen.7

2. WHAT IS BIOLOGICAL ABOUT BIOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP? Implicitly at least, the terms “biological citizenship” and “biosociality” suggest that citizenship claims and emerging communities are based on biological realities shared by certain individuals or groups. However, what often appears to be underestimated are the implications of the fact that such supposed biological or genetic realities are not uncontroversially given, but defined, constructed and ascribed by the biosciences and their specific “styles of thought”. This holds true regardless of whether or not the affected individuals and groups themselves welcome such defi nitions and ascriptions (for instance, because they provide them with better therapies or exempt them from stigmatization). Of course, there are many instances where the biologization or geneticization of specific conditions is entirely uncontested and may have highly beneficial outcomes for those affected. An impressive example of such a process of social inclusion and recognition due to the specification of genetic disease causes is given by Michel Callon and Vololona Rabeharisoa (2008: 232–249), referring to the French association of patients with muscular dystrophy. However, there are many other cases where bioscientific claims are highly ambiguous and questionable. Consider the example of shyness. Should we understand it, as recent biomedical research suggests, as a biological and even congenital condition, resulting from a chemical imbalance in the individual brain which is hardly distinguishable from psychiatric disorders such as Social Anxiety Disorder and preferably to be treated with antidepressants (see for instance Bandelow 2007)? Or is shyness, by contrast, primarily a social role and identity emerging from and being negotiated in social interactions, as social scientists have argued (McDaniel 2003; Scott 2007)? Does biomedical research actually reveal the truth about shyness or is it part of a wider dynamics, driven not least by the economic interests of pharmaceutical companies in medicalizing a widespread and normal pattern of human behavior (e.g., fear of speaking in public settings)? The latter view has convincingly been substantiated by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels (2005) and Christopher Lane (2007), drawing on extensive evidence from the history of psychiatry as well as recent advertising campaigns blurring the boundaries between shyness and Social Anxiety Disorder. Nevertheless, there are presumably a lot of shy people who welcome and accept biomedical explanations because these enable them “to account for their


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behavior in terms of illness rather than social deviance, which exonerates them from moral blame” (Scott 2007: 157). Others, however, oppose such a medicalization of their behavior and feelings. They insist on the strictly social character of shyness, resist the moral pressure to overcome their shyness and “demand their right to be seen as different but equal” (Scott 2007: 166). It would be mistaken, then, to understand shy people and self-help groups straightforwardly as biosocial communities. By contrast, what is at issue is precisely the question of whether and to what extent it is appropriate to re-defi ne shyness in biological and medical terms, thus tacitly affi rming (and naturalizing) cultural norms of assertiveness and self-expression that have become dominant in neo-liberal societies since the 1970s (see McDaniel 2003 for a cultural history of shyness). A similar argument can be made with regard to (male) homosexuality. As Peter Conrad (2007: 97–113) remarks, there are recent developments, not least in genetic research, which might affect the demedicalization of homosexuality achieved only a few decades ago.8 Since the early 1990s, biological and particularly genetic explanations of homosexuality have re-emerged, culminating in the pretended discovery of what was termed the “gay gene” which, though scientifically contested, attracted broad public attention (Conrad and Markens 2001). Although the geneticization of homosexuality would of course not be a simple “revival” of older medical and psychiatric explanations, Conrad points to some possible dangers in the future: “Should a valid and verifiable gene or genes for sexual orientation be identified, there might be considerable pressure in some quarters for genetic testing, which could engender increased medicalization of homosexuality. Such testing might lead to the termination of pregnancies or, if ever available, genetic therapies for the ‘disorder’” (Conrad 2007: 109). Again, there are many gay and lesbian communities that comprehend their homosexuality as an inborn trait and therefore welcome biological explanations. One of the main reasons for this is that reference to biological and genetic origins of homosexuality is held to underline its unchangeability, thus facilitating civil rights claims as well as resisting the conservative belief that homosexuality is a treatable mental disorder. Indeed, as opinion polls suggest, individuals believing in the biological origins of homosexuality are more likely to support gay civil rights claims (Conrad 2007: 110).9 Nonetheless, within the gay and lesbian communities there are also strong objections to biological explanations, motivated not least by fears of remedicalization. One point these critics stress is of more general importance: at least under certain historical circumstances, biological and genetic models of human traits and behavior might foster precisely those essentialist notions of given and fi xed identities that recent queer, disability, and partly also citizenship studies have sought to subvert (see, for instance, Butler 1991, 2006; Isin and Turner 2008). There is a familiar counter-argument to criticisms of geneticization which claims that genetic research today has mostly overcome genetic

232 Peter Wehling determinism and essentialism and increasingly accounts for complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors. While this might be true on a very general level, what can be observed in more concrete instances is rather what Adam Hedgecoe (2001) has termed the narrative of “enlightened geneticization.” Referring to the example of schizophrenia, he uses this term to describe an explanatory strategy which on the one hand stresses the multifactorial causation of diseases or disorders, yet on the other hand subtly prioritizes genetic causes over environmental ones by ascribing to the former the status of a “baseline,” of the “only single necessary condition of causation” while non-genetic factors are considered non-specific and contingent (Hedgecoe 2001: 885).10 One consequence of this explanatory model is to focus further research primarily on the supposed genetic causes, particularly since these are held to be more accessible to scientific investigation than environmental and other factors. Thus, while conferring a central causal role to genes seems to facilitate the successful production of presumedly useful and exploitable knowledge (Rouvroy 2008: 41), it tacitly and unwarrantedly transforms diseases caused by a wide range of factors into “genetic diseases.” Or, as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan MüllerWille (2009: 29–30) have put it, the easier epistemological accessibility of genetic factors tends to be transformed into an ontological primacy. At the same time, the strategy of enlightened geneticization creates so-called “susceptibility genes” as well as individuals who are deemed “genetically at risk” and possibly faced with new responsibilities with regard to prevention, reproduction and life-style (Hallowell 1999; Shakespeare 2003; Lemke 2004). Making genetic citizenship claims or engaging in “biosocial” activities from such a starting point, however, seems to give too much credit to questionable biomedical explanatory models (see Lock 2008). Obviously, there are no simple answers to the questions of what is biological about biological citizenship and what is genetic about genetic citizenship. These questions are contested and negotiated in both scientific and political arenas, and reference to biological factors may occasionally be motivated by mainly strategic concerns, as the example of homosexuality suggests. While explanations of certain conditions in biological and medical terms may often be helpful for the affected groups, there are other cases in which, by contrast, claims to citizenship rights are based on questioning and rejecting biomedical models.

3. PATIENT GROUPS: BIOSOCIAL COMMUNITIES OR POLITICAL MOVEMENTS? In an illuminating article, Phil Brown and colleagues have identified three types of health social movements: fi rst, “Health Access Movements” which seek equitable access to health care; second, “Embodied Health Movements,” which address disease, disability, or illness experience by


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challenging established science on etiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention; third, “Constituency-Based Health Movements” addressing health inequality and inequity based on categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, class or sexuality differences (Brown et al. 2008: 522–523).11 While all these types of movements can be understood as claiming citizenship rights in the realms of medicine and health care, it remains unclear to what extent their claims are built on biology or genetics and whether these rather different movements can equally be interpreted in terms of emerging biosocial communities. One can assume, instead, that these different types of health movements engage in rather different relations to science and biomedicine. In particular, embodied health movements, or opposing associations in Rabeharisoa and Callon’s terms, appear to be critical of the definitions of disease promoted by mainstream science. By contrast, health access movements (or auxiliary/partner associations) frequently, though of course not necessarily, seek to attract attention within established biomedical research paradigms, for instance by demanding therapies for hitherto neglected diseases or by supporting research to fi nd “their” genes (cf. Heath et al. 2004: 162–164). Most of the contemporary accounts of biological citizenship and biosociality seem to focus primarily on health access movements; yet, in order to fully comprehend the complex relationships between patient groups and biomedicine, it is indispensable to have a closer look at constituency-based health movements and, above all, embodied health movements. Constitutive of this latter type are the following three characteristics (Brown et al. 2008: 524): First, they introduce the biological body to social movements, particularly in terms of the embodied experience of people who have the disease; second, they challenge established scientific and biomedical knowledge and practice or, as Brown et al. (2006) and Brown (2007) have termed it, the “dominant epidemiological paradigm”; and, third, they often involve activists collaborating with scientists in pursuing treatment, prevention, research, and funding.12 While embodied health movements seem to share the fi rst and third characteristics with other health movements, it is the second aspect that makes them different and that gives the terms “biological citizenship” and “biosociality” a more reflexive and critical meaning. This can be illustrated by looking at what is perhaps the most significant example of an embodied health movement: the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement (EBCM) that has emerged during recent decades, mainly in the USA (McCormick et al. 2003; Brown et al. 2006; Brown 2007: 43–99). According to Brown (2007: 44), this movement “works towards four goals: 1) to broaden public awareness of potential environmental causes of breast cancer; 2) to increase research into environmental causes of breast cancer; 3) to create policy that might prevent environmental causes of breast cancer; 4) to increase activist participation in research.” Pointing to higherthan-average breast cancer incidence rates in certain US regions such as Long Island, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts (cf.

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McCormick et al. 2003: 551–563), the EBCM has contested the dominant biomedical model in cancer research that focuses on “individual-level factors such as diet, exercise, age at fi rst parity, and genetic make-up” (Brown 2007: 47).13 This movement explicitly challenges the priority given to genetic factors in recent cancer research (Brown 2007: 65–67), and stresses instead the influences on human organisms of environmental factors such as industrial chemicals or pesticides in food. The EBCM thus transforms the ideas of genetic or biological citizenship insofar as it grounds political action and demands for focused research not simply on “the biology” of affected women, not on assumed genetic baselines “inside” the women’s bodies, but on their “toxic exposures” (Brown 2007) to a harmful environment as the primary cause of disease. We can understand such movements as “biosocialities” only in a modified, extended way, since they link the bodily experience of disease with external social and environmental influences; thus, their sociality does not result from a shared internal biological factor such as the BRCA 1 or 2 genes or the “chromosome 17, locus 16,256, site 654,376 allele variant with a guanine substitution” Rabinow (1996: 102) refers to in his defi nition of biosociality. To put it differently, citizenship claims as made by the EBCM and similar movements are indeed based on the biological body and on demands for participation in research and research policies; yet, at the same time, they oppose and resist the dominant “biologization” and “geneticization” of both research priorities and conceptions of disease. And insofar as new individual or collective identities arise out of embodied health movements, these are political rather than biological or genetic identities (McCormick et al. 2003). Nevertheless, in many cases, in particular with regard to supposedly single-gene orphan diseases, it seems entirely justified that patient associations focus on genetics and demands for targeted research. One should not, however, underestimate the problematic side-effects which such a focus might still have. First, even if the “gene for . . .” is identified, this does not necessarily mean that successful prevention or therapies can be developed. This is the case, for instance, with the “mono-genetic” Huntington’s Disease, let alone more complex diseases such as breast cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease. With regard to therapies for the latter, Margaret Lock (2008: 62) sums up the situation by saying that for the near future “no straightforward solution is in sight,” and dismisses the optimism propagated by genetic research. In such cases an exclusive research focus on genetics seems to be not very productive, but simultaneously, by offering testing for “susceptibility genes,” it expands the number of the “pre-symptomatic ill” who might be subject to social discrimination. A second undesirable effect of “high-tech medicine” focusing on genetics has been pointed out by Tom Shakespeare. As he argues, “investment in genetics may not be the most cost-effective way to improve overall quality of life” for disabled people, particularly not on a global level (Shakespeare 2005: 93–94). Instead, “(b)etter social support, housing and education may contribute more to the quality of life


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than medical treatments” (Shakespeare 2005: 92).14 Recently, Bill Hughes (2009) even argued that there is a bifurcation within disability activism into what he terms “social model stalwarts” on the one hand, and “biological citizens” or “biosocial groups” on the other: while the former support the view that disability is not an illness but a result of social discrimination and exclusion, the latter, by contrast, “embrace the specialized medical and scientific knowledge associated with their ‘condition’” and “assume that biology is an important basis for identity and collective action” (Hughes 2009: 679). Hughes criticizes the biological citizens for adopting a questionable “optimism about the benefits of technology and medical science” which is not common among all disability activists (Hughes 2009: 680). While the opposition between the two camps may be overstated, Hughes’ argument rightly points to the tensions that exist between a social and a biomedical model of disability as well as between the different forms of activism arising from these models. These considerations touch upon a more general problematic aspect within the current discourse on biological citizenship and biosociality: its potential overestimation of the manipulability of human nature, or “life” in general, on a molecular, genetic basis. Rose, for instance, emphasizes that biology “is no longer destiny. Vitality is understood as inhering in precise, describable technical relations between molecules capable of ‘reverse engineering’ and in principle of ‘re-engineering’” (Rose 2007a: 40). But what if biology continues to be destiny for some people, either because genetic therapies fail or because their conditions are just not ones that can be “re-engineered” on the molecular level? Against this background, claims to biological or genetic citizenship should be re-embedded within wider political contexts of global social justice, as well as of what could be termed “health care citizenship” including social support in everyday life.

4. RIGHTS WITHOUT OBLIGATIONS? THE CASE OF ORGAN DONATION On the basis of the previous sections, we can say that biological citizenship is not be understood as a more or less static set of novel rights but rather as a set of open and “inter-linked processes of inclusion and exclusion of individuals” (Kerr 2003: 45), of re-negotiating social identities, and of creating not only new opportunities but also new obligations. Even beyond the responsibilities attributed to persons who have, by genetic testing, been identified as “carriers” of susceptibility genes and heightened risks, farreaching moral duties and, perhaps, institutional obligations of biological citizens might emerge in the not-too-distant future. In this section, I briefly illustrate such a possible development, which has in part already begun, with regard to recent debates on organ donation and procurement for transplant medicine.

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The case of organ procurement is only one part of a broader tendency in current and future biopolitics to increasingly draw attention not only to the individual person and her or his “complete” body, but also to the collection and, indeed, commodification of isolated parts and elements of the human body such as cells, blood, DNA, tissues, organs, bones and so on. The human body is thus “depersonalized“ (Sharp 2007) and transformed into what Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell (2006) have termed “biovalue”; at present, the value on the US market of all parts of a human cadaver is an estimated $250,000 (Keller 2008: 11). Against this background, individuals are confronted with an ambiguous situation and role: while, on the one hand, their health and well-being is, perhaps even more than ever, the aim of biomedicine, their bodies are increasingly perceived as a sort of “container” of scarce and valuable biological materials. This ambiguity and some of its possible consequences become sharply visible when we look at recent institutional efforts to increase the number of human organs available for transplant surgery. As is well known, the demand for such organs (kidneys, hearts, livers etc.) by far exceeds the supply. Thus, while this situation is dramatic for those in need of an organ to improve their quality of life or even to save their lives, on the other hand nobody should be forced to donate an organ, neither living nor after death, and of course nobody can claim a right to parts of another person’s body. Given this background, we can observe a remarkable shift in bioethical discourse away from individual rights and choices towards emphasizing the individuals’ moral duties to collective goods and interests15 as well as various proposals for new institutional arrangements (among them regulated markets) aiming at an increase in organs for transplantation. I would like to briefly illustrate these tendencies with reference to a recent statement on organ donation by the German National Ethics Council (Nationaler Ethikrat). The council considered the lack of human organs for transplant medicine a serious and urgent problem in Germany and, to remedy this situation, it argued for a new legal arrangement according to which every citizen would be requested to explicitly declare whether they agreed or disagreed with organ extraction from their bodies after death. While, of course, nobody would be forced to donate or deliver the requested statement, all those who, for whatever reasons, did not express their will, should in case of death be regarded and treated as if they had given their consent to organ extraction. Strikingly, the principle of informed consent, so far a kind of “sacred cow” of medical ethics, is substantially weakened by this proposal. Against the background of high rates of general agreement in public opinion polls with organ donation in Germany, the absence of explicit individual dissent is straightforwardly understood by the Council as “presumed consent” and eventually treated as fully equivalent to active consent. It is illuminating to read the rationale the Council gives for its proposal: “In view of the possibility of helping a fellow human being in the extreme distress of a serious illness effectively and with good prospects


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of success, refusal to donate organs cannot be a matter left entirely to the discretion of the individual” (German National Ethics Council 2007: 33). What is established by such claims is a moral duty of any individual to help other humans, potentially all other humans, by making available to them parts of her or his cadaveric or even living body. And, at least in the Council’s view, this duty justifies weakening the principle of informed consent. It has to be added, however, that the Council’s recommendation was rejected by the majority of German political actors, who argued that lack of disagreement may not automatically be interpreted as agreement. The Council’s statement thus appears to express, at least as yet, a shift in mainstream bioethical discourse rather than in political and institutional practices in Germany. In some other countries, however, the principle of “presumed consent” is legally established. An apparently growing number of bioethicists argue for an even more contentious solution to the problem that “the majority of organs that would be suitable for transplantation are not harvested” (Cohen 1995: 137), namely the creation of organ markets regulated by the individual nationstates (see for instance Cohen 1995; Taylor 2005). Proponents of such a market solution maintain that fi nancial incentives for potential donors or the relatives of deceased persons would be more effective and efficient than alternative options in increasing the supply of human organs.16 Apart from the fundamental question of whether or not it is morally permissible or even imperative to commodify the human body and to sell and buy its parts, there would be an important effect with regard to biological citizenship and biosociality: a market model would be superimposed on social relations of reciprocity and gift in Marcel Mauss’ sense (in that every donor is also a potential recipient); biological citizens, addressed as potential vendors of one of their kidneys, would be transformed into participants in a market where their choices are expected to follow an economic logic; and moral or political autonomy would be transformed into economic freedom to sell or not. As a result, economically vulnerable social groups, particularly in poor countries, might be tempted or even forced by poverty to forego their bodily integrity and, in an ostensibly autonomous decision, undergo a surgical intervention which, despite all medical progress, remains risky, and sell an organ (cf. Scheper-Hughes 2006).17 I use the example of organ donation in order to demonstrate that, once citizenship rights are based on biology, they might be followed by novel obligations resulting from the “simple” fact that every human body contains valuable biological materials that might help to save the life of others or to improve their quality of life. Insofar as the individual’s will and choice is held to be unlikely to be on a par with this obligation, as the German National Ethics Council suspects, new institutional arrangements in governing human bodies might emerge which either restrict the individual’s autonomy (as in the case of “presumed consent”) or transform it into the ambiguous freedom of market participants. To be sure, the point here is

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not that it is entirely unjustified or unnecessary to increase the number of organ donations; what deserves critical scrutiny, however, is how this task is addressed and what institutional forms and power relations will be established by such efforts.

5. BIOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP IN AN ERA OF ENHANCEMENT As Rose (2007a: 6) rightly points out, in the twenty-fi rst century biomedicine and biopolitics will no longer be confi ned to the preservation of health but will increasingly address the objective of optimizing and enhancing the human body. In a way, this tendency towards enhancement has always been inherent in Foucault`s notions of biopolitics and biopower; but in the near future, it seems, biopolitics will be able to mobilize more powerful scientific and technological means than ever before, such as genetics, brain research, neuropharmacology, nanotechnology etc., to achieve the goal of improving the capacities of the human body and mind. In this section, I would like to sketch the effects on the meaning of biological citizenship and on the rights and duties of biological citizens that the move from therapy to enhancement is likely to have. Since this shift is blurring supposedly clear-cut demarcations between health and illness, therapy and enhancement, the question arises of whether the future rights (and obligations) of biological citizens can be, and should be, restricted to therapeutic aims or expanded to the realm of optimization. In Rose’s view, any attempts at a politics of “enough,” which hopes to call a halt to the perfectioning of the human body “is both historically naïve and ethically wistful, yearning for a past that exists only in the imagination” (Rose 2007a: 21). This rather harsh verdict is itself not without problems; this applies especially to its inherent consequence that biological citizenship should also entail claims and rights to the improvement of one’s body that are, in principle, unrestricted. Although the boundaries between health and illness, therapy and optimization have, of course, never been drawn unambiguously, the question remains of whether we should completely abandon such demarcations even as regulative ideas, admittedly provisional and fuzzy, but helpful for discriminating between different types of biomedical intervention with different legitimations and legitimacies. First, there are ethical considerations, in a Foucauldian sense rather than in the sense of mainstream bioethics, that oppose such a complete abandonment: would it be a truly promising future perspective to enter an “enhancement society” which would be driven by quasi-religious, “transhumanist” demands for the relentless perfectioning of human physical or mental capacities? Second, a citizenship right to enhancement may quickly turn into a moral obligation and a more or less direct social pressure: if everybody enhances their performance, for instance in order to improve their employability on labor markets, how can an individual resist and refrain from such practices


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without running the risk of falling behind? And, with regard to the moral responsibilities the individuals might confront in an enhancement society, consider the following statement recently made by the prominent bioethicist Julian Savulescu: “Once technology affords us the power to enhance our own and our children’s lives, to fail to do so would be to be responsible for the consequences. ( . . . ) To fail to improve [the children’s] physical, musical, psychological, and other capacities is to wrong them, just as it would be to harm them if we gave them a toxic substance that stunted or reduced these capacities” (Savulescu 2007: 529). If such moral standards were to become generally accepted, then biological citizens’ autonomy and freedom of choice would turn out to be an empty promise. A third objection to a right to enhancement comes from considerations of global social justice. Even today, health care and biomedical research appear to be focused more on life-style phenomena such as the pharmaceutical therapy of erectile dysfunction than on providing simple cures for those diseases from which a large number of people in poor countries die every day. This disparity will increase in the near future, as the market for life-style medicine and profitable enhancement technologies continues to expand in Western countries. Given the apparently growing support for the use of enhancement technologies (see for instance Greely et al. 2008), a more critical and reflective view of these issues seems appropriate (see Wehling 2008). Although it is true that neither enhancement nor the will to enhancement are new (Rose 2007a: 20), this does not mean that they are simply a natural phenomenon; in fact, both are constructed and shaped by discursive, political and technical dynamics, including the qualification of certain human conditions, traits and behaviors (such as aging, shyness or sleep) as “deficient” and in need of biomedical improvement.18 It is therefore important to ask what kind of society will emerge as both the result and the driving force of the continuous management and enhancement of one’s health and capacities, even beyond what we have been used to consider “natural” and “sufficient.” Against this backdrop, the question of limits to the dynamics of enhancement is neither naïve nor simply a return to an imaginary past, and it is not a purely normative question. It is, above all, a political one. Ultimately, it is the question of whether and to what ends we should believe in and comply with powerful and seductive promises of a “better life” brought about by medical and pharmaceutical interventions.

6. CONCLUSION: BIOLOGICAL CITIZENSHIP AND GOVERNMENTALITY In the previous sections, I have argued that biological citizenship is a both highly ambivalent and flexible element within the contemporary government of biomedicine and biotechnologies, an element which simultaneously encompasses individuals’ rights and obligations, their prospects of

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improving their quality of life and the risk that they will become subject to social pressure and discrimination. Constituted by heterogeneous discourses and practices, the idea of biological citizenship is socially constructed and negotiated in quite different, contested ways. While in many instances making biological citizenship claims may have beneficial effects for previously marginalized or excluded individuals or groups, in some cases the biologization or geneticization of rights, responsibilities, conditions, social identities and communities may lead to undesirable consequences and new forms of stigmatization or even exclusion. By critically reviewing the current debates on biological citizenship and biosociality, one becomes aware that these debates have so far primarily concentrated on health access movements and single-gene disorders. This focus seems to be closely connected with the rather optimistic hope that biomedical research will not only be able to identify the genetic causes of most diseases, but will at the same time develop effective therapies so that biology would indeed no longer be destiny. As Rabinow recently remarked in a rather sceptical account of the (short) history of the concept of biosociality, such expectations were shaped by the enthusiastic climate of the 1990s which he retrospectively terms the “Golden Age of Molecular Biosociality”: “There was hope, there was progress, there was a reason to be urgent even strident— there were reasons to want to be biosocial” (Rabinow 2008: 190). Obviously, the hopes pinned on biomedicine and biosociality have only partly been realized; as Rabinow admits, “the hopes and hype of the genomic decade have failed to provide adequate diagnostic or risk assessment tools or treatments based on them” (Rabinow 2008: 192). Thus, some of the limits of the concept of biosociality can now be seen “with more clarity” (Rabinow 2008: 191). Biosociality is therefore to be understood, Rabinow argues, as a heuristic concept rather than as “an epochal designation meant to characterize an age or era” (Rabinow 2008: 191). The same characterization might apply to the concepts of biological and genetic citizenship (at least in the way they are used in current debates): although coined several years later than biosociality, they still seem to be influenced by the optimistic attitudes and expectations symptomatic of the “genomic decade.” One important conclusion to be drawn from this historization is that we should refrain from normative understandings of biological and genetic citizenship as inherently emancipatory concepts. Instead, these concepts are better used as tools within an analytics of government. Particularly in an era of biotechnological optimization, the (self-)defi nition of conditions and identities in biological terms and the active management of genetic risks and susceptibilities appear to be governmental rationalities (Dean 1999: 176) more or less subtly acting on the conduct of individuals or social communities. It is important therefore to bear in mind that citizenship claims have a significant political dimension insofar as they are intended to challenge dominant forms and technologies of power and exclusion. In the case of biological citizenship, to express this political dimension may frequently,


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and seemingly paradoxically, imply resisting the biologization of social problems and identities. NOTES 1. Hereafter, following Rose (2007a: 136), I will use biological citizenship as the more general concept including genetic citizenship and employ the latter term only when the focus is explicitly on genetics. 2. For overviews of the field of citizenship studies, see Isin and Turner 2002; Isin, Nyers and Turner 2008. 3. The chapter on biological citizenship in Rose (2007a) is a modified and extended version of an earlier paper written by Rose and Novas (2005); I refer primarily to the more recent version (Rose 2007a: 131–154). 4. In an earlier article on “flexible eugenics” (Taussig, Rapp and Heath 2003), the same authors gave a more detailed account of the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in genetic knowledge and the related practices. In their ethnographic study of “Little People of America” (LPA), a self-help organization of people with achondroplasia, a form of heritable, single-gene “dwarfism,” Taussig, Rapp, and Heath observed among the LPA members fears of eugenic practices (especially of the elimination of dwarf fetuses after genetic testing had become possible) rather than hopes for genetic treatment. Instead of using the term “genetic citizenship,” in this article the authors speak of “resistant biosociality” (Taussig et al. 2003: 66), for instance with regard to aspirations for having dwarf children common throughout the LPA. It would be interesting to learn whether “resistant biosociality” is understood by the authors as a specific expression of genetic citizenship or as something different from or even opposed to it. 5. Referring to the example of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Margaret Lock (2008: 64) has pointed to the “wave of uncertainty” resulting from efforts to identify the supposed genetic basis of this widespread and complex, non-singlegene disease. Under such conditions, genetic screening does not make much sense and it remains quite unclear what genetic citizenship with regard to AD would mean. I will address these issues more broadly in sections 2 and 3. 6. However, while contemporary genetic identities are different from race or gender, it remains open for discussion to what extent those identities and their genetic basis may be reformable. Given the fact that direct therapeutic intervention into individual genomes so far has not succeeded and only a few preventive measures are available so far, having a certain gene variant or not may still result in a fi xed and inescapable identity. 7. In another paper, Rose has rightly emphasized that the norms of prudence and responsibility “enable the identification of those who do not act prudently and responsibly, those who are biologically irresponsible and who may, therefore, be exposed to certain sanctions ranging from disapproval to disentitlement to health services as a result” (Rose 2007b: 148). 8. It was only in the 1970s that homosexuality was removed from the “psychiatric bible,” the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (Conrad 2007: 99–100). 9. Remarkably, the fi rst attempts at medicalizing homosexuality during the nineteenth century were also directed against oppressive legal sanctions, arguing for therapeutic treatment instead of punishment. This highlights the ambiguities of medical and biological explanations, which often contribute to improving the social situation of stigmatized groups but are, nevertheless,

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

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Peter Wehling based on scientific assumptions which are highly questionable and sometimes discriminating in themselves. Similar objections to such “enlightened” forms of preformationist genetic essentialism have been raised, for instance, by Lock 2005, 2008; RehmannSutter 2006; Grace 2008; Rouvroy 2008. Using a partly similar typology, Rabeharisoa and Callon (2002: 60) have discerned the “auxiliary association,” the “partner association,” and the “opposing association.” For an overview of the great variety of patient groups and health movements, see also Epstein 2008. As a result “citizen-science alliances” (McCormick, Brown and Zavestoski 2003, Brown 2007) emerge, but since they are based on critical examinations of established biomedical models of disease, etiology and therapy, they primarily include non-mainstream scientists. As Brown (2007: 64) argues, the biomedical model is one in which disease is held to be “purely a biologic phenomenon that can be understood through positivist, value-free research. Further, this model assumes that diseases are best addressed through treatment and through mitigation against individuallevel risk factors ( . . . ).” Paolo Palladino has raised similar objections to Rabinow’s explanation in French DNA (1999) of the concept of biosociality, referring to the example of the acitivities of the French Association against Muscular Dystrophy. As Palladino (2002: 158, endnote 23) emphasizes, “many victims of the disease survive into advanced age, and some of them have actively campaigned for the improvement of social facilities that make their life easier, rather than for research to treat or even prevent the disease by selective reproduction. Such groups do not appear anywhere in Rabinow’s narrative.” Two eminent bioethicists, Bartha Maria Knoppers and Ruth Chadwick (2005: 76), for instance, explicitly stated and welcomed a move away from “the paramount position of individualism and autonomy” in bioethics and argued that more emphasis should be placed on ethical principles such as reciprocity, mutuality, solidarity, citizenry and universality. Although this is a highly questionable claim, I cannot go into a detailed discussion in this chapter. For a critical view, see Schneider 2007. In an illuminating article, Kaushik Sunder Rajan has also touched on the dark side of current global biocapitalism. Using the example of participants in clinical drug testing in India, he explores the constitution of the “experimental subject” as an indispensable element for the emergence of globalized biosociality: “These experimental subjects provide the conditions of possibility for the neo-liberal consumer subjects who generate surplus health, or for the neo-liberal biosocial subjects who form social identifications in the cause of patient advocacy” (Sunder Rajan 2008: 178). Simon Williams and colleagues argue that, due to pharmaceutical innovations such as the drug Modafi nil, we might be faced with a future society “in which sleep is rendered optional if not (entirely) obsolete” (Williams et al. 2008: 852; original emphasis).

REFERENCES Bandelow, Borwin. (2007). Das Buch für Schüchterne. Wege aus der Selbstblockade. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Brown, Phil. (2007). Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. New York: Columbia University Press.


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Brown, Phil, Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer, Stephen Zavestoski, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Rebecca Gasior Altman and Laura Senier. (2006). “A Lab of Our Own”: Environmental Causation of Breast Cancer and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemological Paradigm, Science, Technology & Human Values 31(5): 499–536. Brown, Phil, Stephen Zavestoski, Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Rebecca Altman. (2008). Embodied Health Movements: New Approaches to Social Movements in Health, pp. 521–538 in Phil Brown (ed) Perspectives in Medical Sociology, 4. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Butler, Judith. (1991). Imitation and Gender Insubordination, pp. 13–31 in Diana Fuss (ed) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London/New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (2006). Undoing Gender. New York/London: Routledge. Callon, Michel and Vololona Rabeharisoa. (2008). The Growing Engagement of Emergent Concerned Groups in Political and Economic Life: Lessons from the French Association of Neuromuscular Disease Patients. Science, Technology & Human Values 33(2): 230–261. Cataldo, Fabian. (2008). New Forms of Citizenship and Socio-political Inclusion: Accessing Antiretroviral Therapy in a Rio de Janeiro Favela. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(6): 900–912. Cohen, Lloyd R. (1995). Increasing the Supply of Transplant Organs: The Virtues of an Options Market. New York/Berlin: Springer; Austin: Landes. Conrad, Peter. (2007). The Medicalization of Society: On The Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conrad, Peter and Susan Markens. (2001). Constructing the “Gay Gene” in the News: Optimism and Skepticism in the US and British Press, Health 5(3): 373–400. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Ecks, Stefan. (2008). Global Pharmaceutical Markets and Corporate Citizenship: The Case of Novartis’ Anti-cancer Drug Glivec. Biosocieties 3(2): 165–181. Epstein, Steven. (2008). Patient Groups and Health Movements, pp. 499–539 in Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wacjman (eds) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3 ed. Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press. Fahrmeir, Andreas. (2007). Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Fitzgerald, Ruth. (2008). Biological Citizenship at the Periphery: Parenting Children with Genetic Disorders. New Genetics and Society 27(3): 251–266. Flear, Mark L. (2008). “Together for Health”? How EU Governance of Health Undermines Active Biological Citizenship. Wisconsin International Law Journal 26(3): 868–907. Frankenfeld, Philip J. (1992). Technological Citizenship: A Normative Framework for Risk Studies. Science, Technology, & Human Values 17(4): 459–484. German National Ethics Council. (2007). Increasing the Number of Organ Donations. A Pressing Issue for Transplant Medicine in Germany. Available online at: http://www.ethikrat.org/_english/publications/opinions.html (accessed April 27, 2009). Gibbon, Sahra. (2007). Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge: Science and Citizenship in the Cultural Context of the ‘New’ Genetics. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibbon, Sahra and Carlos Novas (eds). (2008). Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London/New York: Routledge.

244 Peter Wehling Grace, Victoria M. (2008). Human Genome Epidemiology: Reviewing the Stakes. International Journal of Health Services 38(1): 143–159. Greely, Henry, Barbara Sahakian, John Harris, Ronald C. Kessler, Michael Gazzaniga, Philip Campbell and Martha J. Farah. (2008). Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy. Nature 456(7223): 702–705. Hallowell, Nina. (1999). Doing the Right Thing: Genetic Risk and Responsibility. Sociology of Health & Illness 21(5): 597–621. Heath, Deborah, Rayna Rapp and Karen-Sue Taussig. (2004). Genetic Citizenship, pp. 152–167 in David Nugent and Joan Vincent (eds) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hedgecoe, Adam. (2001). Schizophrenia and the Narrative of Enlightened Geneticization. Social Studies of Science 31(6): 875–911. Hughes, Bill. (2009). Disability Activisms: Social Model Stalwarts and Biological Citizens. Disability & Society 24(6): 677–688. Irwin, Alan. (2001). Constructing the Scientific Citizen: Science and Democracy in the Biosciences. Public Understanding of Science 10(1): 1–18. Isin, Engin and Bryan Turner. (eds). (2002). Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Isin, Engin, Peter Nyers and Bryan Turner (eds). (2008). Citizenship between Past and Future. London/New York: Routledge. Isin, Engin and Bryan Turner. (2008). Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies, pp. 5–17 in Engin Isin, Peter Nyers and Bryan Turner (eds) Citizenship between Past and Future. London/New York: Routledge. Keller, Martina. (2008). Ausgeschlachtet. Die menschliche Leiche als Rohstoff. Berlin: Econ. Kerr, Anne. (2003). Genetics and Citizenship, Society 40(6): 44–50. Knoppers, Bartha Maria and Ruth Chadwick. (2005). Human genetic research: Emerging trends in ethics. Nature Reviews Genetics 6(1): 75–79. Kymlicka, Will. (1995). Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, Christopher. (2007). Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Lemke, Thomas. (2004). Disposition and Determinism—Genetic Diagnostics in Risk Society. Sociological Review 52(4): 550–566. Lock, Margaret. (2005). Eclipse of the Gene and the Return of Divination. Current Anthropology 46(5), Supplement: S47–S70. Lock, Margaret. (2008). Biosociality and Susceptibility Genes: A Cautionary Tale, pp. 56–78 in Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas (eds) Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London/ New York: Routledge. Lora-Wainwright, Anna. (2009). Of Farming Chemicals and Cancer Deaths: The Politics of Health in Contemporary Rural China. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17(1): 56–73. Marshall, Thomas H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCormick, Sabrina, Phil Brown and Stephen Zavestoski (2003). “The Personal is Scientific, the Scientific is Political”: The Public Paradigm of the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement, Sociological Forum 18(4): 545–176. McDaniel, Patricia. (2003). Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, Power, and Intimacy in the United States, 1950–1995. New York/London: New York University Press. Moynihan, Ray and Alan Cassels. (2005). Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients. New York: Nation Books.


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Ong, Aihwa. (1999). Flexible Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Palladino, Paolo. (2002). Between Knowledge and Practice: On Medical Professionals, Patients, and the Making of the Genetics of Cancer, Social Studies of Science 32(1): 137–165. Petryna, Adriana. (2002). Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rabeharisoa, Vololona and Michel Callon. (2002). The Involvement of Patients’ Associations in Research. International Social Science Journal 54(3): 57–65. Rabinow, Paul. (1996). Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ/ Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul. (1999). French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Rabinow, Paul. (2008). Afterword: Concept Work, pp. 188–192 in Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas (eds) Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London/New York: Routledge. Rehmann-Sutter, Christoph. (2006). Genes in Labs—Concepts of Development and the Standard Environment. Philosophia Naturalis 43(2): 49–73. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg and Staffan Müller-Wille. (2009). Technische Reproduzierbarkeit organischer Natur—aus der Perspektive einer Geschichte der Molekularbiologie, pp. 11–33 in Martin G. Weiß (ed) Bios und Zoe. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Rose, Nikolas. (2007a). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rose, Nikolas. (2007b). Genomic Susceptibility as an Emergent Form of Life? Genetic Testing, Identity, and the Remit of Medicine, pp. 141–150 in Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit (eds) Biomedicine as Culture. London/New York: Routledge. Rose, Nikolas and Carlos Novas. (2005). Biological Citizenship, pp. 439–463 in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell. Rouvroy, Antoinette. (2008). Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique. New York: Routledge. Savulescu, Julian. (2007). Genetic Interventions and the Ethics of Enhancement of Human Beings, pp. 516–535 in Bonnie Steinbock (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Rebecca, Kristine Kuczynski and Debra Skinner. (2008). Producing Genetic Knowledge and Citizenship through the Internet: Mothers, Pediatric Genetics, and Cybermedicine. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(1): 145–159. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. (2006). Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking, pp. 31–62 in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant (eds) Commodifying Bodies, 4. reprint. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage. Schneider, Ingrid. (2007). Die Nicht-Kommerzialisierung des Organtransfers als Gebot einer Global Public Policy: Normative Prinzipien und gesellschaftspolitische Begründungen, pp. 109–126 in Jochen Taupitz (ed) Kommerzialisierung des menschlichen Körpers. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. Scott, Susie. (2007). Shyness and Society: The Illusion of Competence. Houndmills/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, Tom. (2003). Rights, Risks and Responsibilites: New Genetics and Disabled People, pp. 198–209 in Simon J. Williams, Lynda Birke and Gillian A. Bendelow (eds) Debating Biology: Sociological Refl ections on Health, Medicine and Society. London/New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, Tom. (2005). Disability, Genetics and Global Justice. Social Policy & Society 4(1): 87–95.

246 Peter Wehling Sharp, Lesley A. (2007). Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer. New York: Columbia University Press. Sunder Rajan, Kaushik. (2008). Biocapital as an Emergent Form of Life. Speculations on the Figure of the Experimental Subject, pp. 157–187 in Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas (eds) Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities. London/New York: Routledge. Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp and Deborah Heath. (2003). Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics, pp. 58–76 in Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath and M. Susan Lindee (eds) Genetic Nature/Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, James Stacey. (2005). Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are Morally Imperative. Aldershot/Hampshire/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell. (2006). Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham:Duke University Press. Wehling, Peter. (2008). Selbstbestimmung oder sozialer Optimierungsdruck? Perspektiven einer kritischen Soziologie der Biopolitik. Leviathan 36(2): 249–273. Williams, Simon J., Clive Seale, Sharon Boden, Pam Lowe and Deborah Lynn Steinberg. (2008). Waking Up to Sleepiness: Modafi nil, the Media and the Pharmaceuticalisation of Everyday/Night Life. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(6): 839–855.

12 Human Economy, Human Capital A Critique of Biopolitical Economy Ulrich Bröckling

1. INTRODUCTION: THE ECONOMY OF BIOPOWER Michel Foucault’s observation that we live in the age of biopolitics has now become a truism. Hardly any newspaper article about stem cell research, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or therapeutic cloning fails to broach the topic; hardly any critique of the applied life sciences fails to warn of their biopolitical consequences—usually to call in the next sentence for legal regulation, which is to say for even more biopolitics. Although in the concept’s inflationary usage its genealogy is seldom considered, Foucault’s dictum that the modern human being is “an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” is certainly one of the most cited in his work. For Foucault, biopolitics “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.” He located the “threshold of biological modernity” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the population—that collective subject—surfaced as an object of political interventions (Foucault 1978: 143). Together with the historically older disciplinary institutions, which establish an “anatomo-politics of the human body” and produce individuals who are as economically productive as they are militarily and politically reliable, the biopolitics of population constitutes one of the two poles of a “life-administering power” (Foucault 1978: 136, 139). But for Foucault, the emergence of biopolitics in no way marks the end of sovereign power. Rather, this now takes a new form, developing into state racism. As soon as the state functions in the mode of biopower, that is, as soon as all political action is calibrated according to the telos of a maximization of life, the sovereign right to “to take life or let live” can only be exercised through the introduction of hierarchizing caesurae in the continuum of the human species. That right is transformed into “the power to make live and to let die” (Foucault 2004: 241). State racism “justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary and living plurality” (Foucault 2004: 258).

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On the one hand, Foucault studies this “economy of biopower” in relation to strategies of statistical registration and normalizing regulation, as fi rst formulated in a systematic program in eighteenth-century German Polizeiwissenschaft (Foucault 1981; 1988).1 On the other hand, in his lectures on the history of governmentality, he analyzes how with discovery of the population “as a given, as a field of intervention, and as the end of government techniques,” the economy was isolated “as a specific domain of reality, with political economy as both a science and a technique of intervention in this field of reality” (Foucault 2007a: 143). Not the legitimacy of the exercise of power, but calculating its costs and effects, now takes center stage. For Foucault, political economy “is a sort of general reflection on the organization, distribution, and limitation of power in a society,” offering a guiding principle for the “self-limitation of governmental reason” (Foucault 2008: 13). When it comes to the way in which the calculations of political economy are manifest in the governance of both individuals and the populace as living beings, neither Foucault’s lectures on governmentality nor the rest of his work offers more than scattered, fragmentary remarks. Foucault did not establish a connection to his early epistemological studies centered on the discourse of political economy (Foucault 1970), and he did not work out the specific biopolitical dimension of the liberal and neoliberal rationalities of government in his analyses of it. The title of the second part of his lecture cycle, The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault 2008), thus raises expectations that the lectures do not really live up to. He emphasizes the constitutive connection between the biopolitical regulation of life and an “economical government,” that is, an art of government exercising “power in the form, and according to the model, of the economy” (Foucault 2008: 134), but he never makes this connection an object of systematic reflection. In a further development and reinterpretation of Foucault’s reflections, Giorgio Agamben has radicalized biopolitics into the essential constituent of the political realm in general. The juridical-institutional order, he argues, is inconceivable without the sovereign exception that suspends the law, and that in the form of excommunication, produces “naked life”: homines sacri reduced, because killable with impunity, to a pure biological existence. From this perspective, modernism marks no break with the Occidental tradition but simply generalizes what was already at work in its origins. In Agamben’s view, sovereign power has always determined what forms of human life will be excluded from the body politic as part of the same act that makes human beings into legal subjects: Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern— decides who its “sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now—in the new biopolitical horizon of

Human Economy, Human Capital 249 states with national sovereignty—moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confi ned to a particular place or a defi nite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being. (Agamben 1998: 81) If Agamben—unlike Foucault—does not see any contrast between biopolitics and the sovereign exercise of power, but rather wishes to reveal the former as the most inward core of the latter, dehistoricizing it in the process, his intention is to make visible what he understands to be the foundational aporia of Occidental politics. This consists in wanting “to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place—‘bare life’—that marked their subjection” (Agamben 1998: 13). With reference to Hannah Arendt he argues impressively for a connection between the Declaration of Human Rights and the defi nition and elimination of “life unworthy of living,” between the global realization of the principle of the nation state and the worldlessness of stateless refugees. From this point he arrives at the unsettling “idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism” (Agamben 1998: 13). Connecting all (bio)politics directly with the sovereign ban, which for him is “the original political relation” (Agamben 1998: 102), he has to elide the fact that biopolitical programs by no means exhaust themselves in processing the opposition between inclusion and exclusion but also construct a biological continuum and subjugate human life to the economical imperative of added value. To put this in a slightly different way: Agamben does not recognize that biopolitics is essentially a political economy of population. The following reflections thus start out from a double blank space: Foucault’s failure to analyze the biopolitical management of life, and Agamben’s blindness to political economy, which follows from his narrowing of biopolitics to sovereignty theory. These reflections are meant, then, as an inquiry into the conjuncture between the politicization and economization of human life, and into how the postulate of improving and optimizing life is legitimized and operationalized in an economic framework. Instead of trying to offer a cross-section of the history of economic thought, I will present two exemplary economic models: first the effort, formulated in the years before and after the Great War, to devise a foundational human economy (Menschenökonomie) by Rudolf Goldscheid, a now largely forgotten Austrian social philosopher and sociologist; then the theory of human capital, whose most prominent representatives are the Nobel Prize-winning American economists Theodore W. Schultz and Gary S. Becker. These two models represent opposing forms of biopolitical governmentality: Goldscheid called for a socialist management of “organic capital” through an État providence (Ewald 1986)—a state relying on prevention and social security; the theorists of human capital approach human beings as benefit-maximizing self-entrepreneurs who even treat their biological condition as an asset to be invested. The two models meet as a program for the systematic economization of life.

250 Ulrich Bröckling 2. ECONOMY OF HUMAN BEINGS Rudolf Goldscheid opened his programmatic work Entwicklungswerttheorie, Entwicklungsökonomie, Menschenökonomie (Theory of Developmental Value, Developmental Economy, Economy of Human Beings), published in 1908, with a clarion call: “This book is a protest against the unheard-of squandering of human beings that is being pursued even in our day. It is an indictment of all those who represent and promulgate the delusional belief that the human being is an asset present in excess—an asset no one need hesitate to approach in a thrifty manner” (Goldscheid 1908: IX). Where wastage is lamented, a call for order—or more precisely: for economic order—cannot be far behind, and Goldscheid in fact advocated nothing other than a systematic steering of human productive powers and conditions for reproduction. The “business of life” could only flourish most fully if science took over the “ledger of culture” “each smallest fragment of available means” thus being administered “with the care of a proper merchant” (Goldscheid 1911: 595). The cost-value of human beings, in other words the means expended on their rearing, training, and maintenance, and their earning-value, hence what they bring in through their working capacity, needed to be measured as precisely as possible and adjusted to produce a maximum of added value. What was as stake was solving the problem of “how through working time of less than twenty-four hours the human being can eke out his life over twenty-four hours; how he is placed in the position, through less than twenty-four hours of work, where he can manage not only to sustain himself, his not yet working children, and parents who can no longer work, but also the higher development of the human typus, the elevation of the power of the organic over nature” (Goldscheid 1908: 66). It was Goldscheid’s conviction that such a “vital optimum” (Goldscheid 1911: 499) did not come about either as the result of a struggle for existence, as it were naturally, or through a eugenic radicalization of natural selection, as postulated by Social Darwinists and champions of racial hygiene on the basis of the Malthusian law of population ecology. Rather, what was called for was an “active formation of evolutionism” (Goldscheid 1908: 89) in the sense of a rational administration of “organic capital”: Menschenökonomie is the effort to acquire our cultural qualities with an ever smaller consumption of human material, an ever smaller wastage of human life, the effort at a more economic exploitation, a more economic exhaustion of human working capacity as well as human life in general. . . . Menschenökonomie presses towards technology of the organic, it studies the constitution, volume, and breakdown of working capacities, teaches us to economize on organic capital and how to exercise economic efficiency in our dealings with the most valuable natural treasure a country possesses: economic viability with human working capacity. (Goldscheid 1912: 22–23, emphasis in original)

Human Economy, Human Capital 251 As a pacifist, human rights activist, and supporter of the suffragette movement with close ties to Social Democracy, a founding member of, among other organizations, the Monist Society, the German Sociological Association, and the Sociological Society of Vienna, 2 Goldscheid considered the improvement of social environment as much more important than the “primitive regulator” of selection (Goldscheid 1911: 164). Consequently, the struggle against the “selectionists” and their doctrine of degeneration takes up much space in his writing. To be sure, he basically had no objection to the call for an “increase of the offspring of the gifted and decrease in the offspring or prevention of reproduction by the completely useless” (Goldscheid 1911: 322); and warnings against “racial damage” “racial suicide,” and a looming “flooding of the country with immigrants of lowstanding culture and alien racial elements” are found in his work as well (Goldscheid 1908: 112; 1911: 425, 420). Nevertheless, he considered fatal, because uneconomic, the selectionists’ declaration that “preventive reproductive hygiene” was a panacea and their lack of interest in the improvement of material life circumstances. He did see “the idea of eugenics” as welcome, in that it offered “insight into the significance of organic and namely generative technique in general.” But what he termed the “developmental problem” could in his view not be reduced to “merely needing to sort individuals in order to gain both a great number of geniuses and raise the median level” (Goldscheid 1911: 319). Like many of his contemporaries, Goldscheid tried to transfer Darwin’s theory of species origin to human society; but unlike most of the Social Darwinists, he called the axiom of a pitiless “struggle for life” into question, emphasizing environmental adaptation instead. Goldscheid’s faith in progress was itself grounded in this pacification of biological developmental theory, and even more so in his sense of the power of science: he was convinced that a social science understood as both human and developmental economy could show the way to promotion of progress and improvement of the world. 3 Where the racial hygienists reduced human beings to their inherited biological traits, Goldscheid reduced them to their economic value (Weingart, Kroll and Bayertz 1988: 254). To that end, he could never anchor the principle of utility maximization deeply enough; and at the same time he could never set it high enough. On the one hand, he declared the economic realm to be the “ur- a priori.” Because “in the fi nal analysis, or more correctly in the last synthesis . . . both life and understanding” were “an economic function,” organisms could most appropriately be described as “economisms” (Goldscheid 1915: 82). In his derivation of this “biological utilitarianism” (Goldscheid 1911: 102), Goldscheid anticipated an axiom in the theory of autopoietic systems: as he explained it, every organism represented a “selfpreservation machine,” a “biochemical aggregate distinguished by the ability to behave differently in face of the stimuli promoting the basic function we call life than in face of those threatening to annul it.” The essence of this system was thus “economy in the interest of its maintenance,” with

252 Ulrich Bröckling living defi ned as being of benefit to oneself (Goldscheid 1911: 96–99), the category of the economic thus being even older than that of the logical, although human thinking itself functioned according to the principle of economizing on expenditure and optimizing returns: “A maximum of cognition with a minimum of contradiction, that is the goal of our thinking as cognitive will” (Goldscheid 1915: 85, 90). On the other hand, Goldscheid elevated utility maximization to the highest ethical maxim. Neither Kant’s categorical imperative nor Christian caritas could offer morality a secure foundation; only its “developmentaleconomic necessity” could do this. In his view, only “what is justified in terms of developmental economy, hence not what merely serves our aims in general but only what furthers our goals in the economic manner,” could be considered “objectively ethical” (Goldscheid 1908: 127, 131). In 1914, of all years, he saw grounds for an optimistic prognosis: “As things now stand, it cannot be very long before the recognition breaks through that the deepest meaning of humanity lies in its economic productivity” (Goldscheid 1914a: 525). If the good and the useful came together, ethics would be transformed into “ethotechnics,” “a kind of psychological technology that examines how human psychic machinery has to be shaped in order for it to function according to the postulates of developmental economy” (Goldscheid 1908: 131). With the category of Entwicklungswert, “developmental value,” Goldscheid was trying to determine an objective “qualitative measure of value,” which he juxtaposed with the quantitative measure of labor–value doctrine and the subjective measure of value of marginal-utility theory (Goldscheid 1921: 8–9). In the framework of Entwicklungswert, the value of a good was measured not only in terms of the social working time needed for its production, but also in terms of the “socially necessary needs” it satisfied— or failed to satisfy. For Goldscheid what was “socially necessary” was only “human wishes that are desirable in the interest of higher development,” hence those “preconditions for flourishing social development . . . that need to be created and that must be taken account of if a society is to maintain and fulfi ll itself” (Goldscheid 1908: 23, 5–6). This resulted in an ecological perspective anticipating the current emphasis on sustainability. The reference-point at work here was not the single individual but rather the “generic subject,” developmental value applying “not only to each generation that momentarily represents the human species but to the human species in its total development.” Developmental economy was thus “economy considered in view of the long term” (Goldscheid 1908: 22, 94). Goldscheid’s methodological procedure corresponded to the model of planning-economy rationalization, with science, especially an “exactly founded sociology,” being granted the role of highest planning authority: From the relationship of our intersubjective valuation to our objective energetic position in nature, the science of sociology determines what is

Human Economy, Human Capital 253 to be understood as higher development in view of the present state of scientific knowledge in general. After the ideal of higher development has been ascertained in this manner, and in order for a coordination system to come into being that, although having only a relative character, is capable of functioning like an absolute standard, it now becomes possible to approximately determine the position of every single value point on the basis of this coordination system, and in this way to obtain a systematically arranged value scale. (Goldscheid 1908: 109) At the head of this scale stood human beings themselves: forming, as working capacity, the indispensable means for generating developmental value, but at the same time embodying the one value in whose interest all developmental values are created, and thus not only constituting a means but also the developmental goal. This in itself meant that developmental economy would culminate in Menschenökonomie. For Goldscheid its “central problem” was as follows: “the breeding and upbringing of which type of human being offers the best return in terms of developmental economy?” (Goldscheid 1908: 154). He immediately offered the answer, which in essence was quality not quantity: “If the Werkbund has distributed the lovely motto: loyalty to the material and refi nement of the material!—it must not be doubted that this postulate has to be applied above all to the human being himself” (Goldscheid 1914a: 528). The human being who has been fashioned expensively and solidly reveals quite different qualities from the cheap human being. A solidly fashioned human being is one who has grown from healthy maternal soil and been engendered by healthy fathers, and where the youthful individual receives care and training upon which at least as much care has been taken as is the case in animal breeding. (Goldscheid 1911: 495) Human beings of quality, Goldscheid maintained, lived longer and also worked more productively; in the end the costs invested in them were more than paid back. This was the starting point for Goldscheid’s critique of the capitalist economic order, or disorder, which he accused of over-usage of organic capital, since it exploited human working capacity but could not care less about “satisfaction of developmental needs” and creation of “organic added value” (Goldscheid 1908: 86–87). His accusation concerning the working and living conditions of the proletariat was directed at the gulf between the possible and the actual that the Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung would describe fifty years later as “structural violence.” According to Galtung’s famous defi nition, this was present “when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (Galtung 1969: 168). Goldscheid formulated the same thing more drastically:

254 Ulrich Bröckling If a worker with work corresponding to all hygienic requirements and those of developmental economy would be capable of healthily reaching the age of sixty, seventy, even eighty, instead of—as at present— dying in slow agony between thirty-five and forty-five, then it is clear that his life, that his health, that his joy in existence is consumed with the coal that we burn in our ovens; and since this is so, it is also clear that in tolerating these circumstances, we sin in the worst possible way against the highest law of the theory of developmental value and developmental economy, which demands an equivalence between labor value and developmental value, which demands that no developmental damage be accepted without a counterpart being present in developmental advancement. (Goldscheid 1908: 86–87) Correspondingly, he interpreted the efforts of the socialist movement and labor unions as a struggle, albeit one not entirely conscious of its human-economic dimension, against the worker’s “organic expropriation” and for the preservation of his “developmental property, that is, for the “best possible unfolding of his organism” (Goldscheid 1908: 158). Socialism was, for Goldscheid, “management of workers for the sake of the workers themselves”—a comprehensive planning economy in which “the polity increasingly becomes the trustee of organic capital”; a state capitalism that “sees both its surest fundament and highest goal in the most careful, conscientious individualizing Menschenökonomie” (Goldscheid 1932: 1122–1123, emphasis in original). From a “sociologically grounded, social-biologically oriented administration” rooted “in individualization and differentiation” and aimed “at an internalizing of social regulation,” he hoped for a “restocking of the nation’s entire human material” (Goldscheid 1911: 577). As Goldscheid saw things, in the end developmental-economic reason would spread to the realm of international relations, setting an end to the “desolate paroxysm” of the imperial nation’s quest for advantage (Goldscheid 1911: 552). This line of historical ascent would emerge as it were naturally, he believed, from scientific progress: “Just as the nineteenth century was the century of technology, the twentieth century will be that of internalized technology, and thus of organics and psychotechnology; where for that century nature was the starting point, for this century it will be life. In this way control over nature will be followed by control over life” (Goldscheid 1914b: 14). The model for a universal biopolitical administration was offered by social security—“the modern economy’s most revolutionizing moment . . . and at the same time its most conservative” (Goldscheid 1914a: 520). The historical process moved from the absolutist “rape-based state,” to the “administrative state” and onward to a “community based on mutual solidarity” (Goldscheid 1912: 5) “in which not only the living and working person represents an economic value but also the dying person in the same sense that loss for the society is entered in the books just as dying and sick

Human Economy, Human Capital 255 cattle figure in the farmer’s calculation as a liability” (Goldscheid 1908: 217). Such a social order would subject an economy’s human side, just like the production of goods, to a comprehensive “normalization, typification, and standardization” (Goldscheid 1932: 1122), and precisely in this way secure the individual’s developmental rights—rights that, to be sure, are themselves standardized in line with “socially necessary needs.” Importantly, inaugurating Leviathan as chief human-economic actor did not mean freeing individuals from their responsibility. The demand for rationalization of social production and reproduction corresponded to the individual’s self-rationalization: Regarding his own manner of life, every individual has to repeatedly pose this question: do I live in a developmental-economic way to the highest degree, do I seek, with the energies that are effective in me, to create the greatest possible developmental values? And regarding each individual action as well, every hour one has to ask again: am I here utilizing my life force, am I here using my qualified working capacity with the highest possible evolutionistic efficiency? (Goldscheid 1908: 202–203)4 Regarding one question that seems fairly important, Goldscheid remained silent: what was meant to happen to those unwilling to follow the imperative of Menschenökonomie? In any event, those incapable of producing developmental-economic added value were to be treated with respect and benevolent care—although he again justified this seeming altruism in economic terms. He apodictically rejected the reproach that if he rigorously thought through his Menschenökonomie to the end, he would have “to approve the killing of all incurable children, all invalids, indeed all helpless people,” as follows: Now there can be no question that refined social empathy represents a developmental factor of the highest potency. . . . The certainty of being treated appreciatively by society spurs the human creative drive onward to an extraordinary degree, just as being able to count on the assurance of appreciation by those for whom one works represents a strong motor of our urge to be active. For this reason, although maintenance of those incapable of working, invalids, and old people in general is not always directly tied to added value, the indirect added value coming about through their maintenance is very substantial, and precisely the developmental-economic critique shows, then, that maintaining these human categories is extremely important. (Goldscheid 1908: 195) This would in any case turn out to be a weak argument to the extent that with the Great War at the latest, the semantics of crisis displaced faith in progress, opening up other, entirely different cost-benefit calculations. The

256 Ulrich Bröckling more economic resources shrank (or seemed to do so), the greater became the readiness to cut expenditure on those who needed material support and care and were unable to produce productive services. Despite his highly moral economy of empathy and mutual solidarity, in trying, even to a bizarre degree, to economically determine the value of life, Goldscheid was moving on the same terrain as those convinced that for fi nancial reasons it was “necessary to sacrifice life unworthy of living in order to maintain that worthy of living” (Tandler 1924: 306). 5 Hence, in 1920, the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche compared German society of the time with “participants in a difficult expedition for whom the greatest possible capacity to perform on everyone’s part is an indispensable precondition for the enterprise’s success, and for whom there is no place for half, quarter, or eighth capacity” (Hoche 1920: 54–55).6 In view of the “massive capital in the form of food, clothing, and heat” expended for the institutional care of “ballast existences,” capital “taken from the national fortune for an unproductive goal,” it seemed to him that “authorization for the annihilation of life unworthy of being lived”—this was the title of the notorious book he published together with the jurist Karl Binding—was not only justified but even mandatory, in order to “bring about relief for our excessive national burden” (Hoche 1920: 54–56).7 Goldscheid’s developmental pathos had vanished; what remained was the furor of human-economic accounting. Whether the life of a human being was classified as worthy or not of living depended on the balance of his or her cost-benefit value. Those depending on permanent professional care, hence not creating economic value through their own work, were a burden on the budget and forfeited their right to existence. Goldscheid propagated investment in the “qualification of human material” (Goldscheid 1911: 495); Hoche called for systematic disinvestment when inferior quality left little hope for return.

3. HUMAN CAPITAL Rising to prominence in the decades following World War II and especially exerting its influence (which has recently been growing again) in the realm of educational and developmental economics, the theory of human capital is likewise concerned with investment in human beings.8 As in Goldscheid’s Menschenökonomie, the main concern here is quality and qualification. And the claims being staked are equally high: “The thrust of my argument is that the investment in population quality and knowledge in large parts determines the future prospects of mankind,” programmatically declares the dean of human capital theory, Theodore W. Schultz (1981: XI), in the foreword to his essay collection Investing in People. And his younger colleague Gary S. Becker seconds this statement: “Human capital is important because productivity in modern economies is based on the

Human Economy, Human Capital 257 creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge” (Becker 1993b: 50). But where Goldscheid declared his project to be a “normative economic science” (Goldscheid 1908: 70), the theorists of human capital insist on the purely descriptive character of their research. They do not inquire into the ways human beings should economically arrange their individual actions and social cooperation, but assume that they already do so. This behavioral science orientation, extending far beyond mere methodological individualism, was not the least of the factors sparking Foucault’s interest in the “economic approach to human behavior” (Becker 1976). It was especially from Becker’s writing that he deciphered the rationale of neoliberal governmentality in its clearest because most radical form, distilling its nucleus as the figure of the enterprising self (Bröckling 2007). As was already the case in his work on German ordoliberalism, Foucault here identifies a shift from the paradigm of exchange to that of competition: when theory of human capital presents the human being as homo œconomicus, it is describing him, in distinction from classical economics, not as a partner in exchange but “as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Foucault 2008: 226). The innovation of theory of human capital lies in its conception of consumption as itself an entrepreneurial activity. It sees in the consumer not only a passive user of goods but also an active producer. In this framework, the purchase of a good or service is not a concluding economic act; rather, it is a form of input in which the individual makes use of his resources, especially the scarce factor of time, in such a way that the highest degree of satisfaction leaps out from this as output. This economization not only of working time but of consuming time as well is the decisive lever with which theory of human capital succeeds in drawing the entire spectrum of human activities into its analysis. The individual appears here as an economic institution whose continued existence, like that of a company, depends on his or her choices. Whatever someone does could have been decided against or replaced by something else done at the same time. For that reason it makes sense to presume that individuals take up the options assumed to correspond most closely to their preferences. The human being of human-capital theory is above all someone who unswervingly decides. The economic approach Becker sees applied to all human action assumes, fi rstly, “that individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, whether they be selfish, altruistic, loyal, spiteful, or masochistic” (Becker 1992: 38, emphasis in original). From an analytic perspective, human beings here appear as rational actors, preoccupied in all they do with allocating scarce means in pursuit of competing goals. Within this schema, all action represents a choice between alternatives perceived as attractive and less attractive and is thus self-interested in a far-reaching sense, with the self-interest also potentially manifest in the altruist’s satisfaction at having helped others. The question of the individual’s preferences and how he or she achieves

258 Ulrich Bröckling them lies outside the realm of economic theory. Secondly, however, what is decisive for Becker is the assumption that elementary preferences “such as health, prestige, sensual pleasure, benevolence, or envy” do not change over time. His third basic assumption is related to “the existence of markets that with varying degrees of efficiency coordinate the actions of different participants—individuals, fi rms, even nations—so that their behavior becomes mutually consistent.” What he is referring to here is much more than simply monetary markets: even outside their sphere, “either directly or indirectly, each commodity has a relevant marginal ‘shadow’ price, namely, the time required to produce a unit change in that commodity” (Becker 1976: 4–6). The axiomatic principle is that supply and demand regulate how the actors maximize their benefits and weight their competing preferences. For Becker, these basic premises do not have the status of empirical statements about human nature. Rather, what is at work here is a heuristic construct—an “as-if” anthropology or methodological move aimed at reducing complexity. The assumption that people behave as if they were rational “contains no statement about reality but formulates an analytic schema guiding the generation of statements about reality” (Pies 1998: 19). Theory of human capital grasps the human being as homo œconomicus and grasps him only to the extent that he behaves accordingly: if individuals constantly try to maximize their benefits, their actions can be guided by raising or lowering their costs and thus altering the calculation. As someone who constantly decides, homo œconomicus is also “someone who is eminently governable” (Foucault 2008: 270). If there is no behavior that cannot be described in terms of cost-benefit calculations, then people have no other choice than to make choices in all their actions. The economic approach addresses them from the start as the entrepreneurial market subjects into which they need to be transformed and to transform themselves. Within this framework, human capital initially means nothing other than that knowledge and skills and the state of one’s health, but also outer appearance, social prestige, working ethos, and personal habits, need to be seen as scarce resources requiring investment to set up, maintain, and expand. “The human agent becomes ever more a capitalist by virtue of his personal human capital,” Schultz observes, “and he seeks political support to protect the value of that capital” (Schultz 1981: 76). Even when he possesses no material goods, he at least disposes over his lifespan and will use it to maximum advantage, according to his preferences. This includes, for instance, maintaining one’s health: Gross investment in human capital entails acquisition and maintenance costs, including child care, nutrition, clothing, housing, medical services and care of oneself. The service that health capital renders consists of “healthy time” or “sickness-free time” which contributes to work, consumption, and leisure activities. (Schultz 1981: 13)

Human Economy, Human Capital 259 Becker interprets the decision for or against marriage, for or against children, or for a specific number of children according to the same model: women or men marry, he argues, “when they expect to be better off than if they remained single, and they divorce if that is expected to increase their welfare” (Becker 1992: 46). For their part children are either considered “a source of psychic income or satisfaction” (Becker 1976: 172), which in the framework of economic theory means they are a life-long consumption good, or function as a production good that will itself bring in monetary income and for example assure care in old age. Whether potential parents decide on having a child or having another one depends on whether the expected benefit outweighs the costs incurred. Here the quality of the children is also meant to be considered a cost factor: A family must determine not only how many children it has but also the amount spent on them—whether it should provide separate bedrooms, send them to nursery school and private colleges, give them dance or music lessons, and so forth. I will call more expensive children “higher quality children,” just as Cadillacs are called higher quality cars than Chevrolets. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me hasten to add that “higher quality” does not mean morally better. If more is voluntarily spent on one child than on another, it is because the parents obtain additional utility from the additional expenditure and it is this additional utility which we call higher “quality.” (Becker 1976: 173) As entrepreneurs of themselves, individuals are “abilities-machines” (Foucault 2008: 229) and these machines require prudent development, careful maintenance, and continuous adjustment to market requirements. This cannot begin early enough and demands, before the individual takes the building up and permanent improvement of his competencies into his own hands, the engagement of parents and other social institutions: We know that the number of hours a mother spends with her child, even when it is still in the cradle, will be very important for the formation of an abilities-machine, or for the formation of a human capital, and that the child will be much more adaptive if in fact its parents or its mother spend more rather than less time with him or her. This means that it must be possible to analyze the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection as investment which can form human capital. (Foucault 2008: 229) To a great extent, the concept of human capital corresponds to Goldscheid’s “organic capital”; but while the champion of Menschenökonomie saw the market’s anarchy as responsible for the inadequate accumulation of this capital and demanded the guidance of a planning economy, for the theorists

260 Ulrich Bröckling of human capital the market not only cannot be fooled but is the best conceivable regulatory mechanism for increasing population quality and individual well-being. This does not, however, amount to a plea for laissez faire policies: Schultz and Becker themselves consider state engagement in the realm of education and health to be indispensable; but political measures should increase competition instead of compensating for putative market inadequacies in social-reformist zeal. Within their logic, the market can in any event only fail when the Leviathan of the “invisible hand” places fetters on it, distorting the free play of supply and demand. For this reason, Becker explains, the state “should be involved in fi nancing only a small fraction of the large total investment in human capital”; “in a well-functioning market economy,” he continues, the vast majority of investments in human capital would be the private responsibility of individuals and organizations: parents who invest in their children, adults who gain additional training, and companies and universities that provide training, do research, and develop commercially viable technologies. (Becker 1993b: 56) Here at the latest, Becker’s analytic method—which he claims lies at the heart of his economic approach—reveals itself as a normative guiding principle; and the theorist of human capital is seen as a political economist. Goldscheid equated calculability and humanity; he responded to critics by insisting that human life would only be treated with care when viewed as capital. Becker and Schultz are themselves convinced that the rising significance of human capital—a pointer to the “knowledge society”—will lead to a more humane treatment of human beings. But just as Menschenökonomie offered arguments both for health insurance and for the murder of incurably ill people, the theory of human capital alternates between a grammar of care and one of toughness. It inverts Goldscheid’s regulatory zeal into a complaint, presented in ever new variations, that there are too many regulations. Becker thus populistically denounces especially that institution Goldscheid viewed as essentially anticipating human-economic organization: social security. It encourages, he argues, “many families to count on the government to provide their retirement income rather than saving for their old age while they are working” (Becker and Becker 1997: 96). Becker consistently responds to moral indignation over the amorality of his economic approach by referring to its heuristic power, and in fact empirical evidence for his as-if anthropology is not lacking. His analysis of fertility has thus found practical confirmation in private eugenics (or “liberal eugenics,” as Jürgen Habermas [2003] calls it), which has long been an everyday practice. The lower the number of children per parents and the higher the costs the parents invest in their qualification, the more important the quality of the raw product becomes and the more probable it is that children with prenatal diagnosable maladies or handicaps will remain

Human Economy, Human Capital 261 unborn. In some countries, the embryo only needs to have the “wrong” sex for an abortion to follow or, if preimplantation genetic diagnostics is used, for implantation simply not to take place. Individual management of quality has stepped in for terroristic selection by the state. One may fully support the right of a mother to decide to abort an embryo with Down’s syndrome, but there can be no doubt that this decision is an individual eugenic choice. For the advocates of Menschenökonomie before and after the Great War, the state sovereign no longer simply functioned as an ideal total capitalist who tried to accumulate organic added value, but also decided which life was to be approved for destruction as “unworthy of being lived.” In contrast, for the advocates of human-capital theory, each individual not only becomes a capitalist but also a sovereign over himself. With each of his actions he maximizes his individual benefit, but also exercises the power, to again take up Foucault’s formulation, “to make live and to let die.” At this point if not before, neoliberal governmentality’s biopolitical dimension, as pointed to by Foucault, becomes apparent. Long before the relevant procedures had become operational on a massive scale, he identified the logic of selection following from the coupling of genetic diagnostics with economization of the individual: “as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for” (Foucault 2008: 228). That with its generalized principle of utility maximization, the theory of human capital radicalizes political economy into biopolitical economy, is evident not only in questions of family planning. It also describes individuals’ approach to their own health as the consequence of decisions regarding investment and disinvestment. “Corresponding to the economic approach,” Becker explains bluntly, “most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent ‘suicides’ in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life” (Becker 1976: 10, emphasis in original). Blaming the victim here rules: whoever is sick has not adequately looked after his health; whoever falls victim to an accident or crime ought to have better seen to his or her security. Whatever one does or allows always involves an encounter between two competing preferences: Good health and a long life are important aims of most persons, but surely no more than a moment’s reflection is necessary to convince anyone that they are not the only aims: somewhat better health or a longer life may be sacrificed because they conflict with other aims. . . . Therefore, a person may be a heavy smoker or so committed to work as to omit all exercise, not necessarily because he is ignorant of the consequences or “incapable” of using the information he possesses, but

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Ulrich Bröckling because the lifespan forfeited is not worth the cost to him of quitting smoking or working less intensively. (Becker 1976: 9–10)

The sovereign decision over life and death here splits itself up into a multiplicity of micro-decisions, through which the individual shortens or lengthens his life. Every cigarette: a small death sentence; every time you go jogging: a small stay of execution.

4. CONCLUSION: THE ECONOMIC GOVERNMENT OF LIFE Goldscheid’s Menschenökonomie and the theory of human capital can be read in parallel, not least because both analyze individual life and the population as a whole in rigorously economic terms. The starting point is the same, an identification of human life with the capability to choose, and with the necessity of doing so: “Life means wanting and the deepest sense of wanting is to be able to choose,” declares Goldscheid apodictically, thus anticipating the utilitarianism of the human-capital theorists, extended across all realms of life. Becker und Schultz would most likely also agree with the second of Goldscheid’s anthropological axioms, “the characteristic quality of our nature is that we not only can choose but also must choose” (Goldscheid 1921: 7, emphasis in original). The compelling outcome of the double condition humaine of “freedom” and “necessity” to choose—and this conclusion is also shared by the two economic theories—is that human beings are as in need of government as they are governable: the person who can rationally choose and must choose will make his or her decisions dependent on the structure of incentives. For this reason, behavior can be far more efficiently steered by controlling the incentives than through a repressive truncation of choices. The governmentalization of life here has its basis. To be sure, Goldscheid on the one hand, and Becker and Schultz on the other hand, derive very different rationalities of government from this: where for Goldscheid science, translating the developmental laws learnt from nature into psychotechnology and social technology, serves as the highest authority of good government, Becker and Schultz rely on the “permanent economic tribunal” of the market as a standard for governmental action (Foucault 2008: 247). In his lectures, Foucault analyzes the theory of human capital as a variant of neoliberal governmentality. The interferences between the “economic approach to human behavior” and governmental regimes that have become hegemonic in most Western countries since the 1980s are in fact evident, and have been frequently described on the basis of Foucault’s reading of the texts of Becker and Schultz. The present essay has argued that the expansion of economic rationality to all realms of life necessarily radicalizes political economy into biopolitical economy—that the neoliberal interpellation of the entrepreneurial self also takes in a capitalization of one’s own life.

Human Economy, Human Capital 263 In contrast, if we are to believe Foucault, Rudolf Goldscheid’s draft of a Menschenökonomie documents something that does not exist: a socialist governmentality. In an excursus discussing German Social Democracy’s departure from its Marxist tradition, Foucault observes that in all its variants, socialism doubtless pursues an economic rationality, and that it can also be accorded historical and administrative rationality. But, he indicates, it “lacks an intrinsic governmental rationality” (Foucault 2008: 93) and has always leaned on other forms of governmentality, say liberal forms or the governmentality of a hyper-administrative police state, the absence of an independent socialist art of governance being compensated for through invocation of canonic texts. We could also interpret Goldscheid’s Menschenökonomie as such a bricolage of liberal and welfare-police state set pieces, although the question of “true socialism” was not something that preoccupied this private scholar, who was averse to any party orthodoxy. In any case, the reconstruction offered here suggests another reading: Goldscheid outlines a governmentality that is both socialist and biopolitical, that follows the principle of mutuality, and that constructs an economic rationalization of life upon preventive care, lasting usage, and shared safeguarding of human resources. Progress and solidarity are its maxims, accumulation of organic capital its mobilizing principle. Human-economic socialism is not focused on a radical alternative to capitalism but on an expansion of calculability to society as a whole. Goldscheid’s Menschenökonomie and the theory of human capital form the two complimentary rationalities of governance between which the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries’ biopoliticians oscillate: market and plan, invisible and visible hand, central guidance or self-organization, are the poles between which nearly all efforts to govern human life economically are located. Another outcome of the opposition presented here is perhaps more important: until now, most analyses of governmentality have focused on distilling the functional mechanisms, rationalities, and modes of subjectification of governmental programs and strategies. In other words, they have been interested in the rules and regular patterns of governance and not in the state of exception: for those points of sudden change in which the routines of governance fail. Translated into economic terms, the state of exception means crisis, and the normality suspended in it correspondings to the economic equilibrium of production and consumption. Menschenökonomie and human-capital theory also operate with models of equilibrium. For Goldscheid a balance between costs and the returns of organic capital is the telos of a planned economy. For Schultz and Becker, the assumption of market equilibrium serves as a heuristic principle. Goldscheid raises the mutualism of social security to a model of developmentaleconomic justice; Schultz and Becker generalize self-regulation through supply and demand into a universal medium of social integration. Neither Goldscheid nor Becker and Schultz refer to a crisis, and yet it is inscribed

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into both their theories. In the crisis of the interwar period, calculating lifevalue in the framework of Menschenökonomie legitimized murderous selection. As indicated, those whose cost-benefit balance came out negatively were considered “ballast existences” whose right to existence had been forfeited. In the present crisis, seemingly set for the long term, the “economic imperialism” (Becker 1993a) of human-capital theory has revealed itself as an apology for a reckless competitive struggle of all against all. If the markets threaten to collapse, maximization of benefits becomes a zero-sum game and homo œconomicus “a wolf to man.” At this point, Agamben’s previously discussed deconstruction of the constitutive linkage between biopolitics and sovereignty comes together with the critique of biopolitical economy offered in these pages. Agamben connects Hobbes’ homo homini lupus to the mythological figure of the werewolf: a hybrid animal-human monster once expelled from the human community, exposed in a law-free realm to every form of violence, and only surviving through his own violence. Correspondingly, Hobbes’ state of nature is, in Agamben’s view, “not so much a war of all against all as, more precisely, a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else” (Agamben 1998: 64). The sovereign, he suggests, has not gained his position through others having renounced their potential for violence, but inversely through his being the only one to have retained his natural right to do anything to everyone. If we follow this argumentation, the Hobbesian scenario hidden in the theory of human capital becomes evident. If it promotes each person to a sovereign, it declares him in the same breath to be homo sacer: as an acting agent, the individual disposes as he pleases over his own life and over that of others, with legal sanctions or other consequences of his actions entering his calculations as opportunity costs. As the object of both his own and external action, he is thrown back to the status of “bare life,” his existence depending on someone—whether ego or alter—being available to invest in it. If life becomes an economic function, disinvestment amounts to death.

NOTES 1. According to the defi nition of its most prominent spokesman, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, the Polizei comprised “all regulations and arrangements in the country’s inner affairs through which the state’s general assets are more enduringly grounded and made more usable to the benefit of the state, the assets of the private person are increased and more precisely and effectively connected to the general advantage, and the powers of the state for furthering the happiness of all can be more fully activated in general.” According to Justi, the task of authorities governing according to the insights of Polizeiwissenschaft was to increase both real estate and goods and chattels, together with the “moral state of the subjects,” with the aim of “happiness for the entire state” (Justi 1760: 6–10). The nature of the countryside, natural resources, roads, population, agrarian production, trade, commerce,

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

and public administration were here all equal elements of a functionally coherent whole in which all parts could be instrumentalized by the state and only parts the state could instrumentalize had a right to existence. On Goldscheid’s biography and work see Neef (2009); Fritz and Mikl-Horke (2007); Witrisal (2004); Ash (2002); Fleischhacker (2000); Körner (1976); and Tönnies (1932/1998). This constituted the unbridgeable difference with Max Weber, Goldscheid being his chief opponent in the so-called value–judgment controversy (Werturteilsstreit) within German sociology. The controversy ended in 1912 with Weber’s resignation from the German Society for Sociology (see Honigsheim 1959). In order to spur people to human-economic self-optimization, public enlightenment was in turn necessary. Not the least of its goals was communicating “insight into the numerically recorded causal connections of social phenomena.” In order to popularize “statistics as a society’s self-knowledge,” Goldscheid proposed the “cinematographic representation of statistical data”; what here came into consideration were “the living curve, the living chart, and the living image” (Goldscheid 1919: 210, 212). Julius Tandler was an Austrian doctor, Social Democratic politician active in health issues, and protagonist in the racial hygiene movement; he took up Goldscheid’s idea of Menschenökonomie as well as his demand for “qualitative population policy.” Although a “sensible selection of coupling human beings” was hard to carry out, “nevertheless from the standpoint of population policies we indeed have an interest in a least excluding those cases of reproduction in which we can say with certainty that the descendants and general public will have to pay for the generative transgressions” (Tandler 1924: 17–18, 20). See Weikert (1998); Byer (1988: 86–88); Sablik (1983). On the discussion of institutional costs in the interwar period see Faulstich (1998: 79–109). In 1936 this form of Menschenökonomie even became an exercise in a math book for third- to sixth-year pupils: “A mentally ill person causes around 4 RM, a cripple 5.50 RM, a criminal 3.50 RM daily institutional costs. In many cases an official has at most 4 RM daily, an employee barely 3 RM, an uneducated worker hardly 2 RM for the entire family. a) Present these figures in graphic form. According to careful estimations there are 300,000 mentally ill persons, epileptics, etc. in German institutional care. b) What do they cost annually at a rate of 4 RM?—c) How many marriage loans at 1000 RM each could be granted annually with this money?” (quoted in Faulstich 1998: 102–103). In his analysis of Binding’s and Hoche’s text Agamben (2002: 145–152) focuses, in line with his general approach, exclusively on Binding’s juridical legitimation of the murder of the ill and handicapped, overlooking his economic defi nition of “life unworthy of living.” The roots of human-capital theory in any event extend back to classical economics; for a historical overview of the theory see Pfahler (2000, 7–45). On the present-day discussion of education as investment in human capital, see Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2001).

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford Universiy Press. Ash, Mitchell G. (ed). (2002). Wissen, Politik und Öffentlichkeit. Von der Wiener Moderne bis zur Gegenwart. Wien: WUV-Universitätsverlag.

266 Ulrich Bröckling Becker, Gary S. (1976). The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Gary S. (1992). The Economic Way of Looking at Life. Nobel Lecture, December 9. Available online at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/ laureates/1992/becker-lecture.pdf (accessed November 4, 2009). Becker, Gary S. (1993a). Economic Imperialism. Religion & Liberty 3(2). Available online at: http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/interview.php?id=76 (accessed July 29, 2009. Becker, Gary S. (1993b). Government, Human Capital, and Economic Growth. Industry of Free China 79(6): 47–56. Becker, Gary S. and Guity Nashat Becker. (1996). The Economics of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bröckling, Ulrich. (2007). Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Byer, Doris. (1988). Rassenhygiene und Wohlfahrtspfl ege. Zur Entstehung eines sozialdemokratischen Machtdispositivs in Österreich bis 1934. Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Campus Verlag. Ewald, François. (1986). L’état providence. Paris: Bernard Grasset. Faulstich, Heinz. (1998). Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914–1949. Mit einer Topographie der NS-Psychiatrie. Freiburg: Lambertus Verlag. Fleischhacker, Jochen. (2000). Rudolf Goldscheid: Soziologe und Geisteswissenschaftler im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Porträtskizze, Archiv für die Geschichte der Soziologie in Österreich 20: 3–13. Foucault, Michel. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. Foucault, Michel. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. (1981). “Omnes et singulatim”: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason, pp. 223–254 in Sterling McMurrin (ed) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 2. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Foucault, Michel. (1988). The Political Technology of Individuals, pp. 145–162 in Paul H. Hutton, Huck Gutman and Luther H. Martin (eds) Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. (2004). Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. New York: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. (2007). Security, Territory, Populations. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Fritz, Wolfgang and Gertraude Mikl-Horke. (2007). Rudolf Goldscheid. Finanzsoziologie und ethische Sozialwissenschaft. Münster: Lit-Verlag. Galtung, Johan. (1969). Violence, Peace and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–191. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1908). Entwicklungswerttheorie, Entwicklungsökonomie, Menschenökonomie. Eine Programmschrift. Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Werner Klinckhardt. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1911). Höherentwicklung und Menschenökonomie. Grundlegung der Sozialbiologie. Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Werner Klinckhardt. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1912). Friedensbewegung und Menschenökonomie. Berlin: Verlag der “Friedenswarte”. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1914a). Menschenökonomie als neuer Zweig der Wirtschaftswissenschaft. Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv 8(3/4): 516–535. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1914b). Frauenfrage und Menschenökonomie. Wien/Leipzig: Anzengruber-Verlag.

Human Economy, Human Capital 267 Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1915). Die Organismen als Ökonomismen, pp. 81–99 in Festschrift für Wilhelm Jerusalem. Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag von Freunden, Verehrern und Schülern. Wien/Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1919). Lebendige Statistik, pp. 210–216 in Grundfragen des menschlichen Schicksals. Wien: E.P. Tal Verlag. Goldscheid, Rudolf. (1932). Menschenökonomie, pp. 1114–1123 in Ludwig Heyde (ed) Internationales Handwörterbuch des Gewerkschaftswesens, Volume 2. Berlin: Werk und Wirtschaft Verlagsaktiengesellschaft. Habermas, Jürgen. (2003). The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoche, Alfred. (1920). Ärztliche Bemerkungen, pp. 43–62 in Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Ihr Maß und ihre Form. Leipzig: Felix Meiner. Honigsheim, Paul. (1959). Die Gründung der deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in ihren geistesgeschichtlichen Zusammenhängen, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 11(1): 3–10. von Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob. (1760). Die Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glückseeligkeit der Staaten; oder ausführliche Vorstellung der gesamten Policey-Wissenschaft, Bd. 1. Königsberg/Leipzig: Gerhard Luddewig Woltersdorfs Wittwe. Körner, Erich. (1976). Ein halbes Jahrhundert “im Dienst der Menschheit”— Grundlagen und Entwicklung der ‘Österreichischen Liga für Menschenrechte’ (I), Das Menschenrecht. Offizielles Organ der “Österreichischen Liga für Menschenrechte” 4, Dec.: 2–7. Nadesan, Majia Holmer. (2003). Engineering the Entrepreneurial Infant: Brain Science, Infant Development Toys, and Governmentality. Cultural Studies 16(3): 401–432. Neef, Katharina. (2009). Rudolf Goldscheid—Soziologe oder Sozialpolitiker? Zur wissenschaftshistorischen Exklusion konstitutiver Diskursteilnehmer der frühen deutschsprachigen Soziologie, pp. 23–45 in Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Heiner Kaden and Nikolaos Psarros (eds) Ein Netz der Wissenschaften? Wilhelm Ostwalds “Annalen der Naturphilosophie” und die Durchsetzung wissenschaftlicher Paradigmen. Stuttgart/Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag. [Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig—Philologisch-historische Klasse 81(4).] Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. (2001). The Well-being of Nations. The Role of Human and Social Capital. Paris: OECD. Pfahler, Thomas. (2000). Humankapital und Effizienz. Eine ordnungstheoretische Analyse. Bern/Stuttgart/Wien: Haupt. Pies, Ingo. (1998). Theoretische Grundlagen demokratischer Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik—Der Beitrag Gary Beckers, pp. 1–29 in Ingo Pies and Martin Leschke (eds) Gary Beckers ökonomischer Imperialismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sablik, Kurt. (1983). Julius Tandler. Mediziner und Sozialreformer. Eine Biographie. Wien: Verlag A. Schendl. Schultz, Theodore W. (1981). Investing in People. The Economics of Population Quality (The Royer Lectures, 1980). Berkeley: University of California Press. Tandler, Julius. (1924). Ehe und Bevölkerungspolitik. Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift 74(4–6): 211–214, 262–266, 305–309. Tönnies, Ferdinand. (1998[1932]). Rudolf Goldscheid (1870–1931), pp 308–314 in Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 22 1932–1936. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter. Weingart, Peter, Jürgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz. (2004). Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

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Weikert, Aurelia. (1998). Genormtes Leben. Bevölkerungspolitik und Eugenik. Wien: Promedia. Witrisal, Georg. (2004). Der “Soziallamarckismus” Rudolf Goldscheids. Ein milieutheoretischer Denker zwischen humanitärem Engagement und Sozialdarwinismus. Diplomarbeit an der Sozial und Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Available online at: http://www. witrisal.at/goldscheid/rudolf_goldscheids_soziallamarckismus.pdf (accessed July 25, 2009).

13 Decentering the Economy Governmentality Studies and Beyond? Urs Stäheli

Have economics and the economy always already been poststructuralist? In Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, he introduces economics as a discipline without a center: [E]conomics 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. (Foucault 2008: 282) This confronts discourse analysis and governmentality studies with a problem—at least if we assume that one of the aims of discourse analysis lies in showing the heterogeneous assemblage which constitutes a totality or an abstraction such as the market.1 One might ask: Why and how to decenter a totality which has never been a totality? Or, what might a critique of sovereignty contribute to economic analysis if modern economics has never conceived of the economy as a sovereign realm? I want to argue that the design of a poststructuralist account of the economy depends upon the nature of how it understands the “decentering the economy,” and that this understanding affects the empirical analysis of governmental technologies.

1. Foucault’s description of economics is certainly quite surprising, considering the strange relation between poststructuralism and economy. Politics, law, art, and even science have become objects of deconstructive and discourse analytical readings—only the economy has been neglected for quite a long time. While Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) seminal book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy offered an outline of a comprehensive political theory of hegemony in the 1980s, it took more than ten years to suggest a radical rethinking of liberal and Marxist notions of the

270 Urs Stäheli economy. This rethinking is exemplified by Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (1997) and the success of governmentality studies. This delay of a poststructuralist analysis of economic processes is no coincidence; rather, it is due to the very success of poststructuralist political and social theory. Turning poststructuralism into a social analytics meant fighting against any form of economism; it was the attempt to develop a post-Marxist social theory. One of the effects of these endeavors was to identify and criticize the economy as the place of essentialism and substantialism. Thus, the economy became a no-go area. Should one—against better advice—decide to visit the place of the economy, chances were high to become infected by the virus of essentialism. The disavowal of the economy and economic practices as a legitimate subject of poststructuralist theorizing resulted in an over-politicized theory of society. This becomes very clear in Laclau and Mouffe’s deconstruction of Marxism, which tried to break with any idea of the economy as determining force—or, as a last instance that would eventually govern all social processes. Such a move was crucial for getting the necessary conceptual space for thinking the political construction of social identities. In that sense, the theory of hegemony turned into a deconstructive social and political theory: now it became possible to think the contingency of identities, and to think precarious identities beyond any naturalized foundations. Thus, deconstructing Marxism created the conceptual space for a decentering of political identities. Such a poststructuralist analysis of the political implied doing without any necessary link between the economy and the political. One of the more unhappy effects of such a deconstruction was that the very concept of the economy has not really been challenged. Instead of deconstructing the economy, it was quarantined. It kept on living as a self-contained sphere, considered to be successfully and safely isolated from other spheres of society. The threat of economic contagion was believed to be banned! However, putting the economy aside in such a way was nothing less than a late victory of “essentialism.” The economy was not deconstructed, but became the undeconstructable other—the essentialist evil—of poststructuralist theory. Either it was made invisible or it haunted the analysis of identities as the spectre of a suppressed reality. One of the merits of governmentality studies is to put the economy back on the screen of poststructuralist theorizing. In what follows, I want to specify how governmentality studies try to decenter economics and the economy. 2 In order to do this, I will introduce two different starting points of a poststructuralist understanding of the economy. This will lead me to a critique of certain versions of the idea of governmentality, which tend to neglect the self-reference of economic operations. My reading of governmentality studies is not a reading from “within.” During my work on fi nancial discourses, I found it very useful to combine tools from governmental studies with deconstructive concepts and approaches of systems theory, in order to account for boundary confl icts:

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which techniques are being used for drawing the boundary between the economic and the non-economic? This also means that my reading cannot be more than a—hopefully productive—“misreading.”3

2. SUBSTANTIAL AND FORMAL ECONOMY Any attempt at decentering the economy has to situate itself within existing conceptual dichotomies. One of these has been the distinction between a formal and substantial idea of the economy (Wilk 1996). Neoclassical thinking exemplifies the formal account, which assumes a space of pure economic rationality. Within this paradigm, the economy is basically conceived of in terms of a market model. This model was originally based on the idea of rationally calculating economic man. During the second half of the twentieth century—in what David Ruccio and Jack Amariglio (2003) called the second “formalist revolution”—systemic ideas of market equilibrium replaced the desiring economic man as the starting point of economic theory. Formalist approaches disembed economic processes from cultural and social institutions—the market becomes a machine of abstraction, reproducing pure economic practices. Since the market is seen as an emergent phenomenon, arising out of myriads of individual decision, the economy is thought of as an object of its own with firm boundaries. In contrast, a substantial understanding of the economy criticizes the formal model as an ahistorical abstraction. The classic position is Karl Polanyi’s (1944) analysis of the dis/embedding of economic processes. What formal narratives present as always already given, is now seen as a historical process. The disembedding of the market and its self-regulation are not simply universal models, but expressions of a historical crisis. Eventually, this leads to an economization of cultural and social spheres: “instead of the economic system being embedded in social relations, these relationships were now embedded in the economic system” (Polanyi 1944: 170). The distinction between these two understandings—a “formal” and a “substantial” model—has certainly been highly contested. Still, it is a powerful distinction that configures the terrain of the formation of economic discourse. Any poststructuralist conception of the economy will try to overcome this dualistic distinction. However, due to their different starting points, a deconstructive approach and a genealogy of the economy will differ considerably. To put it differently, it matters how a poststructuralist critique of the dichotomy crosses the distinction between a substantial and formal understanding of the economy. I will argue that governmentality studies start from a substantial understanding of the model in their genealogical reading. This does not mean that they are not interested in the formal side of the distinction, but only that their analytical task begins on the other side. In contrast, deconstructive and systems theoretical attempts at overcoming the dichotomy start off with the formalist idea of the economy.

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3. POST-SUBSTANTIAL ECONOMY Governmentality studies try to arrive at a post-substantial understanding of the economy. They emphasize the heterogeneous network of practices and discourses within which economic practices are formatted and generated. Notably, the separation of politics and the economy is seen as political distinction: “Instead, the constitution of a conceptually and practically distinguished sphere (i.e., the economy, US), governed by autonomous laws and a proper rationality is itself element of ‘economic’ government” (Lemke 2002: 57). Any economic operation is always already embedded within political struggles and power technologies, thus not leaving intact the idea of a pure economy. It is important to distinguish the notion of “economic government” from “governing the economy” (Miller and Rose 1990). Economic government refers to the rationality of governing, e.g., the efficient usage of political resources. What is more central to my argument is what “governing the economy” entails. Since there can be no “economic sovereignty,” it is impossible to govern the economy directly: the market remains intransparent and inaccessible. At the same time, it is emphasized that markets do not evolve naturally and that the existence of markets depends on fortunate circumstances. What Foucault has shown in his analysis of German ordo-liberalism is that the market is a precarious, formal mechanism, made possible by governmental technologies. However, these technologies do not directly aim at the market: One has to govern for the market (Foucault 2008: 121) by adapting one’s devices to an imaginary market. In turn, the market becomes a measure that decides about the “quality” of governmental programmes and techniques. That is why Foucault speaks about the “market test” of neoliberal technologies: the market defi nes what is politically working or not, what is seen as efficient and what is able to foster the ideal market (cf. Foucault 2008: 246; Tellmann 2003). The economy confronts governmental rationalities with the problem of how to govern what cannot be governed. Thus, the assumption of a self-organizing market, which cannot be governed, comes surprisingly close to Foucault’s political interest in ways of not being governed so much.4 The success of governmentality studies in no small part arises from the fruitful confrontation of political sovereignty and the impossibility of economic sovereignty. Foucault’s analysis of the “invisible hand” points precisely at this constitutive gap: It is not the “hand” which interests him, but rather the “invisibility” of this hand. 5 Putting emphasis on the hand would still imply maintaining a theological model of a control. However, control has become invisible and the market is constitutively intransparent—it seems that it is this invisibility which also affects our understanding of the economic sphere. Strictly speaking, the economy, just as it is prefigured in economic knowledge, is not able to constitute a totality of its own. “[E]conomics is a discipline without totality” writes Foucault, as I have quoted previously. If one agrees with this analysis, then the idea of the economization of the social


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becomes highly problematic: There is neither an economic sphere which simply spreads to other social areas, nor an economic “super-coding” and reconfiguring all social spheres according to an economic logic. The reason for this is that the economy itself is essentially contaminated by other discourses: the economy is constitutively unable to purify itself from its micropolitical and micro-aesthetic underpinnings. “Governing the economy,” then, can only mean to create favorable opportunities for this strange realm which remains a dark continent for governmental technologies.6 Following Foucault’s analysis of economic man, governmentality studies were quick to emphasize the figure of “the entrepreneur of oneself” as a technology of indirect control. This figure is paradigmatic for the new forms of power which the intransparent realm of modern economy requires: The impossibility of direct control was translated into the indirect “conduct of conduct”—turning freedom into a primary technology of control. The figure of the “entrepreneur” has proved to be a very successful analytical tool, which, however, also tends to suffer from its excessive success. There is nearly no social sphere that has not been analysed in terms of “entrepreneurialism”: be it the consumer and her/his decisions, the science entrepreneur or even the social-care client, who becomes responsible for his own well-being. The problem of this success lies in its uniformity: What has started off as a critique of a homogeneous understanding of economization, tends to end up with a surprisingly homogeneous figure of the entrepreneur, whose formal logic of control applies to a plurality of fields.

4. POST-FORMAL ECONOMY After this draft of “economic governmentality” as post-substantial (note the similarity to Polanyi’s crisis narrative), I will now briefly turn to a postformal perspective. While post-substantialism is interested in the precarious political and cultural conditions of possibility of a self-regulated market, post-formalism proceeds from a different starting point. A good example of such a position is Jean-Joseph Goux’s analysis of financial speculation. The stock market does not only figure as the idealized market of neoclassical theory, but also introduces a whole new way of thinking: “the stock exchange-paradigm.” What is striking about this new paradigm which was established at the end of the nineteenth century, is its closeness to poststructuralist thinking: The “fundamental instability of ‘value,’” which characterizes this paradigm, corresponds to an endless deferral of meaning in poststructuralist accounts (Goux 1997: 161). The stock exchange paradigm, then, assumes that modern fi nancial economy has always already been decentered: Precisely because of the missing “real” foundation of stock quotes, it generates an always fluctuating chain of price differences.7 We are confronted with two quite different modes of decentering the economy: Governmentality studies decenter the market by embedding the

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invisible economy within heterogeneous networks of power; post-formalism, in contrast, is interested in how economic self-reference disembedds itself. What does this mean? Governmentality studies assume, at least in principle, that the idea of a self-regulating market would be possible, provided adequate control technologies have been established—in principle, because governmentality studies circumvent the very problem of theorizing the economy by exclusively focusing on an empirical analysis of technologies for governing the economy. In doing so, governmentality studies have to deal with a paradox: on the one hand, they aim at radically historicizing the economy, thus pursuing a “happy positivism”; on the other hand, there are theoretical assumptions being made about governing of the self and implicitly about the economy. By analysing “neo-liberal” technologies of government, this tension becomes most clear: Such technologies presuppose the idea of the economy as self-regulated social sphere. This idea is rightly seen as a historical discursive construction—but what does this imply? The first answer, which some positions of governmentality studies seem to cling to without spelling it out, is a redressed version of ideology critique: The construction of the self-regulated market is an ideological model, shaped by neoliberalist rationalities, for enabling new modes of government. Such an answer is, from a discourse theoretical perspective, highly problematic, since it does not take seriously what the historical discourse of the market does. The second answer is more in line with a Foucauldian perspective and emphasizes the performativity of economic discourses: discourses construct and constitute the very market they are describing (e.g., Callon 1998)—and this construction does not content itself with being a political myth that enables governmental practices. Taking seriously the very idea of performativity means to account for how economic constructions acquire a life of their own. It is precisely now that the need for theorizing the economy arises—not in the sense of an objectivist and a-historical notion of the economy, but as an analytics of the becoming self-referential of economic practices. Such a theoretical move, however, entails loosening economic practices from a supposedly privileged function for political rationalities, however broadly defi ned. Instead, it is about focusing on the genealogy of economic practices and the constitution of the economy as self-referential social sphere. This is not an argument for discovering “pure” economic logics, but for looking at the discursive and cultural constitution of self-referential modes of the economy. It is such an argument about the performativity of economic discourses which would force governmentality studies to go beyond an analysis of (micro-)political. Doing so without a theoretical understanding of the economy, however, makes it impossible to understand the working and the failure of the “invisible economy.” Economic failure would always be an empirical and political failure, leaving even open the possibility of a perfect market: If there were, hypothetically, a discourse which successfully institutes an “efficient market,” governmentality studies would have to cling to a historical description of such a market.


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In contrast, the dynamics which I have called “self-disembedding” work from within the economy. Post-formalism, thus, is not simply a neo-classical or systems theoretical description of the economy; a description which would accept the possibility of clearly distinguishing between an economic system and its environment. Rather, it locates the potential of disruption and irritation within economic processes themselves, and not only in their (micro-)political preconditions. Thus, the status of the invisible economy changes: It is not so much an invisibility caused by an impossible economic sovereignty, but an invisibility which has been transformed into the uncertainty of the market. Speaking about an “impossible economic sovereignty” implies a somewhat nostalgic idea of sovereignty, still adhering to the possibility of a political economy, whose unity has (for some: unfortunately) become impossible. Post-formal approaches have given up this nostalgia— and focus on how formal models of the economy tend to implode. Thus, the post-formal view does not so much emphasize the plurality of political authorities which try to—often indirectly—govern the economy or economic organizations (cf. Miller and Rose 1990). Rather, it tries to look at the internal dynamics of invisible economic practices. To put it differently, such a view is interested in the very nature of economic selfreference. Emphasising the self-referentiality of the economy goes beyond a classical formal understanding of closure. Rather, it helps to problematize those formal assumptions which have—often invisibly—found their way into the concept of governmentality. When Foucault emphatically points at the precarious self-regulatory nature of the market, he tends to follow too closely the ordo-liberal positions which he analyzes: capitalism is seen as a possibility which does not suffer from internally produced contradictions as, for example, Marxist positions would have it. The conceptual “costs” of governmentaliy studies lie precisely in the ambiguous status of the invisible economy. This status produces a conceptual aporia which is difficult to navigate: On the one hand, it is emphasized that the economy cannot be a sphere of its own since it is always already political economy; on the other hand, a Foucauldian analysis of “neo-liberalism” has to assume that there is a social sphere which cannot be directly governed, since it is this “invisibility” which is presupposed by neoliberal technologies of power. This closeness to empirical discourses is precisely the danger of a “humble” historicism. Thus, the very assumption of an “ungovernable invisibility” presupposes some sort of imaginary economic purity which is not yet contaminated by political sovereignty. A post-formal perspective starts with an imminent analysis of economic self-referentiality. It is interested in the excess of self-reference, in the augmentation and “overheating” of self-reference. Think of gambling and fi nancial speculation, which generates a spectacle of wild contingency. Descriptions of gambling in the seventeenth century were not simply struck by the irrationality of gambling, but by the shocking observation that gambling celebrates the pure potentiality of money. With the introduction

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of paper money, money became pure representation without any intrinsic value. Marc Shell (1999: 61) notes: “A piece of paper money is almost always a representation, a symbol that claims to stand for something else.” Financial speculation shares with gambling this fascination for the potentiality of the medium of money. A true speculator is not so much interested in the instrumental value of money: it is not only greed, laziness and lust for profit which motivate him. Rather, it is the enjoyment of the “thrill” of speculation, generated by the self-reference of fi nancial economy, which fascinates the speculator (cf. Stäheli 2007). A speculator resembles, as Georg Simmel (2001 [1900]) has noted, an adventurer who enjoys the suspense of adventure itself—the adventure is not a means for another end, but becomes an end itself. Financial speculation is probably that set of economic practices which most clearly focuses on economic self-reference, thus becoming a secondorder economy. And it is in fi nancial speculation that the “self-disembedding” of self-reference becomes exemplarily visible. The excess of the economic fi nds itself within an excessive self-reference, in the enjoyment of the process of abstraction itself. It is remarkable that fi nancial speculation becomes popular by literally staging the process of abstraction, the “becoming-abstract” of the economy. The excess of the economy is produced by itself; one does not have to assume a pre-economic desire for profit in order to explain these dynamics. It is this excess which becomes the site for struggles about what is seen as the legitimate economy and what is not. Self-reference, then, cannot be reduced to a figure of closure—rather it generates effects which move outside the realm of meaning. Recent discussions on affect and affectivity (e.g., Massumi 2002; Thrift 2008; Clough et al. 2007) emphasize the strong connection between self-reference and affectivity. It is important to note the difference between affect and emotion. Affects are social, but they are pre-individual and non-significatory flows. Affects circulate through social and psychic layers of meaning, without being meaningful themselves (Ahmed 2004). In contrast, emotions— such as anger, greed, and anxiety—are individualized and normalized social constructions. Speaking about “expressing one’s love” points at the individualization of emotions; in contrast, a panic is often described as contagious, i.e., it exists in the movement of contagion, it is intoxicating, but nobody is the origin of the panic.8 Affect then also means the capacity of becoming affected, an openness to possible events. There are two dimensions of affect which are crucial to self-reference. First, a self-referential system is an emergent system; i.e., it is impossible to deduce the form of self-reference from pre-existing elements. For Massumi, affectivity denotes precisely this ungraspable and indeterminable moment of emergence—the moment, when something new is being created: “This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of


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which is ‘selected’” (Massumi 2002: 32–33). Secondly, affect is not surpassed by successfully established forms of self-reference. It is regenerated, since self-reference produces uncertainty. The loss of a foundation of the economy—or: a myth of foundation—accelerates this self-referential logic of uncertainty, producing insecurity and fear (Clough et al. 2007, drawing from Massumi and Parisi). Self-reference produces an endless deferral of value. Even political rationalities such as the idea of limitless economic growth cannot account for this process. The logic of economic self-disembedding is a logic generated by the perfect working of the economy. What a perspective on self-reference highlights is that external foundational points, formulated in political programmes external to the economy, lose their orienting force for governmental technologies. Technologies of control and regulation have to respond to a temporality produced by the economy. Affect theorists such as Massumi and Clough emphasize the new challenge for conceiving the power of affect. Power becomes “preemptive power,” which works by a “modulation of futurity”: “The challenge for theories of affect, then, becomes how to articulate a politics in the present, when what constitutes the present is set in relation to a preemptive modulation of futurity.” (Clough et al. 2007: 72) Notably fi nancial speculation was one of the fi rst social spheres which institutionalized such a modulation of the future. The future inscribes itself in the present stock quotes—and introduces a complex play of uncertainty: The already discounted future affects the future in turn. Thus, the political nature of “pre-emptive economic power” cannot be deduced from non-economic rationalities, but is self-produced in the struggle with this strange temporality. This increased self-reference becomes a highly contested terrain itself— a terrain on which struggles about the limits of economy are fought. The reason for this is that the potentiality generated by self-reference overflows the established categories of economics and the control technologies of the economy. Contrary to the philosophy of consciousness, self-reference does not only protect the identity of the economy, but it also becomes the place where heterogeneous and unexpected events occur, where economic logic runs amok. The long fight about how to distinguish fi nancial speculation from gambling is a good point in case. There is no a priori knowledge or epistemic foundation which would allow one to take a defi nitive decision. The horizon of economics is contested, and its limits are temporarily fi xed by competing descriptions of the economy as well as by technologies policing these limits. The precarious construction of boundaries becomes thus the center of analysis: which strategies are being used for purifying the economic and for generating its “invisibility”? What becomes political is precisely the contestation of economic limits, the negotiation of the horizon of the economy. For doing so, it is certainly necessary to identify in a Foucauldian vein discursive regularities and technologies of power. But that is not the whole story. Those imaginaries which try to describe the non-economic, what

278 Urs Stäheli Laclau called the “constitutive outside” of a discourse, become crucial. Which semantics and iconologies are being used for describing the nonmarket? Speaking about constitutive exclusions means that it is not a purely empirical exclusion, i.e., not an accidental exclusion. Rather, this exclusion has to be performed, in order for the market discourse to work (Mitchell 2003: 245).9 However, it is only possible to conceive of such a radical exclusion of the non-economic, if one presupposes the—ever failing—attempt at economic totalization, i.e., of generating a sphere of the economy. That is also why systems theoretical concepts are useful for a deconstructive social theory: the strength of systems theory lies in analysing the constitution of a closed social sphere—however, only a “deconstructed” systems theory is able to note the failure of closure, the undecidabilities that are generated by constructing a pure economic space. Let me summarize the three crucial aspects of a post-formal perspective on the economy. The focus lies on the working of self-reference and processes of abstraction: this creates an endless deferral of value, and produces uncertainty. Secondly, I have tried to show that increased and accelerated self-reference creates boundary confl icts, which, in turn, call for economic and political technologies of control. Thirdly, there is a close alliance between self-reference and affectivity: self-reference produces an excess of possibilities and starts to oscillate, recalling a vast horizon of potentiality. This points to the need for grasping technologies of affect, as well as affective technologies. One aspect of such technologies is the individualization of affects as emotions, which in turn, are at the center of self-technologies.

5. DECONSTRUCTIVE GOVERNMENTALITY I want to conclude by identifying three conceptual problems which become visible if one observes governmentality studies from a post-formal perspective. (1) How to Account for Failing Governmental Strategies? Governmentality studies have produced many precise descriptions of governmental programmes and technologies. But how to account for the ambiguities of these programmes? The very notion of programme produces an argumentative logic of its own: programmes try to formulate idealized practices which are translated into technologies. Such an understanding comes quite close to a normative concept of society. Parts of governmentality studies are, of course, aware of this idealized and idealizing logic and try to account for the limits of idealization: a programme does never fully succeed, its “application” is always separated by a gap from the practices it tries to generate. Thus, it is suggested to think of this gap as constitutive


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for these technologies: knowing that one does not (yet) fully correspond to a governmental logic creates the desire to become even more perfect. In this sense, the gap between programme and application becomes the motor of governmental technologies (Bröckling 2007: 38). However, it remains unclear whether the gap is a question of empirical usage of programmes and their translation into technologies, i.e., whether this gap is generated by the empirical impossibility of fulfilling the governmental requirements and needs: “Programmes are never seamlessly translated into individual behavior; to appropriate their rules always means to modify them as well” (Bröckling 2007: 40, my translation). In the process of translation, the programmes are transformed and altered through empirical usage. However, what is the theoretical status of these alterations? In his discussion of structuralism, Derrida (1978) tried to distinguish between two different modes of criticizing the idea of structure: The first criticism highlights the limits of structuralism by pointing out the empirical failure of ever establishing a fully-fledged structural totality. There are always additional empirical data which have not yet been accounted for. The second criticism is no longer criticism, but a deconstructive gesture. The empirical impossibility is now replaced with a quasi-transcendental impossibility: the construction of a totality or of an idealized programme fails because of the conceptual impossibility of such an identity. This point raises the question of how to account for the aporia of governmental technologies not simply as empirical shortcomings or modifications, but as an impossibility which inscribes itself within these programmes, an impossibility which is not only generated by individual resistance, but by the materiality of these technologies. Certainly, governmentality studies emphasize that the very figure of the entrepreneur is driven by the impossibility of ever achieving a full entrepreneurial identity. Thereby, a flexible subject is being created—a subject always reinventing him- or herself. This is certainly a crucial point. However, the impossibility of the entrepreneurial subject is identified as empirical impossibility. To put it briefly: it is about technologies of impossibility, but not about the impossibility of these technologies. Taking seriously the impossibility of governmental technologies would, however, challenge the empiricism of much research within governmentality studies. It would become necessary to account for failure as a theorectical category, e.g., on the basis of impossible totalization or as the iterability of technologies. (2) How to Account for Self-Regulatory Markets? I have tried to show that governmentality studies are primarily interested in the political construction of the market, somewhat neglecting the mechanisms of economic self-referentiality and self-control. This is emphasized by Foucault’s assumption that it is impossible to govern the economy. Instead, it is about to govern society creating favorable conditions for the market. But what then, is “the” economy? Governmentality studies would have to

280 Urs Stäheli refrain from answering this question—precisely because the economy is an invisible subject. Self-regulation is taken as a given; what becomes part of the analysis are the political conditions and the embedding of self-regulation, but not the operation and the techniques of economic self-organization. It is this “invisibility” which pushes a governmental analytics, often nearly exclusively, into the—certainly widely defi ned—political aspects of the economy.10 This also affects, how “market failures” are thought of. The political control paradigm of governmentality would point at failing governmental strategies that are not able to guarantee conditions for the evolution of complex market mechanisms. The logic of the market itself, however, would remain uncontested. I do not simply emphasise the self-reference of the economy because it is “missing” from governmentality studies. Rather, I am interested in this problem since many concepts of governmentality studies could be very useful tools for analysing self-referential processes. If we accept that self-referentiality may become the space of excess (be it meaningful or affective), then the following question is raised: How to deal with and possibly control it? Studying fi nancial speculation, questions like this become central: which technologies of “purification” are being used for producing pure economic operations (in contrast, for example, to mere, non-economic gambling)? Which discourses of functionalization are being used for providing fi nancial speculation with a proper economic function—such as the production of prices? In contrast to a systems theoretical analysis, this points to the need to account for the production of societal functions. And one might also ask which technologies for boundary maintenance are employed for dealing with “improper” economic events (such as counterfeits, corruption or gambling)? What these questions show is that the emphasis is shifted from the analysis of modes of subjectification to the production and regulation of an (impossible) economic totality—and the problems which accompany such an attempt of totalization. (3) Governmentality and Economization Governmentality studies started off with a critique of economization, precisely by pointing at the necessary political character of economic practices. At the same time, many studies show, how techniques of calculation and entrepreneurialism start to structure nearly all social spheres. In this sense, entrepreneurialism produces a homogenizing effect: many social fields are linked to the same political rationality, and similar technologies of subjectification are used within different fields. In order to avoid a homogenizing effect, it would be crucial to identify the contradictory articulation of different political rationalities, and the contradictory nature of a mode of subjectification such as the enterprising self. Governmentality suffers from the strange combination of minute and detailed case studies about the micropolitics of power and an over-generalized concept of neoliberalism whose


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key mode of subjectification is the entrepreneur.11 Thus, what escapes the abstract label of “neoliberalism” is the plurality of different logics in contemporary societies, possibly even “illiberal” modes of government (Opitz 2008), and their mutual articulation. In this sense, the heterogeneity of discursive formations has to be accounted for not only as a celebration of countless micro-techniques, but also as failures of ever establishing a fully hegemonic rationality. While this argument cautions about speaking too easily about “neoliberalism,” the second argument points at the contradictory nature within the central figure of “neoliberalism”: the entrepreneur. Governmentality studies introduces the enterprising self as mode of subjectification of indirect control: as conduct of conduct on the basis of freedom. The subject is being instituted as self-controlling self that “calculates about itself, and that works upon itself in order to better itself” (Rose 1989: 7f.). There is no telos of bettering, but the permanent flexibility and adaptation to new challenges. What is permanent is the need for ever-changing modes of self-control. Empirically, there is high risk of overstressing, of not being able to reply to these demands. In Bröckling’s (2007: 125) account, the enterprising self becomes even more precarious since he emphasizes that the entrepreneur has to combine “strength of will and courage on the one hand, and sober calculus on the other.” Thus, the enterprising self has to develop a structure of self-control which is able to accommodate moments of the non-economic. However, what happens if this explosive mixture gets out of control? Campbell Jones and Andrew Spicer (2006) have argued that the entrepreneur is far from being a well tempered self, but rather a deviant and passionate figure, often disregarding all economic probabilities and rationality. For Jones, the entrepreneur represents the excess of economics, the idea of pure expenditure and waste. In a sense, the entrepreneur is, temporarily, out of control, defying the ideal of self-control and calculation which Rose highlights—and it is precisely because of these moments of affection that the figure becomes attractive. Such an analysis might overemphasize “entrepreneurial excess.” However, it is worthwhile to link this description with that of governmentality studies. This might open a perspective for noting the immanent ruptures within the figure of the entrepreneur. Assuming a position against the idea of economization, then, would necessarily imply to contaminate economic figures such as that of the entrepreneur: to show, how these modes of subjectification do not automatically produce “neo-liberal” subjects. Rather, these subjects are confronted with an undecidability, which is inscribed within these technologies: a logic of creative responsibility and, at the same time, a logic of thrill and excess.

NOTES 1. In this sense, Mary Poovey’s (1998: 28) Foucauldian analysis of the market tries to undo reified abstractions such as the market.

282 Urs Stäheli 2. For the moment, I will leave aside the question of why knowledge generated by economics relates to economic practices. Assuming the performativity of economic knowledge (cf. Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2006), these are certainly not simply two distinct spheres. 3. Parts 2 and 3 draw from Stäheli (2008). 4. This uncanny closeness has stirred a sometimes polemic debate. Radical political positions criticize Foucault for being a forerunner of neoliberalism (e.g., Reitz 2003), others simply state the close relation (e.g., Sarasin 2005), while proponents of governmentality studies are eager to defend Foucault’s critical stance (e.g., Rose 1999). However, it would be a mistake to misuse Foucault’s fascination with the neoliberal critique of government for political partisanship—be it for a left-wing or a neo-liberal project. Colin Gordon (Donzelot and Gordon 2008: 57) rightly emphasizes: “The seductive element in Foucault’s rereading of liberalism was the thought that the art of better government was presented as the art of governing less, and that in this sense liberalism forms an autocritique of governmental reason: a governmentality which develops and corrects itself through its own critique.” 5. See Tellmann (2008) for a more detailed reading of the “invisible economy” in Foucault’s work. 6. The invisibility of the economy is different from the general impossibility of directly governing a social sphere. Governing at a distance has become the general imaginary of control in modern societies. The economy, however, is represented as a sphere which is the very opposite of the possibility of governing. 7. With the fall of the gold standard, the economy has lost its foundation. For Mark C. Taylor (2004: 52), this corresponds to the death of god in religion. Now, the economy transforms itself into a volatile, self-regulating system. 8. However, there are contradictory readings of the de/individualizing effects of panic. See Dupuy (2003) for the paradoxical status of individualization within a panic. 9. This stands in contrast to Foucault’s interest in discursive regularities. For a discussion of the function of limits in Foucault, Laclau and Luhmann see Stäheli (2004). 10. This creates a dynamic between a presupposed formalism of the market and social interventions for German ordo-liberalism: “Whereas economic regulation takes place spontaneously, through the formal properties of competition, the social regulation of confl icts, irregularities of behavior, nuisance caused by some to others, and so forth, calls for a judicial interventionism which has to operate as arbitration within the framework of the rules of the game.” (Foucault 2008: 175) 11. Lawrence Grossberg points at his problem in his discussion with Toby Miller when he criticizes the “mistake of leaping from the micro to the macro” (Packer 2003).

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text 22(2): 117–139. Bröckling, Ulrich. (2007). Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds). (2002). Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart: Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.


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Butler, Judith. (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Callon, Michel (ed). (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks and Craig Willse (2007) Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself, ephemera 7(1): 60–77. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Derrida, Jacques. (1978). Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. pp. 278–294 in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London: Routledge. Donzelot, Jacques and Colin Gordon. (2008). Governing Liberal Societies—The Foucault Effect in the English speaking World. Foucault Studies 5: 48–62. DuGay, Paul. (2005). Which is the ‘Self’ in Self-Interest? Sociological Review 53(3): 391–411. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. (2003). La Panique. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Foucault, Michel. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1997). The End of Capitalism (as we knew it). A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Goux, Jean-Joseph. (1997). Values and Speculations: The Stock-Exchange Paradigm. Cultural Values 1(2): 159–177. Jones, Campbell and André Spicer. (2006). Enterpreneurial Excess, pp. 187–202 in Joanna Brewis, Stephen Linstead, David M. Boje and Tony O’Shea (eds) The Passion of Organizing. Kopenhagen: Abstrakt. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lemke, Thomas (2002). Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxism 14(3): 49–64. MacKenzie, Donald. (2006). An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massumi, Brian. (1995). The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. Massumi, Brian. (2002). Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy & Society 19(19): 1–31. Mitchell, Timothy. (2003). Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nadesan, Majia Holmer. (2008). Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall. Opitz, Sven. (2008). Zwischen Sicherheitsdispositiven und Securitization: Zur Analytik illiberaler Gouvernmentalität, pp. 201–228 in Patricia Purtschert, Katrin Meyer and Yves Winter (eds) Gouvernementalität und Sicherheit. Bielefeld: transcript. Packer, Jeremy. (2003). Mapping the Intersections of Foucault and Cultural Studies: An Interview with Lawrence Großberg and Toby Miller, pp. 23–46 in Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy (eds) Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. Albany: State University of New York Press. Polanyi, Karl. (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart. Poovey, Mary. (1998). A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reitz, Tilman. (2003). Die Sorge um sich und niemand anderen. Das Argument 45(249): 82–97. Rose, Nikolas. (1989). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.

284 Urs Stäheli Rose, Nikolas. (1999). Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruccio, David and Jack Amariglio. (2003). Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics. Princeton: Princeton University. Sarasin, Philip. (2005). Foucault zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Shell, Marc. (1999). The Issue of Representation, pp. 53–74 in Martha Woodmannsee and Mark Osteen (eds) The New Economic Criticism. Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London: Routledge. Simmel, Georg. (2001 [1900]). Philosophie des Geldes. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Stäheli, Urs. (2004). Competing Figures of the Limit, pp. 226–240 in Simon Critchley and Oliver Marchart (eds) Laclau. A Critical Reader. London: Routledge. Stäheli, Urs. (2007), Spektakuläre Spekulation. Zum Populären der Ökonomie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Stäheli, Urs. (2008). Ökonomie: Die Grenzen des Ökonomischen, pp. 295–311 in Stephan Moebius and Andreas Reckwitz (eds) Poststrukturalistische Sozialwissenschaften. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Taylor, Mark C. (2004). Confi dence Games. Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Tellmann, Ute. (2003). The Truth of the Market. Distinktion 7: 49–63. Tellmann, Ute. (2008). Foucault and the Invisible Economy. Foucault Studies 6: 5–25. Thrift, Nigel. (2008). Nonrepresentational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Wilk, Richard R. (1996). Economies and Cultures. Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

14 The Economic Beyond Governmentality The Limits of Conduct Ute Tellmann “We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization . . . The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing.” (Foucault 1983: 209)

1. INTRODUCTION: NOVEL PERSPECTIVES ON ECONOMY Over the past decade, the economy has become the object of novel theoretical perspectives. Scholars from diverse disciplines have begun to unravel the understanding of the economy as a self-standing entity, governed by some essential mechanism (Barry and Slater 2002; Callon 1998; du Gay and Pryke 2002; de Goede 2005; Escobar 1995; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Mirowski 1994; Mitchell 1998; Ruccio and Amariglio 2003; Stäheli 2007; Tellmann 2003). These scholars have elucidated the uncertain boundaries, impure constituents, cultural representations and political imaginaries at work in the making of economy. These works propel and call forth what Arturo Escobar once termed “economics as culture,” in order to indicate that the economy is “above all a cultural production, a way of producing human subjects and social orders of a certain kind” (Escobar 1995: 59). The oeuvre of Michel Foucault has been an important source of inspiration for this theoretical endeavor in two respects. At a very general level, Foucault’s theoretical and methodological perspective makes it possible to circumvent the “universals employed by sociological analysis, historical analysis, and political philosophy” (Foucault 2008: 2)—of which the notion of the economy is a paramount example (Gibson-Graham 1996). Instead of taking monolithic accounts of economic reality at face value, scholars have used Foucauldian notions of discourse to dissect the particular “politics of truth” inherent in apparently neutral depictions of the economy (de Goede 2005; Escobar 1995; Mitchell 2002; 2005; Miller and Rose 1990; Kalpagam 2000; Tellmann 2003). But Foucault did not only offer tools to be used in unravelling the objectifications of economic discourse. More particularly, his concept of governmentality provides an analytical frame for understanding the modes of power at work within the economy. Governmentality describes a type of power that “shapes the way we act” through incentives and other indirect means (Dean 2002: 119,121). The very economic and liberal character of this type of power lies, according to Foucault, in its reliance upon

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the freedom of the calculating and sentient “economic” subject as its relay station. In this perspective, economic discourses and subject-positions are integral to the exercise of power (Miller and Rose 1990; Miller and O’Leary 2002; Rose 1993): economic rationalities are political rationalities, as they elaborate modes of conduct. The notion of governmentality undoubtedly provides an ingenious and instructive perspective on how relations of power and the economic intersect. Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that the dominant conception of governmentality also contains unwitting limitations, which make it difficult to refocus our perception of the economic.1 An important source of limitation lies in the prevalent understanding of the “conduct of conduct” as the dominant analytical key for decentering the economy. Is the economy not, one might ask, as much about governing money and objects as it is about governing subjects? Linking the understanding of power solely to the rationality of governing the conduct of subjects lends itself to an underestimation of the “ontological politics” ingrained within the economic and monetary order of things.2 Annemarie Mol has coined this composite term in order to address the fabricated “conditions of possibility we live with” (Mol 1999: 75). Monetary, juridical, or spatial arrangements conjoin in defining, negotiating, and contesting the malleable forms of the economic, its temporality and its regimes of valuation (Callon, Millo and Muniesa 2007: 3).3 They define types of economic reality. But employing a conceptual frame which subsumes all these ways of “world-making” in terms of “conduct of conduct” makes it more difficult to understand how and where else the economic becomes defined. The claim being made here is not that governmentality studies in general have never transgressed the bounds of this formula of conduct. But the theoretical and conceptual discussion of these bounds has mostly been avoided, and the opportunities for pushing the perception of the economic onto a new terrain have thus been neglected. The argument proceeds in three steps. The fi rst part seeks to show that the formula of “conduct of conduct” actually narrows the conceptual understanding of the liberal security dispositif that Foucault introduced at the outset of his lectures. The second part demonstrates how this narrowed focus on conduct stays within the bounds of liberal economic discourse without rendering them visible. The question of money serves as an exemplary case to discuss this unwitting reiteration of the liberal imaginary of economy. Just like liberal discourse, the perspective of governmentality is in danger of eschewing reflections about the density and politics of money. The third and concluding part argues that governmentality studies need to engage in historical-conceptual work about “the economic” in order to explore the “type of reality” it is dealing with (Foucault 1983: 209). Instead of using the “conduct of conduct” to characterize a general form of power regardless of the question at hand, it is hence necessary to revive the conceptual “art of using history” that Foucault practiced. This art consists in the constant inflection of the conceptual and historical horizons in order to

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retrieve conceptual tools, while simultaneously unsettling them. The chapter concludes with a short meditation on how governmentality–studies with a newly gained sense of “the economic” could complement, in crucial ways, the recent discussion of the economic and economization as proposed by Actor-Network Theory (Callon et al. 2007; Callon 1998).

2. FROM THE SECURITY DISPOSITIF TO THE ALLURE OF CONDUCT Foucault’s lecture courses were testing grounds, as François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana remark in their preface: Foucault used these courses to explore lines of research and ways of thinking (2007: xiv). The elaboration of the notion of governmentality in the courses on Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics is no exception in this respect. In these lectures, Foucault tries and tests how to understand the “birth of politics” (Foucault 2008: 313), the viability of his analytics of power for decentering the state (ibid.: 186f; Foucault 2007: 512), and the genealogy and dangers of liberalism as a political horizon (Foucault 2008: 134, 312). How the economy can be thought within an “analytics of power” is therefore, arguably, a side-product of these more central concerns. These former interests eventually shape how Foucault specifies the security dispositif of liberalism: more and more, it comes to revolve around a rationality of governing at a distance. The possibility of thinking the economy in terms of the security dispositif is thus left comparatively unexplored, as I shall show. Foucault suggests that the emergence of the modern meaning of economy as a “level of reality” should not be understood as a mere effect of a presumed differentiation of the economy into a functionally coherent subsystem of society (Foucault 2007: 95). Instead of the commonly assumed quasi-ontological difference between the economy and the political horizon, Foucault assumes that an unbroken plane of governmental strategies and reflections envelops both spheres, taking as its target the regulation of the population (ibid.: 64, 95; Foucault 2008: 323f and 328). He sees the conceptualization of economy as part of the “episode in the mutation of technologies of power and an episode in the installment of this technique of apparatuses of security that seems to me to be one of the typical features of modern societies” (Foucault 2007: 34). No longer referring to the proper administration of the oikos or prudential advice about saving on means, economy projects a new socio-political ontology: a plane of circulatory flows, naturalness and internal forces, forging a complex causal intermeshing between a milieu and its population (Foucault 2007: 30, 45, 94). “It is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake in this notion of milieu [ . . . ]. The milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried out. The milieu is a set of natural givens—rivers, marshes, hills—and a set of artificial givens— an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain

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number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it” (Foucault 2007: 21). As the economy is taken to articulate the milieu of circulation, it becomes integral to this new dispositif. The conception of economy is thus fi rmly positioned within the field of governmental reason and technique, and thus opened up for an “analytics of power.” But what kind of relations of power does this analytic render visible? What kind of technologies of power does the security dispositif depict? Foucault addresses this question by contrasting the techniques of discipline and the technologies of security in respect to time, space and norms (Foucault 2007: 17, 44, 62). The space of the security dispositif is no longer organized within the cells and grids of discipline, it does not rely on a temporality of homogeneous units of time, and it does not impose the norms of disciplinary conduct on the individual body. Instead it assumes a given milieu of circulation, reckons with the aleatory occurrences of events, and derives its norms from statistical regularities calculated on the level of the population: “Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway allowing the development of ever wider circuits” (2007: 45). Foucault’s analytics of this dispositif is not comparable to the dense and detailed descriptions he marshalled in order to understand the dispositif of sexuality or disciplinary arrangements (Foucault 1990; 1995).4 Still, these cursory remarks are inspiring, since they invite us to focus on the ordering of spaces of circulation, temporality, and norms as aspects of the economic and the making of economy. Indeed, those who have used Foucault’s account of governmentality for re-thinking the economy have often had recourse to notions of spatiality and norms (Barry and Slater 2002; Miller 1992; Larner and Heron 2004; Larner and Walters 2004): Peter Miller’s (1992: 74) coinages of “calculable spaces” and “functional ensembles of financial flows” are telling in this respect. These phrases point beyond the subject and its conduct; they focus on the making of economic space, which allows for comparisons and differentiations that constitute novel economic norms. In this vein, Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron (2004) have suggested that we should understand the global economy as the manufacturing of “spaces of comparison.” Pointing to this possibility, they also indicate that their suggestion remains schematic and needs further elaboration. From a different, albeit related angle, Aihwa Ong (2006) turns towards Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the sovereign exception in order to point to the territorial strategies of zoning and gradation as ways of creating the spaces and milieus of circulation. The enumeration of these works signals that the notion of ‘spaces of circulation’ has captured the scholarly imagination, as it seems to harbor the analytical potential to decenter the economy. Foucault’s account of the security dispositif resonates with or even inspires this scholarly imagination. But one has to recognize that the concept of governmentality, as developed by Foucault, does not offer further analytical refi nement in this respect. Foucault does not engage in rethinking the economic in terms of temporality, valuation and space. He does


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not wonder about the role of money or objects in shaping the peculiarity of economic relations, and he is not disquieted by the question of how the economic is to be thought. He eschews these questions for a simple reason: the economy was not his main object of theoretical concern.5 Indeed, he assumed “that economic history and theory provide a good instrument” for understanding “relations of production” (Foucault 1983: 209), whereas to his mind, the intersections of power, knowledge and the subject were less well understood (Foucault 2003). He sought, very explicitly, to unravel the cold monster of the state rather than the economy. Thus, to Foucault himself and many of his followers, the economy seems to have been “defi ned as offlimits” as Peter Miller and Ted O’ Leary (2002: 91) have put it. Foucault’s exploration of the governmental nature of economic discourse has to be seen in the light of these research interests. Intent on thinking the state in terms of rationalities of governing, his account of governmentality begins to revolve around the economy as a governed interplay between a milieu and the interests of the subject. He identifies the figure of the sentient, willing and calculating subject as the main target of an “economic” technology of power aiming at the level of population (Foucault 2007: 21). The focus on the order of things and the spatial and temporal organization of circulation recedes accordingly into the background. As Stuart Elden (2007) has argued, the question of territoriality becomes equally muted. The broader outlines of the security dispositif are only dimly present in the subsequent elaborations on governmental power: Foucault never fleshes out the suggestions he makes at the beginning of his lecture. Instead of unearthing the “anatomy” of the security dispositif in similar fashion to the disciplinary “anatomy of power,” Foucault identifies the notion of interest as the single key to understand the economic form of liberal governmental power: Government is only interested in interests. The new government, the new governmental reason, does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. (Foucault 2008: 45) This passage is indicative of how emphatically Foucault describes the new technologies of governing in terms of their inherent focus on the regulation or governing of interests. Several other instances corroborate this impression. Desire, defined as “the pursuit of the individuals’ interest,” is “one of the important theoretical elements of the whole system” as it renders the population accessible to governmental technique (2007: 73). “Mechanisms of incentives” and “the law and mechanics of interests” (2007: 352) are the

290 Ute Tellmann words Foucault uses to describe the new form of governmental reason which, he maintains, still circumscribes our political horizon.6 Foucault’s rearticulation of the economic as governmental rationality can thus rightly be said to culminate in the contention that the self-interested subject of economic discourse functions as a point of relay for a governmental strategy. Undeniably, this entails a profound and critical shift of perspective. Instead of being an apolitical figure of purely economic interest, Foucault renders the homo oeconomicus visible as “the partner, the vis-à-vis, the basic element of the new governmental reason formulated in the eighteenth century” (2008: 271). The notion of governmentality thus enables us to understand economization as a strategy for governing through techniques of responsibilization, evaluation, accreditation, and motivation. It shows how the political technologies work by putting the moral and calculating individual at the center of visibility and intelligibility. “Advanced liberal rule,” as Nikolas Rose concisely defi nes it, “governs through the regulated choices of individual citizens” (Rose 1993: 285; Dean 1999). Under the paradigm of neoliberalism, the entrepreneur with his imperative of self-activation has become an ubiquitous form of subjectivity, which is made to traverse the whole social field (Bröckling 2007). In this sense, governmentality is admirably well equipped to understand the pervasive application of these strategies of conducting conduct: historical reality and analytical strategy intermesh perfectly, in both critical and analytical ways. Wendy Brown (2003) summarizes what this perspective on the economy as part of neoliberal strategies of governing shows: “Neo-liberalism is a constructivist project: it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality.” The strength of this analysis of liberal economy is that it reclothes the liberal subject in governmental dress. But acknowledging the ingenuity of this governmental understanding of economy should not lead us to presume that we have found the key to decentering the economy. This would be to assume that we do not need any further understanding of the very subject matter we hope to unravel: the economic. Just as one needs to see power and knowledge as distinct in order to think their intimate connection, one needs to recognize the economic in terms of its own forms of density in order to understand its intimate conjunction with power. Putting aside the question of how to tackle the specificity of the economic, the “conduct of conduct” comes rather close to reiterating the liberal imaginary of the economy without estranging us from its familiarity. It underwrites, so to speak, the same modes of visibility and intelligibility which take the economic to be an attribute that pertains solely to structured choices. The next section elucidates the contours of this omission and its uncanny closeness to the liberal imaginary of the market by discussing the question of money.


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3. SILENCES OF GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE VEIL OF MONEY It is revealing that Foucauldian scholars, who have turned towards the question of money and economy, have actually pushed the conceptual frame of governmentality into the background. Marieke de Goede (2005), for example, takes the general understanding of discourse, objectification and performativity as her conceptual vantage points. Indeed, there is very little about money in Foucault’s account of the economic form of liberal government. This omission is not without consequences for how the notion of governmentality depicts the economy: it implies that it is possible to define the “economic,” for example, without taking into account the forms of (monetary) mediation. It follows the classical liberal understanding that the essence of things economic lies in the calculations or governing of interest. In order to counter this understanding, this section takes money as an exemplary case for highlighting the limits of the focus on the “conduct of conduct.” The issue of money is taken as a paradigmatic case for a discussion of the conceptualization of the economic for two reasons. Firstly, money is often taken to be a quintessential characteristic of economic issues. Symptomatically, social and economic theorists like Niklas Luhmann, Georg Simmel and John Maynard Keynes commence their reflections on the economic with the question of money (Luhmann 1994; Simmel 2004; Keynes 1936; 1930). Even Karl Marx’s substantial defi nition of economy in terms of production uses the idea of money’s power of abstraction in order to explain how the laws of value take hold (Marx 1973: 244). At the same time, money is also the most impure economic element. As Karl Polanyi puts it: “The separation of the political and economic spheres had never been complete, and it was precisely in the matter of currency that it was necessarily incomplete” (1957: 196). Money ties issues of representation, discourse, politics and economic valuation together in an intricate knot (Pryke 2007, Kirshner 2003a; Carruthers and Babb 1996; de Goede 2004). The example of money therefore functions like a window revealing the impure constitution of the “economic.” As the following discussion will show, liberalism’s account of money as a neutral veil closes this window and governmentality studies should not be so unsuspecting as to follow. David Hume’s contention that money is “nothing but the representation of labor and commodities” still holds as an accurate description of the liberal quantity-theory of money (Hume 1955: 37). Irving Fisher, the patriarch of American monetarism, described his opus The Purchasing Power of Money at the beginning of the twentieth century as “at bottom simply a restatement of the old ‘quantity theory of money’” (Fisher 1920: vii, 196, 197, quoted in Kirshner 2001: 56).7 These quotations provide the first indications of how classical and (neo-)liberal economic discourse problematize money in terms of its representational capacities vis-à-vis the order of things (see Shell 1995: 72 seq.; Goux 1990: 96 seq.). Money is supposed to serve as a proper

292 Ute Tellmann place-holder for exchange values. Only if operating as a representational sign can it fulfil its most central functions: to be the medium of exchange, the store of value and the unit of account. To a certain extent, demanding that money should assume this role of representation is an uncontroversial aspiration: the inflationary derailment of the monetary sign clearly undermines money’s functions.8 But the crucial difference lies in the fact that money is only problematized in terms of this representational function or the lack of it. By analogy, this would be like entertaining a theory of language that focused exclusively on the representational function of a signifier without apprehending the formative aspects of language (Shell 1994). Money can therefore appear to liberal discourse as being essentially neutral—neither adding nor taking, neither qualifying nor constituting the economic order of things: “The long-run money neutrality is a crucial property of the classical model” (Snowdon, Vane and Wynarczyk 1994: 56).9 Consequently, money pales into insignificance compared to the realm of scarcity, calculation and decision, or however the real sector comes to be defi ned. As John Stuart Mill states it in the nineteenth century, “there cannot, in short, be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money [ . . . ]” (Mill 1848: 333).10 The later monetarist and more constructivist position is that the task of an appropriate monetary policy is to make sure that money actually is as neutral and insignificant as it is supposed to be. Preventing the excesses of government spending is the key to ensuring this neutrality (Hayek 1981: 58). Whereas the nineteenth century took the gold standard to be the guarantee of this representational function of money, the monetarist position assumes that an unhindered market mechanism will itself ensure that only “honest money” circulates (Hayek 1986: 8–10; 1976). Recent decades, which turned “transparency” into a “governance panacea,” have demonstrated the persistent discursive regularities that shape approaches to money and finance (Blyth 2003: 245). A profound family resemblance connects nineteenth-century liberalism and twentieth-century neo-liberalism in this belief about money as essentially a medium of representation and transparency. In this perspective, the question of power and politics only arises if money is made to deviate from its neutrality by the spending practices of political authorities (Snowdon et al. 1994: 145). Disturbances of this medium of representation are usually seen to be caused by short-term panics or excessive government spending, which results in a period of adaptation and crisis. Apart from these moments of crisis, money does not even appear as a contentious issue of political rationality. Liberal economic discourse rules out, by definition, the possibility that money itself entails an “ubiquitous politics” (Kirshner 2003a). The analytical ability to grasp whether and how monetary regimes indeed entail an inherent “ontological politics” depends, in contrast, on a conceptualization of money that differs from the liberal account of neutrality. A lively debate within social theory and anthropology about the social nature of money offers instructive suggestions in this respect (Gilbert


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2005; Ingham 2006; Maurer 2005; McKenzie 2004, Pryke and du Gay 2007; Thrift 2002). Although it is impossible to do justice to this debate here, a few remarks may help to indicate the ways in which the very conceptualization of money defines the visibility of “the economic as culture.” Two conceptual shifts in thinking about money are of interest here. The fi rst one concerns the definition of money as a relation of credit, obligation and debt, which establishes a temporal horizon (Ingham 2006).11 As John Maynard Keynes (1936: 294) puts it, “money is above all a subtle device for linking the present to the future.” The temporality of a debt relation, its measures and obligations take precedence in the defi nition of money. Indeed, the specific traits of a monetary economy, Keynes claims, only come into being once money settles the units of account, in which relations of debt and credit are fi xed (1930: 3). Instead of taking money to be a neutral veil and a medium of representation, this perspective points towards money as formatting a social relation of a certain kind (Ingham 2006; Bryan and Rafferty 2007; Simmel 2004; Gilbert 2005). Its economic character, one might say, is fashioned through the variable conventions, instruments and dispositifs that determine monetary patterns of temporality and regimes of obligation. Taking up this perspective, Bill Maurer (2008: 171) has recently argued that one should problematize the fi nancial offshore economy in terms of the political negotiations that shape relations of payment. Not exchange, but ranks and hierarchies of payment, he maintains, defi ne these offshore spaces. Even these brief comments show that differentiating between money as a medium of exchange and money as a relation of payment has a different analytical thrust than focusing solely on the technologies of “conduct of conduct.” The former enables us to pose the question of how the economic is defi ned, and the latter tends to assume this question has already been answered. The second example of an illuminating shift in conceptualizing money pertains to the question of commensurability. “Money’s role as a universal equivalent,” Emily Gilbert (2005: 360) records, “has until recently drawn the bulk of the attention of social theorists.” Money renders comparable and quantifiable—but this capacity, as is now argued, is not simply given. Rather, it requires the continuous “reproduction of equivalence—in current exchange, across time and across space” (Bryan and Rafferty 2007: 147). Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty have argued that we need to understand derivatives as a monetary instrument that extends such commensuration across a wide range of fi nancial and physical assets (ibid.: 153). According to this argument, a particular form of money defi nes a “space of comparison” anew. It permits an “on-going measure of all capital, in all forms, at all locations and across time” to take place, something that was not possible before the ubiquitous use of derivatives (ibid.: 141f). Bryan and Rafferty delineate a particular modulation of comparison and commensuration that shapes inter alia “the economic” in a different way. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether their rendering of derivatives is valid or

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sufficient: for the question at hand, it functions as an example that orients us toward an analysis of how monetary arrangements and fi nancial instruments partake in moulding the “spaces,” temporalities and media of comparison that shift the notion of what counts as “economic.” This research perspective is somewhat akin to the recent suggestions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that we should be studying the “rendering of the economic” (Callon et al. 2007: 3). Indeed, ANT and governmentality share theoretical sensibilities and methodological devices (Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006: 92). But before merging these approaches too quickly, the conceptual tools of each—and their respective limits—need to be scrutinized. How far a reworked Foucauldian perspective could offer valuable insights beyond ANT’s “market test” (Callon 1998) will be discussed in the concluding section of this chapter. At this point it suffices to demonstrate that the important shift in perspective concerns the very question of the economic: how it comes to be defi ned in terms of temporality and obligation, of translation and valuation (Maurer 2005; 2006; 2002). If governmentality studies continue to neglect the question of the economic, the field deprives itself of the possibility of detecting the multiple sites at which it is fashioned. Instead, the opposite effect ensues: the regime of visibility and intelligibility which classical and neo-liberal economicpolitical discourse organizes is strengthened, because the field continues to ignore the disputable and historical character of the economic. The question of money has served only as an example to pinpoint this omission, its costs and effects. In order to avoid falling unknowingly into the grid of visibility that liberalism organizes in respect to economy, governmentality would have to inquire about the “type of reality with which we are dealing”—as Foucault puts it. Unlocking the “conduct of conduct” from its status as a conceptual short-cut for power is a necessary step in this process of renewing the “toolbox” of governmentality studies, as the remainder of this chapter shows.

4. THE PECULIARITY OF GOVERNING MEN AND THE ART OF USING HISTORY Foucault’s historical mode of investigation never proceeded without constantly destabilizing and questioning his conceptual tools by relating them to a historical frame. Curiously, the concept of “conduct of conduct” seems to be an exception in this respect: it has been turned into a general conceptual tool that supposedly captures the essence of relations of power. Like no other concept of Foucault’s, the “conduct of conduct” enjoys a status of conceptual refi nement and closure (Allen 1991). The “conduct of conduct” is said to have effectively broken with the somewhat claustrophobic grid of disciplinary power, and is seen as a concept which enables us to think power and the subject as a conjunction of conduct and counter-conduct, in which freedom is an over-determined practice (Foucault 1983: 220f.;


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2008:185f.). Thomas Lemke (2002: 49f.), among others, has demonstrated how the notion of “conduct of conduct” enabled Foucault to bring together the “technologies of domination” and the “technologies of the self” in an understanding of power that avoids the pitfalls of a deterministic or mechanistic account.12 Indeed, Foucault himself seems to articulate the “conduct of conduct” as just such a general concept of power, and ties it to the broad meaning of government: “To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others” (1983: 221). Government, power and conduct henceforth become synonymous. Consequently, as Senellart has shown, governmentality mutated from a historically specific concept—geared to understanding the security dispositif—into a generalized notion of “‘the way in which one conducts people’s conduct’” (Senellart, 2008: 388). Thus, Foucault himself has apparently authorized us to treat governmentality as the understanding of power, thereby shedding its historical horizon. The following argument cautions against taking these words of Foucault’s as a conceptual and ahistorical fi nalization of the “analytics of power” in terms of the “conduct of conduct,” and suggests that we should instead revisit Foucault’s historical ethos of investigation. It tries to show that Foucault never forgot to cultivate a vivid sense of the bounds of this governmental rationality—politically and analytically. Rather than taking the “conduct of conduct” as a conceptual given, he wrote a genealogy of this rationality that wedded this concept to a sense of historical estrangement. More often than not, mechanical applications of the concept of governmentality forget this destabilizing turn to history. Reminding oneself of this historical peculiarity means keeping open the possibility of conceptual innovation, and is thus of paramount importance. The decisive moment for the “birth of modern politics” occurs, according to Foucault, as political rationality becomes invested with a quintessentially religious form of individualizing power (Hindess 1997: 260, 266): pastoral power. Pastoral power is a “quite specific type of power”—its peculiarity and specificity lies in taking the conduct of men as its sole aim (Foucault 2007: 194). It is not inevitable that a political horizon must revolve around such a “government of men,” as Foucault points out. On the contrary, this approach to governing men belongs to the questionable intermeshing between the pastoral and the political that still accompanies liberalism (Foucault 2007, 184, 148). Foucault (2007: 122) performs a defamiliarization of this political horizon by juxtaposing it to the Greek understanding of politics: “[O]ne thing clearly emerges through all these meanings, which is that one never governs a state, a territory, or a political structure. Those whom one governs are people, individuals, or groups [ . . . ] Now, the idea of governing people is certainly not a Greek idea.” The Greek understanding of politics, which consists in the very “rejection of the pastoral theme,” targets the “city-state in its substantial reality, its unity” but not the “men of the city” (2007: 123). The emphasis on the “conduct of conduct” appears as a curious trait of the modern political horizon and clearly reveals the bounds of the historical formation it

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belongs to. It is not just a conceptual tool, but equally a historical horizon. Does Foucault ever undo this conceptual-historical intermeshing? After these lectures, as we know, Foucault shifted his focus away from the state, power and the “birth of modern politics.” At this point in his writing, he boldly and confusingly claims that “not power, but the subject” is the general theme of his research (1983: 209). He explains his renewed interest in the question of the subject by referring to the pressing actuality of this question. The “struggle against the forms of subjection—against the submission of subjectivity” is becoming, he observes, “more and more important” for understanding the present (Foucault 1983: 213). The codification of “the conduct of conduct” as a formula of power stems from exactly this moment. Hence, the fact that Foucault coined “the conduct of conduct” as a frame for understanding power needs to be related to the very specificity of the problématique he was interested in at that time. Power as “the conduct of conduct” aims at understanding the forms of subjectivity that are at stake in these struggles. But it does not mean that the triangulation of power-knowledge-subject should be reduced to this formula: it does not seem fit to capture the whole “anatomy of power” that economic dispositifs entail. What can be learnt from this moment of Foucault’s thought is not the particular codification Foucault used, but the ethos of investigation he laid out in the famous Afterword on “The Subject and Power”: The task of analysis is to “check the type of reality, with which we are dealing,” to “know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization.” And this conceptualization implies, he adds, “critical thought—a constant checking” (Foucault 1983: 209). I am not claiming that this reminder of Foucault’s particular way of using history is an original observation. Rather, in view of the need to unearth novel perspectives on the economic, this reminder hopes to reinvigorate the methods that Foucault employed for working within a historical formation. His style of genealogical and archaeological analysis did not offer a secure theoretical or analytical ground for writing a “history of the present.” His very theoretical stance committed him to working in between the historical and the conceptual register. With the words “I am in effect much more a historicist and Nietzschean,” he contrasted his work with Jürgen Habermas’ project of founding a transcendental way of thinking, hostile to any form of historicism (Foucault 2001: 1099; my translation). But “happy positivism,” the term he coined as a characterization of his mode of reading the historical record, did not imply a purely immanent perspective.13 On the contrary, he always sought to produce a sense of an outside that signalled the limits of the historical formation he was analyzing. To “become someone else” and to think differently were the professed aims of this exercise (Foucault 2001: 1596; Saar 2003: 167 and 172). For this reason, Foucault remained consistently and notoriously equivocal about how wholeheartedly he adopted a historicized concept as his own—which is an ethos of investigation very much opposed to taking a single conceptual


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formula as a blueprint for analysis.14 This continual destabilization between the historical and the conceptual, used in order to negotiate the immanence of this perspective, is thus not merely optional for the Foucauldian methodology. The Foucauldian “toolbox” is a machine for referring concepts back to the historical record while retaining their conceptual force—rather than being a “cookie-cutter” that reproduces the same outcomes regardless of the question at hand. It is because liberalism forms our political horizon, and because the “conduct of conduct” is indeed such pervasive form of power, that one has to be especially diligent in maintaining this distinction between the historical and the conceptual while remaining aware of their permanent oscillation. Otherwise, the very success of governmentality as a way of capturing adequately some very dominant types of power might ironically turn into an impediment to seeing other sites of power. As this chapter has sought to show, the economic constitutes a problématique that is not exhausted by the logics of conducting conduct but needs historical-conceptual enquiries about this “type of reality.”

5. CONCLUSION: GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE ECONOMY—BEYOND ANT? This chapter has problematized the limited “analytics of power” that governmentality delivers in taking the “conduct of conduct” as its main analytical key. To understand the economy as a “cultural production of subjects and social order of a certain kind” (Escobar 1995: 59) means analyzing the dispositifs of money and objects as much as the governing of subjects. Without engaging with the question of the economic as a malleable social form, the concept of governmentality remains within the limits of the liberal economic discourse without being aware of this. My discussion of money has served here as an exemplary case, showing why we need to broaden the analytical perspective in this respect. Governmentality studies should therefore consider a research question that scholars working in the perspective of Actor-Network Theory have recently articulated: Michel Callon and colleagues (2007: 3) have argued that we need to analyze how the economic is produced: “The meaning of what it is to be ‘economic’ is precisely the outcome of a process of ‘economization’, a process that is historical, contingent and disputable.” The economic, they continue, might imply commensurability or exchangeability. But it might equally mean saving or rationing. How these articulations of economy materialize is the very object of research. But raising this question of the economic should not imply that governmentality studies will become identical to ANT. There are still important differences between these approaches and how they are put into practice. ANT attends to the socio-technical devices that configure “economic calculative

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capacities” and “qualify market objects” (ibid.: 5; Callon 1998). “Market devices” range in this respect from shelves in supermarkets via shopping carts to pricing models (ibid.). The studies that are now being undertaken demonstrate the diversity of these “devices” by unfolding a multiplicity of empirical cases. But the announced conceptual-historical question of the “economic” and its “anatomies of power” is rarely an overarching aim. In contrast, the concept of governmentality points to the political rationalities and technologies that animate a particular dispositif. Governmentality studies works toward understanding the forms of spatial, temporal and normative mechanisms that delineate the “history of the present.” Rather than focusing solely on the technical objects and their networks, governmentality attends to the fuzzy logics of “technologies of power.” A type of governmentality studies that took up the question of the economic could offer a distinct and valuable focus on “economics as culture.” It would have the potential to embed the particular case studies that characterize ANT in a more diagnostic perspective that dissects the “lines of force and fragility” of the present. As I have argued, such research perspectives will remain unavailable as long as governmentality-studies lose sight of the broader outlines of the security dispostif. The heuristic of governmentality should not be misunderstood as a mechanical toolkit that can be employed while dispensing with theoretical and historical work.

NOTES 1. The thoughts presented here are part of a more comprehensive argument about the invisibility of the economy within Foucault’s oeuvre. The other facets of this argument have been developed in my article “Foucault and the Invisible Economy” (Tellmann 2009). 2. I would like to thank Monica Greco for reminding me of this term, which makes it possible to point out very precisely what is in danger of being excluded within the prevalent understanding of the governmental perspective. 3. The relation of governmentality to this research perspective on the economy, as recently articulated by scholars of Actor-Network Theory, will be discussed later on. 4. The cursory explication of the security dispositif provided by Foucault has given rise to the complaint that his analytical strategies concentrated to an undue extent on purely theoretical or textual material (O’Malley, Weir and Shearing 1997). 5. For a further discussion of this point see Tellmann (2009). Foucault conceded that relations of power, conduct, and truth intertwine with economic relations, but he articulated them as distinguishable and explicitly set them aside (Foucault 2007: 196; 2003; 1983: 213). Of course, he did include economic discourse in his analysis of the human sciences as presented in the Order of Things. His attention in this case did not revolve primarily around the question of economy, but the general shifts of the episteme, of which economic discourse proved to be one instance. 6. Governmentality is sometimes characterized as being a mode of power that is directed towards the “arrangement of things.” The textual passage in which


7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

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Foucault refers to governmentality in these terms stems from the lecture of February 1, 1978, in which he discusses the genealogical emergence of this rationality in the sixteenth century. Given the considerable historical gap between this period and the emergence of liberal rationality proper in the eighteenth century, as well as the much more prominent, consistent and precise focus on interest and incentives as the only stakes of modern governmentality, we should not place too much weight on this textual allusion to the role of things. Nigel Dodd (1994: 10) explains the quantity theory of money in its general sense as follows: “In so far as money serves solely as a medium of exchange, there is little which is contentious or surprising about the theorem itself. If there is a definite quantity of money and a definite quantity of goods to be sold, the prices at which those goods will be sold is an elementary question of arithmetic, at least once values for the velocity of money’s circulation and the volume of transactions are known.” For a discussion of the margins of economic tolerance in respect of inflation, which are contrasted with the strict policy of no inflation, see Jonathan Kirshner (2001). The classical model refers here to the basic tenets of macro-economic thought from 1776–1936 (Snowdon et al. 1994: 42). This passage continues as follows: “[ . . . ] except in the character of the contrivance for sparing time and labor [ . . . ] The introduction of money does not interfere with the operation of any of the Laws of Value laid down in the preceding chapters [ . . . ] The relation of commodities to one another remain unaltered by money: the only relation introduced is to money itself; how much or how little money they will exchange for; in other words, how the Exchange Value of money itself is determined.” (ibid.) It should be noted that the representational logic of money belongs to what is usually discussed in terms of money as a medium of exchange, in contrast to a theory of money that takes the unit of account to be the crucial feature of money (Ingham 2006: 268). Most prominently, Foucault articulates this stance in the Afterword to Rabinow and Dreyfus’ influential interpretation of his work: “Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term conduct is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specifi city of power relations. For to ’conduct’ is at the same time to ’lead’ others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving within a more or less open fi eld of possibilities. The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome” (Foucault 1983: 221). Foucault coined this term in his Archeology of Knowledge in order to position his historical mode of description against philosophical questions about his own epistemological legitimation (Foucault 1972, 234). This immanent perspective intends to defamiliarize the familiar by rendering visible what has, as Foucault puts it, never been invisible in the first place: it simply lies on the surface, where it can be read from a slightly different perspective. The argument against the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as marshaled by Paul Ricoeur is based on showing and exposing the superficiality of things in an “overview, from higher and higher up, which allows the depth to be laid out in front of him in a more and more profound visibility; depth is resituated as an absolutely superficial secret,” as Foucault puts it in an early text, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (Foucault 1967, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 107). It is also a very dominant theme in his text on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (Foucault 1977: 187).

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14. A striking example of how Foucault refers his conceptual questions back to a historical analysis of discourses and practices in order to scrutinize their use and effects is present in his lectures entitled Society Must be Defended (2003). He commences the lecture course by drawing out the consequences of discarding an “economism of power”: understanding power in terms of war and struggle, he contends, remains—aside from the also discarded notion of repression—a viable possibility. Far from adopting this understanding of power as the valid conclusion of his theoretical argument, he turns this very theoretical conclusion back to historical analysis. The different lectures tease and test, use and qualify the aim of analyzing a social formation through the notion of war and struggle. There is no final verdict on this question at the end of the lecture. Rather, Foucault tries to determine the effects, the strength, the politics implied.

REFERENCES Allen, Barry. (1991). Government in Foucault. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21(4): 421–440. Barry, Andrew and Don Slater. (2002). Introduction: The Technological Economy. Economy and Society 31(2): 175–193. Blyth, Mark. (2003). The Political Power of Financial Ideas: Transparency, Risk and Distribution in Global Finance, pp. 239–259 in Jonathan Kirshner (ed) Monetary Orders. Ambiguous Economics, Ubiquitous Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bröckling, Ulrich. (2007). Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Brown, Wendy. (1993). Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event 7(3). Available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown. html#copyright (accessed June 16, 2008). Bryan, Dick and Michael Rafferty. (2007). Financial Derivatives and the Theory of Money. Economy and Society 36(1): 134–158. Callon, Michel (ed). (1998). The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Callon, Michel, Yuval Millo and Fabian Muniesa. (2007). An Introduction to Market Devices, pp. 1–12 in Market Devices. Oxford: Blackwell. Dean, Mitchell. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Dean, Mitchell. (2002). Powers of Life and Death beyond Governmentality. Cultural Values 6(1–2): 119–138. De Goede, Marieke. (2004). Repoliticizing Financial Risk. Economy and Society 33(1): 197–217. De Goede, Marieke. (2005). Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dodd, Nigel. (1994). The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason & Contemporary Society. New York: Continuum. Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul Rabinow (eds). (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Gay, Paul and Michael Pryke (eds). (2002). Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Elden, Stuart. (2007). Governmentality, Calculation, Territory. Society and Space (Environment and Planning D) 25(3): 562–580. Escobar, Arturo. (1995). Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.


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Lemke, Thomas. (2002). Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxism 14(3): 49–64. Leyshon, Andrew and Nigel Thrift. (1997). MoneySpace: Geographies of Monetary Transformation. London/New York: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas. (1994). Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. MacKenzie, Donald. (2004). The Big, Bad Wolf and the Rational Market: Portfolio Insurance, the 1987 Crash and the Performativity of Economics. Economy and Society 33(3): 303–334. Marx, Karl. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Random House. Maurer, Bill. (2002). Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives’ Theological Unconscious. Economy and Society 31(1): 15–36. Maurer, Bill. (2005). Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms, pp. 140–164 in Daniel Miller (ed) Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press. Maurer, Bill. (2006). The Anthropology of Money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:15–36. Maurer, Bill. (2008). Re-Regulating Offshore Finance? Geography Compass 2(1):155–175. Mill, John Stuart. (1909 [1848]). Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, ed. William J. Ashley, Library of Economics and L ib er t y. Ava i lable on l i ne at: ht t p: // w w w.e con l ib.org / l ibra r y/ M i l l /m lp36.ht m l (ac ce ssed O c tob er 2 2 , 20 08). Miller, Peter and Nikolas Rose. (1990). Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society 19(1): 1–31. Miller, Peter. (1992). Accounting and Objectivity: The Invention of Calculating Selves and Calculable Spaces. Annals of Scholarship 9(1–2): 61–86. Miller, Peter and Ted O’Leary. (2002). Rethinking the Factory: Caterpillar Inc. Cultural Values 6(1): 91–117. Mirowski, Philip (ed). (1994). Natural Images in Economic Thought: Markets Read in Tooth and Claw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. (1998). Fixing the Economy. Cultural Studies 12(1): 82–101. Mitchell, Timothy. (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, Timothy. (2005). The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World. European Journal of Sociology 46(2): 297–320. Mol, Annemarie. (1999). Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions, pp. 74–89 in John Law and John Hassard (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. O’Malley, Pat, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing. (1997). Governmenality, Criticism, Politics. Economy and Society 26(4): 501–517. Ong, Aiwha. (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Polanyi, Karl. (1957). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Pryke, Michael. (2007). Geomoney: An Option on Frost Going Long on Clouds. Geoforum 38: 576–588. Pryke, Michael and Paul du Gay. (2007). Take an Issue: Cultural Economy and Finance. Economy and Society 36(3): 339–354. Rose, Nikolas. (1993). Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism. Economy and Society 22(3): 283–299. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 83–194.


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15 Constructing the Socialized Self Mobilization and Control in the “Active Society” Stephan Lessenich

1. GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE WELFARE STATE For almost two decades now, critical studies of the development of advanced capitalist societies have been stimulated by what has been called the “Foucault effect.”1 According to the editors of a volume which, back at the beginning of the 1990s, set out the state of the art in the emerging field of “governmentality studies,” the Foucault effect in the social sciences consists in “the making visible, through a particular perspective in the history of the present, of the different ways in which an activity or art called government has been made thinkable and practicable” (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991: ix). When talking of “Government” in Foucauldian terms, there is much more at stake than the operations, rules, and procedures of states, political executives and public administrations. Colin Gordon argued that with the rise of the “governmentality school,” the analytical perspective had been widened well beyond the classical political science notion of the concept: “Government” was conceptualized as an activity that could concern the whole of social relations constituting modern “society”—“the relation between self and self, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance, relations within social institutions and communities and, finally, relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty” (Gordon 1991: 2–3; emphasis added). If government was conceptualized by governmentality scholars as a comprehensive “social activity,” with political government seen as only one of its possible forms (Miller and Rose 2007: 15), governmentality studies aimed at uncovering the rationality of the governmental practices specific to contemporary societies, revealing the ways in which a particular set of practices becomes “thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon which it [is] practised” (Gordon 1991: 3). The central question posed by a Foucauldian-style analysis, then, is how it comes about that governing individuals, relationships, collectivities and ultimately “the social” (Donzelot 1984) is socially effective. How are government, the conduct of conduct, action on actions, made thinkable, sayable—and practicable, operable, doable? “The sense and object of governmental acts do not

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fall from the sky or emerge ready formed from social practice. They are things which have had to be—and which have been—invented.” (Burchell et al. 1991: x) This “invention” of government and its specific rationality, in turn, is a question of power. Who is capable of conducting people in the ways they conduct their lives? Who is enabled to take action on whose actions, in which manner, and to what end? In pursuing these (and related) questions, those studies in governmentality which have turned out to be most fruitful for the deciphering of the social world of our time have taken the work of the late Michel Foucault as an instruction manual for a specific mode of analysis which, focusing on the relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity inherent to our society, effectively questions prevalent accounts of the present. “The study of governmentality studies might thus be thought of as a disruptive technology of intellectual inquiry which can pose different kinds of questions outside the arc provided by commonly accepted narratives” (Dean 2007c: 9). In this context, contemporary narratives on the state and its public action are among those challenged and called into question. For students of governmentality, the state is neither society’s monopolist of political power nor the epicenter of the ordering of social relations, but is thought of as being embedded and levelled into society and its practices. In a way, when we adopt the perspective of governmentality, the state is moved away from the center stage of social order. The state is “no super-technique of power . . . taking effect behind all other power techniques” (Gehring 2007: 15), but ultimately an effect of social practices—and an effective social practice itself, an ensemble of different governmental techniques. The intellectual and analytical preference for practices and effects of “Political Power beyond the State” (Rose and Miller 1992; emphasis added) may explain why the state itself and, more specifically, the transformation of state capacities and state intervention, has not been an issue of primary interest for governmentality studies during the last two decades. The relevance of the state’s “actions on others’ actions” (Gordon 1991: 5) becomes obvious in the context of the transformation of social policies we are currently witnessing in all the advanced capitalist societies of the Western world. It comes as a surprise, then, that this fundamental change in the institutional arrangement of the Western welfare state has not been among the most popular themes of the governmentality approach. Even more surprising, however, is the fact that those analyses which actually deal with the recent change from “welfare society” to “active society” (Dean 1995; Walters 1997) seem to limit themselves to classifying this transformation as a “neoliberal” move towards the construction of a self-relying homo oeconomicus. But it can be argued that this is only half the story about the reformed Western welfare state. “Activating” social policies are not only directed by an economic rationality, and they amount to more than just a political project of “enterprisation” (Dean 1995: 580) of the self. In addition, they are guided at least as much by a social rationality: they aim at

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the construction of a “socialized self” who, in relying on and taking care of him/herself, is actually acting in the name and for the sake of “society.” In line with this argument, in what follows I will present an initial contribution to a reinterpretation of the welfare state and its current, “activating” reform(s). 2 Starting from the assumption that the modern state’s action on people’s actions amounts to a specific mode of subjectivation, the first central question to be clarified is what type of subjectivity is currently emerging out of the social implementation of renewed, activating welfare state programs: those to be governed can be [and have historically been, S.L.] conceived of as children to be educated, members of a flock to be led, souls to be saved, or, we can now add, social subjects to be accorded their rights and obligations, autonomous individuals to be assisted in realising their potential through their own choice, or potential threats to be analysed in logics of risk and security. (Miller and Rose 2007: 7) From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century and throughout most of the 20 th, the institutionalization of the welfare state in Western democracies meant transforming individuals into citizens endowed with social rights (Marshall 1963)—a transformation which constituted a public responsibility for individual welfare, and indeed for the constitution of “the social” itself. The welfare state established a “sociopolitics” (Ewald 1991: 210) through which society—or “the promotion of the social” (Donzelot 1988)—became “a permanent principle of political self-justification” (Ewald 1991: 210). At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst, however, a reformed, activating welfare state has been constituting itself as the new mode of political self-justification of society vis-à-vis its individual members, constructing active subjects as bearers not of social rights, but of social obligations—as socialized selves obliged not only to be responsible for themselves, but for society and its welfare as a whole. It is this new—or renewed—focus of the welfare state on “governing from the perspective of society” (Walters 1997: 221) which comprises the essence of its most recent, neosocial stage of development. “Foucault saw it as a characteristic . . . property of the development of the practice of government in Western societies to tend towards a form of political sovereignty . . . whose concerns would be at once to ‘totalize’ and to ‘individualize’” (Gordon 1991: 3). In a sense, activating the self for the sake of society can be interpreted as the up-to-date version of this modern governmental rationality: the re-invention of the welfare state as an activating enterprise establishes a social setting in which “individuals are willing to exist as subjects” (Gordon 1991: 48; Maasen and Sutter 2007), in which each subject assumes (or is assumed to be assuming) “the idea that all have to contribute ‘of themselves’” (Gehring 2007: 27) to a common good called “the social.”


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In the reformed welfare state of the active society, then, governing people means relocating the promotion of the social into the individual, resubmitting it to the individual’s responsibility or, to put it another way, subjecting the subject to a social—or societal—logic. If this description of the specific type of subjectivity emerging from current welfare state transformation is accurate (Lessenich 2003), the second central question to be dealt with at this point relates to the modus operandi of this type of subjectivation, to the specific mode(s) of processing these new “sociopolitics” of the welfare state. In this respect, the argument to be developed here holds that in the governmentality of contemporary active society, there reappears—in new guise—a contradiction inherent in the political economy of liberal society: the dilemma of mobility and control.

2. THE “LIBERAL PARADOX”: THE WELFARE STATE BETWEEN MOBILIZATION AND CONTROL The analysis of current welfare state transformation(s) to be presented here rests on what in political economy has been called the “liberal paradox” (Hollifield 1992, 2003). The basic—and apparently trivial—initial insight is that the welfare state of twentieth century Western societies was constituted and has been instituted as an (a) capitalist and (b) national arrangement. On the one hand (a), the institutions and interventions of the welfare state are functionally related to the productive and reproductive needs of the capitalist economy. To be sure, and to avoid any economistic misreading, this is by no means the only functional attribute of the modern welfare state. But the welfare state is basically (among other characteristics) a capitalist state (Offe 2006), in that the constitution of a market economy and, more specifically, of labor markets, the “employment society” (Castel 1996), and a capitalist system of production, are logically and historically related to the welfare state social policies which systematically commodify—and situationally and selectively de-commodify—substantial parts of the population, which by means of welfare state intervention becomes a way of forming the capitalist workforce (Lenhardt and Offe 1984; Offe 1984). On the other hand (b), the set of individual and collective social rights, the institutional practices of solidaristic risk-pooling, and the provision of social services and benefits, all of which are associated directly with the (de-)commodifying function of the welfare state, have all developed in the context of the national political community and are inextricably linked to the constitution of the modern polity as a nation-state (Marshall 1963; Donzelot 1984). The modern welfare state, then, is national in the same basic sense in which it is capitalist, and this circumscribes its (to this extent exclusive) programmatic of “social inclusion” to its (national) citizens and those politically put on a par with them. In its most basic version, the resulting “liberal paradox” consists in (a) an economic logic—the logic

308 Stephan Lessenich of commodification—that is fundamentally (among other things: territorially) unlimited, being combined or, to be more precise, being functionally intertwined with (b) a political logic—the logic of inclusion—which is strictly (not least: territorially) delimited in its operation. Looking rather more closely at the liberal concomitance of capitalism and the nation-state, however, we can identify behind the dualism of an “open economy” and a “closed polity” an even more fundamental opposition which, arguably, is central to the operational logic of liberal governmentality as such: the antagonism of liberty and discipline (Wagner 1994), the dialectics of mobility and control. Although the two dimensions of this dialectics are analytically separable, empirically the liberal mobility/control complex is operative in the economic as well as the political dimension. From its very beginning, the history of liberal capitalism is a history of mobilizing labor, of channelling it from traditional and static forms of self-sufficient, communitary or tributary work into modern and dynamic modes of productive, profitable, wage-related employment. This historical process of active (and passive) “proletarianization” (Lenhardt and Offe 1984: 92–100) of large parts of the population, escorted and driven forward by the (avant la lettre) social policy programs and provisions of the nascent welfare state, has been (and is) of a highly ambivalent nature. Operating by means of positive and negative incentives, of rewards and sanctions, of material and immaterial power, of money, law, and (not least) violence, it is productive and destructive at the same time. A significant part of this ambivalence is due to the fact that throughout the secular process of mobilizing people for commodification, and arguably until today, there have been (and are) countervailing powers aiming at controlling people’s mobility or (to put it in a less intentional way) leading to an opposite, political dynamic of narrowing, constricting, and confi ning the very mobility unleashed in the economic realm. Activities like keeping people at their workplace, imposing continuous service and deferred gratification on them, controlling the transformation of their productive capacities into day-to-day work performance, or ensuring that their economic activity does not spill over into the political arena mark only part of the “business” of social regulation of capitalism. To be sure, people making use of given (or arising) opportunities for mobility are potentially productive— and treasured; but at the same time (and on the very same grounds of their mobility), they are potentially dangerous—and risky. As with any highly valued property (in the wider sense of the word), mobilized people—and a society in motion—are hazardous goods. To put it in a nutshell, the capitalist mobilization and ensuing “movement of society” (Donzelot 1988: 397; 1991) has raised, right from the start, fundamental issues of governability—of “governing the freedom” given to its citizens by a liberal political economy (Lemke 2007; Saar 2007). But this is only part of the story of the inbuilt ambivalence of liberal societies. To complicate the picture further, the interplay (or counter-play) of


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mobility and control, of mobilization and de- or im-mobilization, is not only inherent in the process of capitalist accumulation of economic wealth. In a complex and contradictory—and historically contingent—way, this process interacts with the political drift toward state-building in the guise of the nation-state. The modern capitalist (political) economy constitutes itself as a national affair. Producing wealth by unleashing the productive forces of labor works as a structural incentive for further mobility, as a pull factor attracting—the ambiguities of the capitalist mode of production notwithstanding—people across territorial, spatial, and cultural borders, making them move in order to seize the opportunity to become an integral part of national production systems. This “wealth appeal” of (advanced, metropolitan) capitalism, however, is thwarted by the logic of limitation and control inherent to the nation-state and to the institutions of national citizenship (Bommes 1999; Bommes and Geddes 2000). The modern state as a nation-state is defi ned—and even more so to the extent to which it historically develops features of a welfare state—by instituting an effective regime of external surveillance and control of its territory (Giddens 1987; Dean 2007a, b). In a way akin to but even more intense than in the case of the internal mobility of “risky subjects,” external (or inward) mobility implies severe operational problems for national systems of capitalist production and reproduction. Therefore, people on the move outside the borders of the national polity (and around them) are constructed neither as “citizens” nor as “workers”—or “citizen workers” (Montgomery 1993)— but, at least in principle, as “aliens,” “foreigners,” and “boarders,” i.e., as potential (or actual) intruders and, in a sense, as enemies (Bauman 1991). In a paradoxical manner, then, the modern regime of welfare capitalism is based—in all its institutional varieties (Hall and Soskice 2001)—on the (economic) mobilization of people and, at the very same time, on the internal and external (political) limitation of their mobility. Any variant or model of national welfare capitalism is built on confi ning and delimiting the social risks of people’s mobility. Internally, this means instituting not only the technology of insurance against the risks of the capitalist employment relation (Ewald 1991) but also a range of technologies for securing, assuring, and safeguarding society against its mobilized citizens; externally, it implies the establishment of a regime of security and control that allows for the systematic (and, compared to controlling citizens, much more unrestrained) use of force, coercion, and violence vis-à-vis mobile “non-nationals”—including political acts of “sovereignty” such as disenfranchisement, displacement, and exclusion. A Foucauldian (or governmentality) reading of the liberal mobility/control paradox outlined previously can be said to have a double virtue. On the one hand, the (welfare) state, with all its functional attributes and in all its regulative interventions, appears not so much as a sovereign, autonomous, and self-sufficient source of power, but becomes visible as an institutional effect of social practices and governmental technologies—as a

310 Stephan Lessenich (pretty material) social construction, a complex co-production of institutional actors acting on the actions of individuals (or collectivities). On the other hand, it becomes possible to grasp the essential characteristic of the current, “neoliberal” transformation of the welfare state which—as will be argued in more detail in what follows—consists in a process of subjectivation of the dialectics of mobility and control through technologies of self-regulation and social knowledge production. In a sense, this process constitutes a radicalization of the “liberal paradox,” with people being socially subjectivated by individually subjecting themselves to a governing programmatic of self-rationalization or, more precisely, of self-mobilization and self-control. In this process, what we used to call “the state” emerges (or reemerges from its alleged withdrawal in the age of globalization) as a political “authority” torn between contradicting logics of action, selectively and situationally urging people to mobilize and, at the very same time, to demobilize themselves.

3. THE WELFARE STATE TRANSFORMED: (DE-)MOBILIZING PEOPLE IN THE “ACTIVE SOCIETY” Recent social policy reforms in all advanced welfare states have revolved around the idea of “activation” (Serrano Pascual and Magnusson 2007). Their guiding principle, to quote the former president of the United States Bill Clinton, has been “to move people from welfare to work” (Lødemel and Trickey 2001). In essence, the conventional analysis underlying the transformation of public interventions in this field during the last two decades claims that the post-World War II welfare state was based mainly on compensating people for the loss of their work or employment (i.e., their earning) capacity—be it due to injury or sickness, unemployment or ageing, pregnancy or motherhood, or any other “social risk.” This compensation was meant to be made effective via transfer payments replacing (at a higher or lower rate, depending on why people were obliged to leave their workplace) the wage earner’s former income. In the course of the postwar expansion of the welfare state, this “compensatory logic” of social policies, so the story usually goes, was expanded qualitatively and quantitatively, granting ever higher benefits to ever larger parts of the (potential) working population—gradually incorporating into the “compensation community” even individuals (and groups) who had never been wage earners before or who were (held to be) perfectly capable of work. Looking back at the old welfare state through the eyes of its critics, its main defining feature was its passiveness: all sorts of people were made (and kept) passive by means of public transfers, giving them all sorts of opportunities to opt for exit from the labor market—or so it seems. The welfare state in its golden age, commonly described as “Fordist” or “Keynesian,” is thus retrospectively depicted as if it had been a perfect materialization of Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s famous (and obviously misleading3) version


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of the concept of “de-commodification”: “A minimal definition must entail that citizens can freely, and without potential loss of job, income, or general welfare, opt out of work when they themselves consider it necessary” (Esping-Andersen 1990: 23). Consequently, and in line with this interpretation, the main guiding principle of welfare state reforms throughout the Western (OECD) world has been to activate those (allegedly) made passive: to move people into work. Clinton’s (successful) crusade “to end welfare as we know it” was continued (though somewhat less straightforwardly) by European—fi rst and foremost British—and EU policies. New Labour’s “New Deals”, the “European Employment Strategy” (EES), and German labor market reforms (“Hartz IV”) are all, in one way or another, regulative sequels to “Clinton’s law”: “anyone who can go to work must go to work” (cf. Caraley 2001: 527). Not only for the “undeserving poor” of our times—the non-disabled unemployed receiving public benefits—but for non-employed women or elderly people as well, activation—meaning the re-commodification of their working capacity—is the public order of the day: “The active society seeks to make us all workers” (Walters 1997: 224). The social philosophy of these activation policies rests on two main pillars. Basically, “activation” means (a) a changed allocation of responsibility for social welfare (or “well-fare”) between the individual and society—“society” meaning (depending on the context) the larger community, the general public, the national economy, the tax-payer (or simply the state itself). Put in its most condensed form, the activation paradigm advances the well-known “Kennedy formula” regarding the division of labor between the individual and the social: “Do not ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” In this sense, welfare state citizens are being confronted under the activation paradigm with a modified weighting of rights and responsibilities. Individual rights and (corresponding) public responsibilities lose prominence, “public rights” and (corresponding) individual responsibilities coming to the fore instead. In the activation perspective, society has a legitimate claim against its members to, each and every one of them individually, act in the public interest, enhancing and advancing the welfare of the larger collective: beneficiaries of public assistance programs should worry about not drawing on tax-payers’ support unduly; women should strive to enter the labor market because of the investment society has made in raising their human capital; old-age pensioners should look for some socially productive activity after they retire (as late as possible); young graduate couples should strive to have children for the sake of the viability of the pension system, the competitiveness of the national economy, or the well-being of future generations. In all these cases, individual behavior is seen in the context of present or prospective social goods or public needs. On the basis of this fundamental shift in social liabilities, activation policies aim at (b) consistently unleashing what is (inconsistently) called

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private initiative, personal responsibility, and/or individual autonomy (Ullrich 2005). Activation relies on—and at the same time (paradoxically) is meant to produce—the self-arranging, pro-active behavior of individuals acting as “responsible risk takers” (Giddens 1998: 100). Anthony Giddens’ (ibid.: 99–128) programmatic account of “the social investment state, operating in the context of a positive welfare society” (ibid.: 117), is a pretty accurate portrayal of the active society—a society in which “Government has an essential role to play” (ibid.: 99). Activating social policies are meant to guide people not merely toward (more) activity, but also toward the adoption of “pro-active” behavior, understood as planned, purposive, and prudential action. Pro-active behavior means calculating and (on that basis) taking risk(s), adopting an entrepreneurial stance toward life, relying on self-management and self-control. Pro-active behavior is, at the same time, both self-centered and pro-social. “Deciding to go to work and give up benefits, or taking a job in a particular industry, are risk-infused activities—but such risk taking is often beneficial both to the individual and to the wider society.” (ibid.: 116; emphases added). In exactly this vein, ongoing social policy reforms revolve around producing such “risk-infused” activities: “a more active risk-taking attitude . . . , wherever possible through incentives, but where necessary by legal obligations” (ibid.: 122). In all Western welfare states, these policies of activation are by no means restricted to the core area of labor market and unemployment policies, but have begun to spread—mainly in the context of the public discourse on demographic change—into other fields of social policy intervention such as public education, health care, long-term care, and welfare provision in old age. But beyond that diffusion process, what is analytically important is that the obvious activation logic dominating recent social policy and welfare state reforms is being accompanied, complemented, and counterbalanced by additional (co-)logics. Insofar as the national welfare state citizenry is concerned, activation policies are being systematically supplemented by a politics of prevention. Additionally, with regard to non-nationals seeking inclusion in the national “activation game,” a second tier of the mobility/ control complex is operating. This, in a paradoxical way, combines what may be called the technologies of exclusion and toleration. In what follows I will very briefly sketch this complex constellation, thus providing a fairly complete picture of the current transformations of the welfare state. In principle, welfare state interventions aiming at prevention are perfectly complementary to the dominant activation paradigm. Prevention is an integral part of pro-active behavior, and social policies increasingly tend to animate people, by way of discursive persuasion and material incentives, to providently and foresightedly take care of themselves in order e.g., to avoid diseases (through regular medical checkups), to secure the flow of income in old age (through private savings), or to prevent the loss of productive capacities and human capabilities (e.g., through “life-long learning”). “Investing in people” means investing in their potential for (and in their


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actual) pro-active behavior—and it implies that social policies (and public interventions more generally) adopt a pro-active orientation themselves: “The cultivation of human potential should as far as possible replace ‘after the event’ redistribution” (Giddens 1998: 101). In a way, with the paradigm shift from social policies which supposedly keep people passive to straightforwardly activating ones, “Government itself assumes the discourse of critique, challenging the rigidities and privileges of a blocked society” (Gordon 1991: 46)—calling society to activity, to a social order of movement and mobility. However, beyond the public cultivation of human potential, there is another side of the activation coin. This consists of “counter-acting” activities of public frustration of human potential—in case this very potential is defi ned as being socially unacceptable or even “unsocial.” Prevention policies have a productive as well as a punitive dimension, the “punitive turn” (Garland 2001) being inherently built into positive measures of risk prevention. The inbuilt contradiction of public prevention policies, then, is that being oriented to the mobilization of people, they simultaneously operate through immobilization: individual non-compliance with the social requirement of pro-active behavior results in de-activating interventions of the welfare state—ranging from cuts in benefits that effectively restrain the individual’s capacity to meet the expectation of mobility to the inevitable recourse to the devices of criminal law if active citizens engage in unwanted activities (Stenson and Sullivan 2001; Johnston and Shearing 2003). Obviously, the preventive—and hence punitive—bias of public intervention for the sake of activation is potentially unlimited, because, by defi nition, everything and everybody (literally: every thing and every body) can be socially constructed as being a—or at—risk. Curiously (in a way), what is highly valued with regard to welfare state citizens—to show initiative, risk-taking, and self-activation, seizing opportunities for inclusion in productive participation in the economy—is not truly honored when it comes to non-nationals (“aliens”) exhibiting the very same behavior. Foreign nationals actively seeking to be part of the (national) active society are confronted with a multi-dimensional system of (legal, judicial, and policing) measures to confi ne, avert, and repel external mobility. Taking the case of Germany as an example, at the level of national politics, there are ongoing discussions about how to mobilize internal resources—women, elderly people, young people—before and instead of resorting to immigration; the recruitment of highly qualified immigrants is pursued only reluctantly, placing all kinds of obstacles in the way of their entry and setting a time limit to their stay; labor mobility for citizens of the new EU accession countries in East Central Europe is still restricted, market liberalization being postponed until 2011; the numbers of asylum seekers have gone down to very low levels during the last decade (and the numbers being granted asylum are even lower); refugees who cannot be deported are dispossessed of freedom of movement of any kind (be it geographical or labor mobility). On the European level, “fortress Europe” is working

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quite smoothly and inconspicuously, with the “Frontex” agency4 having been established in 2004 and its “European Patrols Network” executing the Joint Operations “Hera” (to tackle “illegal” migration flows from West Africa to the Canary Islands) and “Nautilus” (reinforcing border control activities on the shores of Malta, Lampedusa, and Sicily, cutting off North African migration). Once again, however, the dominant logic of exclusion of external (migrant) mobility is complemented (and, in a way, undermined) by a cologic which is called here, in allusion to a legal concept in German residence law, the logic of toleration (“Duldung”). Externally exclusive though welfare state policies are, they still provide for (highly selective and always precarious) channels of mobility and inclusion. As a matter of fact, certain (“high potential” or otherwise socially indispensable) groups or categories of people do have the opportunity to gain access—if only temporarily—to the national labor market(s). A mechanism that seems to be more important, however, being a direct consequence of the strict and exclusive admission and residence regime of national welfare states, is the one discussed under the heading of “illegal,” “irregular,” or “undocumented” migration (Jordan and Duvell 2002). People overstaying their legal entitlement to reside within the national territory are forced into a whole range of “illegal” activities, into a world of “submerged pro-activity” where they constantly run the risk of being discovered, identified, and expelled from the country. Thus, by means of (unavoidably imperfect) exclusion and control, the welfare state and its institutions produce a para-legal world of activation which is functional to the highly flexible service and knowledge economies of advanced capitalist societies—and which, its coerced and repressive character notwithstanding, is effectively being co-produced by those “illegal” migrants who try to take advantage of the possibilities of action the submerged economy, the changing demography, and the prosperity needs of Western societies offer them.

4. TORN BETWEEN TWO LOGICS OR: HOW TO ACTIVATE THE HOMO SOCIETALIS What does this preliminary analysis of the activating welfare state, its mode of subjectivation, and its forms of operation mean for further research on what is commonly called the “neoliberal” political economy of Western societies? There are at least two ways of answering this central question. First of all, the ongoing transformation towards an active society driven forward by a reformed welfare state is not sufficiently captured when it is conceptualized as a process of subordination of the social to an overwhelming economic rationality. In addition to and well beyond this undeniable process of “economization” (Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2000), a distinctive feature of the current development is what may be called a tendency


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towards the subjectivation of the social: handing over social responsibility from public (collective) institutions to private (individual) actors. This is what I have been addressing here and elsewhere (Lessenich 2003, 2008) as the neosocial philosophy of the welfare state. Generally speaking, welfare state policies may be seen as involving “practices of self-formation, practices concerned to shape the attributes, capacities, orientations and moral conduct of individuals, and to define their rights, obligations and statuses” (Dean 1995: 567). Through social policies of “activation,” individuals are guided towards taking responsibility not only for themselves, but for society at large. Activating social policies not only “seek ethical effectivity in the shaping of the relation of self to self” (ibid.: 575), but aim at moving people into an ethical relationship to society as a whole, making them want to serve society by protecting it from themselves, i.e., from the risk they pose to society if they do not act as responsible selves. Welfare state activities in the active society are not only about conducting the conduct of an (undersocialized) homo oeconomicus, but also—and equally importantly—about the political construction of the subjectivity of an (over-)socialized homo societalis. Closely related to this “subjective turn” in the promotion of the social, a second analytical dimension of welfare state transformation relates to the ongoing process of redefi ning the boundaries not only between public and private responsibility, but also between the active society’s inner and outer space. On the whole, it seems that the governmentality of our present fundamentally revolves around the management of boundaries: welfare states are constantly drawing lines of demarcation between “the passive” and “the active,” between “the mobile” and “the immobile,” between “good” and “bad” mobility—and, at the same time, they are busy blurring these very boundaries. Mobility and immobility, or—adopting the perspective of the welfare state’s actions on people’s actions—mobilization and control, celebrate a strange (and strained) marriage in the transformation towards an active society (Lessenich 2006). On the one hand, activation is the (social) order of the day, public policies driving people to adopt a pro-active attitude, a self-monitoring conduct of life—for the sake of society and the common good. On the other hand, preventive welfare state interventions selectively de-mobilize—on behalf of society’s security—people who do not comply with the activation directive. But beyond this, the activation logic is systematically denied by a regime of territorial control that is meant to prevent, by way of exclusion, the very behavior—individual initiative and self-responsibility—which is otherwise insistently being called for. At the same time, and to complicate the picture even further, these excluding practices are entangled with a politics of tolerating the “subterranean” activities of illegalized non-citizens. At this point, the simultaneity of drawing and blurring the lines between “insiders” and “outsiders,” between mobilization and control, becomes quite obvious. What is proclaimed to be the savior of “us” all (activation),

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is being suggested to, taught to, or even imposed on some people but effectively denied to others. What is operating as the counter-logic to mobilization in some cases, control, acts (and is enacted) as the primary logic in others. What is formally being controlled as undesirable mobility is informally promoted as a functional contribution to the mobility regime of capitalist economies. Thus, governing society today is not only about the management of boundaries, but also—and to an even greater extent—about the management of antagonisms. Quite obviously, the central antagonism of the reformed welfare state’s activation regime is a revenant of the essential paradox of liberal governmentality, its resuscitation in a contemporary (neoliberal) guise. The rationality of liberty, spelt out as “activity” and “mobility” today, inescapably breeds its counter-rationality of security, of “discipline” and “control”. The mobilization of society inevitably creates a dynamic of controlling what is considered to be a permanently unsafe public good: the (neosocial) movement of people for the sake of society. Instead of systematically looking for government beyond the state, then, governmentality studies should take more interest in the state itself, and a Foucauldian perspective on the welfare state and its current transformation should try to make sense of the structural contradictions and strategic ambivalences of public policies for an “active society.”5 Earlier analyses of this new societal formation suggested that, since it is geared toward the selfmarketization of its citizens, it constitutes a turn away from the “project of governing from the perspective of society” (Walters 1997: 221). In the light of the analysis presented here, quite the opposite seems to be true: the active welfare state is a renewed arrangement of “governing through society” (ibid.)—or, more specifically, of governing the self in the name of society. Because we are badly in need of an evaluation of the social effects of this “neosocial” constellation, studies in governmentality should re-orient themselves toward a critical analysis of political power not beyond, but within the (welfare) state. It would not be the fi rst time that taking a step back means advancing.

NOTES 1. Thanks go to Sven Opitz and to the three editors of this volume for their critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter, which improved it significantly. 2. For a more systematic elaboration of the argument, see Lessenich 2008. 3. Esping-Andersen’s account clearly relates not to a “minimal” but to a maximal or ideal-typical—and thus, by very defi nition, extra-empirical—conception of “de-commodification”: it would be impossible for de-commodifying social policies in real-world (i.e., capitalist) welfare states to match EspingAndersen’s defi nition. 4. The acronym “Frontex” stands for the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. According to the Frontex website (http://www.


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frontex.europa.eu), its official device obeys classical liberal governmentality: “libertas—securitas—justitia.” 5. In line with Foucault’s (1991: 103) assertion that “[the] governmentalization of the state is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon.”

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Contributors

Friedrich Balke is Professor of Media Studies, Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany. Ulrich Bröckling is Professor of Sociology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Didier Fassin is a James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA, and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University, Great Britain. Lars Thorup Larsen is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Stephan Lessenich is Professor of Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany. Thomas Lemke is Professor of Sociology, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Susanne Krasmann is Professor of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Germany. Sven Opitz is Lecturer of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Germany. Martin Saar is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johann-WolfgangGoethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Urs Stäheli is Professor of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Germany.

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Contributors

Ute Tellmann is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Germany. William Walters is Professor of Political Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Peter Wehling is Senior Researcher in Sociology, University of Augsburg, Germany.

Persons Index

A Adler, Alfred, 206 Agamben, Giorgio, 24-25, 106-108, 117, 125, 130, 142, 166-167, 169, 174, 179, 188, 190, 194, 203, 248-249, 264-265, 288 Albahari, Maurizio, 147 Althusser, Louis, 39, 50, 58,88, 90-91 Amariglio, Jack, 271, 285 Anderson, Benedict, 180 Aradau, Claudia, 131 Arendt, Hannah, 24, 90, 167, 187-188, 190-191, 194, 249 Aristotle, 188-189, 194

B Bachelard, Gaston, 187 Bakhtin, Michail, 58 Balibar, Étienne, 58 Balke, Friedrich, 21, 74, 106 Barret-Kriegel, Blandine, 69 Barry, Andrew, 101, 111, 148, 157, 180, 204 Barthes, Roland, 1, 58 Bataille, Georges, 167 Bauman, Zygmunt, 190 Bayart, Jean-François, 10 Becker, Gary S., 25, 249, 256-263 Benjamin, Walter, 106, 131, 167 Bentham, Jeremy, 6, 130 Berlin, Isaiah, 41 Biehl, João, 190 Bigo, Didier, 159, 190 Binding, Karl, 256, 265 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 124 Böhm, Franz, 27 Bonditti, Philippe, 146, 159 Bourdieu, Pierre, 159, 206 Bröckling, Ulrich, 1, 25, 50, 247, 281

Brown, Phil, 232-233 Brown, Wendy, 290 Bryan, Dick, 293 Burchell, Graham, 57, 159 Butler, Judith, 106, 130-131 Buzan, Barry, 101-102

C Callon, Michel, 180, 230, 233, 242, 297 Campbell, Timothy, 179 Canguilhem, Georges, 24, 187-191, 193, 197 Cassels, Alan, 230 Cassirer, Ernst, 41, 90 Cavaillès, Jean, 187 Chadwick, Ruth, 242 Clinton, Bill, 310-311 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 277 Conrad, Peter, 231 Crelinsten, Ronald D., 132 Croce, Benedetto, 41 Croissant, Klaus, 105 Cruikshank, Barbara, 180

D Daase, Christopher, 127 Danner, Mark, 126 Darwin, Charles, 251 Davidson, Arnold I., 49-50 Dean, Mitchell, 27, 50 Debrix, François, 139 Defert, Daniel, 8 Deleuze, Gilles, 139, 219 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 131, 279 Dershowitz, Alan, 122-123, 129-130 Dillon, Michael, 97, 179 Dodd, Nigel, 299 Donzelot, Jacques, 8, 48, 56, 70 Dratel, Joshua, 95

324

Persons Index

Dreyfus , Hubert L., 49, 187, 299 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 282 Durkheim, Émile, 122

E Eckert, Julia, 132 Elden, Stuart, 140, 159, 289 Escobar, Arturo, 285 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 310, 316 Esposito, Roberto, 100, 169, 179 Eucken, Walter, 27 Ewald, François, 8, 48, 127, 287

F Fahrmeir, Andreas, 227 Fassin, Didier, 10, 23-24, 143, 154, 180, 185 Faulstich, Heinz, 265 Fisher, Irving, 291 Fontana, Alessandro, 287 Forsthoff, Ernst, 21-22, 75, 82-90 Franklin, Sarah, 170 Freudenstein, Roland, 146 Fromm, Heinz, 95

G Galtung, Johan, 253 Genel, Katia, 179 Gibson-Graham, J.K., 270 Giddens, Anthony, 312 Gilbert, Emily, 293 Goede, Marieke de, 291 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 25, 249-257, 259260, 262-263, 265 Gordon, Colin, 50, 57, 70, 149, 155, 282, 304 Gottweis, Herbert, 180 Goux, Jean-Joseph , 273 Greenberg, Karen, 95, 129-130 Grossberg, Lawrence, 282 Guattari, Félix, 139

H Haahr, Jens Henrik, 108 Habermas, Jürgen, 11, 180, 260, 296 Hamdan, Salim, 132 Haraway, Donna, 179 Hardt, Michael, 144, 148, 166-169, 203 Heath, Deborah, 226, 228-229, 241 Hedgecoe, Adam, 232 Heidegger, Martin, 167 Hindess, Barry, 27, 160

Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 97, 124, 169, 264 Hoche, Alfred, 256, 265 Hughes, Bill, 235 Hume, David, 291 Huspek, Michael, 159 Husserl, Edmund, 187 Huysmans, Jef, 103

I Ignatieff, Michael, 192 Irwin, Alan, 226 Isin, Engin, 241

J Jessop, Bob, 21, 56 Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 264

K Kant, Immanuel, 49, 252 Kelly, Mark G.E., 61 Kerr, Anne, 228-229 Kessler, Oliver, 127 Keynes, John Maynard, 291, 293, 310 Kiesow, Rainer Maria, 130 Kirchheimer, Otto, 70 Kirshner, Jonathan, 299 Knoppers, Bartha Maria, 242 Koch, Carsten, 219 Koselleck, Reinhart, 43, 45-46 Krasmann, Susanne, 1, 22, 49, 50, 70, 115

L Laclau, Ernesto, 269-270, 278, 282 Lalonde, Marc, 208, 223 Lane, Christopher, 230 Larner, Wendy, 288 Larsen, Lars Thorup, 24, 174, 180, 201 Latour, Bruno, 180 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 179 Le Heron, Richard, 288 Lefort, Claude, 130 Lemke, Thomas, 1, 23, 27, 49, 50, 70, 165, 179-180, 295 Lessenich, Stephan, 26, 304, 316 Lindemann, Gesa, 180 Lock, Margaret, 170, 234, 241-242 Louis XIV., 105 Löwy, Ilana, 190 Luban, David, 116, 131 Luhmann, Niklas, 50, 282, 291

Persons Index M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 38, 79 Malkki, Liisa, 190 Marcuse, Herbert, 18 Marx, Karl, 58, 205, 291 Massumi, Brian, 276-277 Maurer, Bill, 293 Mauss, Marcel, 237 Mayer, Jane, 111 Mbeki, Thabo, 192 Mbembe, Achille, 189 McKinley, Brunson, 144 Meinecke, Friedrich, 41 Melville, Herman, 18 Memmi, Dominique, 10 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 187 Mill, John Stuart, 292 Miller, Peter, 11, 57-58, 70, 288-289 Miller, Toby, 282 Mitchell, Robert, 236 Mol, Annemarie, 286 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 106 Morrell, Geoff, 132 Mouffe, Chantal, 269-270 Moynihan, Ray, 230 Müller-Armack, Alfred, 27 Müller-Wille, Staffan, 232 Münkler, Herfried, 43, 50

325

Petryna, Adriana, 190, 228 Pfahler, Thomas, 265 Pocock, John, 43, 46 Polanyi, Karl, 271, 273, 291 Poovey, Mary, 281 Poulantzas, Nicos, 50, 58 Procacci, Giovanna, 8, 48

R

Napier, David, 190 Negri, Antonio, 144, 148, 166-169, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 36, 46, 50, 142, 191, 206, 296, 299 Novas, Carlos, 228, 241 Nyers, Peter, 160, 241

Rabeharisoa, Vololona, 230, 233, 242 Rabinow, Paul, 49, 187-188, 190, 225, 229, 234, 240, 242, 299 Rafferty, Michael, 293 Rancière, Jacques, 17, 19, 128, 160 Rapp, Rayna, 241 Ratzel, Friedrich, 149 Redfield, Peter, 144, 150 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 115, 125 Reid, Julian, 179 Rejali, Darius, 130, 131 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 232 Ricoeur, Paul, 299 Robespierre, Maximilien, 90 Röpke, Wilhelm, 27 Rorty, Richard, 41 Rose, Nikolas, 11, 27, 50, 57-58, 70, 189-190, 226, 228-229, 235, 238, 241, 281, 290 Roth, Klaus, 51 Rouse, Joseph, 49, 179 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 49, 74-82, 84-85, 87-91 Ruccio, David, 271, 285 Rumsfeld, Donald, 127 Rusche, Georg, 70 Rüstow, Alexander, 27, 174 Rutherford, Paul, 171, 180

O

S

O’Leary, Ted, 289 O’Malley, Pat, 154, 160 Oakeshott, Michael, 41 Oestreich, Gerhard, 43, 50 Ong, Aihwa, 288 Opitz, Sven, 22, 93, 128 Osborne, Thomas, 16, 27

Saar, Martin, 21, 34, 49, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 187 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 58 Savulescu, Julian, 239 Scarry, Elaine, 129 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 95 Schmitt, Carl, 21, 82-83, 106, 117, 124, 167 Schultz, Theodore W., 25, 249, 256, 258, 260, 262-263 Senellart, Michel, 49, 63, 295 Shakespeare, Tom, 234 Shell, Marc, 276 Simmel, Georg, 276, 291

N

P Palladino, Paolo, 242 Pasquino, Pasquale, 8, 48 Patton, Paul, 50 Pêcheux, Michel, 58, 180 Peter the Great, 91

326

Persons Index

Simon, Dieter, 125 Skinner, Quentin, 43, 46 Stäheli, Urs, 25, 50, 269 Starobinski, Jean, 80 Strauss, Leo, 41 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, 242

T Tadros, Victor, 131 Tandler, Julius, 265 Taussig, Michael, 189 Taussig, Karen-Sue, 241 Taylor, Mark C., 282 Tellmann, Ute, 26, 282, 285 Tully, James, 46 Turner, Bryan, 241

V Valverde, Mariana, 103 Veblen, Thorstein, 205 Viroli, Maurizio, 43 Voegelin, Eric, 41

W Wæver, Ole, 101-103 Waldby, Catherine, 170, 236 Walters, William, 21-23, 108, 138 Weber, Max, 11, 120, 205-206, 265 Wehling, Peter, 24, 225 Wilde, Jaap de, 101-102

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 122-123

Subject Index

#

Abu Ghraib, 115, 126 activation, 22, 26, 89, 290, 310-316 active society, 304-305, 307, 310-316 actor-network-theory (ANT), 26, 287, 294, 297-298 advanced liberalism, 59 See also neoliberalism affect, 276-278 AIDS, 24, 165, 189, 191-193, 195 anatomopolitics, 61-63, 66, 171, 185186, 247 Anglo-Foucauldian school, 56-62, 64, 69-70 antagonism, 8, 18, 44, 104, 119, 308, 316 anthropology, 10, 14, 16, 23-24, 34-35, 48, 51, 104, 166, 180, 185, 189191, 258, 260, 262, 292 anthropopolitics, 170, 172 apparatus of security, 4, 5, 20, 22, 97, 103, 119, 287 asylum, 24, 66, 105, 144-145, 147, 151, 154, 157, 190-191, 194, 313

biologization, 228-230, 234, 240-241. See also geneticization biomedicine, 24, 191, 196, 225-227, 233, 236, 238-240 biopolitics, 20, 22-25, 37, 46, 48, 59, 63, 81, 93, 117, 119, 130-131, 139, 142-144, 148, 150, 152, 156, 158, 165-180, 185-189, 191, 193, 196, 197, 201-206, 208, 211-213, 215-216, 218, 221-222, 225-227, 229, 236, 238, 247-249, 254, 261-264 biopower, 7, 37, 61, 83, 105, 146, 152, 159, 168, 179, 181, 185-186, 196-197, 203, 225, 238, 247248 bios, 24, 188-191, 194 biosciences, 170, 190, 225, 230 biosociality, 190, 225-226, 229-231, 233-235, 237, 240-242 biotechnology, 170-171, 225, 227, 239-240 biovalue, 170, 179, 190, 236 body politic, 75-76, 78, 80-81, 91, 166, 174, 248 border, 4, 21-23, 76, 107-108, 118119, 127, 132, 138-159, 309, 314, 316; border control, 22, 150, 153, 159, 314

B

C

bare life, 117, 130, 167, 188-189, 191, 194, 248-249, 264. See also zōē biocapital, 190 bioethics, 170, 227, 236-239, 242 biohistory, 179, 188 biolegitimacy, 196-197 biological citizenship, 24, 190, 225230, 232-235, 237-241

Cambridge School, 43-44, 46 camp, 108, 167, 190, 194 capitalism, 3, 25-26, 61, 66, 70, 87, 166, 168, 170, 242, 253-254, 258, 261, 263, 275, 304-305, 307-309, 314, 316 care of the self, 186, 189 Chicago School, 6-7, 68, 256-262

9/11, 109, 115, 121, 126, 129, 131, 141

A

328

Subject Index

commodification, 26, 236-237, 307308, 311, 316 conduct of conduct, 2, 22, 26, 56, 60, 63, 70, 93, 110, 204, 273, 281, 286, 290-291, 293-297, 304 constitution, 8, 22, 45, 78-81, 83-85, 87-91, 95, 102, 116-122, 124125, 129, 131-132 constructivism, 39-40, 102, 193, 290, 292 Copenhagen School, 94, 101-102, 104 crisis, 19, 59, 86, 115, 119, 144-145, 204-205, 255, 263-264, 271, 273, 292

D danger, 6, 8, 16, 86, 95, 99-101, 104, 109-110, 119, 121-122, 126128, 131-132, 150, 159, 194195, 215, 229, 231, 308 Daseinsvorsorge, 83-84, 86, 89, 91 death, 4, 23, 74, 130, 138, 147, 150, 160, 167, 169, 171, 176, 177, 180, 185-186, 190, 193, 236, 247, 261-262, 264, 282 demography, 79, 176, 192, 204, 207, 312, 314 deterritorialization, 107, 139 discipline, 1, 4-5, 12, 17, 37, 43, 60-63, 65-68, 70, 85-87, 99, 103, 105, 118, 129, 140, 142, 158-159, 166-167, 173-174, 176, 186, 204, 219, 247, 288-289, 294, 308, 316 dispositif, 37, 64, 93, 99-101, 103, 108, 117, 286-289, 293, 295-298

E economics, 90, 168, 256-257, 265, 269-270, 277, 281-282, 285, 298 economization, 20, 25, 249, 257, 261, 271-273, 280-281, 287, 290, 297, 314 economy of power, 37, 62, 119 education, 10, 76, 78, 193, 206, 212, 215, 221, 234, 256, 260, 265, 306, 312 Empire, 148, 168 empowerment, 9-10, 12, 14-15, 106 enhancement, 227, 238-239 enterprising self, 12, 15, 257, 280-281 entrepreneurialism, 6, 9, 25, 65, 93, 257-258, 262, 273, 279-281, 312

epistemology, 170, 195, 298 essentialism, 41, 57, 231-232, 242, 270 EU, 83, 108, 131, 145-146, 148, 154155, 157, 160, 311, 313 eugenics, 188, 190, 204, 228-229, 241, 250-251, 260-261 everyday life, 43, 190, 217, 219-221, 235 exclusion, 21-22, 94, 101, 103, 108, 119, 126, 167, 177, 188, 235, 240, 249, 278, 309, 312, 314-315

F freedom, 5, 6, 13-15, 21-22, 37, 59, 84-85, 89, 91, 93-94, 99-100, 103-104, 110, 117, 119-120, 128, 169, 173, 205, 230, 237, 239, 249, 262, 273, 281, 286, 294, 308, 313 frontier. See border

G gambling, 275-277, 280 genealogy of morals, 191 genetic citizenship. See biological citizenship geneticization, 228-232, 234, 240. See also biologization genocide, 188, 191 governability, 19, 79, 308 governance, 13, 103, 108, 141-142, 148, 153-154, 158-159, 193, 248, 263, 292 government: of biomedicine, 225, 239; of bodies, 180, 186, 189; of borders and frontiers, 22, 141; of life, 23, 25, 165, 172, 186, 222, 262; of migration, 146; of others, 189; of the self, 2, 13, 17, 19, 25, 185, 189, 204 governmental: practices, 2, 7, 11-13, 17, 42, 59-61, 63, 66, 69-70, 84-85, 89, 105, 107, 120, 153, 173-174, 176, 178, 274, 304; rationality, 4, 11, 21, 25-26, 61, 79, 94, 97-98, 106, 108, 203, 209 217, 219-220, 222, 240, 263, 272, 290, 295, 306; technology, 8, 9, 11-13, 15-17, 20-21, 34, 69, 85, 89, 99, 104, 121, 143, 203, 210, 216, 221222, 269, 272-274, 277, 279, 289, 305, 309 governmentality: liberal, 5, 59, 93, 97, 99, 108-110, 159, 176, 308,

Subject Index 316-317; illiberal, 93-94, 103, 105,107-108; neoliberal, 12, 17, 20, 25, 59, 85, 89, 108, 257, 261-262 governmentalization, 2, 46, 62, 64, 74-75, 82, 119, 151, 186, 262, 317 Guantánamo, 117, 129, 131-132

H health, 6, 10, 23-24, 93, 173, 177, 185, 192-193, 195-196, 201-223, 226-229, 232-236, 238-242, 253-254, 258, 260-261, 265, 312 hegemony, 12, 35, 67-68, 262, 269270, 281 historicism, 40, 275, 296 historiography, 34-35, 37-38, 40, 44-48, 50 homo œconomicus, 65 257 258 264 290 305 315 homo sacer, 167, 188, 264 homosexuality, 231-232, 241 human capital, 6, 12, 25, 178, 24,7 249, 256-265, 311 human economy, 247, 249, 254-256, 260, 263, 265 human rights, 101, 124, 131, 149, 151, 154, 157, 178, 249, 251 humanitarianism, 139, 143-145, 148150, 152-157, 194-195; humanitarian border, 23 138-140, 143-158; humanitarian government, 138-139, 143, 146-147, 159-160; humanitarian intervention, 152, 156; humanitarian reason; 143, 156, 191, 195; humanitarianization, 138-139, 146-147, 158 hygiene, 173, 192, 251. See also racial hygiene

I ideological state apparatuses, 39, 58 Ideologiekritik, 58 immigration, 10, 141, 145, 151, 156, 158, 191, 193, 313 immunization, 100, 169 imperialism, 168, 194, 264 individualization, 2-3, 254, 276, 278, 282 insurance, 6, 8, 208, 260, 309 invisible hand, 15, 260, 272

329

L Lampedusa, 144-145, 148, 150, 157, 314 legislative, 75-76, 79, 95, 115, 125, 132 Leviathan, 5, 97, 124, 255, 260 Liberalism, 3-8, 14, 16, 22-23, 25-26, 34, 37, 41, 46, 48-49, 59-60, 63, 68-70, 84-85, 93-94, 97-101, 103-111, 115-120, 122-123, 128-129, 155-156, 158-159, 165, 167, 173-176, 178-180, 189, 214, 220, 248, 260, 263, 269, 282, 285-287, 289-292, 294-295, 297, 299, 307-310. See also governmentality, liberal life unworthy of living, 177 178 249 256 261 265 lifestyle, 24, 201-203, 205-223, 232 239

M Malthusian law, 250 Marxism, 9, 14, 21, 25, 39, 41, 46, 50, 57-59, 68, 167, 186, 193, 205, 263, 269-270, 275 mechanisms of security. See apparatus of security Menschenökonomie, 25, 249-250, 253256, 259-265 methodology, 12, 15, 17, 21, 34-37, 40-50, 56, 63, 102, 202, 207, 252, 257-258, 285, 294, 297 microphysics of power, 1, 61, 63-64, 158 migration, 10, 101, 141, 143-147, 151, 155-158, 191, 313-314; migrant, 23, 138, 144-145, 147-148, 150160, 194, 222, 251, 313-314; migration control, 22, 138-139, 185, 193-194 mobility, 107, 141, 146, 150, 185, 307310, 312-316 mobilization, 17, 304, 307-309, 313, 315-316; self-mobilization, 17, 26, 310 molecular politics, 170-171 money, 26, 275-276, 286, 289-294, 297, 299, 308 multitude, 18, 68, 76, 167-168, 193

N nature, 5, 23, 38, 74, 80, 82-83, 98, 168, 170, 172-173, 176, 178, 194, 225, 235, 250, 252, 254, 258, 262, 264

330

Subject Index

Nazism, 83, 165, 169, 188, 194 necropolitics, 189 neoliberalism, 3, 6-7, 9, 12, 15-16, 21, 22, 25, 27, 48, 59, 68, 85, 103, 139, 142, 158-159, 178, 204, 222, 231, 242, 248, 262, 272, 274-275, 280-282, 290, 292, 294, 305, 310, 314, 316. See also advanced liberalism; governmentality, neoliberal neosocial, 306, 315-316 normalization, 5, 66, 116, 118, 123, 145, 167, 185-186, 219, 255

O

208-213, 215-219, 221-222, 228, 247-250, 256, 260, 262, 264-265, 287-289, 307-308, 310 poststructuralism, 9, 167, 269-271, 273 poverty, 6, 10, 48, 99, 142, 146, 156, 160, 177, 195, 237 prevention, 19, 24, 26, 107, 126, 128, 165, 201, 206, 208, 211-212, 214-217, 222, 232-234, 249, 251, 312-313 problematization, 18, 40, 76, 78, 97, 100-101, 103-105, 108-109, 111, 126, 172, 178, 196, 210 property, 91, 169, 254, 292, 308 public health, 195-196, 201-203, 205217, 219-223 punishment, 66-67, 77, 95, 241, 313

optimization, 16-17, 172, 177, 203204, 215, 227, 238, 240, 249, 265 ordoliberalism, 6, 27, 68, 87, 257, 272, 275, 282 organic capital, 249-250, 253-254, 259, 263

Q

P

R

pastoral power, 3, 7, 40, 88, 101, 141, 152, 155, 158-160, 175, 295 paternalism, 59, 205 patient group, 226, 229, 232-233, 242 pauperism, 99 pedagogy, 76, 78, 91 performativity, 14, 18, 102, 116, 121, 124-125, 127, 129, 131, 274, 282, 291 police science (Polizeiwissenschaft), 3, 7, 107, 248, 264 political economy, 5, 25, 37, 40, 46, 56-57, 60-61, 63, 65-66, 68-69, 74, 98, 170, 173, 180, 248-249, 261-262, 275, 307-309, 314 political technology, 24, 175, 186, 206, 221, 278, 290 politicization, 154, 203, 248-249 politics: of care, 145; of life, 24, 177, 185-186, 189-191, 193-195, 197, 228; of populations, 185; of torture, 95; of truth, 12, 36, 285 population, 5, 23, 25, 37, 39-40, 48, 61, 66, 68, 70, 74, 77, 79-81, 83, 89, 91, 98, 102, 104, 108, 117, 119-120, 140, 144, 146147, 150, 152, 154, 158, 165, 168, 171-178, 180-181, 185186, 189, 196-197, 202-204,

racial hygiene , 250, 265 racism, 59, 65, 93-94, 159, 166, 169, 177-179, 188, 247, 250-251, 265 reason of state (raison d’État), 3-5, 7, 40, 43, 94, 100-101, 119-120, 140, 173, 186 refugees, 10, 148, 153-154, 158-160, 165, 167, 190, 193-195, 249, 313 resistance, 11, 13, 17-19, 59, 64, 66, 70, 130, 148, 153, 168, 172, 279 reterritorialization, 107-108, 139 risk, 8, 12-13, 15, 22, 26, 84, 86, 88, 91, 110, 121, 126-128, 141, 146-147, 150, 159, 172, 178, 186-187, 195, 206, 208, 214, 220, 229, 232, 235, 237, 239-240, 242, 281, 306-310, 312-315

quality of life, 25, 171, 177, 192-193, 234, 236-237, 240 quarantine, 141, 270

S securitization, 22, 94, 101-108, 110111, 126, 138-139, 141, 145, 147 security, 4-6, 10, 14, 20-22, 34, 37, 48, 61, 93-111, 116-124, 126-130, 132, 141, 143, 146-147, 150151, 154, 156, 158-159, 169,

Subject Index 189-190, 193, 205, 249, 254, 260-261, 263, 286-289, 295, 298, 306, 309, 315-316; social security, 193, 249, 254, 260, 263 self-constitution, 1, 174, 178 self-control, 17, 26, 101, 279, 281, 310, 312 self-referentiality, 25, 270, 274-280 self-regulation, 23, 25, 173, 263, 271, 280, 310 self-help group, 24, 231 shyness, 230-231, 239 social contract (Contrat social), 74-81, 90, 119 Social Darwinism, 250-251 socialism, 7, 64, 228, 249, 254, 263, 269 sovereignty, 4, 9, 17, 20-22, 37, 40, 43, 45, 48, 59-61, 63, 67-68, 74-79, 82, 85-87, 90-91, 94, 97-98, 100-101, 103, 105-109, 111, 117-118, 124, 129-131, 139, 141-142, 167, 169, 171, 204, 221, 247-249, 261-262, 264, 269, 272, 275, 288, 304, 306, 309 state: statecraft, 56, 57, 63; statehood, 2, 20-21, 35, 40-42, 46-49, 61, 139, 149; state control, 20, 23, 64; state effect, 62, 68-69; state phobia, 20, 41, 45, 121, 205; state racism, 247; state theory, 10, 39, 40, 57, 121, 204; total state, 82-83; welfare state, 8-9, 16, 22, 26, 48, 86, 89, 91, 126, 141, 149, 152, 159, 203-205, 304-316 state of exception, 86, 107, 117, 125, 148, 167, 169, 263 statistics, 4, 46, 98, 152, 176, 192, 201, 204, 208-209, 213, 219-221, 229, 241, 248, 265, 288 structuralism, 58, 279

331

subjectification, 1-3, 9, 12, 14-16, 18, 118, 172-174, 176-177, 263, 280-281. See also subjectivation subjectivation, 13, 59, 94, 104, 110, 187, 203, 213, 280, 306-307, 310, 314-315. See also subjectification subjectivity, 2, 9, 12, 15, 107, 109-110, 152, 155, 187, 190, 290, 296, 305-307, 315

T technologies of control, 13-14, 109, 155, 277-278 territory, 4, 40, 59, 61, 63, 66, 68, 79, 81, 108, 127, 138-140, 143, 146, 148-149, 156, 159, 189-191, 204, 288-289, 295, 308-309, 314-315 terrorism, 14, 95-96, 115, 121, 126128, 132, 141, 158, 261; war on terror, 95-96, 104, 106, 109 thanatopolitics, 167, 169-171 torture, 22, 66, 94-95, 104, 106, 111, 115-118, 120-127, 129-132 totalitarianism, 63, 83, 88, 194, 205, 249 truth, 3, 12, 14, 17, 22, 25, 36, 124125, 127-130, 152-153, 168, 174, 177, 180, 191, 195, 197, 207, 220, 230, 285, 298

U utilitarianism, 142, 251, 262

V vital politics, 172, 174 volonté générale, 21, 75-76, 78, 82, 87-89

Z zoē, 188-191, 194. See also bare life

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