Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life

Majia Holmer Nadesan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135903572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life synthesizes and extends the disparate strands of scholarship on Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower and grounds them in familiar social contexts including the private realm, the market, and the state/military. Topics include public health, genomics, behavioral genetics, neoliberal market logics and technologies, philanthropy, and the war on terror. This book is designed for readers interested in a rigorous, comprehensive introduction to the wide array of interdisciplinary work focusing on Foucault, biopower and governmentality. However, Nadesan does not merely reproduce existing literatures but also responds to implicit critiques made by Cultural Studies and Marxist scholarship concerning identity politics, political economy, and sovereign force and disciplinary control. Using concrete examples and detailed illustrations throughout, this book extends the extant literature on governmentality and biopower and helps shape our understanding of everyday life under neoliberalism.

1
Introduction

How are human populations governed in contemporary societies? How is the conduct of everyday life in the family, in the school, and in the workplace shaped by social relations of power? How do individuals engage in self-regulation across social contexts? How are recalcitrant or unruly individuals disciplined? How are the state, the market, and the population constituted and entwined in/through particular arts of government?

One framework useful for addressing these questions is Foucault’s analytic of governmentality. Foucault used the idea of governmentality to explore the regularities of everyday existence that structure the “conduct of conduct,” ultimately giving expression to distinct historical epochs characterized by particular arts of government (or governmentalities), including laissez-faire, social-welfare, and neoliberal governmentalities.¹ Foucault’s understanding of neoliberal governmentality extended beyond popularized definitions that center laissez-faire economic policies to encompass the particular logics and technologies of rule operative across varied domains of social life.

Accordingly, governmentality scholarship simultaneously addresses the rationalities of historically specific forms of political government such as neoliberalism and the forms of activity and technologies of power shaping everyday interpersonal and institutional life, thereby bridging micro- and macrolevels of analyses (Gordon, 1991). For example, in the contemporary United States, governmentality explains homologies across neoliberal economic policies in the market and the everyday discipline and character-development programs used by teachers in public schools to foster a particular kind of calculative accountability (Nadesan, 2006). Likewise, governmentality provides a framework for analyzing homologies across “employee-driven” corporate human resource policies that shift risk to employees and neoliberal, international economic policies pursued by the World Bank. Governmentality addresses how society’s pressing problems, expert authorities, explanations, and technologies are organized in relation to particular kinds of action/policy orientations, problem-solution frameworks, subjectivities, and activities (see Rose, 1999a). Governmentality also explores how individuals are privileged as autonomous self-regulating agents or are marginalized, disciplined, or subordinated as invisible or dangerous.

Foucault was particularly interested in how liberal governmentalities target life through social and scientific engineering, through expert administration, and through everyday technologies of the self. Life has been a significant problem-solution frame for liberal governmentalities since the eighteenth century. However, understandings and problematics of life have varied significantly across time, reflecting divergences in liberal governmentalities and distinct historical circumstances. Take, for example, the current cultural preoccupation with genetics. Genetic engineering and genetic-based pharmaceuticals, among other biotechnological pursuits, share an approach aimed at identifying and engineering what are seen as the most basic components of life. The molecularization of life accords with neoliberal rationalities by transforming complex phenomena (e.g., human diversity and disease) into biological assets and costs that can be represented and manipulated within marketized calculi of value. Accordingly, complex conditions such as depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are coded as social and economic risks with calculative costs for industry and the state that must be administered. Expert market authorities trained in molecular psychiatry offer pharmaceutical solutions. Older liberal frameworks of knowledge, such as psychoanalysis and social anomie, lose credence among the public, insurers, and the state, their experts marginalized or retrained. How has this shift in perspective and protocol been achieved? The answers to this question are myriad because shifts in the “conduct of conduct” reflect a vast array of new technologies, new subjectivities, and new calculations. And yet, across disparate, heterogeneous, and decentralized transformations in problem-solution sets, one can also discern a particular regularity, a particular frame, focus, or reduction on the “elements” of life (Rose, 2007) and their market capitalization. Foucault argued that efforts to understand and administer the life forces of the population have persisted since the eighteenth century, although formulations reflect changing liberal governmentalities producing historically distinct problem-solution frames.

Foucault developed the idea of biopower to capture technologies of power that address the management of, and control over, the life of the population. Life, as the central focus, is neither purely accidental nor fully determined. Foucault offered historical contingency when explaining how governmental operations cohere around particular sets of problems, technologies, and forms of expertise. By contingency, Foucault meant that the institutionalized matrices and regularities of conduct that define specific historical strategies of biological government are neither (a) fully or necessarily determined by an underlying structural imperative such as capitalist accumulation or technological “progressive development” nor (b) the result of the arbitrariness of voluntary, rational, or even accidental decision making. Rather, social homologies across the conduct of everyday conduct are achieved in relation to governmental rationalities that link societal governance with everyday life by constituting and binding market, population, and state in relation to common sets of problem-solution frameworks (e.g., health), values (e.g., enterprise), and identities (e.g., entrepreneur).

Biopower is arguably the most pervasive form of power engendering the homologies and systemic regularities across the diverse fields of social life. Although neoliberal strategies of government appropriate and utilize older forms of power—sovereign power, pastoral power, and disciplinary power—biopower offers the most effective and appealing set of strategies for governing social life under neoliberalism because it finds its telos and legitimacy in its articulated capacity to maximize the energies and capabilities of all: individuals, families, market organizations, and the state. As a kind of power that concerns itself with representing, explaining, and regulating the life forces of populations, biopolitical forces adapted to neoliberal ends seek to minimize societal risk and maximize individual well-being through scientific engineering and individual technologies of the self.

Biopower is seductive because its logics, technologies, and experts offer, or at least purport to offer, tools for societal self-government. Biopower’s mantra of the rational administration of life promises means for realizing the elusive cybernetic fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals. Under neoliberal governmentalities, sovereignty is disseminated amongst society’s members as the welfare state sheds responsibility for its pastorate by shifting risk and empowerment to its subjects. Thus, the classical liberal fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals is invoked as a rationale for the dissemination of risk and responsibility achieved by and though biopower’s operations. In essence, the emergence of biopower as a major force in shaping, eliciting, and controlling populations is inextricably linked with historically contingent developments in liberal, and now neoliberal, forms of government.

And yet, there is more to biopower than the productive, cybernetic administration of life. Biopower may also serve the interests of capitalist accumulation and market forces by eliciting and optimizing the life forces of a state’s population, maximizing their capacity as human resources and their utility for market capitalization. Biopower can therefore supplement and extend the power of capital to expropriate value from the relations of production. For example, efforts to manage the health of populations through pharmaceutical interventions serve market interests by relying on commodity solutions (e.g., drugs) and by purportedly delivering a healthier workforce without changing the conditions under which workers labor, without changing market commodities consumed by labor (e.g., soda), and without changing industrial pollutants that affect workers’ health. In 2005, Americans spent more than $200 billion on prescription drugs (Tone & Watkins, 2007). Of course, in the context of the United States, this example also points to divergences in interests across the state and market, as industry within the United States shoulders rising health-care costs. Efforts by industry to shift risk (e.g., health insurance and pensions) to employees are not necessarily supported by the state, despite considerable corporate lobbying, because the state retains an interest in, and responsibility for, optimizing the health of its population. Accordingly, biopower may be mobilized and promulgated by market forces, but not all expressions of this form of power necessarily serve market interests or express underlying class conflict.

The complex operations of power and the web of entanglements and sites of contradiction and conflict are also evident within the state itself. The state, a loosely coupled matrix of institutions and authorities, is rent by contradiction and antagonism as its various agencies and expert authorities simultaneously cooperate with, and resist, alliances with market and social activists. For example, the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent efforts to dramatically reduce perchlorate in drinking water in the name of public health were met by fierce opposition from Pentagon officials, and their defense contractor allies, for fear that lower limits would curb arms production and raise costs (Waldman, 2005). Put otherwise, the (bio)power of the state to reduce health risks in the name of public security were met with the sovereign power of the state’s repressive apparatuses (see Althusser, 1971).

Thus, although governmentality stresses how common rationalities of government and technologies of power align the institutions, authorities, and technologies of everyday life, the market, and the state (de jure governmental apparatuses), it also recognizes discontinuities, sites of divergence, and contradictions within and across social realms. Some of these discontinuities and divergences can be explained historically in terms of the very constitution of these realms as distinct social fields. Accordingly, this project addresses how the market/economy and population and state were constituted as distinct fields of visibility. Governmentality reveals these fields as organized in relation to common rationalities while simultaneously acknowledging historical discontinuities and divergences. Thus, biopower’s complex of operations within a given historical period can never be reduced to the logics of a particular liberal governmentality.

Additionally, although neoliberalism typically governs from a distance through biopolitical technologies of the self and remote flexible networks, older forms of power and control are employed across social realms as the authorities of population (e.g., teachers and doctors, therapists), state (e.g., elected officials and government bureaucrats), and market (e.g., hedge funds and CEOs) exercise a kind of dispersed sovereignty in the course of daily decision making. Moreover, whereas technologies of the self are exercised by affluent populaces, more overt surveillance networks and corporeal disciplines are often exercised over poorer populaces, particularly over those seen as incapable of self-government. Fertility testing, treatment, and expert-informed child rearing among the U.S. upper-middle class are matched by the disciplining, surveillance, and incarceration of the children of America’s lower classes (Chaddock, 2003). Up-to-date assessments of cardiac risk, including genetic analyses, are available for the empowered, responsible, self-regulating, choosing subjects of the upper classes while in 2003, 44.7 million Americans lacked health insurance (Fuhrmans, 2005). In the United States, the greatest risk for poor health and premature death is posed by “class,” which is a determinate ignored by many market-based and state-sponsored biomedical apparatuses (Isaacs & Schroeder, 2004).

Foucault argued that biopower involves both the life politics of population and the harnessing and disciplining of corporeal bodies. Although his later work emphasized the former expressions of biopower in order to address power’s productivity and circulation, discipline and sovereignty remain important dimensions of his approach to social analysis. Accordingly, it is my contention that analyses of how biopower operates must remain attuned to the systems of marginalization, exclusion, and discipline that supplement liberal technologies of the self implicated in the production of self-regulating agents. This emphasis on how biopower operates as a technology of power that both privileges and marginalizes, empowers and disciplines, sets this book apart from more optimistic formulations of biopower as a technology of optimization.

Contemporary analyses of power and control must look beyond the disciplines and surveillance technologies of enclosed institutional spaces. Foucault (2007) argued that governmentality extends analysis beyond the inside of disciplinary institutions to the outside, from specific institutional functions to dispersed, networked technologies of power that circulate across all domains of social life. Foucault’s shifted analysis to the outside because he saw historical shifts in the technologies and operations of social power.

Gilles Deleuze (1992) coined the idea of “societies of control” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4) to address contemporary forms of power that circulate dynamically, producing individuals who experience themselves as internally fragmented, or dividuated, by dispersed networks (see also Hardt & Negri, 2000). Circulating networks often involve computerized strategies of surveillance, representation, and control, thereby requiring individuals to succumb to historically novel surveillance modes and disciplines while adopting new kinds of technologies of the self requiring continuous self-modulation. Deleuze argued that market operations and logics have gained disproportionate power within contemporary societies through the iconic figure of the corporation, which encourages competition among individuals while dividing each person “within” with its imperatives for self-modulation (p. 5). The corporation and financial capital circulate almost without limit, exacerbating old social divisions while also producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion.

My work provides a genealogy of the new societies of control and their attendant global market networks in order to explain the dispersion of neoliberal governmentality across social fields that older liberal governmentalities presented and constituted as distinct. Marketized neoliberal governmentalities increasingly shape the problem-solution frames and technologies organizing...