Handbook on Governmentality 1839108657, 9781839108655

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HANDBOOK ON GOVERNMENTALITY

RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN POLITICAL THOUGHT Series Editor: John Kane, Professor, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia The Research Handbooks in Political Thought series provides a comprehensive state-of-the art overview of contemporary research and thought in all areas of political philosophy and political theory. Combining theoretical, methodological and comparative perspectives, the series offers prestigious high quality works of lasting significance. Under the guidance of the Series Editor, Professor John Kane at Griffith University, these Handbooks will be edited by leading scholars in their respective fields and will comprise specially commissioned contributions from distinguished academics. The emphasis is on the most important concepts and research in each field with the aim of expanding debate and indicating likely research agendas for the future. By exploring political, economic, legal and philosophical dimensions, this series acts as a platform for interdisciplinary studies and an essential reference point for all academics, researchers and students of political thought.

Handbook on Governmentality Edited by

William Walters Carleton University, Canada

Martina Tazzioli Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© The Editors and Contributors Severally 2023 Cover image: Tintin Wulia, installation detail from Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories, 2016. Installation of 16 bales of cardboard waste from around Central Station, Hong Kong, with ink drawings. Part of the project Trade/Trace/Transit, Tintin Wulia 2014–16. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931364

This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781839108662

ISBN 978 1 83910 865 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 83910 866 2 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxii Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality William Walters and Martina Tazzioli PART I

1

GOVERNMENTALITY: GENESIS, ENCOUNTER, TRANSFORMATION

1

Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self Daniele Lorenzini

2

The yoke of law and the lustre of glory: Foucault and Dumézil on sovereignty Stuart Elden

3

Governmentalizing ‘policy studies’ Carol Bacchi

4

Governmentality and international relations: critiques, challenges, genealogies Hans-Martin Jaeger

72

5

Towards a postcolonial theory of crisis, neoliberal government, and biopolitics from below Ranabir Samaddar

94

PART II

22

38 54

TALKING GOVERNMENTALITY

6

Governmentality: a conversation with Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee and Nikolas Rose Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, Nikolas Rose, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

7

Governmentality and beyond: an interview with Colin Gordon Colin Gordon, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

136

8

Governmentality in translation: an interview with Graham Burchell Graham Burchell, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

156

v

113

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PART III GOVERNMENT AND ITS PROBLEMS 9

The neoliberal welfare state Ian Alexander Lovering, Sahil Jai Dutta and Samuel Knafo

174

10

Governmentality and security: governing life-in-motion Jef Huysmans

187

11

Secrecy beyond the state: governmentality, security and truth effects Susanne Krasmann

208

12

Governmentality and the subject of rights Ben Golder

221

13

Algorithmic governmentality: questions of method Claudia Aradau

235

14

Logistical power Brett Neilson

251

15

Governmentality and political ecology Emanuele Leonardi and Luigi Pellizzoni

266

PART IV GOVERNMENTALITY ACROSS NATIONS AND OTHER POLITICAL FORMATIONS 16

Diminishing life: racialized medicine, neoliberalism, and precarity in the United States Jonathan Xavier Inda

17

French humanitarianism: governmentality and its limits Miriam Ticktin

304

18

EUrope’s border ensemble and the disorder of migrant multiplicities Maurice Stierl

320

19

Hukou and suzhi as technologies of governing citizenship and migration in China Chenchen Zhang

PART V 20

287

335

GOVERNMENTALITY AND CONTESTATION

Feminist politics and neoliberal governmentality: from co-option to counter-conduct Srila Roy

353

Contents  vii

21

The practice of parrhēsia and the transformation of managerial governmentality369 Richard Weiskopf

22

Countering governmentality: enacting diverging territorialities by former enslaved people in Cauca, Colombia (1849–1886) Cristina Rojas

389

23

Insurgent politics: refugees, sans-papiers and deportees under asylum and migration laws Clara Lecadet

405

Index421

Contributors

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator grant ‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’. Carol Bacchi is Professor Emerita of Politics, University of Adelaide, Australia. Elected as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2000, she has a significant national and international record in feminist scholarship and policy studies. With Susan Goodwin, she has published a book outlining a poststructural form of policy analysis and introducing a poststructural analytic strategy for interview analysis (Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, 2016). Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Class of 1936 Chair, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Her most recent works are In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019) and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023). Graham Burchell was one of the editors and a contributor to The Foucault Effect. He is a translator, in particular of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. He lives in Italy. Partha Chatterjee is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, New York, USA, and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. Among his many books are The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004); Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2012); and I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today (2019). Sahil Jai Dutta is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at City University, London, UK. He is a co-author of Unprecedented? How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy (2022), and writes about financialization and neoliberalism in the UK. Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of books on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Lefebvre. Ben Golder is a Professor of Law in the School of Law, Society and Criminology in the Faculty of Law and Justice, University of New South Wales, Australia. He viii

Contributors  ix

teaches and writes at the intersection of legal and political theory and is currently working on a book manuscript about postfoundational approaches to human rights. Colin Gordon studied English and Philosophy at Oxford and graduated from London. A PhD project on Foucault morphed into Power/Knowledge, The Foucault Effect and a commissioned chapter on Foucault and Weber. He co-edited the journals Radical Philosophy and Ideology & Consciousness (I&C) and translated Michèle Le Doeuff’s The Philosophical Imaginary. He co-edited and wrote the introduction to Foucault, Power. He has presented conference and seminar talks on Foucault in London (1994, 2004, 2011), Paris, Sao Paolo, and Rotterdam, and his papers, talks, reviews and chapters have been delivered, translated and published in Brazil, Korea, Argentina, Australia, Netherlands, France, Italy, and Greece. He was active in campaigning against Brexit. Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. He co-convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology (http://​www​.doingips​ .org). Jonathan Xavier Inda is Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. Hans-Martin Jaeger is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Samuel Knafo is a Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard (2013), and writes about neoliberalism, shareholder value and financialization. Susanne Krasmann is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, Universität Hamburg, Germany. Clara Lecadet is a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She works on deported migrants’ protest movements in Africa. She is also working on the history of refugee camps in relation to migration control, and on the refugees’ political organization inside camps. She co-edited with Michel Agier Un monde de camps and Après les camps: Traces, mémoires et mutations des camps de réfugiés with Jean-Frédéric de Hasque. She is the author of Le manifeste des expulsés. Emanuele Leonardi is Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy, and Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies – University of Coimbra, Portugal. Daniele Lorenzini is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Ian Alexander Lovering is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s

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College London, UK. His research looks at neoliberalism in the Eurozone and public sector reform. Brett Neilson is Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Cultural Research, Western Sydney University, Australia. Luigi Pellizzoni is Professor of Environmental Sociology and Political Ecology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, and coordinator of the research group ‘Politics Ontologies and Ecologies’ (http://​www​.poeweb​.eu/​). Cristina Rojas is Distinguished Research Professor, Political Science Department, and adjunct professor, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her main interests are in the areas of political ontology, international political sociology, decolonial theory and indigenous and black studies in Colombia and Bolivia. Some of her publications include ‘Ontological disputes between Indigenous communities and the state in Bolivia’ (2018); ‘Contesting the Colonial Logics of the International’ (2016); Civilization and Violence. Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth Century Colombia (2002). Nikolas Rose FBA, FAcSS, FRSA was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, UK, which he founded in 2012, and was co-Founder and co-Director of King’s ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health until his retirement in April 2021. He has Honorary appointments at University College London and the Australian National University. He is Senior Editor of BioSocieties: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Social Studies of the Life Sciences. Recent books include The Politics of Life Itself (2006), Neuro (with Joelle Abi-Rached, 2013) and The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City (with Des Fitzgerald, 2022). Srila Roy is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her teaching and research is in transnational feminist studies, and her latest book is Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (2022). Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. Among his influential works are The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999) and Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018). His most recent publications are The Postcolonial Age of Migration (2020), and written in the background of the COVID pandemic, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021). Maurice Stierl leads the research group ‘The Production of Knowledge on Migration’ at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University, Germany. Martina Tazzioli is Reader in Politics & Technology, in the Department of Politics & International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

Contributors  xi

Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Anthropology at CUNY’s Graduate Center (City University of New York), USA. William Walters is Professor in Political Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His books include Governmentality: Critical Encounters (2012), State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (2021), and the edited collection Viapolitics: Borders, Migration and the Power of Locomotion (with Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, 2022). Richard Weiskopf is Professor of Organization Theory at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research focuses on ethical and political dimension of organizational practices. He is particularly interested in transparency and surveillance, whistleblowing and truth(telling) in organizations. Chenchen Zhang is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Durham Univeristy, UK.

Acknowledgements

We have been fortunate to work with a wonderful group of scholars. It is not easy writing during a pandemic: we are grateful for your excellent contributions and for staying the course. We also offer our thanks to Hailey Walker for the careful editorial work she put into preparing our manuscript. Daniel Mather at Edward Elgar has been a patient, wise and always helpful editor, and we extend our gratitude to him. Likewise we thank Nina Booth, Christine Gowen and Jo North for their work on the production of this Handbook. William Walters would like to acknowledge the support he received from the Faculty of Public Affairs at Carleton University in the form of a Research Excellence Chair (2019–2022). He also thanks Christina and Zoë for tolerating him during his work on this book. Finally, we sincerely thank the artist Tintin Wulia for permission to feature an installation detail from her work Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories (2016) on the cover of this book. The detail shows a bale of waste cardboard and features ink drawings made by Wulia on the cardboard shelters of Filipino domestic workers around the Central Station, Hong Kong. It comes out of her project called Trade/Trace/Transit (2014–16) which follows and intervenes in the movements of cardboard and some of the very different locales, lives and organizations it interacts with. If governmentality enjoins us to think about the administration of people and things in terms of heterogeneous networks, and to begin always with the particular, and if it also attunes us to the possibility for creativity and change that is immanent to those networks, then we think Wulia’s cardboard ‘murals’ offer a rather appropriate counter-image for this Handbook on Governmentality.

xii

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality William Walters and Martina Tazzioli

This introduction to the Handbook on Governmentality serves three purposes. First, it offers some introductory remarks locating governmentality within Michel Foucault’s political thought. We explain that for Foucault governmentality was a way of decentring the state within political theory but also, and more generally, a refinement and extension of his nominalist, critical and relational account of power relations. Second, we reflect on some ways in which a whole interdisciplinary field of research has taken shape in conversation with governmentality. In these ‘governmentality studies’, state forms of governance are but one theme within a much wider engagement with practices, knowledges and contestations of governing. Third, we introduce the contributions to this Handbook, explaining what aspects, issues and problems of governmentality they speak to, and in which directions they push this vibrant area of critical thought. While the Handbook offers readers an introduction to research and debates on governmentality (especially in Parts I and II), it is also intended as an agenda-setting intervention. There are three themes that we emphasize: the case for conceptual and methodological innovation in the face of new problems the world throws up (Part III); the potential of a comparative approach to governmentality (Part IV); and the need for a fuller account of practices and experiences of contestation alongside and in connection with studies of governing (Part V).

1.

FOUCAULT ON POWER AND GOVERNMENTALITY

The word governmentality was coined by Michel Foucault as part of his multi-faceted challenge to the way we think about power in modern societies.1 Today a prominent keyword in the lexicon of critical thought, this idea first appears in a series of lectures Foucault delivered at the Collège de France in 1977–78 entitled ‘Security, Territory, Population’ (STP) (Foucault 2007a). There, he proposes the term to capture what he sees as a historical shift in the way in which power is imagined, rationalized and exercised. This shift needs to be understood in light of Foucault’s wider interest in power relations.2 Perhaps his best-known work, Discipline and Punish analysed what he would call disciplinary power, distinguishing the disciplines from sovereignty (Foucault 1977). However, in the STP lectures, he identifies a third modality, one that is distinct from the disciplines or sovereign forms. It is a modality that builds on work Foucault had been pursuing in the context of the first volume of his History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990) and also in an earlier lecture course, ‘Society must be 1

2  Handbook on governmentality

defended’ (1975–76) (Foucault 2003). In both these contexts Foucault discusses biopolitics, a concept he uses to identify a form of power that operates at the level of population (Lorenzini, this volume). This question of population – what kind of object it is, how experts and authorities first acquire knowledge of it (e.g., with the invention of statistics), how its discovery opens new avenues for the conduct and contestation of political rule – will be central to Foucault’s understanding of governmentality (Bacchi, this volume). One way that Foucault illustrates these different modalities is with the example of the treatment of theft (Foucault 2007a, 4–9). We gloss this as follows. A juridical approach to theft lays down a law – you shall not steal – and attaches punishments like banishment, hanging and fines to this prohibition. It often makes a spectacle and an example out of those it punishes. A disciplinary approach adds new mechanisms to the law: perhaps mechanisms of surveillance to deter theft, and a series of ‘corrective’ measures to reform and rehabilitate those it punishes. A third modality, which Foucault initially calls ‘a technology’, ‘techniques’ or ‘mechanisms of security’, works quite differently (Aradau, Huysmans, this volume). For it operates at the level of population, and thinks in terms of risks, averages, and political economy. It asks: How does the incidence of theft vary across jurisdictions and populations and over time? Does its incidence correlate with other data about population – for example, levels of poverty and unemployment, literacy, immigration, health – as well as the severity of punishment itself? How do rates of crime change if we act on these other variables? As the STP course develops, Foucault will redescribe these technologies of security and the kind of reflexive political epistemology they embody as ‘governmentality’. Sovereignty, discipline, governmentality – this threefold schema, which Foucault at one point likens to a triangular relationship rather than a line of evolution (Foucault 2007a, 107–8), offers a useful first attempt at giving some content to this idea of governmentality. Indeed, this is how a great many researchers have understood governmentality in their work. Yet the triangle is only helpful up to a point. No sooner does Foucault offer it in the fourth lecture (1 February 1978) than he embarks on a sweeping arc of inquiry that will significantly complicate but also deepen what he means by governmentality (Brown et al., this volume). As the STP course unfolds, he will now pursue the question of how and from where did this will to know and act on a collective, a species life, a population derive? Where do the material practices capable of governing individual and collective lives come from? The question leads him to an examination of what he calls at one point the ‘shepherd-flock game’ (Foucault 2000, 311), and more fully, pastoral power (Foucault 2007a). This move has led some scholars to observe, quite rightly in our view, that one way to read Foucault’s lectures is not as a work that presents a single definition of a kind of power called ‘governmentality’ but rather as a genealogy of modern states (Valverde 2007; Golder 2007) and an ‘analytics’ of the different forms of power that are at stake in such an exercise (Dean 2010). Seen in this light there is not a single governmentality so much as there are ‘multiple governmentalities’ (Foucault 2008,

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  3

7; Bacchi, Zhang, this volume) which one finds combining in various and sometimes contradictory ways; or, as Collier (2009) has put it, ‘topologies of power’. This genealogy, and this focus on governmentality in the plural is a rather different exercise from the project that leading Marxist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s were engaged with, namely the elaboration of a theory of the state (Miliband 1969; Poulantzas 1978). Grasping this difference is important for the purposes of understanding some of the key intellectual, methodological and political stakes with governmentality (Lemke 2007; Jessop 2007; Valverde 2007; Larner 2000; Brown 2006). Theories of the state tend to make sense of the form and the transformation of the state in terms of certain transhistorical processes and structures. For Marxism this is usually class struggles, modes of production, and their immanent contradictions. But other theories of the state were widely debated at the time Foucault was lecturing on governmentality too, including those which privileged logics of patriarchal domination, interstate rivalry, or bureaucratic rationalization. What distinguishes Foucault’s project from these theories, as well as from more recent theories of governance (Lemke 2007) and globalization, is his radically historicist commitment to analyse the exercise of power and the phenomenon of states without invoking any essence or foundation (Veyne 2010, 51–53). Just as his archaeologies had decentred the human (Foucault 1973), revealing the human as a contingent and historical effect not an origin of history, his genealogies of government would decentre the state. They do this by treating the state not as something primary but the effect of specific practices and discourses. Governmentality is, on this reading, a grid or matrix – a way to be nominalist about states, understanding them not through universal categories but by describing as empirically as possible the particular practices and discourses through which the state has been imagined and actualized. This post-foundationalism is important for understanding the appeal of analytics of governmentality today. While it would be as an analytical framework to guide empirical research into the different discourses and practices that have made the state possible that Foucault first forged this concept and gave it empirical content, his interest or use of governmentality was in no way confined to the study of states in an institutional or policy sense. Indeed, at one point Foucault stresses the necessity for ‘moving outside’ an institutional or functional perspective on power (Foucault 2007a, 116–119; Bacchi, this volume). This can be seen in at least two ways. First, in the lecture series where he engaged governmentality most extensively (Foucault 2007a, 2008), he makes clear that the discourses, technologies, and games of power that make governance in the name of, and in the form of the state possible, emerge in a variety of milieux often at some formal distance from the state – for example, at the level of the problems facing the town, church, insurance company, colonial enterprise, etc. One task of historical research is to trace the way these technologies may (or may not) get appropriated by the state. For example, how did technologies of insurance first emerge as a way of governing collective life and how did the ‘statification’ (Foucault 2008, 77) of insurance mechanisms make possible the arrangement we come to know in the twentieth century as the welfare state (Ewald 1991)?

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But there is a second sense in which governmentality is not confined to the study of states, and this is the point we wish to emphasize here. Governmentality is from its inception also and always tied to a relational view of power in which freedoms, subjectivities and conducts play a key role.3 Indeed, as a mode of exercising power, governmentality grounds on a political technology, that is as ‘the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security’ (Foucault 2007a, 48). In fact, it is in this direction that Foucault will take governmentality in his later work in the 1980s on ethics as well as on the government of self and others (Lorenzini, Golder, this volume). Governmentality, he argued in one of his last interviews, concerns ‘the relationship of the self to itself’ as well as ‘the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other’ (Foucault 1997a, 300). That is, governmentality is not only about techniques of governing (others), or about governmental rationales: it also consists of the heterogenous tactics and techniques that individuals adopt to relate to each other, and always entails some leeway of freedom and manoeuvre for resistance. As Foucault stressed in his essay ‘The subject and power’, ‘power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized’ (Foucault 1983, 221). More broadly, in his later work Foucault has notably defined ‘government’ as the possibility ‘to structure the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault 1983, 221). This definition of what ‘to govern’ means, inflects the notion of governmentality as well: indeed, governmentality makes ‘it possible to bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship to others – which constitutes the very stuff [matière] of ethics’ (Foucault 1997a, 300; translation in the original). As far as the nexus between governmentality, ethics and the possibility to resist is concerned, it should be stressed that Foucault coined the notion of governmentality at the same time that he revisited his understanding of ‘critique’ as ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ (Foucault 2007b, 75). Critique then becomes a matter of ‘the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (Foucault 2007b, 47). In this respect, we argue that it is key to take into account Foucault’s late work (1980–1984) about the art of governing. This ethical-political dimension of governmentality which he emphasizes there, grounded on the government of self and others, was actually already signalled in 1978, in Security, Territory, Population, where Foucault introduced the notion of ‘counter-conduct’ (Lecture of 1 March 1978) alongside the notion of ‘governmentality’ (Lecture of 1 February 1978). What different practices of counter-conduct had in common is the fact that ‘the struggle was not conducted in the form of absolute exteriority, but rather in the form of the permanent use of tactical elements that are pertinent in the anti-pastoral struggle to the very extent that they are part, even in a marginal way, of the general horizon of Christianity’ (Foucault 2007a, 215). In sum, one finds in Foucault’s own work not a single definition of governmentality, and certainly not a unified theory, but rather a series of distinct yet overlapping themes. These include: an account of governing at the level population through

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  5

mechanisms of security; a genealogy of the technologies of power and forms of reason that have made state governance thinkable and practicable (which ranges, in Foucault’s own studies, from the pastoral power of the Catholic Church to the neoliberalism of the Freiburg and Chicago schools of political economy); and a concern with government as ethical-political activity involving questions of conduct and counter-conduct, and in which the practice of freedom is always present. These different themes are present, albeit in different ways, in the chapters comprising this volume, as we explain in section 3 of this introduction. But first we must consider some of the ways that the social sciences have taken up questions of governmentality.

2.

TOWARDS GOVERNMENTALITY STUDIES

Let us now turn to governmentality studies, that is, the vast field of research that in a variety of ways, not all of them entirely consistent, wherein scholars have made links to, adopted or repurposed this idea. In fact, governmentality has a strange and far from linear career (Gordon et al., Golder, this volume).4 During Foucault’s own lifetime, unlike his studies of madness, prisons or sexuality, governmentality was not widely known. Indeed, the lectures where this theme is developed were not translated or published until the mid-2000s (Foucault 2007a, 2008). However, a few of these lectures had circulated already, so that by the late 1980s one could find the beginnings of commentaries and reflections about Foucault on ‘governmental rationality’ (Gordon 1987). In the English-speaking world, research inspired by or allied with governmentality would take shape in a number of ways. In the United States, and more specifically at Berkeley where he had been a visiting professor, Foucault’s interest in states, biopower and the regulation of population resonated with the work of certain anthropologists, historians and criminologists like Paul Rabinow, Arturo Escobar, Keith Gandal and Jonathan Simon (Foucault et al. 2017). In the UK, one saw the publication of The Foucault Effect (Burchell et al. 1991) which assembled studies by scholars, mostly based in Europe, working in Foucault’s orbit (Burchell, Gordon, this volume). At around the same time, there also appeared a series of influential publications by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (Miller and Rose 1990; Rose and Miller 1992) as well as Mitchell Dean (2010). If they did choose to emphasize ‘problematics of government’ (Rose and Miller), or ‘analytics of government’ (Dean), more than governmentality per se, these essays and books were nevertheless decisive in forging governmentality as a research framework facilitating the investigation of a whole range of problems, whether pertaining to state governance or the governance of various locales, lives and problems located beyond the formal boundaries of the state. These interventions proved important in stimulating the spread of governmentality across the social sciences and an understanding of governmentality as a novel analytics of power. In the work of Partha Chatterjee governmentality would take another course: in The Politics of the Governed (2004) Chatterjee engages with it, by speaking about ‘the antinomy between the homogeneous national and the heterogeneous social’ and

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stressing how ‘technologies of governmentality often predate the nation-state, especially where there has been a relatively long experience of European colonial rule’ (Chatterjee 2004, 36). While independent nation states were historically founded on popular sovereignty and produced citizens, governmental agencies, Chatterjee argues, pursue ‘multiple policies of security and welfare’ and foreground a specific political domain, that he defines ‘political society’ (Chatterjee 2004, 38). Building on Foucault’s thinking on sexuality, biopolitics and state racism (Foucault 1990, 2003), rather than governmentality, Ann Stoler also offered an early study showing how Foucault’s ideas could be extended to shed new light on the ‘colonial order of things’ (Stoler 1995). Thus, well before Foucault’s lectures were widely available, governmentality and some of its allied concepts was already being put into action in the above areas as well as on topics as diverse as crime (O’Malley 1996), self-help and empowerment (Cruikshank 1999), the regulation of refugees (Lippert 1999), imperial communication systems (Barry 1996), the invention of ‘the economy’ (Mitchell 1999), poverty and pauperism (Procacci 1991) and citizenship as a mode of regulating population on a world scale (Hindess 2000). At the same time, one sees studies which expand, challenge and rethink key concepts that had been central to Foucault’s account of government, such as territory (Elden 2013), sovereignty (Singer and Weir 2006) and population (Curtis 2002). Far from being merely the implementation of some kind of Foucauldian schema, then, governmentality studies will take shape as a field of debate and disagreement as well. It should be emphasized that these various authors and projects do not amount to a distinctive governmentality ‘school’ or even approach, even if those terms are sometimes appended. Indeed, even to speak of ‘governmentality studies’ may be questionable if that term implies anything like a discipline with boundaries and rules. For many scholars working in this area, governmentality does not represent a self-contained or self-sufficient framework where one can satisfy all one’s conceptual needs. Hence in some of the most influential works it is combined, as we have just seen, with intellectual currents from postcolonial theory. In Rose and Miller (1992), it has been connected with actor-network theory. For Didier Bigo (2008), governmentality can be profitably mixed with concepts like ‘ban’ (Nancy, Agamben) and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu) to better understand contemporary security practices. In the work of Wendy Brown, governmentality is brought into conversation with key currents in critical political theory (for example, Brown 2015) in problematizing the demos under neoliberal politics. This mixing has led some to liken governmentality to a box of tools (cf. Brown et al., this volume), indicating a pragmatic relationship rather than an intellectual empire building project. If there have been novel combinations with other theories and traditions there have also been some very notable extensions to other geographies and histories. Many have noted that Foucault’s terrain was largely European (for example, Legg 2007). Yet, by now his work has been transported to many national and regional contexts, beyond Eurocentric empirical framings (Roy, Zhang, Rojas, Samaddar, this volume)

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  7

as well as into other scales, most notably cities (Joyce 2005), but also transnational and international scapes (Jaeger, this volume). Yet, a question arises from the curious fact that the birth of governmentality studies predates the full publication of Foucault’s lectures on this theme. If the publication of these lectures came, somewhat ironically, late to the scene, what impact have they made? We think the answer to that question is provided in a number of our chapters (for example, Golder, this volume). But we think two developments in particular are worth flagging. First, there is the matter of the exploration of governmentality beyond, before (and even after – Gordon et al., this volume) liberalism and neoliberalism. It is certainly true that the analysis of neoliberalism has been perhaps the predominant focus of governmentality scholarship, and sometimes, as Barnett (2005) rightly notes, in a rather instrumental fashion. Hence it is important that, encountering the themes of pastoralism, raison d’état, police, mercantilism, along with ideas like state racism and biopolitics in earlier lectures, scholars have found inspiration and provocation to explore these and related modes of power, often as sui generis forms and not merely footnotes or prehistories to (neo)liberalism. For example, the idea of pastoral power has been rethought and embedded in political economy to illuminate historical practices of colonial governance through the Catholic Church in Quebec (Curtis 2017) and the modes of subjugation of Indigenous people on Canada’s west coast (Blake 1999). Second, there is the notion of counter-conduct, which we already mentioned above. This is, in fact, key for understanding the ethical-political dimensions of governmentality. Indeed, while Foucault has been criticized for not giving enough space in his work to resistances in his analysis of prisons and disciplinary power, the notion of counter-conduct links up interrogations on governmentality to questions about the immanence of resistances and to ethics (Death 2010; Lorenzini, Weiskopf, Golder, this volume). More precisely, counter-conduct points to non-juridical forms of resistance and political subjectivities, that is to modes of tactical appropriation and refusal that are not framed through the terms of the law, nor addressed to it. In fact, through the lens of counter-conduct, governmentality illuminates practices of resistance that are not deemed to be political when analysed through the grid of sovereign power. The analytics of governmentality enables undoing what in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990) Foucault has defined as ‘repressive hypothesis’ according to which power mainly works through repression and interdictions and, thus, resistance is essentially conceived as refusal. Indeed, governmentality and counter-conducts foreground, respectively, the productivity of power relations and the tactical immanence and the inventiveness of resistances. There is one final point we should emphasize when discussing the question of governmentality studies. It is about the need to see it alongside other uses of Foucault’s ideas. In the last decade or so, governmentality studies has unfolded alongside another Foucauldian-inspired literature, this one centred on the idea of biopolitics and biopower, and expanding into debates about the powers of life and death, or what Mbembe (2003) terms necropolitics. Biopolitics has proved especially important

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for scholars working on themes of biomedicine (Rose and Novas 2005; Inda 2016), as well as areas like borders, migration, terrorism and war (Dillon and Reid, 2009; Tazzioli 2019; Stierl, this volume). The explosion of interest in biopolitics has been catalysed by a number of factors. At the level of intellectual debate, an important event was the publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which linked biopolitics to debates about globalization, and the emergence of new social movements. A focus on biopolitics has proved important because the questions of life and death, violence and subjugation it foregrounds were not always adequately addressed in governmentality studies (Dean 2002), especially whenever the latter focuses too exclusively on the more irenic themes of managerialism and technocracy under liberalism. It is in fact through the lens of biopolitics and debates around biopolitical and necropolitical power that some scholars have discussed the racialized borders that shape and differentiate subjects (Browne 2015; Weheliye 2014). In a similar vein, biopolitics has probably been more successful at connecting analyses of power to analyses of struggles and collective movements. In this volume most of our contributors do not regard biopolitics as a separate realm from governmentality so much as a complementary viewpoint, albeit one that makes certain aspects of power more visible than others. Indeed, in the wider literature, a number of scholars illustrate why it is useful to combine analytics of governmentality and biopolitics (Lemm and Vatter 2014). For instance, Stephen Elbe has analysed the securitization of HIV/AIDS as part of a ‘biopolitical rationality’ predicated on risk, conceiving this latter in the frame of governmentality more than sovereign power (Elbe 2008; see also Inda, this volume). Similarly, scholars have mobilized the analytics of governmentality to critically investigate and challenge the nexus between immigration and criminality: the criminalization of migration is in fact part of a racialized biopolitics (Hirschler, 2021). Having contextualized governmentality within Foucault’s own research, and sketched some of the ways it has been developed in the social sciences, we turn now to the specific contributions of this Handbook.

3. THE HANDBOOK The handbook form has truly multiplied across the publishing landscape of the social sciences in recent years. From ‘air power’ to ‘zen, mindfulness and mental health’, it seems there is a handbook for nearly every topic. It could be said, therefore, that in connecting governmentality to the world of the handbook we run the risk of further institutionalizing and possibly overvaluing a mode of inquiry that, for Foucault at least, began as a ‘little experiment’ (Foucault 2007a, 358; Collier 2009; Neal 2009; Bacchi, this volume). Nevertheless, it is a risk we do not shy from with this edited collection. This is because, in terms that might echo the kind of utilitarianism of the social reformers and political economists that fascinated Foucault, we deem the benefits to far outweigh these and other costs. One of these benefits is certainly the opportunity to take stock of this critical innovation in social and political thought,

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  9

and to do so on a scale that is not possible within the framework of a review essay or even a standard edited volume. The Handbook allows us to gather the work of thirty scholars working in diverse disciplines, problem areas, research cultures, and political traditions yet connected by a shared interest in themes of government. But while taking stock is properly a task of any decent handbook, so is the advancement of understanding and the exploration of new issues, methods, and debates. This is a second objective here. Third, we think the Handbook is a worthwhile undertaking for reasons of academic space claiming. While governmentality has flourished to the point of becoming part of the critical mainstream in some fields (for example, cultural studies and political geography), in others it is lacking in disciplinary recognition (or subject to significant misrecognition). We hope that this Handbook will bolster an appreciation for governmentality as a critical method for undertaking research, and allay the suspicion that it is somewhat exotic or a ‘postmodern’ diversion. Of course, we would also like the Handbook to prove valuable beyond the narrow and sometimes parochial struggles of the academy. We hope that the ideas gathered here will resonate with the kinds of struggles that are their subject matter. Critical research grows out of these struggles and should also prove capable of feeding back into them, even if those lines of connection might be fuzzy and anything but direct. In what follows we introduce the five sections that make up this Handbook, explaining their logic and the contribution of each chapter. It’s worth emphasizing at the outset that a handbook is not an encyclopaedia. Hence, the interpretations, themes and debates we present here cannot possibly represent an exhaustive mapping of this vast field. Nevertheless, we do hope that the range of scholars, approaches and topics we have collected do justice to thirty years of thinking with, and against governmentality. Part I. Governmentality: Genesis, Encounter, Transformation We begin the Handbook with a set of essays that explore the origins, context and meaning of governmentality within Foucault’s thought, trace some of the lines of transformation and expansion of this idea into a collective and interdisciplinary research programme, and examine the way it has interacted with certain fields within the social sciences. This first part of the book opens with Daniele Lorenzini’s chapter, ‘Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self’. Importantly, Lorenzini places Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in a conversation with his previous work on biopolitical power and discipline, but also with his later thinking on ethics and techniques of the self. Rather than seeing governmentality as a radical break in Foucault’s thinking, Lorenzini emphasizes continuities in terms of the ethics and politics arising from the government of human beings’ life. But crucial for the purposes of this Handbook, he also illuminates its significance as an analytics of power. Indeed, characterizing Foucault’s approach as an ‘analytico-political philosophy’, Lorenzini explains that it is not a matter of making claims about power in general but how to make sense of the multiplicity of power relations in an open-ended way. Lorenzini reads Foucault in terms of a ‘Austinian-Wittgensteinian’ move that brings

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political theory ‘back to the ordinary’, tasking it with describing and analysing the way ‘everyday’ games of power operate, how they shape individual and collective lives. Our second chapter shifts focus momentarily from arts of government to questions of sovereignty. As we noted above, governmentality is often understood through a juxtaposition with sovereign power (Foucault 2007a). While this move does considerable explanatory work, it often leads to a situation in which sovereignty gets flattened and only engaged as a foil for developing an analytics of governmental power. Elden’s chapter helps to counteract any simplification of sovereignty (see also Singer and Weir 2006; Valverde 2007; Dean 2013). Continuing our theme of genesis and encounter, Elden explores how Foucault’s relationship with the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil significantly shaped his thinking about sovereignty. In addition to enriching knowledge about the intellectual milieu of Foucault’s work, Elden’s inquiry is also valuable for the purposes of an analytics of sovereignty. From Dumézil Foucault takes the idea of two conjoined faces: sovereignty as yoke or bind but at the same time something magical that dazzles and petrifies. Clarifying these two faces of sovereignty, Elden allows us to see sovereignty as no less complex and multiple than governmentality. We then move to a group of essays whose concern is the development of governmentality after Foucault. In her chapter ‘Governmentalizing “policy studies”’, Carol Bacchi traces some of the respects in which the emergence of governmentality studies, and especially the kind of analytics of power which Lorenzini (this volume) highlights, allows us to approach policy studies in ways that refuse to essentialize the state or other entities. Whether by allowing us to shift attention from problems to problematizations – the processes and conditions by which problems are constituted in particular ways – or by decentring objects, subjects and places, she shows that governmentality studies opens up new ways of doing policy and comparative politics research. Hans-Martin Jaeger interrogates the encounter between governmentality studies and another branch of political science, international relations (IR). In an impressively far-reaching survey of scholarship that takes up governmentality in this field, he takes stock of accomplishments, while noting certain methodological, empirical and conceptual challenges. In particular, he identifies how recent work in intellectual history examining imperialist ideologies can be brought into a fruitful conversation with genealogies of international politics, and suggests that this move can improve understanding of ‘the constitutive significance of coloniality and race for international governmentality’. There are two kinds of encounter at stake in Ranabir Samaddar’s contribution, ‘Towards a postcolonial theory of crisis, neoliberal government, and biopolitics from below’. The first is about making sense of modes of government not in the European and North American contexts that Foucault and a great deal of governmentality studies have empirically privileged, but in postcolonial democracies like India, where the biopolitics of population can look rather different. It is to illuminate these differences, and especially how they manifest in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, that

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  11

Samaddar speaks of a ‘biopolitics from below’. The second encounter is between a Foucauldian analytics of government and Marxian political economy, a connection that allows Samaddar to inject much needed concerns with questions of wage labour, logistics, and class struggle into debates about governmental power. Part II. Talking Governmentality We want this Handbook to be innovative not just in the way it approaches the study of power and government but in its format. For this reason, in Part II we depart from the usual convention of handbooks and feature a set of interviews and conversations with leading scholars in the field. This move enables us to canvass a wider range of topics than the essay form usually affords. It also allows us to explore difference and disagreement amongst thinkers, which is vital for the purposes of treating governmentality not as a fixed or settled topic but a forum of lively debate and contention. The section begins with ‘Governmentality in conversation’. Here we pose a series of questions to Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee and Nikolas Rose, three of the most original and creative thinkers to engage with governmentality. They each approach governmentality in a very distinctive way. This conversation touches on numerous issues such as the biopolitics of COVID-19, populist politics in the Global North and South, the meaning and significance of neoliberalism, and the distinctiveness of Foucault’s concepts and methods and their relevance to our present. The second contribution to this section features Colin Gordon, a scholar who has been absolutely pivotal to the reception of the work of Foucault in the English-speaking world and the emergence of governmentality as a trajectory for critical research. In an interview that he subsequently enriched with extensive references and further thoughts Gordon reflects on a range of topics which includes the beginnings of governmentality studies, the case for doing not only genealogies of government but also genealogies of politics, and whether governmentality remains a productive and relevant frame of analysis in a time of post-truth politics and rampant kleptocracy – or, as he puts it borrowing the language of the great Sienese painter Lorenzetti, malgoverno. Our final chapter in this section is an interview with Graham Burchell. An early interlocutor of Foucault and governmentality, as well as English translator of many of Foucault’s most influential lecture series, Burchell’s reflections will prove fascinating for scholars of Foucault. The early reception of Foucault in the English-speaking world as well as in Italy (where Burchell lives), the pleasures, challenges and techniques of translating Foucault, and the usefulness of Foucault for thinking about truth in politics – these are just some of the topics broached in this lively discussion. Part III. Government and its Problems Problems – or more specifically, problematizations (see Foucault 1997b; Bacchi, this volume) – are especially important for governmentality studies. Rather than institutionalized policy fields, global processes, or the play of actors and their interests,

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problems are very often the starting point, the milieu in which scholars have undertaken studies of government, exploring the forms of reason which invest governing, the technologies on which it draws, and the subjectivities it invokes and elicits. Accordingly, Part III is structured by a concern with problems and problematizations, past and present. The section begins with Lovering, Dutta and Knafo’s chapter on ‘The neoliberal welfare state’. The very title is provocative, and in the eyes of those who would define neoliberalism through its opposition to welfare state logics and principles, perhaps even oxymoronic. But it is by tracing the genealogy of the managerial practices, which were mobilized to address the problems of mature welfare states, that these authors explain how the idea of a neoliberal welfare state makes sense. Arguing in the case of the UK that the origins of these managerial practices can be found less in neoliberal theory and more in planning innovations in the US defence sector in the 1950s and 1960s, Lovering and his colleagues challenge the way governmentality studies and critical political economy have often approached neoliberalism. They offer compelling evidence that studies of government should be more attuned to the eclecticism and hybridity of regimes of power (see also Collier 2009; Stierl, Zhang, this volume). We then turn to the question of security. In his chapter, ‘Governmentality and security: governing life-in-motion’, Jeff Huysmans begins by clarifying how governmentality offers a different understanding of security than we usually get from international relations (including the constructivist and speech-act grounded literatures on securitization). Huysmans explains that governmentality approaches to security are distinctive in foregrounding technical practices, professionals and forms of expert knowledge, and mapping contingent constellations of these elements empirically, concretely and analytically. He emphasizes that their focus is usually the management of risks and populations rather than the defence of a people or territory from an external threat. But he also advances theory in this area by showing how we can connect this way of thinking about security to the theme he calls ‘life-in-motion’. As such he identifies potential new conversations between governmentality and the mobilities ‘turn’ across the social sciences. Questions of security are frequently shadowed by issues of secrecy. Susanne Krasmann explores this connection and, given that questions of secrecy have rarely been pursued within governmentality studies, makes a timely intervention. This she does by bringing Simmel’s sociology of secrecy into conversation with Foucault. If governmental apparatuses are also regimes of truth (Lorenzini, this volume) then Krasmann reminds us that practices of secrecy and disclosure are some of modernity’s most privileged and affectively charged ways of producing truth effects. Ben Golder’s chapter does not address a specific problem site so much as the discourse and practice of rights that has come to operate transversally across a whole range of sites, including struggles over sexuality, welfare, mobility, health, and so on. Noting the way in which Foucault’s own political praxis opened towards rights in his later years, Golder shows that the themes of conduct and counter-conduct help us understand connections between governmentality, politics and subjectivity. As

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  13

such, his chapter also offers a bridge to our final section on governmentality and contestation. We then feature several chapters that engage with very contemporary problems and mutations in government. Claudia Aradau’s focus is algorithmic governmentality which she understands as a particular ‘diagnosis’ of our present wherein ‘words, actions and gestures are rendered into actionable data’. Her chapter is notable not just as a contribution to making sense of the difference which algorithmic logics and practices are making, but also for her insights on methods. Borrowing from science and technology studies, she argues that a focus on controversies is a fruitful way to approach emergent, technopolitical situations, and illustrates this point by following algorithmic governmentality into certain areas of migration control. There are certainly affinities between algorithmic governmentality and what Brett Neilson in his contribution calls logistical power. Yet he proposes this latter term to underline that the advent of logistical technologies and digital practices cannot be adequately captured by Foucault’s concepts of sovereign, disciplinary or governmental power (see also Isin and Ruppert 2020). He also calls for greater dialogue with Marx’s political economy if we are to understand how logistical power articulates with processes of commodification, circulation and labour control (see also Samaddar, this volume). This section concludes with Leonardi and Pellizzoni’s chapter on ‘Governmentality and political ecology’. These authors ask what an analytics of governmentality offers to our understanding of perhaps the foremost problem facing humanity today, namely the ecological crisis. As with many of our chapters, these authors insist it is not sufficient to use governmentality as a ready-made set of tools to analyse transformation in power and novel political challenges. To keep politics and struggle in the frame, they combine governmentality with the tradition of political ecology, and proceed to interrogate the Anthropocene and the green economy – the foremost discourses at play in ongoing attempts to manage climate change. Part IV. Governmentality across Nations and Other Political Formations While governmentality is sometimes used by researchers as a catchall term, or, as Bevir (2010) notes, awkwardly grafted onto structuralist theories of power, Foucault was usually careful to eventalize his analyses of different governmental knowledges and technologies, locating their emergence in definite times, places and problem spaces (Foucault 1991). For example, he reminds us that raison d’état is ‘born in Italy’ where it was ‘formulated on the basis of specific problems of the relations between small Italian states’, though it will subsequently disperse, becoming a ‘fundamental category of thought for all European states’ (Foucault 2007a, 292). Much the same can be said for his genealogy of neoliberalism: we are given not a general theory articulated around macroprocesses but rather a careful analysis of certain developments in governmental reason located within certain expert networks in Germany and the United States at the middle of the twentieth century. In this Handbook we seek to foster this eventalized, genealogical, and, one might say,

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comparative approach to governmentality. Hence, this section of the Handbook comprises a set of chapters examining governmental arts and innovations across nations and other political formations. Jonathan Inda opens this section with a chapter that examines ‘racialized medicine’ in the United States. A careful analysis of the way in which particular medicines have been developed and marketed based on the idea that particular populations are genetically and biologically different, his work offers readers a glimpse of the fruitful dialogue studies of governmentality can have with scholarship on race and racialization. It also offers a nuanced account that understands neoliberalism not as a general process or ideology but a very heterogeneous ensemble that, in this case, combines pharmaceutical markets, biopolitical struggles, categories of population, risk management, and other practices in particular ways. If racialized medicine represents a particular governmental strategy that has gained momentum in the US, Miriam Ticktin examines another form of governmentality that also manifests a pronounced biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the case of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), she traces a form of humanitarianism that was born in France only to become a ‘transnational governmentality’. She also shows how this specific experience of humanitarianism has generated new practices of resistance – social movements that refuse the particular forms of authority humanitarianism imposes on them in the name of care, movements that struggle to create other forms of coexistence. Maurice Stierl uses governmentality to make sense of the governance of borders and migration in ‘EUrope’. As a mode of analysis that is not founded on a centred or essential concept of the state, he shows governmentality is also well suited to researching emergent political arrangements like EUrope where borders have become ‘decoupled’ from ‘nominal sovereign spaces’. Crucially, he also calls governmentality studies to task for overlooking regimes of violence. He insists one cannot study European borders today without an account of the way racism and necropolitics mediate practices of letting die or abandoning (see also Tazzioli 2015). Our final chapter in this section contributes to recent moves to understand governmentality in South-East Asian countries (see Legg and Heath 2018). As a global superpower and a state whose sovereignty encompasses at least a fifth of the world’s population, China certainly merits further scrutiny at the level of its specific forms of political rationality, arts of governing, and forms of political subjectivity. These themes are all addressed by Chenchen Zhang’s chapter, ‘Hukou and Suzhi as technologies of governing citizenship and migration in China’. Based on a careful reading of recent reforms to practices of population control and ideas of citizenship, Zhang argues we are witnessing not the simple unfolding of neoliberalism so much as ‘modernization’ and ‘socialist-neoliberal hybrid governmentalities’ in China today. Part V. Governmentality and Contestation The final part of this Handbook grapples with questions of contestation. While themes of opposition, resistance, refusal, dissidence and struggle appear in many

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  15

of our chapters, in this final part they are given centre stage. We deem this specific focus a necessary and important move in order to counter the misrecognition of governmentality as another top-down theory of power or form of analysis dominated by managerialism and technocracy. Srila Roy takes up the theme of counter-conduct that Foucault first sketches in his lectures on governmentality (see also Lorenzini, Golder, this volume). Connecting this concept with an ethnography of women development workers involved with NGOs in rural West Bengal, she shows that counter-conduct offers a way to challenge binaries of resistance versus co-option, binaries that appear in certain debates about ‘neoliberal feminism’. As she puts it, a focus on care of the self shows that in the lives of these women some norms associated with neoliberalism get disrupted at the same time that others might be strengthened. Our next chapter looks at one specific form of counter conduct, the practice of parrhēsia, or fearless speech. Richard Weiskopf uses this concept, which Foucault adapted from antiquity, to make sense of contemporary practices of whistleblowing within corporate and political life. Weiskopf rejects a view of parrhēsia that accords it a definite politics in favour of a perspective that locates it in strategic games of power. He also shows that parrhēsia takes new forms when it occurs in contemporary, mass-mediated societies. One of the most interesting of these is the way that prominent parrhēsiasts like Edward Snowden can become ‘ghosts’ who haunt politics – driven into exile and absence by vengeful political authorities they become very present and even ubiquitous across our communication systems. We then move to a chapter by Cristina Rojas that, in its use of history, departs from and in fact challenges the tendency of governmentality research to focus almost exclusively on contemporary issues (see Gordon, this volume). Engaging with the struggles of formerly enslaved people (libres) in Cauca (in today’s Colombia) in the nineteenth century, Rojas demonstrates the limits of some of governmentality’s core concepts like population and territory. Building on decolonial scholarship, she examines the modes of ‘territoriality’ which these libres enacted, forms of life that are radically other to the divisions and distributions naturalized by liberal governmentality. As such, she shows that a focus on struggle can have ‘onto-epistemic’ as well as political and methodological significance. In the final chapter in this section, and indeed this Handbook, Clara Lecadet proposes the idea of insurgent politics to inject questions of political subjectivity and struggle into studies in the governmentality of migration and borders. Finding that the latter all too frequently dwell on the perspective of governmental authorities, insurgent politics is sensitive to the various ways that people facing exile, deportation, displacement or life without formal status, forge themselves as political actors. Crucially, she shows that these oft-neglected struggles actually shape the hegemonic institutions of migration governmentality. It might be objected that Foucault has never properly expanded on collective political struggles and in his late work in particular, he has mainly drawn attention to individual practices of resistance. The contribution of Lecadet, like that of Stierl, Ticktin, Rojas, and several others in this

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Handbook, is significant for foregrounding questions of collective struggle and their relationship to governmentality. Ultimately, we should not forget that Foucault’s interrogation of governmentality was framed in light of the ethical-political question of establishing ‘the art of not being governed quite so much?’ (Foucault 2007b, 45). This is how he put it in ‘What is Critique?’ (Foucault 2007b), delivered in 1978, the same year as ‘Security, Territory, Population’. That is, an accurate engagement with the notion of governmentality cannot disregard the ethical-political orientation that has informed Foucault’s intellectual trajectory and explorations about the arts of governing. While the chapters and sections that make up this Handbook traverse many different themes, topics, world regions, pasts and presents, the vast majority of them share in this need to call our norms and forms of government into question, and attune us to the search for different, better ways of governing selves, others, populations as well as emergent collectivities that may, as yet, have no name.

NOTES 1. As Lemke (2007, 44) has pointed out, the word itself had already been used in the 1950s by Foucault’s contemporary, Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies. For Barthes, governmentality named an ideological operation whereby the government, through its own public relations activity as well as the mediation of the press, comes to be seen as a unified cause and origin of social outcomes (Barthes 2012, 241). Barthes gives the example of the falling price of fruit which a particular government is keen to take credit for (whereas, in fact, the shift in prices may be due to seasonal movements in the market). Of course, governmentality in this sense also works the other way around: blaming the government for everything that goes wrong! What Barthes’ brief mention of governmentality, and Foucault’s much more extensive engagement share is a critique of the move that essentializes and overstates the power and efficacy of the state (or indeed any single actor). 2. There has emerged in the last decade a wealth of commentary examining Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and asking how this research relates to his wider field of interests, including questions of genealogy, archaeology, law, discipline, biopower, microphysics, and subjectivities. See, inter alia, Gane 2018; Patton 2013; Lemke 2019; Elden 2016; Bröckling et al. 2011; Valverde 2007; Lorenzini 2016; Brown 2006. 3. It is worth noting how the language Foucault uses to analyse power relations shifts with his turn to governmentality. In his earlier work on the disciplines, he employs terms like microphysics whereas with governmentality he privileges ideas of conduct, conduct of conduct, and counter conduct (Gordon 1991). This language of conducts opens space for considerations of ethics and subjectivity within power relations whereas metaphors of physics suggest a more mechanical imaginary of power. 4. Our aim in this introduction is not to present an exhaustive survey of governmentality studies so much as indicate some important lines and areas of development and give some context for the essays gathered in this Handbook. For accounts of governmentality that go into much greater detail see, inter alia, Rose et al. 2006; Bröckling et al. 2011; Rose 1999; Donzelot and Gordon 2008; Busse 2021; Bevir 2018; Dean 2010; Walters 2012.

Introduction to the Handbook on governmentality  17

REFERENCES Barnett, Clive (2005), ‘The consolations of “neoliberalism”’, Geoforum 36, 7–12. Barry, Andrew (1996), ‘Lines of communication and spaces of rule’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism, and rationalities of government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 123–142. Barthes, Roland (2012), Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang. Bevir, Mark (2010), ‘Rethinking governmentality: Towards genealogies of governance’, European Journal of Social Theory 13(4), 423–441. Bevir, Mark (2018), Governmentality after neoliberalism, New York: Routledge. Bigo, Didier (2008), ‘Globalized (in)security: The field and the ban-opticon’, in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds), Terror, insecurity and liberty: Illiberal practices of liberal regimes after 9/11, London: Routledge, pp. 10–49. Blake, Lynn (1999), ‘Pastoral power, governmentality and cultures of order in nineteenth-century British Columbia’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, 79–93. Bröckling, Ulrich, Krasmann, Susanne and Lemke, Thomas (2011), ‘From Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France to studies of governmentality: An introduction’, in Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current issues and future challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–33. Brown, Wendy (2006), ‘Power after Foucault’, in John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips (eds), The Oxford handbook of political theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–84. Brown, Wendy (2015), Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution, New York: Zone Books. Browne, Simone (2015), Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter (eds) (1991), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Busse, Jan (ed.) (2021), The globality of governmentality: Governing an entangled world, New York: Routledge. Chatterjee, Partha (2004), The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world, New York: Columbia University Press. Collier, Stephen (2009), ‘Topologies of power: Foucault’s analysis of political government beyond “governmentality”’, Theory, Culture & Society 26, 78–108. Cruikshank, Barbara (1999), The will to empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Curtis, Bruce (2002). ‘Foucault on governmentality and population: The impossible discovery’, Canadian Journal of Sociology 27(4), 505–533. Curtis, Bruce (2017), ‘Pastoral power, sovereignty and class: Church, tithe and simony in Quebec’, Critical Research on Religion 5(2), 151–169. Dean, Mitchell (2002), ‘Powers of life and death beyond governmentality’, Cultural Values 6(1–2), 119–138. Dean, Mitchell (2010), Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society, 2nd edition, London: Sage. Dean, Mitchell (2013), The signature of power: Sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics, London: Sage. Death, Carl (2010), ‘Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian analytics of protest’, Social Movement Studies 9(3), 235–251. Dillon, Michael and Reid, Julian (2009), The liberal way of war: Killing to make life live, London: Routledge. Donzelot, Jacques and Gordon, Colin (2008), ‘Governing liberal societies: The Foucault effect in the English-speaking world’, Foucault Studies 5, 48–62.

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Elbe, Stefan (2008), ‘Risking lives: AIDS, security and three concepts of risk’, Security Dialogue 39(2–3), 177–198. Elden, Stuart (2013), The birth of territory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elden, Stuart (2016), Foucault’s last decade, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ewald, François (1991), ‘Insurance and risk’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 197–210. Foucault, Michel (1973), The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences, New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1983), ‘The subject and power’, in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 208–226. Foucault, Michel (1990), The history of sexuality. Volume 1: An introduction, New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel (1991), ‘Questions of method’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73–86. Foucault, Michel (1997a), ‘The ethics of the concern for self as practice of freedom’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity and truth, New York: New Press, pp. 281–301. Foucault, Michel (1997b), ‘Polemics, politics and problematizations’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity and truth, New York: New Press, pp. 109–119. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘“Omnes et singulatim”: Toward a critique of political reason’, in James Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power, New York: New Press, pp. 298–325. Foucault, Michel (2003), Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2007a), Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2007b), ‘What is critique?’, in Sylvère Lotringer and Michel Foucault (eds), The politics of truth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 41–82. Foucault, Michel (2008), The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel, Simon, Jonathan and Elden, Stuart (2017), ‘Danger, crime and rights: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon’, Theory, Culture & Society 34(1), 3–27. Gane, Mike (2018), ‘The new Foucault effect’, Cultural Politics 14(1), 109–127. Golder, Ben (2007), ‘Foucault and the genealogy of pastoral power’, Radical Philosophy 10(2), 157–176. Gordon, Colin (1987), ‘The soul of the citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on rationality and government’, in Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (eds), Max Weber, rationality and modernity, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 293–316. Gordon, Colin (1991), ‘Governmental rationality: An introduction’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–51. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hindess, Barry (2000), ‘Citizenship in the international management of population’, American Behavioral Scientist 43(9), 1486–1497. Hirschler, Steven A. (2021), Hostile homes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Inda, Jonathan X. (2016), Racial prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, difference, and the politics of life, New York: Routledge.

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Isin, Engin and Ruppert, Evelyn (2020), ‘The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible’, Big Data & Society 7(2). Jessop, Bob (2007), ‘From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power’, Political Geography 26, 34–40. Joyce, Patrick (2005), The rule of freedom, London: Verso. Larner, Wendy (2000), ‘Neoliberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality’, Studies in Political Economy 63, 5–25. Legg, Stephen (2007), ‘Beyond the European province: Foucault and postcolonialism’, in Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds), Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 265–289. Legg, Stephen and Heath, Deana (eds) (2018), South Asian governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the question of postcolonial orderings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemke, Thomas (2007), ‘An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15, 43–65. Lemke, Thomas (2019), Foucault’s analysis of modern governmentality: A critique of political reason, London: Verso Books. Lemm, Vanessa and Vatter, Miguel (eds) (2014), The government of life: Foucault, biopolitics, and neoliberalism, New York: Fordham University Press. Lippert, Randy (1999), ‘Governing refugees: The relevance of governmentality to understanding the international refugee regime’, Alternatives 24, 295–328. Lorenzini, Daniele (2016), ‘From counter-conduct to critical attitude: Michel Foucault and the art of not being governed quite so much’, Foucault Studies 21, 7–21. Mbembe, Achille (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15(1), 11–40. Miliband, Ralph (1969), The state in capitalist society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Miller, Peter and Rose, Nikolas (1990), ‘Governing economic life’, Economy and Society 19(1), 1–31. Mitchell, Timothy (1999), ‘Society, economy, and the state effect’, in George Steinmetz (ed.), State/culture: State-formation after the cultural turn, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 76–97. Neal, Andrew (2009), ‘Rethinking Foucault in international relations: Promiscuity and unfaithfulness’, Global Society 23(4), 539–543. O’Malley, Pat (1996), ‘Risk and responsibility’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism, and rationalities of government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 189–208. Patton, Paul (2013), ‘From resistance to government,’ in Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (eds), A companion to Foucault, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 172–188. Poulantzas, Nicos (1978), State, power, socialism, London: New Left Books. Procacci, Giovanna (1991), ‘Social economy and the government of poverty’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 151–168. Rose, Nikolas (1999), Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas and Miller, Peter (1992), ‘Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government’, British Journal of Sociology 43(2), 172–205. Rose, Nikolas and Novas, Carlos (2005), ‘Biological citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (eds), Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 439–463. Rose, Nikolas, O’Malley, Pat and Valverde, Mariana (2006), ‘Governmentality’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2(5), 1–22. Singer, Brian and Weir, Lorna (2006), ‘Politics and sovereign power: Considerations on Foucault’, European Journal of Social Theory 9(4), 443–465.

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Stoler, Ann (1995), Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tazzioli, Martina (2015), Spaces of governmentality: Autonomous migration and the Arab uprisings. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Tazzioli, Martina (2019), The making of migration: The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders, London: Sage. Valverde, Mariana (2007), ‘Genealogies of European states’, Economy and Society 36(1), 159–178. Veyne, Paul (2010), Foucault, his thought, his character, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Walters, William (2012), Governmentality: Critical encounters, New York: Routledge. Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014), Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

PART I GOVERNMENTALITY: GENESIS, ENCOUNTER, TRANSFORMATION

1. Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self Daniele Lorenzini

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I retrace the emergence of the notion of governmentality in Michel Foucault’s work as both a way of prolonging his previous analyses of disciplinary and biopolitical power, and as a necessary condition for the development of his reflections on ‘ethics’ and the techniques of the self. First, I show that the anatomoand biopolitical mechanisms of power that Foucault explores in the 1970s have a common goal: the government of human beings’ (everyday) life in its multiple, interconnected dimensions (section 2). I then argue that Foucault elaborates the notion of governmentality as a response to the objection according to which his power/knowledge framework makes any attempt at resistance ultimately pointless. His genealogy of the government of human beings emphasizes that the point of articulation and clash between power and resistance is to be situated at the level of what he calls ‘subjectivity,’ thus establishing a direct link between politics and ethics (section 3). Indeed, defined as the contact point between coercion-technologies and self-technologies, subjectivity constitutes for Foucault both the main target of governmental mechanisms of power and the essential support for the enactment of counter-conducts and practices of freedom (section 4). This, I argue, helps to explain the distinctively ‘anarchaeological’ (Foucault 2014, 78–79)1 flair of Foucault’s lectures and writings post-1978: the study of governmentality goes hand in hand with the postulate of the non-necessity of all power, and hence with the ever-present possibility of critique and resistance. The political relevance of Foucault’s so-called ‘turn to ethics,’ I claim, can only be understood in this light, since governmentality for him ultimately implies the relationship of self to self (section 5).

2.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF GOVERNMENTALITY

To situate the emergence of the notion of governmentality in Foucault’s thought, I suggest that we take a step back and trace a brief archaeology of Foucault’s own discourse on power, or better, of his analysis of power/knowledge mechanisms from the 1970s. My aim is to show that the notion of governmentality does not indicate a further modality of power, distinct from what Foucault calls disciplinary power 22

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and biopower; on the contrary, it encompasses both disciplinary and biopolitical technologies of power, while allowing Foucault to more clearly explore the strategies of resistance that have been and can be opposed to them. As is well known, one of the main features of Foucault’s analytics of power consists of the critique of what he calls ‘sovereign power.’ This critique takes different forms – the first and most famous of which is organized around the contrast between the ‘macrophysics of sovereignty’ and the ‘microphysics of disciplinary power’ (2006, 27). Disciplinary power, Foucault argues, aims ‘to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behavior’ in order to obtain ‘productive service from individuals in their concrete lives’ (1980, 125). Foucault famously explores this modality of power in his 1973–1974 lecture course at the Collège de France, Psychiatric Power (2006), as well as in Discipline and Punish (1977), against the background, respectively, of the history of psychiatry and the emergence of the prison in the nineteenth century.2 Foucault’s aim when analyzing the emergence and development of disciplinary power in modern society is not, however, to construe it as the archetype of all modalities of modern power. In other words, his goal is not to replace the Sovereign-Law paradigm with another paradigm which would play an analogous role in political theory – the role of a universal principle of explanation. Foucault’s genealogical inquiries from the 1970s are rather intended as a remedy for our theoretical and historical ‘blindness’: they make us see power and resistance in a different light by addressing the multiplicity of power relations that innervate the daily life of individuals and that political theory has generally failed to consider. In 1978, a few months after coining the notion of governmentality, Foucault characterizes this move as a Wittgensteinian-Austinian one: much as ordinary language philosophers carry out ‘a critical analysis of thought on the basis of the way one says things,’ Foucault conceives of his own work as an ‘analytico-political philosophy,’ that is, ‘a philosophy that would have as its task the analysis of what ordinarily happens in power relations, a philosophy that would seek to show what these relations of power are about, what their forms, stakes, and objectives are’ (2018, 192–193). Foucault thus brings political theory back to the ordinary3 focusing on the analysis of everyday power relations, on the concrete exercise of power and ordinary strategies of resistance. This reorientation or ‘conversion’ of our gaze toward the ways in which power and resistance ordinarily work and shape individual lives constitutes the common thread that unifies the different aspects of Foucault’s analytics of power – from his analyses of disciplines and biopower to the introduction of the notion of governmentality. It is also, I argue, what allows us to understand his much debated (and misunderstood) ‘turn to ethics,’ which is all but a turn away from politics, as I will show. In his analysis of disciplinary power, Foucault argues that the latter, through a daily ‘penalization of existence’ (2015a, 193), exerts ‘a total hold, or, at any rate, tends to be an exhaustive capture of the individual’s body, actions, time, and behavior’ (2006, 46). By ‘capturing’ the body and life of the individual, disciplinary power is doubly productive: it not only fabricates subjected bodies, but its ‘punitive and continuous action on potential behavior’ also projects, ‘behind the body itself, […] something

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like a psyche’ (ibid., 52). In other words, disciplinary power produces individuals by attaching the ‘subject-function’ to a somatic singularity (ibid., 55), thus creating the ‘soul’ as the effect and instrument of its own exercise – ‘the soul, prison of the body’ (1977, 30). The upshot of this new way of conceiving of the functioning of power is that the individual can no longer be thought of as a trans-historical constant; instead, it becomes the ‘historical correlative’ of a set of power mechanisms and, as we shall see, of techniques of the self (2016, 76). There is thus no point for Foucault ‘in wanting to dismantle hierarchies, constraints, and prohibitions so that the individual can appear, as if the individual was something existing beneath all relationships of power, preexisting relationships of power, and unduly weighed down by them’ (ibid., 56). The individual is both an effect of power and its relay: ‘power passes through the individual it has constituted’ (2003b, 30). Disciplinary power relies on three main strategies to produce subjugated subjects: a generalized and constant surveillance (police, archives, panopticism); a discipline of life, time, energies (isolation, grouping, and localization of bodies to obtain an optimal use of forces); and a normalization of individuals (definition of the ‘normal,’ exclusion of the ‘abnormal,’ corrective interventions). These three dimensions of disciplinary power, even in their specificity, have a common target and ‘point of application’: the life of human beings. ‘Life’ here should not be conceived as an abstract entity or philosophical concept, however, nor as pure and simple biological existence or ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), but as the complex, material combination of all the qualifiable dimensions of human existence: biological, of course, but also social, cultural, ethical, and political.4 In short, what the ancients called bios: ‘When the Greeks speak of bios,’ Foucault explains, and they claim that it ‘must be the object of a teknē, it is understood that they do not mean “life” in the biological sense of the term’ (2017, 251). Indeed, ‘bios may be good or bad, whereas the life one leads because one is a living being is simply given to you by nature’: bios encompasses both aspects, that of necessity (certain things just happen to you, such as for instance the fact of being born in a certain body and context, of growing up in a certain way, etc.) and that of freedom, because you still have the possibility of changing some things and transforming your existence, at least in part (ibid., 34). Consequently, bios constitutes not only the target and point of application of disciplinary mechanisms of power – one that they aim to shape and manage in detail – but also the fundamental correlate of the techniques of the self that allow one to modify one’s life. Disciplinary power, however, is not the only modality of power that has bios as its main target. Another set of power mechanisms, different but complementary to this ‘art of the human body’ (1977, 137), this ‘political anatomy of detail’ or ‘discipline of the minute’ (ibid., 139–140), constitute what Foucault calls biopower or biopolitics. The theme of biopolitics has been widely developed by scholars such as Agamben (1998), Negri and Hardt (2000), Esposito (2008), and others, who have tended to construe it as sharply distinct from Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power and governmentality.5 But in fact biopolitics is consistently presented by Foucault as the correlative of disciplinary power (1977, 190). Together, these two modalities of power aim at ‘generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,’ or in other

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words, at managing the life (bios) of human beings in its multiple dimensions, both at the level of the individual and at that of the population (1978, 136–137). As Foucault clearly argues: In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles – the first to be formed, it seems – centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. (Foucault 1978, 139; italics in the original)

The disciplines of the individual body and the regulations of the population thus constitute the two main poles around which a power over life was organized, in the nineteenth century, aiming to manage the bios of human beings both individually and collectively – a power which, Foucault notes, played a fundamental role in the development of capitalism (ibid., 140–141). This ‘bio-power’ relies on scientific and statistical tools to include – in its field of knowledge and control – the biological dimension of the life of human groups, but its overall aim remains that of forging, transforming, and subjugating each and every somatic singularity. If the biopolitics of the population constitutes as an object of power/knowledge the human being in her/his specificity of living being (2003b, 239), Foucault argues that it still needs to be supported and supplemented by a set of anatomo-political (disciplinary) technologies that invest ‘the body, health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence’ (1978, 143–144): ‘managing the population’ does not mean ‘just managing the collective mass of phenomena or managing them simply at the level of their overall results,’ but managing the population ‘in depth, in all its fine points and details’ (2007a, 107). Thus, as the management of the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown, the biopolitical technologies of power which apply to the population the massifying instruments of statistics, demographics, health and urban planning, and economic regulation, always need to be combined and supplemented by disciplinary mechanisms of power which allow to shape the daily existence of individuals in order to control, maximize, and extract their forces while making them docile (2003b, 242). Foucault’s analytico-political philosophy does not separate but brings together these two complementary dimensions of the power over life: only at the level of their articulation6 can one grasp the actual morphology of the power relations that innervate our everyday existence. This is because the anatomo- and biopolitical mechanisms of power have a common goal: the government of human beings’ life in its multiple, interconnected dimensions.

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3.

THE GENEALOGY OF GOVERNMENTALITY

The theme of the government of human beings and their life, at the level both of the individual body and of the population, is therefore already present in Foucault’s analytics of power pre-1978. In 1975, for instance, Foucault explicitly talks of an ‘art of governing’ in the context of his analysis of disciplinary power and its normalizing function (2003a, 48–49). Consequently, the introduction of the notion of governmentality in Security, Territory, Population (2007a) does not constitute a radical rupture vis-à-vis Foucault’s previous analyses of disciplinary and biopolitical power, as it has often been claimed. Instead, it is for him a way of clarifying and developing those analyses further, while also breaking a deadlock he found himself stuck in. The elaboration of the power/knowledge framework had led Foucault to redefine the concepts of power and resistance, and to famously claim that ‘where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978, 95). If this is the case, however, if power is everywhere and even constitutes individual subjects, is resistance not ultimately pointless – an empty dream – insofar as one will always be ‘trapped’ in a net of power relations (2001a)? It is to respond to this objection, while remaining faithful to his previous analyses of power and resistance, that in 1978 Foucault elaborates the notion of governmentality (2007a, 108–110). Little did he know, at the time, that this notion would not only allow him to inaugurate the project of a genealogy of the government of human beings, but also lead him to go back in time way further than he had originally planned: from the study of the raison d’état and the liberal and neoliberal arts of government between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, through medieval ‘pastoral power’ and ‘counter-conducts’ (ibid., 163–226), to early Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity. This genealogical inquiry into the different ways of governing human beings thus provides us with the key to understanding Foucault’s interest in the ancient techniques of the self and the practice of parrhēsia as an integral part of (and not a rupture with) his analysis of governmentality and the critical attitude from the late 1970s. But how exactly does Foucault define governmentality? And how does this notion allow him to respond to the aforementioned objection? In Security, Territory, Population, when introducing the notion of governmentality, Foucault characterizes it in a somewhat ambiguous way. On the one hand, he claims that he will use this notion to indicate the very specific (modern) modality of power ‘that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’ (2007a, 108). The analysis of this specifically modern form of power will show, Foucault argues, that what is relevant is less ‘the State’s takeover [étatisation] of society’ than ‘the “governmentalization” of the State,’ thanks to which the latter has survived while becoming an agent – a very important one, of course – within a more general set of governmental mechanisms (ibid., 109). On the other hand, however, governmentality also defines for Foucault a historical ‘tendency’ or a ‘line of force’ that has characterized ‘the West’ for a very long time, thus allowing us to explain the

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‘pre-eminence’ of a form of power/knowledge that consists in the ‘government’ of human beings (ibid., 108). This tendency, that in 1978 Foucault traces back to the Middle Ages and the organization of the Christian pastorate, will subsequently be discovered in early Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity too, due to Foucault’s focus – starting in 1980 – on the problem of government now understood in the broad sense ‘of mechanisms and procedures intended to conduct human beings, to direct their conduct, to conduct their conduct’ (2014, 12). It is thus the second, more general sense of governmentality that, after the analyses developed in Security, Territory, Population (2007a) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), will retain Foucault’s attention in the last five years of his life. In many important respects, however, this broader sense of governmentality was already crucial for Foucault in 1978. Indeed, although the concept of government is a polymorphous one, which can be applied to a variety of things – in the sixteenth century, for instance, one would ‘govern’ a household, a family, a province, a convent, a religious order, souls, children, etc. (2007a, 93) – in Security, Territory, Population Foucault maintains that in fact one always ‘governs’ a group of people in their relationships with other people and with things (ibid., 96). Foucault locates the roots of the idea and practice of governing human beings in the organization of a ‘pastoral’ power, where the king, god, or chief are seen as shepherds who govern their subjects as a flock. First, the shepherd does not exercise their power over a territory, but over a multiplicity of human beings in movement. Second, the power of the shepherd is essentially beneficent and curative, because it aims to ensure the salvation of the flock. And third, this power takes the form of a duty, a service carried out through the shepherd’s zeal, devotion, and concern for the flock (ibid., 125–128). Pastoral power is therefore an ‘individualizing power’ because it is exercised over a collective entity (the flock as a whole) only by being exercised over each sheep individually – only through the government of each sheep in its singularity. Omnes et singulatim: the shepherd can govern and ‘save’ the flock only ‘insofar as not a single sheep escapes him’ (ibid., 128). Consequently, the shepherd must know each sheep, make sure it is healthy, watch over its daily conduct to avoid that it gets lost, check in the evening whether it has returned home – thus contributing to the shaping of each individual on whom they exercise their solicitude. Foucault claims that, through the institutional mediation of the Christian Church, pastoral power has progressively extended its reach, to the point of becoming the matrix of many governmental mechanisms of power that are still in use in contemporary Western society (ibid., 148). The Christian pastorate has organized a whole set of tools and strategies for the government of human beings ‘in their daily life and in the details and materiality of their existence’ (ibid.,149), an ‘art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating [human beings], an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of [human beings] collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence’ (ibid., 165). After many centuries in which it remained essentially linked to the ecclesiastical institution, this modality of power started being integrated into the field of the State and its structures during the eight-

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eenth century. Its individualizing function, Foucault argues, was thus able to reach the entire social body thanks to a multiplicity of old and new institutions (family, education, justice, medicine, psychiatry, etc.), but of course after undergoing a series of modifications. First, a change of objective: the goal was no longer to lead human beings to salvation in the other world, but to ensure that they obtain it in this world in the form of health, security, protection against accidents, etc. Second, a strengthening of the administration and a multiplication of the individualizing instances of power: the police, of course, but also welfare societies, private insurances, benefactors, and so forth. Finally, a development of knowledge about the human being around two poles: ‘one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual’ (2001c, 335). Anatomo- and biopolitics – the circle is closed. One of the fundamental objectives of Foucault’s analytico-political philosophy, no matter whether it focuses on disciplinary power, on biopolitics, or more generally on governmentality, is therefore to show that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the individual became – and no doubt still is – ‘an essential concern for power’ (2018, 199). Modern technologies of power all have individualizing effects, according to Foucault, because they turn the individual, his or her behavior and daily life, into ‘an event that is relevant, even necessary, indispensable for the exercise of power’ (ibid.). The modern State, Foucault claims, has always been ‘both individualizing and totalitarian’; consequently, ‘opposing the individual and his interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirements’ (2001b, 325). The libertarian solution is just as unsatisfactory as the communitarian one. What Foucault’s genealogy of the government of human beings in Western society contributes and emphasizes is thus the necessity to redefine the point of contact, articulation, and clash between power and resistance. The name that Foucault ends up giving to such a point of contact and clash is ‘subjectivity.’ Hence, Foucault’s introduction of the notion of governmentality and his (genealogical) focus on the problem of the government of human beings lead him to reject the all too rigid boundaries usually drawn between the fields of politics and ethics, while also providing a more convincing response to the aforementioned objection. If we define ‘subjectivity’ as ‘the set of processes of subjectivation to which individuals have been subjected or that they have implemented with regard to themselves’ (2017, 282), then resistance can newly be conceived as a strategic practice of desubjugation (désassujettissement) and re-subjectivation (subjectivation) within the framework of the government of self and others.

4.

CRITICAL ATTITUDE AND THE TECHNIQUES OF THE SELF

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault famously focuses on the notion of ‘conduct,’ which he takes to be coextensive with that of government and which he considers particularly helpful because of its threefold meaning: not only can one

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conduct someone else or be conducted by someone else, but one can also conduct oneself (2007a, 193). As Arnold Davidson (2011) aptly remarks, this is the moment in which Foucault explicitly inaugurates the ethical dimension of his work – if we accept to define ‘ethics’ as the theoretico-practical domain that is concerned with the reflexive elaboration of the relationship of self to self. Two years later, in his lectures at Dartmouth College, Foucault offers an original characterization of the concept of government based precisely on the intertwining of these different modalities of conduct: The contact point, where the way individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. (Foucault 2016, 25–26)

It is in that context that Foucault first coins the notion of techniques of the self (ibid., 25). The analytics of power that Foucault developed in the 1970s now seems to be too narrowly focused on ‘techniques of domination,’ as if government could be simply reduced to the operation(s) of conducting the conduct of others. This risks construing power as ‘pure violence or strict coercion,’ whereas Foucault has always wanted to characterize it as a set of ‘complex relations’ involving ‘rational techniques’ that he now describes in terms of the ‘subtle integration of coercion-technologies and self-technologies’ (ibid.). One can therefore distinguish four major types of techniques in human societies:7 techniques of production, techniques of signification, techniques of domination, and techniques of the self – i.e., those techniques that ‘permit individuals to effect, by their own means or with the help of other people, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, or to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on’ (ibid.). The introduction of the notion of techniques of the self and the new focus on subjectivity as the contact point between coercion-technologies and self-technologies thus show that the objection Foucault was facing in the mid-1970s – how can resistance be possible if it is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power? – was misplaced. Governmentality in its broad sense encompasses both techniques of domination and techniques of the self, emphasizing the multiple ways in which techniques aimed at conducting others and techniques aimed at conducting oneself interact, that is, oppose or reinforce each other. The question therefore becomes: how can we modify the interplay between – and respective strategic importance of – techniques of domination and techniques of the self in a given situation, in order to counteract as effectively as possible the effects of coercion, but aware of the fact that it will never be possible to extricate oneself from all power relations? Foucault’s elaboration of the notions of critical attitude and critical ontology of ourselves between 1978 and 1984 constitutes, I argue, a way of responding to this

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question. To understand why, it is crucial to refer once again to his analyses of the government of human beings. According to Foucault, governmental mechanisms of power can only function by relying on the freedom of the individual: far from depriving the latter of his or her free will, they incite him or her to engage in processes of subjectivation whose aim is to constitute voluntarily subjugated subjects. This is true not only in the case of pastoral power (see Lorenzini 2016, 12–17) but also, and a fortiori, in the case of liberal and neoliberal governmentality: the latter, Foucault argues, construe individual freedom as no longer simply ‘the right of individuals legitimately opposed to the power, usurpations, and abuses of the sovereign or the government,’ but more importantly as ‘an element that has become indispensable to governmentality itself’ – for ‘a condition of governing well is that freedom, or certain forms of freedom, are really respected’ (2007a, 353). Thus, individual freedom is no longer merely exploited, like in pastoral power, but concretely produced. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault defines liberalism and neoliberalism as specific forms of the art of governing human beings; however, while in the context of the Christian pastorate the shepherd’s power over their subjects, albeit based on the latter’s perpetual consent to be conducted, was unlimited, the limitation (or better, self-limitation) of government becomes crucial in the liberal and neoliberal art of governing. Consequently, far from being a necessary but nevertheless dangerous condition of the exercise of governmental power, individual freedoms here become themselves a tool to govern human beings more effectively (Lorenzini 2018). In short, liberalism and neoliberalism govern human beings through their freedom – and for the market, since of course the most fundamental freedom remains that of the market (Foucault 2008, 121). They do not just respect or guarantee a greater or lesser number of freedoms, but incessantly produce, organize, and consume freedom (ibid., 63). Foucault therefore argues that freedom ‘is not a universal which is particularized in time and geography,’ it is not ‘a white surface with more or less numerous black spaces here and there and from time to time,’ but ‘a current relation between those who govern and those who are governed’ – one that is defined by a constant struggle over the ‘too little’ of existing freedom and the demand of ‘even more’ freedom (ibid., 63, trans. mod.). The upshot of these analyses is that individual freedom is (re)defined, not as the irreducible adversary of power, but as the necessary condition for its exercise – that which ensures the functioning of the governmental apparatuses. Of course, Foucault does not want to erase the significant differences that exist between pastoral power and liberal and neoliberal governmentality: while in the first case the freedom of the individual remains intact only to be better obliterated (since it is reduced to the mere fact of consenting to be indefinitely governed), in the second case it is safeguarded, encouraged, produced, organized, and consumed within a complex dynamic that pertains to a completely different governmental rationality. However, Foucault makes clear that all forms of governmentality ultimately rely on an original consent that the individual has to reiterate incessantly – on an ‘I want’ (to be governed, directed, conducted in this way), which constitutes not only the basis of their alleged legitimacy but also the secret of their effectiveness.

Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self  31

It should therefore not come as a surprise that Foucault’s definition of the critical attitude focuses precisely on the possibility of saying ‘I no longer want’ (to be governed, directed, conducted in this way), of withdrawing one’s consent to be governed in this specific way: critique becomes, for Foucault, the ‘will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this cost’ (2015b, 65). One must of course carefully avoid interpreting this ‘will’ in light of a traditional (philosophical or metaphysical) conception of the will. In fact, rather than of ‘will,’ it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of ‘decision’ or, better still, ‘effort’ (2014, 77), in the same way in which, instead of ‘freedom,’ Foucault prefers to use the expression ‘practices of freedom’ (1997c, 282–283). In both cases, it is the singularity and specificity of a given situation, of a certain configuration of power relations and type of governmental practice, that give a singular and specific form to the effort that one can make and the practices of freedom that one can implement, concretely, in order to conduct oneself differently. This is what Foucault will end up calling ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ (1984a, 50).

5.

SUBJECTIVITY, TRUTH, ETHICS

When placing the notion of subjectivity at the heart of his analysis of governmentality, Foucault makes also clear that he wants to redefine the conceptual couple power/ knowledge in the direction of the problem of the ‘government of [human beings] by the truth’ (2014, 11). Western society, he argues, has organized in the course of its history, a complex system of relations between the government of human beings, the manifestation of the truth in the form of subjectivity, and the promise of ‘salvation’ for each and all (ibid., 75). Unsurprisingly, Foucault refuses to address this system of relations in terms of ideology. The problem, for him, is not that ‘inasmuch as human beings worry more about salvation in the other world than about what happens down here, inasmuch as they want to be saved, they remain quiet and peaceful, and it is easier to govern them’ (ibid., 75). Instead, Foucault suggests analyzing governmental apparatuses as ‘regimes of truth’ (ibid., 93),8 thus developing what he calls an ‘(an)archaeology of knowledge’ that focuses on ‘the types of relations that link together manifestations of truth with their procedures and the subjects who are their operators, witnesses, or possibly objects’ (ibid., 100). By conducting an analysis in terms of regimes of truth and refusing to establish a clear-cut distinction between scientific knowledge and ideologies, Foucault aims to emphasize the specific ways ‘of linking the manifestation of truth and the subject who carries it out,’ and to show us that this link always functions as a support for operations pertaining to the government of human beings (ibid., 100). Thus, during the last few years of his life, Foucault’s analysis of governmentality has a specific target: the multiple ways in which human beings have been and still are governed by the truth, that is, the ways in which a given set of truths – religious, cultural, political, scientific, medical, and so on – have exerted and still exert on them a ‘force’ that turns out to be instrumental to conduct their conduct. This apparently new methodological perspective actually

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builds on Foucault’s claims in ‘What is Critique?’: the anarchaeology of knowledge is nothing but the instantiation of an ‘attitude’ relying on the postulate that ‘no power, of whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable,’ that no power has an ‘intrinsic legitimacy’ (ibid., 77–78). It is a form of the critical attitude defined by ‘the movement of freeing oneself from power,’ of wanting to be governed otherwise – one that shares with anarchy the theoretico-practical postulate of ‘the non-acceptability of power’ and the (conditional) imperative to call into question ‘all the ways in which power is in actual fact accepted’ (ibid., 78). In other words, Foucault’s anarchaeological analysis of the government of human beings by the truth is itself ‘a theoretico-practical attitude concerning the non-necessity of all power’ (ibid., 78), an exercise in desubjugation (désassujettissement) within the context of a ‘politics of truth’ (Foucault 2015b, 39). This conclusion allows us to more clearly understand that Foucault’s so-called ‘turn to ethics’ – his ‘Greco-Latin “trip”’ (2012, 2) – is in fact to be situated in direct continuity with his analyses of governmentality. It is true that what interests Foucault in ancient philosophy is the centrality of questions such as: ‘How ought I to live?, or What should my life be like?’ (Annas 1995, 27), and the idea that human life in all of its aspects can be not only the object of a theoretical reflection, but also that of a practical elaboration. This has an immediately political relevance for Foucault: to consider our bios as a ‘matter’ that, while being constantly shaped by governmental mechanisms of power, the individual can also modify thanks to a series of techniques of the self, means for Foucault to open up the possibility of conceiving of ‘ethics’ as a practical effort of transformation of our relations to ourselves, the others, and society as a whole. From this perspective, Foucault’s claim that ‘bios is Greek subjectivity’ (2017, 253) is even more remarkable. Ethics is thus the name that Foucault gives to the complex task consisting in changing, modifying, transfiguring our relation to ourselves – that is, our way of living and being, or our subjectivity. Consequently, ethics for Foucault always has a critical potential: it is the ‘art of living’ only insofar as it can also be the art of no longer living in this way, that is, of no longer being governed thusly. If Foucault’s analytico-political philosophy aims to address the multiple ways in which life (bios) is caught up in and shaped by a set of governmental mechanisms of power, ethics is its ‘flipside’ and necessary correlative, as it consists in the effort to transform this ‘subjugated’ life and create other forms of subjectivation. As Foucault argues: Maybe the main objective nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modem power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the State, and from the State’s institutions, but for us to liberate ourselves both from the State and from the type of individualization linked to it. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries. (Foucault 2001c, 336, trans. mod.)

Foucault, governmentality, and the techniques of the self  33

Foucault’s interest in ancient ethics and the techniques of the self can only be understood in light of this critical and political task. What interests Foucault, in other words, are the forms that have taken and can take the effort to transform one’s own bios – to change one’s way of living and being, to modify what one knows and does, and to try to think and act ‘differently’ (1990, 8–9). Thus, it is not a matter of reviving ancient ethical principles or practices, but of realizing that ancient Greece offers us the example of a society in which the latter were not linked to a religion, or to a juridical structure, or to science, as it is the case in our modern society. This means that ‘ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure’ (1984b, 348). Consequently, it is possible to build ‘a new ethics,’ and with it new forms of subjectivity, that would not be linked to religion, law, or science, but that would constitute the unpredictable outcome of the exercise of what Foucault calls our ‘ethical imagination’ (2015c, 143). Ethics would then play the role of a practice of freedom – or better, as Foucault famously claims, a ‘reflected practice of freedom’ (1997c, 284, trans. mod.). In 1983, Foucault claims, perhaps a bit ironically, that what interests him ‘is much more morals than politics or, in any case, politics as an ethics,’ that is, as an ethos, a way of living and being (1984c, 375). Indeed, while in his books Foucault had ‘especially wanted to question politics, and to bring to light in the political field – as in the field of historical and philosophical interrogation – some problems that had not been recognized there before’ (ibid.), the crucial (ethico-political) issue that his work post-1978 has brought to the fore is that of the ways in which individuals are constituted and constitute themselves as subjects – both as the fundamental target of governmental mechanisms of power and as a strategic place for the elaboration of practices of freedom. It is not surprising, then, that Foucault ends up claiming that constituting an ethics of the self ‘may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task’ (2005, 252). Not, of course, because ‘the only possible point of resistance to political power […] lies in the relationship of the self to the self’ (1997c, 299–300, my emphasis), but because ‘governmentality’ implies the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of ‘governmentality’ to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other. Those who try to control, determine, and limit the freedom of others are themselves free individuals who have at their disposal certain instruments they can use to govern others. […] I believe that the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship to others which constitutes the very stuff [matière] of ethics. (Foucault 1997c, 300)

Consequently, ethics as the elaboration and transformation of the relationship of self to self has for Foucault a crucial political value that one can always exploit, in specific and strategically singular ways, in order to ‘work on ourselves and invent – I do not say discover – a manner of being that is still improbable’ (1997a, 137).

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6. CONCLUSION Throughout his career, Foucault has consistently claimed that one must never accept ‘anything as definitive, sacrosanct, self-evident, or fixed’ (2016, 127). His (an)archaeologico-genealogical analysis of governmentality aims precisely to incite us to question everything that is given to us as universal, necessary, and obligatory (1984a, 45) – in particular when it comes to the ways in which we are conducted, and in which we conduct ourselves. Thus, by elaborating an ethics of immanence which does not rely on any transcendent or absolute principle, but which makes ‘discomfort’ its watchword (2007b) in order to ‘render immobility mobile’ (Davidson, 2010, 464), Foucault also elaborated a politics of immanence and discomfort, one that is not based on universal theorems but that aims at every moment ‘to determine which is the main danger’ and to invent strategies to confront it (1984b, 343). Foucault once described this ethico-political attitude as a ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’ which does not suggest that ‘everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous’ – and so that ‘we always have something to do’ (ibid., 343). Far from being inevitably ‘trapped’ by power, Foucault thinks that we are always in a strategic situation toward each other, and hence that – even though ‘we cannot jump outside’ of it, even though we will never be absolutely free ‘from all power relations’ – we have always the possibility of transforming our situation (1997b, 167). This transformation can, and normally does, begin with the transformation of ourselves.

NOTES 1.

This is a neologism that Foucault coins in his 1979–1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (2014, 78–79). 2. It should be noted, however, that Foucault’s interest in disciplinary power first emerges in his analysis of the ‘punitive society’ during his 1972–1973 lecture course at the Collège de France (2015a, 237–241). 3. See Wittgenstein (2009, §116, 53e): ‘What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.’ 4. As Georges Canguilhem aptly remarks, ‘human life can have a biological meaning, a social meaning, and an existential meaning’ – which can only artificially be separated one from the other: ‘A human being does not live only like a tree or a rabbit’ (2008, 121–122). According to Foucault, the very notion of ‘biological life’ is the effect (and not the original, independent substratum) of a scientific discourse that should be analyzed historically (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 6). For a convincing critique of the attempt to ‘de-historicize’ the concepts of (human) nature and life, see Revel (2008). 5. Within the field of governmentality studies, scholars have tended to follow Deleuze (1992) and argue that we no longer live in disciplinary societies but in societies of control, therefore discarding Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power and exclusively focusing on the link biopower-governmentality. This is true even of those who correctly read Foucault as claiming that, by the nineteenth century, the distinction between disciplines and regulations blurs; see, e.g., Rose (2007, 53, 223). For a helpful corrective, see Bargu (2014).

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6. As Foucault argues, ‘the two sets of mechanisms – one disciplinary and the other regulatory – do not exist at the same level. Which means of course that they are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other’ (2003b, 250). 7. Foucault here uses the word ‘techniques’ to indicate ‘ordered procedures, considered [réfléchies] ways of doing things that are intended to carry out a certain number of transformations on a determinate object’ – or subject (2017, 251). 8. On this notion, see Lorenzini (2015).

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Annas, J. (1995), The Morality of Happiness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bargu, B. (2014), Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, New York: Columbia University Press. Canguilhem, G. (2008), Knowledge of Life, ed. P. Marrati and T. Meyers, trans. S. Geroulanos and D. Ginsburg, New York: Fordham University Press. Chomsky, N. and Foucault, M. (2006), The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, New York: New Press. Davidson, A. I. (2010), ‘Foucault, le perfectionnisme et la tradition des exercises spirituels,’ in S. Laugier (ed.), La voix et la vertu: Variétés du perfectionnisme moral, Paris: PUF, pp. 449–467. Davidson, A. I. (2011), ‘In praise of counter-conduct,’ History of the Human Sciences, 24(4), 25–41. Deleuze, G. (1992), ‘Postscript on the societies of control,’ October, 59, 3–7. Esposito, R. (2008), Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. T. C. Campbell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Truth and power,’ in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. C. Gordon et al., New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 109–133. Foucault, M. (1984a), ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, trans. C. Porter, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32–50. Foucault, M. (1984b), ‘On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, trans. C. Porter, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 340–372. Foucault, M. (1984c), ‘Politics and ethics: An interview,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, trans. C. Porter, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 373–380. Foucault, M. (1990), The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1997a), ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. R. Hurley, New York: New Press, pp. 135–140. Foucault, M. (1997b), ‘Sex, power, and the politics of identity,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. R. Hurley, New York: New Press, pp. 163–173.

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Foucault, M. (1997c), ‘The ethics of the concern of the self as a practice of freedom,’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. R. Hurley, New York: New Press, pp. 281–301. Foucault, M. (2001a), ‘Précisions sur le pouvoir: Réponses à certaines critiques,’ in D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds), Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 625–635. Foucault, M. (2001b), ‘“Omnes et singulatim”: Toward a critique of political reason,’ in J. D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. R. Hurley et al., New York: New Press, pp. 298–325. Foucault, M. (2001c), ‘The subject and power,’ in J. D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. R. Hurley et al., New York: New Press, pp. 326–348. Foucault, M. (2003a), Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. V. Marchetti and A. Salomoni, trans. G. Burchell, London: Verso. Foucault, M. (2003b), “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey, New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2006), Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, ed. J. Lagrange, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2007a), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2007b), ‘For an ethics of discomfort,’ in The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 121–127. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2012), The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2014), On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2015a), The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, ed. B. E. Harcourt, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2015b), ‘Qu’est-ce que la critique?’ in Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi, ed. H.-P. Fruchaud and D. Lorenzini, Paris: Vrin, pp. 33–70. Foucault, M. (2015c), ‘Débat au département d’histoire de l’Université de Californie à Berkeley,’ in Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi, ed. H.-P. Fruchaud and D. Lorenzini, Paris: Vrin, pp. 127–148. Foucault, M. (2016), About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, ed. H.-P. Fruchaud and D. Lorenzini, trans. G. Burchell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (2017), Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980–1981, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2018), ‘The analytic philosophy of politics,’ trans. G. Mascaretti, Foucault Studies, 24, 188–200. Lorenzini, D. (2015), ‘What is a “regime of truth”?,’ Le Foucaldien, 1(1), [online], accessed 20 February 2021 at http://​doi​.org/​10​.16995/​lefou​.2. Lorenzini, D. (2016), ‘From counter-conduct to critical attitude: Michel Foucault and the art of not being governed quite so much,’ Foucault Studies, 21, 7–21. Lorenzini, D. (2018), ‘Governmentality, subjectivity, and the neoliberal form of life,’ Journal for Cultural Research, 22(2), 154–166. Negri, A. and Hardt, M. (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Revel, J. (2008), ‘Identità, natura, vita: tre decostruzioni biopolitiche,’ in M. Galzigna (ed.), Foucault, oggi, Milan: Feltrinelli, pp. 134–149.

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Rose, N. (2007), The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2009), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

2. The yoke of law and the lustre of glory: Foucault and Dumézil on sovereignty Stuart Elden

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the relation between Michel Foucault and one of his intellectual mentors, Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), on the question of sovereignty. While sovereignty is often seen as a model of power which Foucault’s work allows us to get beyond, he was still interested in the question, especially in his mid-1970s lecture courses at the Collège de France. Equally there has been a renewed critical interest in the question of sovereignty, either historically or in the contemporary moment, some of which is in dialogue with Foucault. In this piece I suggest that Foucault’s use of Dumézil’s work helps us to shed light on his understanding. Dumézil was a comparative mythologist and philologist, and he and Foucault first met as a result of Dumézil being asked by the University of Uppsala for a recommendation for a new lecturer in French. Dumézil had held this post himself in the 1930s, and after consulting friends in France, was given Foucault’s name. Dumézil made the introduction to Uppsala and Foucault took up the post there in 1955 (Eribon 2011; Macey 2019; Elden 2021a). Foucault and Dumézil kept in close contact, with Dumézil supporting Foucault throughout his career. They exchanged books and ideas over a thirty-year period, and while Dumézil imagined Foucault would write his obituary, he found himself writing a tribute to the younger man in 1984 (Dumézil 1984b). Foucault acknowledges a debt to Dumézil in key places, including in the original preface to the History of Madness, where he says without him ‘the work would never have been undertaken’ (1961, x; 2005, xxxv).1 Dumézil is also invoked as one of three important mentors in Foucault’s inaugural lecture to the Collège de France in 1970, alongside Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite.2 Dumézil is praised for his influence on Foucault’s research process – ‘it was he who encouraged me to work at an age when I still believed that writing was a pleasure’ – but also for his writings and ideas: I hope he will forgive me if I have stretched [éloigné] the meaning of his texts, which dominate us today, or departed [détourné] from their rigor. It was he who taught me to analyse the internal economy of a discourse in a manner entirely different from the methods of traditional exegesis or linguistic formalism; he is the one who taught me to identify [repérer], through the play of comparisons, systems of functional correlations from one discourse to the next; it was he who taught me how to describe the transformations of a discourse and its relationships to an institution. If I sought to apply this method to discourses other than legends or mythological narratives, it was probably because I was looking at the work of historians of science, especially that of Monsieur Canguilhem. (1971, 72–74; 2019, 169–170) 38

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Dumézil is a frequent reference in lectures and interviews, and Foucault sees him as sitting alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan in his contemporary importance (i.e., 1994 Vol. I, 516; 2020, 31). He particularly suggests that Dumézil’s philological work has opened up new ways of thinking about the social sciences (1994 Vol. I, 667, 822). Foucault’s partner Daniel Defert suggests that Dumézil was important in Foucault’s reading about debates in historiography which led to The Archaeology of Knowledge (1994, 30), and while Dumézil is absent from the published book, he is present in an earlier draft.3 Archival documents such as this add some detail to an account of their relation.4 Dumézil is also important for the content of his work, rather than just his approach. He is particularly used by Foucault in his work on Greek and Roman antiquity, alongside more familiar figures including Paul Veyne and Pierre Hadot (see Davidson 1994, 116). Dumézil’s book Servius et la fortune is briefly quoted in the Lectures on the Will to Know course from 1970–71 on the relation between true speech and speech of justice, and the same passage serves as an epigraph to the 1981 Louvain lectures Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling (Foucault 2011, 82; 2012a, 17–18; 2013, 84; 2014, 27–28; Dumézil 1943, 243–244). Foucault engages with Dumézil’s work in much more detail in some of his final lectures on the figure of Apollo and on the death of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo (Foucault 2008, 113–116; 2010, 122–125; on Dumézil 1982; and Foucault 2009, 87–101; 2012b, 95–109 on Dumézil 1984a, 129–170; 1999, 93–124).5 The links between Foucault and Dumézil are under-explored. There is no entry for Dumézil in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, for example, and he is unmentioned in the Blackwell Companion or the Palgrave Research Companion (Lawlor and Nale 2015; Falzon et al. 2013; Raffnsøe et al. 2016). Arnold Davidson underscores the importance of Dumézil to Foucault, saying that the lack of a contribution by Dumézil in his collection Foucault and his Interlocutors is, ‘of all the possible lacunae in this book, the one I most regret … Both personally and intellectually, Dumézil accompanied Foucault from the beginning until the end of his career’ (1997, 16). The significant exception to the lack of work on Foucault and Dumézil is Didier Eribon. In his Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Eribon declares that ‘Dumézil’s oeuvre is one of the fundamental theoretical sources of inspiration for Foucault’ (1994, 247). As well as being Foucault’s first and arguably most important biographer, Eribon conducted a series of conversations with Dumézil which were published shortly after his death and wrote a book on Dumézil a few years later (Dumézil 1987; Eribon 1992). Eribon’s work is invaluable for tracking the biographical links between Foucault and Dumézil, with some useful discussion of their intellectual relation (1994, Part II, Chapter 1). More recently, the relation between Dumézil and Foucault’s archaeological method has been explored by Troels Krarup (2021). In this chapter the focus is more specific than these wider questions, which explore further elsewhere (Elden forthcoming a). The focus concerns the question of sovereignty, which is one of the modes of power Foucault wishes to go beyond with the notion of governmentality, but also a question of interest to him in its own right.

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THE TWO FACES OF SOVEREIGNTY In his 1975–76 lecture course ‘Society Must Be Defended’ Foucault suggests that ‘we can understand the discourse of the historian as a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power’ (Foucault 1997, 58; 2003, 66).6 Traditional history therefore had the aim of both recounting a past that provides a legal foundation for power in the present, and of provoking a fascination for ‘the almost unbearable intensity of the glory of power’. Foucault suggests then that historical discourse uses both ‘the yoke of law and the lustre [l’éclat] of glory’. In this way it might be situated alongside other modes of commemoration or celebration. ‘Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies, and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power’ (Foucault 1997, 58; 2003, 66). This historical work might stress the ‘antiquity of kingdoms’, the lineage of rulers, and the heroes who founded polities. The two interlinked aspects of power are described by Foucault as ‘binding and dazzling, subjugating by imposing obligations and intensifying the lustre of force [l’éclat de la force]’ (Foucault 1997, 59; 2003, 67). Foucault’s point is that these ‘two functions correspond very closely to two aspects of power, as represented in religions, rituals, and Roman, and more generally in Indo-European, legends’ (Foucault 1997, 59; 2003, 68). The key passage where he explores this theme reads: In the Indo-European system of representing power, power always has two aspects or two faces, and they are perpetually conjugated [conjugés]. On the one hand, the juridical aspect: power uses obligations, oaths, commitments, and the law to bind; on the other, power has a magical function, role, and efficacy: power dazzles, and power petrifies. Jupiter, that eminently divine representative of power, the preeminent god of the first function and the first order in the Indo-European tripartite system, is both the god who binds and the god who hurls thunderbolts. Well, I believe that history, as it is still functioned in the Middle Ages, with its antiquarian research, its day-to-day chronicles, and its circulating collections of examples, was still this same representation of power. It is not simply an image of power, but also a way of reinvigorating it. History is the discourse of power, the discourse of the obligations power uses to subjugate; it is also the dazzling discourse that power uses to fascinate, terrorize, and immobilize. In a word, power both binds and immobilizes and is both the founder and guarantor of order; and history is precisely the discourse that intensifies and makes more efficacious the twin functions that guarantee order. In general terms, we can therefore say that until a very late stage in society, history was the history of sovereignty, or a history that was deployed in the dimension and function of sovereignty. It is a “Jupiterian” history … [History] had a certain political function, which was precisely to be a ritual that reinforced sovereignty. (Foucault 1997, 60; 2003, 68–69)

Although Foucault thinks this is just ‘a crude sketch’ he suggests that it provides a foundation for the past which a more modern historical approach begins to replace. This is history as a conflict between races, which he describes as ‘the first non-Roman or anti-Roman history that the West had ever known’ (Foucault 1997, 60; 2003, 69). The question of race and the conflict between races is a well-known theme of this course, and has been widely explored (see Dillon and Neal 2008; Elden 2016,

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Chapter 2). So too has the way this course leads to his explicit theorization of governmentality in the subsequent course Security, Territory, Population (2004; 2007). But what might be said about the sense of sovereignty which Foucault sketches here? There are some key terms which he leaves largely unexplored. What is the basis for the two kinds of power he outlines as operating within sovereignty? Where does this distinction between a juridical and magical sense originate? What does it mean to talk of the ‘first function and first order’, and what is the ‘Indo-European tripartite system’? Why the reference to Jupiter, and how is Jupiter both the god that binds – a contract – and hurls thunderbolts – a weapon more akin to Mars or the Norse god Thor? How might this be significant enough to warrant the description of a ‘“Jupiterian” history’? Foucault does not develop the point in detail in the course, provides no reference and cites no authority. In mid-1970s Paris, many of his auditors would have made a connection and his editors fill in this reference, saying that ‘Foucault is obviously referring to the work of Georges Dumézil’ (in Foucault 1997, 73 n. 2; 2003, 85 n. 3). A twenty-first century Anglophone audience is unlikely to immediately make the same connection, and Dumézil is not so well-known even in France today. The editors add the two works they suggest Foucault is thinking of ‘in particular’: Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, and Mythe et épopée [Myth and Epic]. Relatively little of Dumézil’s extensive work is available in English translation, though Mitra-Varuna was translated in 1988, having been first published in French in 1940 and extensively revised in 1948.7 Mythe et épopée appeared in three volumes in 1968, 1971 and 1973 and has gone through multiple reeditions in French, now being available as a single large volume (1995). It has only been partly translated into English. The second French volume is translated as three separate English books – The Stakes of the Warrior, The Plight of a Sorcerer and The Destiny of a King – and parts of the third volume appear in Camillus (1983, 1986, 1973b, 1980). The first volume was at one point due to be translated into English as Earth Unburdened: Mythic Infrastructure in the Mabharata, edited by Jaan Puhvel, but it was never published (see Coutau-Bégarie 1998, 56). Most of these books are long out-of-print in English, and Mitra-Varuna is also hard to find in French.

DUMÉZIL AND THE THREE FUNCTIONS This is not the place for a long sketch of Dumézil’s voluminous work (see, for example, Rivière 1979; Littleton 1982; Eribon 1992; García Quintela 2001; Poitevin 2001; Dubuisson 2006, Part I). Briefly, in a series of works from his two doctoral theses in 1924, Dumézil devoted most of his attention to studies of comparative Indo-European mythology. This was the theme of his principal thesis on magic drinks which gave the gift of immortality, a study of centaurs in 1929, as well as a 1934 book on the relation between the Indian god Varuna and the Greek Uranus. All these books had the subtitle ‘Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne’ (Dumézil 1924,

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1929, 1934). A parallel research project begun while at the University of Istanbul in the 1920s explored the languages of the northern Caucasus, both in terms of their linguistic structure and the myths and legends of the people that spoke them.8 For his principal project, Dumézil explored sources from India, Iran, Rome, Scandinavia and the Celts, and showed how a comparative approach could reveal similarities and differences between quite diverse sources. While initial sketches of his key ideas can be found in Ouranos-Varuna in 1934 and Flamen-Brahman in 1935, Dumézil saw 1938 as the year he made his major breakthrough, identifying a fundamental division in otherwise distinct traditions (Dumézil 1934, 1935, 1938). This was his influential tripartite hypothesis, with a divide between priests, warriors and farmers or traders. Two books mark this breakthrough in particular, Mythe et dieux des Germains in 1939, and Mitra-Varuna in 1940. Mythe et dieux des Germains has three parts on myths of sovereignty, warriors and vitality. There is a political controversy about this book which is significant but largely beyond the reach of this chapter.9 It is worth noting though, that even his most prominent defender, Eribon, suggests that between 1933 and 1935 Dumézil ‘was pro-Fascist and anti-Nazi’ (1992, 140). Twenty years later Dumézil reworked themes of the book in Les dieux des Germains with parts on ‘magic, war, law [la droit]’, ‘the drama of the world’ and ‘from storm [l’orage] to pleasure’ (1959, 1973c). The other book which outlines the first formulations of this model, Mitra-Varuna, concentrates on the first function, and draws on examples in comparative mythology from India to Iran, Rome, Greece and Scandinavia. Dumézil suggests that the traditional etymology of the Vedic name for a king, rāj(rājan-), relates to both the Latin rēg- and the Celtic rīg- (1938, 189). Similarly, the Vedic name for a priest, brahmin, can be related to the Latin flamen.10 In a key article of 1938 he suggests that the fundamental breakthrough he made in the mid-1930s was that these were not two distinct claims, but one and the same (1938, 189). ‘In both India and Rome, the two names designated two connecting bodies [organes solidaires], more precisely the two inseparable halves of a single body [organe unique], the body of Sovereignty’ (1938, 189). As he goes on to discuss, in India, the relation between the rāj-brahman was fundamental, ‘not isolated, detached from the rest of the world’, but ‘by contrast the head of the social hierarchy’ (1938, 190–191). The brahmin sat above the warrior class, kshatriya or sometimes rajanya, and the éleveurs-agriculteurs—the breeders and farmers of the vaishya group. This distinction between the brahmin, kshatriya and vaishya varna or castes is fundamental, but can also be found in legends of Rome, with the flamen, military and farmers. As Dumézil notes, the patrician-plebeian distinction of historic Rome is a distinction of another kind, not a functional one (1992, 87).11 One of the best summaries of this position comes in a late work: three fundamental functions: the mastery of the sacred and knowledge with the form of temporal power it founds; physical strength and warrior value; fecundity and abundance with their conditions and their consequences. (1985a, 94)

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Across his work Dumézil provides multiple examples of how this tripartite model might structure society or mythology.12 He finds indications in Julius Caesar’s writings of how this worked in Celtic and Gallic society, with druids and equites, cavalry, forming the first two groups, as well as in Irish pagan texts (1938, 191–192). Ancient Germanic societies, though, had no priesthood to compare with the brahmin, flamen or druids.13 In the Christian world it includes the medieval oratores, bellatores, laboratories – those who pray, fight and labour, which becomes the clergy, nobility, and third estate of the French ancien régime. This is work which has been extended by the historian Georges Duby, especially in his book The Three Orders (1978; 1980). Most important in Dumézil’s work, however, is the way that this can correspond to gods in different religious systems, such as Jupiter-Mars-Quirinus in Ancient Rome; or Odin-Thor-Freya in Norse mythology (1948, 143; 1988, 121; see 1952, Chapter 1; 1939; 1959; 1973c). Jupiter is therefore, as Foucault notes, the god of the first function in Rome. Dumézil’s four volume study Jupiter-Mars-Quirinus, especially the first volume (1941), is therefore also significant to Foucault’s account. Dumézil was an inveterate reviser of his ideas, and he developed these claims in other works including Les dieux des Indo-Européens (1952); Mythe et épopée, especially volume II (1971) and – postdating Foucault’s remarks – in Les dieux souverains des indo-européens (1977). This last work is a major summary of his work. In part it is almost a third edition of Mitra-Varuna, summarizing some of its claims and developing the comparative reading in Iran, Rome, and Scandinavia.14 But this 1977 book also summarizes key claims of Les dieux des Indo-Européens and Le troisième souverain: Essai sur le dieu indo-iranien Aryaman (1952; 1949b). It appeared towards the end of Dumézil’s life and was part of his attempt at an overall assessment of his work. He described this project in 1968 as: This unitary publication of revised studies constitutes part of the general updating in which I have been engaged for the past five years, in an effort to prepare for the inevitable autopsy as proper a cadaver as possible, that is, to deliver to the critic of the near future, in an organized and improved form, the results of the endeavours, of varying success, carried out over the past thirty years … neither program nor Vorarbeiten, but a balancing of accounts [bilan]. (Dumézil 1969, 5; 1970, xiv)

In the second volume of Mythe et épopée Dumézil outlines ‘three types’, of which the king and the sorcerer represent the two forms of the first function; and the warrior the second (1971; 1983; 1986; 1973b). There is no equivalent study for the third function of the producer, though his English editor Udo Strutynski suggested in 1980 that such a volume was forthcoming: ‘a yet-to-be-assembled collection of previously written articles, properly revised and commented on, for the third prong, which is diffused throughout the spectrum of concepts relating to welfare’ (Strutynski 1980, 260). Unfortunately, this collection never appeared, and given the number of studies of the first and second functions, its absence seems to indicate Dumézil’s preference for sovereignty and war as a focus for his work. Function is perhaps a somewhat restrictive way to describe the term, though it is not incorrect since the French is fonction. But Dumézil does not want to restrict

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a function to simply activity [activité]. It has a social function, but also an ideological one, in which morality, science and knowledge are also important (Dumézil 1992, 95–96; see Allen 1993, 121–122). As Nick Allen glosses, ‘a function is a domain within an ideology, a unit within a structure of ideas’ (Allen 1993, 122). Between the first and second function there is a distinction between ‘science and intelligence … mediation and manipulation of sacred objects’ and ‘physical force, brutal, and the uses of force’ (Dumézil 1992, 96). The third function encompasses a wider range of aspects: ‘fecundity, certainly, human, animal and vegetal, but at the same time nutrition and wealth [nouritture et richesse], health and peace … and often lust [volupté], beauty, and also the important idea of the “great number”, applied not only to goods (abundance), but also to the men who compose the social body (the mass)’ (Dumézil 1992, 96). Dumézil’s point is that studies need to explore relations between elements – gods, people, groups, characteristics – rather than just look at each in isolation, in order to uncover structural similarities. Indeed, often when Foucault invokes Dumézil’s work early in his career, it is this sense of structure which he highlights. Foucault does so, for example, in his first interview with Le Monde in 1961, following the publication of the History of Madness. Foucault is asked about his influences, he notes some literary figures, but in contrast to the interviewer’s insistence of psychoanalysts, says that Dumézil is the most important. The interviewer expresses surprise: ‘Dumézil? How could a historian of religions have inspired a work on the history of madness?’ Foucault’s response is interesting: ‘Through his idea of structure. Just as Dumézil did for myths, I attempted to discover the structured forms of experience whose pattern can be discovered, again and again, with modifications, at different levels’. He clarifies that it is ‘social segregation, that of exclusion’. It is this approach which reveals, he suggests, the ‘structural coherence’ between a play by Racine and a seventeenth-century police lieutenant (1994, Vol. I, 168–169). Foucault would of course strongly deny he was a structuralist, and Dumézil similarly rejected that label (Foucault 1970, ix–xiv, xiv; Dumézil 1973a, 14; 1979, 78). But this does not mean that they did not make analyses of structures in investigating their topics. Indeed, we might suggest that when Foucault uses language of structure in his early work – especially prevalent in texts he would later revise – he has Dumézil much more in mind than, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss. This relation is one which requires much fuller investigation (see Elden, 2023, especially Chapters 4 and 6). But one point is important to insist upon. When in two 1970 lectures Foucault used Dumézil’s book Horace et les Curiaces to illustrate what he thought were the benefits of the structural method, he stresses that the point is not to look at resemblances between different myths, but rather to analyse the ‘system of differences’.15

DUMÉZIL’S TWO FORMS OF SOVEREIGNTY The first of the three functions is therefore the one which Dumézil describes as sovereignty. Foucault had already indicated the importance of this understanding

Foucault and Dumézil on sovereignty  45

in the third of his ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’ lectures in Brazil in 1973. Talking of an ancient relation between power and knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean, in which a political ruler holding power also held a knowledge that could not be more widely communicated, he said: This is the form of power-knowledge that Dumézil, in his studies concerning the three functions, has isolated, showing that the first function was that of a magical and religious political power. Knowledge of the gods, knowledge of the action that can be brought to bear on us by the gods—that whole magico-religious knowledge is present in the political function. (Foucault 1994, Vol. II, 569; 1997–2000, Vol. III, 31)16

This point is essential. Rather than conceiving of the first function as a unitary god, or source of power, Dumézil sees it as split into two parts, distinct though often conjoined. Dumézil crucially distinguishes between a worldly, juridical form and a magical, supernatural form of this power of sovereignty. This has already been indicated by his suggestion that the king-priest formed two parts of an inseparable whole. He indicates this in the preface to the original edition of Mitra-Varuna: This essay investigates a certain bipartite conception of sovereignty that appears to have been present among the Indo-Europeans, and that dominated the mythologies of certain of the peoples who spoke Indo-European languages at the time of the earliest documents. In my earlier work, mostly devoted to the mechanisms and representations of sovereignty, I had already encountered some of the elements that interest me here; but I had previously understood their relations only very imperfectly. In this work, it is the broad system of those relations that I try to elucidate. (1948, 17; 1988, 17)

Mitra and Varuna are gods who exemplify the two different parts of sovereignty. Mitra is associated with the open, the juridical, right, light; Varuna with the hidden, magical, left, dark (see Miller 2000, 29). Mitra is the sovereign under his reasoning aspect, luminous, ordered, calm, benevolent, priestly; Varuna is the sovereign under his attacking aspect, dark, inspired, violent, terrible, warlike. (1948, 85; 1988, 72; see 1952, 42)

While the book is titled ­Mitra-Varuna, Dumézil also discusses a range of other pairings. In Rome, Jupiter is the key god who accords to the first function, but when this function is analysed as the two forms – magical and judicial – Dius Fidius, as the god of oaths, sits alongside Jupiter (Dumézil 1992, 158–159). In Norse mythology Odin and Tyr represent the two forms of sovereignty. The book also discusses examples outside of India, Rome and Norse mythology. There are discussions particularly of the Celts and Iran. There is also some discussion of the Greek myths. In his 1934 book Dumézil had seen the Greek Uranus as having a similar function to the Indian Varuna. He also proposed an etymological link between their names, though he tends not to develop this claim in subsequent works, and later scholarship has seen the linguistic link at least as untenable.17 Indeed, Mitra-Varuna suggests that while he could discern the twofold understanding of

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sovereignty in India and, especially, Rome, it could not be found in Greek myth. He suggests that this is because ‘Uranus does not form a couple with any other god’, which is part of the reason for his noting the ‘peculiarity of the Greek myths, and the impossibility of reducing them to the Indo-European systems’ (1948, 140; 1988, 119). Nonetheless Rome is the key example in this work, not just in terms of its mythologies, but its political history. Parallels might be found in legends of a tyrannical king, often with magical powers and a better, more just king. As the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus created the city, but the next king, Numa Pompilius, founded many of Rome’s legal, political and religious institutions (1948, 55; 1988, 47). What I do think is that, from its very beginnings, from the time when it acquired those specific characteristics that led to its success, Rome conceived its myths on the terrestrial plane, as a dynamic balance between terrestrial actors and forces. (1948, 179; 1988, 152)18

CONCLUSION Dumézil recognizes that this analysis of the Mitra-Varuna, Numa-Romulus pairings indicates that the trifunctional analysis was not, in itself sufficient: The implications of this then led me to look more closely at the Indo-European hierarchy of social functions, and I observed that this ‘bipartition’ was not a specific characteristic of the first function, by that, by a sort of dialectical deduction, the entire social and cosmic hierarchy was made up of similar opposing pairs, successively harmonized into wider and wider concepts. (1948, 189–190; 1988, 161; see 1948, 210; 1988, 179–180)

Such an analysis exceeds Foucault’s use of his work, and the point being made here, but it does suggest that Dumézil’s work requires a more nuanced appreciation than the trifunctional hypothesis alone. It is important to underscore then, that it is the distinction between forms of sovereignty, of the twofold division of the first function, more than the tripartite one between three functions, to which Foucault alludes in the ‘Society Must be Defended’ lecture course. It was also an approach adopted by Georges Bataille in his Theory of Religion (1976, 358; 1992, 122–123). The two-part aspect of sovereignty can be compared to other models of political power. The constitutional and the charismatic might bring to mind Max Weber, while the relation of the religious and political rule is essentially that of the medieval doctrine of the two swords of the Church – spiritual power to use direct; temporal power to command in kings and other rulers.19 Notoriously, in 1939 Dumézil himself suggested that the Third Reich had based itself on earlier mythology, and that in this context ‘Adolf Hitler could conceive, forge, and practice a sovereignty that no German overlord has known since the fabulous reign of Odin’ (1939, 156). Denis Hollier and Bruce Lincoln have also suggested that the relation of magic and law as that of church and state owes something to Benito Mussolini’s reconciliation of his power with that of the Vatican in the Lateran treaty (Hollier 1988, 33; Lincoln

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1999, 267 n. 83). But the treaty and related conventions date from 1929, a decade before Dumézil elaborated this view. The treaty did, however, deal with one crucial question, the temporal power of the Papacy, which was now restricted to the Vatican City, with acceptance of the Italian state’s sovereignty over the former Papal States.20 Foucault’s work on governmentality, which he contrasts both to this view of sovereignty and his earlier work on discipline, is not the focus here. That relation is explored in other chapters of this volume. But it is worth recalling Foucault’s suggestion that we should not conceive of these different modalities of power on a linear scale, with a movement from sovereignty to discipline to governmentality. Rather we should think about power relations within a sovereignty–discipline–government triangle, with different societies across history and geography closer to one corner or another (Foucault 2004, 111; 2007, 107–108). Some work using Foucault’s ideas has usefully recognized this need to think about sovereignty and biopower together, rather than as distinct (i.e. Thompson 2007; Dean 2013). Additionally, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in sovereignty in recent years, some of which is due to the work of Giorgio Agamben, especially The Kingdom and the Glory (2009; 2011), and the wider work on the question of political theology (i.e. Hammill and Lupton 2012; Santner 2011). While the term political theology in its modern use follows the classic, if not notorious works of Schmitt in 1922 (1985; 2009) and Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957, the term has been used critically to think about both historical and modern forms of power (see, for example, Dean 2012; Diamantides and Schütz 2017; Cavanaugh and Scott 2018). Regrettably, the name of Dumézil is almost entirely absent from these accounts, despite the importance of his analysis of sovereignty and its two forms.21 As this chapter has discussed, Dumézil’s analysis of the dual nature of sovereignty was utilized by Foucault, who is a crucial reference in contemporary debates about the multiple senses of political power. Dumézil’s analysis and Foucault’s use remains of interest and importance today.

NOTES 1. This is from the book’s 1961 preface, absent in whole or part from later French editions. 2. On the lecture, see Elden 2017a, Introduction; on the links between the three older men, Elden, forthcoming b. 3. This manuscript is archived at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds Michel Foucault, NAF28284, box 1. 4. Another is a 1957 radio lecture on anthropology, ‘IV: Die französische Anthropologie’, Fonds Jean Bollack, Archives littéraires suisses, D-6-a-FOU, in which Foucault praises Dumézil’s work. See Elden 2021a, Chapter 6. 5. There are some other interesting discussions of Dumézil in this course, on the Indo-European root mel (Foucault 2009, 109–110; 2012b, 117–118) and around the relation of the two parts of Dumézil’s Le moyne noir (Dumézil 1984a; see Foucault 2009, 111–113; 2012b, 119–121). 6. Foucault had discussed this question in what appear to be Dumézilian terms in his first course at the Collège de France, Lectures on the Will to Know. See particularly 2011,

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106–107; 2013, 111–112. On ceremony in Foucault generally see Elden 2017b; and for a development, Elden 2021b. 7. A critical edition of this text, comparing the 1940 and 1948 versions, is forthcoming from HAU books (2023). 8. Foucault does not seem to show a particular interest in this aspect of Dumézil’s career, though it is a largely unstated theme in The Order of Things. For late summaries of this work, see Dumézil 1975 and 1978. 9. It was sparked by a 1983 piece by A. D. Momigliano (1994); and followed by one in 1984 by Carlo Ginzburg (1989). Dumézil replied in 1985a, 299–318; and 1985b. In the last essay (1985b, 985) Dumézil anticipated a more detailed response, but died before this was completed. For discussions, see Eribon 1992; Lincoln 1999, Chapter 6; and Miller 2000, 34–37; and for a deeper historical background, see Arvidsson 1999, 2006. I return to this politics briefly in the conclusion. 10. On this relation, Dumézil (1935) is the key source, especially 6–9. Late in life Dumézil continued to believe this ‘relation … as probable, though it does not matter [rapprochement … comme probable, mais cela n’a aucune importance]’ (1985a, 324 n. 4). This is a reprint from 1949a, 243, to which Dumézil adds notes to retrospectively examine this text of which he says, ‘few things have to change in substance’ (1985a, 319). 11. This text contains a partial reprint of Dumézil 1958. References are to this more easily available edition. 12. There is a table of the gods in Indo-Iranian, Rome, Zoroastrian, and Germanic mythologies in Dumézil 1992, 114–115 and a more reduced one of Rome, India, and Scandinavia in 1952, 34. 13. See for example his noting of ‘the absence of a large priestly body, analogous to the brahmans, the magi, the Druids or the pontifical college (flamines and pontiffs)’ (1948, 142; 1988, 121; see 1939, 4–5). 14. The first chapter of the second part of Les dieux souverains, entitled ‘Mitra-Varuna’ (1977, 55–85), is effectively a summary of the earlier book. 15. See Foucault 1994, Vol. II, 273–276; 1997–2000, Vol. II, 423–426; and his contribution to a seminar, summarized in Malan 1976, 177–178. The text analysed is Dumézil 1942. See also Foucault 1994, Vol. I, 614–615 on the relation between structure and the question of the subject. 16. The editorial reference here is Dumézil 1941 and 1968. 17. See, in particular, Dumézil 1934, 37–46; 1938, 194; Polomé 1997, 65; Littleton 1982, 182–183. 18. On the successor kings to Numa and Romulus, which link through to many of Dumézil’s subsequent studies, see 1948, 191–192; 1988, 163. 19. For a discussion and references, see Elden 2013, especially Chapters 5 and 6. 20. See http://​www​.uniset​.ca/​nold/​lateran​.htm. 21. Agamben’s most sustained discussion of Dumézil comes instead in The Sacrament of Language, on the question of the oath (2008; 2010).

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio (2008), Il sacramento del linguaggio: Archeologia del giuramento, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Agamben, Giorgio (2009), Il regno e la gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Agamben, Giorgio (2010), The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, A. Kotsko (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Agamben, Giorgio (2011), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, L. Chiesa and M. Mandarini (trans.), Stanford: Stanford University Press. Allen, N. J. (1993), ‘Debating Dumézil: Recent Studies in Comparative Mythology’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 24, 119–131. Arvidsson, Stefan (1999), ‘Aryan Mythology as Science and Ideology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 67(2), 327–354. Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, S. Wichmann (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bataille, Georges (1976), Théorie de la religion in Oeuvres complètes VII, Paris: Gallimard. Bataille, Georges (1992), Theory of Religion, R. Hurley (trans.), New York: Zone Books. Cavanaugh, William T. and Scott, Peter Manley (eds) (2018), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, 2nd edition, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé (1998), L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Economica. Davidson, Arnold I. (1994), ‘Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought’, in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Michel Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–140. Davidson, Arnold I. (1997), ‘Structures and Strategies of Discourse: Remarks Towards a History of Foucault’s Philosophy of Language’, in A. I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–17. Dean, Mitchell (2012), ‘Governmentality Meets Theology: “The King Reigns, but He Does Not Govern”’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29(3), 145–158. Dean, Mitchell (2013), The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics, London: Sage. Defert, Daniel (1994), ‘Chronologie’, in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds), Paris: Gallimard, vol. 1, pp. 13–64. Diamantides, Marinos and Schütz, Anton (2017), Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dillon, Michael and Neal, Andrew (eds) (2008), Foucault: Politics, Society, and War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dubuisson, Daniel (2006), Twentieth Century Mythologies: Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade, M. Cunningham (trans.), 2nd edition, London: Equinox. Duby, Georges (1978), Les trois ordres ou l’Imaginaire du féodalisme, Paris: Gallimard. Duby, Georges (1980), The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, A. Goldhammer (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dumézil, Georges (1924), Festin d’immortalité: Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne, Paris: Paul Geuthner. Dumézil, Georges (1929), Le Problème des Centaures: Étude de mythologie comparée indo-européenne, Paris: Paul Geuthner. Dumézil, Georges (1934), Ouranos-Varuna: Essai de mythologie comparée indo-européenne, Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve. Dumézil, Georges (1935), Flamen-Brahman, Paris: Librarie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Dumézil, Georges (1938), ‘La préhistoire des flamines majeurs’, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 118, 188–200. Dumézil, Georges (1939), Mythes et dieux des Germains, Paris: Librarie Ernest Leroux. Dumézil, Georges (1941), Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus: Essai sur la conception indo-européenne de la société et sur les origines de Rome, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1942), Horace et les curiaces, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1943), Servius et la Fortune, Paris: Gallimard.

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Dumézil, Georges (1948) [1940]), Mitra-Varuna—Essai sur deux représentations indo-européennes de la Souveraineté, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; revised edition, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1949a), L’Héritage indo-européen à Rome, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1949b), Le troisième souverain: Essai sur le dieu indo-iranien Aryaman, Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve. Dumézil, Georges (1952), Les dieux des indo-européens, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dumézil, Georges (1958), L’Idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens, Brussels: Latomus. Dumézil, Georges (1959), Les Dieux des Germains, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dumézil, Georges (1968), Mythe et épopée I: L’Idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1969), Heur et Malheur du guerrier: Aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dumézil, Georges (1970), The Destiny of a Warrior, A. Hiltebeitel (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dumézil, Georges (1971), Mythe et épopée II: Types épiques indo-européens—un héros, un sorcier, un roi, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1973a), Mythe et épopée III: Histoires romaines, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1973b), The Destiny of a King, A. Hiltebeitel (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dumézil, Georges (1973c), Gods of the Ancient Northmen, Einar Haugen (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press. Dumézil, Georges (1975), Le Verbe oubykh, études descriptives et comparatives, Paris: Klincksieck. Dumézil, Georges (1977), Les dieux souverains des Indo-Européens, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1978), Romans de Scythie et d’alentour, Paris: Payot. Dumézil, Georges (1979), ‘Entretien sur les mariages, la sexualité et les trois fonctions, chez les indo-européens’, Ornicar?, 19, 69–95. Dumézil, Georges (1980), Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History, U. Strutynski (ed.), A. Aronowicz and J. Bryson (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press. Dumézil, Georges (1982), Apollon sonore et autres essais: Vingt-cinq esquisses de mythologie, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1983), The Stakes of the Warrior, Jaan Puhvel and David Weeks (eds), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dumézil, Georges (1984a), “Le moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes”: Sotie nostradamique suivie d’un Divertissement sur les dernières paroles de Socrate, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1984b), ‘Un homme heureux’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 June, ix. Dumézil, Georges (1985a), L’oubli de l’homme et l’honneur des dieux et autres essais: Vingt-cinq esquisses de mythologie (51–75), Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1985b), ‘Science et politique: Réponse à Carlo Ginzburg’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 40(5), 985–989. Dumézil, Georges (1986), The Plight of the Sorcerer, D. Weeks (trans.), Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press. Dumézil, Georges (1987), Entretiens avec Didier Eribon, Paris: Gallimard. Dumézil, Georges (1988), Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, D. Coltman (trans.), New York: Zone Books. Dumézil, Georges (1992), Mythes et dieux des indo-européens, Hervé Coutau-Bégarie (ed.), Paris: Flammarion. Dumézil, Georges (1995), Mythe et épopée I, II, III, Paris: Gallimard Quarto.

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Dumézil, Georges (1999), The Riddle of Nostradamus: A Critical Dialogue, B. Wing (trans.), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dumézil, Georges (2023), Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty, S. Elden (ed.) and D. Coltman (trans.), Chicago: HAU Books. Elden, Stuart (2013), The Birth of Territory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elden, Stuart (2016), Foucault’s Last Decade, Cambridge: Polity Press. Elden, Stuart (2017a), Foucault: The Birth of Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Elden, Stuart (2017b), ‘Foucault and Shakespeare: Ceremony, Theatre, Politics’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 55, Spindel Supplement S1, 153–172. Elden, Stuart (2021a), The Early Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press. Elden, Stuart (2021b), ‘Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology’, in Shirin M. Rai, Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Michael Saward (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 377–390. Elden, Stuart (2023), The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press. Elden, Stuart (forthcoming a), ‘Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity’, Journal of the History of Ideas. Elden, Stuart (forthcoming b), ‘Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries’, Revue internationale de philosophie. Eribon, Didier (1992), Faut-il brûler Dumézil? Mythologie, science et politique, Paris: Flammarion. Eribon, Didier (1994), Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard. Eribon, Didier (2011 [1989]), Michel Foucault, 3rd edition, Paris: Flammarion. Falzon, Christopher, O’Leary, Timothy and Sawicki, Jana (eds) (2013), A Companion to Foucault, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Foucault, Michel (1961), Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Plon. Foucault, Michel (1970), ‘Foreword to the English edition’ of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon, pp. ix–xiv. Foucault, Michel (1971), L’ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1994), Dits et écrits 1954–1988, 4 vols., Daniel Defert and François Ewald (eds), Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1997), “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975–1976), Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (eds), Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (1997–2000), Essential Works, 3 vols., P. Rabinow and J. Faubion (eds) and R. Hurley et al. (trans.), London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, D. Macey (trans.), London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (2004), Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, M. Sennelart (ed.), Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (2005), History of Madness, J. Murphy and J. Khalfa (trans.), London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, G. Burchell (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2008), Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France 1982–1983, F. Gros (ed.), Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Foucault, Michel (2009), Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement des soi et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France 1983–1984, F. Gros (ed.), Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Foucault, Michel (2010), The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–83, G. Burchell (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2011), Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France, 1970–1971, suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe, D. Defert (ed.), Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Foucault, Michel (2012a), Mal Faire, Dire Vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice, F. Brion and B. E. Harcourt (eds), Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

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Foucault, Michel (2012b), The Courage of Truth (The Government of the Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–84, G. Burchell (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2013), Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–71, G. Burchell (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2014), Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, S. W. Sawyer (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel (2019), ‘The Order of Discourse’, in N. Luxon (ed.) and T. Scott-Railton (trans.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 141–173. Foucault, Michel (2020), ‘Interview with Madeleine Chapsal’, M. G. E. Kelly. (trans.), The Journal of Continental Philosophy, 1(1), 29–35. García Quintela, Marco V. (2001), Dumézil: une introduction, Crozon: Armeline. Ginzburg, Carlo (1989), ‘Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil’, in J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi (trans.), Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 126–145. Hammill, Graham and Lupton, Julia Reinhard (eds) (2012), Political Theology and Early Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hollier, Denis (1998), ‘January 21st’, M. W. Andrews (trans.), Stanford French Review, 12(1), 31–47. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1957), The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Krarup, Troels (2021), ‘Archaeological Methodology: Foucault and the History of Systems of Thought’, Theory, Culture & Society, 38(5), 3–24. Lawlor, Leonard and Nale, John (eds) (2015), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Littleton, C. Scott (1982 [1968]), The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Macey, David (2019 [1993]), The Lives of Michel Foucault, afterword by Stuart Elden, London: Verso. Malan, André (1976), ‘Colloque de Saclay’, in A. Lichnerowicz, F. Perroux and G. Gadoffre (eds), Structure et dynamique des systèmes, Paris: Maloine, pp. 165–190. Miller, Dean A. (2000), ‘Georges Dumézil: Theories, Critiques and Theoretical Extensions’, Religion, 30(1), 27–40. Momigliano, A. D. (1994), ‘Introduction to a Discussion of Georges Dumézil’, in G. W. Bowerstock and T. J. Cornell (eds), Studies on Modern Scholarship, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 286–301. Poitevin, Michel (2001), Georges Dumézil, un naturel comparatiste, Paris: L’Harmattan. Polomé, Edgar C. (1997), ‘Binder-god’, in J. P Mallory and D. Q. Adams (eds), Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Raffnsøe, Sverre, Thaning, Morten S. and Gudmand-Hoyet, Marius (2016), Michel Foucault: A Research Companion, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rivière, Jean-Claude (1979), Georges Dumézil à la découverte des Indo-Européens, Paris: Copernic. Santner, Eric L. (2011), The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl (1985), Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, G. Schwab (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Schmitt, Carl (2009), Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Strutynski, Udo (1980), ‘Bibliographical Note’, in Georges Dumézil, Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History, U. Strutynski (ed.), A. Aronowicz and J. Bryson (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 257–262. Thompson, Grahame F. (2007), ‘The Fate of Territorial Engineering: Mechanisms of Territorial Power and Post-Liberal Forms of International Governance’, International Politics, 44, 487–512.

3. Governmentalizing ‘policy studies’ Carol Bacchi1

Governmentality is a difficult concept, not least because Foucault used it in several ways and, according to Collier (2009, 98), used it inconsistently. The term ‘governmentality’ derives from the French word gouvernemental, which means (simply) ‘concerning government’ (Lemke 2007, 44). Government has a broader meaning than conventional uses of the term that target specific state institutions; it involves the regulation and oversight of the behaviours (or conduct) of the population to encourage and produce a safe, functioning and prosperous state. Hence, it includes a wide range of agencies, authorities, experts and professionals. I suggest thinking about governmentality as a ‘thought experiment’, concentrating on the ways in which Foucault (1980a) hoped it might be developed. ‘Experiment’ is used, not in the scientific sense of hypothesis testing, but to refer to how concepts serve as prompts to envisage the world in particular ways. In line with a poststructuralist and nominalist perspective, this approach to governmentality allows researchers to view the term as a ‘dynamic abstraction deployed strategically’ (Valverde 2010, 52). As a ‘thought experiment’, the term ‘governmentality’ is intended to encourage us to think differently about the activity of governing and about how power is exercised in modern liberal democracies. ‘Power’, in this account, is not solely a prohibitive force; rather, ‘power produces; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (Foucault 1984a, 205). In this chapter I elaborate three ways in which governmentality can be deployed to alter the remit and widen the ambit of ‘policy studies’ and ‘critical policy studies’: through expanding the ‘scope’ of government; through a focus on the ‘thought’ in government; and through an examination of how governing practices involve the production of ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’. I pay particular attention to the distinctive form of questioning governmentality prompts – that is, ‘how’ questions and ‘how possible’ questions (elaborated below) – and to the key role played by problematization/s in Foucault’s thinking on governmentality. This analysis draws on the insights of those largely responsible for developing the field of ‘governmentality studies’, including Dean, Gordon, Larner, Miller, Rose and Walters.

QUESTIONING ‘POLICY’: GOVERNING THROUGH PROBLEMATIZATIONS Foucault’s most expansive comments on governmentality appear in a series of lectures he delivered at the Collège de France in 1977–78 on Security, Territory, Population (Foucault 2007). In these lectures Foucault elaborates the three mean54

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ings of ‘governmentality’ involved in what he describes as his ‘little experiment’ (Foucault 2007, 358). The first meaning – and the meaning most often used by researchers in the field – refers to: the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. (Foucault 2007, 108)

This description of ‘governmental-ity’2 signals the broad scope of ‘government’ which is of interest to Foucault and to governmentality scholars, a scope I later suggest is usefully imported to policy studies. What is Foucault’s ‘little experiment’ intended to achieve? He describes this goal in relation to his ‘more general project’, referring to his work on prisons and on psychiatric hospitals, as a desire to move ‘outside the institution, moving off-centre in relation to the problematic of the institution or what could be called the “institutional-centric” approach’ (Foucault 2007, 116).3 Foucault describes ‘this kind of method’ as ‘going behind the institution and trying to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power’ (Foucault 2007, 117). Foucault also emphasizes the importance of genealogy as a part of this analytic method, reconstructing ‘a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support’ (Foucault 2007, 117; see also Walters 2012). Governmentality represents Foucault’s attempt to bring this method of ‘going behind’, or exploring the ‘outside’ of, institutions, to ‘the State’. I find this language of ‘behind’ and ‘outside’ the State a useful supplement to the more common usage of ‘beyond the State’ or ‘action at a distance’ from the State (Rose and Miller 1992; Miller and Rose 1990), which tends to provoke debate because it appears to displace the State from the analysis (Jessop 2010; Jessen and von Eggers 2020).4 Indeed, Foucault (2000, 345) insists that ‘power relations have become more and more under state control’. However, this is not ‘the State’ as an institution or as some abstract universal; it is ‘the State’ as a ‘mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentality’ (‘L’État ce n’est rein d’autre que l’effet mobile d’un régime de gouvernmentalité multiple’; Foucault 1984b, 21).5 ‘Multiple governmentality’ is a notion meant to capture both the processes/ practices of government (read broadly) and the ‘thought’ – most often described as ‘rationalities’ (see below) – necessary to those processes. To explore this ‘multiple governmentality’, a ‘distinctive family of questions, arising from a concern with our own present’ (Rose 2000, 19), is developed – usefully described as ‘how’ questions and ‘how possible’ questions (Foucault 1982). We ask – how have certain things (e.g., the psychiatric hospital) come to pass? What is it possible or impossible to think? Under what conditions is it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others (Gougelet 2014)? Asking these sorts of questions, explains Foucault, allows us to explore the ways in which power relations are ‘rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted “above” society as a supplementary structure [for example,

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“the State”] whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of’ (Foucault 1982, 222). The goal therefore in going ‘behind’ or ‘outside’ ‘the State’ is to reflect on and critically interrogate this ‘social nexus’, this ‘ensemble’ of ‘institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics’ (Foucault 2007, 108) through which governing takes place. The conceptual tools of ‘rationalities’ and ‘technologies’ provide ways to study this ‘social nexus’ or ‘ensemble’. Rationalities, described as ‘relatively coherent ways of understanding the tasks and objects of rule’ (Dean 1999, 24), provide access to the ‘thought’ in governmental practices. ‘Technologies’ are the practical mechanisms of rule, the modes of description, definition and calculation that have a role in governing daily life. They can take the form of league tables, performance data, case management, memoranda, reporting forms, charts, tables, censuses and the like (Rowse 2009). Bringing a governmentality perspective to ‘policy studies’, therefore, involves exploring the ‘outside’ of ‘policy’. Instead of conceiving of ‘policies’ as (simply) the tools of government, they are approached as ‘connected up with’ (Foucault 2007, 117) a particular view of government. Specifically, ‘policies’ form part of a liberal technocratic rationality of government in which ‘the State’, conceived as a discrete entity, manages ‘problems’ through its ‘policies’ (Bacchi 2020). The analytic task becomes considering how such a ‘space’, called ‘policy’, becomes possible, and with what implications for how ‘government’ takes place. There are debates about whether the notion of ‘rationalities’ sits comfortably with Foucault’s challenge to universals. Consistent with his nominalist starting point, he explains that ‘one must restrict one’s use of this word [“rationalities”] to an instrumental and relative meaning’ (Foucault 1991, 79). In line with this position, he introduces the concept of ‘problematization’ as an additional experimental tool to interrogate the type of power he calls ‘government’. To undertake this task, attention is directed to the assumed concerns for which policy ‘responses’ are devised, instead of treating these concerns as self-evident. The focus of analysis shifts from assumed ‘problems’ to problematizations, how issues are problematized. For example, according to Miller and Rose (1990, 3), ‘the emergence of unemployment, crime, disease and poverty as “problems” that can be identified and construed as in need of amelioration is itself something to be explained’. Importantly, the concern is not with how people debate (or problematize) competing interpretations of ‘poverty’, ‘unemployment’, ‘disease’, ‘crime’ and similar taken-for-granted governmental categories. Rather, the targets of interest become the conceptualizations (or problematizations) of these issues that lodge within governmental programmes and policies, effectively shaping subjectivities and lives. The analytic project becomes identifying the ‘thought’ (or knowledges) that underpin specific governmental problematizations, tracing the genealogy of these problematizations and reflecting on their political implications (Bacchi 2009). As an illustration of this approach, Wahlberg and Rose (2015) describe how the knowledges of health economics and epidemiology contributed to a profound rethinking of how to measure the health of the world’s population in the late twentieth century through quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and disability-adjusted

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life-years (DALYs). They trace a shift from a problematization of population health in terms of morbidity and mortality to a focus on what they call ‘morbid life’ – the decline in ‘productivity’ of certain people due to their ill-health. In this problematization, a whole new metrics emerges, which targets ‘potential’ life and ‘healthy’ life (Wahlberg and Rose 2015, 63), effectively reconfiguring how we think about ‘health’ and ‘limitations’ to health. Identifying specific styles of problematization, at times described as ‘grids of intelligibility’ or ‘interpretative grids’ (Castel 1994, 243), provides further insight into how ‘government’ takes place. For example, Bletsas (2007) shows how certain federal government policies in Australia produced the ‘problem’ of ‘poverty’ as a matter of individual responsibility rather than of structural inequality: ‘The focus on individual choices, goals and responsibilities shifts attention away from any particular policy area and on to individual behaviours as causing the “problem”’ (Bletsas 2007, 70). A similar ‘responsibilization’ motif can be discerned in contemporary criminal justice policy, in drugs/alcohol and gambling policy, and in much health policy in contemporary industrialized countries (Bacchi 2009, 118, 134, 157). Other examples of important governing motifs include ‘security’ (Walters 2004; Larsson 2020) and ‘unease’ (Bigo 2010). Such styles of problematization are conceived of as fluid and fluctuating modes of thought that nonetheless provide useful pointers to the operations of governmental power. The following section elaborates, with examples, how a governmentality perspective alters the remit and expands the ambit of ‘policy studies’. Three interconnected themes are pursued: the ‘scope’ of government, the ‘thought’ in government, and the (re)conceptualization of ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’.

GOVERNMENTALIZING ‘POLICY STUDIES’ The Scope of Policy Studies As noted at the outset, a governmentality perspective embraces a broad understanding of ‘government’ as the regulation and oversight of the conduct of the population. The governmentalization of ‘policy studies’, therefore, involves opening up the scope of analysis to include the wide array of agencies, authorities and mechanisms/ technologies in ‘government’ (Dean 1999, 3; Rose 2000, 21). The goal is not to divert attention from ‘the State’ as a governing mechanism, but to go ‘behind’ or ‘outside’ the State in order to interrogate the ‘ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics’ (Foucault 2007, 108) participating in ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Gordon 1991, 2). This broadening of the scope of ‘government’ highlights the ways in which multifarious and interconnected sites are implicated in governing population. I offer the Australian Federal Government’s 2020 Action Plan for Advancing Women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to illustrate how governmentality broadens the ‘scope’ of ‘policy studies’. The Action Plan

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identifies three targets: ‘Australia’s education system, from early education to tertiary’, ‘Australian STEM workplaces’ and ‘making girls and women visible’. To ‘make girls and women visible’, the Action Plan endorses a Science & Technology Australia (STA) initiative to identify ‘Superstars’ – ‘a critical mass of celebrity Australian women who work as scientists and technologists’ – to act as ‘role models for young women’ (Australian Government 2020; emphasis added). STA represents more than 80 000 scientists and technologists. The Action Plan further encourages the key research funding bodies, the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), to increase women’s participation in the research sector. The Action Plan makes it possible to see how policy aimed at increasing the representation of girls and women in science and technology studies embraces a heterogeneous collection of governing authorities (Rose and Miller 1992, 175). Included in this collection are educational sites, workplace relations and a wide array of ‘experts’, scientists, technologists and researchers. There is no suggestion that this broad scope of ‘government’ constitutes some ‘all-pervasive web of “social control”’ (ibid.). Rather, the analytic focus is directed to ‘assorted attempts at the calculated administration of diverse aspects of conduct’ that take place ‘through countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement’ (ibid). The ‘Superstars’ initiative is an apt illustration of these ‘local tactics’. There are also clear links between the role of experts in governing practices and the need in ‘policy studies’ to identify and interrogate governing knowledges. These linkages will be further pursued in the next sub-section. The focus in a governmentality perspective on ‘technologies’ – the mechanisms and devices through which governing takes place – further expands the ambit of ‘policy studies’. Illustrating this point, Walters (2002) explores how the apparently innocuous signposts at airports directing ‘EU’ and ‘Non-EU Nationals’ into separate queues serve to designate and firm up both ‘Europe’ as a ‘place’ and the category of ‘the European’.6 The point of the analysis is to consider how something so apparently mundane as signposts has significance far beyond their purely technical and administrative function. It is possible to bring this broad understanding of government as societal administration/regulation to a wide range of ‘mechanisms’. For example, buildings and building design can be read in terms of an infrastructure of governing. Bottrell and Goodwin (2011) offer the example of how modern schools with their ‘uni-purpose facilities located on enclosed land, fenced and gated’ reflect a ‘hidden curriculum’ that problematizes the moral and cognitive training of young people (4). In this perspective, the scope of what can be included in ‘policy’ expands to embrace the multitude of groups, agencies and mechanisms involved in ‘government’ (read broadly). To be clear, there is no suggestion that this mode of governing through multiple interconnected sites and practices is illegitimate or avoidable. The point rather is to expand the scope of what needs to be interrogated to better understand how governing takes place. Subsequent sub-sections elaborate the nature of this task,

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highlighting the role and significance of governing ‘knowledges’ and how ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’ are constituted in ‘policy’. Exploring the ‘Thought’ in Policy The argument behind the turn to ‘thought’ in a governmentality perspective is that, in order to understand how specific practices (‘policies’) become possible (that is, asking ‘how possible?’ questions), it is necessary to identify the forms of thought that made these practices intelligible and practicable. Foucault described this conception of ‘thought’ as ‘the level of reflection in the practice of government’, referring to the rationales or ‘logics’ that form part of governing (Foucault 2008, 2; emphasis added). ‘Thought’ here is conceived, not as ideas or mentalities (Foucault 1984c), but as ‘a set of practices in its own right’, participating in ‘the constitution of the objects and subjects of which it speaks’ (Deacon 2000, 132). To deal with these complex issues, it has become commonplace to refer to ‘rationalities’ or ‘mentalities’ of rule – specific combinations of concepts and reasons guiding rule (Rose 2000, 24) – sometimes described as ‘diagrams of rule’ (Deleuze 1988, 44), or even as ‘programs’ (Foucault 2008, 78). Hence, governmentality scholars tend to speak about a ‘liberal rationality’ or a ‘neo-liberal rationality’ or an ‘authoritarian rationality’, to refer to clusters of theories, suppositions and notions that produce a particular meaning of ‘government’. As noted earlier, the identification of ‘rationalities’ (‘mentalities’) as styles of rule has also attracted criticism. To some researchers, ‘rationalities’ appear to be too fixed in form ‘as though it were a coherent regime that nominated an epoch’, leading to the ‘reification’ of governmentality (Collier 2009, 98). There is concern, for example, at the ways in which, at times, ‘neo-liberalism’ is put forward as a ‘govern-mentality’ to explain patterns or trends in government practices in a monolithic way, ignoring complexity and contestation (Larner 2000; Rose et al. 2006, 97). Above, it is suggested that problematizations, as an alternative or supplement to rationalities, offer a more fluid understanding of how thought emerges in and guides practices. For example, in his History of Sexuality, Foucault (1980b) asks how different eras have problematized sexuality and thus made sexuality a particular kind of object for thought in different sites. In interview, Foucault pointed out that his ‘object would be the historical study of the way in which domains we call sexuality – that is analyses and experiences – have been formed’ (Mort and Peters 2005, 12–13). Particular attention is directed to the shaping influence of the various modern bodies of knowledge about ‘sexuality’ (various ‘sciences of sexuality’, including psychoanalysis) and to the political structures, laws, requirements and regulations surrounding sexual practices. Such an approach opens up policy studies to include reflection on the ‘knowledges’ that form part of governing practices. Knowledges, as indicated in the adoption of a plural form, are treated not as truth but as what is generally accepted to be true (Bacchi 2012, 4). Above, for example, we saw the governing position assigned to cognitive ‘role model’ theory in Australia’s STEM Action Plan (Australian

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Government 2020), and to health economics and epidemiology in governing global health (Wahlberg and Rose 2015). How such knowledges shape ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’ further expands the ambit and alters the remit of ‘policy studies’. The Production of ‘Subjects’, ‘Objects’ and ‘Places’ Governmentalizing ‘policy studies’ requires rethinking the ways in which ‘subjects’ tend to feature in policy studies as pre-given, rational, autonomous, asocial and ahistorical. In the place of this ‘humanist subject’ Foucault offers a conception of subjects in process, continually produced as particular kinds of provisional subjects. In governmentality studies, particular attention is directed to the ways in which ‘government’ involves the ‘fabrication of certain kinds of subjectivity and identity’ (Dean 1999, 67). Ong (2003, 89) describes how ‘diverse techniques from multiple sources’ act on the body, the mind, and the will to make individuals, families, and collectivities ‘governable’. These ‘diverse techniques’, described as subjectification processes, produce self-governing ‘subjects’ ‘who are voluntarily subjugated (assujettis)’ (Lorenzini 2016, 17, emphasis in original). The objective in governmentality studies is to find ways to explore how subjectification occurs and with what effects (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 49–53). To engage in this form of analysis, it is useful to consider the identity categories, described as subject positions, that appear in programmes and policies. Dean (1995, 576) offers the categories of ‘the consumer’, ‘the active job seeker’ and ‘the poor’ as examples. The analytic task becomes considering the ways in which these identity categories affect how people are treated and how people come to think of themselves. For example, one could explore the particular mechanism Foucault (2000, 326–327) calls ‘dividing practices’. He shows how ‘government’ differentiates groups of people (for instance, citizen/migrant, youth/adult, welfare recipient/taxpayer), often with stigmatizing effects for ‘outgroups’. Meanwhile, the opposition between groups (for instance, between the ‘responsible gambler’ and the ‘problem gambler’) works to promote desired behaviours among those who wish to avoid stigma, making them ‘governable’ (Race 2005). The dynamics involved in subjectification processes are complex. Subject positions are not imposed on people but delimit possible ways of being. Furthermore, they are in ongoing-formation and hence susceptible to variation, signalling the ever-present possibilities for change. A provisional ‘subject’ is produced from plural and contradictory subject positions (Bonham and Bacchi 2017). When (‘real’) people take up or assume subject positions (simply by filling in a form or making a claim for government support), the practice may affect how they feel about themselves and others. Indeed, it may make them more ‘governable’ – that is, more easily governed – but then again it may not! Indeed, this mode of governing, through the creation of ‘subjects’ or subjectification, derives its strength ‘from the fact that it does not impose itself upon individuals through constraint or threat’ (Lorenzini 2016, 16). Dean (1999) elaborates:

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Regimes of government do not determine forms of subjectivity. They elicit, promote, facilitate, foster and attribute various capacities, qualities and statuses to particular agents. They are successful to the extent that these agents come to experience themselves through such capacities (e.g. of rational decision-making), qualities (e.g. as having a sexuality) and statuses (e.g. as being an active citizen). (Dean 1999, 32; emphasis in original)

Moreover, notoriously, ‘“government” is a congenitally failing operation’ (Miller and Rose 1990, 10), seen in the repeated efforts to shape citizen behaviours. Quoting Foucault (2000, 324), ‘there is no power without potential refusal or revolt’. A governmentality perspective also brings new ways of thinking to the treatment of ‘objects’ and ‘places’ in policy studies. To explore the ‘outside’ of institutions, including ‘the State’, involves ‘refusing to give oneself a ready-made object, be it mental illness, delinquency, or sexuality’ (Foucault 2007, 118). As with ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ are seen as in process, as ‘in formation’, rather than as fixed. Attention shifts therefore to the practices involved in their emergence. As Veyne (1997, 160) explains: ‘there are no natural objects … There are only multiple objectivizations (“population”, “fauna”, “subjects under law”), correlatives of heterogeneous practices’. It follows that researchers need to develop a critical approach to the assumed categories and concepts they draw upon. The implications of this stance are pursued in the next section. The treatment of ‘places’ in policy studies offers an example of the tendency to naturalize ‘objects’. ‘Places’ are commonly treated as self-evident physical sites or locations, illustrating what Thrift (2003) describes as ‘container thinking’ – ‘space as a container within which the world proceeds’ (96, 100). Much comparative policy research, for example, hinges upon the ‘recognition’ of ‘nation-states’ as ‘not simply the main but the only geographic unit of account’ (Agnew 2011, 323). Walters (2009, 495) cautions against this tendency to ontologize our spatial concepts. He asks: what is a region? a zone? a territory? a network? an area? and with Larner, suggests that policy analysts need to become ‘much more nominalistic about the diversity of global spaces’ (Larner and Walters 2004, 16). In a governmentality perspective, ‘places’ are treated as political creations, as the ‘outcome of political activities as well as a contribution to them’ (Finlayson and Martin 2006, 155). Instead of ‘context’ for policies, ‘places’ are produced, reproduced and transformed by policies. Above we saw, for example, how the introduction of signposts at airports participates in the production of ‘Europe’ (Walters 2002). Following Massey (2005, 9), space ‘is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed’. Any space or place becomes a ‘precarious achievement made up of relations among multiple entities’ (Anderson 2008, 230). New questions – ‘how possible’ questions – arise about how complex spatial relations come to be described as ‘state’, ‘urban’, ‘colony’ and so on, and about the effects accompanying such labelling. The usefulness of such questions as a form of critique is considered in the final section.

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GOVERNMENTALITY AND CRITICAL POLICY STUDIES Governmentality as a thought experiment advances a critical analytic strategy. Rose (2000, 19) describes its purpose as ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘descriptive’. What kind of diagnosis does it offer and how does its style of critique compare to other positions within the broad category of ‘critical policy studies’? The answer to this question depends, to a large extent, on how the field is constituted and characterized. I take the Handbook of Critical Policy Studies (Fischer et al. 2015a) as an entry-point for this topic. While the Handbook contains contributions from diverse perspectives, including poststructuralists (Howarth and Griggs 2015), Foucauldians (Lövbrand and Stripple 2015) and ‘interpretivists’ (Yanow 2015), the editors offer a more targeted description of the field. In their view, ‘critical policy studies, like policy studies generally, focuses on the policymaking process’, and involves ‘how policies are decided in a political setting’ and how ‘the practices of policy analysis … address the formulation and assessment of particular policies and their outcomes’ (Fischer et al. 2015b, 1). Identifying Habermas as a formative influence, in their view, ‘critical policy studies’ gives ‘special attention’ to ‘communication and argumentation’ (see Fischer and Forester 1993). This characterization of ‘critical policy studies’ works within and accepts a conventional understanding of ‘policies’ as (simply) the ‘tools’ of government. By contrast, as argued above (see ‘Questioning “policy”’), those who adopt a governmentality perspective step back from this ‘front line’ form of analysis to ‘go behind’ or ‘outside’ ‘policy’ and ‘the State’. Attention shifts from the ‘policymaking process’ to the ‘incessant transactions’ (Foucault 2008, 77) between ‘the State’ and other agencies and societal groups that are involved in governing the ‘thought’ or knowledges that inform policy directions, and the ways in which political ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’ are constituted within governing practices. While there may be shared qualms among critical policy scholars about technocratic styles of government, the role of experts and a correspondence view of knowledge, the emphasis in governmentality studies is on ‘strategies for governing’ rather than on communication and argumentation. Its diagnosis attends to the presuppositions, the assumptions, and the exclusions within those strategies. To produce this form of critique, researchers exploring a governmentality analytic freely navigate across disciplinary boundaries, with possible implications for the very categories ‘policy studies’ and ‘critical policy studies’. In terms of ‘scope’, some critical policy scholars bring into focus a range of multi-level relationships among various governmental institutions, civil society organizations and international organizations, signalled in the adoption of the term ‘governance’. This trend is evident in the work on ‘networks’ (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003) and ‘discourse coalitions’ (Hajer 1993). However, as Jessop (2003, 6) notes, ‘much of the literature on governance assumes that the objects of governance pre-exist their coordination in and through specific governance mechanisms’. This ‘realist approach to politics’ (Lemke 2007, 54) contrasts with the nominalism of a governmentality analysis that focuses on the ‘the ensemble’ of interconnected and

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emergent ‘institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics’ involved in government (Foucault 2007, 108). This distinction in approach influences the ways in which categories and concepts feature in political research and analysis. For example, in Stenson’s (2008) ‘realist governmentality’, key terms such as ‘white flight’, the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘social capital’ are treated as ‘self-evident descriptors of the terrain being analysed’ (Larner 2008, 23), ignoring the politics involved in their creation. In Stevens’s (2020) exposition of Critical Realism, similarly, key terms such as ‘children’s resilience’ (7) and ‘new psychoactive substances (NPS)’ (8) are taken for granted as actual and existent states or objects. By contrast, in Foucault-influenced governmentality, these terms become something to be explained rather than assumed starting points in an analysis. A similar approach is taken to ‘places’ as uninterrogated key terms, inquiring into what made these spaces come to be, how power operates through them, and how they could be different (Lövbrand and Stripple 2015). In terms of ‘thought’, an important distinction can be drawn between the focus on ‘knowledges’ (or ‘discourses’) in governmentality approaches, and on language (or ‘discourse’) in critical policy studies concerned primarily with communication, linguistic practices and language use (Bacchi and Bonham 2014). The latter perspective is most closely associated with Fairclough (2013) and Critical Discourse Analysis (see also Hajer and Versteeg 2005, 175), which has links to Critical Realism. While governmentality scholars are interested in language, they treat it as an ‘intellectual technology’ that ‘renders aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation’ rather than in terms of meaning or rhetoric (Miller and Rose 1990, 1). In relation to ‘subjects’, a large number of critical policy theorists adopt actor-centred approaches. A broad sub-grouping of ‘interpretivists’, working in a hermeneutic tradition, emphasize how policy-relevant actors intersubjectively construct meaning in their lives (van Hulst and Yanow 2016, 97). People’s beliefs and intentions become central to the research exercise (Bevir and Rhodes 2012, 202). A governmentality perspective, by contrast, invokes a post-humanist stance that questions the existence of a sovereign subject who can access ‘true meanings’ (see above). For this reason, the wide interest in framing and frame techniques that has become part of the purview of critical policy scholarship also requires scrutiny. In interpretivism, a primary focus is on how policy actors frame or define ‘problems’. These ‘problem definitions’ are sometimes described as ‘problematizations’, referring to the ways in which actors problematize an issue. A primary objective is to assist policymakers to learn how to reconcile competing interpretations, or definitions, of problems-that-exist (Hajer and Versteeg 2005, 107; Yanow 2000, 22). The hope is that developing the capacities of practitioners to resolve disputes through ‘frame reconciliation’ will lead to ‘shared problematizations’ (Colebatch et al. 2010, 236) and better decisions (Rein and Schon 1996). Consensus is seen as a desirable outcome of effective ‘problem management’. By contrast, governmentality directs attention to problematizations as the products of governmental practices rather than the interpretations of policy actors. The

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objective is not to develop ‘shared problematizations’ among policy actors, but to encourage critical interrogation of existing governmental problematizations. The aim is to trouble rather than to cultivate consensus and, in doing so, to open up other ways of thinking (Bacchi 2015). Illustrating this mode of critique, the ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis provides a framework for identifying and critically interrogating the problematizations operating in each and every policy, programme or governmental technology. WPR goes ‘behind’ ‘policies’ to study them from the outside, directing attention to the knowledges that make specific problematizations possible, the genealogy of their development and their effects (Bacchi 2009; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). Those who pursue ‘actor-centred’ forms of policy analysis often express qualms that governmentality-style approaches are deterministic because they ignore the ‘voices’ of those affected by governmental prescriptions (Brady 2014). Concentration on official documents – Foucault’s (1986, 12–13) ‘practical texts’ – may, it is argued, exclude indicators of resistance and protest (McKee 2009; Tazzioli and Walters 2016). There is a good deal of expressed concern about ‘subject agency’, and many useful efforts to rework conceptions of agency as a generic property of human beings (Clarke et al. 2015, 57–58). However, as argued above, in a governmentality perspective, people retain space to move within processes of subjectification, processes that nonetheless remain critically important to understanding how governing takes place. Governmentality studies are also, at times, characterized as overly cognitive due to the concentration on the ‘thought’ or ‘rationalities’ in governing practices. The concern is that, while such studies tell us what people think and say, they ignore ‘what we can feel’ (Paterson 2019, 5; emphasis in original). The recent interest in ‘emotions’ in critical policy studies (Durnová 2015), alongside the turn to ‘affect’ in social theory generally (Clough and Halley 2007; Thompson and Hoggett 2012), suggests that the ‘new materialisms’ (Lemke 2015) may be influencing directions in research on this topic. A governmentality focus on subjectification processes alerts researchers to the need to avoid slippage into common-sense ways of speaking about subjects with an ‘interior’ existence who (simply) express ‘emotions’ (see Bonham and Bacchi 2017). Governmentality approaches also display a somewhat fraught relationship with Marxist-influenced inquiries. The attention directed to local and mundane practices and a heterogeneity of agencies produces a reluctance to identify enemies and ‘hegemonic’ practices (compare Howarth and Griggs 2015). In Cultural Political Economy (CPE), Sum and Jessop (2015) bring Marx and Foucault into dialogue, integrating ‘technologies’ and aspects of subject formation from Foucault to produce an analytic method that goes beyond ‘ideology critique’. Illustrating his Marxist heritage, however, Jessop (2010) continues to emphasize forms of structuration and practices of domination. Further debate has arisen about the possible limitations of deconstructive styles of critique, deployed in many governmentality studies. In his seminal 2004 article, entitled ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’, Latour characterizes deconstruction as purely ‘negative’ in its impact, with a tendency to ‘totalize’ and ‘demonize’ oppo-

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nents. He is particularly concerned at the targeting of proponents of scientific truth, which he sees as a deeply dangerous political project in the light of climate change and the claims of climate change deniers. Instead of (simply) deconstructing (or ‘debunking’), therefore, researchers are advised to become engaged in assembling – that is, in bringing together collective ‘matters of concern’. Governmentality challenges this assembling/debunking dichotomy. Assembling is pivotal to Foucauldian analysis, illustrated in the conception of governmentality as ‘the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics’ (Foucault 2007, 108). Moreover, in a governmentality perspective the point is not to approve or condemn particular courses of action. There is no interest in ‘assigning points of error or illusion’ (Foucault 1997, 60) and hence in ‘demonizing’. The task, rather, is to subject ‘strategies for governing’ to a process of continuous questioning and critique (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020, 33).7 Such interrogation requires asking what those strategies include within, and exclude from, their terms of reference, examining their underlying presuppositions, and considering how ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’ are constituted within them. The implications of this poststructural style of critique for researchers are significant. The conviction that governmental problematizations shape who we are and how we live poses a challenge to analysts who wish to ‘stand back’ and critically scrutinize those problematizations ‘from the outside’. Agnew (2011, 326) asks ‘how one can see over the horizon … if one is entirely limited by one’s immediate associations’. Such concerns have prompted a good deal of discussion about researcher reflexivity among critical policy analysts (Yanow 2007, 408). In a governmentality perspective there are attempts to move beyond simple declarations of the need to become ‘reflexive’. Self-problematization is put forward as a practice of the self in which one subjects one’s own recommendations and proposals to the same forms of ‘how’ and ‘how possible’ questions applied to other sites and materials (Bacchi 2018, 10). In this way policy analysis becomes political practice.

CONCLUSION The chapter begins by identifying governmentality as a thought experiment aimed at ‘going behind’ or ‘outside’ ‘the State’ in order to explore the ways in which power relations are ‘rooted deep in the social nexus’ (Foucault 1982, 222). It proceeds to question how the term policy commonly operates as part of a conception of government in which the state marshals policies as tools to manage and fix problems. To bring the insights of a governmentality perspective to policy studies, attention is directed to the problematizations in policies, emphasizing their assumptions, their inclusions and their exclusions. With this perspective, ‘policy studies’ adopts a broad research programme – attending to the plural, interconnected authorities and mechanisms involved in governing, the ‘thought’ that makes governing possible, and the processes of subjectification and objectivization.

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This challenging agenda alters the kinds of questions brought to ‘policy studies’. Instead of assessing ‘policies’ as successes or failures, or stressing the importance of ‘implementation’, we ask: how did this happen and how was this possible? To address these questions, researchers examine the ‘ensemble’ of ‘institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics’ (Foucault 2007, 108) through which governing takes place. Emphasizing the ‘complexity, ambiguity and the contingency of contemporary political formations’ in this way maximizes ‘possibilities for critical responses and interventions’ (Larner 2000, 14).

NOTES 1. I wish to thank Angie Bletsas, Jennifer Bonham, Sue Goodwin, Anne Wilson and the Editors for comments on an earlier draft. 2. By hyphenating the term in this unusual way, (‘governmental-ity’) I wish to emphasize the French origin of the word and to suggest the possible need to rethink other common adaptations. Specifically, there has been a tendency to refer to ‘govern-mentalities’ (Senellart 2007, 382), a convention I myself have adopted on occasion (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 41). However, Foucault (1984c) explicitly distanced himself from the ‘history of mentalities’ associated with the Annales School of History. It is interesting to consider how shifting the location of the hyphen (from govern-mentality/ies to governmental-ity) de-emphasizes the focus on mentalities and brings wider attention to the complex ensemble of institutions, procedures and tactics involved in ‘government’. 3. The ‘outside’ or exteriority of ‘thought’ is a persistent theme in Foucault’s work (Foucault 1987; Gougelet 2014). 4. I acknowledge that every word choice is fraught with risks due to other possible interpretations. 5. The French is offered here because of the common tendency to translate this passage as ‘multiple governmentalities’ (see Senellart 2007, 382, for instance), linked perhaps to the convention of referring to ‘govern-mentalities’ mentioned in note 2. As in my comment on that convention, I conjecture that ‘multiple governmentality’ captures the complex amalgam of influences within ‘government’. 6. The use of ‘place’ in this context refers to the tendency in political science and policy studies to view ‘place as a location on a surface where things “just happen”’ (Agnew 2011, 317). Agnew traces this ‘privileging of place as simply location’ to a modernist impulse to ‘exalt abstract categories’ (ibid., 321). He contrasts this usage with the adoption of ‘space’ to capture a ‘more holistic view of places as the geographical context for the mediation of physical, social and economic processes’ (ibid., 317). 7. Puig de la Bellacasa (2011, 96) expresses concern that Latour’s position moderates a critical standpoint – exhibiting ‘mistrust regarding minoritarian and radical ways of politicizing things that tend to focus on exposing relations of power and exclusion’.

REFERENCES Agnew, J. (2011), ‘Space and Place’, in Agnew, J. and Livingstone, D. N. (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, London: Sage, pp. 316–330. Anderson, B. (2008), ‘For Space (2005): Doreen Massey’, in Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. and Valentine, G. (eds), Key Texts in Human Geography, London: Sage, pp. 225–234.

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Australian Government (2020), ‘Advancing Women in STEM: 2-2 Action Plan’, Canberra: Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. https://​www​.industry​.gov​.au/​data​ -and​-publications/​advancing​-women​-in​-stem​-strategy. Bacchi, C. (2009), Analyzing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be?, Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education. Bacchi, C. (2012), ‘Why Study Problematizations? Making Politics Visible’, Open Journal of Political Science, 2(1), 1–8. Bacchi, C. (2015), ‘The Turn to Problematization: Political Implications of Contrasting Interpretive and Poststructural Adaptations’, Open Journal of Political Science, 5, 1–12. Bacchi, C. (2018), ‘Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a Poststructural Analytic Strategy’, Contemporary Drug Problems, 45(1), 3–14. Bacchi, C. (2020), ‘Problem-Solving as a Governing Knowledge: “Skills”-Testing in PISA and PIAAC’, Open Journal of Political Science, 10, 82–105. Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. (2014), ‘Reclaiming Discursive Practices as an Analytic Focus: Political Implications’, Foucault Studies, 17, 173–192. Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. (2016), Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R. A. W. (2012), ‘Interpretivism and the Analysis of Traditions and Practices’, Critical Policy Studies, 6(2), 201–208. Bigo, D. (2010), ‘Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones’, in Squire, V. (ed.), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, New York: Routledge, pp. 31–50. Bletsas, A. (2007), ‘Contesting Representations of Poverty: Ethics and Evaluation’, Policy and Society, 26(3), 65–83. Bonham, J. and Bacchi, C. (2017), ‘Cycling “Subjects” in Ongoing-Formation: The Politics of Interviews and Interview Analysis’, Journal of Sociology, 53(3), 687–703. Bottrell, D. and Goodwin, S. (2011), ‘Contextualising Schools and Communities’, in Bottrell, D. and Goodwin, S. (eds), Schools, Communities and Social Inclusion, South Yarra: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–20. Brady, M. (2014), ‘Ethnographies of Neoliberal Governmentalities: From the Neoliberal Apparatus to Neoliberalism and Governmental Assemblages’, Foucault Studies, 18, 11–33. Castel, R. (1994), ‘“Problematization” as a Mode of Reading History’, in Goldstein, J. (ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 237–252. Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N. and Stubbs, P. (2015), Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Bristol University Press. Clough, P. T. and Halley, J. (eds) (2007), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Colebatch, H., Hoppe, R. and Noordgraaf, M. (2010), ‘Lessons for Policy Work’, in Colebatch, H., Hoppe, R. and Noordegraaf, M. (eds), Working for Policy, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 227–245. Collier, S. J. (2009), ‘Typologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond “Governmentality”’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26, 78–108. Deacon, R. (2000), ‘Theory as Practice: Foucault’s Concept of Problematization’, Telos, 118, 127–142. Dean, M. (1995), ‘Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society’, Economy and Society, 24(4), 559–583. Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage. Deleuze, G. (1988), Foucault, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Durnová, A. (2015), ‘Lost in Translation: Expressing Emotions in Policy Deliberation’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 222–240.

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Fairclough, N. (2013), ‘Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Policy Studies’, Critical Policy Studies, 7, 177–197. Finlayson, A. and Martin, J. (2006), ‘Poststructuralism’, in Hay, C., Lister, M. and Marsh, D. (eds), The State: Theories and Issues, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 155–171. Fischer, F. and Forester, J. (eds) (1993), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds) (2015a), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (2015b), ‘Introduction to Critical Policy Studies’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 1–24. Foucault, M. (1980a), ‘Two Lectures’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) and Gordon, C. et al. (trans.), Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, London: Longman, pp. 78–108. Foucault, M. (1980b), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An introduction, New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1982), ‘How is Power Exercised?’, in Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 216–226. Foucault, M. (1984a), ‘The Means of Correct Training’, reprinted from Discipline and Punish, in Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 188–206. Foucault, M. (1984b), ‘La Phobie d’État’ (excerpt from the lecture of 31 January 1979 at the Collège de France), Libération, 967, 20–31. Foucault, M. (1984c), ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’, based on an interview conducted by Paul Rabinow in L. Davis (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 1: Ethics, New York: New Press. https://​edisciplinas​.usp​.br/​pluginfile​.php/​4256765/​mod​_resource/​ content/​1/​FOUCAULT​_Polemics​_Politics​_Problematizations​.pdf. Foucault, M. (1986), The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. II, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1987), ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’, in Foucault/Blanchot, New York: Zone Books. Foucault, M. (1991), ‘Questions of Method’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73–86. Foucault, M. (1997), ‘What is Critique?’, in Lotringer, S. (ed.), Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 41–81. Foucault, M. (2000), ‘The Subject and Power’, in Faubion, J. D. (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault Vol. III, New York: New Press, pp. 326–348. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, C. (1991), ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–51. Gougelet, D.-O. (2014), ‘Outside’, in Lawlor, L. and Nale, J. (eds), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 322–326. Hajer, M. (1993), ‘Discourse Coalitions and the Institutionalization of Practice: The Case of Acid Rain in Great Britain’, in Fischer, F. and Forester, J. (eds), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 43–76.

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Hajer, M. and Versteeg, W. (2005), ‘A Decade of Discourse Analysis of Environmental Politics: Achievements, Challenges, Perspectives’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 7(3), 175–184. Hajer, M. and Wagenaar, H. (eds) (2003), Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howarth, D. and Griggs, S. (2015), ‘Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and Critical Policy Studies: Interests, Identities and Policy Change’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 111–127. Jessen, M. H. and von Eggers, N. (2020), ‘Governmentality and Statification: Towards a Foucauldian Theory of the State’, Theory, Culture & Society, 37(1), 53–72. Jessop, B. (2003), ‘The Governance of Complexity and the Complexity of Governance: Preliminary Remarks on Some Problems and Limits of Economic Guidance’. https://​ www​.lancaster​.ac​.uk/​fass/​resources/​sociology​-online​-papers/​papers/​jessop​-governance​-of​ -complexity​.pdf. Jessop, B. (2010), ‘Another Foucault Effect? Foucault on Governmentality and Statecraft’, in Bröckling, U., Krasmann, S. and Lemke, T. (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 56–73. Larner, W. (2000), ‘Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality’, Studies in Political Economy, 63, 1–25. Larner, W. (2008), ‘Comments on Kevin Stenson’s “Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety”’, Social Work and Society, 6(1), 21–25. Larner, W. and Walters, W. (2004), ‘Introduction: Global Governmentality’, in Larner, W. and Walters, W. (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–20. Larsson, O. (2020), ‘The Connections between Crisis and War Preparedness in Sweden’, Security Dialogue, November, 1–19. Latour, B. (2004), ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248. Lemke, T. (2007), ‘An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 8(2), 43–64. Lemke, T. (2015), ‘New Materialisms: Foucault and the “Government of Things”’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32(4), 3–25. Lorenzini, D. (2016), ‘From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much’, Foucault Studies, 21, 7–21. Lorenzini, D. and Tazzioli, M. (2020), ‘Critique without Ontology: Genealogy, Collective Subjects and the Deadlocks of Evidence’, Radical Philosophy, 2(7), 27–39. Lövbrand, E. and Stripple, J. (2015), ‘Foucault and Critical Policy Studies’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 92–110. Massey, D. (2005), For Space, London: Sage. McKee, K. (2009), ‘Post-Foucauldian Governmentality: What Does It Offer Critical Social Policy Analysis?’, Critical Social Policy, 29(3), 465–486. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990), ‘Governing Economic Life’, Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31. Mort, F. and Peters, R. (2005), ‘Foucault Recalled: Interview with Michel Foucault’ (conducted in 1979), New Formations, 10, 9–22. Ong, A. (2003), Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, Berkeley: University of California Press. Paterson, S. (2019), ‘Emotional Labour: Exploring Emotional Policy Discourses of Pregnancy and Childbirth in Ontario, Canada’, Public Policy and Administration, 33, 409–427.

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Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011), ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things’, Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106. Race, K. (2005), ‘Recreational States: Drugs and the Sovereignty of Consumption’, Culture Machine, 7, 1–10. Rein, M. and Schon, D. (1996), ‘Frame-Critical Policy Analysis and Frame-Reflective-Polic y-Practices’, Knowledge and Policy, 9(1), 85–105. Rose, N. (2000), Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992), ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, The British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173–205. Rose, N., O’Malley, P. and Valverde, M. (2006), ‘Governmentality’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2, 83–104. Rowse, T. (2009), ‘The Ontological Politics of “Closing the Gap”’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2(1&2), 33–48. Senellart, M. (2007), ‘Course Context’, in M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 369–401. Stenson, K. (2008), ‘Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety’, Social Work and Society, 6(1), 1–14. Stevens, A. (2020), ‘Critical Realism and the “Ontological Politics of Drug Policy”’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 84(6), Article 102723. Sum, N.-L. and Jessop, B. (2015), ‘Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies: Developing a Critique of Domination’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 128–150. Tazzioli, M. and Walters, W. (2016), ‘The Sight of Migration: Governmentality, Visibility and Europe’s Contested Borders’, Global Society, 30(3), 445–464. Thompson, S. and Hoggett, P. (2012), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies, New York: Continuum Books. Thrift, N. (2003), ‘Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography’, in Holloway, S. L., Rice, S. P. and Valentine, G. (eds), Key Concepts in Geography, London: Sage, pp. 95–107. Valverde, M. (2010), ‘Specters of Foucault in Law and Society Scholarship’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 6, 45–59. van Hulst, M. and Yanow, D. (2016), ‘From Policy “Frames” to “Framing”: Theorizing a More Dynamic, Political Approach’, American Review of Public Administration, 46(1), 92–112. Veyne, P. (1997), ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in Davidson, A. I. (ed.) and Porter, C. (trans.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 147–182. Wahlberg, A. and Rose, N. (2015), ‘The Governmentalization of Living: Calculating Global Health’, Economy and Society, 44(1), 60–90. Walters, W. (2002), ‘The Power of Inscription: Beyond Social Construction and Deconstruction in European Integration Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31(3), 84–108. Walters, W. (2004), ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics’, Citizenship Studies, 8, 237–260. Walters, W. (2009), ‘Europe’s Borders’, in Rumford, C. (ed.), The Sage Handbook of European Studies, London: Sage, pp. 485–505. Walters, W. (2012), Governmentality: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge. Yanow, D. (2000), Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yanow, D. (2007), ‘Qualitative-Interpretive Methods in Policy Research’, in Fischer, F., Miller, G. J. and Sidney, M. S. (eds), Handbook of Public Policy Analysis: Theory, Politics, and Methods, London: CRC Books, pp. 405–415.

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Yanow, D. (2015), ‘Making Sense of Policy Practices: Interpretations and Meaning’, in Fischer, F., Torgerson, D., Durnová, A. and Orsini, M. (eds), Handbook of Critical Policy Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 401–421.

4. Governmentality and international relations: critiques, challenges, genealogies Hans-Martin Jaeger

From Larner and Walters’ (2004, 1) observation of a dearth of governmentality research on international forms of rule to recent calls to reinvigorate or pluralize this kind of research (Busse and Hamilton 2021, 1–2, 17–18; Bonditti et al. 2017, 1), the international and the global have had a steep career in governmentality studies.1 To be sure, in disciplines like anthropology, geography and law this career had already begun before Larner and Walters’ Global Governmentality brought Foucauldian engagements with the international to wider attention in political science and International Relations (IR) (see Scott 1995; Stoler 1995; Perry and Maurer 2003). While mindful of contributions to International Governmentality Studies (IGS) from different disciplines in the social sciences,2 this chapter will review and seek to expand on the debate in IR. The first part of the chapter discusses some of the major criticisms of IGS in IR; specifically, the charges of ‘domestic analogy’3 and an alleged analytical and normative bias towards liberalism in the field (Selby 2007; Joseph 2010; Chandler 2009, 2010). While I largely concur with the qualified defences of IGS against these charges (Rosenow 2009; Walters 2012; Vrasti 2013a; Busse and Hamilton 2021), I identify six current challenges for the field. These include questions over the theoretical status of Foucault’s categories, IGS’ empirical concentration on (neo-)liberalism, its treatment of the political and the international, and of coloniality and race. Bearing in mind these challenges and heeding calls to rethink governmentality through genealogy (Biebricher 2008; Bevir 2010; Walters 2012, ch. 4), the second part of the chapter provides an illustrative discussion of historical forms of modern international governmentality neglected by Foucault and IGS in IR;4 specifically, those emerging and evolving in European conquest and colonization, and especially through liberalism’s implication with British imperialism and racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Foucault’s (2007, 2008) governmentality lectures can provide some pointers, but their emphases on diplomacy, war, the balance of power, and international law and commerce are curiously reminiscent, and echo some of the omissions and limitations, of conventional ‘Westphalian’, English School (see Bull 1977), and liberal accounts of modern international relations (see Hobson 2012). To address some of these oversights (in illustrative and selective fashion), the chapter draws on related historiographical scholarship outside IGS. 72

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THE IGS DEBATE IN IR: REBUTTALS AND REMAINING CHALLENGES International Governmentality: Domestic Analogy and Liberal Bias? Compared to previous invocations of Foucault as the avatar of poststructuralism in IR, Walters credits IGS with introducing a more empirically minded form of ‘minor’ Foucauldian theorizing. Rather than the discursive conditions of epistemic regimes, the latter is more interested in ‘an analysis of world politics in terms of its singularities, apparatuses, strategies and technologies’ and the contingent deployment of varied rationalizations, practices, and techniques without the presupposition of an overarching ‘logic’ of power (Walters 2012, 88–89). Others similarly see the contribution of IGS in its appreciation of decentralized and heterogeneous aspects of global power relations (Merlingen 2006, 184–193; Rosenow 2009; Vrasti 2013a; Busse and Hamilton 2021, 1–3). Like Walters (2012, 89–91), Rosenow (2009) and Vrasti (2013a) also acknowledge conflicting tendencies towards grand theoretical (over-)generalization in the diagnosis of global (neo-)liberalism and in certain uses of governmentality’s cognate concepts of biopower and biopolitics when these are portrayed as the inner logics of new globe-spanning capitalist or security regimes (as, for instance, in Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire or in Foucauldian critical security studies, such as Dillon and Reid 2001). All three reviewers concede, however, that IGS still needs to engage further with questions of global capitalism without universalizing the latter into a social ontology; a point to which we will return below. The notion of international/global governmentality has faced a series of trenchant criticisms (Selby 2007; Joseph 2010; Chandler 2009, 2010). These have largely revolved around three related issues. First, claims about international governmentality have been charged with a fallacy of domestic analogy, that is, with unduly extrapolating from the (early) modern West European domestic contexts in which Foucault first diagnosed the emergence of governmentality to the ontologically different sphere of international politics. Whereas governmentality may complement and sometimes supersede sovereignty and discipline inside modern Western states, the critics argue, these modalities of power, along with coercion, violence and war, remain prevalent in the international realm. Second and related, IGS in IR has been charged with a liberal analytic bias: given the inherently liberal (or neoliberal) temper and Western context of governmentality, its alleged internationalization is said to overstate the global prevalence of liberalism and the extent to which the latter can be ‘exported’ to countries lacking liberal dispositions and corresponding political and socioeconomic conditions. Third, critics have charged IGS with a liberal normative bias insofar as the asserted internationalization of governmentality effectively normalizes, and even provides ideological support for, depoliticized global governance in the name of (neo-)liberalism by international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The first two criticisms of IGS overlook that Foucault’s own account, rather than being restricted to supposedly ontologically distinct domestic and liberal settings,

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situates the emergence of governmentality, especially its early modern instantiation of raison d’état,5 in the context of European inter-state competition, war, diplomacy, and the development of international law, all of which complement and interact with domestic police rationalities and practices (Foucault 2007, chs. 10–12; Walters 2012, 86–87; see also Leira 2009). Rather than constituting distinct spheres, the domestic and the international were thus imbricated with each other in the emergence of governmentality. This imbrication continues with the turn to liberalism which refines states’ economic capacities for international competition in continuity with raison d’état, while simultaneously limiting their ability to interfere with markets through ‘globalization’ (Foucault 2007, 55, cf. 348). Rather than being extrapolated to the international by analogy and analytic bias at the hands of IGS then, liberalism has been ‘international governmentality’ since its inception.6 Overlooking the inherently international character of governmentality, the first two criticisms of IGS largely equate governmentality with liberalism, understood as a ‘domestic’ form of rule. However, as already seen with the proto-governmentality of raison d’état, governmentality – ‘national’ or ‘international’ – is not coextensive with liberalism. Liberalism rather takes its place alongside, and sometimes interacts with, other modes of power including discipline, police, sovereignty, warfare, ‘balancing’ power, and pastoral care (Walters 2012, 94–97; Vrasti 2013a, 56–57; Busse and Hamilton 2021, 9–11). Contrary to the critics’ assertions, international governmentality then does not imply an even terrain of global liberalism. Pace Joseph (2010), uneven international development, or distinctions between liberal and non-liberal spaces and forms of rule are internal to (neo-)liberalism’s operation as governmentality rather than constituting its external conditions of possibility. This is evidenced, for instance, by the policing of purportedly dangerous, deviant or deficient populations as well as civilizing-modernizing-developmental interventions in the name of liberal governance (Hindess 2001a, 2001b). Without claiming that such interventions are necessarily successful, IGS scholarship on ‘postcolonial governmentalities’ (Teo and Wynne-Hughes 2020) or transversal and heterogeneous ‘spaces of governmentality’ like the Mediterranean (Tazzioli 2014) has also demonstrated the utility of a governmentality lens in presumably non-liberal or non-Western contexts.7 While not committing the fallacy of domestic analogy or inherently displaying liberal analytic bias, IGS may be liable to a certain reification of the international (Walters 2012, 100–102; Busse and Hamilton 2021, 6–8). Rather than investigating in what ways the international (or the global) in international governmentality is itself constituted by governmental rationalities, techniques and practices, IGS has tended to take for granted the international as a ‘Westphalian’ or ‘post-Westphalian’ states system on which different forms of governmentality are inscribed. Indeed, Foucault himself may be faulted for presuming a ‘statist-Westphalian’ imaginary of the modern international (Leira 2009) and a Eurocentric liberalism rather than, say, an ‘imperial-Atlantic’ or ‘Black Atlantic’ one centring 1492 and its aftermath which would acknowledge the implication of ‘European’ raison d’état and liberalism with Western colonialism and imperialism outside Europe (Fernández and Esteves 2017). While critical of liberalism in principle, Foucauldian security studies (as part of IGS)

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and Foucault himself have recently even been charged with silencing racism’s constitutive significance for biopower and biopolitical security practices, and with this, eliding the coloniality of modernity (Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2019). Related to the tendency of reifying the international, IGS may also have considered Foucault’s triangle of sovereignty-discipline-government as exhaustive of the ‘geometry of power’, or treated police, biopolitics, liberalism, neoliberalism and other Foucauldian concepts as general theoretical categories that can be ‘applied’ to a given international context without qualification or historicization (Walters 2012, 102–109; Rosenow 2009). Accordingly, Walters (2012, 95–97, 102) has called for a more ‘eventalized’ and genealogically informed knowledge of the international in IGS, and for the investigation of ‘other governmentalities’ beyond Foucault’s conceptual toolbox. We will return to these challenges below and in the second section. The third criticism, IGS’ normative liberal bias or its alleged ideological complicity with the legitimation of (neo-)liberal global governance, is more difficult to assess. Few (if any) scholars of international governmentality may intend to support an ostensibly depoliticized regime of global (neo-)liberalism, and yet studying global governance through its varied rationalities and technologies rather than as ‘(neo-) liberal ideology’ may be said to produce this discursive effect.8 The critics have their own remedies for IGS’ supposed normative (neo-)liberal predicament and deficit in criticality. Based on the epistemological critique that Foucault ‘explains the how but not the why’ (Joseph 2012, 15), Joseph (2010; 2012, ch. 2) advocates a ‘Marxist social ontology’ situating neoliberal governmentality within the ‘deeper structures’ of capitalist production and uneven accumulation, and thereby exposing it as the ideological product of structural changes associated with the shift from postwar Keynesianism to the ‘Washington consensus’ since the 1980s. Chandler (2009, 2010) appeals to the normative significance of the nation-state which he sees marginalized by IGS’ diagnosis of global governmentality and which he considers the only site where neoliberalism can be confronted politically by citizens as rights-bearing autonomous subjects. The problem with these remedies for IGS’ alleged ideological effects is that they counteract the epistemological and analytical import as well as the arguable political merits of a Foucauldian approach. Refraining from causal and normative-prescriptive arguments alike, the governmentality analytic seeks to avoid essentializing universals, such as the ‘structures’ of global capitalism or the sovereign state as the sole founts or authentic sites of power and politics. Instead, it is concerned with investigating discursive and material modalities and effects of particular localized and historicized configurations of power/knowledge without a priori ontological assumptions about underlying causal structures or foundational institutions (see Rosenow 2009, 498–500; Vrasti 2013a, 53; Walters 2012, 91–92). From Foucault’s arguably postfoundational perspective (cf. Marchart and Martinsen 2019), the sites of power and politics are not given by ontological fiat but rather emerge in political struggles and through ‘techniques of politicization and democratization’ (Walters 2012, 80), whatever scale or locale they may be placed at analytically. Contrasting with the contingent (never necessary, but always

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possible) manifestation of the political in governmentality, Joseph’s and Chandler’s ‘foundational’ remedies ironically appear as ‘metapolitical’ and ‘parapolitical’ forms of depoliticization, respectively reducing the political to an underlying logic of capitalism and class struggle or channelling it into the institutional police apparatuses of nation-states (to borrow Rancière’s [1999, 70–91] typifications). To be sure, the extent to which the politicizing potential of a Foucauldian approach is borne out in IGS in practice remains open to questioning (see Merlingen 2006, 193–195). Challenges for IGS The critiques of IGS and their qualified rebuttals highlight six major challenges for the field: (1) a divide between ‘minor’ theorizing and more macroscopic approaches to governmentality and biopolitics as global security or capitalist logics; (2) a residual, more empirical than analytical or normative, overemphasis of (Eurocentric) liberalism and corresponding neglect of other, complementary or contradictory, modes of governing; (3) a tendency towards a state-centric essentialization of the international at the expense of investigating the multiple ways in which the latter is produced;9 (4) the elision of the constitutive role of the coloniality of modernity and racism for biopower and biopolitical security practices, and for modern international governmentality more broadly; (5) the limitation to, and ‘over-theorization’ of, Foucault’s categories at the expense of conceptually innovative, site-specific, and genealogically informed studies; (6) the theorization of the political (including attention to resistance, critique, and contestation) in governmentality to counter inadvertent discursive effects of ideological depoliticization in IGS. We will not be able to address these challenges for IGS comprehensively or systematically within the scope of this chapter but only highlight some tendencies. In particular, the following brief, selective, and macroscopic observations cannot do justice to the various thematic literatures within IGS on security, migration, development, etc. 1. Minor theorizing vs. grand theory. Despite many site-specific and detailed engagements with particular governmental rationalities, practices and technologies (Walters and Haahr 2005; Vrasti 2013b), especially in the thematically specialized literatures, IGS in IR remains prone to grand-theoretical temptations. These are apparent, for instance, in Neumann and Sending’s (2010) or Bartelson’s (2014, 99) identifications of international-liberal governmentalization with (respectively) a ‘global polity’ and a ‘new nomos of the Earth’ (or ‘empire’), or in attempts to connect international governmentality to Luhmannian or Stanford School theories of world society (see Busse 2017; Stetter 2021; Jaeger 2007). 2. Liberalism and ‘other governmentalities’ (beyond Foucault and Eurocentrism). While not according liberalism and neoliberalism analytical (let alone normative) priority, these have been the empirical focus of much IGS scholarship in IR. ‘Other governmentalities’ (Walters 2012, 95) beyond Foucault’s ‘toolbox’ and operating alongside or outside liberalism, especially in relation to non-Western

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contexts are thereby neglected. This neglect may be explained by IGS’ predominantly presentist empirical focus that retains liberalism largely within Foucault’s Eurocentric horizon and thereby omits the colonial past and postcolonial present. Empirically, liberalism remains the theme with non-liberal governmentalities (within and beyond Foucault’s writings), especially those applied to non-Western populations, constituting the counterpoints. To be sure, it is usually recognized that global (neo-)liberalism is never limited to governing through freedom and markets alone. Dillon and Reid’s (2001) programmatic statement about ‘global liberal governance’, for instance, sees liberal security and war suffused with molecular and digital biopolitics. Neumann and Sending’s (2010) and Bartelson’s (2014, ch. 3) arguments about the prevalence of liberal international governmentality acknowledge the policing of ‘deficient’ or ‘delinquent’ states. And Glenn’s (2019) study of the post-crisis global economy shows that the persistence of neoliberalism implies surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms for indebted Eurozone economies. However, these examples of ‘other governmentalities’ operating in conjunction with (neo-)liberalism still present the challenges of (a) adjusting the balance between (or reversing) liberal themes and non-liberal counterpoints, and (b) moving beyond Foucault’s categories and their Eurocentric horizon (see (4) and (5) below). 3. State-centric essentialization of the international. While not necessarily positing that international governmentalities are inherently connected to states, much IGS still takes for granted that the international, understood as a ‘Westphalian’ (or post-Westphalian) world of states, constitutes the context within which state-transcending governmentalities are deployed or upon which they supervene. Neumann and Sending, for instance, introduce their study of international governmentality as being ‘about how states govern at a distance, through other types of agents’ (2010, vii); the ‘form’ of their ideal-typical ‘global polity’ is defined by sovereignty and therefore remains international in a state-centric sense, while its ‘contents’ (that is, the practices and relations of states and other actors) are governmentalized (ibid., 6; cf. 157–174; see also Bartelson 2014, 79, and critically, Busse and Hamilton 2021, 6–8). The possibility that the international itself may be plural and take forms which exceed or defy sovereignty, as in various internationalisms ranging from the religious and the socialist to the feminist and the Indigenous (see Sluga and Clavin 2017), thereby remains beyond consideration. 4. Coloniality and racism. Despite extensive scholarship on colonial governmentality and race outside IR (see Scott 1995; Stoler 1995; Inda 2005; Legg 2007; Kalpagam 2014) and the long-standing recognition of liberalism’s illiberal colonial dimension in theoretically oriented governmentality scholarship (Hindess 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Helliwell and Hindess 2002; Rojas, Samaddar, this volume), the inherent implication of governmentalities ranging from raison d’état to neoliberalism with colonial and postcolonial modernities and racisms has only registered as a ‘flickering presence’ (Moffette and Walters 2018) in IGS in IR. Perhaps more than with the other challenges to IGS, Foucault’s own muted or rather partial treatment of colonialism, race, and racism is also at issue here. Howell and

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Richter-Montpetit (2019) trace Foucauldian security studies’ ‘whitewashing of colonial and racial violence’ (ibid., 2) to Foucault’s own neglect of ‘the constitutive role of (settler) colonialism in the production of modernity’, ‘the fundamental role of the Black or savage Other in the ontological consolidation of man or “the human” necessary for biopower’ (ibid., 5), and ‘the concomitant raciality and coloniality of the modern subject’ (ibid., 6) in his lecture on the emergence of biopower and state racism (Foucault 2003, ch. 11). Fernández and Esteves (2017) similarly fault him for overlooking the constitutive role of the colonial world in his account of the emergence of European international society (Foucault 2007, chs. 11–12).10 While colonialism and race might therefore be ‘absent presences’ in Foucault’s thought and much IGS, the critics may err in presenting a somewhat universalizing counter-narrative of ‘racialization as a generic process’. This in turn may preclude more ‘transformationalist’ genealogical accounts of ‘the changing material and discursive regimes of race historically’ (to draw on Moffette and Walters’ [2018, 94] threefold typology of framings of race in IGS on migration). The second part of this chapter will straddle the line between the generic and the transformationalist frames to offer some observations on colonialism and race as constitutive elements of international governmentalities. 5. Application vs. innovation of Foucault’s concepts. Despite Walters’ cautioning against over-theorization and applicationism (see also Aradau, this volume), IGS scholarship has often limited itself to selecting from Foucault’s conceptual toolbox of disciplinary, pastoral, police, biopolitical, liberal and neoliberal governmental powers (for example, Jaeger 2010). While this can lead to insights about historical and transnational continuities of governance across a variety of sites, it runs the risk of turning Foucault’s arguably more experimentally deployed conceptual categories into reified theoretical concepts (Neal 2009). A perhaps inflationary fascination with neoliberalism and its technologies of competition and responsibility, for instance, may also have fuelled Joseph’s (2010) critique of its putative overdiagnosis as a global phenomenon. However, some IGS scholarship has certainly been sensitive to governmentalities other than neoliberalism, and in some cases ‘other governmentalities’ beyond Foucault’s writings. Death (2013, 774–778), for instance, has named Bayart’s ‘politics of the belly’ as a distinctive governmental regime in the context of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa. Tazzioli (2014, ch. 1) has identified governmentalities of ‘border interruption’ and ‘precarization’ in the governance of North African and Mediterranean migratory mobilities. And a whole distinctive line of IGS scholarship has emerged around governmentalities of risk and resilience (with debates about the extent to which these comport with or deviate from neoliberalism) (for example, Aradau and van Munster 2007; Aradau et al. 2008; Amoore and de Goede 2008; Brassett et al. 2013; Corry 2014; Bourbeau 2015). 6. Governmentality and the political. Foucault’s status as an arguably postfoundational (or agonal) thinker of the political has at least implicitly been recognized in scholarship in political theory and IR for some time (for example, Simons 1995, ch. 9; Edkins 1999, chs. 1–3). Foucault’s (2010, 2011) ‘post-governmen-

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tality’ lectures centred on parrhēsia (see Weiskopf, Lorenzini, this volume) have provided further impetus to such a reading (Bang 2015; Marchart and Martinsen 2019). Nevertheless, as noted above, critics have sometimes seen analyses of depoliticizing modalities of neoliberalism in IGS (for example, Jaeger 2007; Muehlenhoff 2019) as themselves contributing to depoliticization rather than constituting a political antidote to it. Apart from the literature on risk and resilience which has kept the political in view (Aradau et al. 2008; Brassett et al. 2013), however, some scholarship explicitly charts a more agonal-political direction for IGS. An early example is Lipschutz’s (2005) attempt to bring the political into governmentality through an Arendtian ‘constitutive politics’ of discursive ruptures by contemporary social movements countering ‘official’ global civil society- (that is, NGO-) supported schemes for corporate social responsibility and other market-based mechanisms. In his discussion of global climate governance, Methmann (2013, 79) points to the repoliticizing potentials of fundamental challenges to fossil-fuel based economies, industrial agriculture, and global inequality in response to the depoliticizations effectuated by the Clean Development Mechanism. One may object that such prescriptive approaches to repoliticization could be antithetical to Foucault’s normatively more abstemious research ethos. Accordingly, others have more empirically drawn on Foucault’s notions of counter-conducts and parrhēsia to highlight the repoliticizing potentials of aesthetic practices, such as photographic/video documentation of the violence of US drone warfare (Walters 2014), literal appropriations of codified rights by South African slum-dwellers (Selmeczi 2015), or other inventive and less visible practices of resistance not cast ‘in an expressly political register against the state and/or the market’ (Odysseos et al. 2016, 152). Each of these six challenges for IGS could be addressed in various ways. The second part of this chapter will suggest that a particularly fruitful avenue might lie in a deeper historicization of international governmentality. The historicization in question here is a Foucauldian-genealogical one which Bevir (2010, 429) characterizes as a form of ‘denaturalizing … critique’. In the short illustration that follows, this type of critique will be brought – somewhat reflexively – to Foucault’s own (brief) genealogical account of international liberalism by situating it within the context of European colonialism and empire. While not systematically treating the six challenges identified above (and indeed excluding attention to the first and the last), the illustration seeks to decentre and denaturalize Eurocentric liberalism with reference to some of its – simultaneously complementary and conflicting – ‘differential’ international governmentalities, that is, ‘other’, colonial, racial/racist, and not necessarily state-centric ones beyond a Foucauldian governmental script (see (2) to (5) above).

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TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF LIBERALISM’S DIFFERENTIAL INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENTALITIES A genealogy of international governmentality tracing Foucault’s (2007, 2008) own work could range from the emergence of raison d’état and the concurrent Spanish ‘conquest of America’ in the sixteenth century to ‘the birth of neoliberalism’ in the twentieth.11 However, the following illustration will focus on, and genealogically denaturalize and displace, Foucault’s account of international liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by highlighting liberalism’s ‘differential’ (colonial, racist, non-statist, etc.) international governmentalities. Foucault (2008, 51) considered ‘Europe and the international space’ as ‘fundamental’ to liberalism. However, his discussion of the subject is brief and limited to late eighteenth-century political(-economic) thought (especially Adam Smith and Kant), and as he says, to Europe. Within these confines, liberal international governmentality crystallizes in the ‘collective enrichment of Europe’ through economic competition and commercial interaction in a globalized market (in turn underpinning international law and organization); ‘not … the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others’, Foucault (2008, 54–55) emphasizes, passing over in silence the colonial and imperial configuration of the globalized market in (and beyond) the eighteenth century. Indeed, he explicitly distinguishes the new internationalized form of liberalism from the preceding and ongoing European colonialism and the imperialisms that would follow (Foucault 2008, 56).12 As noted above, he has therefore rightly been criticized for, at best, misconceiving, and at worst, whitewashing international liberalism in both thought and practice. Extensive historical scholarship on European colonialism and imperialism and their bearings in, or connections to, international liberalism could be consulted to remedy Foucault’s omissions. To indicate some directions, we will (very selectively) rely on Duncan Bell’s trilogy on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American imperial political thought (Bell 2011, 2016, 2020).13 Bell’s work lends itself particularly well to an illustrative reading in terms of the differential international governmentalities implicit, and often quite explicit in, or related or complementary to, liberalism at its arguable imperial zenith (or nadir) in the late nineteenth century, a governmental configuration and period not covered by Foucault’s governmentality lectures or IGS in IR. Based on a Cambridge School approach to political thought and intellectual history and in this respect resembling a genealogically oriented governmentality analytic,14 Bell (2016, 93) considers nineteenth-century British imperial ideologies as discursive, material and performative; ‘never above’, but ‘always part of the [political] battle’ (Bell 2016, 1, quoting Quentin Skinner). In addition to contemporary (or earlier) canonical liberal political thinkers such as Locke, John Stuart Mill, or Kant whose intellectual and (in Locke’s and Mill’s case) practical entanglements with colonial and imperial thought and governance are well established (Mehta 1999; Helliwell and Hindess 2002; Jahn 2005; Losurdo 2011),15 imperial quasi-governmentalities were articulated by often lesser known political economists in the first and historically minded academic thinkers or politicians in the

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second half of the nineteenth century (Bell 2016, 7, 16, 34–36 and passim). As much as, or more so than the canonical thinkers, these were the engineers of late-Victorian imperial governmentalities, liberal and otherwise. Much like the actual engineers, doctors, bureaucrats, statisticians, social reformers, opinion pollsters and other ‘technicians’ who often author governmentalities in response to concrete questions of disease and mortality or other social ills (Osborne and Rose 1997), the intellectual engineers of empire devised governmental interventions based on practical problematizations (ibid., 96–97); namely, the ‘illness’ and decline of the British Empire due to the rise of competing powers internationally, and the social question and democracy domestically (Bell 2011, ch. 2). Like other problematizations, these also involved technical inventions; specifically, ‘classifications and categories’ (Osborne and Rose 1997, 98) such as institutional schemes for imperial federation or racial typologies and hierarchies (as further discussed below). ‘Other’ (Non-Liberal, Non-Foucauldian) Imperial-International Governmentalities It was in empire, however conceived – British, American, Anglo-American, federated, racial or otherwise – that liberalism in particular found its ‘dream machine’ (Bell 2016, 19). This said and cognizant of the possible co-presence of multiple international governmentalities in the same historical conjuncture (cf. Foucault 2008, 58–60), Bell (2016, 5) highlights the ‘ideological complexity and internal variability’ of liberal British imperial thought and specifies (alluding to and qualifying Mehta 1999, 37) that it was in the settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and ambivalently, South Africa) and their projected federative association ‘that many liberals found the concrete place of their dreams’ (ibid., 33; cf. 6, 22). The settler colonies thereby of course often became places of nightmares for Indigenous and enslaved populations at the same time. Before turning to some of the rationalities and technologies of liberal imperial government, we should note that imperial governmentality in the nineteenth and early twentieth century also displayed co-present multiplicity beyond liberalism (and largely beyond Foucault). At least four ‘other’ imperial-international governmentalities alongside liberalism (though sometimes operating in conjunction with it) can be identified. We will see below that late-Victorian international-imperial liberalism, broadly speaking, concerned itself with ‘races’ as governance subjects and objects, and involved a variety of racial-civilizational, pastoral, political-organizational and other rationalities and technologies of government. My brief sketch of four ‘other’ late-Victorian imperial-international governmentalities16 is limited to flagging their different governance subjects or objects and rationalities. 1. ‘Realist-geopolitical’ governmentality, rather than governing white and civilizationally homogeneous selves and non-white and civilizationally ‘inferior’ Others, sought to govern competing imperial states and the imperial international system.17 In this governmental mode, statesmen and diplomats redeployed the tactics and

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calculative techniques familiar from Foucault’s account of raison d’état in the European context, such as balancing power or great-power concertation, in the broader context of empire. It is only within this broader context that Foucault’s (2008, 56) phrase that ‘the game is in Europe, but the stake is the world’ gains its full meaning. Indeed, understood in terms of realist-geopolitical governmentality, the phrase could also be reversed. For alongside the European, there was also an imperial ‘game’ with its own diplomatic-military techniques, especially in the conduct of colonial warfare in which the legal strictures of intra-European wars were typically suspended, at least in part for the ‘stake’ of advantages in intra-European rivalries. In the context of warfare, realist-geopolitical and liberal international governmentalities could also condition one another. For instance, on a broad historical canvas Losurdo (2011, 297–298) points out that all Western ‘advances’ towards liberalism, such as the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution or the post-Second World War ‘liberal international order’ followed victorious wars, often in colonial or imperial contexts. A case for the reverse conditioning (or instrumentalization) could be made as well. 2. Rather than governing other states, ‘commercial-exploitative’ international-imperial governmentality, drawing on political economy, sought to govern international circuits of production and exchange, whether through the extraction of raw materials or labour or through opening new markets for trade. Since classical political economists (like Adam Smith) had often been sceptical of commercial-exploitative rationalizations of empire, ‘colonial reformers’ in the 1830s and 1840s challenged ‘the economic orthodoxy that colonies were drains on the “mother country”’ by redirecting political economy towards governing the ‘social question’ at home. ‘Systematic colonization’ could solve the problems of excess metropolitan capital and labour supply by giving capital a wider field of operation and exporting superabundant (or unemployed) working populations (along with ‘dangerous’ populations like inmates) as settler-colonists. The settler colonies were thereby reimagined as ‘productive spaces for economic growth’ and ‘nodes in a globe-spanning imperial security apparatus’ (Bell 2016, 34–36). 3. Similarly to commercial-exploitative governmentality, its ‘republican’-imperial counterpart primarily sought to govern the collective ‘domestic’ self rather than (or in conjunction with) other ‘races’ or states. However, what preoccupied republican imperialists was not the health of the metropolitan economy and the social question, but rather ‘the character of the imperial power’ and the moral-political question of how ‘to foster individual and collective virtue in their compatriots, while upholding national honor and glory’ (Bell 2016, 105). And rather than diplomatic techniques or the scientific conclusions of political economy, republican imperialism relied on the less technical practical wisdom of classical political thought of Roman provenance. 4. Like the two preceding types, ‘martialist’-imperial governmentality was concerned with governing individual and collective selves, and especially gendered selves and social relations. Its proponents saw the imperial ‘field of battle … as a space for enacting a form of warrior masculinity – and for inculcating

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virility in a population’ (ibid.). We may add that this entailed the ‘emasculation’, feminization, or infantilization of civilizational Others, which the liberal civilizing mission would also rely on. As such, martialist rationality ‘infused the thought and practice of many British soldiers, imperial administrators, and civil servants’ (ibid.). ‘Morally’ oriented similarly to its republican counterpart, martialist-imperial governmentality drew on a quasi-existentialist philosophy of authentic human self-realization through war, or of ‘forging character through exercising the will-to-power in rituals of destruction’ (ibid., 106) as a kind of psycho-ontological governmental knowledge. International Liberalism with a Colonial Difference: Racial Contractualism, Eliminativism, Civilizational Pastoralism It was perhaps not by accident that the settler colonies became the ‘dreamland’ of late nineteenth-century liberalism. For, imagined as the ‘state of nature’ in Hobbes’ and Locke’s classical works in political theory,18 they had also been the metaphorical birthplace of the fundamental constitution of a liberal society through a social contract that ended this imaginary state and ensured the consent to government by the governed. Contemporary liberal governmentality is sometimes associated with a different kind of contractualism that operates as a ‘technology of agency’ for targeted high-risk populations. Based on an ‘ethos of negotiated intersubjectivity’, it seeks to transform these into empowered subjects, sometimes in conjunction with ‘technologies of citizenship’ using ‘“voice” and “representation”’ to combat dependency and engage them as ‘active and free citizens’ (Dean 2010, 196–197). Contractualism was also operative in the ‘distinct modality of imperial governance’ (Bell 2016, 39) of nineteenth-century settler colonialism. However, this was a contractualism of a rather different, or differential, kind. Settler colonialism’s ‘racial contract’ (ibid.)19 provided intra-racial egalitarianism for white settlers, while applying interracial exclusivism to Indigenous and enslaved populations. The liberal government by consent afforded to the propertied and, until late into the nineteenth century, only male among the former was not only denied but turned into eliminativist and pastoral-civilizing governmental powers over the latter. Racial contractualism applied to the Indigenous and enslaved target population among the governed was not intended as a technology of agency but rather served their social and political deactivation and exclusion. Rather than an ethos of negotiated intersubjectivity, it was based on ‘Herrenvolk ethics’ (Bell 2016, 39, quoting Charles Mills).20 And rather than pursuing empowerment and combating dependency of the racially excluded, it sought to intensify their disempowerment and dependency. Deprived of voice and representation, they were not meant to become active and free citizens but remain passive and enslaved subjects. In a certain continuity with the (in part) genocidal rationality of its early modern Spanish-American predecessor (see Todorov 1992, 132–145), modern settler colonialism involved ‘colonial eliminativism’ (Bell 2016, 40). Beyond sovereign powers over life and death, the latter involved ‘assorted practices’ ranging from informal

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everyday humiliations, intimidations, and violence to institutionalized forms of assimilation, displacement, racial segregation, legal discrimination, and genocidal extermination of Indigenous and enslaved populations (ibid.). Like early modern Spanish genocidal necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), colonial eliminativism could occur as a result of deliberate inaction or be explicitly encoded in particular governmental knowledges. Similarly to endemic-diseases-become-biblical-plagues in New Spain (see Todorov 1992, 135–138), the extinction of Indigenous and black populations in the settler colonies could be accounted for in secularized scriptural terms; for instance, when the liberal and white ‘community of the free’ was regarded as the new ‘chosen people’ following a divine mandate of conquering ‘Canaan’ to destroy or enslave the populations condemned by Jehovah (with Indigenous and black people considered new ‘Canaanites’) (Losurdo 2011, 229, 310). However, the extinction of Indigenous populations could also be rationalized more ‘scientifically’ or philosophically as a matter of natural selection and an ‘inevitable function of historical progress’ (as in Herbert Spencer’s version), and above all in terms of scientific racism (as further discussed below) (Bell 2016, 45). Partly in reaction to (or in ‘repentance’ for) the atrocities of colonial eliminativism, liberals could take late-Victorian imperial governmentality into the ostensibly benign pastoral direction of its well-known ‘civilizing mission’. The liberal variant of civilizational pastoralism then considered its individually infantilized subjects (such as Indigenous or otherwise racialized people) or its collectively merely politically immature subjects (such as the white-settler dominated colonies) as being in need of ‘benevolent’ parental discipline, guidance, and education (cf. Bell 2016, 43).21 In a more morbid variant, Cambridge theologian and philosopher Alfred Caldecott conceived liberal civilizational pastoralism as palliative care (‘comfort, patience, and tenderness’) dutifully administered by the colonizers to ‘sick and dying tribes’ in ‘the sick-chamber’ of Western civilization (quoted by Bell 2016, 42). Liberal civilizing pastoralism then was pastoral insofar as it was ostensibly undertaken for the benefit of the governed to lead them to individual or collective ‘salvation’. It was liberal (and indeed, ‘inter-national’) insofar as the telos of collective salvation was the political form of the nation which, once achieved, would allow the ‘non-civilized’ people to govern itself and take its place in the inter-national community. However, the settler colonies excepted, it often appeared as though this kind of autonomy, like salvation in its literal sense, was deferred to eternity (see Bell 2016, 104–105). Political Technologies of International Liberalism: Scientific Racism and Imperial Federations Liberal governmentality was informed by classical political economy across the imperial space.22 However, its international civilizing variant additionally governed education systems, market orders, (‘un’)civil societies, and cultural institutions in the colonies through the expert ‘scientific’ and ‘moral’ knowledges of the emerging human and social sciences. In order to govern the civilizational differences in empire, these developed comparative classifications of races, castes, tribes, ‘languages, legal

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systems, sexualities, geographies, and even dreams’ to ‘map the “human terrain”’ (Bell 2016, 106). ‘At stake here’, Bell (2016, 108) notes, ‘was a question about … the most appropriate governing technologies of empire’. Depending on the nature of the perceived civilizational difference, the technologies deployed could vary between more ‘Orientalist’ variants that patronized indigenous social and political practices in the service of government at a distance (or ‘indirect rule’) and more aggressive colonial policing and ‘modernizing’ interventions in local institutions (Bell 2016, 107–108). Such differences in governing style notwithstanding, the fundamental governing technology underpinning civilizing rule (and sometimes abstention from it) was a racial (and racist) ‘pyramid of peoples’ (Losurdo 2011, 246) spanning the entire European colonial-imperial period from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, while varying in its particular configurations. Eminent liberals from Benjamin Franklin and Francis Lieber in the United States to Bentham, Cobden, and J. S. Mill in Britain gave the pyramid of peoples a specifically bio-racial/racist cast with slightly different but broadly convergent skin colour codes classifying Africans, Asians, and pre-Columbian Americans and other Indigenous peoples at the bottom, various shades of Europeans in the middle, and Anglo-Saxons at the top of the pyramid (Losurdo 2011, 246–248).23 In the late nineteenth century, a range of thinkers and politicians across the political spectrum, including (future) British prime ministers Disraeli and Cecil, and Alfred Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt across the Atlantic, ‘amended’ the racial pyramid to include a ‘Teutonic’ branch alongside the Anglo-Saxon among the ‘Aryan races’ at the top (Losurdo 2011, 268–273).24 In a vaguely Hegelian, more classically-historically than biologically-phenotypically conceived version of the top of the pyramid, British historian Edward Freeman identified Greeks, Romans, and Teutons as the most important ‘races’. 25 Of these, the Teutons were ‘the greatest’, which predisposed them, and especially ‘their dominant English branch’ to assume the ‘burden and sacred mission’ to be ‘the rulers and teacher of the world’ (quoted by Bell 2016, 326). Freeman’s fanciful racialization of the evolving idea of Western civilization contributed to an ongoing debate about the project of an imperial federation, supported by prominent liberals including J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse, in response to a perceived crisis of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Bell 2011; 2016, chs. 7, 8, 14). Addressing both the geopolitical anxieties about the rise of new great powers (Russia, the United States, Germany) and democratic ones (about waning support for the empire due to the expansion of the franchise), ‘Greater Britain’ would unify the mother country and the settler colonies in a pan-racial and/or pan-regional polity (in variously conceived institutional configurations). As a potential template and catalyst for a future world state, the imperial federation (according to some) could also include the United States which ‘demonstrated the power of federalism as a political technology’ (Bell 2016, 185; see also Bell 2020). The latter in turn was seen to rely on a set of material-political technologies, such as transoceanic steam ships and telegraph cables, which would allow the underlying ‘techno-utopian’ vision of an extended polity (including an extended ‘people’ and

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‘public’) to converge with the equally utopian vision of an ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ (see Bell 2016, chs. 7, 8; 2011, ch. 3; 2020, 25–41).26 Freeman opposed imperial federation and instead favoured independence for the colonies along with common British-American citizenship which he in turn considered the appropriate political technology that could consolidate their ‘racial brotherhood’ (Bell 2016, 337). However, his view that ‘[r]ace was the basic ontological category of global politics, far more significant than the state, let alone the artificial shell of empire’ (ibid., 335) was also shared by the supporters of the idea. With the First World War looming, Freeman’s (and others’) ‘Teutonist’ inflection of the ‘racial’ underpinnings of Western civilization and Anglo-America was short-lived. However, as a geo-racial ‘governance episteme’ (Bell 2016, 183, 189), his account ‘played a formative role in the development of the human sciences in North America’ (ibid., 338; cf. 339). This includes (what would in the twentieth century become) the field of governmental knowledge Freeman named ‘comparative politics’, which assumed racial descent as the central category accounting for social, political, and cultural differences in the world (ibid., 325–326). As Vitalis (2015) has comprehensively demonstrated (without reference to Freeman), the geo-racial governance episteme also played midwife to the birth of the discipline of IR which had its beginnings in a new science of ‘colonial (or imperial) administration and race development’ at the turn of the twentieth century.

CONCLUSION Taking stock of the debate on international and global governmentality in IR, this chapter has qualified critics’ concerns with questions about scale and analytical and normative biases towards liberalism in IGS. However, I have also identified six current challenges for governmentality research in IR including (perhaps un-Foucauldian) grand-theoretical ambitions, an empirical preoccupation with liberalism at the expense of examining other modes of governance, a state-centric inflection of conceptions of the international, a need to reckon with the constitutive significance of coloniality and race for international governmentality, an arguable overattachment to Foucault’s categories to the detriment of conceptual innovation, and a critical accounting for the role of the political in governmentality. In the second part of the chapter, I demonstrated the value of a genealogical approach to address these challenges by drawing a sketch of late nineteenth-century British imperial-international governmentalities complementing, and contrasting with, Foucault’s historical account of international liberalism. Specifically, I pointed to (non-liberal) realist-geopolitical, commercial-exploitative, republican and martialist modes of international governance coexisting with liberalism, and not necessarily taking for granted the state or the states system as their target or frame. I also emphasized the centrality of colonialism and race for any understanding of modern and contemporary international governance by pointing to racial-contractual, eliminativ-

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ist and pastoral-civilizing rationalities, and political technologies of scientific racism and imperial federation deployed to confront the crisis of the late British Empire. My genealogical sketch did not explicitly address the challenges related to the theoretical status of international governmentality and the role of the political within the latter. However, based on my illustration it may be surmised that while IGS should continue to be wary of presupposing universal governmental logics of global capitalism or a world polity, it may inherently involve the consideration of international collectives or social wholes such as civilizations and races exceeding the nation-state without however constituting a genuinely global order. Contrary to Busse and Hamilton’s (2021) recent argument about the inherent globality of governmentality which leaves the political (often violent) foundations and contestations of a putatively global order somewhat amorphous, IGS may be better advised to consider other routes towards a ‘political turn’, such as a postcolonial one that foregrounds coloniality and race. To be sure, just as the arguable globality of governmentality is not simply a matter of analytical fiat or a question of the governmental globalization of this or that particular issue but still requires contextual investigation, centring the constitutive role of coloniality and race to rethink the role of political critique and counter-conducts might proceed in a similar fashion. Rather than either presupposing a global (and transhistorical) colonial and racist regime or simply demonstrating colonial legacies or racializations of different issues, IGS is perhaps particularly well invigorated as a political-critical form of inquiry through contextualized studies of constitutive moments of the coloniality and raciality of the international.

NOTES 1. These studies have often opted for the designation of ‘global’ rather than ‘international’ governmentality (or distinguished the two). In keeping with the nineteenth-century conceptual history of the word ‘international’ as exceeding inter-state relations (Friedemann and Hölscher 1982), this chapter will use the two terms interchangeably. 2. Rather than a segmented space shared by different disciplines, IGS could also be viewed as a more ‘functionally’ or thematically organized one including fields like critical security studies (terrorism, war, surveillance, etc.), postcolonial governmentality studies, studies of migration and borders, global governance and global civil society, and humanitarianism and development, all of which recruit contributions across several disciplines (Walters 2012, 83; see also Bonditti et al. 2017). 3. That is, a mere ‘scaling up’ of Foucault’s concept of governmentality from the domestic to the international without regard to the contextual differences. 4. For a discussion of pre-modern ‘international’ governmentality (or ‘inter-governmentality’) see Leira 2021. 5. While often conflated with sovereignty, raison d’état is best seen as a proto-governmentality deploying rationalizations and calculative techniques which, in altered forms, also characterize later mercantilist and liberal governmentalities. 6. While Foucault does not elaborate on this, the same case can be made for neoliberalism (see Jaeger 2013, and more comprehensively, Slobodian 2018).

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7. Qualifying the presumed success of governmental interventions, this scholarship is also noteworthy for its attention to their interplay with counter-powers, resistances, contestations, and evasions of governmentality. 8. The issue is further complicated by recent charges of neoliberal sympathies in Foucault’s (2008) own account of neoliberalism (Zamora and Behrent 2016; Dean and Villadsen 2016). 9. This is a somewhat ‘revisionist’ challenge born from the particular context of IR. The more common charge among social and political theorists is that Foucault and governmentality scholarship have unduly neglected the continuing centrality of states and sovereignty (see Singer and Weir 2008; Dean 2013; Dean and Villadsen 2016; Dean and Larsson 2021). 10. Note however that Bigo and Bayart object to Foucault’s supposed oblivion of colonialism in the same volume (Bonditti et al. 2017, chs. 3, 10). 11. For quasi-genealogical accounts of the episodes of international governmentality designated in quotation marks see Todorov (1992) and Slobodian (2018), respectively. 12. Characteristically circumspect, he later adds that international liberalism does not entail the disappearance of other international governmental practices, and that the nineteenth century would inaugurate ‘the worst period of customs barriers, forms of economic protectionism, of national economies and political nationalism, and the biggest wars the world has ever known’ (Foucault 2008, 58), while still failing to acknowledge the imperial parameters of these developments. 13. My focus will be on Bell’s Reordering the World (2016) which most explicitly connects liberalism and empire, provides the analytical scaffolding for the trilogy, and ‘hinges’ the British-centred political-imperial imaginaries covered in the earlier work and the Anglo-American racial-imperial ‘dreamworlds’ in the later one. 14. Explicitly referenced by Bell (2016, 106, 110, 183). To be sure, the resemblance between the Cambridge School and Foucauldian genealogy is disputed. Walter (2008) and Neal (2009, 540) see the two as fundamentally different (though perhaps complementary), whereas Saar (2011, 44) and Gordon (2013, 1062) emphasize similarities and potentials for synthesis. To the extent that both approaches concern themselves with ‘contingent forms of local reasoning’ and assume that such ‘reasoning always takes place against the background of a particular subjective or intersubjective web of beliefs’ (as Bevir 2010, 432 stipulates for Foucauldian genealogy), there would appear to be sufficient overlap for repurposing Bell’s historiography towards a genealogical illustration of international governmentality. 15. Given the sometimes anti-imperialist policy stances of liberal thinkers, this is not to assert a necessary connection between liberal thought and imperialism, as discussed by Bell (2016, 20–31). However, what matters from a governmentality perspective is the presence and effectivity of liberal thought in much imperial practice. 16. Here I recast Bell’s (2016, 101–106) ideal types of ideological justifications of empire as international governmentalities. 17. While Realpolitik appeared in German geopolitical discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term ‘realist’ as such is anachronistic in contemporaneous British imperial discourse. 18. Locke (in)famously states in chapter five (§49) of the Second Treatise of Government (1689) that ‘in the beginning all the world was America’ having made the colonial case for the rightful appropriation of this supposed wasteland by ‘the industrious and rational’ who applied their labour to them (§34). 19. Bell borrows the term from Charles Mills. 20. Losurdo (2011, 107, ch. 7) similarly refers to a ‘master-race democracy’ of white people and countries extending from the settler colonies to a global scale.

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21. As is well known, J. S. Mill put the matter more starkly – and indeed, ‘governmentally’ – when likening ‘backward’ populations to children and stipulating that ‘[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’ (quoted by Bell 2016, 104; see also Losurdo 2011, 225–226). We may note in passing that this kind of patriarchal expression of governmentality and the corresponding infantilization of ‘backward’ populations also challenges Foucault’s (2007, 104) claim about the disappearance of the family as a model of government. 22. Its application, however, could vary between metropoles and colonies, with free trade being employed in the service of economic subjection (for example, through selective free trade regimes reserved for settlers that excluded indigenous industry) or even as necropolitical enablement of famine in the colonies (Bell 2016, 107). 23. In 1920, the racial pyramid would find direct institutional application in the designation of A, B, and C mandates in the League of Nations Covenant. 24. Disraeli and Gobineau elaborated the racial hierarchy based on a mythology of blood giving ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Aryans’ the top ‘purity’ rating (Losurdo 2011). While observing a transition ‘from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality’ (Foucault 1990, 148), Foucault notes (albeit without direct reference to colonial and imperial contexts) that the former endured in conjunction with the latter in the scientific and statist form of racism beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century (ibid., 149). 25. Testifying to the fluidity (or nebulousness) of the concept, these different versions may suggest that ‘race’ in late-Victorian imperial governmentality operated as a ‘biocultural assemblage’ consisting of a combination of cultural attributes ‘circumscribed by “whiteness”’ (Bell 2016, 174; cf. 97, 184, 192–193; see also Bell 2020, 25–35). 26. As a testimony to the fungibility of political technologies, we may note in passing that the institutional device of the imperial or international federation championed in Anglo-American discourse at the turn of the twentieth century would have – rather different – afterlives in international neoliberalism (Slobodian 2018, ch. 3) and what one might consider anticolonial or Black Atlantic international governmentality later in the twentieth century (see Getachew 2019, ch. 4).

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Leira, Halvard (2021), ‘Inter-Governmentality: A Framework for Analysis’, in Jan Busse (ed.), The Globality of Governmentality: Governing an Entangled World, London: Routledge, pp. 68–84. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. with Rowe, James (2005), Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics: Regulation for the Rest of Us? London: Routledge. Losurdo, Domenico (2011), Liberalism: A Counter-History, London: Verso. Marchart, Oliver and Martinsen, Renate (eds) (2019), Foucault und das Politische: Transdisziplinäre Impulse für die Gegenwart, Wiesbaden: Springer. Mbembe, Achille (2003). ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. Mehta, Uday Singh (1999), Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merlingen, Michael (2006), ‘Foucault and World Politics: Promises and Challenges of Extending Governmentality Theory to the European and Beyond’, Millennium, 35(1), 181–196. Methmann, Chris (2013), ‘The Sky is the Limit: Global Warming as Global Governmentality’, European Journal of International Relations, 19(1), 69–91. Moffette, David and Walters, William (2018), ‘Flickering Presence: Theorizing Race and Racism in the Governmentality of Borders and Migration’, Studies in Social Justice, 12(1), 92–110. Muehlenhoff, Hanna L. (2019), EU Democracy Promotion and Governmentality: Turkey and Beyond, London: Routledge. Neal, Andrew (2009), ‘Rethinking Foucault in International Relations: Promiscuity and Unfaithfulness’, Global Society, 23(4), 539–543. Neumann, Iver B. and Sending, Ole Jacob (2010), Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Odysseos, Louiza, Death, Carl and Malmvig, Helle (2016), ‘Interrogating Michel Foucault’s Counter-Conduct: Theorizing the Subjects and Practices of Resistance in Global Politics’, Global Society, 30(2), 151–156. Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas (1997), ‘In the Name of Society, or Three Theses on the History of Social Thought’, History of the Human Sciences, 10(3), 87–104. Perry, Richard Warren and Maurer, Bill (eds) (2003), Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques (1999 [1995]), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenow, Doerthe (2009), ‘Decentering Global Power: The Merits of a Foucauldian Approach to International Relations’, Global Society, 23(4), 497–517. Saar, Martin (2011), ‘Relocating the Modern State: Governmentality and the History of Political Ideas’, in Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, London: Routledge, pp. 42–63. Scott, David (1995), ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social Text, 43, 191–220. Selby, Jan (2007), ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR’, International Relations, 21(3), 324–345. Selmeczi, Anna (2015), ‘Who is the Subject of Neoliberal Rights? Governmentality, Subjectification and the Letter of the Law’, Third World Quarterly, 36(6), 1076–1091. Simons, Jonathan (1995), Foucault and the Political, London: Routledge. Singer, Brian C. J. and Weir, Lorna (2008), ‘Sovereignty, Governance and the Political: The Problematic of Foucault’, Thesis Eleven, 94, 49–71. Slobodian, Quinn (2018), Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sluga, Glenda and Clavin, Patricia (eds) (2017), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stetter, Stephan (2021), ‘Global Governmentality and Foucault’s Toolbox: Reflections on International Politics as a Social System and Field of Power Relations’, in Jan Busse (ed.), The Globality of Governmentality: Governing an Entangled World, London: Routledge, pp. 29–49. Stoler, Ann Laura (1995), Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tazzioli, Martina (2014), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Teo, Terri-Anne and Wynne-Hughes, Elisa (eds) (2020), Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences and Contestations, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Todorov, Tzvetan (1992), The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard, New York: HarperCollins. Vitalis, Robert (2015), White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vrasti, Wanda (2013a), ‘Universal but not Truly Global: Governmentality, Economic Liberalism, and the International’, Review of International Studies, 39(1), 49–69. Vrasti, Wanda (2013b), Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal Times, London: Routledge. Walter, Ryan (2008), ‘Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the State: The Primacy of Politics?’, History of the Human Sciences, 21(3), 94–114. Walters, William (2012), Governmentality: Critical Encounters, New York: Routledge. Walters, William (2014), ‘Parrhēsia Today: Drone Strikes, Fearless Speech and the Contentious Politics of Security’, Global Society, 28(3), 277–299. Walters, William and Haahr, Jens Henrik (2005), Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration, London: Routledge. Zamora, Daniel and Behrent, Michael C. (eds) (2016), Foucault and Neoliberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press.

5. Towards a postcolonial theory of crisis, neoliberal government, and biopolitics from below Ranabir Samaddar

INTRODUCTION Governing life with various procedures appears in the history of rule as a central repository of experiences of governance and statecraft. Yet conditions of life in large parts of the world appear as unstable. These conditions of life pose the stiffest challenges to settled governmental procedures and to the science of governing. An examination of this point involves some theoretical questions concerning among others the premises of Michel Foucault’s expositions on governmentality (see especially Foucault 2007). Elements such as trust, familiarity, norms of a political society such as rules of citizenship, market norms, agreed modes of financial transactions, likewise agreed notions of subject–ruler relations, and the legitimacy of State coercion and violence (including engaging in foreign wars) work as the basis of a theory of uninterrupted development of governing procedures and governmentality as a specific reason. If we think a little bit, we shall see that a contract-centric attitude to social relations – which includes economic and political relations – marks the modern theory of governmentality. It is through the mode of contract that the normalization of rule through various governmental procedures is achieved. Postcolonial experiences of government, such as those of having to deal with migrants and refugees on a truly massive scale, tell us how daily flexibility – while posing a question for the established theory of governmentality – also enriches the global knowledge of governing. It is a mix of colonial knowledge of rule and constitutionalism, select practices of global governance, neoliberal economy and its logistical procedures, and finally postcolonial statecraft. But more importantly, postcolonial experiences of governing also show the limits of neoliberal governmentality when it faces the biggest challenge to the science of governing – such as in a famine or, as now, in the time of a pandemic. This is because – and here we can refer to the current epidemiological crisis – the sciences of governmentality face the question of life. We may say the question of life emerges from the crisis of life. Government is the government of life. Foucault famously argued that before the seventeenth century power justified itself by demonstrating its capacity to inflict death, whereas now its legitimacy comes from ensuring life (Foucault 1978).1 Yet as the COVID-19 crisis has shown, the government can guarantee life only by adjudicating the number of deaths. It is a knowledge that goes by such names as ‘herd immunity’, and it 94

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is towards ensuring this immunity that neoliberal epidemiological governance is geared. The ghost of Malthus has come back. Life has to be productive and governments function on the basis of stable life. Yet, what happens to government when life faces a crisis? What is the relation between crisis and government? We have to turn to postcolonial experiences to see the fortunes of government in the wake of severe crises like famine, an epidemic, or a long drawn out civil war. At the same time we shall also see that the crisis of life may produce an unanticipated politics of life. Given the dramatic twists to the notions of risk and trust in the wake of such a crisis, the said crisis of life may give birth to a massive desire for a new type of public power. The situation produces what we may call ‘biopolitics from below’.2 It indicates a moment when the politics of the lower classes of society around the question of life exceeds the governmental power that wants to control life with ever new technologies. Can we then term such a moment as one that demonstrates the limits to the concept of governmentality? This chapter aims to explore the question of biopolitics from below in the context of governments caught in crises, particularly in the neoliberal time. The chapter has two sections. The first section presents the framework of ‘crisis’ – today, indeed, a double one – with the current epidemiological crisis leading to a crisis of life and a crisis of governmentality as a specific form of reason. The second section discusses biopolitics from below as a response to this double crisis. There is a caveat, however, before we move on the question of crisis. This chapter does not aim to wrestle with Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and biopower and biopolitics. In lectures, articles and interviews over several years Foucault discussed these notions of power (see Lorenzini, this volume). However, he never gave a single, cohesive account of them. Indeed, after 1978–79, the theme of biopolitics fades away from his writings and lectures. Yet, his influence on the discussions of governmentality and biopolitics can hardly be overestimated. His ideas thus can be taken as a gesture towards further thinking along new lines of inquiry and not as an accomplished analytical grid.

CRISIS AS A PROBLEMATIC FOR A THEORY OF GOVERNMENTALITY We begin then with the question of crisis.3 Crisis gestures towards a break, a rupture, an unfolding of inner dissonances moving towards a systemic disruption. At times, an outside factor may accelerate these systemic faults and bring the disruption to a head; at times the inner dissonances wait for a catalyst, an outside factor, which – in quasi-philosophical language – we may call, the ‘third factor’. In any case, a crisis assumes the template of a given system and a given structure, which produces a crisis of its own on the basis of a double movement – a movement from within towards disruption and a movement from outside with varying degrees, extents, and speeds of combination of the within and outside. The temporal factor is critical in the

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making of a crisis: a trade cycle, a production crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a political crisis, an ecological crisis, and now an epidemiological crisis. Time is crucial in all these crises, as if it is time that brings a crisis to our notice, at the same time as if it is time that makes crisis a self-fulfilling prophecy. We could have borrowed Marx’s words, changing them a little: time is everything, government is nothing; government is at most a carcass of time (Marx 1955, 22).4 The question therefore will be: how do we place the act of governing in this secular feature of history? What do we mean by governing time, governing in the wake of a critical time, governing unstable time in a way that governing becomes steady and stable? For without this, governance is meaningless. Hence we know of the technologies of governing time, such as interest, risk compensation, assurance, futures, medical technologies towards prolonging life or provisions of shortening life, etc. With these applications time is governed in a capitalist society – particularly in the neoliberal age. Yet can instability and governance go together for long? Or does the age of neoliberalism call for redefining our theory of governmentality, which takes government as a specific reason, a specific mode of existence? The question assumes urgency in view of the postcolonial experiences of leading life on the basis of paradoxes and contradictions, which do not fit the established knowledge of government, including governing selves and lives. Never before in human history has the question of surviving in a time of chaos been so paramount. Crisis is of course not always a catastrophic end. Crisis means a situation that has been brought about by a conjunction of circumstances upsetting the prevailing schema of things; crisis also indicates an opening to claw back, fight back, to recover lost ground, to push ahead, to judge a situation in its dynamics, and not necessarily an end of the dynamics. This is the reason why theorists of rupture and break do not think usually in terms of disaster, but of crisis. Crisis is not only due to a new set of unsettling circumstances, but the reproduction of a disorder organic to the economy. Marx, as we know, moved away from the Physiocrats and showed that the falling rate of industrial profit had to be sought in industry itself and not in agriculture. Technical change, far from arresting the falling rate of profit, could be the basis of the fall. Technical change saved labour, and when all the capitalists saved labour there was a change in the organic composition of capital, namely dead labour had risen in comparison to living labour, the ultimate source of all value (Marx 1963). Yet this denotes no more than the most abstract form of the crisis, as Marx noted of bourgeois economy, ‘without content, without a compelling motivating factor’ (Marx 1963, 509). If this seems to be the reason why we have to search for organic factors in a crisis, there is a further reason to this. Crisis appears as a crisis only at a particular moment – even though it may be in the coming – because economic thought is an ideology. It clouds the coming of the crisis. For instance, profits may seem to arise in circulation, yet this is globally impossible, for one commodity owner can thereby secure profit separately, but all capital owners cannot take that route simultaneously. Capital may be destroyed through commercial convulsions, improvements in production, import of cheap necessities and instruments, and outflow or emigration of capital (Rosdolsky 1977, 381). Bourgeois economists have

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not been able to discard Marx completely and they have repeatedly tried to reformulate his analysis, for instance with the concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter 1994, 82–83, 139), or sharp bust cycles leading to recession, and so on.5 Thus to bourgeois economists the degree of tuning necessary for intervention in otherwise perfect market mechanisms is crucial. In time, as interventions became increasingly frequent, fine-tuning became the essence of governmental practices. In this sense, governing economic mechanisms became the core of modern governmentality. In this way investment in the economic became paramount in governing a society. Yet, as we know, postcolonial experiences made the economic logic only partly effective, or largely ineffective. Crisis betokens breakdown of social mechanisms, economy, political order, and at times crisis of life. In short, in understanding a crisis we are on the cusp of several times: long term/ short term; the time of coming/the time of appearance; local time/global time; the time of economy/the time of the immediate, that is to say, political response; the time of reproduction of crisis/the time of recovery; and finally, the suddenness of the crisis/the preparedness of the combatants. It also means we are on the cusp of several causes. Crisis is not usually a mono-causal event. Mono-causal explanations generally centre around the idea of disproportionality, and thus anarchy of production, as the key cause of crises, or the idea of under-consumption, lack of purchasing power of the consumers as the cause of crises. On the other hand, take for instance the present epidemiological crisis which meets with a continuing global financial crisis and the crisis of global liberal democracy. Hence there is always the possibility of a particular crisis adding fuel to other factors leading to a crisis of life. It is like a mass of explosives waiting to catch fire. In this sense, the relation of the crisis with the rulers’ governing society – with a view to lending stability to social conditions of reproduction – is a vexed one. Crisis makes the situation chaotic. A situation of chaos renders the distinction between a crisis and a normal time – or between crisis and order – to a large extent, irrelevant (de Sousa Santos 2018). In this neoliberal world, which began as a great age of globalization, forces have been let loose that impel everyone to pounce on the other for survival. It is a chaotic time, reminding us of the past centuries of primitive accumulation – the early age of capitalism. What is remarkable and constant in the present context is the universal valence of finance and money with the instrument of public debt among its other tools. Public debt has been one of the great levers of primitive accumulation; also with national debt there is now an international credit system, which conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation. Today, the mobility of credit capital is unprecedented. ‘A great deal of capital … without any certificate of birth’ (Marx 1990, 920) roams around the world. Escaping taxes and the possible scenarios of less return, capital moves offshore from place to place and reaches various destinations in the form of financial investments by known as well as newly set up, unknown companies. If chaos is more because it is originating mostly from the uncertainty of the global financial flows, it also combines now with the capitalist thrust for more territory and more extraction. This makes the unlikely combination of finance capital with the

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primitive forms of accumulation possible. Thus we witness the present economic order featuring both technology and investment companies like Apple or Morgan Stanley and total destruction of countries like Iraq and Libya. In this milieu, people have lost faith in a stable political order – globally or nationally. It is as if an all-out war – but without the actual war – has broken out with no camp, no side, and no direction. Issues of high finance volatility and primitive accumulation under an extractive mode of economy are reflected in worldwide massive population flows. Immigration and containment policies are becoming crucial everywhere. Whereas controlling and monitoring refugee and migration flows was earlier a government function, now the responsibility for the refugees is externalized and migration securitized. Privatization of the security function has produced a profitable asylum market. A market for human bodies has emerged, people have become pure commodities or units of exchange to be shifted and circulated like parcels. The architects of this new market include multinational companies, global banks, and private security companies, designers, and constructors of detention and processing centres, digital technology companies, and other institutions. Nationalism now appears, in many cases, as the mirage of a solution to the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism. Nationalism is facilitating neoliberalism. Yet what is conceptualized as ‘global’ is equally a mirage, for it offers no exit to the contradictions. This truly is a chaotic situation. While governing procedures are shaping popular politics, the reverse is also true. Hitherto conventional political parties provided legitimacy to governmental modes and functions. Now these parties have ceased to perform their most important function, namely, representing the people. Government therefore has become a banal institution, and popular politics based around rights and claim-makings is compelling governing procedures to orient themselves in unforeseen manners. Populist politics composed of popular forces, welfare and social protection-centric governing procedures, and electoral dynamics have created enormous uncertainty among the political class present in both Right and Left formations. This is different from what we saw in the days of welfare capitalism. When populism is seen – in contemporary liberal thinking – as an ideology and not as an ensemble of political and economic practices; as ‘reason’ (for example, Laclau 2005) and not as a mode of contentious politics, the chaos in our thinking is even more evident. Neoliberalism may want to thrive on chaos. Yet, while management of chaos as a permanent form of governance may appear appropriate for global capitalism, it is too much of a ruler’s utopia. In short, we may put the problem this way: Crisis produces a new mode of governing. The new mode aims to stabilize society and resolve the factors leading to disruption. Yet, how will a mode of governing free itself of the permanent possibility of disruption and breakdown? Will the reason of government have any meaning in an age of disorder and chaos?6 The question assumes urgency when chaos is implicated in a crisis of life. But remember, life in crisis is a deeply historicized phenomenon, which springs from what we may call the historicization of the concept of economy. Recall Marx who in Grundrisse called the question of labour under capitalism the question of life itself (Marx 1973, 131, 211–213). The epidemiological crisis of

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COVID-19 arrived in this background of financial and political crises and chaos. The conjunction of several crises has produced a crisis of life. The great question of biopolitics from below has emerged in this context.

THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL CRISIS AND BIO-POLITICS FROM BELOW The COVID-19 crisis, as an epidemiological crisis, did not arrive in India on its own. It coincided with two other crises: a financial crisis and a political crisis and it produced one more, the infamous ‘migrant crisis’. As a general crisis the COVID-19 crisis broke out in the country after a countrywide lockdown was declared in late March 2020. There was already a general economic downturn and a financial squeeze, now exacerbated by a monumental public health crisis, and the massive centralization of bureaucratic-police powers at the hands of the central government through the invocation of the National Disaster Management Act of 2005 (Gazette of India 2005) and the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 (popularly known as the Plague Act).7 In the wake of the countrywide lockdown, politics was at once and completely demobilized. However the COVID-19 crisis made clear to India’s state governments that public health had an intimate relation with urban governance. Factors such as density of population, class and other social divisions – founded on gender, race, caste, religion, communicability and transportation, availability of food and drinking water, and administration of wards and boroughs – all emerged as important concerns of public health. Several state governments realized that public health meant the science and the management of the tasks of preventing and controlling disease and saving and prolonging life through organized efforts of the society. Population became a critical category in health management by these administrations. The city and the underclass became issues of primary concern to public health. Thus epidemiology, statistics, management of health and other public services, environmental health, community health, health education, occupational health and safety, reproductive health, and several other branches of study became matters of renewed governmental attention. With the idea of public health appearing as a key governmental theme to ensure the well-being of people, the very field of public health showed its fault lines around issues of divisions within a population. At the same time, the shadow of the political crisis around the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India – passed on 11 December 2019 – still loomed large.8 Beginning with the rumblings in Assam, the protests against the CAA continued roughly from late October 2019 to mid-March 2020. This was a time of tumult, citizens’ upsurge across the country, and desperate attempts by the State to legitimate itself by continuously pushing a less than adequately nationalized society to be ‘completely nationalized’ along laid down lines of religion, dress, language, moral codes, economy, and militarism. The country could not accept the pressure after a point and protests erupted throughout India. The public protest had specific and varying

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nature in different parts of the country. The country’s Constitution was imagined as commons. The protest thus enabled popular interpretations, understanding, and interventions in the constitutional domain. The protest also was a kind of public questioning of the postcolonial aporia of the citizen/alien duality that had produced precarious lives in the entire region of South Asia. All these became political marks of a time of crisis and the appearance of a punitive state. The confrontation over the remaking of the people raged furiously as communal riots broke out in Delhi in February–March 2020 and repression of minorities acquired a war-like frenzy. COVID-19 arrived in this milieu in the month of March.9 As to how the crisis unfolded, at one level the political crisis began with the general elections of 2019 (April–May 2019) when the ruling party at the Centre announced to the populist opposition in various parts of the country that in the event the ruling party was returned to power, it would ensure that law of the land would prevail, illegal aliens would be expelled, unruly elements straightened out, the country made properly nationalist, and economy unlocked with aggressive tools of privatization, support to corporate power, labour deregulation, and the kind of fiscal tightening that any orthodox monetarist would be proud of. The credit market was squeezed, indebtedness among common people rose as welfare expenditure went down and banks reduced their operations, the GDP declined, the economy shrank with each passing day, and the Left-liberal opposition – the alternative nationalist force – fell before the repeated invocations of legality, judiciary, fiscal responsibility, and the norm of responsibility. The populists entrenched in states, localities and specific domains of political life were the only troublesome factor in the new model of power, which was based on a combination of: nationalism and globalization, ‘made in India’ strategy and open entry allowed to global capital in all sectors of economy, ‘country first’ and privatization, and finally law and authoritarianism. To the rulers the opposition represented what Foucault (2015) once called the ‘illegalisms’ of society. Also, we must not forget that these opposition forces hosted, sheltered, encouraged, and facilitated the protests against the CAA, leading to an upsurge of minority communities against the new model of power. Then the Delhi riots happened. In one blow the anti-CAA protest had been quelled. The organized, parliamentary political parties once more proved ineffective before the power of legality and authority. Crisis always has been resolved in one way or another. History does not wait for the Left or the liberals. The political crisis was accompanied by the fiscal-economic crisis, and the double crisis met with the epidemiological crisis in March 2020. As earlier mentioned, the impending epidemiological crisis provided the government the occasion to invoke the Epidemic Diseases Act and the National Disaster Management Act. The template of managing COVID-19 in India, by an extremely centralized governmental apparatus, was thus set. Policies of law and order took the place of public health. The measures directed at the novel coronavirus pandemic stemmed from such a response. Politics was to be suspended. The traditional political forces lowered their guards. The result was the tragic ‘migrant crisis’ whose images beamed all over the world showing thousands upon thousands of migrant labourers trekking hundreds of kilometres to escape hunger, joblessness and absence of shelter, with three hundred odd workers

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dropping dead on the road or being run over by trains or speeding buses and trucks. Almost another hundred workers perished in ‘shramik specials’ (workers’ trains, specially run to enable the workers to reach home). The trains were likened to moving gas chambers. Altogether around 900 migrant workers died while trying to return home. Meanwhile the public health scenario remained grim. States, localities, slums, villages, small towns and city councils emerged as the frontline defence. They fought on their own against the epidemiological spectre. The populists, locally powerful and in some cases ensconced in governmental power in states, found themselves in the midst of an unprecedented situation. They had some economic policies of welfare and protection and some policies of agricultural development and improvement of social infrastructure focusing on education and rural connectivity. However, a public health crisis with its various dimensions was an unfamiliar challenge, particularly as the epidemic combined with two other crises. Part of the reason probably lay in the fact that in the case of general welfare and protection measures, such as food security, populists could draw upon earlier experiences including experiences of Leftist politics and administrations. But in public health management during a grave crisis like this, what was required was counter knowledge, distinct and different from liberal and neoliberal health management. The populists were obviously faced with a much more complex problem because they had to fight on two fronts: ensuring millions of poor access to food and allowing minimum forms of livelihood (informal work, petty trade, etc.) during the lockdown, while at the same time expanding public health infrastructure and a social management of the COVID-19 crisis. They performed reasonably in the first task given the monumental nature of the challenge, but, to a large extent, they failed in the second. They mounted no serious effort to mobilize the society to meet the challenge of COVID-19. Yet while the opposition was confounded and fumbled for response, to the neoliberal rulers of the country the crisis appeared as a perfect occasion to, in Mirowski’s (2013) words, ‘never let a crisis go to waste’. The spate of measures announced by the central government in May 2020 was perched on a single-minded drive to carry through the suspended reforms in order to make the country safe from pathogens and underdevelopment. The country had to become ‘self-reliant’, and towards that end big business would be backed and all other impediments removed. Once again, labour was the raw material on which the reforms were to be experimented, planned, and executed.10 As a first step, recalcitrant labour had to be disciplined. Migrant workers were taught the lesson of their lives in this background. Only some amount of food grains for the migrant workers were assured by the government (The Hindu 2020a, 2020b; Aneesha 2020). The government also denied, before the Court, any detailed knowledge of migrant workers on the road (Mishra 2020). At one level it is a story of earlier histories of crisis resolved this way or that. Yet possibly this time the crisis – itself a combination of several crises – raised the important question: In what way does neoliberal governance approach the moment of crisis? As later months showed, the regime decided to negotiate the crisis in a ruthless manner – by using every aspect of the crisis to push the neoliberal reforms further.

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This was the context of the breakdown of life. Biopolitics, especially biopolitics from below, emerged in this context. The banal process of reproduction of life that allowed life to be represented by politics was put into question as the reproduction of life itself suddenly faced a crisis. The epidemic upset the fantasy of the certainty of life. Life’s fault lines in the form of caste, race, gender, age, differential entitlement, property system, employment structure, public–private relations and so on were compounded as the virus struck India. Biopolitics as the dominant form of popular politics – which I term as biopolitics from below – emerged in this background. In some sense it was an attempt to restore the direct relation between life and politics by removing or at least drastically reducing representational devices and other mediations based particularly on corporate and class interests, and by the same token, change the mode of governing life. This is the first meaning of biopolitics from below. Biopolitics from above is the politics of states and governments to focus on the health and lives of the people, to continue to maximize production and to reap greater profits as bio-capital accumulates particularly in the wake of diseases and epidemics and in the forms of medicines, investigative institutions, the race for vaccines and so on, and to ensure conditions of human reproduction and thereby social stability. Biopolitics from above aims to determine the pattern of human life from the angle of productivity, and thus continues neo-Malthusian policies of population management. Certain sections of population are periodically sacrificed – perhaps the population of a continent at a certain time (say Africa), or people of old age (as in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic) – and therefore biopolitics from above cannot dissociate itself from social Darwinism. Michel Foucault probably underestimated the deep imprints of Malthusianism and Darwinism on liberal ideology and the exacerbation of these two social ideologies under neoliberal conditions. Neoliberal techniques, such as governing on the basis of social policies on education, skill enhancement, poverty management and so on, aim to escape these two binds of Malthusianism and Darwinism by trying to ‘flexibilize’ and draw the so-called unproductive sections of population (the aged, invalid, the poor, the migrant, the lazy, the unskilled, etc.) into the nexus of the market and make them ‘productive’. 11 The traditional social-democratic way of population management now confronted the neoliberal way of making the population productive. Yet this is a paradox neoliberalism cannot escape. War disturbs this schema of managing population and managing production, as states and governments focus on destroying human lives in the hope that social stability will return in an improved form, and accumulation will resume on an expanded scale. The hope is often unfounded or at best realized partially and at great cost. Famine is even more brutal in exposing the fragile biopolitical basis of modern rule, and now the epidemic. The epidemic, the current COVID-19 crisis has shown, similarly disrupts the biopolitical foundation of modern rule. Not strangely then, in India, the migrant became the most difficult figure in the neoliberal enterprise of reconciling the market with the security of life.

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At the same time, this situation lends biopolitics a new possibility – that of reorganizing human life (and thus the society) along new lines. ‘Biopolitics from above’ meets its adversary in the form of ‘biopolitics from below’. The measure of the hold of politics over life may be the latter’s confinement by the regime of politics, the deprivation, destitution, and misery of life. But on the other hand the measure of life’s hold over politics may be its impact on the latter in the form of organization of care, solidarity, and collectivism – in short, what many now increasingly describe (in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis of life) as commons.12 However, only in particular moments in the history of modern politics do we find these two forms of biopolitics meeting each other face to face. These are the exceptional moments of crisis. We must therefore understand the exceptional nature of the time when epidemiological crisis magnified hundredfold as it combined with an acute financial crisis and a political crisis. As we explain later in this chapter, the figure of the migrant became in the critical moment of epidemiological crisis the emblem of ‘biopolitics from below’. Migrants – migrant labour and refugees – were not only crossing traditional borders, but also new ones set by the epidemic. They challenged the given notions of security and added a new dynamic to the world of the endangered population groups at the lower levels of the society. In short, biopolitics from below and the breakdown of established modes of governing are inexorably linked to moments of crisis – in fact, to crisis as a phenomenon. In 2020, nearly 125 years after the Bombay Plague, India found itself in a similar situation. With entire populations at risk, the structural inability of the neoliberal postcolonial regime to ensure the safety of life was evident. The shock of COVID-19 is simply too much for the old order to return. Even with restoration of trade, resumption of supply lines, initiating the work for wages scheme on a large scale, expanding the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA),13 and so on, this return may not be possible. At best we may see the adoption of some form of neo-Keynesianism globally based on injecting new money in the market by specifically enabling the unemployed lower classes to spend. But it will be short-lived and it is hard to see how an adoption of some form of neo-Keynesianism can become a strong cure. Such policies will not be able to address the question of life. Biopolitics from below, on the other hand, revolves around that question. If, as indicated earlier, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnesses across many countries a neo-Malthusian scenario, what will be the response to this resurgence of neo-Malthusianism in global politics? The question is important if we want to envision a new politics of life and the importance of care in a transformed politics of life. This calls for a new type of public power, which values care as the guiding principle of organizing society, which will be treated as a commons. We have to consider the questions that surfaced in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis: What kind of power will guard the society that emerges as the commons? What kind of power will nourish the universe of care, which would mean protection and a consequent norm of responsibility – precisely the principles which have been central to the notion of ‘care of the self’ (a notion manipulated by modern bourgeois democracies)? What will be the new policies and new modes to create new ways to

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reinforce and widen the social foundations of care and protection? The more we think of these questions, the more we shall see that these are issues of imagining self-rule in a different manner – a manner which will learn from the histories of fighting diseases and wars in the past and yet will be infused with a new imaginary of a power that runs things differently, assures protection to its people, discharges responsibility for the safety, security, and well-being of its people – in short a new combination of autonomy, history, and politics. The response to the epidemic has not been even. The poor and the migrant labourers, the aged and the vulnerable, the assembly chain workers in a plant that produces ventilators, the mechanics in a small shop producing test kits, workforces in transportation, the vigilant guards of a village, an urban slum, or the waste processing workers – all have played roles in this war. Trust will be an important element in protecting society as a common resource. Although this is a crude sketch of the new type of general power that the post-epidemic scenario will call for, reminding us of a post-world war scenario, I think it provides a starting point to reconstruct and characterize what is specific about this ‘war’, the other conflicts it will unleash, and other confrontations it will provoke. In some sense it is a counter-history based on elements that the given history of crises and statehoods provides. In this milieu public health became the occasion for the emergence of biopolitics from below, which signals attempts to once again link politics with life – life’s protection and survival – without the mediation of capital. The biopolitics we are speaking of here is thus not a transcendental category. The politics of life is the politics of a specific moment of crisis. The epidemic invokes the issue of life in three ways: the safety of the biological life of the person, the life of a collective called a population, and finally the life world of people. Bourgeois historical knowledge never addressed the question of life in its entirety. The crisis of the bourgeoisie flows from its inability to negotiate the life question. It still has no anchor except neo-Malthusianism and a social-Darwinist approach to global history notwithstanding capitalism’s welfare-phase. Therefore it will be too facile to think that the progress of liberalism depends on saving lives in place of asserting the right of the republic to proclaim death. In a way it is still the right of the capitalist class to adjudicate the numbers of deaths and the numbers of lazy and the unproductive. The pandemic laid bare the contradiction of the life question with what may be called biopolitics from above. The period of lockdown brought home this truth more than anything else. Thus safe and unsafe areas were negotiated by thousands of supply workers, housemaids, cleaners, waste disposal employees, food stuff and vegetable vendors, maintenance and production staff of electricity and other urban utilities, all of whom transited the borders of lockdown. Their jobs reflected the constant refrain of neoliberal capitalism, namely, keep things moving; keep the supply-chain clear of cumbersome human life, congested space, traffic jams, and of course, of contagion (Brown 2020; Cowen 2014; Khalili 2020; Neilson, this volume). Thus, as we know, ports functioned, seafarers remained offshore (Kindig 2020), with a new border appearing between those

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who were shut indoors, and those who remained outside the boundary lines of safety and security. Biopolitics from above thus rationalizes economy by a mode different from the Fordist rationalization of production that operated by dividing the economy into distinct spheres of production, distribution, and consumption with each of these based on its lowest cost of operation independent of each other. In contrast, a circulation-based logic of economy works though the idea of a single supply chain. In this idea, production, distribution, and consumption do not function independently but together – that is, they help in value-realization in tandem, while simultaneously affecting each other. The relation between borders and security of life is complicated by the neoliberal motto of increasing the speed of commodity circulation. Life’s security must be judged accordingly in neoliberal calculation.14 Hence for biopolitics from above the issue will be how to enable the travel of goods, commodities, capital, and labour without touching the contagious world outside. This would mean, in turn, ensuring land-corridors such as railways, delivery routes and highways, and functioning of stockyards and warehouses across the disease stricken land. Unlocking becomes as important as lockdown, which would mean a shift from extremely regulated flows into moving segments and zones. This also means that while people are interned, they are motivated to shop online, engaging in a touchscreen mode of existence, thus remaining safe while keeping the supply lines functioning. As is said nowadays, ‘key workers’ (Dalits workers in India, East European workers in Western Europe, or Hispanic labour in the United States) will be appreciated as they must work as cogs and wheels of movements along the corridors. For all these reasons, the precarious migrant labourer has appeared as the key figure of the scenario. The migrant labourer symbolizes precarity, the primitive mode of accumulation, negotiation of borders through corridors, and the entire range of the techniques of governance of a population in quarantine. The migrant worker is the last person on the horizon of visibility of the neoliberal rulers, which explains the complete absence of the migrant in the policy response of the government as the lockdown was suddenly imposed in India on 24 March 2020 with barely four hours’ notice. Yet this figure of the migrant – a critical component of biopolitics from below – is a liminal one, never actually disentangled from the spaces of the epidemic. There is only a fantasy of the safe zone. Fugitives are everywhere. They tell us of the sites of these border relations. The migrants present a threshold of mobility beyond which is the unreachable zone of safety. The conceptual grid of biopolitics from above mixes borders and corridors; creates zones of safety while undercutting them at the same time by desperately trying to resume untrammelled flows of labour and goods. Measures to lockdown and unlock combine in incalculable relations.15 The subjects of biopolitics are subjects of regulations of safety, yet crossing continuously the borders of homes, neighbourhood streets, hamlets, slum-like settlements, playing hide and seek with the police who are standing at corners to ensure that no one is standing outside, and no one is travelling ‘irresponsibly’. More than the lack of testing facilities, hospitals, ICU beds, ventilators, medicines, doctors, and nurses, it is they who concern the rulers. Neoliberal rule must take chances with the virus. The

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precarious migrant only resembles neoliberal rule as its shadow. At the same time to take chances with the virus – and in desperation to resume the ‘economy’ – neoliberal rule must engage in calculating possible scenarios – of deaths, lives, wealth, and future. Hence splashed on the daily media were the continuous calculations of the number of deaths, the infected, the number of active deaths, the number of persons released from the hospital, the number of people in quarantine, safe homes and home isolation, weekly ratio of deaths to the infected, infected to the total population, rate of increase of infection, and state-wide performance. Countless weekly, monthly, and fortnightly comparisons across states, countries, continents, number of deaths of people with co-morbidities, the average period of hospitalization of a COVID-19 patient, safe areas, enclosure zones, green zones, their increase and decrease, number of hotspots, and we can go on, with infinite interrelations and correlations, and endless model making exercises to ascertain how much ‘risk’ to take, that is, how much death can be afforded. To biopolitics from above, the collective body or the corporeal existence of a disease stricken population seems therefore, at least at one level, endowed with magical powers of cure – some perhaps illusory, but some which can and must be known. The disease stricken population, appearing in the form of numbers and percentages, appears and disappears. On some occasions it appears invincible, possessing a sort of trans-materiality. The migrant characteristically carries this occult quality. Did the migrant carry the disease? Did the migrant become the medium of contagion? Did they melt in the ocean of population? Did not the migrant population carry certain signs, and represent to the rulers specific spots and zones, dark enclaves of poverty, intractability, disease, joblessness, and an unending burden on the State to feed a vast and amorphous mass of bodies on the bread line? Perhaps therefore, the migrant proved the most difficult problem for the calculative regime of capital in a crisis time. To be truthful, the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated that on all three of its so called unique points, neoliberal governmentality stands on dubious ground, namely: rationality, determination of ratio as a way of governing, and calculability. Its inefficiency and incapability are there for the subjects of the neoliberal world to see. We can say a crisis exposes the limits of governmental rationality. These limits suggest that the politics of life is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values that exceed the historically determined techniques of government (Fassin 2009). Liberalism can be better understood as a governmental technique modelled on the rationality of the governed. Neoliberalism has not done away with this reality, but has added flexibility (and therefore calculability and determining the ratio between different uncertain options and trajectories as the reinforced basis of rational governance) as a fundamental attribute of government. Thus if we are to understand how the lives of populations are subsumed by power we have to study the framework of government – in other words study the ways and tools by which government shapes people’s lives. In this way, governing a disease stricken population becomes an

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important part of the way in which governments take hold of people’s lives. With new tools of political economy, new modes of disease control, and new technologies of calculation, government has become a way of reflecting on the relations between the rulers and the ruled. Neoliberalism as a form of government has changed beyond recognition the early principles of government that Foucault had detected, namely, confession, penance, uninterrupted examination, obedience, and verbalization of all inner thoughts and anxieties (see in particular, Foucault 2012). Government has externalized, with new material and virtual means, the task of making people the subjects of rule. Yet as I have tried to show in this chapter (though insufficiently), life exceeds the techniques of government. The project of making the life of the people (in this case, the lower classes, dangerous people) the life of the governed fails. Postcolonial capitalism reinforced by global neoliberalism produces crisis and survives as ‘crisis’. This makes life itself unruly. At times, life begins where government ends.16 This is what I mean by biopolitics from below. The politics of life builds around biopolitics from below.17 We must not forget, however, that politics of life appears as an exceptional form of politics, appearing within the conventional ones. Politics of life carries the terrible force of immediacy and conjunction of events. The labour of life is irrelevant to bourgeois history. Yet, as we have attempted to show in this chapter, there is a fundamental correlation between politics and life that we must come to terms with, a correlation that is uncertain, conflictive, and contentious.

NOTES 1.

‘In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations … The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed’ (Foucault 1978, 13). According to Foucault, power over life started to appear during the seventeenth century, first in the form of disciplinary power (ibid., 139), and, of course, in time it emerged as a form of power that concentrated upon the species body with its characteristic phenomena including propagation, dying, illness, health, life expectancy, mortality rate, sexual behaviour and so on. Thus the need to cope with events of food scarcity and high mortality with practices of hygiene, medical techniques and so on, led to the emergence of ‘a biopolitics of the population’ (ibid.). In this process, life was invested with power as distinct from the power meant to manifest itself by taking lives as the former sovereign power did – in Foucault’s words, a ‘calculated management of life’ (ibid., 140). Foucault theorized this notion of power over life in the context of the rise of capitalism. 2. What I propose as biopolitics from below has the following features: (1) Biopolitics from below assumes the form of a politics of life among the lower classes in times of crisis. Politics is reoriented towards issues of life and death. It is not a special brand of politics; it emerges from the conjunctures of history when life and death become the most crucial issues of social life. (2) A crisis is one such moment of conjuncture. The life question is reflected in a crisis of the reproduction of life and compels a reorientation of

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

several aspects of political and social life. (3) Biopolitics from below may be understood as a congealed form of the response of the lower classes in society to the crisis of life, such as an epidemiological crisis and the threat of impending death. As such, biopolitics from below stands face-to-face with biopolitics from above, which, today, takes the form of neoliberal rule. (4) Neoliberal rule realizes itself by transforming issues of life into those of market accessibility and productivity, and of a rational calculation of ‘necessary deaths’ in order to ensure social life. (5) Biopolitics from below is fundamentally horizontal in nature. The solidarity it evokes, and the trust it bases itself on in order to protect life, run along a horizontal line. A politics of life needs vertical mobilization as well as horizontal mobilization to become hegemonic. Such a combination of horizontal and vertical mobilization on issues of life suggests a new form of public power that will facilitate the horizontal mobilization of social power to protect life, and at the same time, will be able to invoke collective power to do so. (6) In the realm of biopolitics from below (which displays in capillary form the values of care, protection, and solidarity) the issue of protecting the migrant, and in particular, migrant labour, assumes critical significance. This is so because the figure of the migrant incessantly crosses the boundaries of forms of labour, identity, places of stay, and national and other loyalties, and in the process challenges the given histories of enmity and friendship. The migrant, in this way, is on the edge of politics, visibility, and autonomy, posing a challenge to the formation of solidarities and the structure of biopolitics from below. The word ‘crisis’ appears not infrequently in the historical description of the development of neoliberalism (Foucault 2008, 68–70); yet the phenomenon of crisis remains largely disconnected in the overall theoretical formulation of the notion of governmentality. Marx’s actual words: ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time’ (1955, 22). While Joseph A. Schumpeter (1994) popularized this idea of creative destruction, it is a phrase that Marx did not use. In a sense Foucault (1979) raised this issue of the historicity of our idea of government when he termed it as a ‘scandal of nascent political thought’ (243). He wrote, ‘Reason of state is regarded as an “art”, that is, a technique conforming to certain rules. These rules do not simply pertain to customs or traditions, but to knowledge – rational knowledge … From where does this specific art of government draw its rationale? The answer to this question provokes the scandal of nascent political thought. And yet it’s very simple: the art of governing is rational, if reflection causes it to observe the nature of what is governed – here, the state. Now, to state such a platitude is to break with a simultaneously Christian and judiciary tradition, a tradition which claimed that government was essentially just’ (ibid.). ‘The Epidemic Diseases Act’ as amended in 2020. https://​legislative​.gov​.in/​sites/​default/​ files/​A1897​-03​.pdf. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019 (see Gazette of India 2019). Under the 2019 amendment, migrants who had entered India by 31 December 2014, and had suffered ‘religious persecution or fear of religious persecution’ in their country of origin, were made eligible for citizenship. Protesters argued that this was the beginning of religion-based citizenship policy. For an account of the controversy and this entire period, see the special collection of reports on citizenship in India, compiled as ‘Against the Day: India Citizenship Law’ in Barney and Szeman (2021). For instance, on 1 May 2020, the Punjab government issued a letter announcing a reverse in the hike of the minimum wage for the workers. The Punjab government’s decision was replicated by some other state governments, which claimed that to provide relief to the employees they would have to renege on their promise of a rise in minimum wages or even reduce the minimum wage. The Uttar Pradesh government decided to suspend all

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

labour laws for the next three years barring three laws: the law on bonded labour, laws related to compensation for injuries and death, and laws related to construction worker (Stranded Workers Action Network [SWAN], 2020). On this theme of generalizing the norm of paid work throughout the population see Donzelot (1991) and Walters (1997). As an instance of the imagination of life as commons, see Stavrides (2020). The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (see Government of India 2005) – later renamed as the ‘Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’ – is a social security measure aimed at guaranteeing the right to work by enhancing livelihood security in rural areas. The Act provides at least 100 days of wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Important to remember here is the fact that the logistics of ensuring public health becomes a part of the concepts, calculations, and infrastructures of supply of commodities – in this case commodities ranging from medical supplies, labs, hospitals, nurses, bio-medical research, physicians and surgeons, ICU facilities, to an unbelievable ranges of services and goods. Public health becomes the corporatized concept of health care. On the limits of calculability of neoliberal governance, see Mitra (2018). Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, ‘It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them’ (1978, 143). To be truthful, Foucault discusses the notion of power over life by means of two explanations – the disciplinary form of power and biopower – with these two forming the two poles of the same architecture of power. Yet as I suggest, Foucault also admits that the power revolving around life may not sit easily with the disciplinary form of power. Giorgio Agamben puts the conundrum in this way: ‘We have no nostalgia for the notions of the human and of the divine that the implacable waves of time are erasing from the shore of history. But we reject with equal conviction the mute and faceless bare life and the health religion that governments are proposing … We rather seek, here and now, among the ruins around us, a humbler, simpler form of life. We know that such a life is not a mirage, because we have memories and experiences of it – even if, inside and outside of ourselves, opposing forces are always pushing it back into oblivion’ (Agamben 2021, 97).

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (2021), Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani, Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Aneesha, M. (2020), ‘Coronavirus Lockdown: “No Migrant Worker on Road Now” Government Tells Supreme Court’, India Today. https://​www​.indiatoday​.in/​india/​story/​coronavirus​ -lockdown​-no​-migrant​-worker​-on​-road​-now​-govt​-tells​-supreme​-court​-1661723​-2020​-03​ -31. Barney, D. and Szeman, I. (eds) (2021), ‘Against the Day: India Citizenship Law’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(1). Brown, M. (2020), ‘Transit Workers are Still Dying: With No End in Sight’, The Bullet, 21 September. https://​socialistproject​.ca/​2020/​09/​transit​-workers​-are​-still​-dying​-with​-no​-end​ -in​-sight/​#more. Cowen, D. (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Sousa Santos, B. (2018), The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Donzelot, J. (1991), ‘Pleasure in Work’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 251–280. Fassin, Y. (2009), ‘The Stakeholder Model Refined’, Journal of Business Ethics, 84, 113–135. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, Hurley, R. (trans.), New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (1979), ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford University, pp. 225–254. https://​tannerlectures​ .utah​.edu/​_resources/​documents/​a​-to​-z/​f/​foucault81​.pdf. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2012), On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–80, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2015), The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–73, Harcourt, B. E. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gazette of India (2005), ‘The Disaster Management Act, 2005’, 26 December, New Delhi. https://​cdn​.s3waas​.gov​.in/​s3656​58fde58ab3​c2b6e5132a​39fae7cb9/​uploads/​2018/​04/​ 2018041720​.pdf. Gazette of India (2019), The Citizenship Amendment Act, 12 December, New Delhi. https://​ egazette​.nic​.in/​WriteReadData/​2019/​214646​.pdf. Government of India (2005), ‘The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’, as amended in 2017. https://​nrega​.nic​.in/​amendments​_2005​_2018​.pdf. Khalili, L. (2020), Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping & Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, London: Verso. Kindig, J. (2020), ‘Abandoned at Sea: Sailors and COVID-19’, Verso Books Blog, 1 May. https://​www​.versobooks​.com/​blogs/​4692​-abandoned​-at​-sea​-sailors​-and​-covid​-19. Laclau, E. (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Marx, K. (1955), The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1963), ‘Ricardo’s Theory of Accumulation and a Critique of It (The Very Nature of Capital Leads to Crises)’, in Theories of Surplus Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 470–546. Marx, K. (1973), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Nicolaus, M. (trans.), New York: Vintage Books. Marx, K. (1990), Capital, Volume I, Fowkes, B. (trans.), London: Penguin. Mirowski, P. (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, New York: Verso. Mishra, D. (2020), ‘RTI Shows the Government Did Collect Data on Deaths of Migrant Workers During Lockdown’, The Wire, 17 September. https://​thewire​.in/​rights/​centre​ -indian​-railways​-lockdown​-deaths​-migrant​-workers​-shramik​-special​-rti. Mitra, I. (2018), ‘Spatialization of Calculability: Financialization of Space: A Study of the Kolkata Port’, in B. Neilson, N. Rossiter, and R. Samaddar (eds), Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a Region, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 47-68. Rosdolsky, R. (1977), The Making of Marx’s Capital, Burgess, P. (trans.), London: Pluto Press. Schumpeter, J. A. (1994), Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, London: Routledge. Stavrides, S. (2020), ‘Life as Commons’, XXI Magazine. https://​xximagazine​.com/​c/​life​-as​ -commons. Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) (2020), ‘32 Days and Counting: COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India’. https://​c​ ovid19soci​alsecurity​.files​.wordpress​.com/​2020/​05/​32​-days​-and​-counting​_swan​.pdf.

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The Hindu (2020a), ‘Coronavirus – Centre Files Report on Migrant Workers’, 7 April. https://​ www​.thehindu​.com/​news/​national/​coronavirus​-centre​-files​-report​-on​-migrant​-workers/​ article31283896​.ece. The Hindu (2020b), ‘8 Lakh MT More Grains Allocated to States for Migrant Workers’, 17 May. https://​www​.thehindu​.com/​news/​national/​coronavirus​-lockdown​-8​-lakh​-mt​-more​ -grains​-allocated​-to​-states​-for​-migrant​-workers/​article31601661​.ece. Walters, W. (1997), ‘The “Active Society”: New Designs for Social Policy’, Policy and Politics, 25(3), 221–234.

PART II TALKING GOVERNMENTALITY

6. Governmentality: a conversation with Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee and Nikolas Rose Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, Nikolas Rose, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

For this conversation we (WW and MT) asked Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose – three of the most original and creative political thinkers of our time – to engage with a series of questions about governmentality. Their scholarship has fundamentally shaped and animated debates on this topic, pushing scholarship in multiple directions, and deepening its connection to such vital issues as democracy and social justice, biopolitics and citizenship, political economy, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and populism, and much else. We hope this conversation will both enhance appreciation for the areas of concordance and difference in their thinking, and more broadly, advance debates about governmentality and politics. Brown, Chatterjee, and Rose work within and across a variety of disciplines and theoretical traditions, their work addressing different world regions as well. We hope these differences will also illuminate questions of governmentality. Ideally we would all have sat around a table together. Instead, circumstances (not least the COVID-19 pandemic) meant our interlocutors’ responses and interventions were dispersed across space and time. We gathered their thoughts in an iterative process over a six-month period beginning with Rose, whom we interviewed by Skype (18 September 2020), then Chatterjee (8 December 2020) and finally Brown (5 March 2021). The latter two scholars gave us written responses. A second, shorter round of comments and reactions then followed. A slight disadvantage of this asynchronous approach is that these thinkers are not always commenting on precisely the same object – as is the case when the object in question is a very dynamic, contemporary event. For example, the governance of the pandemic, like the virus itself, mutated over the course of this conversation. Nevertheless, there is enough consistency in the world to make this approach viable and, we think, worthwhile. The material that follows has been lightly amended by our interlocutors and edited by us. We have added the occasional reference for purposes of clarification. WW. We would like to start with two questions that are very contemporary. First, about the Coronavirus pandemic. If we imagined the pandemic in terms of a laboratory then what can we learn about variations and mutations in government from it? Is it as simple as saying there are authoritarian approaches,

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police approaches, even populist approaches? Or is the picture perhaps more interesting and unexpected than that? NR: It’s always dangerous to extrapolate when one’s right in the middle of something because you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Michel Foucault was always wise enough, at least in what he wrote, to allow a few decades or more to pass before trying to work out the transformations in forms of thought and forms of intervention that might have been involved. So I think we should hesitate before jumping straight in and making a grand diagnosis. But on the basis of what’s occurring, I suppose for me there are at least two very remarkable facts. And the first is that a rapid and massively transformative response has occurred in almost every region of the world, irrespective of the politics of their government, irrespective of their level of economic development, the degree of urbanization, irrespective of the capacities of their health systems to cope and so on. Of course, I mean lockdown, lockdown strategies being considered, although unevenly imposed, across the world in almost every country, even to some extent in Brazil, so even in quite authoritarian countries. And with some exceptions, of course, Sweden being an exception of a socially liberal country that, for a long time, resisted lockdown and curtailment of the rights and liberties of citizens. Most of us would have found it unthinkable that there would be such a level of acceptance, even if grudging acceptance, of this massive curtailment of liberties in the face of a biopolitical threat. Lockdowns that were policed, enforced by emergency laws, but which also depended on intense responsibilization, injunctions to each and all to take responsibility for themselves and for others. That I think needs some reflection. It’s not the first time, of course. And it is not just ‘neoliberalism’. There were lockdowns during the Spanish flu also entailing ‘responsibilization’. There were lockdowns in some epidemics in the 50s and in the 60s. But nothing of this scale. How does that happen? Of course, as we will discuss later, there was resistance, sometimes stoked by populist political leaders and activists. And there were differences in the speed of response and the efficacy of the measures put in place, which to some extent depended on previous pandemic experiences and also on the trust of the population in their governors. But for me, the interesting question is this: How has such a uniform, a relatively uniform biopolitical approach, at least in its conception, at least in its strategy, occurred in a very short period of time in highly differentiated regions with different political systems and so on with a few outliers. What compelled those who govern to act in this way in the face of a pandemic, while they so obviously fail to act in the face of the other great threat to the life or our species, climate change. So that’s an interesting thing to reflect upon when we think about ‘globalization’ – the uneven and inequitable globalization of the value of life. The second thing to reflect upon, from my point of view, is the role that expert knowledge has had to play in these transformations. Even in countries that have political regimes that have said ‘away with all experts’, ‘we’ve had enough of experts’, etc. Somehow, when it comes to a biopolitical emergency, expertise has become obligatory, obligatory as a guide,

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obligatory as a legitimation, obligatory as a focus of blame. So those rapid changes in our forms of life are stunning. Of course some – even some socio-political theorists – have argued very strongly right from the very beginning, that this was an absurdly over-intensive response which focused on short term questions, on the short term rise in rates of death, whereas the overall rates of death were not that great compared to rates of death from seasonal flu let alone from other diseases. While I think they were largely wrong, the question remains: How did this become such a massive emergency, overriding everything that we know about the deaths and illnesses that would occur from the lockdown itself, the economic hit, the impact on other forms of medical treatment and so forth as a consequence of that? How did this become the obvious way of responding to the pandemic to the extent that if you don’t do it, you’re either Bolsanaro or Bolsanaro-like? You become a pariah, a pariah state. So whether the mode of governmentality is populism or authoritarianism, social liberalism, social democracy or whatever, a biopolitical emergency has come to overshadow the lot of them. And what we have witnessed is a compelling, depressing ‘social autopsy’ of the national and international inequities when it comes to the differential values attached to life itself, to different human lives themselves. If it was not so indefensible, it would be comical to see those in authority pretending surprise at the statistics of morbidity and mortality that repeatedly reveal the extent of the systemic social suffering experienced by those who are poor, those who are black, those who do the often invisible under-labouring that enables others to enjoy their privileges. PC: Comparing the response to the COVID-19 pandemic with earlier instances in history, what is remarkable is, first, its scale and intensity, and second, a certain uniformity in the pattern of its variations around the world. Nikolas is entirely right in his observation on this point. Undoubtedly, both the scale and the uniformity of responses can be attributed to the global spread of authoritative expert knowledge through professional institutions and publications in specialized scientific disciplines, helped by global institutions such as the WHO and promoted by global news media. The speed with which discussions among experts circulated among their peers around the world and then were almost instantly disseminated among the general public was, I think, unprecedented in history. I was in India from March to October 2020 and witnessed how Indian physicians would appear on TV talk shows to speak of studies published the previous week in the USA or Japan, only to be immediately engaged in debate by epidemiologists in Britain or Canada. Since a great deal was unknown about the new virus, the discussions among experts often revealed considerable tentativeness. Opinions were frequently revised and there even seemed to be opposed camps. When policy differences emerged in the way the crisis was being handled in different countries, these too were publicly debated. The efficacy with which expert knowledge can circulate throughout the world today was shown most dramatically in the last few months. The other feature was the relation of government agencies to expert knowledge. Almost all governments have permanent agencies for consultation with experts

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in matters of public health. But the sense of crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 epidemic saw the activation of these agencies or the creation of new advisory bodies to make possible intensive communication on a daily basis. The same was true of the public dissemination of updated reports and health advisories. Round-the-clock news channels and internet websites made possible a constant circulation of public discourse that echoed, challenged and often distorted expert opinion. I noticed that whereas all governments sought to base their administrative decisions on expert advice, there were differences in the degree to which political leaders, bureaucrats or health experts were allowed to control the narrative. These differences may be traced to the political conditions in which governmentality functions. While specific governmental techniques may be universally available, their selection and use varies with the politics that prevails in particular locations. The variations in government responses to the pandemic are being attributed to differences between liberal and authoritarian regimes or their underlying political cultures. Thus, the effectiveness with which East Asian regimes managed to impose restrictions on the movement and behaviour of populations is being explained by a culture that habitually defers to public authority, whereas in Britain and the United States people are supposedly far more attached to their personal liberties to concede readily to government directives. I think this is too simple and misleading. This does not explain, for instance, why in Iran or Turkey the government has found it so difficult to enforce restrictions, or why New Zealand and Australia have had such success. I think Foucault’s discussion on the genealogy of pastoral power in Europe carries an important insight. He shows how, after the Reformation delegitimized the punitive power of the church and elevated individual conscience as the site of morality, the task of looking after the people was gradually taken over by the public institutions of the polizei. These institutions are still the main agencies of surveillance and security, not just in matters of law and order but housing, public health and several other social functions in most countries of continental Europe. In his discussion of Ordoliberalism, Foucault describes how even the neoliberal turn in Germany continued to uphold polizeiwissenschaft as the science of public policy and no sharp distinction was drawn between citizens as subjects of rights and populations as subjects of interest. This contrasts with the Anglo-American tradition which has continued to valorize the distinction between personal freedoms and public responsibility. I suspect that the absence of this history in the non-Christian countries of Asia where very different traditions exist of enforcing public conduct has much to do with the observed difference in the handling of the pandemic (although I still don’t know how to explain the case of New Zealand). In India, the globally circulating expert wisdom on how to handle pandemics as well as the example of what other countries were doing led the Central government in New Delhi to declare a harsh lockdown (this was the first time I heard this American term used in India, indicating the global hierarchy of knowledge) all over the country. The immediate intention was to prevent a breakdown in hospital services in the cities where populations were densely concentrated. The economy was badly hit, but the incomes of the large proportion of people who were directly or indirectly

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employed by government was protected, as was the service staff in the private sector which could continue its work from home. The suspension of all public transport was expected to keep the rural population safe from the spread of the virus. The population that was forgotten was a few million migrant workers who were only temporarily lodged in cities and employed under short-term contracts. There was no governmental machinery that kept track of these people and no protections could be offered to them. In April and May 2020, reporting on the pandemic in India was dominated by harrowing images of thousands of men, women and children walking hundreds of miles along highways and railway lines to their village homes. Several hundred died along the way. Political leaders and the central bureaucracy tried in the initial months to keep a tight control over the governmental apparatus dealing with the epidemic, using expert opinion and statistics as best as they could to present an optimistic picture. But political tensions erupted with states and local governments insisting on policing their own boundaries to prevent the infection from being brought in from the more badly affected areas. The most effective policing seems to have been done by local communities themselves which, in many places with strong community organizations, controlled the movement of people into their urban neighbourhoods or villages. Their methods were not always benign: those suspected of having contracted the disease or having had close contact with COVID patients were often treated cruelly. The fragility of the link between politics and expert knowledge was starkly exposed by the suddenness and ferocity with which the second wave of the epidemic hit India in April 2021. Only a few months before, the Modi government had confidently declared its final victory over COVID and effectively dismantled the emergency health facilities that had been built. In March, it began a steady rollout of its vaccination programme, with Modi’s portrait on each vaccination certificate, expecting the effort to go on for several months. The government even distributed a substantial part of its vaccine stocks to other countries and won diplomatic Brownie points. Curiously, there was some expert-sounding talk of how the people of Asia and Africa might have a natural immunity against the virus, which was why it had had a far less deadly effect on them than on people in the West. The few voices that kept warning against complacency were ignored. The hubris of political triumphalism was smashed in a matter of days when even the most well equipped hospitals in the biggest cities declared they had no oxygen or ICU beds and distribution centres ran out of vaccines. As I write this in early May [2021], the virus has definitely made its way into rural areas in India where healthcare facilities are minimal even in the best of times. India is witnessing the worst COVID outbreak anywhere in the world. Having flaunted its achievements only weeks ago, the Modi government is now trying to pass the burden of dealing with the present crisis to the states. Experts close to the government are claiming there was no credible warning of the severity of the second wave. Other experts in India and abroad disagree. WB: There are three things I would note about governmentality in relation to the pandemic.

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The first is that the pandemic exacerbated the already exploding political, economic, Anthropocenic and social crises of neoliberalism, and even of liberalism, in the West (but not only the West). It also highlighted the messiness of the protracted interregnum between nation-states and whatever comes next as organizing political forms. Nothing about managing a pandemic can be left to markets, morals or individual choice. Rather, saving populations from sickness, death and pandemic-induced economic precarity demanded a complex and coordinated political response comprising public health protocols, investments in vaccine research and COVID testing, coordination of dispersed healthcare provision, negotiations of global production and supply chains, negotiations among nations, and unprecedented government bailouts for economic activity slowed, stalled or threatened with death by shutdowns. Only by denying the significance and science of COVID-19 itself, which many on the right did in 2020, could one deny the need for this comprehensive political response. Yet neoliberalized states were in a lousy position to offer this response and neoliberalized populations were in a lousy condition to accept or work with it. States could issue decrees – shutdowns – but addressed them to publics steeped in neoliberal mistrust of government, social cooperation and social care. Hence the widespread rebellions against shutdowns, masking, and now vaccinations, all in the name of distrust of and freedom from the state. States struggled to coordinate procurement and distribution of supplies and care, but were up against privatization of this provisioning and, again, dis-integrated societies. Few states had either the apparatuses or the trust in place for provisioning national welfare in a crisis, let alone the ability to direct markets and supply chains. Hence the enormous inequities and outright failures in such provisioning – from providing income support to access to testing, healthcare and vaccines; from procuring PPE to securing childcare, education and housing for those hard hit by pandemic economics. All of this deepened, not only revealed, gross inequalities across race, class and gender, and between nations and hemispheres, inequalities that neoliberalism did not invent but intensified over its forty year reign, through its race to the bottom and individualization or familialization of social reproduction. In short, even where subtended by authoritarians like Trump or Bolsonaro, neoliberal governmentality limped, not leaped, into the breach of COVID, which is one reason it claimed so many lives even in rich countries. At the same time, the anti-statist, anti-social and anti-egalitarian principles comprising neoliberal governmentality were exposed as disastrous in a crisis, whether that of a pandemic or that of climate change. In other words, this created a huge opportunity for the left though I’m afraid the left has gotten pretty good at wasting crises. The second thing I want to note will sound like the opposite of the first, though thoughtful readers will see how they go together. While Nikolas is certainly right that global political responses to COVID share common features, the differences are important to analyse. Not only differences between New Zealand and Brazil, or Israel and India, stark as those were. Even the differences between the Trump and Biden administrations in the US are worth attending to. Both had to tap exorbitant federal spending and carefully titrate relations between localities, states and the Federal government in managing the crisis. But the commonalities end there. The

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administrations featured radically different relations to science, experts, politics, truth, communication, acknowledging suffering, wealth protection and the inequalities discussed above. The two COVID-relief packages passed under the respective administrations are revealing texts in this respect. The CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security] Act, passed in March 2020 when the Republicans held both the Senate and the White House, enacted the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in the history of capitalism. Two-thirds of the nearly two trillion dollar relief package went to corporations and the wealthy in the form of tax cuts, largely unrestricted direct bail-outs and interest-free loans (many of which will be forgiven); individual ‘stimulus’ checks were one-off and minuscule. The ARP [American Rescue Plan] Act, passed in March 2021, pours resources into schools, vaccine clinics, communities of colour and the undocumented; it provides rent assistance, paid family leave, child care and other ways of putting a floor under the vulnerable. This is not a defence of centrist Democrats or an ‘all is well now’ story. The problem of getting these resources where they need to go remains hampered by lack of social integration and public trust. COVID continues to kill non-whites at twice the rates of whites; there are lack of protections and infection rates for undocumented agricultural workers and the incarcerated. Tens of millions of women have left paid work to do unpaid care work, which will have decades-long implications for gender equality. All this said, the difference between the two bills underscores the limitations of the language of neoliberal governmentality. Finally, I want to add a footnote to my colleagues’ reflections on the place and play of science in contemporary governmentality. It has become commonplace to divide regimes and the populations supporting them into right wing anti-science and left wing pro-science camps. This ignores 50 years of left critiques of the objective, non-discursive character of science. It also ignores the ways that science and technology have suffered legitimacy deficits as they have become increasingly owned and developed by and for corporate capital, and the ways that the state itself has been saturated by corporate interests and buffeted by finance. Many anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are deeply suspicious of expertise emanating from what they consider to be corrupt sources, and they are not all wrong. In this regard, dubiousness about science and public health mandates is not arising only from a preference for truth or authority from God, or because of the unverified information circulating on social media or unaccountable mainstream media. States relying on expert knowledge to manage COVID have run straight into the crisis of truth, one not caused by erased lines between science, capital and the state, but ramified by this erasure. WW. How should we make sense of the forms of politics and government that are today associated with the term populism? Does populism mark a new type of governmentality, a mutation within and against neoliberalism, or something else? NR: I’d like to leave the question of neoliberalism in brackets, because I’m not very keen on the term as a characterization of our present. It will be interesting to see

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the extent to which in the countries which have become populist or the movements that have become populist (those led by Marine Le Pen, Trump and we could add Erdogan, Modi and so forth), it will be interesting to see the way in which they survive this current crisis, except as oppositional movements. Because if the current crisis has shown one thing, it is that when there’s a pandemic around, most people want the ‘nanny state’. They want somebody to be in charge. They want someone to manage their vital lives in ways that are more associated with the traditional social welfare regimes than they are with populism. The market doesn’t hack it. Freedom doesn’t hack it. Individual choice doesn’t hack it when there’s a virus around. It is true, especially in the United States, that we see those people who proclaim ‘live free or die young’, and the people who support Trump, the conspiracy theorists who have taken up their oppositional positions towards experts and the management of life. But what will come of those populists in the wake of the pandemic? I don’t think populism is a form of governmentality, really. I don’t think it has invented a way of governing. If governmentality is about inventing a way of governing, that is a way of managing institutions, of forming subjectivities, of organizing forms of expertise, of having certain strategies for the transformation of a polity, I don’t think populism has done [any of] that. I think populism is in its nature, oppositional. Whether it can form, in the way that fascism might have done in Italy, a viable mode of governing over a period of time seems to me to be unclear. Think about Mussolini. It’s not a history I know very well. But Mussolini starts off as a kind of socialist, you know, extolling the powers of the state and seeking to implement a kind of socialist polity and then gradually morphs into a populism that ceases to govern. Fascism rules – especially if it can create a state of constant war – but it cannot govern. So I think populism is a style of rule which depends on a kind of state of exception, of perpetual battle against internal and external enemies, that doesn’t operate through any of the forms of governmentality that have become the norm since the nineteenth century. PC: I think the current discussion on populism in the West fails to take account of the long history of this phenomenon in electoral democracies in Asia and Africa. In India, for instance, populist movements, parties and leaders have been around for more than half a century, both in opposition as well as in government. They have used governmental techniques from the period of development planning as well as the more recent neoliberal era. They have adapted to changing bases of support and managed leadership successions. Most significantly, they have developed relatively stable forms of competitive electoral populism, with one populist party or alliance being opposed by another. These histories of populism do not support the view that it is only an aberrant or perverse form of electoral democracy. Ernesto Laclau, it is true, has attributed a distinct ‘reason’ to populism.1 This is a valuable contribution, although I think he rather overstates his case by suggesting that it is the only kind of politics possible in contemporary democracy. But his key insight, that successful populist movements or leaders manage, through rhetoric and performance, to erect an internal border between the oppressed people on one side

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and the oppressor elite on the other, is, I believe, a crucial analytical achievement. He suggests that when a populist opposition movement comes to power, it will resort to the techniques of governmentality to deal with the heterogeneous demands made on it, leading to a steady dilution of its populist appeal, unless it is able to fill the signifier called ‘the people’ with a changing content. The Indian experience shows that some populist regimes have been able to do this, such as under Indira Gandhi in the period from 1971 to her assassination in 1984, or the DMK and AIADMK, the two rival populist parties in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which have negotiated leadership successions and stayed in and out of power for five decades. A crucial method of achieving this is by attaching the collective identity of a people to the singular personality of a leader. The leader’s enemies then become the people’s enemies; if the leader’s enemies change, so do the people’s enemies. This also produces the distinctly populist phenomenon of endowing the leader with the arbitrary powers of an absolute sovereign, albeit a sovereign chosen by the people. The leader is expected to use his or her sovereign powers to cut through the maze of laws and regulations that only perpetuate the rule of the elite and deliver justice to the people. Indeed, the leader is celebrated as one scoring victories in a war on behalf of the people against its enemy. Which is why populist regimes do not turn themselves into dictatorships; they must demonstrate through periodic elections that they continue to be chosen by the people, even though those elections may not be entirely fair to the opposition. This suggests that populist movements, while they frequently use the techniques of governmentality to bestow benefits on their supporters, acquire their popular appeal not by governmentality alone but from the emotional charge generated by the conjuring of an internal border between the authentic people and their enemy. The Indian discussion on populism highlights the striking absence in Western political theory of a serious consideration of the affective or emotional aspect of politics. Although practitioners of politics have long understood the importance of rhetoric, performance and melodramatic narrative, political theory has obstinately clung on to the prejudice that its true field of study is rational discourse: the rest should be dealt with by anthropologists, social psychologists or cultural critics. That is why when a phenomenon like Trump appears, analysts end up describing it as a third-world pathology that has somehow infected the rational conduct of American democracy and seek explanations in personality disorder or mass delusion. Foucault, I believe, shows a more accurate perception of the problem in Society Must be Defended in his claim that the constitution of a sovereign polity does not bring the war of all against all to an end; war continues under the surface of an ordered polity in the form of a struggle of groups against groups by means of politics. Populist politics in contemporary electoral democracies in the West has a different genealogy from the populism we witness in Asian or African countries, and perhaps also in Latin America. The social democratic ideology which inspired the welfare state devised governmental techniques within a framework of universal rights to which all citizens were entitled. The problem it faced was how to balance universal claims with the differential encouragement of merit acquired mainly through education and professional training. This led the welfare state into the domain of policy

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planning by experts. The outcomes were not always satisfactory, leading to charges of inefficiency, waste and an overbearing presence of government in the daily lives of people. The neoliberal critique moved away from the idea of the citizen-subject endowed with universal rights to the individual consumer-subject with interests. By the 1980s, the neoliberal forms of governmentality, operating within a legally enabled market framework and targeted support only for those unable to sustain themselves, became dominant in the West and even influenced the policies of the emerging economies in Latin America and Asia. The key idea in neoliberal governmentality was for policy to play on the interests of individual consumer-subjects through a carefully calibrated set of rewards and penalties in order to achieve the desired social outcome. There was a depoliticization of the art of government, taking it into the domain of the administration of populations as things. Once again, Foucault describes this change in his discussion of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics. But he also anticipates the ever-present possibility that not everyone would agree to being treated as part of a population. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault offers this intriguing distinction between the population and the people: ‘The people comprise those who conduct themselves in relation to the management of the population … as if they were not part of the population as a collective subject-object, as if they put themselves outside of it, and consequently the people are those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system’ (Foucault 2007, 43–44). Come to think of it, by the 1990s, the expert consensus on the range of optimal policies on most areas of government was so complete that all organized political opinion, including the major political parties, subscribed to them, with only marginal differences. For voters, there was little to choose. This led to widespread political apathy. The populist turn in Western democracies, which gathered speed after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, was in a sense a refusal by the people to be treated as the population. There was no such political apathy in postcolonial democracies. On the contrary, the destruction of traditional agriculture and the swelling of the ranks of the informal sector meant that groups of people in localities and occupations were desperate to seek governmental support to help them maintain a modicum of subsistence. They entered the political arena in order to be recognized as legitimate population groups deserving of support. That is the ground where populist parties and leaders attempted to string together collective identities of ‘the authentic people’ separated by the internal frontier from their enemies – the entrenched elite. Even though the formal properties of populist politics are often the same, this genealogy is entirely different from that of populism in Western democracies. WB: By definition and in practice, populism is not a form of rule, or a regime. It is a political mobilization across differences or identities, in the name of ‘the people’, that is based in antipathy to perceived rule by illegitimate elites – economic, political, military or some combination. It opposes a particular mode of rule, whether from the right or left. Occupy was a populist movement (‘the 99%’, the authentic people, against the banks and plutocrats); Chavismo was a populist movement; and of course

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right-wing populism opposing perceived rule by globalists, secularists, multiculturalists, feminists has sucked up a lot of oxygen in the public square of late. When a maverick leader rides to power on populist energies, they are supported and legitimated by these energies but cannot actually govern in a populist fashion and survive. Populism is reactive, though not therefore reactionary. It is pure opposition, or in Laclau’s formulation, pure ‘antagonism’, while governments have to govern, or fail. Trump’s failure is exemplary here. While in office, he kept his populist base energized and entertained, but did not even try to create a governing form to replace the one he and his base rejected. He remained 100% attack, opposition, grievance. Even in Trump’s authoritarianism and autocraticism, he did not identify with the state or with governing. Left populist leaders such as Hugo Chavez are routinely faulted for turning authoritarian after they have risen to power, and many liberal pundits indict populism as having this turn at its core. But authoritarianism or authoritarian leadership is not endemic to populism; again, no particular regime, political rationality or governmentality corresponds to a populist formation. Let me put this differently by turning to Foucault, the thinker we are centring in this conversation. Apart from the passage in Security, Territory, Population that Partha cites above, Foucault is not particularly helpful in theorizing populism or helping us answer the questions, why populism now or what is its relation to neoliberalism or the predicaments of nation-states under globalization. Foucault had little interest in mass political mobilizations. And no more than the classical neoliberals could he anticipate the specific kinds of mass political energies that would be generated by the dis-integrated societies, extreme inequalities and discredited electoral democracies of neoliberal governmentality. But what may be relevant from Foucault are his remarks in the Birth of Biopolitics about socialist governmentality: such a thing, he argues, does not exist. Socialism, he says, has no political rationality of its own, in its texts or its practiced forms. Unlike liberalism or neoliberalism, socialism does not contain or entail an order of governing principles, norms or forms. It does not have a distinct mode of political reason. To put the matter another way, there has never been a political theory of socialism; it is an economic and social theory, politics was the (fatally) missing third leg of the stool. Thus, Foucault says, socialist states borrow their political rationality from elsewhere – police states, welfare states, Maoism/Confucianism, Leninism, liberalism, republicanism or various religious traditions. Well, it seems to me that the same is true of populism, both left and right. It may have a logic but it has no political rationality, and it is not a governmentality, though every populism is immanent to the governmentality that it opposes. This is not a minor issue for left activists today. Thus, what we need to know about a particular populist mobilization are not only ‘the chains of equivalence’ it features or the content it supplies to the empty signifier of The People, or the particular elites it opposes. Rather, we need to know: from what ground does it arise, what does it reject, what does it think it wants and what are the paradoxes in its own demands? As Partha suggests, while Ernesto Laclau’s logic of populism is useful in understanding the antagonism populism articulates, that logic is too ahistorical and abstract to

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help us with these questions. In the case of left populist movements one can ask two further questions: How might populist energies be channelled toward political, economic and cultural transformation without stilling those energies by submitting them to institutionalization? And how might populist demands be contoured toward transformations of capitalism and liberal democracies rather than remaining grievances within them, hence perversely dependent on them? I think these questions will be vital for developing twenty-first century democratic ecological socialist political possibilities. MT. The diffusion and use of governmentality across the social sciences over the last 25 years has been quite remarkable. Why do you think these analytics have proved so appealing to scholars in so many areas? Does governmentality still remain a valuable toolkit for studies of political power? Or have we reached a kind of impasse such that its critical edge is now blunted? NR: I should start [my answer] with the preliminary that I’ve not really been working on governmentality for 10 years or so, maybe more than that. So, I’m quite out of touch with what’s been going on in the domain. I’ve not been reading the literature. I’ve not been thinking about it too much. For the last 10 years, I’ve been thinking about neuroscience. And for the last three years, I’ve been thinking a lot about mental health. […] So my mind’s a little bit away from this, but I hope I can say something sensible. At the high point of governmentality, I was the managing editor of Economy and Society, and almost every paper that was submitted to the journal was about governing this, governing that, governing the other. Almost all our papers were about governing. Not necessarily about governmentality, but about governing. That is to say, they identified a dimension for analysis which was about the conduct of conduct, to use that very handy Foucauldian term. Who is trying to conduct the conduct of whom, according to what ways of thinking, using what kinds of techniques, based upon what kinds of knowledge, and to what kind of end. That type of analysis became a really powerful, although not necessarily a radical approach. Governing in the form of the conduct of conduct became a very powerful way of cutting into a whole series of challenges. How could one understand the ways in which a refugee policy governed refugees? How was the refugee understood? What kinds of knowledges were involved? What kinds of strategies were there? What forms of resistance were generated? And so on. Governmentality, that is to say the argument that one could characterize political regimes in terms of a certain family resemblance of all the different ways of conducting conduct that authorities deployed: that was only the end point of doing these other analyses. One needs to be able to show that this is happening here. We can see this happening there. We can see this happening there as well. One needs to identify a family resemblance amongst all the ways in which political subjects were understood, in the kinds of techniques that were being used in the school room, in the factory, in the army and the mental hospital. And we could call that a particular mode or style of governmentality in that there was a family resemblance of all these

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ways of conducting the conduct of citizens. If the analysis goes the other way round, if you start by saying it’s neoliberalism and then you find examples of neoliberalism everywhere because [you look] for them, and where you find something that does not seem to fit you say, oh, this is a perverted form of neoliberalism, then it doesn’t become a powerful strategy for me. If I was going to have a criticism, and far be it for me to have a criticism because I’ve not been doing this stuff [in recent years], it would be that the critical edge of the analytics of governmentality has been blunted because it’s become an overarching descriptive device. What is it? Neoliberalism. Why is it? Neoliberalism. What’s wrong with it? It’s neoliberalism? It’s become that kind of overarching descriptive strategy, it feels satisfying because it explains everything, but it is not really an analytical strategy. Often, to speak of a form of governmentality implies a sort of homogeneity in ways of thinking, trying to rule, across a particular territory at a certain time. I think Peter Miller and I were probably guilty of this to some extent: When we wrote ‘Political power beyond the state’,2 we said, well, just for heuristic purposes, you could say there was liberalism, and then welfarism and then advanced liberalism – the term we came to prefer to neoliberalism. That implied homogeneity-change-homogeneit y-change-homogeneity-change. Now, for example, if you look at [the case of the coronavirus pandemic in] the United States, you see a very heterogeneous political domain, because there are multiple levels of power. What you see is one thing happening in the White House in the form of rule, the pronouncements of a ruler [Trump] with little regard to experts. It’s just a little flu. It’s going to go away. Why don’t we try injecting ourselves with bleach or something like that. And then you see Andrew Cuomo in New York, and governors in other states like California doing something completely different – a different biopolitics with a different relation to expertise. You see the mayors of different cities doing something similar actually implementing the lockdown. And you see the national government, the federal government often railing against this: ‘Why are we doing this? I told them not to do it!’ But ‘rule’ is not auto-effective! So I think that a problem with ‘governmentality studies’ is that while the idea of thinking about forms of rule, of forms of exercise of political power in this way is a really powerful one, the tendency to homogenize is a weakness. For example, going back to neoliberalism: the governmental technologies deployed in many of the states which people would say are ‘neoliberal’ regimes don’t bear any relationship at all to the classical proposals of Hayek and other ‘neoliberals’. Very few, if any, are completely free market economies, small state polities, etc. So to call them all ‘neoliberal’ does not help much. The question for me is: can one take some of the concepts and modes of analysis of governmentality and hone them into finer and more effective ways of cutting into what’s going on in particular spaces and places at particular times? Because for me – and Peter Miller and I have often said this – we did our work on governmentality at a very particular time. Our objects of investigation were the politics of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the rise of policies of marketization, new public management and so on. It was an attempt to understand that – which seemed to us to represent a significant mutation in ways of governing – that we used

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these kinds of concepts that are now often thought of as part of ‘governmentality studies’, borrowing some from Foucault, some from elsewhere, making others up ourselves. And it seems to me – though as I say, have not been following the field [in recent years] – people need to hone the concepts to look at the problems of today rather than trying to apply a kind of a formula to say, oh, it’s a neoliberalism or it’s not neoliberalism. WB: It is tempting to retort to Nikolas’s caricature of neoliberal scholarship, which may capture some weak moments in cultural studies twenty years ago but misrepresents the serious, careful scholarship on neoliberalism – its origins, theory, catalysts, materializations, migrations and mutations – undertaken in recent years by historians, geographers, anthropologists, political economists, sociologists, political theorists and scholars of postcolonalism, race and gender. But that is not what you asked about. You asked whether governmentality remains a useful notion to think with. To the extent that liberal and Marxist theories remain hegemonic for theorizing power and states, governmentality remains revolutionary. It does four essential things: it challenges liberal and Marxist ontologies and epistemologies as it reveals how modern power and governing work; it identifies governing with a normative order of reason rather than with representation, sovereignty, or ideology; it decentres without eliminating the state in its analysis, revealing governing to be diffused throughout society; and it identifies both the population and the individual (omnes et singulatim) as imbricated objects of governing. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for a snippet of theory, which is all governmentality really is, and alters the landscape of contemporary political theory. Whether or not one keeps the word, governmentality, we cannot think well without this altered landscape, though certainly we can and should think beyond it. PC: There could well be further refinements in the analysis of governmentality in different situations. But I don’t think governmentality is an exhausted idea. On the contrary, I see the techniques of governmentality being applied and elaborated in front of our eyes in the management of the COVID crisis and now in the administration of the vaccine. Think of normalization techniques such as pegging the degree of restrictions on mobility and public gathering to the prevailing mortality rate or the availability of ICU beds in hospitals. These are optimization techniques that have emerged in the last few months. I have no doubt we will see many more that will take their place as authorized best practices. I want to make one more comment as an extension to Wendy’s very useful characterization of the extraordinary intellectual achievement of governmentality as a concept. It has proved to be useful not only in understanding specific biopolitical techniques as they have emerged since the rise of the welfare state and the transition to neoliberal administration. By effectively discarding the liberal or Marxist constructions of ideology, it also helps uncover the mystery of why populist leaders can so effortlessly put together the most eclectic combinations of policies that would have been traditionally regarded as utterly incompatible. Thus, as Wendy points out,

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classic Keynesian policies of stimulating demand were combined under Trump with blatantly pro-rich bailouts, tax breaks and easy loans. Numerous other examples can be cited from around the world of populist parties that combine left-wing and right-wing policies. One thing seems clear. Even as traditional forms of liberal sovereignty and representation are in crisis and populist politics is visible everywhere, the normative frame of governmentality still remains the principal explanatory language of policy. An interesting point can be made in this connection about the Modi regime in India. Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with the promise of major pro-business structural reforms. He had virtually unanimous support from corporate business houses. But neoliberal policies have little electoral traction in a country like India where a majority of the people expect the government to help them with subsidized food, health, housing, education and other necessities of life. In any case, the global slump did not make it easy for Modi to push through pro-business reforms. Instead, electoral calculations forced him to resort to the familiar techniques of populist spending. After being re-elected in 2019, Modi’s government has tried to enact pro-business reforms under the cover of a heightened Hindu nationalist rhetoric. Major public sector companies are to be privatized, the scope for foreign investment is being expanded and trade union rights curbed. But Modi’s attempt to open up the market in agricultural commodities to multinational companies provoked a massive resistance from farmers, once again proving that neo-liberal policies can be legitimately pursued only if they are enunciated in an appropriate language of governmentality within the antagonistic terms of populist reason. MT. Do you think we find in Foucault a certain discrepancy between governmentality as an homogenizing analytics and Foucault’s situated analysis of governmentality as the governing of conducts? Does this latter enable dealing with the heterogeneity of political technologies? The late Foucault’s work on ethics seems to some extent opening up to a use of the notion of governmentality which is not overarching. WB: The simple answer is that all governmentality rests on a normative order of reason or political rationality combined with specific techniques of governing. Yet there may be diverse techniques or technologies within the same political rationality, for example, surveillance, or indebtedness at the site of privatization of public goods or responsibilization generating individual portfolio management or breaking employment into gigs. Even TINA did not work the same way in every rollout of neoliberalism.3 Squaring a political rationality (your ‘homogenizing analytics’) with heterogenous technologies is not so hard. It’s like knowing the difference between your cooking and your ingredients and cooking utensils, even as they are connected in practice. At the same time, your question captures an important fluctuation in Foucault’s deployment of neologisms or terms of art like governmentality, political rationality, biopower, and even archaeology, genealogy, disciplinary power, discourse or arts

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of the self. It seems to me that when he first floats these terms, they are often only roughly historicized and internally undifferentiated; he is at these moments trying to illuminate what certain conventions of thought, and other governing concepts, have kept in the shadows. Yet, over time, these terms often acquire in his work more historical location, more specificity and less unity. They become less like concepts and more like rubrics with internal differences and morphological alterations. They come to harbour a changing arsenal of techniques or technologies. Sometimes, as with discourse, archaeology or disciplinary power, Foucault will eventually cast away the term altogether, declaring that it inadequately captured some aspect of history or power, time or space, subject constitution or governing. This approach to honing and transmogrifying conceptual apparatuses, even to the point of jettisoning them after a while, frustrates some readers. But I love it. The idea starts fuzzily, takes him somewhere, and takes us too, and then gets filled out, altered, reconsidered, maybe allowed to expire. I love this because it represents thinking that is alive, hungry and unsatisfied, the opposite of lazy, and it makes Foucault someone from whom to learn how to think, rather than treating him as having a fount of notions or concepts to accept or reject, apply or criticize. PC: I think Foucault’s analysis suggest that while there may be a wide variety of techniques of governmentality, including a range of institutional apparatuses that will keep being invented, there is a basic rationality they all follow, which is what Foucault called normalization. This involves optimization, the emphasis on policy rather than law, and a depoliticized sphere of the production and operation of expert knowledge in the service of policy. NR: If you read Foucault’s lectures, it is well known that they are all very empirically dense. They take very specific questions and explore them through a detailed reading of selected texts. The governmentality language of description is not central to Foucault. It is commentators on Foucault who’ve taken up and developed this governmentality approach. The same is true of biopolitics. Foucault does not say a huge amount about biopolitics, but again many have taken up the term ‘biopolitics’ as if applying it to a specific set of strategies was itself description, explanation and critique. I think maybe one should, in reading Foucault, focus more on the ways in which he actually did his investigations and how he sought to make sense of the texts rather than focus on the overarching concepts. As we all know, he would say things like ‘this year’s lectures are going to be about biopolitics’. But actually, the lecture series turns out to be not at all about biopolitics, but about something completely different. We should look more to Foucault’s methods than to these generalized concepts. Certainly when I [am persuaded] to teach sessions on Foucault once or twice a year [...] I say to the students, focus on what he does. Look at the way in which he did it and try and do something similar. Look at Birth of the Clinic, my favourite book, look at the way in which he analysed the emergence of clinical medicine and try and do something similar, which looks at lots of contingent things that are going on and how these contingent things

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map together, intersect and make an event. Or look at the description of microphysics in Discipline and Punish. Forget the whole thing about a disciplinary society and just look at how he analyses space and time and the organization of gazes and the management of subjective experience and try and think about how you can use that for your own research. Or, in our current crisis, go back to Discipline and Punish, to the description of the strategies and explanations that were embodied in the plague city, and then think about what’s going on now in lockdowns, where there is maybe a similar rationality but different technologies. That would be a really interesting thing to do and I know some people are trying to do that, and to tease out what is different and why. So I hope that’s a way of answering your question. I should say again that I am not a Foucault scholar and I am not a Foucault commentator. I have done my best over the last 30, 40 years to not comment on Foucault, but use him and use his concepts and make up other concepts that he never used. That’s what Peter [Miller] and I did in our work on ‘political power beyond the state’. We borrowed a bit of Bruno Latour and a bit of Ian Hacking and a bit of other people and sort of botched them together to make an analytical machinery that would work for us. And I think that was the spirit of what Foucault encouraged us to do rather than to become a Foucauldian. Like Marx, who famously said that he was never a Marxist, I think Foucault would say that he was never a Foucauldian. WW. One of the more common criticisms of governmentality is that as much as it presents a very powerful, supple and sophisticated analysis of formations of political power and technical expertise it is nevertheless not so helpful to those looking for intellectual orientation when it comes to effecting progressive political change. What does governmentality offer to those struggling for social and racial justice? What use is it to individuals or social movements campaigning for better healthcare or fighting against climate catastrophe? PC: That is both a political and intellectual challenge. How does one resist or rise above the technical administration of populations in order to project a popular political agenda of transformation that would effect a change in political subjectivity? The social democratic politics that created the welfare state did produce a new political citizen-subject with universal political, economic and social rights. Behind it was the pressure of an organized working class whose potential opposition was neutralized when the post-war bourgeoisie partially incorporated working-class demands into the ruling ideology of the welfare state. The neoliberal era too produced a new consumer-subject, fully in accordance with the changing conditions of the decline in manufacturing and rise in the power of financial capital. What is the social force that will bring about the next great transformation? I don’t insist that it must be a fundamental class in the Marxist sense, except that, at the present moment, while the owners of capital in Western countries seem to be thoroughly organized as well as fully conscious of their own interests, all other social classes are scattered. I see two possible sources of transformative change in the relatively long term. The first consist of movements such as Black Lives Matter which are less concerned with

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progressive politics as electoral tactics and more invested in cultural-pedagogical projects of changing perceptions and self-awareness. The other is the unpredictable future of Chinese capitalism which, even as it has converged with a global economy, has a very different ethical genealogy and cultural-political character from Western capitalism. What will be the outcome of China’s attempt to claim its share of dominance in the global order? Needless to say, we cannot blame Foucault for not anticipating this historical moment. NR: I have two not very satisfactory ways of answering [this question of ways of governing and political struggles]. The first is to say that some of the things that we now take as established ways of governing started as critiques of ways of governing. For instance, when people talk about neoliberalism now … if you look at the early neoliberals, their arguments were a criticism of welfare states and everything that was associated with welfare states, centralized planning and so forth [– the kind of charges that Partha Chatterjee mentioned above]. At the beginnings of the political currents that led to the mutations in governing in the 1980s, theirs was a quite compelling set of criticisms. They argued that although welfare states claimed to be in the interests of the poorest in society, they actually held them, locked them into positions of clientism. Despite their hopes and claims they seldom produced any increase in equality. They allowed enclaves of professional power to develop that were very demeaning towards their clients and protected the interests, the status and the incomes of the experts. And so on. So this marketization that we’re all very critical of began as a struggle against the power relations in welfare systems. So it’s not so easy to say ‘here is power and there is resistance’; some of the things that we call power started off as resistance. The second not very satisfactory answer is this – it is probably a very liberal, ameliorist kind of approach to politics. Foucault says that power systems provide handles that resistance can grab onto and turn against those systems themselves. So we have those famous statements: resistance at the level of the body to the body of the prison itself. [For example] when I first used to talk about this, it was the time of the struggles in Northern Ireland. Many Irish Republicans were imprisoned in the Maze prison. They went on hunger strike and they went on dirty strike. That is to say, they didn’t eat and they didn’t wear clothes and they urinated and defaecated in their cells. If they had been in one of the prisons in the eighteenth century and they didn’t eat and they didn’t drink and they defecated in their cells, nobody would have given a damn about it. Why did it become a strategy of resistance? It was because of the fact that personal hygiene, obeying discipline, getting up at the right time, etc., was a way in which the prison operated. So the resistance could grab hold of the structures that were trying to do something and turn them against themselves. So I think that was one idea of resistance. A related idea of resistance through turning a governing strategy against itself is to point to the hypocrisy in rationales for a particular strategy or technology. For example, to say, well, you claim that X, Y and Z is to the benefit of those who are the subjects of it. But actually, if you ask those who are the subjects of it, they do not

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accept it is for their benefit, they do not find it benefits them, often quite the reverse. This way of thinking comes from something that Colin Gordon said at one point and which I’ve found very helpful in the work that I’ve been doing on psychiatry and mental health. Practices of psychiatry and mental health claim to be for the benefit of those who are its subjects. But if those who operate in those practices claim that they are for the benefit of those who are subjects, surely the minimum condition of accepting that claim is to ask those subjects whether or not they think it is to their benefit. For example at least part of the rise of the resistance movement in psychiatry, the user and survivor movement, has been to say: if you claim that your practices are to the benefit of us, why don’t you ask us whether we like your drugs, whether we think that CBT is a good way of doing things, whether we think your attention to our problems actually makes our lives better. Why don’t you ask us what we think are the reasons why we’re feeling so miserable, anxious, fearful, distressed and what we know makes feel better, makes our lives better? So in other words, you take something that makes a claim and you turn the claim against the reality and you use that as a means of resistance. That probably does not sound radical enough, I know. My dear late friend Paul Hirst was very much of that way of thinking about how socialist strategies should work. They should go with the grain of the present, not against it. They should take the promises that had popular support, and show how those promises were not delivered, could not be delivered, were not deliverable within current political way of thinking and acting, and argue that other ways would actually go further in actually delivering these promises. WB: I’ve always thought this complaint – that X theory only offers an account or a diagnosis of the present but not a solution or way forward – was symptomatic of the worst of Enlightenment progressivism (whether dialectical or otherwise) and wholism, two conceits Foucault really shattered. Once one gives up these conceits, why should a ‘history of the present’ or a mapping of power or governmentality tell us what is to be done or how? Yet can activists be effective, understanding what we are up against, without such a mapping? Pace Hegel and Marx, even the deepest accounts of how we are ordered or governed do not tell us how to arrive at a better world. It may reveal damages and cruelties we were not aware of, it may reveal fissures and opportunities to exploit, and it may also show us how certain kinds of resistance mirror the regime we think we reject. We need all of this. If, for example, liberal, neoliberal or securitarian governmentality fails to secure a sustainable future and justice and well-being for planetary life, and it fails even when it attempts to absorb racial reckoning or green economics, we need to understand precisely why this is so. We especially need to grasp the rationality and techniques of power – their sweep, their penetrations and saturations of unlikely venues, and their weaknesses – that constitute this failure. In turn, we need to formulate political prospects and projects that do not overleap the present but, rather, can be grown out of it. Resistance is one part of this, as Nikolas suggested, but so also are agitations and aspirations for the future that emerge from political, social or economic fractures and breaches in the present. This is how we may understand Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Extinction

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Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, Debt Strike, the extraordinary Latin American feminist movement, immigrant-supportive border politics and more. Each of these simultaneously reveals and criticizes how we are governed now, and limns an alternative future. MT. Foucault’s analyses on power and governmentality have been extensively used and put to work across disciplines. It seems to us that we can distinguish two currents about the ‘uses’ of Foucault’s thought and of the so called ‘Foucauldian tool box’. The first consists in the scholarship that has sought to interpret, contextualize, survey and compare Foucault’s oeuvre. The second current encompasses a variety of works that build on Foucault’s concepts and style of thoughts and put these to work to investigate phenomena and contexts which are far away from Foucault. How in your own work do you mobilize the Foucauldian tool box? And what is your understanding of the ‘uses of Foucault’? PC: Since my ability to read French is extremely limited, I do not have the resources to participate in the first category of Foucault scholarship. I have used Foucault entirely in the second sense – using his concepts, observations or suggestions to reflect on situations far removed from his concerns. There is no doubt at all that I have found my repeated readings of Foucault extremely enabling, even though in my uses I may have strayed far from his path. WB: May I offer a third approach to Foucault, one that comports neither with ‘Foucault studies’ nor with treating thinkers as tool makers? Earlier I noted that Foucault was a thinker on the move, one whose theoretical, historical and analytic insights were always shaped by what he was studying and also by an admirable openness to revising his thought. In this regard, he’s very much an experimental and speculative thinker, despite being deeply bound to historical research. Foucault did not develop ‘tools’ but, rather, through his different research projects aimed at giving us a new view of ourselves and our histories and also at deepening and complicating our understandings of power, truth, subjects, governing, states, identity, history, and more. However, Foucault did not work especially hard at refining or polishing the formulations and concepts he invented or deployed, including governmentality. Rather, he drew on them to enable certain theoretical disruptions and intellectual openings, things like decentring the state and sovereignty, or upending the Marxist opposition between base and superstructure, or material and ideological life, or extending the Weberian appreciation of rationalities that acquire their own momentum and power, or challenging the hydraulic and repressive theories of power he attributed to liberalism and psychoanalysis. But he did not stipulate governmentality in a precise way, and there is plenty of slippage in his writing between governmentality, political rationality, technologies of power and biopower. We can spend our days trying to get this tidily sorted and organized in response to Foucault’s failure to do so. Or we can reify the unfinished concept and sharpen it as a tool. But a third possibility is critical apprenticeship, which many of us have adopted for other profound yet partial think-

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ers: This means reading him to ask: What was Foucault struggling to bring to light and what was the power of this idea (governmentality) in that struggle? Crucially, what did it also bracket or vanquish, for example, the ferocious drives of capital, or the deeply tentacled sub-regimes of race and gender within other governmentalities that a Foucauldian analytics of power doesn’t illuminate especially well? In short, as we think with, through and against him, instead of reifying the ideas as tools, we allow the fecundity of his thinking to be generative for our own. NR: Foucault says somewhere that the task of effective history is to become a curative science. History is more for cutting than for knowing. It’s a kind of diagnostics, a diagnosis that can lead to a cure, to be curative. You can see where you’re going to cut in to change things. And I suppose that’s always been my approach. You have to start from a question in the present that has become problematic, or that is problematic to you. That is a ‘value’ decision if you like. But when you undertake the analysis, you leave your value judgements at the door, at least while you are doing the work. It’s almost a Weberian approach. At least in the sense that for both [Foucault and Weber], you take a problem that is of interest to you, a challenge and then you try and cut into and make sense of that problem without judgement in the first instance, just seeing how something works. So mine is a tool box approach, if you like. I think about modes of expertise, styles of thought, forms of explanation, how those forms of explanation lead to certain kinds of intervention, how they can be contested, what their consequences might be, the kinds of subjectivities that they aspire to produce, how they fail. And what are the consequences of them failing. So I use these little tools that I’ve taken out of Foucault’s approach and that of others, and then to some extent I also make use of models, exemplars. Birth of the Clinic is a really good exemplar of how an event happens as a result of a combination of things which are completely unconnected: change in laws of assistance, different forms of medical training, developments in pathological anatomy and the autopsy, etc. – all come together and make something different happen. So if you’re looking to understand an event, look at those kinds of things. Don’t look for the origin, don’t ask why. Always ask how. So I’ve got a few technological ways of setting up an approach to something. Be very, very empirical. Try and see how a thing works. Take it apart. And then once you’ve done that and seen how it works, without judging it, without judging the people, without judging whether it makes sense in today’s terms, analyse the consequences. Then you can make judgements, and then you can see where you might intervene to transform it. I try to take this approach in my own work right now, which is miles away from my earlier work on governmentality. I am working on psychiatry and mental health, and how one might transform psychiatry. My very radical friends think that the idea of transforming psychiatry is completely crazy. They argue that one needs to abolish psychiatry and replace it with something else. Whereas I say: no, let’s try and understand how psychiatrists think, why they think that certain things are effective. For instance, why do they think that the drugs work? Let’s try and look at the arguments that they use. Let’s try and meet them on their own terms and actually show

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that the evidence does not support their arguments. Let’s try and help them think outside those arguments. And then let’s try and think about how one could build an alternative way of thinking and doing and explaining that might have different kinds of consequences. Let’s avoid the epistemic injustice that excludes some forms of knowledge and valorizes other forms of knowledge. So it requires a kind of deep description of the apparatus which tries to show where you might intervene to do something differently. That’s how I try to do it, although, of course, one always completely and utterly fails at doing these kinds of things. These ways of analysing are usually concerned with relatively systematized forms of knowledge, relatively authorized modes of power, relatively formalized modes of intervention. If you take psychiatry, it’s got textbooks, training courses, strategies, bodies of evidence, legitimated treatments and so forth. Whether you can use these types of analysis to think about something like the Black Lives Matter movement, which doesn’t use any of those things, which doesn’t always look for formalized types of argument. If you want to know that something is unjust, just look. Of course, then the argument is backed up by evidence, but the compelling thing is self-evident. Andrew Barry described something like this in a different context in a book that he wrote, which explored environmental politics among other things.4 When some of the environmental activists campaigning against the destruction of forests tried to make their point, they didn’t start with an argument about the ecological value of forests, that they were sinks for climate change and so forth. They went to places where huge trucks, bulldozers, had gouged out roads and pulled down trees and they brought the journalists there and they said, just look. This can’t be right. It speaks for itself. Just look at this devastation. Just look at these forest fires. Just look at these droughts. Just look at the death of this coral reef. I don’t need to make an argument for you. Just look at it. That’s a different mode of political action. It is probably not amenable to a Foucauldian kind of analysis. Maybe it’s more effective at least in putting a certain injustice onto the political agenda. But maybe in the longer term you need the two. So maybe for climate change, you need the ‘just look at how terrible things are’. Just look at how our forests are burning, how we’re all sweating and some are dying in these heatwaves , how there are droughts and storms destroying our ways of life and so on and so forth. Plus, you need the quiet scientists in the background making the case, compiling the evidence that this is not just a one off phenomenon, that over the last 20 years, you can see the numbers of these adverse events rising and so on, so forth. So perhaps you need some combination of the two. One final comment I would like to make is this. I speak in ignorance here because I’m not up to date with what the scholarship is, but when I stopped working on governmentality, it was because I thought that there was a kind of conceptual stasis, that people weren’t inventing new concepts to diagnose new situations. After all, Foucault died in 1984, before the internet, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before globalization, before social media, before a million things that differentiate our present from his. And it should be the challenge to people who were inspired by his work to create the new concepts, the new tools. And maybe that means leaving some of the other stuff behind. Maybe some of it is good, maybe biopolitics is good,

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maybe governmentality is good. But maybe it’s an obstacle to thinking in the way we ought to be thinking. So people need to be inventive. When I stopped working on these questions I had come to the end of being able to be inventive myself. But I was hoping that a newer generation of people would be more inventive. And that’s what I hope now. I can see this happening in the responses from Partha and Wendy above and the important lines of thought they draw upon. Like them, I’d like to hear the voices from the global South, from Latin America, from India, from Africa, from China, from Malaysia, seeing whether these concepts work for them and what new concepts they needed to try and understand all these different forms of political power, which are so very, very different from the kinds of things, the kinds of models that Foucault used to do his analysis. So that would be the challenge I would throw out to people: for heaven’s sake, stop poring over the old texts in the hope that you’ll extract some wisdom from them and try and do something along the same lines yourself. That’s my last word on governmentality!

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

See, for example, Laclau (2005). Rose and Miller (1992). ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) is a well-known slogan often used by Margaret Thatcher and usually taken to mean that the way of the market economy is the only way. 4. Barry (2001).

REFERENCES Barry, Andrew (2001), Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, London: Athlone. Foucault, Michel (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Michel Senellart (ed.), Graham Burchell (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laclau, Ernesto (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Rose, Nikolas and Peter Miller (1992), ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173–205.

7. Governmentality and beyond: an interview with Colin Gordon Colin Gordon, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

The work of Colin Gordon has been pivotal in shaping the reception and understanding of Michel Foucault’s thinking on power and governmentality in the English-speaking world and beyond. Gordon’s editorial work, his influential essays and interventions, and his translations of Foucault have, for more than four decades, been decisive in catalysing Foucault scholarship, and influencing the way countless researchers have taken up themes of governmentality and genealogy. This conversation ranges across a number of topics which include Gordon’s role in the landmark publication, The Foucault Effect, his thoughts on neoliberalism and post-truth politics, his take on the emergence of governmentality studies, his view that Foucault’s work points us towards a genealogy of the political, and how our notions of politics and power (including governmentality) require updating to understand today’s present (including Brexit). Our conversation began as a Zoom meeting which took place on 7 December 2021. The material that follows has been significantly expanded by Colin Gordon and edited by us (MT and WW). WW. The Foucault Effect is widely regarded as the collection that put questions of governmentality on the map for the English-speaking social sciences, bringing attention to this whole dimension of Foucault’s thought. Looking back at the impact of that book, thirty years on, how would you describe The Foucault Effect effect, or perhaps the governmentality effect? What were the accomplishments of that book and what, if any, were its shortcomings? It’s easiest maybe to reply by retelling a story. The Foucault Effect (hereafter TFE) was a sequel and side-effect of the earlier volume I edited which was also originally published by Harvester Press, Power/Knowledge (1980). When I contacted Foucault to propose a collection of translations of his recent interviews and short pieces, he put me in touch with the editors who had just been doing the same thing in Italian: Giovanna Procacci and Pasquale Pasquino. They were young Italian researchers both based in Paris who took part in Foucault’s seminar. I met them fairly quickly and got to know about their work, and they in turn soon introduced me to Jacques Donzelot and Robert Castel, two French sociologists who published around that time ground-breaking works closely influenced by Foucault; shortly after that I came to know Daniel Defert and François Ewald, respectively Foucault’s partner and assistant, and their own respective researches. I happened to hear Foucault’s lecture on governmentality of 1 February 1978, just after arriving in Paris for a research visit. 136

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I can remember exchanging looks with friends present in the auditorium sharing the same immediate unspoken reaction of ‘wow, this is the next big idea!’ Together with Graham Burchell who was my thesis supervisor at Oxford and Peter Miller (who took an early interest in the work of Castel), we were able to publish and discuss the work of this Parisian group around Foucault in a journal we co-edited, and we published work by Ian Hacking who knew and had some clear affinities with Foucault. So nearly all the ingredients of The Foucault Effect were all provided through these interconnected people and enterprises, things that we discovered in quick succession in a few years at the end of the 70s – and in part translated for publication from that time, in the journal I&C.1 The decade in between was a period of what one could now call curating the installation and negotiating a few obstacles – the main one being that Foucault had the bad idea of dying in 1984, at which point we had no written contract for the volume, and there were liable to be issues about rights and permissions for an extended analysis of his lectures, given what was then known of the terms of his living will. It was far from clear at that time that there would be authorized editions of the Collège de France lectures. During those years other important later and posthumous Foucault materials were continuing to appear, although we didn’t then have the Dits et Ecrits (collected shorter writings) and the excellent authorized editions of the governmentality lectures appeared in French only in 2004. It is still a bit of a mystery why there was so little apparent attention to the governmentality lectures in France after, or indeed before Foucault’s death. As we know now, Foucault was talking in 1984 of getting back to modern governmentality issues and he had just undertaken to co-supervise a set of PhD projects at Berkeley on twentieth-century government.2 It is less clear whether Foucault was specifically minded at that time to revisit his earlier work on neoliberalism. The authors we brought together in this volume never published together after his death, and afterwards followed various different and mainly separate paths, each producing distinguished bodies of work with varying degrees of overt kinship or affiliation to Foucault. One of them promised never to speak to me again if I included his work in our volume alongside that of another contributor, and remarked to me ironically years later of the surprise of discovering himself to be of a practitioner of ‘governmentality studies’.3 But the volume would not have been created without many real as well as virtual conversations, in locations from Tübingen and Sardinia to the battlefield of Princeton, and some precious and lasting friendships. To the best of my recollection, the book wasn’t exactly intended to launch or create something called governmentality studies. Astute readers of our volume have noticed over the years that the notion of governmentality and the ideas in Foucault’s lectures are not specifically and explicitly evoked in most of the other contemporary contributions. By the time of its long overdue publication, drafts of the newer materials it included had circulated privately for a while and may have already been influencing some research and publications. It was Peter Miller who had the idea to subtitle the volume ‘studies in governmentality’, a brilliant marketing concept which may well have performatively helped to create its referent. The intent of the book to my mind

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was to share more widely a coherent body of innovative research content by Foucault and several other talented hands, and to try to distil from this work the formula of a new critical approach to the present and its history. It was also, at least fleetingly, an attempt to situate this research style in an ecumenical republic of dialogue with other relevant contemporary interlocutors, such as Koselleck and the Cambridge school historians of political thought (particularly the Kings College project on ‘wealth and virtue’). Graham Burchell’s chapter in TFE deepened the exploration of resonances between governmentality and Cambridge research paradigms. One Foucault Effect contributor, Pasquale Pasquino, who during a period around 1978 worked closely with Foucault, developed collaborative links with these other centres and currents, including innovative contemporary work in Weber studies. The British scholar Keith Tribe has produced a significant body of work within and concerning this same field of connections. I wrote during the 80s about Foucault’s Weberian interests and affiliations as a background to the theme of governmentality.4 From anecdotal evidence and conversations over the years I have had the impression that our volume has been fairly effective in communicating these perspectives and resonances to a new generation of researchers. ‘Governmentality studies’ and what they have become are something else which is much more diverse and various and which others here are better placed to speak for and about. The other observation I would make about my introductory text in The Foucault Effect was that its ambition was not only to capture the distinctive methodological and conceptual originality, coherence and commonality of the pieces there assembled and connect them to underlying developments in Foucault’s later work, but also to provide an outline of a coherent narrative historical framework in which different individual studies could be located, connected and brought into comparison with other strands and agenda of contemporary historical research – thereby potentially stimulating new investigations and connections. At various intervals in the subsequent period there have been some encouraging signs that such new syntheses are indeed possible. MT. To continue this reflection on The Foucault Effect at 30, your introductory chapter to the collection is one of the first places where Foucault scholars along with a wider reading public would have learned something that would surely have surprised them in the early 1990s: that Foucault had actually delivered an entire lecture series on something as contemporary as questions of neoliberalism. What is the significance of Foucault’s reflections on neoliberalism? And how do you make sense of neoliberalism today? In my own contribution to the volume I was at best able to capture only fragments of the significance of Foucault’s extraordinary lectures of 1978 and 1979.5 That also applies of course to his treatment of neoliberalism. Foucault was decades ahead of much of the intellectual left in his grasp of key aspects of neoliberalism and of the importance and seriousness of its challenges. The left of the day barely acknowledged neoliberalism, and since it has belatedly been obliged to do so it has pretended that

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neoliberalism barely yet existed as a describable entity in Foucault’s time – whereas Foucault himself was then already outlining a history stretching back over four or five decades. But much other academic and critical history of neoliberalism has also taken a long time to arrive on the scene. The later publication of Foucault’s lectures overlapped with the appearance of new, archivally informed histories of neoliberalism, whose authors in many cases only then discovered Foucault as a significant precursor. One needs here of course always to remember that although Foucault routinely now earns the accolade of prescience for this part of his work, prescience is not prophecy and Foucault did not give us the history of neoliberalism since 1979. No one is that perfect.6 More to the point, neither, it should probably be said, did any collaborator or successor of Foucault undertake to do this.7 There is a sensitive epistemological problem here which also arises when one comes to discuss Brexit. Nikolas Rose, the leading organizer of governmentality studies, chose to reject neoliberalism as a key disciplinary category in the study of recent governmental rationalities, opting to substitute for it the newly-coined alternative of ‘advanced liberalism’. We know now that neoliberals themselves took an early decision to disavow the public use of the term neoliberalism; until very recently one would be told that this was an unscientific polemical label used only by ill-informed leftist critics of what is in fact mainstream, orthodox neoclassical economics. This defensive camouflage has now been abandoned and in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 the debate now tends to focus not on whether neoliberalism is a thing (or several things), but whether it is a thing or an ex-thing whose time has ended or is ending (spoiler: the answer is no). We also know now, since the appearance of the ground-breaking collective volume The Road from Mont Pelèrin (2009), that neoliberals organized themselves from the immediate post-war period as a coordinated, semi-private international network of institutions implementing a programme of ideas, policy development and propaganda explicitly intended to penetrate and colonize politics in concerted opposition to the policies of the New Deal and Welfare State. From the 1940s but increasingly from the 60s and 70s this continuing, trans-generational agenda was powered by large-scale funding from a number of pro-active and ideologically motivated super-rich American business magnates, the best known and most significant of whom over an extended (and ongoing) period being the oil, gas, industrial and mining magnates Charles and David Koch. The investigative journalist who has written the major existing history of this network, Jane Mayer, has named it, in recognition of its tentactular multiplicity and reach, the ‘Kochtopus’. Foucault said little or nothing about the contribution of neoliberalism to the emergence of the European Union, which indeed was not established by treaty under that name until nearly a decade after his death. He drew certain clear distinctions between the post-war German and a somewhat later American form of neoliberalism; his remarks on the key role of German ordoliberalism to the formation of the new West German state clearly also have relevance and applicability to the subsequent development of a shared European institutional market order.8 Recent researchers have highlighted that neoliberal responses to the European Union have been varying and widely diverse.9

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Foucault, as far as we know, working from primary and secondary sources then available, was not fully cognizant of the contemporary activities and strategies of the Mont Pelèrin Society, although he showed close interest in the biographies, connections and interactions of the early neoliberals. There is, however, one interesting, brief and little noticed comment in his discussion of American neoliberalism whose significance I grasped only much later and after reading the book Democracy in Chains (2017) by Nancy MacLean. This is where Foucault mentions the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the earliest major players in the network of market-fundamentalist thinktanks, and its ‘market cynicism’ [cynisme marchand] regarding the motives and interests of governmental and public service actors. This appears to be a very condensed allusion to a key thesis of the ‘Virginian school’ of neoliberalism, also known as ‘public choice’ theory, co-founded by the economist and political theorist James Buchanan. Public choice theory indeed propagated a radically cynical view of the venal motives and interests of elected state officials and bureaucrats, who it considered to be primarily interested in exploiting their monopoly public position for the extraction of private profits (or ‘rents’). Some of Buchanan’s views on corruption may have been influenced by a year which he spent in his early career as a visiting researcher in Italy. Buchanan came to public attention by offering an economic device to enable the prevention of school desegregation in Virginia by means a programme of school privatizations. The near equivalence which the Virginia school’s drastic economic critique proposed between state action and corruption was reinforced by a theoretical position which denied the reality of a public interest and the legitimacy of an institutional sphere of democratic decision concerning the public interest.10 Foucault’s brief reference to the AEI accurately references the connection between neoliberal doctrines and business antagonisms to state-imposed business taxation, anti-trust laws, public heath, climate action, the precautionary principle, environmental protection and labour union rights. One of the important themes of Nancy MacLean’s remarkable book is the great difficulty and long effort which the American business right needed to expend in order to roll back public support and demand in the post-war decades for an active and protective welfare state. In more recent years, the public discredit of the political, of politicians, political agency and public action has become an unquestioned, axiomatic quasi-fact of media discourse and political science. What both Mayer and MacLean show us is that this reality or pseudo-reality is in fact the result of protracted and intense efforts to influence and shift opinions. Whatever its other sources, public suspicion of the public has been the objective and at least in part the product of a heavily resourced and persistent ideological campaign which targeted not only the mass electorate but also the institutions and actors of law, economy and government itself. The massively resourced and sustained campaign of the ‘public choice’ ideologies and their exponents achieved a double victory which still seriously impedes resistance to the Brexit-Trumpian offensives: by a kind of globalized astroturfing operation, in the first place successfully communicating to the public a distrust of politics and public action, and in the second place, creating a matching

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assumption among the commentariat that this shift of popular attitudes is a deep and unquestioned fact of contemporary collective life. Investigators have found a mass of evidence of strong strategic and personal affiliations between a cluster of London-based, US-sponsored lobbies and think tanks which drove Brexit and the vaster assemblage of proselytizing and post-truth machines (drawing on decades of experience in organized disinformation acquired by the tobacco and hydrocarbon industries, among others) assembled in the USA by the Kochs and others.11 Neoliberalism is, more than is often acknowledged, essential to the understanding of Brexit, but is often also liable to be a source of obfuscation and confusion. The Brexit vote has commonly been framed as a populist national revolt by economic victims of an international order of globalization, of which the EU was perceived as the regional embodiment and neoliberalism as the ruling ideology; for some on the Left, the EU additionally represented a neoliberal regime intrinsically inimical to equality and solidarity. Most of UK business, finance and industry, operating successfully within the single market, was opposed to Brexit. The EU with its immense single market implements certain elements of neoliberalism, it has some ordoliberal ideas written into its founding order, and it has been, like most states, permeable to neoliberal ‘reforms’ and governance systems in ways which the left has often denounced. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the key strategic importance of a web of ties connecting the UK Brexit campaign with a US-centred global network of pro-business, hydrocarbon, market-fundamentalist and anti-state interests, whose motives for antagonism towards the European Union have been evident and multiple. I would not describe Brexit as a conflict of governmentalities, but it might not be wrong to see it in part as a conflict between global forces and projects diversely influenced by neoliberal agendas and ideas. What we Brits in our vain post-imperial complacency still properly fail to register is the extent to which the ostensibly nationalistic project of Brexit has been driven and sponsored by external oligarchic and kleptocrat actors: most notably, the hard American-led business Right, and Vladimir Putin (himself the product, boss and rentier of a US-facilitated, UK-serviced Mafia state). A project like Brexit, or the Trump presidency, is not a war within governmentality, it is a war against governmentality. In Steve Bannon’s justly notorious phrase, it is ‘the deconstruction of the administrative state’. This is disaster government, the militant deployment and application of disaster capitalism. The existence of the EU in essence offends the Kochs, Mercers and Murdochs, exactly like the big American state of the mid to later twentieth century, because it is an institution of governmentality founded in law. The single market is a strong regulatory and regulated space. It (to a certain degree) restricts monopoly (including tech and data) power, limits pollution, pursues tax evasion and money laundering,12 and generally impedes the pillage and theft of public goods and assets by private actors. Rupert Murdoch is said to have concisely explained his objection to the EU as follows: ‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’ As is now obvious, the purpose of Brexit was never to restore the sovereignty or independence of the UK, or confer benefits on its citizens, it is to disarm and deconstruct

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the EU – and via the EU, very arguably, all regulatory international order capable of impeding a powerful business interest. Brexit fits exceedingly well the model described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (2007) – the mercenaries of the Brexit coup (some drawn from a UK service consultancy industry exporting skills in political psy-ops and election-rigging), the Oliver North-like characters such as Dominic Cummings of Vote Leave, the recipe of surprise, shock, intimidation, material and technical force, privatized authority, ruthless illegality and violent threat. For an improved grasp of the elements of violence always inherent in neoliberalism, we are indebted to a generation of scholars active since Foucault left us, at least one of whom is also a thoughtful reader of Foucault, Will Davies. The practices of ‘market critique’ of the public sector which Foucault mentions in 1979, subsequently evolve into processes of penetration, transformation and capture. From the 1980s, ‘New Public Management’ prescribed market-based logics and norms for public action; in the UK, a flotilla of major consultancy companies were awarded state contracts for the delivery and governance of growing sectors of public services. Abby Innes comments: ‘many of the British state’s core responsibilities have been outsourced to the companies that now constitute the “public service industry sector”. A third of central government spending is currently contracted out. As a result, the state is porous to business interests to a degree that is exceptional among established democracies.’ ‘The problem is structural … “Corporate state capture” is the highest point of political corruption, when private interests can rig the legislative process in their favour.’13 Accompanying state capture, we encounter new episodes of state failure: the explicit abandonment of the precautionary principle, the downgrading of pandemic precautions, the corrupt and failed outsourcing of COVID-19 PPE provision and the NHS track and trace service, and (of course) the wholesale suspension of economic state rationality in the negotiation and implementation of Brexit. Foucault’s ‘market cynics’ are now in power, embedded at the heart of the state. WW. Your answers have touched several times on Brexit. You have been heavily involved not only in scholarly analysis of Brexit, but in the political movement against it. How has that difficult experience shaped your thinking about power and politics? Brexit interrupted some projects I then had in hand, including things we have just been discussing. Some of them have come to seem a bit less urgent or important in the light of what is now occurring. At the time when the Brexit vote shattered our Arcadian peace, I was coordinating with Patrick Joyce a discussion group about Foucault, political life and history, and we had Foucault-tinged discussions with a wide range of excellent contributors about Brexit, neoliberalism, ‘populism’ and postcolonial studies.14 I am one of those who the shock of Brexit has recently brought into practical organized political campaigning in sometimes new and unaccustomed ways. A lot of our best contemporary political observers – Timothy Snyder, Roberto Saviano, Judith Butler, Ece Temelkuran – have reflected, based on first-hand

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experience and enquiry, on the contemporary techniques of political corruption and democratic defence. We are thinking in a new situation of major crisis and we are having to think this crisis in order to craft a political response. Brexit is an intellectual as well as a political challenge, an experience which is also a test. UK citizens are now experiencing through Brexit their variant of something which comes in related form, associated with various forces, across the planet – Trump, Salvini, Zemmour, Bolsanaro, Erdogan, Modi, Johnson, Bannon, Orban, Farage. Does governmentality help us understand Brexit? Some of us learned from Foucault in the 70s or after to think about the politics of truth – has this helped us to think about the politics of post-truth? I think that with honourable exceptions the academic response, intellectual and political, to Brexit in the UK has been fairly weak, and it’s a matter of judgement whether this is more due to debilitation or to intimidation, and whether these are in turn due to a prolonged hollowing out of the national public culture, or inherent vices which a long period of good fortune had allowed to remain latent and relatively harmless. I would not say that the community of Foucault studies has been a notable exception to this generalization. The books which I have found to throw most light on the nature and origins of Brexit are not primarily about the UK, are not about Brexit, and do not mention Foucault.15 Important work which addresses the sources and actors of Brexit has often been the work, sometimes at personal risk and cost, of non-academic investigative journalists, whistleblowers and campaign workers.16 The excellent London-based German TV correspondent Annette Dittert recently tweeted, responding to a recent escapade of the current Brexit UK regime: ‘there is no government in this government’. By the same token, one can say there is no governmentality in Brexit – neither government nor rationality. In the steps of Quentin Skinner17 we could return to the vocabulary of the great Sienese fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti; what we have is malgoverno, malgovernment: not a pastoral power but a power which is intrinsically predatory, which is both essentially extractive and criminal, mendacious and indifferent or malignant to life. Achille Mbembe introduced the term necropolitics, with reference primarily to certain postcolonial regimes. Today we should also be speaking about a widening incidence of necropolitical kleptopower, and not only in regard to the postcolonial world. At this moment, in the heartland of past European genocides, we witness a return of aggressive genocidal war. In parts of our contemporary world we may seem to be moving into an era of post-governmentality. Yet if we consider that Brexit, like the Trumpian episode in America (including the attack on the Capitol) belongs to the category of coups d’état (as also to the overlapping category of shock-doctrine interventions), does this place it outside the field of intelligibility of the governmentality perspective? I heard a talk given shortly after Brexit at St Antony’s College Oxford by the former senior civil servant Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK government’s recently defenestrated chief Europe expert and ambassador to the EU, telling of the shock of encountering, ensconced in the heart of government, the revolutionary mentality of hard-core Brexit ideologues. Confronted by

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revolutionaries in captured executive office, this high priest of applied governmental rationality found no alternative to exit. One of these ideologues, Dominic Cummings, claims inspiration from the USAF fighter pilots’ tactical doctrine devised by Colonel John Boyd, the doctrine of a rapid attack technique which outpaces and disrupts the opponent’s cycle of perception, decision and action.18 In his 1978 lectures Foucault describes the early modern police state as a ‘permanent coup d’état’, citing Gabriel Naudé’s seventeenth-century Considerations on coups d’état: ‘with coups d’état, we see the thunderbolt before we hear it rumbling in the clouds’; in coups d’état, ‘matins are said before the bells are rung, the execution precedes the sentence; […] he who thought to strike receives the blow, he who thought himself safe dies, another suffers evils he never dreamed of, everything is done at night, in the dark, in fog and shadow.’19 According to Albert Hirschman, coups d’état fell out of favour during the Enlightenment because political economy taught that state actors would always lack the accurate and exhaustive knowledge necessary for detailed executive interventions to achieve their intended effect.20 In the era of Facebook, with the advent of microtargeting and the marriage of military and advertising technologies, such limitations purportedly no longer apply. The British governmental, academic and media elite, already part corrupted and depleted by decades of neoliberal and kleptocrat assault, indeed appears to have had its capabilities of response overloaded by the Brexiter shock assault.21 Yet the inter-war founders of neoliberalism, a century before Cambridge Analytica and even before the Third Reich, were already well aware of the destabilizing potentialities of the technological manipulation of mass public opinion: Walter Lippmann and his friends worried precisely over the disturbingly effective use of government war propaganda during the First World War, and the danger of a demagogic populism armed with similar techniques: his solution was an official regime of expert-determined truth, disseminated to achieve the ‘manufacture of consent’ through the ‘art of persuasion’. Angus Burgin’s excellent history of neoliberalism is aptly titled The Great Persuasion (2012). In his 1978 lectures Foucault indeed notes how the early modern invention of state reason and a secular pastorate goes in hand from the outset with state news management, censorship and regime endeavours at surveillance and control of personal conduct and opinion.22 Arlette Farge, Foucault’s co-author in Disorderly Families, the annotated anthology of lettres de cachet (letters from ordinary citizens requesting the monarch to intern an errant spouse or child), wrote a superb matching book, Subversive Words (1995), on eighteenth-century public opinion and rumour as captured and, at times, counterproductively fanned by the efforts of police spies. Governmentality, as the rational conduct of conduct, has never been unaccompanied by contested arts of messaging and censure.23 An adequate investigative response to Brexit will need to include the explanation of the lack or failure of systemic defences against wholesale assaults on truth and public reason. If one properly recognizes the special relationship between the Brexit operation of state capture and the US oligarch war-machine,24 one has to abandon two core beliefs of the UK elite: the belief in the essential autonomy of the British polity, and the belief in its essential resilience in the face of conspiratorial

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invasion and capture – indeed the effective denial of the existence, outside the realm of conspiracy-theorists’ imaginations, of conspiratorial enterprises as a significant factor in major historical events. The school of politics at the University of Cambridge (UK) recently conducted a multi-year project on conspiracy theories;25 it seemed that any equivalent study of contemporary political conspiracies would have been epistemologically prohibited. Perhaps a consensus in conspiracy-denial will prove to have been one of our most debilitating errors. We now have a serviceable history of the Mont Pelèrin Society, 50 years after the founding events. We know that Suez was a conspiracy hidden by an organized lie, Kennedy’s missile gap an orchestrated lie, Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident another – all definitively exposed only decades later. When will we know how Brexit was procured and organized? How soon will we decide to find out? Alongside the organized production and imposition of post-truth, the Brexit experience to date foregrounds a theme which contrapuntally accompanied that of governmentality in Foucault’s late work, the theme of parrhēsia or fearless speech – and its absence: corrupted, compliant, conformist and intimidated failures to speak freely, extending to active collusion in disinformation. The democratic riddle asked by the Athenians still has to be asked, now as a matter of practical urgency: how does one tell a charlatan from a sage, a flatterer from a friend? And what inner or outer conditions (shareholder value, youth, old age or approaching retirement) enable or inhibit truthful speech by a given person at a given time? Countering post-truth, new truth-tellers emerge. Today’s Diogenes, a stentorian Welshman with a top-hat, a giant megaphone and a pair of placards, prowls the streets outside Westminster and interrogates or interpellates each government politician passing on foot or in car. People organize a network of community citizen newspapers, conduct, organize and publish in significant numbers and volume citizen investigative journalism. Are these counter-conducts and citizen voices a possible corrective to the tamed and silenced mainstream media, or an antidote to the deluge of paid regime spam on social media? By what practices does one halt and reverse the theft of a democracy? WW. It seems to us that a great deal of governmentality scholarship has focused on questions of regulation and governance, and rather less on politics and the political. You have written and lectured at length about the idea of a genealogy of politics. Could you elaborate on this idea and whether it might offer something of a corrective to this imbalance? Just as a crude observation of academic sociology, the departmental penetration of the governmentality agenda, at least in most of the Anglosphere, seems to have been mainly in sociology together with adjacent and overlapping areas in literary, gender, feminist and postcolonial studies, and very much less via politics, history, economics or philosophy. Sociologists may at a certain point have internalized this demarcation by announcing that governmentality was essentially about politics and power in work, life and society, beyond the state and formal political institutions.

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(This may have inadvertently helped to encourage a contrary view among students and exponents of politics that the Foucault-inspired agenda is, in effect if not also in explicit intention, depoliticizing and politically demobilizing and thereby ultimately more inimical than useful to the left; one tenacious subvariant of this, popular among a section of the academic left, was an ill-informed claim that Foucault downgraded or disregarded the political importance of law.26) There is a now famous moment in the 1979 lectures where Foucault says very unapologetically that he does not have or believe in a theory of the state, because the state ‘does not have an essence’ – but then adds that one can still perfectly do a history of the state, as a specific reality which is a resultant and effect of multiple factors and forces, including conceptions and practices of government.27 There is another equally important but much less cited passage where Foucault distances himself from various forms (to be found among both the left and the conservative and neoliberal right) of radical critique of the state as the seat and centre of historical and political evil.28 (This key remark seems to have been overlooked by some recent commentators, inverting Foucault’s viewpoint from that of a pointed critic to that of an adherent of the tendency which he termed ‘state-phobia’.) The ‘beyond the state’ motif which was key in the positioning of the governmentality studies project by Nikolas Rose (co-founder of the journal I&C) and Peter Miller (our co-editor of the journal I&C and of TFE, and a significant early commentator on the work of Robert Castel) involves an element of ambiguity, depending on whether ‘beyond’ means ‘as well as’ or ‘instead of’. Foucault’s governmentality lecture shifted his focus from the microphysics of power in disciplinary institutions, prison, school, factory or asylum, to the macrophysics of the government of national populations by sovereign powers and institutions – while asserting that a continuity and coherence was possible across and between analyses at these respective levels. The rhetoric of ‘beyond the state’ on the other hand places a deliberate stress on the right to equal analytical status of the microscopic level of objects and practices, a rhetoric of the ‘little things’ of government, the social work interview, the clinical psychology assessment, the creations of professions and specialisms – humbler studies of humbler actors than the worlds and studies of grand political theories, events, powers and policies. These governmental studies of detail and little things were thus framed as a kind of subaltern discipline, a research from below, while the disavowal of high, prestigious, received political themes and materials became a badge of virtue and difference. In a sense one could take governmental studies thus defined as an enriched framework to continue doing the same kinds of studies that had already been inspired by Discipline and Punish, whereas Foucault’s own idea of a history of governmentality (in my reading) also envisages a history of the state and the political. A history of the present needs to include the latter as well as the former. I’ve argued elsewhere29 that one should avoid exaggerating the extent to which the appearance of the governmentality theme marks (after a year when Foucault took a sabbatical break in his annual lecture series) a radical break in Foucault’s thought. I think in particular there’s a great deal to be gained from treating the 1976 lectures and the 1978-9 lectures as a trilogy. During the 80s I visited the Jesuit library in Paris

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where Foucault had worked, to listen to tapes deposited there of his 1978 and 1979 lectures; I later learned that during this same period Ann Stoler had listened there with similar auditory discomfort to Foucault’s 1976 lectures which she reported, used and critiqued in her Race and the Education of Desire.30 The continuity from 1976 to 1978–9 is now evident particularly in terms of the notions of state, nation and empire. In 1979, Foucault says that the state has no essence and the nation, considered as a self-conscious and autonomous collectivity, is a kind of reaction and resistance to the police science of population. In 1976 Foucault talks about the nation in early modern thought conceived as a project, allied to notions or tools of historico-political will and agency: in a Japanese interview recorded in April 1978, he remarks that the state for a long time exists more as an ambition or as an ideal, a transcendental norm, an object of desire, rather than as actual capability, and there is ‘a sort of immense and irrepressible thirst for the state’;31 the nation similarly is something that has to be built or which has to build itself, as in the historic claim by Sieyès and others on behalf of the bourgeois Third Estate, that it is the one historical class which is capable of nation-building, ‘capable de nation’.32 Fruitful linkages could be made between these suggestions and books by near-contemporaries of Foucault like Keith Baker’s Inventing the French Revolution (1990) and Donald R. Kelley’s The Beginning of Ideology (1981). Nation-building proceeds in counterpoint with state-building. The British historian Patrick Joyce has drawn on Foucault and other sources to propose a material history of the imperial British state and its tools, conducts and practices.33 If one can suspect that governmentality as a historical phenomenon might now be in its twilight, this could also be a reason to return to the history of the state before its governmentalization, where we may rediscover factors and configurations which are perhaps in process of recurring in new forms: the original violence of power as the foundation of pacification and justice, and the monopoly of sovereign law instrumentalized as a system of appropriation and extraction. One other observation to be made about TFE and what became governmentality studies is that in Foucault it is nearly always a matter of a history – the history of truth, the history of the state, the history of governmentality, and of course the history of the present. It is often supposed that Foucault always had bad relations with historians, something which in reality was very far from being the case.34 Work which defines itself as falling within governmentality studies, on the other hand, although it embraces the concept of a history of the present as a critical credo, seldom seems to consider or present itself as a historical enquiry and tends not to particularly pursue dialogue with wider fields of historical research. One could say that governmentality studies, in its forms self-consciously developed on a basis of independence from philological Foucault scholarship and commentary, has turned out to be defined and limited by a set of negatives: it avoids neoliberal economics and the neoliberalized economy, it avoids the state, and it avoids history and historical national context. As suggested earlier, a thread linking some of these choices may have been a certain neo-Bourdieusian, subaltern academic class-consciousness positioned in opposition to elite national academic centres and their curricula of elite training and reproduction.

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As you say in your question when you mention a genealogy of politics, I’ve argued elsewhere35 and assembled indications that Foucault’s project involved looking at the styles of character, conduct and capability, and forms of sociability of political actors and subjects, and that all of this is implicit and encapsulated in his later theme of the government of the self and others. I still think this is a key area if one wants to take Foucault’s project further (if one does not think that a fantastical or vain ambition), but recent events are tending to force one to think about this now in different ways. MT. While governmentality studies in the UK have been the result of academic debates, in Italy the engagement with governmentality and Foucault’s work of the 1970s has been historically more grounded in political movements (for instance, Basaglia and the movement of ‘psichiatria democratica’). How do you read these two different historical trajectories? And have they influenced the way in which nowadays governmentality is mobilized as an analytical grid? Indeed there were material and intellectual links between the important ‘democratic psychiatry’ movement founded in Italy by Franco Basaglia and an earlier phase in Foucault’s work running from the reception of History of Madness to the theme of power/knowledge and the politics of the prisons. One of our TFE contributors, Robert Castel, was closely involved, along with his wife the psychiatrist Françoise Castel, in the Europe-wide Network for Alternatives to Psychiatry within which Psychiatria Democratica was one of the major forces. I have been struck by the affinity that people in Italy have seen between Basaglia’s movement and the work of Mimmo Lucano, the Calabrian village mayor who created a new community-based model of asylum welcome (and is currently one of the victims of a scandalous and politically motivated prosecution).36 Basaglia’s work was deeply linked to anti-fascism, and Lucano’s work to both anti-fascist and anti-mafia grassroots struggles, in the tradition of Danilo Dolci. For some, these resonances relate to the memory of Foucault (who also acted and spoke in favour of boat people and asylum seekers37) perhaps more in terms of a style of moral engagement, sympathy and resistance, than of a particular political analysis or agenda. The recent Italian Sardine movement – a citizen campaign specifically resisting the xenophobic populist offensive of Salvini and the Liga – was very interesting and encouraging for those of us resisting the similar assault of Brexit, especially because it was initiated and led by young people with no obvious prior ideological or theoretical affiliations. As far as I know it’s fair to say that governmentality studies (even, to my knowledge, in Italy – unless one counts the unhappy recent case of the philosopher Agamben and the movement of resistance to compulsory public health precautions against the COVID-19 pandemic) have not been identified or closely associated with a specific radical political movement, although its exponents are by and large recognizably on the progressive left of centre in their sympathies and commitments. This need not be a reproach, but neither is it entirely surprising. Governmentality studies belong to, although it would not be fair to assimilate them to its ethos, an age of triangulation, roughly spanning the high points of the New Democrats in the USA and New Labour

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in the UK. Governmentality studies and earlier Foucault-inspired critical analyses had dealt with the biopolitical and disciplinary sources and components of the modern social-democratic welfare state: they turned out to be doing this in what turned out to be a period of significant neoliberal critique and rollback of parts of the welfare state, plus a hardening penalization and redisciplinarization of institutions, deepening inequality, impoverishment and economic class war. Melinda Cooper tells this bleak and continuing story in her coruscating and brilliant study Family Values (2017). Cooper’s book can be read as a devastating judgement on the illusions of a recent generation that socially progressive politics could be successful allies in our time of aggressively weaponized economic liberalism, rather than its (willing or unwilling) dupes and losers. On the other side of the coin, Foucault’s former assistant François Ewald, whose 1986 doctoral thesis on insurance and the origins of welfare has recently been published in American translation (with a preface by Melinda Cooper; some early drafts were included in TFE), took a rightward political turn in the 90s as a neoliberal business propagandist, even flirting for a time with climate change denial.38 A few years ago Foucault’s American editor Bernard Harcourt hosted a dialogue in Chicago between Ewald and Gary Becker, in which the neoliberal Nobel laureate, then aged 82, pronounced himself largely content with Foucault’s representation of his ideas, while Ewald affirmed Foucault’s overt endorsement of Becker. In recent times, some readers of these lectures have questioned whether we should be content with Becker’s contentment. It has always seemed to me that Foucault here represented American neoliberalism to his left-leaning Parisian not as a model for emulation, but as a set of significant reinventions of capitalist governmentality, deserving of attention because they represented an intellectual challenge to which the left needed to offer a new response. He suggested that this response would require the invention of a distinctive left governmentality, no longer reliant on borrowings from either liberalism or the police state. It is notable that Foucault refrains here from advising the left to address its policy challenges by borrowings from neoliberalism. MT. Related to the question above, it seems to us that governmentality studies have contributed to bring Foucault beyond the discipline of philosophy. The very notion of ‘use’ (the use of Foucault) has gained centre stage in critical works in social sciences that have engaged with Foucault for understanding contemporary phenomena. The so-called ‘Foucauldian toolbox’ has been mobilized across different disciplinary fields. Yet, it seems to us that ‘the use of Foucault’ and, in particular, of the notion of governmentality, have been mainly conceived as a top-down operation: that is, analysing the present through the lens of governmentality, more than mobilizing this latter drawing on existing political movements and claims. Thirty years after the publication of The Foucault Effect, how do you analyse this? The ‘toolbox’ notion was coined in a moment of unruly radical political will, when militant actors were imagined as selecting and assembling concepts instrumental to their causes and purposes, rather than having both purposes and concepts prescribed

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by an ideological or philosophical leadership. (In May 1968, Paris students famously invited Sartre to speak, but with the request to be brief.) Of course the modest, reusable, multipurpose toolbox has always been liable to mutate into a boilerplate, a means of mechanical reproduction and mass production. An element of routinization is liable to be part of the fate of any successful idea. Now that universities are neoliberal businesses and students bound by debt to urgently maximize their human capital prior to entry into a highly flexible labour market, the connection of intellectual study and production to radical will is liable to seem ever more tenuous and/or performative. Foucault taught us an idea and a certain way (which we still value and find meaningful) of interrogating our present. But different times are liable to require different tools, which in turn are not guaranteed to be dispensed either from the summits of theory or by internal processes of academic innovation and reproduction. As we began to notice around 1980, the very idea of a present and a history of the present (Foucault) is closely connected to the idea of a history of changing experiences of time (Koselleck, Pocock). The historian Christopher Clark,39 recently a perceptive commentator on Brexit, has commented on this link in two of his books. Clearly our own relation to time has changed, now that we must think of the next generation as the one condemned by ours to suffer and contend with planetary disaster. Today the experience of time is inseparable from the moral relations between generations. For people of my generation, that is likely to continue, no doubt deservedly, to be an uncomfortable experience. The best archivally informed study to date of Foucault’s last book, published this year in translation, suggests that its completion left its author by no means drained or exhausted in spirit, but perhaps more reserved about the efficacy of genealogy as a guide to being and action.40

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Ideology & Consciousness (I&C) was obliged to cease publication in 1982 because of the declining level of academic subscriptions. For further discussion of this journal see Burchell (this volume). For example, the work of Stephen Kotkin and Keith Gandal. See Donzelot and Gordon (2008); see also Donzelot (2008). See Gordon (1987). The theme of Foucault, Weber and governmentality is then revisited in Gordon (2014). See Gordon (2013a) where I talked of some specific omissions, and also of aspects which may have been generally neglected in later reception and discussion. Some attempts have been made during the past decade to represent Foucault’s discussions of American neoliberalism as an enthusiastic endorsement and commendation; these have included some occasional strictures on my early account in TFE of these discussions. I responded to these polemics in Gordon (2013b). See, however, Dardot and Laval (2013) and its sequels, in particular Dardot et al. (2021). Cf. Walters and Haahr (2005). Slobodian and Plehwe (2019). On this see also notably Amadae (2016), whose daring and original research is a rich source for the fuller understanding of some of the militaristic philosophizing and coer-

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cive tactics of Brexiters. Amadae has a brief but important discussion (2016, 207–12) of ‘eminent domain’, the legal doctrine reinterpreted by the Chicago neoliberal law and economics movement to directly license the power of money as a basis for the right of compulsory purchase of private property by wealthy private actors. Alongside the epochal Citizens United judgement by the US Supreme Court of 2010, conferring a right on money itself to exercise public political voice as campaign funding, this opinion marks a stage in the oligarchic politics of wealth which is a fundamental feature of the Brexit enterprise and its unfolding consequences. 11. See Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America (2016). See also the important discussion of agnotology, the organized production of mis-knowledge, uncertainty and ignorance, in Mirowski (2013). 12. The report ‘Russia’, published in July 2020 by the UK House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee), stated: ‘it would appear that the UK has been viewed as a particularly favourable destination for Russian oligarchs and their money. […] The UK welcomed Russian money, and few questions – if any – were asked about the provenance of this considerable wealth. […] What is now clear is that it was in fact counter-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London “laundromat”’. See Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (2020). Also in July 2020, another House of Commons committee was told by a very senior UK police official that he shared concerns that Brexit might result in reduced UK–EU police cooperation in the suppression of money-laundering and other financial crimes (Gordon 2020a). 13. Innes (2021); see also for a remarkable new overview David-Barrett (2022). 14. Postcolonial studies is a field about which there was little in Foucault or The Foucault Effect, although one in which the notion of governmentality has now been found applicable with notably fertile results. See Legg and Heath (2018) and Teo and Wynne-Hughes (2020). 15. See, for example, Mayer (2016), MacLean (2017), Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America (2016), Klein (2007), Snyder (2018), Bullough (2018). 16. Geoghegan (2020), Cadwalladr (2019), Wylie (2019). 17. Skinner (1999). 18. On Cummings and Russia, see Gordon (2020b, 2020c, 2020d). Boyd’s ideas are said to have been influential in Russia during the Putin regime. Cummings (2017) refers to Vladislav Surkov, ‘Putin’s communication maestro’, in a Spectator article explaining the Leave victory in the 2016 referendum. Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, expressed concern that Cummings might have forged contacts with people involved in ‘politics, intelligence and security’ in Russia and that he may have been ‘close to Vladislav Surkov, a shadowy Kremlin ideologue’ (The Times 2019). 19. Foucault (2007, 266). As William Walters reminds me, the Naudé quote has recently been requoted by Perry Anderson (2020), in a discussion of ‘coups d’état’ during the constitutional development of the European Union, as told by its Dutch historian Luuk Van Middelaar. 20. Hirschman (1977). A British delegate, however, quoted at the 1978 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society David Hume’s observation that: ‘Though men be much governed by interests, yet even interest itself, and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion.’ https://​www​.libertarianism​.org/​publications/​essays/​mont​-pelerin​-1947​-1978​ -road​-libertarianism. 21. For a comparable first-hand memoir of the moral components in defensive system failures, see Bloch (1968), on the causes of the fall of France in the Blitzkrieg attack of 1940. 22. ‘Richelieu invented the political campaign by means of lampoons and pamphlets, and he invented those professional manipulators of opinion who were called at the time “publicistes.” Birth of the économistes, birth of the publicistes. Economy and opinion are the

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

two major aspects of the field of reality, the two correlative elements of the field of reality that appears as the correlate of government’ (Foucault 2007, 353). For a remarkable exploration of censorship and the supervision of conduct via the early modern, neo-Roman formula of census et censura, see Laurie Catteeuw (2013). In 1979, Gilles Deleuze was lecturing in Paris on the notions of appareil de capture and machine de guerre. Uscinski (2018). Gordon (2012). Foucault (2008, 77). Foucault (2008, 76–8, 187–8, 191). Gordon (2013a). Stoler (1995). Foucault (1994, 617). On this, see the excellent work of Skornicki (2015, 2017). Following the emergence of postcolonial governmental studies it has become easier to discern some points of connection between Foucault’s remarks on early modern European nation-building and the themes of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). In subsequent work, Anderson makes one borrowed use of the term ‘governmentality’, without citing or engaging with Foucault. Joyce (2014). Bad historians are of course always willing to have bad relations with Foucault. But over time and helped by major posthumous publications and translations, important new dialogues and cross-fertilizations have become possible. Among the most important are those which have occurred with historians of antiquity and Christianity, notably Brown (2013). On historical experience and thought, see also Mazower (2008). Gordon (2013a) and (2014). Caprioglio et al. (2021). See also Lucano (2020), Tazzioli (2018), Tazzioli and Walters (2019), and a series of essays by Giovanna Procacci, ‘Solidarity on trial: Mimmo Lucano and the Riace experiment’; ‘Solidarity on trial: The anatomy of a political trial’; ‘Solidarity on trial: Is integration a crime?’ and ‘Solidarity on trial: A judicial monstrosity’, available at https://​northeastbylines​.co​.uk/​author/​giovannaprocacci/​. Foucault (2015), Gordon (2015). Becker et al. (2012). For my comments see Gordon (2013b). Clark (2019a, 2019b, 2021). Alternative historical experiences and conceptions of time are also central in the important recent work of the historian and political thinker Timothy Snyder (2018, 2022). See Chevallier (2022) on Foucault (2021). See also the video at https://​foucaultsconfessions​ .org/​philippe​-chevallier/​.

REFERENCES Amadae, S. M. (2016), Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anderson, Perry (2020), ‘The European Coup’, London Review of Books, 42(24), 17 December. Baker, Keith Michael (1990), Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Gary, S., Ewald, François, and Harcourt, Bernard E. (2012), ‘“Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker”: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 Birth of

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Biopolitics Lectures’, University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper No. 614; University of Chicago Public Law Working Paper No. 401. https://​ scholarship​.law​.columbia​.edu/​faculty​_scholarship/​1762. Bloch, Marc (1968), Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, London: W. W. Norton. Brown, Peter (2013), Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bullough, Oliver (2018), Moneyland: Why Crooks and Thieves Now Rule the World and How to Take it Back, London: Profile Books. Burgin, Angus (2012), The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cadwalladr, Carole (2019), ‘Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy’, TED2019. https://​www​.ted​.com/​talks/​carole​_cadwalladr​_facebook​_s​_role​_in​_brexit​_and​ _the​_threat​_to​_democracy. Caprioglio, C., Ferri, F. and Gennari, L. (2021), ‘La colpa di Lucano: Una lettura della condanna oltre la criminalizzazione della solidarietà’, Studi Sulla Questione Criminale (Online). https://​stu​diquestion​ecriminale​.wordpress​.com/​2021/​10/​11/​la​-colpa​-di​-lucano​ -una​-lettura​-della​-condanna​-oltre​-la​-criminalizzazione​-della​-solidarieta​%EF​%BF​%BC/​. Catteeuw, Laurie (2013), Censures et Raisons d’Etat. Une Histoire le la Modernité politique (XVI–XVIIe Siècle), Paris: Albin Michel. Chevallier, Phillipe (2022), ‘The Genesis of Confessions of the Flesh: A Journey through the Archives’, Piecyk, C. A. (trans.), The Maynooth Philosophical Papers, 11, 55–73. Clark, Christopher (2019a), ‘What would Bismarck do?’ London Review of Books, 41(18), 26 September. Clark, Christopher (2019b), Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark, Christopher (2021), Prisoners of Time: Prussians, Germans and Other Humans, New York: Penguin. Cooper, Melinda (2017), Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, New York: Zone Books. Cummings, Dominic (2017), ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, 9 January 2017. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ dominic-cummings-how-the-brexit-referendum-was-won/. Dardot, Pierre, Guéguen, Haud, Laval, Christian and Sauvêtre, Pierre (2021), Le choix de la guerre civile. Une autre histoire du néolibéralisme, Paris: Lux. Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian (2013), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso. David-Barrett, Liz (2022), ‘Is the UK sliding into state capture?’, The Constitution Society, https://​consoc​.org​.uk/​is​-the​-uk​-sliding​-into​-state​-capture/​. Donzelot, Jacques (2008), ‘Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence’, Economy and Society, 37(1), 115–134. Donzelot, Jacques and Gordon, Colin (2008), ‘Governing liberal Societies – The Foucault Effect in the English-Speaking World’, Foucault Studies, 5, 48–62. Farge, Arlette (1995), Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, Rosemary Morris (trans.), University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Farge, Arlette and Foucault, Michel (2016), Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives, Nancy Luxon (ed.), Thomas Scott-Railton (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (1994), Dits et Ecrits, 1954–1988, Tome III, Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Senellart, M. (ed.), Burchell, G. (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2015), ‘The Refugee Problem Is a Presage of the Great Migrations of the twenty First Century’, Colin Gordon (trans.), openDemocracy, 13 November. https://​ www​.opendemocracy​.net/​en/​can​-europe​-make​-it/​refugee​-problem​-is​-presage​-of​-great​ -migrations​-of​-twenty​-first​-century/​. Foucault, Michel (2021), Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4, Robert Hurley (trans.), New York: Pantheon. Geoghegan, Peter (2020), Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, London: Apollo. Gordon, Colin (1987), ‘The Soul of the Citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on Rationality and Government’, in Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (eds), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 293–316. Gordon, Colin (2012), ‘Expelled Questions: Foucault, the Left and the Law’, in Ben Golder (ed.), Re-reading Foucault: On Law, Power and Rights, London: Routledge, pp. 13–38. Gordon, Colin (2013a), ‘Governmentality and the Genealogy of Politics’, Educação e Pesquisa 39(4), 1049–1063. Gordon, Colin (2013b), ‘A Note on “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker”’, Foucault News, February. https://​foucaultnews​.files​.wordpress​.com/​2013/​02/​colin​-gordon​-2013​.pdf. Gordon, Colin (2014), ‘Plato in Weimar: Weber Revisited via Foucault: Two Lectures on Legitimation and Vocation’, Economy and Society, 43(3), 494–522. Gordon, Colin (2015), ‘The Drowned and the Saved: Foucault’s Texts on Migration and Solidarity’, openDemocracy, 13 November. https://​www​.opendemocracy​.net/​en/​can​ -europe​-make​-it/​drowned​-and​-saved​-foucaults​-texts​-on​-migration​-and​-solidarity/​. Gordon, Colin (2020a), ‘Crime control after Brexit’, North East Bylines, 20 July. https://​ northeastbylines​.co​.uk/​crime​-control​-after​-brexit/​. Gordon, Colin (2020b), ‘On “Central Asia”, science, “weirdos and misfits”’, North East Bylines, 3 August. https://​northeastbylines​.co​.uk/​cummings​-brexit​-and​-russia​-part​-1/​. Gordon, Colin (2020c), ‘On independence, Russian style’, North East Bylines, 7 August. https://​northeastbylines​.co​.uk/​cummings​-brexit​-and​-russia​-part​-2/​. Gordon, Colin (2020d), ‘On military philosophers and mercenaries’, North East Bylines, 15 August. https://​northeastbylines​.co​.uk/​cummings​-brexit​-and​-russia​-part​-3/​. Hirschman, Albert O. (1977), The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Innes, Abby (2021), ‘Short cuts: State capture’, London Review of Books, 16 December. Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (2020), ‘Russia’, 21 July, HC 632. https://​isc​.independent​.gov​.uk/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2021/​01/​20200721​_HC632​_CCS001​ _CCS1019402408​-001​_ISC​_Russia​_Report​_Web​_Accessible​.pdf. Joyce, Patrick (2014), The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, Donald (1981), The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, Naomi (2007), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books. Legg, Stephen and Heath, Deana (eds) (2018), South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lucano, Domenico (2020), Il Fuorilegge. La Lunga Battaglia di un Uomo Solo, Milan: Feltrinelli. MacLean, Nancy (2017), Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, New York: Viking.

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Mayer, Jane (2016), Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, New York: Penguin. Mazower, Mark (2008), ‘Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis’, boundary 2, 35(1), 23–34. Mirowski, Philip (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. Rabin-Havt, Ari and Media Matters for America (2016), Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, New York: Penguin Random House. Skinner, Quentin (1999), ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo Frescoes: Two Old Questions, Two New Answers’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62, 1–28. Skornicki, Arnault (2015), La Grande soif de l’État: Michel Foucault avec les sciences sociales, Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires. Skornicki, Arnault (2017), ‘Sur les traces de la théorie foucaldienne de l’État’, Histoire@​ Politique, 32, mai-août; http://​www​.histoire​-politique​.fr. Slobodian, Quinn and Plehwe, Dieter (2019), ‘Neoliberals against Europe’, in William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (eds), Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 89–111. Snyder, Timothy (2018), The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York: Duggan Books. Snyder, Timothy (2022), On Tyranny and on Ukraine, New York: Penguin Audio. Stoler, Ann Laura (1995), Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tazzioli, Martina (2018), ‘Crimes of Solidarity: Migration and Containment through Rescue’, Radical Philosophy, 2(1), 4–10. Tazzioli, Martina and Walters, William (2019), ‘Migration, solidarity and the limits of EUrope’, Global Discourse, 9(1), 175–190. The Times (2019), ‘How Dominic Cummings came in from the cold’, The Times, November 16th, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-dominic-cummings-came-in-from-the-cold-cztv655jj. Teo, Terri-Anne and Wynne-Hughes, Elisa (eds) (2020), Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences and Contestations, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Uscinski, Joseph E. (2018), Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, New York: Oxford University Press. Walters, William and Haahr, Jens Henrik (2005), Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration, London: Routledge. Wylie, Christopher (2019), Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World, London: Profile.

8. Governmentality in translation: an interview with Graham Burchell Graham Burchell, Martina Tazzioli and William Walters

‘The original’, observes Jorge Luis Borges, ‘is unfaithful to the translation’.1 If Borges troubles our ideas about primacy with his observation, it was in a similar spirit of respecting the work of translation, and not treating it as merely functional, that we (WW and MT) approached Graham Burchell. As the English translator of many of Foucault’s most influential lecture series and a scholar whose essays and editorial work played a key role in shaping Foucault’s reception in the Anglophonic world, Burchell brings a unique experience and essential insights to debates about Foucault and governmentality. We planned for this conversation to take place in Bologna in the spring of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic put paid to that idea and we met instead over Zoom on 20 November 2020. The material that follows has been lightly revised by Graham Burchell, and edited by us. We have added the occasional reference. WW. It’s almost 30 years since The Foucault Effect first appeared, this landmark collection that you co-edited with Colin Gordon and Peter Miller. More than any other book, The Foucault Effect has been hugely significant in the way it introduced Foucault’s work on government to an English-speaking audience. So we’d like to know from you about your involvement in that project and the wider intellectual and political environment in which you were working at the time. What was the genesis of this project? How did it come about? The first thing I’d like to say is that Colin Gordon was the driving force behind the book (see Gordon, this volume). I met Colin in Oxford in 1976 or 1977. We came together through a shared interest in Foucault. I don’t think there was anyone else in Oxford interested in Foucault at that time. He introduced me to a group of people who were involved with the journal Radical Philosophy. Colin spent some time in Paris, a few times I think, and attended some of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures. I recall him once returning with Surveiller et Punir and enthusiastically summarizing its general argument for me (I couldn’t read French at the time). He also made a number of contacts in Paris and gathered a lot of material by Foucault and others, some of which was published in Radical Philosophy and some later in the volume of Foucault’s interviews, lectures, and other writings he edited in 1980, Power/Knowledge.

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We got a bit disillusioned with Radical Philosophy for a number of reasons and we both joined the editorial board of the new journal Ideology and Consciousness. I can’t remember exactly how this came about, possibly through contact with Nikolas Rose and Diana Adlam who I already knew in London. The journal’s name tells you something about its preoccupations at that time; we later rebranded it as I&C in the hope of shedding the somewhat embarrassing connotations of the original name. Peter Miller became an editor and contributor to the journal a bit later I think. On I&C Colin became the driving force behind the translation, publication and promotion of work by Foucault and others – like Jacques Donzelot, Giovanna Procacci, Pasquale Pasquino and Ian Hacking – who were later included in The Foucault Effect. Both Colin and myself came from a background in philosophy, whereas I think most of the people involved in I&C came from sociology or psychology. I would say that the general or at least dominant political-theoretical background was Althusserian Marxism. That wasn’t the case for Colin, however, who came from a quite different background; he had the good fortune to be free of the culture of Althusserian Marxism and the kind of debates provoked, particularly in the United Kingdom, by the work of people like Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess. I think a focal point of the UK Althusserianism of the time, on which Foucault’s work made a decisive impact, for some of us at least, was the whole problematic or search for a theory of ideology, along with its accompaniment, a theory of the subject. Foucault was sometimes seen as a possible contributor to some kind of amalgamation or synthesis of Marxism, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, semiology, discourse theory and so on – which was later labelled ‘French theory’. And an important political and theoretical focus of this was, I think, the question of ideology, or of analysis in terms of ideology. It was around these questions that a number of different strands, like feminism for example, came together. I should add that Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton in Australia were also important in shaping the reception of Foucault in the Anglophone world around the same time. Colin had met and formed a friendship with both of them in Paris and there was a strong, if distant, connection with the work they were doing. Meaghan Morris reviewed La volonté de savoir in an Australian journal, Working Papers, in 1977, and in 1979 she and Paul Patton edited a Working Papers volume, Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Morris and Patton 1979) which included a number of shorter pieces by Foucault as well as an essay by Paul Patton on Discipline and Punish and an essay by Meaghan Morris on Foucault and feminism. Both became corresponding editors of I&C – for the last issue I think! – and both contributed pieces to the journal, Paul Patton (1981) on Deleuze and Meaghan Morris (1981) on Michèle Le Dœuff. I came from an Althusserian background, with a particular interest in the history and philosophy of science, the distinction between science and ideology, the idea of theoretical practice, the question of whether Marxism was a science, the problem of the subject of knowledge/ideology, and so on. This was the framework in which, shortly before I met Colin, I was trying to use Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, and bits of The Order of Things, in a study of the history of linguistics in relation to the formation of national languages. What became decisive for me in this context,

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and possibly for some others, was the English translation of Surveiller et Punir in 1977. It was decisive not so much because of the themes of disciplinary power and panopticism, which were, of course, absolutely important, but, for me at least, because of the way the perspective of power/knowledge broke out of and free from the whole problematic of ideology. Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France were not available then. But we can now see how in these lectures the theory of ideology, or analysis in terms of ideology, was a constant target for criticism and an obstacle that had to be overcome to pursue the kind of investigations that Foucault wanted to undertake. Around the same time that we were engaged in the work of promoting Foucault and others in I&C, the version of Althusserian theory that had been developed by Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess in the UK pretty much came to an end. In a way, I think a certain form of Marxism came to an end, for some of us anyway, and there was a period of people trying to find their way out of the kind of impasse which that kind of Marxian theorizing had produced. I&C came to an end as well, but it seemed important to keep open the possible paths for future research that had been indicated in the work the journal had begun to publish. I&C had published a translation of Foucault’s 1978 lecture ‘On governmentality’ in 1979. We also had some badly typed and incomplete transcripts of some of Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures to work from. It was Colin’s idea to publish in book form a selection of the papers we had published in I&C along with a number of others, and to group them around the theme of governmentality. Although the three of us are credited with editing the book, the project was very much Colin’s idea and he did the lion’s share of the work to bring it together. So that is something of my memory of the book’s genesis, as seen, obviously, from my particular perspective. WW. A quick follow up on that, you made the point that you and Colin Gordon were both coming out of philosophical backgrounds, whereas most of the others were in sociology and psychology. Can you say a little bit about what difference you think that made to The Foucault Effect and Foucault’s early reception in the UK? Well I wouldn’t say that it made a clearly identifiable difference to The Foucault Effect, and anyway Peter Miller’s background was in sociology. I wouldn’t want to speculate about the significance of the different backgrounds of a few people for Foucault’s general reception in the UK. I suppose there may have been a question of differences in focus and emphasis. Of course, the introduction of Foucault in the UK, with Madness and Civilization, was closely associated with the anti-psychiatry of R. D. Laing and David Cooper. And then it is not difficult to see how the themes of disciplinary power and panopticism, for example, could quite easily find a place in sociology and be used as models for social description or explanation. Again, the possible affinities with aspects of Weberian historical sociology, which Colin Gordon has written about (e.g., Gordon 2014), was another direction taken in the reception of Foucault’s work. For my own part, I would say that my political-epistemological

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interests inclined me more to a critical perspective on the historical conditions of possibility of the social and human sciences than, say, to a project of using Foucault within sociology. Perhaps too, a background in philosophy may have led to framing the subject of disciplinary power in a different ethical perspective. Psychology is another matter. Philosophy has often had a difficult and sometimes hostile relationship with psychology. And it is not difficult to see why psychologists might feel uncomfortable about Foucault’s work. I&C published reviews of Robert Castel’s books Le psychanalysme (by Colin Gordon) and L’Ordre psychiatrique (by Peter Miller) as well Georges Canguilhem’s essay ‘What is Psychology?’ and I think it is fair to say that Foucault’s work was seen as having a strong anti-‘psy’ slant. In the context of a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis, by way of Althusser and Lacan, and perhaps in connection with some tendencies within feminism, I think the first, introductory volume of the History of Sexuality was greeted with a degree of hostility or suspicion in some quarters. Initially I think the focus was more on what was seen as Foucault’s hostility to psychoanalysis than on the concluding section on biopolitics. That has, of course, changed now. But it is extremely difficult for me to untangle all the threads and identify all the factors involved in the early reception of Foucault in the UK. I should also say that Foucault made hardly any impact on academic philosophy in the UK at this time, or for a long time after, with, I should say, the important exception of Ian Hacking. Hacking was initially important for me as a kind of bridge between my interest in Foucault and my earlier interest in the themes of scientific revolutions and the rational reconstruction of the history of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend and all that). But, of course, Hacking’s highly original work goes well beyond what provided the initial ‘hook’ for me. Similarly, unlike in France, Foucault was not accorded much recognition by historians (with a few exceptions, like Peter Brown or Keith Baker). However, it is perhaps worth noting that at the time of I&C, Nikolas Rose – whose background was psychology out of biology, and then into sociology – was working on his important historical study of psychology, The Psychological Complex, published in 1985. I think The Foucault Effect probably had its biggest impact in sociology and the social sciences, and the work of Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller played a major role in shaping its initial academic reception in the UK. MT. You mention that Discipline and Punish was the main text that you referred to in this first year that you started to engage with Foucault. I was wondering, given that your main interest was this relationship between power and knowledge, why Discipline and Punish precisely and not The Will to Knowledge? No, Discipline and Punish certainly wasn’t my first engagement with Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization years before, as an undergraduate in 1969. It was published by Tavistock in a series which was edited, I think, by R. D. Laing. I read it and took it up within a political-philosophical perspective I had acquired, adopted or fashioned from my enthusiastic reading of the work of Laing and Cooper. For me, this was not just a question of ‘anti-psychiatry’, although this went without saying, so much as

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a political-phenomenological analysis of the family. Anyway, this was the context in which I read Madness and Civilization, and it completely bowled me over. I thought it was a fabulous work. I didn’t know it was a much abridged version of the French, and anyway I couldn’t read French. I thought of it as a kind of historical phenomenology. Then I read The Order of Things in the hope of escaping the limits of a university course on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. But it was difficult to see how you could use this strange book in a course on Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant taught from the perspective of English analytical philosophy! It was the Althusserian question of science/ideology that focused my attention on Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge in the early and mid-seventies. My idea was a bit crazy and inevitably fruitless from the point of view of a theory of ideology! So Discipline and Punish wasn’t my first encounter with Foucault’s work. I would say that it was a breakthrough book for me in the sense that it ended any idea of using Foucault for a theory of ideology. The theory of ideology, the problem of ideology was over. At the same time it opened up new perspectives on a question that interested me at the time – the place and operation of all the different ‘psy’ discourses in the system of school education, juvenile justice and the government of childhood. So that was why it was a breakthrough work. It displaced all kinds of epistemological problems and questions of the theory of ideology and opened up exciting new perspectives and avenues of research that, importantly, spoke directly to my own experience. At that point the introductory volume of the History of Sexuality – The Will to Knowledge – hadn’t appeared in English. That came later and by then I was already committed to exploring the kind of work that he was doing. And then there was a bit of an overlap, chronologically. The Will to Knowledge appeared in English in 1978, so there was a bit of an overlap of the reception of The Will to Knowledge with the publication of the governmentality related material underway in I&C in 1978–1980. The Will to Knowledge certainly had a big effect on me. The introduction of the notion of biopolitics in the last section of the book seemed particularly relevant to my interest in the history of racism, for example. However, I don’t think that aspect got taken up much in the early responses to the book; people seemed to be more interested in what was seen as Foucault’s hostility to psychoanalysis. I think the kind of work that Colin was introducing in I&C to some extent eclipsed, for me, the impact of The Will to Knowledge. So there was a kind of staggered and uneven impact of Foucault’s work. MT. Since The Foucault Effect, governmentality became one of the buzzwords and heuristic principles through which Foucault is known in the Anglo-American context, as well as in wider public debates. Thirty years later, what is the political legacy of governmentality and what do you think about the ways in which accounts have travelled across discipline and across places far beyond the Anglo-American world? This is a very difficult question and I don’t think I am best placed to give an answer. I had already left the academic world when we were putting together The Foucault Effect. I was no longer attached to an academic institution. Shortly after its appear-

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ance I moved to Italy and was living in a fairly isolated place in Le Marche. This was before the Internet, and even when we eventually got online it was by dial-up connection, which was extremely slow and unreliable where we were living. So I became rather detached from the huge explosion of Anglo-American secondary literature on Foucault, the applications of his work across different disciplines, the development of ‘governmentality studies’ in university departments, and so on. It is very difficult for me to assess it or give a general overview. I was a bit surprised by the huge expansion of ‘governmentality studies’ in the Anglophone academic world. Obviously, the work that goes under this label, or to which the label was applied, has been of extremely variable quality and value. I confess that I have not read a great deal of the stuff that has been produced and, rightly or wrongly, have tended to steer clear of a lot of it because it didn’t seem to be what I was most interested in. It seems to me that there was a bit of a lag between the lectures, publication of The Foucault Effect, and then the dissemination of the theme of neoliberalism, which is now massively present in political analysis. No doubt this is in part to do with the many ways in which, with globalization, neoliberalism has been inscribed in reality. Of course, Foucault’s lectures predate this phenomenon. It is not clear to me how much Foucault’s earlier analyses contributed to making possible or facilitated the recent important work of people like Philip Mirowski, Quinn Slobodian, Sonja Amadea, William Davies, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper and others on neoliberalism and related questions of political rationality. Obviously there is an enormous body of work now and, as I say, I am really not in a position to offer any kind of balance sheet in terms of Foucault’s influence. It is interesting that the governmentality theme was picked up and developed in the Anglophone world first of all. The lecture ‘On governmentality’ published by I&C was actually translated into English from Italian. Pasquale Pasquino had transcribed and translated the lecture for the Italian journal aut aut in 1978. In 1977 Pasquino had also edited, with Alessandro Fontana, a collection of short pieces by Foucault, Microfisica del potere. And around the same time that The Foucault Effect appeared, Fontana and Mauro Bertani published an Italian translation of the 1976 Collège de France lectures ‘Il faut défendre la société’ (Bisogna difendere la società). This was the first of the Collège de France courses to be published anywhere. I remember finding it by chance in a bookshop in Florence. (Two lectures from this course were published in Microfisica del potere and, translated from Italian, in Power/ Knowledge.) Giovanna Procacci was also familiar with Foucault’s lectures and was developing a similar approach in her own work. With Pasquale Pasquino she also translated The Will to Knowledge into Italian (La volontà di sapere). However, despite this early Italian interest in and enthusiasm for Foucault’s work, my impression is that it was followed by a kind of lull, and the governmentality theme was not taken up again in Italy until much later. And when it was picked up it was as part of and subordinate to the theme of biopolitics and neoliberalism, on the one hand, and subjectivation on the other. In France too, despite the huge attendances at Foucault’s lectures, there was nothing like the Anglophone interest in the question of governmentality. Maybe publication of the second and third volumes of the History

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of Sexuality eclipsed the themes of governmentality and liberalism which, apart from the material in The Foucault Effect, was in the unpublished lectures. You ask about the political legacy of the governmentality theme. It’s a good question. There are many good reasons for an interest in and enthusiasm for Foucault’s work. But for me a central one has always been political, that is to say for its value as an original contribution to a possible strategic perspective on and analysis of contemporary reality: what is singular and new in the present? what are the dangers it harbours? what are ‘the diabolical powers of the future knocking on the door’?2 where are the points of resistance? and so on. There has been an enormous amount of valuable work done in different areas which has used and developed the perspective of governmentality, but I have not seen much that has developed this in a strategic analysis of the present and contemporary politics. Maybe it exists and my view is just the result of my ignorance. For example, and maybe we could come back to this, Foucault says that it is very difficult to imagine a form of the exercise of power that is not joined in some way with what he calls an alethurgy, a procedure of the production and manifestation of truth. This is in the 1980 lectures, On the Government of the Living, and he sketches out five possible examples of different relations between the exercise of power, or government, and the production and manifestation of truth. It seems to me that this is of great interest right now: how might an analysis in terms of government and regimes of truth, of government and the production and manifestation of truth, be extended to an exercise of power that depends upon deliberate and calculated mendacity, misinformation, gaslighting, and so on? How might it be extended to, I won’t say a post-truth but rather an anti-truth politics that is part of an oligarchic, kleptocratic, Mafia-style politics directed against government, against a rational art of government as that has been understood until now? After all, if neoliberalism forms an important element in the genealogy of contemporary politics, Foucault’s lectures of 40 or so years ago don’t have much to tell us about the forms and consequences of later neoliberal globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the development of modern oligarchic politics in an era of accelerating global warming. I am just saying this as an example of what one might have expected from a use of Foucault’s genealogies for a strategic analysis of the present. There are no doubt other possible examples. But, as I say, I have not seen much evidence of the development or extension of a governmentality perspective in this direction. WW. I agree with you on that point about politics. I’m very intrigued in The Birth of Biopolitics where Foucault, but only in passing, talks about ‘party governmentality’ (Foucault 2008, 191), and I’ve often thought that would be a fascinating theme to explore. But I can’t find anything written on that. To think about the Chinese Communist Party or Britain’s Conservative Party along such lines would just be wonderfully rich. It is interesting and rich. I did think of looking at this myself one time and briefly looked at [Robert] Michel’s (1999 [1915]) book on political parties and some of the work on elites which deals with the question of parties. Again, I don’t know the mate-

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rial in detail, but it looked rather thin. A study of the emergence and organization of political parties, the forms of political and party life, the operation of party governmentality, and so on would be fascinating. Maybe it exists and I’m just unaware of it, but I suspect it calls for some serious original research. Likewise the question of socialism. I’ve seen one or two papers taking up Foucault’s aside about the failure of socialism to produce a distinct form of governmentality of its own, but nothing very developed. The politically engaged side of Foucault’s work does not seem to have been taken up as much as I expected and hoped. Of course, there has been a lot about whether he supported the Ayatollah Khomeini and more recently about whether he was a neoliberal, but I don’t want to say anything about that. MT. You mentioned the Italian reception of Foucault by Pasquale Pasquino, Giovanna Procacci and also Allesandro Fontana. I was wondering if, in your opinion, there is a difference between how Foucault has been read in Italy and in the UK. In Italy it seems to me that there has been always a very strong political impetus and link between Foucault’s work and the Italian tradition. So I also think about Franco Basaglia and his intellectual relationship with Foucault. So there is this more political drive that shaped the Italian reading of Foucault. And maybe in the UK, I was wondering if you think there has been a slightly different approach. I couldn’t say whether there have been distinctively different ‘national’ readings of Foucault, although it’s an interesting question. The peculiarities of the Italian ‘psy’ world has intrigued me since I have been living in Italy – why are there so many Jungians? – and your question about Basaglia and Foucault makes me wonder whether Robert Castel’s work on psychiatry and psychoanalysis has been translated into Italian. But I lack the knowledge to be able to say anything about Basaglia and Foucault, although the connections are clearly interesting and important. I have a book on Foucault and Basaglia by Pierangelo Di Vittorio that came out in 1999, but I confess I haven’t read it. It’s true that there did seem to be a very strong political impetus behind the link between Foucault’s work and people like Pasquino, Procacci, and Fontana, although none of them focused on Italian history and politics in their own work. But my impression is that after this initial interest there was a lull before his work was taken up again – by Toni Negri, for example, who was very favourably drawn to Foucault and often invokes his work. Like Deleuze, he was taken up very strongly by a certain Marxist strand. The biopolitical theme was also taken up philosophically by Agamben and Esposito of course. As I say, I think the governmentality perspective was generally subordinated to the theme of biopolitics, as in the work of Laura Bazzicalupo for example, and much more so perhaps than in the Anglophone world. So while there may be a strong political impetus behind the Italian reception of Foucault’s work, at the same time I would say it operates at a very high level of abstraction and generality; it’s very ‘theoretical’ rather than investigative. At any rate, my impression is that it doesn’t engage with specifically Italian political reality,

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even as a problem or number of problems. At any rate this is how I saw things from my situation. I was living in Italy, translating Foucault’s lectures. At the same time I was trying to make sense of Italian politics. Now, there didn’t appear to be much that was helpful in the Italian literature inspired or influenced by Foucault. I wasn’t looking for the kind applications of Foucault to Italian history and politics that would confirm or disconfirm some pre-existing schema or model taken from his work. I happened to be immersed in the translation of Foucault’s lectures, thinking in terms of governmentality, liberalism/neoliberalism, subjectivation, regimes of truth and so on, and, at the same time, I was struggling, with considerable difficulty, to make sense of Italian government and political culture, trying to grasp the distinctive logic or coherence of its configurations and dynamics. As I say, I didn’t find much that helped me from the Foucault-oriented side. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough and just didn’t find what I was looking for. But I did find a lot of really interesting material. For example, around the time I was translating Les anormaux I came across Adriano Prosperi’s excellent book, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari, which opened up a whole different perspective on confession in the Italian Counter-Reformation Church and its deployment, alongside and often in conjunction with the courts of the Roman Inquisition, as a kind of conduit of denunciation, in the war against heresy. Or, for a different period, there was Silvana Patriarca’s important book, Numbers and Nationhood, on national statistics in the nineteenth century. I found interesting discussions of the problem or paradox of developing a decentralized, ‘liberal’ form of national government which had to be imposed centrally and from above, on nationalism and Fascism, on the Mafia as a form of government, on the weakness of liberalism in Italy, but then also on the role of Italian liberal and neoliberal thought in post-Second World War economic policy, on regionalism, on Berlusconismo and so on. Now the thing is that, on the one hand, most of this was produced by people who were not influenced by Foucault in the slightest and, on the other, those influenced by Foucault did not seem interested in this kind of material or these questions. It seemed to me, it still seems to me, that the Italian case, if it can be put like that, is absolutely fascinating and potentially a rich experimental field for extending the kind of analyses that Foucault began in his 1978 and 1979 lectures, for stretching them beyond the point at which they stopped. How does one make sense of governmental practices in a context of multiple governmentalities, in the broad sense of the term, and the evident absence of any clear liberal or neoliberal hegemony in the culture of government? But, as I say, I couldn’t find anything to help me from the Italian Foucault side. I once gave a paper at a conference in which I presented some reflections arising from my experience of this awkward conjunction of my attempts to understand Italian political culture and my immersion in Foucault’s thought. An Italian friend remarked afterwards: ‘That’s why no one has applied Foucault to Italian history’. I think she meant that the result would be what I had just offered – un pasticcio. I got the impression of a kind of shying away from engagement with Italian reality, or from bringing together an engagement with both Foucault and Italy. In view of the

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rich field for exploration offered by the latter, this seemed and still seems strange to me. I mean, if it is so difficult to see how Foucault’s work might be useful for analysing present Italian reality, isn’t that a good reason for asking why? Clearly, like everyone else, I don’t understand Italian politics! WW. These are wonderful insights and I hope that when we publish this, this will be a provocation to lots of new research, lots of new PhDs. So our next question: your contribution to Foucault and governmentality scholarship is, of course, not just as an editor or author, but as a translator of many of Foucault’s lectures and courses, as well as important works by Deleuze and Guattari, Boltanski, Callon and others. So we’d like to know how you came to play this very significant role of English translator. And did you already have much experience as a translator when you started to work on Foucault? The short answer is I came to be involved in translating the lectures pretty much by chance. I hadn’t done much translation before then. I didn’t have a background in languages or translation. I taught myself French in order to read books that weren’t translated. I first started seriously studying French when I was in hospital with a broken pelvis. With the help of a dictionary and a grammar book, I read Le français national by Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte, which was about the politics of the national language in the French Revolution. This came from my project of a history of linguistics in relation to the nationalization of languages. Much later I translated Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? under the stewardship, as it were, of Hugh Tomlinson, who was very generous with his help. In a way he gave me my start in translating, at book length anyway, and he basically helped me through it. It was translated mainly by me, but it couldn’t have been done without his corrections, encouragement and assistance all the way through. So that was my first book length translation. With Deleuze and Guattari under my belt, I felt more confident about translating other work and I was approached by a friend about translating Boltanski’s La Souffrance à Distance, which I did. The Collège de France lectures came about because, after doing ‘Society Must be Defended’, the first course to be translated, David Macey decided he didn’t want to do any more. I think Arnold Davidson approached Paul Patton, who declined, and Colin Gordon, who recommended me and encouraged me to do it. It was very kind of him to recommend me because I was still pretty much a novice translator at the time. So that’s how I got into it. I have to say, I am grateful to both Hugh Tomlinson and Colin Gordon for opening up the opportunity to translate the lectures, because for the most part it has been intellectually exciting and enjoyable work. I was not attached to any academic institution and living in a fairly isolated place in Italy, so in a way it was ideal. I could work at my own pace without any distractions and I could take a break, go for a walk in the countryside, and so on, whenever I liked. It did not provide a good income because translating is appallingly paid, but it provided a book roughly every 18 months, I suppose. And then through that I got to translate other bits and pieces.

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WW. If genealogy allows plenty of scope for the role of the accidental and the unexpected in making the world then you’re offering us a genealogy of how you came to translate Foucault! Including, breaking your pelvis! MT. Can you tell us about the process and the mechanics of translating these lectures in particular? You’re working from Foucault’s own manuscript, but also audio recordings and adding considerable footnotes. Is it comparable to other translation or does it pose unique challenges? How long does it take? Have some series been more difficult than others? Are there perhaps other challenges we should know about? OK, first of all, a correction: I didn’t work from the original manuscripts, from the transcripts or recordings. That was all done by the French editors and they did an excellent job. All the notes, apart from the occasional footnote concerning the translation, were provided by the French editors. So I just had to translate them and, as I say, I think they have done an excellent job. How do I go about it? Well, I don’t think there is anything especially noteworthy about my method. I work rather slowly and ploddingly and more or less follow the same procedure for each book. I first read it through marking some passages and making minimal translation notes in the margins. Then I read it through again, drawing up a list of problems and questions to be resolved and making more detailed notes. And then I start translating proper and proceed from beginning to end. The work of translating is interspersed with spells reading the material Foucault refers to. One of the challenges, but also pleasures, of translating the lectures has been exploring the wide range of material they are based on. But this also involves the less pleasurable work of tracking down existing English translations of works he refers to. There are English translations of most of the Greek and Roman texts Foucault discusses, for example, and for the early Christian texts. But these are often very different from the French translations. Moreover, the translations of some terms have become, as it were, institutionalized. My principle has been that I am translating what Foucault says in his lectures, and so where he quotes or paraphrases a French translation of a Greek or Latin author, I certainly consult existing English translations, but in the end I translate the words he uses. Where possible I reference and quote an available English translation in the endnotes. However, this has changed for the volume I am presently translating – his 1964 and 1969 lectures on sexuality – because it’s a different publisher and they insist on existing English translations being used for quotations. But in many cases, when translating Foucault’s quotations of Freud, for example, it is impossible to use the English Standard Edition of Freud’s works without distorting what Foucault actually says in the lectures. So that is a particular difficulty, but it’s not peculiar to translating Foucault. Another, obvious difficulty, but again not peculiar to Foucault, is just that of finding the best translation for new, invented philosophical concepts and arguments. But this is a difficulty for the translation of any work of philosophy. And I have to say that Foucault is not as difficult as some people may imagine. In his lectures he

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doesn’t go in for elaborate wordplay or extremely complicated formulations. He’s remarkably clear, I find, and very readable. He frequently repeats and goes back over what he’s already said. There are conceptual problems which are specific to him, but these can often be clarified in notes by the editor or translator – for instance, the well-known difference between connaissance and savoir in his work from the Archaeology onwards, or the notion of dispositif in The Will to Knowledge. It may well be that some translation decisions will only become settled with time. For example, while noting the different meanings covered by the French terms aveu and confession, I decided to translate both as ‘confession’, noting the corresponding French term in brackets and providing a Translator’s note. Now, the English translator of the Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling decided to translate the former term as ‘avowal’. This is perfectly fine, I have no objection and respect the reason for the choice; it marks a real distinction in Foucault’s thought and the context of use generally makes the sense clear. My decision was based on the view that the English ‘avowal’ and ‘confession’ do not map directly onto Foucault’s use of aveu and confession and that in a great many cases the use of ‘avowal’ for aveu seemed to me very odd and unnatural; look at the second verse of Baudelaire’s poem ‘To the reader’ introducing Les Fleurs du mal for example. However, with time it may come to seem perfectly normal and possibly more accurate because of subsequent use of the English word in a more technical sense. Some translation decisions become settled or change over time. So, there’s a problem, a problem in translating any philosopher’s particular use of terms and concepts, and there is no obvious or simple solution. WW. Were some series more difficult than others? Oh yes, certainly. The first two courses, which were not the first to be published and translated, The Will to Know and Penal Theories and Institutions, were not transcripts of recordings of the lectures. They were his lecture notes, supplemented with other material. Both the layout and note form of the text made translation very difficult. Individual sentences and even whole passages were often very cryptic, and it was only after discussing them with other people, or after a number of readings, or returning to them after having read the whole text that I got a better idea of what he was saying. And I’m not sure I’ve wholly succeeded in all cases. I’m not sure it’s possible to succeed, because parts seem almost inherently undecidable. Maybe, one might be able to make some things clearer if one found more notes in the archive dealing with the same topic. The lectures I am translating now are also in note form. There are parts which are extremely difficult to get absolutely clear in English, and I have to say it’s not much fun. That’s the other difference. I have thoroughly enjoyed translating all the lectures for which transcripts exist. Even when one initially thinks, ‘Oh, I know this stuff, this is in Discipline and Punish, I don’t need to think too hard about this’, one quickly finds that the seemingly familiar is formulated in a different way and that there is lots of new, original material, analysis and ideas which is never taken up again in other lectures or the published work. This is one of the joys of the Collège de France lectures – there are always surprises and possible new paths to

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follow. So the lectures in note form are both much more difficult and less enjoyable to translate. And, of course, they take much longer, because they are more difficult, but pay less, because there are fewer words! MT. You are currently working on some unpublished lectures that Foucault gave on sexuality. What is the difference in terms of politics of translation between this material and the lectures at the Collège de France? I have to say that I have some misgivings about the material being published in this way, that is in what will probably be a very expensive print form. I wonder whether it might not have been better to publish the lectures in another format, perhaps to make them available much more cheaply online for researchers particularly interested in the trajectory of Foucault’s thought, or in the political, theoretical, philosophical culture of France in the 1960s. But, of course, Foucault sells extremely well, so the interests of publishers are involved. Having said that, the lectures are, of course, very interesting. The, 1964 lectures are interesting from the point of view of his relationship at that time with the literature of transgression, with Bataille, Blanchot, de Sade and so on. That side is very interesting and a lot of people in the literary world will be keen to follow that up. His take on Freud, his use of Freud is also interesting. And then, in both the 1964 and 1969 lectures, there is a kind of Nietzschean use of positive scientific knowledge, concerning the sexuality of plants and animal ethology for example, to undermine any kind of essentialist and humanist notion of natural-normal sexuality. And so before The Will to Knowledge, predating that, there’s clearly an attempt to escape any kind of humanist and essentialist conception of natural sexuality along with its counterpart in the idea of its repression in bourgeois society and the promise of its possible future liberation. And again, as with his Collège de France lectures, it’s fascinating to see the extent of the research on which the lectures are based. From my own, personal point of view, the 1969 lectures in particular take me back to a period of my intellectual life which, in all honesty, I have no great desire to revisit: the whole problematic of ideology and Althusser’s version of it in particular. Without referring to it by name, it is clear that the lectures stage a confrontation with Althusserian theory. This is in 1969, the year The Archaeology of Knowledge was published, and you can see the entry into his work of the notions of discursive practices, and of savoir as opposed to connaissance, and so on. So, for all these reasons, the two lecture courses are very interesting, especially for those studying Foucault. They help us understand how he confronted a certain problem space and tried to get round or through it. Nevertheless, I do wonder if bringing this material together in his way, giving it an appearance of unity in the form of the book, is the best way to make it available. MT. May I ask in this regard, what do you think about, apart from these specific lectures on sexuality, of these unpublished works that have been given to the BNF [Bibliothèque national de France] by Daniel Defert. What do you think in terms of, say, editorial operation?

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I see no real harm in the material being made available. It is probably inevitable. The material will no doubt vary considerably in interest and value. There is, I suppose, the rather dispiriting prospect of increasingly fragmentary bits and pieces being published which will in turn encourage research projects with exorbitant claims about the crucial and revelatory significance of this or that fragment for the ultimate meaning of Foucault. But this is probably unavoidable. And as I have said, for the moment at least, publishing Foucault is profitable. I don’t know the plan for what is going to be published. There are certainly some things I would like see: there is a text on philosophy from the sixties, the manuscript of La croisade des enfants, and his lectures on Nietzsche, which I think are now being prepared for publication. As I have said, I have misgivings about how these will be published in book form, but like everyone else I have my selfish, personal interests. Nietzsche has always been ‘my’ philosopher, as it were, so I am really looking forward to seeing those lectures – if they are in legible form! We will just have to wait and see what comes out. WW. Since Foucault’s death we’ve seen an enormous effort of seeking out and publishing Foucault’s various lectures, articles, speeches and so on. This posthumous activity is, of course, not at all unusual when one is dealing with great thinkers and cultural figures and the excitement when some lost notes, a sketch, a few letters turn up. However, here we’re talking about the thinker who demanded that we problematize the very notion of authorship. So we ask, is there a risk? Is there a downside to this exhaustive excavation? Yes, I think there is a downside. I have already referred to the encouragement it gives to a certain type of obsessive research for the revelatory, for the hidden, secret meaning, perhaps detracting from the effort to extend the kind of analyses he began and then left off. There is that kind of Foucault cult, maybe a particular Anglo-American thing, where people are ‘Foucauldian’ in a devotional way. But I don’t think there is much you can do about that, although one could maybe reduce the temptation of publishers to exploit it if there were a way of making the material available more cheaply, online perhaps, as a research resource. But the question of his status as author does not bother me unduly. It’s true that from the point of view of an archaeological analysis, the author becomes a kind of accessory reality or function of discursive practice. But I don’t think that means that the notion of author, or actor, is thereby done away with completely. It’s a question of how the notion of author is used in a form of analysis. I mean, after all, Foucault continued to talk about Hegel, Kant or Nietzsche, and to designate particular styles of thinking or bodies of thought with their names. So I would say the downside is not so much that he’s identified by a category which he himself wants to get rid of, but that there is a danger in how the category is used, the kind of value you give it. Just as an example, I would like to hold on to the idea of a particular individual – author or actor – functioning as, let’s say, an example: authorship as a practice, Foucault’s practice of writing as a singular form and possible example of authorship.

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WW. Another question about the politics of translation. How do you think that the reception of Foucault’s work has changed over the years? Did you notice any relevant difference between how the late Foucault has been read in comparison to Foucault’s analyses of disciplines and governmentality? Again, I’m not really the best person to ask about this because I’m not immersed in the secondary literature. My impression is that Discipline and Punish was certainly taken up in a way which was immediate application, immediate identification of areas in which one could apply the schemas of disciplinary power, panopticism, and so on. To a certain extent, that may be true of governmentality, except that governmentality seemed, and quite rightly in a way, to extend beyond political governmentality, the governmentality of a sovereign body or state. Clearly Foucault himself gives the term a much broader extension. And maybe the same is true of the theme of subjectivation. But I can’t really make any general comment, I don’t know. It is natural that interest and focus, the sense of what the pressing issues of the moment are, will change, and this will affect how the kind of work Foucault was doing will be read and taken up. But perhaps I can return to what I was saying earlier. I have been re-reading the Collège de France lectures in chronological order, something I hadn’t done before. It’s a fascinating exercise. I am presently reading the 1980 course, On the Government of the Living, and have been struck by his comments in the first few lectures on the relationship between the exercise of power, or government, and alethurgy, or the production and manifestation of truth, the relationship between government and regimes of truth, games of truth, truth-telling and so on. After a quite dense and intricate introduction in the first four lectures, in which he sets out his modified approach to the theme of power and truth, the rest of the course is mainly devoted to an examination of ‘self-alethurgy’, that is to ‘reflexive truth acts’, to the procedures of telling the truth about oneself in forms of avowal or confession in early Christianity. Of course, as he makes clear, there is a relationship between the truth-power relation in self-alethurgy and the truth-power relation in, let’s say, political alethurgy, and he will develop aspects of this in the subsequent courses. Now, notwithstanding having spent a number of years translating his lectures, I am not a professional Foucault scholar; I have not kept abreast of the burgeoning expert philosophical commentary on the development and articulations of his concepts. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the focus of the latter part of the course on self-alethurgy, on reflexive truth acts, on avowal and confession, on subjectivation, and so on, has been taken up more widely and in more detail in recent commentary than have his comments in the earlier part of the course on regimes of truth and political government, which relate directly, of course, to the introduction of the theme of government and governmentality in the previous two years’ lectures. Now this is not surprising given the direction Foucault’s lectures will take over the next four years. Yet it seems to me that the politics of truth – which Foucault once suggested might be the only thing that philosophy could be today – and the question of truth and political government are absolutely central to a present reality of the deliberate and calculated deployment of lies, disinformation, and fiction as a political strategy. Maybe I am mistaken, but this side seems to have

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been relatively neglected by scholars influenced by Foucault. It is as if the 1978 and 1979 lectures are seen as more significant for being moments in the process of the development and refinement of general concepts of power, truth and subjectivity than for their potential usefulness for a diagnosis of the present. We have been talking about The Foucault Effect and governmentality. Well, is a rational art of government, of the kind discussed by Foucault in 1978 and 1979, even possible when there is no truth to which it may be pegged that is not subject to an overriding power of the deliberate lie and a political disqualification as ‘fake’? It is difficult to see how you could articulate a notion of governmentality in that environment. This is not a question of ideology. And I don’t think it can simply be attributed to neoliberalism as its necessary corollary or consequence, although the hollowing out of democracy associated with neoliberal globalization and post-2008 austerity have certainly played their part in facilitating this politics. The deliberate assault on truth, the calculated deployment of lies and disinformation, cannot provide a basis for a rational, coherent art of government. At the same time it is an assault on democratic politics that systematically blocks or corrupts the space and terms of any rational and critical transaction between government and the governed. It is difficult to see how this politics can be described in terms of governmentality, unless, and I am only half joking, we take as a model for a kind of governmentality the operations of a Mafia type system of the protection of criminal fiefdoms of corruption, theft, and patronage, of the protection of the operations of oligarchic, plutocratic clans coexisting in an unstable state of quasi-war. This may be a fanciful description, but we lack terms for describing the power relations associated with contemporary anti-truth and anti-government politics. It is difficult to describe the kind of politics developed by Putin, Trump and Johnson in terms of governmentality in the sense of Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism. But this does not mean the absence of strategic intent or logic. If we understand governmentality more generally as a strategic field of mobile, transformable, and reversible power relations, then these contemporary political forms can and should be subject to a strategic analysis of the actors and forces involved in the capture and occupation of government, in the use of government against government, in the project of disabling or dismembering the instruments of public intervention and administration, in the theft of public assets, and so on. I am, again, expressing this badly, but what I want to say is that if I have found work that is useful for making this reality intelligible, for the most part it has not come from Foucault-inspired research, and I find this both surprising and disappointing.

NOTES 1. 2.

As quoted in Waisman (2005, 113). According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is these ‘diabolical powers’, ‘the sound of a contiguous future’ that Kafka listens for. They include ‘capitalism, Stalinism, fascism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 83) [WW and MT].

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REFERENCES Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, Colin (2014), ‘Plato in Weimar: Weber Revisited via Foucault: Two Lectures on Legitimation and Vocation’, Economy and Society, 43(3), 494–522. Michel, Robert (1999 [1915]), Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Morris, Meaghan (1981), ‘Operative Reasoning: Michèle Le Dœuff, Philosophy and Feminism’, I&C, 9, 71–100. Morris, Meaghan and Paul Patton (eds) (1979), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Feral Publications. Patton, Paul (1981), ‘Notes for a Glossary’, I&C, 8, 41–48. Waisman, Sergio Gabriel (2005), Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

PART III GOVERNMENT AND ITS PROBLEMS

9. The neoliberal welfare state Ian Alexander Lovering, Sahil Jai Dutta and Samuel Knafo

INTRODUCTION Neoliberalism was meant to get rid of welfare and replace it with the market. It pitched itself as defending taxpayers against the free-spending habits of bureaucrats and welfare recipients. At a time of post-war welfare expansion, neoliberals promised to end what they saw as wasteful spending and force households to purchase care from the private market. It is, therefore, something of a surprise that as the neoliberal populist insurgency took over the state, the spend on welfare hardly budged. When the neoliberal politicians took power in 1980, average Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) social expenditure was 14.5 per cent of GDP. By 1995 it was 18.2 per cent and grew to over 20 per cent since the 2008 financial crisis (OECD 2022). Such aggregate statistics mask the distributional aspects of state social expenditure, but the trend is nevertheless surprising. This contradiction has led critical scholars to argue that neoliberalism worked more as a project of social engineering than a simple unleashing of markets. From this perspective, the ‘market’ is a template for what neoliberals wanted to produce, rather than a means to get there. As numerous scholars have argued, neoliberalism was about creating a market society by manufacturing a competition ethic in social and political life. To do so, scholars have highlighted how neoliberals have mobilized practices of management. While the welfare state may be bigger than ever, it has become governed by ‘internal markets’, league tables, and performance benchmarking practices that are said to simulate the workings of the market to achieve the neoliberal ends of a society founded on competition. This re-engineering of social welfare may explain the popularity of Foucault in studies of neoliberalism. Foucauldian inspired scholarship has productively interpreted the surprising persistence of welfare under neoliberalism by taking the notion of market freedom as a premise for a liberal ‘art of government’, rather than a description of what liberalism consists of. Crucial to this has been the elaboration of the idea of ‘governmentality’ (Burchell et al. 1991). Through this concept, Foucauldian inspired literature has analysed the remaking of welfare institutions on the template of the market through New Public Management (NPM), that have been at the centre of neoliberal welfare reform (Dardot and Laval 2013; Davies 2014; Brown 2015). In this chapter, however, we argue that the fit between these managerial practices and neoliberal theory has never been as smooth as Foucauldian perspectives 174

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often take it to be. While the managerialism of the neoliberal era is often couched in the language of the market, its history suggests instead a stronger affiliation to the planning practices of the post-war era. This can be seen in the fact that today’s managerialism seeks to empower the very people that neoliberals distrusted: the top bureaucrats in the public administration. More importantly, it can also be seen from the historical lineage that shaped these practices which goes back directly to planning innovations in the defence sector in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than to neoliberal economics. These tensions, we argue, highlight the need for scholars of neoliberal governmentality to take managerialism more seriously as an object of research in its own right. As is often pointed out, Foucault wrote about governmentality before the era of neoliberal governance. It is what made his contribution so striking. But instead of seeing this as a sign of Foucault’s prescience in getting what neoliberalism is all about, we argue that it poses difficult questions regarding how we conceive of the relationship between the neoliberal texts analysed by Foucault, and the actual managerial practices of neoliberal governance. To address this problem, the chapter will first contextualize Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism to highlight why the issue of managerialism is of greater importance than often realized. We will then discuss attempts by Foucauldians to address managerialism. Finally, the chapter will provide the outlines for a genealogy of managerialism to highlight the ways in which it challenges current conceptions of neoliberal governmentality.

NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE OF THE SOCIAL To grasp the puzzle of how managerialism fits within the study of governmentality, it is important to start by looking at how Foucault ended up thinking about neoliberalism in his Collège de France lectures of the mid-to-late 1970s. Crucial to this was his attempt to understand the rise of biopower. In the second half of the 1970s, Foucault was moving away from his earlier studies of power that had focused on the more specific institutions of the psychiatric clinic and the prison in The Birth of the Clinic or Discipline and Punish. Instead, he began to reflect on the ways in which localized mechanisms of social ordering were coalescing into broader structures of power with the rise of modern states. Starting from the premise that ‘the state has no heart’ and could not be reduced to a fixed set of eternal institutions (Foucault 2008, 77), Foucault was interested in the discursive processes through which diverse techniques of control were becoming increasingly tied to what would become our modern idea of government. Foucault’s initial focus in this endeavour revolved around the idea of biopower, initially an apparent afterthought in the back pages of A History of Sexuality. What he saw as a new form of biopower referred to a modality and terrain of politics that worked at the level of the human species, organized around a new social object of the ‘population’. By contrast to the sovereign power that Foucault had elaborated

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in his earlier work, which revolved around disciplinary control over territory, or the coercive ordering of individuals, biopower consisted in a more indirect form of control that regulated flows. Particularly important here was the birth of statistics. These offered concrete – yet abstracted – representations that could be acted upon to manage the health and vitality of the ‘population’. In the process, biopower has moved from the disciplining of individuals to the more fluid management of a population. As he was developing the idea of biopower, Foucault became interested in the history of liberalism. The relationship of biopower to liberalism remains an ambiguous issue that divides Foucauldians (Lemm and Vatter 2014). Moreover, much of the conceptual development of biopower has extended far beyond Foucault’s discussion of liberalism to address the broader question he raised about the governance of biological life (Campbell and Sitze 2013; Cisney and Morar 2016). Nevertheless, it is clear that Foucault’s work on biopower yielded an original conception of liberalism. At a time when most were reading liberalism as a zero-sum project for expanding the market at the expense of the state, Foucault instead saw liberalism as a political philosophy concerned with exercising biopower. For Foucault, liberalism approached the question of exercising power from a place of scepticism towards collective institutions. More historically concerned with trying to limit monarchical sovereignty, liberalism was originally focused on putting limits on power rather than exercising it. As liberalism became the founding political philosophy of the modern state, however, it found in biopower a way to remain disengaged from the particulars of life, while still exercising a form of control over society as a newly discovered object. Whereas the broader idea of biopolitics had offered a way to enquire into the arrival of life as a distinct object of social control, Foucault’s excursus into liberalism offered insights into how biopower was integrated into the institutions of the state. This work would yield the concept of governmentality as a way to reflect on the liberal rationale that informed biopower. The concept of liberal governmentality put the relationship between state and market in a new light. Rather than trading one off against the other, liberalism – as a governmentality – was said to be about governing from a premise that the market existed as a natural force that escaped direct control. Biopower was thus a mode of governance that worked with the grain of the market, trying to regulate its flows or manage its risks, rather than control or discipline its existence (Lemke 2019, 197). With this new actuarial notion of government, the key biopolitical tool for a liberal governmentality were ‘mechanisms of security’. These were the techniques through which liberal freedom would be ‘secured’. As Lemke argues, Foucault explains that ‘freedom cannot prevail without restriction, but must be subjected to a principle of calculation: security’ (Lemke 2019, 344; original emphasis). Likewise, in Foucault’s words, ‘freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security’ (Foucault 2007, 48). Freedom was, therefore, not the absence of regulation but a human condition that required careful construction and maintenance to mitigate dangers that may interrupt it. While the market may do the work of social

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regulation in a liberal governmentality, the task of governance would be to tame market excesses, manipulate its flows, and extend its logic into new areas. The reliance of liberalism on the idea of the market as an ordering mechanism offers a set of problems. This is particularly the case when using the concept of governmentality to make sense of the neoliberal welfare state. As Polanyi pointed out, the danger of reading liberal political economy has always been to take on board too readily the defining idea of economics that the market is a social regulating force (Polanyi 1957). The problem here stems from a duality in the concept of the market that makes it highly slippery (Knafo 2020). On the one hand, the market refers to a place where people exchange goods, usually for money. This is a fairly innocuous depiction of the term which makes few assumptions about what it relates to. It generically refers to a type of activities or to a place where these activities take place. It is, in this most basic sense, a social field that remains to be specified or even defined. The problem is that the market has come to have a second meaning since the rise of liberal political economy. Indeed, since Adam Smith, the notion of the market has come to refer to a distinct social logic that can be said to be present whenever market-like exchanges take place. It was the great originality of liberal political economy, even if a misleading contribution, to thus posit that the market represented a distinct ordering mechanism. It was precisely this proposition which justified the liberal idea that political authorities were less needed or desired; that they could now recede to the background and content themselves with a more abstracted role of managing risk in a social field totalized by the market. Recognizing this duality highlights the problem with using the notion of the market as a way to understand social control under liberalism. While a historically situated market, as a social field, certainly has regulatory dynamics, these are not derived from the market itself as a natural ordering mechanism, but from the way it is socially shaped. To single out the market as a logic is to stop precisely where our reflection should be starting. It is tantamount to saying that society regulates social activity. Everything that characterizes this regulation remains to be specified. Given this problem, one can understand why neoliberal theory became an intriguing discursive register to get at what liberalism was fundamentally about for Foucault . Since neo/ordoliberals explicitly emphasized the need for social engineering to make markets a reality, it seemed to reconcile government with the idea of the market and move us beyond classic ideas of liberalism as a small state agenda. However, the discourse of neoliberalism remained tied to an unspecified notion of the market, as if the idea of the market had been settled, when in reality it remained to be specified. It did not help that Foucault’s reflections on neoliberalism were short lived. As Ute Tellmann (2009, 5) points out, Foucault never really conceptualized ‘the economy beyond its liberal imaginary’. Since Foucault was writing his biopolitics lectures long before the advent of neoliberalism as an actually existing biopolitical regime, it would be unfair to hold that against him. Instead, many have since taken the conceptual void of the market as an opportunity for further investigation into the workings of governmentality. In particular, Foucauldian scholars have widely mobilized the idea of governmentality to make sense of the many managerial practices that have

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been said to carry out the social engineering of neoliberalization. It is to this that the next section will now turn.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT Post-Foucauldian studies of governmentality revolve around the rise and spread of New Public Management (NPM), which has been a notable feature of neoliberalism. NPM refers to a series of reforms adopted by OECD governments from the 1980s and 1990s. It is seen by many today as the administrative face of neoliberalism. For its originators and advocates, NPM works to make the public sector run more like the private sector – leaner, performance-driven and customer focused. NPM practices include internal markets, performance-related pay, league tables, and benchmarking. NPM lends itself well to being analysed as a form of governmentality. A phrase synonymous with NPM that the state should ‘steer, not row’ is highly suggestive of Foucault’s notion of governmentality managing dispassionate statistical aggregates and market flows, rather than disciplining details. As a result, a number of scholars have addressed NPM as liberal governmentality in terms of how it extends principles of market competition into the welfare state. This could be seen, for example, in Michael Power’s classic work on the emergence of an ‘audit society’. His Foucauldian-inspired analysis showed how market-like performance evaluation in the audit has become a cornerstone of modern governance (Power 1997). Likewise, Mitchell Dean pointed to the ‘proliferation of contract’ under NPM as it replaced procedure-bound bureaucracies with fictions of managerial freedom governed through ‘technologies of agency and performance’ (Dean 2010). William Davies, similarly, wrote of managerial reforms as leading to the ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’ as the state was re-modelled as a firm, citizens were re-modelled as customers, and the numerical indicators and rankings thrown up by NPM treated as market-like verdicts (Davies 2014). The effect of this for Foucauldian scholars was that a neoliberal rationality has ‘enjoin[ed] everyone to live in a world of generalized competition’ (Dardot and Laval 2013, 11). Under the totality of ‘the economic’, people were made to reconstrue themselves as entrepreneurs locked in an endless competitive battle in the simulated market that the welfare state had become. This turned the social contract inside out as traditional sites of solidarity and collective belonging in the citizen’s demos or the worker’s union were fundamentally ruptured by a market logic (Brown 2015). Clear in these diverse accounts is the idea that neoliberal governmentality was about extending market principles into social life. As Lemke explains, neoliberals ‘generalize[d] the scope of the economic’ to render ‘non-economic areas and forms of action in terms of economic categories’ and established ‘a critical evaluation of governmental practices by means of market concepts’ (Lemke 2001, 198). For these Foucauldian analyses, what mattered about governance under neoliberalism was that

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it used managerial techniques to bring the principles of market competition – laid out in neoliberal theory – to bear on society. Yet, this depiction relies on underplaying the contradictions and discrepancies between practices of neoliberal governance in NPM and the principles of neoliberal thought that Foucauldians take to be the raw material of neoliberal governmentality. To take one example, quantification is frequently considered to be a crucial element in the neoliberal remaking of the welfare state through NPM. Problematically, though, neoliberals have long written about the perils of numbers that seem to dominate governance today. As Quinn Slobodian has argued, ‘Geneva School’ neoliberals like Polish economist Michael Heilperin warned about the dangers of ‘pseudo-quantitative concepts’ and criticized the use of ‘statistical constructions’ to understand ‘the heterogeneous reality they are supposed to represent’ (Slobodian 2018, 85). This contradiction between the neoliberal antipathy to bureaucratic information processing and the well-observed rise of quantified governance is rarely thought through as a way to make sense of the neoliberal project. While the Foucauldian literature focuses on the texts and tracts of the neoliberal thought collective to make sense of governmentality, it is complicated by the fact that neoliberal thought was explicitly pitched against the very techniques and agents of planning and evaluation that neoliberal governance today is built upon. Ultimately, we argue this comes down to the vagueness in the work ‘the market’ does within Foucauldian analyses of NPM. Rather than examining how NPM practices work as a form of governance, scholars frequently defer to liberal political economy and see them as yet another case of a market principle in action. But, as the previous section argued, this notion of the market still leaves much to be explained. Instead, we argue that what is required to make sense of the neoliberal welfare state is a shift in our perspective from neoliberal political theory to a genealogy of the managerial practices that have shaped the neoliberal era. As Foucault taught us, social practices that often look obvious at first sight can often reveal a very different face when we trace back their genealogy. It is surprising that there is so little on the genealogy of managerialism within the literature of governmentality, especially when one contrasts this lack with the wide-ranging literature on the history of neoliberal thought. Even when Foucauldians do trace these developments – for example in Wendy Larner’s fascinating account of the rise of benchmarking in the 1950s defence sector (Larner and Le Heron 2004), or in Jacqueline Best’s excellent work on ‘governing through failure’ in global development practices (Best 2014) – there are surprisingly few attempts to take stock of what this history of managerialism actually tells us about neoliberal governmentality. Perhaps one of the most intriguing contributions in this regard is Egle Rindzevičiūtė’s (2016) Foucauldian reading of systems analysis as a form of governmentality. But it is noteworthy that she also says little about the connection of these developments to the managerial practices of neoliberalism. At most they are discussed as variations on the theme of biopolitical practices, but these histories do little to disrupt our understanding of neoliberal biopolitics.

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One of the interesting features of these histories is that they all seem to go back to developments in the defence sector that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. There is much to gain exploring an alternative lineage of managerialism that begins here. The specific practices that Foucauldian scholars have attempted to reconcile with a neoliberal governmentality (like audit, performance management and generally the corporatization and economization of social life) have their roots in a radically new approach to governance that stemmed not from the jurists of inter-war continental Europe or the post-war economists of Chicago, but the martial foundations of the post-war US military-science complex. Importantly, what began as a new way to scientifically wage war was later – in the mid-twentieth century – transported to govern a welfare state deemed out of control. By disentangling this managerial lineage from a neoliberal one, we have elsewhere argued that we can build greater perspective on the practices of control and exclusion that have shaped neoliberalism’s governance of the social today (Knafo et al. 2018). In the next section, we will briefly sketch out this history of managerialism.

COLD WAR LIBERALISM AND MANAGERIAL POWER The Second World War saw a unique encounter between military personnel and the scientific establishment. While warfare has always produced technological developments, the Second World War was perhaps unique in that scientific and mathematical know-how was brought to the front line. The specific innovation this produced was called Operations Research (OR). It was a loose categorization referring to an extremely varied set of techniques, to the extent that some of its practitioners doubted the arrangement between science and military would outlast the war. What united OR, though, was the idea of steering military tactics on the basis of how they performed in the field as revealed by the power of statistics (Thomas 2015). OR was initially conceived in Britain, in particular around implementing new radar technologies in the Battle of Britain. Warfare fought through performance management was, however, taken up most intensely by the USA directing activities such as hunting submarines in the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG). After the war, many of the US research groups bringing together scientists and military personnel were sustained and civilianized (Mirowski 2008). Of particular importance here was the RAND Corporation (Amadae 2003; Abella 2009; Erickson 2015). As the polymaths of RAND continued working on the scientific pursuit of warfare, they gestated a huge number of innovations in cybernetics, statistics and economics such as game theory, rational choice, and linear programming. Fuelling this were new developments in digital computing. Among RAND’s major innovations was systems analysis. It was seen as a radical extension of the logic of OR. Whereas OR was focused on making on-the-ground tactical decisions, systems analysis was concerned with using rational techniques of decision-making and performance optimization to redefine strategy at a higher level. As systems analysis was introduced to the defence establishment through a catalogue

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of RAND studies, it massively upset military hierarchies. Rather than the speculative intuitions of experienced on-the-ground professionals reflecting on the wisdom of possible policy choices, systems analysis attempted to rationalize the process, turning decision-making into a highly mathematical and seemingly objective science. Its great benefit was that it could provide decision makers with a clear and objective basis from which to decide their plans. But these techniques radically reordered who was empowered within the military apparatus. Decorated military generals, whose years of direct experience had long been thought to imbue them with a valued know-how and strategic nous, found themselves displaced by youthful, polymath academics whose claims to expertise lay precisely in their lack of on-the-ground experience. Systems analysis got its first application to the work of government in Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense in the early 1960s through the Planning and Programming Budgeting System (PPBS). It was meant to rationalize defence spending, turning it from a turf war between competing generals seeking funding for vanity projects, to a more centralized decision-making process that would link-up financial resources with quantitatively expressed strategic objectives. The apparent success of PPBS in the defence department led to President Johnson pushing for its roll-out across the social welfare state as the guiding technology organizing his War on Poverty, as well as more local efforts in remaking urban governance in, for example, John Lindsay’s New York City (Jardini 2000; Light 2003). PPBS itself ended in failure. At a trivial level, practitioners could not cope with the amount of paperwork endless performance reporting required. More profoundly, they struggled to rethink welfare according to a logic of performance management that required quantifying desirable social outcomes like good education or good quality housing. It is this spectacular failure of PPBS that many scholars have folded into the more general turn against state planning, and the modernist enthusiasm of the early post-war decades. But, as we have argued elsewhere, there were important legacies from RANDite planning that shaped governance in the neoliberal era (Dutta et al. 2021). Encapsulating this is the story of Alain Enthoven. He is best known as a health economist responsible for ‘marketizing’ healthcare in the US and Britain. Most notably, Enthoven importantly shaped the ‘internal market’ reforms in Britain widely seen to have introduced an economic logic into the National Health Service (NHS). His idea of ‘managed competition’ proposed that top managers would steer the delivery of health services by commissioning competing providers who may work on a commercial basis, thus leading to accusations of introducing ‘market forces’ into healthcare. But Enthoven does not come from a neoliberal background. He started his career working at the RAND Corporation, playing a vital role in the development of systems analysis as an important agent of McNamara’s defence operation. Coming from this point of departure, managed competition was a project to empower central planners who held a scepticism over the operations of markets as ordering mechanisms. While the evolution of systems analysis as a governing technology may have come to invoke the market in the neoliberal era, the managerial foundations of systems

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analysis meant it had a very different interpretation of the market compared to neoliberals. To make sense of this, it is useful to contrast neoliberal notions of uncertainty with the way in which the concept evolved in the RAND-centred managerial lineage. For Hayekian neoliberal theory, uncertainty was both a fact of life and a political necessity for a liberal society (Davies 2014, 6). The neoliberal deference to the market was built around the idea that the world is infinitely unknowable and thus it is useless to try and control it. As Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah explain, neoliberals interpret the market on this basis as a powerful information processor whose machinations are the arbiters of truth (Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2017). On this basis, Foucauldian-inspired literature has observed how the proliferation of metrics and indicators is a reflection of this neoliberal effort to ‘roll-out’ this market model by representing social life in ever more indicators that mimic the workings of a market information processor (Beer 2016). Managerial understanding of uncertainty likewise began from a premise that the world is infinitely unknowable. But rather than be content with this fact, managerialism is built on finding grounds to nevertheless intervene into this world despite the reality of perpetual uncertainty. On this basis, the proliferation of metrics should be interpreted not as the expansion of market logics and our resignation as competitive market actors, but precisely as a managerial interest in making informed decisions in a context of uncertainty. The market here is thus not an uncertain force that could be harnessed, but a metaphor for a foundational social condition that must be reacted against. There were, however, a number of steps along this road. Originally, RANDite thinkers had seen uncertainty as an issue to resolve rather than accommodate themselves with. In the early post-war years the fundamental issue for the US defence establishment was how to minimize uncertainty and make strategic decisions against an opponent whose intentions were unclear, in a condition where a wrong move could result in nuclear annihilation (Mirowski 2008, 189; Andersson 2012, 1416). Along these lines, Mirowski highlighted the reliance on the computer as an organizational tool such that at RAND ‘problems of rationality and organizational efficiency became conflated with problems of computer design and programming’ (Mirowski 2008, 188). Heyck identifies the systems thinking that dominated this period as a ‘high modernism’, an instrumentalist faith in the capacity for technical control over nature and society (Heyck 2015). For this defence establishment, abstract mathematics in game theory and systems analysis held hopes for eradicating uncertainty by removing human judgement from strategic decisions via automation (Mirowski 2008, 284). It was only after this faith in the modernist vision of total control hit against its own inevitable limits, however, that RANDites began to refine their thinking. As Pickering explains, examining a number of British cybernetic thinkers travelling along a similar path, ‘the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage of and enjoying, a world that one cannot push around’ (Pickering 2010, 394). The cybernetic metaphor of the ‘black box’, favoured by social scientists, is illustrative of this. While scholars today are forever determined to ‘open up the black box’

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of this or that, for the cyberneticians who coined the term the entire point was that the box was shut. As a metaphor for the unknowability of a machine’s workings by those who merely operate rather than design them, the black box showed how actors could nevertheless navigate its workings by dynamically calibrating between the inputs put in and the outputs spat out. Complex systems thus defied straightforward control; the point was to find a way to act within this uncertainty. Transferred to the realm of organization, Stafford Beer’s management cybernetics considered ‘how one would run a company, or by extension any social organization, in the recognition that it had to function in and adapt to an endlessly surprising, fluctuating and changing environment’ (Pickering 2010, 234). It is this that Eglė Rindzevičiūtė characterizes as a ‘cybernetic governmentality’ that does not suppose perfect knowledge, but a performative knowledge where even under conditions of uncertainty we find ways to behave and interact with complex systems (Rindzevičiūtė 2016, 207). Transferred to the idea of the market, while RANDites invoked the term, they did so not to defer to an external information processer as an arbiter of truth, but as a particular system they would intervene within and gear towards their own ends. Insofar as this relates to the governance of the welfare state, it is interesting in this regard to look at the notion of managed competition developed by Enthoven. One can understand how the language of managed competition may have given the idea to many commentators that Enthoven was following a classic neoliberal logic. However, the proposal betrayed very different ideals. As we have pointed out, neoliberals seek to empower consumers to make decisions by offering them more choice. Neoliberals reject the idea that the state should mediate service provision directly. While the state certainly has an important role, it is conceived along constitutional lines. The focus is placed on fixing the rules of the game, rather than purposeful management. By contrast, the idea of managed competition started from the opposite standpoint. Enthoven lamented the limited competition over price in the health sector. His biggest concern, however, was not expanding market choice, but the lack of managerial capacities to oversee the system to ensure that competition would not simply result in cheaper prices but deliver ‘value for money’. As Enthoven pointed out, price competition too often led to diminishing quality of services: ‘If not corrected by a careful design, [the] market is plagued by problems of free riders, biased risk selection, segmentation, and other sources of market failure’ (Enthoven 1993, 44). Leaving suppliers to compete simply on price would incentivize them to only cover healthy subjects and more benign health conditions, leaving risky and costly patients to fend for themselves. With fewer suppliers willing to take them on, these high-risk patients would then have to compensate by paying much higher prices. As a result, what provided ‘bite’ to competition from his perspective, was not so much the market itself, but the ability of customers to review the performance and services of health providers and make decisions on the basis of this performance. Yet in a fragmented market system, customers did not have the resources, abilities, or desire to review performance in a consistent, precise and systematic way. This made it easy for suppliers to get away with inefficient practices and costly procedures.

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The idea of managed competition was meant to address this failure of the market of health provision through managerial empowerment. ‘Managed competition’, he wrote, ‘relies on a sponsor to structure and adjust the market … to establish equitable rules, create price-elastic demand, and avoid uncompensated risk selection’ (Enthoven 1993, 24). At the heart of his vision was the idea of the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) which would pool customers in such a way so as to enable managerially-determined service provision. These sponsors were not market regulators, but intermediaries between users and commercial providers. Representing numerous customers, they would review and act upon the quality of services provided. They would stand as arbiters of the kind of services that citizens would get by taking the place of the active consumer. By acting as the main decision maker, HMOs would have a direct impact on the types of conditions that would be covered, which doctors or institutions would be covered by health plans, where those services would be delivered and would contribute to force inefficient institutions/ doctors out of health provision entirely. Ultimately, while expressed as an ‘internal market’, Enthoven’s ideas (as a proxy for modern managerialism) were not about spreading a competition ethic, but about systematically empowering a managerial class governing public welfare beginning from a premise that leaving it to a market (simulated or otherwise) was insufficient and undesirable.

CONCLUSIONS Recognizing the managerial roots of neoliberalism’s social engineering project raises a series of questions for those interested in governmentality. For some, this could be read as an alternative form of governmentality (Rindzevičiūtė 2016). There is certainly work to be done in this area with a focus on exploring the relationship between these two forms of governmentality. However, from our perspective, this lineage poses deeper problems for the very notion of governmentality as a way to think of power because of the reliance on the idea of the market that is borrowed from liberal mythology. It is a perspective that continues to underestimate the novelty of managerial governance. While Foucault certainly has a lot to contribute in thinking about the complex power entanglements that are at the heart of this practice, the need for us to move beyond the liberal imaginary (Tellmann 2009) to grasp what is at stake is of paramount importance. This is why we have our doubts about the notion of governmentality. It is not that this concept necessarily confines us to a liberal framework, but given the way it was elaborated by Foucault, it encourages scholars to think of current practices of governance by turning to the lineage of liberal and neoliberal thought. More fundamentally, we have suggested in other work that the rise of managerialism, given (and despite) its numerous spectacular failures, may have more to do with agency than control per se. More specifically, we argue that its emergence can only be understood as a series of innovations that have empowered a specific group of people (we would argue a managerial class), often at the cost of a loss of strict control

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of outcomes. This gives a different spin to an important Foucauldian idea about the ways in which power, or control, generates unintended effects (Ferguson 1990). Given the messy history of managerial governance, we would ultimately prefer to read it as a technology mediating social struggles, rather than as a regime of control.

REFERENCES Abella, A. (2009), Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire, Boston: Mariner Books. Amadae, S.M. (2003), Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andersson, J. (2012), ‘The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World’, The American Historical Review, 117(5), 1411–1430. Beer, D. (2016), Metric Power, New York: Springer. Best, J. (2014), Governing Failure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, T. C. and Sitze, A. (eds) (2013), Biopolitics: A Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cisney, V. and Morar, N. (eds) (2016), Biopower : Foucault and Beyond, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2013), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso Books. Davies, W. (2014), The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dean, M. (2010), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2nd edition, London: Sage. Dutta, S. J., Knafo, S. and Lovering, I. A. (2022), ‘Neoliberal Failures and the Managerial Takeover of Governance’, Review of International Studies, 48(3), 484–450. Enthoven, A. C. (1993), ‘The History and Principles of Managed Competition’, Health Affairs, 12 (suppl. 1), 24–48. Erickson, P. (2015), The World the Game Theorists Made, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, J. (1990), The Anti-Politics Machine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heyck, H. (2015), Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jardini, D. R. (2000), ‘Out of Blue Yonder: The Transfer of Systems Thinking from the Pentagon to the Great Society’, in A. Hughes and T. Hughes (eds), Systems, Experts and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 311–359. Knafo, S. (2020), ‘Rethinking Neoliberalism after the Polanyian Turn’, Review of Social Economy, 80(2), 194–219. Knafo, S., Dutta, S. J., Lane, R. and Wyn-Jones, S. (2018), ‘The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism’, New Political Economy, 24(2), 235–251.

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Larner, W. and Le Heron, R. (2004), ‘Global Benchmarking: Participating “at a Distance” in the Globalizing Economy’, in W. Larner and W. Walters (eds), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, New York: Routledge, pp. 212–232. Lemke, T. (2001), ‘“The Birth of Bio-Politics”: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 30(2), 190–207. Lemke, T. (2019), Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason, New York: Verso Books. Lemm, V. and Vatter, M. (eds) (2014), The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, New York: Fordham University Press. Light, J. S. (2003), From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mirowski, P. (2008), Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mirowski, P. and Nik-Khah, E. (2017), The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. OECD (2022), Social expenditure – Aggregated data. https://​stats​.oecd​.org/​Index​.aspx​ ?DataSetCode​=​SOCX​_AGG. Pickering, A. (2010), The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, K. (1957), The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Power, M. (1997), The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rindzevičiūtė, E. (2016), The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Slobodian, Q. (2018), Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tellmann, U. (2009), ‘Foucault and the Invisible Economy’, Foucault Studies, 6, 5–24. Thomas, W. (2015), Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

10. Governmentality and security: governing life-in-motion Jef Huysmans

Security means different things in different times and locales. Taking this as the starting point for reflections on security and insecurity invites paying attention to how we let security and insecurity emerge in security analyses. Accepting the highly situated nature of security practices and claims implies that any hierarchization of insecurities, defining which insecurities need addressing most, raises the question of how and where this hierarchy is produced. Some might claim that international politics is a politics of insecurities between states aggregated into a threat of military intervention. That is as situated a claim as saying that food security or managing climate change are key global security issues or that crime prevention in cities is a major security concern. The multiplicity of insecurities and how they are hierarchized is not the only key issue of interest, however. What matters at least equally importantly is that the situatedness of insecurities draws attention to the processes through and in which a set of insecurities emerges. It shifts the starting point for the study of security from defining how in a given political, social and/or cultural order different insecurities are named and instituted – a taxonomy of insecurities – to the processes of securitizing through which phenomena and matters of concern become enacted and are made intelligible as matters of insecurity. In other words, security studies move from threat or risk analysis to the study of the processes that inscribe securitiness onto phenomena and concerns. The question ‘what security means’, becomes then a question of the rationality of security. Rationality is here understood in the dual sense of the word ‘ratione’: the condition under which something emerges and the nature of that what emerges (Nail 2018, 52). For example, some analyses study how a variety of issues are securitized by means of speech acts of security performed by political leaders that insert a logic of war – an exceptionalist relation between friends and enemies that demands extra-ordinary ways of doing politics – into phenomena (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). Others focus on what kind of knowledges and technologies security professionals, in particular the military and police, enact within a competitive field in which different groups of professionals prioritize different conceptions of insecurity and different modes and technologies of operating security (Bigo 1996, 2000). The important issue to note here is that the study of securitization implies an analytics of power (a conceptualization of the processes through which insecurities are acted into being) as well as an understanding of what are the security qualifications of these practices, technologies, knowledges, and institutional processes. 187

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The concept of governmentality has operated within this understanding of security studies. Although governmentality has been used in quite a variety of ways (Walters 2012), it draws attention to security processes, practices and institutions that emerge within problematizations of life as an object of government, rather than defence of the state territory or public order, for example. The concept is often connected to the governance of populations as a biological entity through risk management. However, giving primacy to life is not limited to enacting and managing populations. I will foreground a concept of governmentality that takes life in and as movement. I will explain what giving primacy to life-in-motion means for security studies in the second and third section of the chapter. First, I want to set out how the concept of governmentality also brings a particular analytics of power to security studies, one that fractures the conditions through and within which securitizing emerges. In other words, governmentality is not just about the nature of security questions that emerge – i.e., insecurities linked to conceptions of ‘life-in-motion’ – but also about a distinct analytical approach of the conditions within which they emerge.

1.

SECURITIZATION AND GOVERNMENTALITY

How does security emerge in security studies? Statements like ‘the right to security is the basic right of citizens’ or ‘security is a value in competition with other values like profit, welfare, beauty’ foreground security as something that is valued but that therefore is also in competition with or has to be balanced against other values (Wolfers 1952). Political debates about trading off and seeking an acceptable relation between security and liberty are one such example. Controversies on whether providing planetary security in light of climate change is compatible with economic growth generating welfare provisions are another. Security is also treated as something a person, society or state, for example, have, have not or have to a more or lesser degree. Here security is a property that one obtains from limiting vulnerabilities and threats. For example, in the question ‘if the security of states will be enhanced by instituting a nuclear non-proliferation regime’, security is something that states have. Security Techniques Security in relation to governmentality, however, is conceptualized differently. Security is a mechanism or technique (Foucault 2004, 111) through which insecurities are acted into being and sustained over time. Security technique refers to patchworks of professional knowledges, skills, and technologies that between them govern phenomena, like global climate change, a humanitarian crisis, arms trade, or a neighbourhood as matters of insecurity. Security is then not a given value that can be traded off against other values or a property of a neighbourhood or group of people that they can have in various degrees. It refers instead to constellations of practices, artefacts and processes through which matters of concern are problematized as insecurities. Security and insecurity are then an outcome of a process of securitization. It

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invites studying how global pandemics, for example, come into being as an object of governance by means of technologies of surveilling and reporting and collations of institutionalized knowledges (Tirado et al. 2015). Instead of a strategic analysis that identifies threats to a referent object and how best to neutralize these, security studies is then a study of processes that make some things intelligible as security issues. It is an analysis of emergence rather than of something given. Not all studies of processes of securitizing speak of security as technique. In the discipline of International Relations, the term ‘securitization’ referred in the first instance to studying security as speech acts (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). Acts of speaking security are then studied not as descriptions of insecurities out there but as performances through which insecurities are spoken into being. Like a promise comes into being by uttering a promise, security comes into being through its enunciation. Uttering ‘I promise’ brings into play a particular structure that involves a sanctioned expectation that a future action will take place. Similarly, security speech acts bring a specific ‘grammar’ to bear upon a situation. Speaking security renders phenomena into existential threats, to something which demands swift extra-ordinary actions to deal with the threat. Security as technique does not focus on speech acts, or other performative linguistic practices like language games (Fierke 1998) or claim-making, but on the work that constellations of technologies and professional knowledges do (Bigo 1996, 2002; Huysmans 2006). For example, for understanding the securitization of migration, ‘technique’ refers to how policing operations, surveillance technologies and visas are used in border controls rather than how political leaders speak of stopping floods of migrants or declare that migrants are a national security problem. The notion of technique has led to formulating compositions of security defined by a distinctive rationale – for example, how technologies and professional knowledges and skills come together into something like risk management of populations (O’Malley 1996, Lund Petersen 2012) or pre-emptive security practices (Aradau and van Munster 2007, de Goede 2012). Although security compositions can include a wide range of practices, what holds them together is a rationality that defines the securitiness of a situation, event, or development. Just like speech acts of security are defined by a generic structure of meaning – existential threats creating exceptional situations – the security compositions that emerge from practices of governmentality are defined through a rationality that makes events and histories intelligible as a specific kind of security practice or series of security happenings. A De-centring Analytics of Power In so far as governmentality is treated as generating a quite specific mode of securitizing, one that is tied in with the emergence of a government of biological life – populations, in particular – and techniques of risk management, it can take on paradigmatic qualities that allow for using it as a macro-structural concept that can be applied to multiple cases. Although such a take on governmentality is far from uncommon, the concept of technique as used here resists such an applicationist (Walters 2012, 5–6,

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110–111) or paradigmatic reading of governmentality and security. The concept of governmentality as used here implies not simply specific sets of governing practices linked to a biological understanding of populations and risk management, for example, but also requires a distinctive analysis of the conditions of emergence of these security compositions and their governmental rationality. In particular, it foregrounds a de-centring analytics of power in which security emerges from within multiplicities of forces that connect into compositions that remain in turbulence. One can speak of security as a mechanism of governing populations through risks rather than existential threats, for example, but the workings of this mode of governing are not exactly the same within the WHO and in identification technologies in welfare policies in India. Both can be read as ‘governmental management, which has populations as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism’ (Foucault 2004, 111) but they need to be understood through the singular workings that are taking place in each case and through which the governing of populations continues to emerge (Castro-Gómez 2011; Walters 2012). The concept of governmentality comes with a de-centring analytics of power that is tied in with conceptions of biological life and that differentiates the conception of power from legal-sovereign conceptions of power. Governmentality refers to a process in which life rather than law is the stake and concern that defines political struggle (Foucault 1976, 191). It is an institutional, historical, and societal set of configurations and developments in which power is exercised not by organizing obedience to law but by steering, normalizing, and optimizing flows of life including economic exchange, health relations within a neighbourhood, hygienic education for a national population, and creating a global health infrastructure aimed at reducing global mortality rates. Juridico-discursive understandings of power focus on separating illicit and licit practices, instituting mechanisms to limit and punish transgressions of a body of rules thus producing submission of people to the state, children to parents and states to supra-national bodies (Foucault 1976, 112). Security is then in this image a practice of limiting transgressions of legal, or more broadly, normative orders, enforcing obedience and thus of maintaining instituted submissions and order. Such power flows from institutional centres that enunciate norms and organize obedience. Governmentality is a form of power that functions instead by means of techniques that normalize, optimize or more generally take charge of steering life of populations or species – or, more generally as I will set out in the next section, life-in-motion. It is not modelled on enunciating laws and the institutionalization of enforcing obedience to a normative framework but works within and through multiple relations, forces, desires that are immanent to a domain. In other words, governmentality does not work upon a population from the outside but from within its pro-creative, hygienic, economic dynamics. Security takes then the form of enhancing a population’s health by means of introducing infrastructures that enhance hygienic conditions in a city, for example. We can extend such an immanent analytics of power to international politics too. For example, security governing the limitation of war in the international system does not then operate through instituting a body of international law

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and organizing a global coercive force that can impose obedience. Instead, it works through stimulating and facilitating the intertwining of life – e.g., via economic, cultural, educational exchanges – across states thus creating dependencies between people’s lives which are expected to reduce the likelihood of war between states. It allows for multiple practices of governance to emerge that enact populations that are separated by belonging to different states into a single transversal entity for whom one seeks to maximize life chances, for example. I am not arguing here that classical interdependence and regional integration theories in international studies concerned with security (Deutsch 1957) are expressions of governmentality but use this example from international politics to show how the conception of power implied in governmentality works less vertically and more transversally, flowing not from a centre but operating in a de-centred way. The forces are not security speech acts by statespersons who are considered to be particularly powerful because they hold governmental positions in the state. Forces emerge in-between the ongoing economic, cultural, educational, hygienic, procreative practices as they connect to one another and connect people and sites into ‘populations’. The forces are immanent to populations, in the sense that populations emerge from them and that the forces are part of them (such as pro-creation) and not imposed from the outside upon an existing population/entity. The population is constituted through a multiplicity of forces that remain distributed. Statistical practices, professionals of health, welfare, and policing, market economic exchanges, and technologies of registration, for example, remain distributed without layering onto one another into a hegemonic totality or an organizational centre. That does not mean that integrative forms like social organizations or states do not exist. Distributed, micro-physical forces can move such that they create centric instances, like a hospital or an international institution. Yet, the latter are not taken as the origin of power, the points from which power flows. Power moves through and emerges between the multiple instances and points. The micro-physical forces – rather than the institutional centre through which they flow – are how the conditions of emergence of security techniques are analysed (Deleuze 1986, 83). The hospital is an institutional site that is made up of various medical knowledges, technologies, architectural configurations, managerial dispositions, and so on. It is the connections and tensions between the latter that are of primary interest in understanding the workings of a hospital and the governance of health of a population. Such an analytics is not a bottom-up or micro power analysis, however. At issue is not how ‘local’ or ‘micro’ practices impact on a centre or higher power constellation. It is the interplay between the multiple forces itself that is at issue in the analytics of power. The concept of governmentality is therefore not the same as some security analyses that argue for studying ‘the everyday’ or that argue that global security governance can only be understood by analysing how the policies of global institutions are appropriated in their local sites of implementation. A micro-physical analytics of power is not an analytics of miniaturization but one that foregrounds a different type of relations, relations that are mobile and (from the point of view of centric power) non-localizable because it is the movement between them that matters

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rather than their solidification in a centre or point (Deleuze 1986, 81). In that sense one can say that from the point of view of power analyses that let power flow from a centre, governmentality implies an analytics of power that always prioritizes the outside, not in the sense of exteriority but of making that which looks like a centre or place into a non-centre or non-place. This analytics of power displaces institutional analysis (Foucault 2004, 120–121). It is not the configured institutional forms that are powerful, but the composing that is taking place between the distributed forces that run through them. Including this analytics of power within the concept of governmentality is important because it helps avoid reading the analysis of security techniques back into a state centric and international relations logic of power in which security becomes a policy and mode of governance emanating from the state or an international organization. The concept of governmentality I am drawing on here thus implies a line of thought that refuses to organize the conditions of emergence from ‘centres of power’. De-centring Security Such a de-centring of power has another implication for how security emerges in security studies. If a security technique emerges and operates within and through a multiplicity of composing forces, the analytics not only de-centres the state and global or regional organizations but also invites a de-centring of security. Security studies, like most disciplinary knowledges, tends to centre analyses on security issues and processes. For example, securitization is an analysis of the processes that turn phenomena into security questions – processes that make phenomena objects of security practices. The processes analysed are already linked to key security practices and developments from the start: such as an analysis of security speech acts, an analysis of struggles between different branches of security professionals, or the circulation of security technologies. The nexus between governmentality and security, however, opens towards a different kind of security studies in which the security technique emerges from and within a broader set of relations that enact conceptions of life and its governance. For example, in linking governmentality to the invention of population dynamics and their governance, particular security techniques, such as insurance and risk management (Ewald 1996; O’Malley 1996), emerge and operate within a domain of welfare provisions and (re)distribution that is created through the relations between economic knowledges, practices, and technologies, security technologies and knowledges, configurations of hygienic infrastructures, and so on. The security issues, rationale and practice are known through how they emerge within a broader-than-security domain; broader in the sense of a multiplicity of conjunctions and disjunctions between various knowledges, professions, encounters and technologies which enact population welfare, for example. In that sense, the analytics of power that is invested in the concept of governmentality opens towards a security studies that comes to security from outside security. Security as governmentality then, is not known through the securitization of life as such but through how inse-

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curities are enacted within a micro-physics of forces that make life intelligible as a domain of government. It is a mode of security analysis that explicitly seeks to avoid centring the interplay of forces on their securitizing work. This section introduced how thinking security in relation to governmentality comes with a distinctive conception of security as technique that differs from other conceptions of securitization. This conception of security also implies a de-centring analytics of power. It understands power as the forces that exist in the in-between of a distributed multiplicity of practices, things, knowledges and encounters rather than something that flows from a centre. It is important that this micro-physics of power remains folded into the concept of ‘security technique’ and governmentality. It will help to avoid the idea that governmentality and its security technique stand for a security configuration that takes on the form of a historical paradigm of governance that can be studied as flowing from a state, an institution or an international organisation and that can be applied across the world without concern for the multiplicity of relations through which the security technique and the government of life is enacted.

2.

SECURITY GOVERNING LIFE-IN-MOTION, NOT LIFE-UNTO-DEATH

The previous section focused on how the concept of governmentality is related to a particular conception of securitizing – security as technique – and how it is tied in with a distinctive analytics of power. Does that mean that governmentality is simply a different way of analysing any security issue that we might be interested in? Although the analytics of power it introduces will shift how to analyse the process through which any issues, events and developments become enacted as security problems, the concept also refers to a distinct set of securitizing processes. The concept of governmentality focuses on security techniques that take biological and bio-chemical conceptions of life as their defining concern. In doing so insecurities are rendered differently from security techniques that focus on protecting the territorialized state from external intervention or public order from organized crime, for example. While we can also analyse the latter through a decentring analysis of power and techniques of securitizing, governmentality is not directly concerned with governing territorial integrity or policing public order. In this and the next section, I propose to use the concept of governmentality for studying processes of securitizing in which insecurities emerge within compositions governing life-in-motion rather than life-unto-death. Its approach to life is a defining part of the security studies agenda that governmentality has opened. Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics has inspired various analyses of the governance of life. In particular, it offered the basis for analyses that explored security as techniques of population management through risk calculations (Aradau and van Munster 2007; Ewald 1996; Dean 1999, 178–197), and security techniques that govern through shaping freedom rather than trading off security against freedom (Dean 1999, 113–130; Huysmans 2004). Further, Foucault’s work on governmentality also offered the basis for analyses of the condi-

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tions of possibility of the modern, governmental state as it emerged from knowledges and techniques that distributed the living in domains of value and utility – political economies of life – rather than a politics of inter-state war and death in the domain of sovereignty (Foucault 1976, 189; Walters 2012). Instead of further detailing the security questions and processes that have been studied under the governmentality heading, I want to reflect in this section and the next on what difference it makes for security studies to focus on ‘life’ as it is conceptualized in relation to governmentality. In Foucauldian works on governmentality one often draws a distinction between sovereignty as a mode of governing through the right to kill and governmentality as governing through the optimization of life. However, I want to work through a slightly different distinction. In international politics, security is defined in terms of survival: In the case of security, the discussion is about the pursuit of freedom from threat. When this discussion is in the context of the international system, security is about the ability of states to maintain their independent identity and their functional integrity. … Its bottom line is about survival but it also reasonably includes a substantial range of concerns about the conditions of existence. (Buzan 1991, 18–19; my italics)

Although security can reference the protection of a wide range of values and ways of life, the organizing rationale or what is called ‘the bottom line’ is one of holding off death. Security is here about life, but a life thought from the spectre of death; it is life-unto-death. Governmentality works with a different conception of life. It takes life as life-in-motion. Life is conceived as consisting of ongoing flows, fluxes, or circulations. At issue is not that bodies are moving but that life exists only in movement. If it stands still, it ceases to exist. In Ingold’s phrasing: ‘It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going’ (Ingold 2011, 4). While the existentialist notion organizes security in terms of the finitude of life – life-unto-death – life-in-motion implies working with an infinity of life. The flows of life move and continue to move. It’s not the final stop or the point of origin that are important, but its continuous moving. Finite or Infinite Life Such a conception of life invites thinking security techniques not as ‘holding off the end of life’ but as working within the continuous becoming of life. Some approaches to resilience frame security partly along these lines when they seek to manage insecurities by facilitating bouncing back, adapting to and ultimately working with the idea of continuing life that is continuously in motion. For example, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) report defined resilience as follows:

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So, what is resilience? Resilience is, as the Japanese say, like bamboo, which bends under the weight of winter snow but stands tall again come springtime. It is the ability of households, communities and states – layers of society – to absorb and recover from shocks, whilst positively adapting and transforming their structures and means for living in the face of long-term stresses, change and uncertainty. (Mitchell 2013, 3)

The definition contains two different elements: (a) the experiencing of shock, which is a sudden and serious disruption, and (b) continuous transformation so living continues in the face of change and uncertainties. Although the first element – the shock – can, but does not have to, take the form of an existential threat (such as a natural disaster flooding a city), the second element, as well as the metaphorical use of the bamboo, emphasizes how security works with continuous life, with life adapting, changing. Life does not work against an external threat but folds the environmental forces into itself, shaping itself such that they become part of forest’s life itself. The bamboo does not resist the snow but makes it part of its own make up and being – including, its capacity to bend without breaking. Life-in-motion comes with a particular conception of change. Conceptions of change are important to understand differences between security techniques and how they open up matters of concern. In life-unto-death, change is produced by external forces – an inimical army, people on the move, climate change – endangering the survival of something given. Life is here enacted as retaining a bodily something by postponing its ending through the control or neutralization of external forces. Even when these forces are located as being physically internal to the body – e.g., the enemy from within – they are rendered as alien or external to the body. Note also that life-unto-death posits bodies rather than flows as the referent of life. It is bodies that are alive. When starting from bodies that are – or are at risk of – dying from the moment they are born, security becomes a question of controlling and holding off the permeation of hostile elements into the body as long as possible. When life is enacted as infinite, existing only in the continuous movement of flows in relation to one another, change happens from within the flows that materialize life. Viruses are then not an external force working upon human bodies from the outside but are flowing through them in intertwining biological flows and processes that materialize life. Life is in motion not because one life form gives way to the next but because it is in continuous transmutation, symbiosis, distribution or turbulence. Life is becoming – in which old and new continuously intertwine. In Zourabichvili’s words: ‘We do not abandon what we are to become something else (imitation, identification), but another way of living and sensing haunts or is enveloped within our own and “puts it to flight” [fait fuir]’ (Zourabichvili 2012, 149). The ‘putting to flight’ implies a conception of flows that are patterned but also always changing: the patterning is in motion itself in a way that is unpredictable but not random.1 The important point here is that when approaching life as infinite and consisting of continuous flows, change emerges from within the flows that make up life; the forces of change are immanent rather than external. Immanent is not the same as internal, however. ‘Immanence of life’ is problematized without an outside – meaning, gener-

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ated through the forces within which it emerges rather than external forces working upon it. To govern life with the aim of optimizing it is to work with biological and bio-chemical flows that materialize life as they work in relation to one another. Such a conception of life as immanent is entwined with the de-centring approach to power set out in the previous section. If life emerges and develops from flows moving in relation to one another, then we have a multiplicity of heterogenous changing practices in continuous becoming. The working of power then consists in the multiple forces exercised in the attuning, distancing, crossing of multiple movements in relation to one another. There is only an in-between movements; not a given configuration that exercises power onto an external configuration or vice versa. Life-in-motion thus fractures power; letting it emerge from the in-between of multiple and heterogenous flows of experts, knowledges, technologies, and artefacts, rather than letting it flow from a centre or from the interests and capabilities of entities that inter-act with one another. The concept of life-in-motion may sound a little abstract, but it poses quite a different problematization of insecurity from the one that security studies tend to work with.2 For example, borders and boundaries that constitute bodies by separating them from an outside are key to understanding insecurities in the international system. Governmentality points us towards security techniques that work with and upon flows – of people, microbes, goods, energy – which continuously move in relation to one another. Of course, one can argue that flows will fold onto themselves in such ways that they create something like a bounded body and so the infinity of life will then be managed also through its finitude – that is, protecting the body from hostile forces working upon it. Although such an approach is a possibility, the concept of governmentality as I introduce it here invites us to retain a focus on the flows and how distinctive modes of governing and security techniques have emerged in making life intelligible as life-in-motion. For example, drawing on a similar conception of life, Umut Ozguc (2021) has argued for understanding border walls in Israel as more fluid and continuously emerging rather than fixing a separation between inside and outside: I have argued that walls do not have stable structures. Rather, they are constituted by and constitutive of entangled lines of politics: colonizing lines, crack lines and radical lines. These lines are in constant movement, entangled with one another, turning walls into fluid meshworks. The Separation Wall example shows that those borders that seem to be governed only by disciplinary–biopolitical power cannot be simply understood as abject spaces. Rather, borders are spaces of becoming; they never settle and they never accommodate our neatly drafted narratives. (Ozguc 2021, 301)

But let us not be distracted by borders too much. For this chapter, the question raised by this take on the lineage of governmentality thought is how security is conceptualized as a technique of enacting the immanence of life-in-motion.

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Security as Conformity How to think security as a method of governing life from within rather than governing by controlling the forces of destruction working upon a bodily life from the outside? I will draw on Gros’s concept of security as conformity. Security refers to the conformity of things to themselves and the stability that follows from it (Gros 2012, 219). Unlike security as defence against external forces threatening a corporeal or organizational entity, conformity is about retaining stability in patterns between dynamics that make up a collective or systemic category (birth and death rates defining population as a statistical category, for example). Conformity is measured against a ‘defined’ state of equilibrium or a harmonious relation between flows defined as a stable or optimal pattern. The focus is thus on the immanent workings of flows in relation to one another that make up ‘the thing that is to conform to itself’. In other words, the oneself is not a person here, but a confluence of flows that enact between them a configuration like a market, a population, a planet. This immanent nature of conformity makes it different from securing an identity (such as a nation) or a territorial entity (such as a sovereign state). ‘A population’ is in that sense different from ‘a people’ if we understand the latter as referring to an ethnically, racially, or nationally defined shared identity and the former as a statistical aggregation of individuals and activities for purposes of administrating economic activity, demographic compositions, or health. In relation to conformity, the governance question is one of attuning flows such that their movement remains in relative harmony or in sufficient approximation to an equilibrium or an equation expressing a pattern of flows. For example, when governing markets in terms of equilibriums, it takes the form of steering labour and employment forces so that they flow in relation to one another in ways that remain relatively close to a defined equilibrium. The notion of attuning is well illustrated by Erin Manning in her example of seeing a metro station from the point of view of movements-moving rather than the architecture of the metro-station: As the subway doors open, a subtle anticipatory shift in posture and tonality can be felt across the platform. Where before there seemed to be a relatively simple directionality, most of it tuned toward the subway doors, now a bidirectional tendency begins to form. These two movements can be quite frantic in their co-composition, especially when in addition people are running from the just-arrived train on the other side of the platform, hoping to make it onto the one you’ve been patiently waiting for. Yet very few collisions occur. And this is with many distractions – people listening to music with their earphones, friends talking, people running to get in before the doors slam … The choreography of collective movement is made possible by the inter-relation between the intervals the movement creates and the collective capacity to cue and align to them, in the moving. Cueing is an important activity in the relational field. It is not directly tied to volition or intentionality. It happens in the moving. Although it may feel like it is individuals cueing to one another, what is actually happening is that movement is cueing to a relational ecology in the making. (Manning 2016, 119–120)

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Attuning here means that movements work in relation to one another. Security is built into these movements in the way they align themselves to one another such that they avoid some movements ending up on the subway tracks, for example. ‘Harmonious moving’ does not mean that people running badly into one another or ending up on the tracks never actually happens, but rather that it ‘generally’ does not happen. Achieving such an attuning to relative harmonious moving involves architectural layout, the habitual practice of people taking metros, warnings about how to move, announcements that time the movement, and so on. Unlike security practice that focuses on controlling hostile forces permeating a given body – for example, someone entering the metro station with an intention to kill people – security governance works upon and through the movements itself. How does insecurity emerge in relation to conformity to oneself? Insecurity arises from the turbulent nature of movement; life-in-motion exists only through the folding of order and disorder in the sense that movement is not predictable and determined but pedetic. Dissonances are inherently taking place in the attuning of movements; life in motion is always also a life in becoming as we set out above. If security techniques are linked to sustaining and optimizing a pattern of attuning that stays close to a defined equilibrium, defined pattern of harmony, or equation, then the inherent uncertainty of how the defined conformity of life to ‘itself’ is sustained and optimized in the turbulence of flows is the insecurity that needs to be governed. Not enemies but the turbulent working of the flows in relation to one another themselves is the organizing principle of these security techniques. We can speak of insecurity as fragility here to differentiate it from insecurity as threat. Insecurity then becomes a generalized unease about the possibility of the flows becoming dissonant in ways that break the relative harmony or make the equation – for example, the risk calculus – of not much value anymore. Of course, governing life-in-motion can cross over into governing life-unto-death, as the literature on necropolitics and bare life has shown (Mbembe 2019, 2003; Agamben 1998). In my understanding, however, the latter do draw security back to its existentialist meaning in which survival of life forms is central. They tend to conceptualize life mostly as embodied life (such as the welfare of a body of citizens) facing permeating forces that are also embodied (such as migrants crossing the Mediterranean) and that are endangering the delivery of an optimal or continuing state of well-being of a people’s form of life. To move from optimizing vital flows to defence and killing, they need to identify taxonomically classes of phenomena and bodies that are endangering the optimizing and protection of life. These classes are then turned into existential threats to the embodied life that needs protecting and/or optimizing. Such a reading of migration policies differs from one that seeks to show how migrations are a fact of life and its government works not by means of simply asserting externalization of migrants but by seeking to optimize migratory flows so as to obtain an optimal demographic or economic composition. They work not by blocking migration but by making it easier or more difficult, more or less lucrative, or more or less speedy for some categories of populations to move than others.

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In other words, from this point of view the policies stratify, create differences in migratory movements, and these have consequences for the people migrating, including migrants dying. However, such an understanding does not render migration primarily from the perspective of existential threat creation (such as an invasion) or the death of migrants but from the stratifying implications of how migratory movements are steered. Both practices can coexist, of course, and governmentality of migration is not – normatively speaking – necessarily better than territorial defence. It is not a question of normative preference but an analytical question of what are the compositions of migratory life that emerge from the connections between various expert knowledges, technologies, management practices, and so on. Concepts like necro-politics emphasize how a politics of life-in-motion creates a politics of destroying those who do not fit. However, the value of taking the governmentality point of view – that is, security techniques working with and through life-in-motion and conformity without folding it into a politics of death – is that it opens a series of contemporary security practices that are not immediately enacting an existentialist securitization. It helps to resist defaulting security studies back to a politics of survival.

3.

SECURITY PRACTICE AND COMPOSITIONS OF LIFE-IN-MOTION

If we follow the conception of security linked to life-in-motion, security techniques emerge within confluences of knowledge and technology that make life-in-motion and its conformity to itself actionable in governing practices. A key question that governmentality introduces for security studies is then: what security techniques materialize in relation to which compositions of life-in-motion? In this section, I will briefly introduce three compositions of life and consider how they speak to contemporary security issues with a difference: securing populations; (sub)molecular life as code in warfare; and planetary life in catastrophic turbulence. Populations The classic composition through which security is refocused from sovereignty as the play of death and survival to the distribution of vitality and value (Foucault 1976, 189) are populations and the government of their vitality (Dillon 2007). I refer to it as the ‘classical composition’ because it is the one central to Foucault’s own work on governmentality and biopolitics. The key reference points for security here are less the history and enactments of war between political entities and more the technologies, knowledges, institutions, and experts governing health, welfare, poverty and demography, among others. Populations are statistically rendered aggregations of the biological life of a collection of human beings for the purpose of managing their vitality. Populations are not defined through citizenship or nationality but through the ‘vital process of human existence’ (Rose 2001, 1). Biological, demographic, medical,

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statistical and economic knowledges, technologies and experts between them generate demographic, hygienic, and fitness techniques that steer mortality, birth, health and so on as they arise from within the flows of life in a population, including procreation, eating, and polluting. Security refers then to techniques of steering that seek to bring these flows of life in line with a healthy or optimal demography or fitness of the population. Bringing a population in conformity to one-self thus consists in creating the conditions for procreation, bacterial or viral flows, movement of bodies, and so on to move in relation to an optimal value and distribution (for example, an optimal birth rate, an optimal distribution of age categories, or a desired distribution of health for example, measured through distributions of obesity). Populations are here governed through education (waste sorting practices, for example), infrastructural works (such as introducing sewage systems, or the circulation of means of birth control through a health infrastructure) or incentivizing processes that seek to condition the flows of life into an acceptable or desired distribution. Populations are not immediately rendered as a people or a resource for the defence of the State; they are a living entity in continuous turbulence due to the flows of life (such as procreation, eating, exercising, and so on). Insecurity arises from a conception of the inherent fragility of life when left unattended. As we explained in the previous section, life-in-motion is immanently changing, not because of external factors working upon a population but because of the inherent contingency of flows of life that make up a population. The security technique that works within such a conception of life and its government, identifies factors within a population through which its fragility can be kept in bounds for the purpose of efficiency and optimization. In security studies this difference gave rise to distinguishing risks from threats (Lund Petersen 2012). Unlike threat analysis that identifies insecurities through friend/enemy binaries, risk analysis differentiates gradations of insecurity in terms of degrees of being vulnerable or propensity to create vulnerabilities within an overall population. Everything/everyone is included in risk analysis and distributed according to their distance from a measure of optimality. The distribution is a continuity of ‘more or less’ within a population but it identifies groups and localities that are significantly more at risk and/or that pose a higher risk of life moving in sub-optimal directions.3 These groups or sites then need to be governed (such as by educational efforts, income provisions, or infrastructural changes to a site) so that the population as a whole can continue to develop in an optimal direction. (Sub)molecular Life as Code A second composition of life-in-motion organizes the vitality of life and its flows through a (sub)molecular conception of life and by making life intelligible as code. This composition of life emerges from a shift in medical practice and biological knowledge from anatomical analysis of bodies through their parts and the flows and connections between the parts to an analysis of life at molecular and submolecular levels (Rose 2001; see also Inda, this volume). The change implies more than a different explanation of life – molecular rather than anatomical. In Rose’s words: ‘It

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was a reorganization of the gaze of the life sciences, their institutions, procedures, instruments, spaces of operation and forms of capitalization’ (Rose 2001, 13). DNA, sub-cellular processes controlled by a genome defined molecular biological life. They are not a chart of physical or chemical flows but exist as information and code (for example, ‘a genome is … a digital code written on the molecular structure of the chromosome’ [Rose 2001, 14]). Knowing and enacting life becomes a matter of digital coding and de-coding, and the motions of life are processes of re-combinations in complex information systems. The ‘problems of life’ emerge then within a complex adaptive system that continuously re-codes through feedback loops. Complexity arises from code being continuously in the making; not from life being chaotic or disorderly.4 For example, in their exploration of how some strategies of contemporary war work with conceptions of life as information, Dillon and Reid (2009, 75) set this out as follows: flows imply ‘a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose relations are described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to components of “information” whose continuous transmission and reception render components themselves continuously “in-formation”’. Nikolas Rose has extensively analysed how the (sub)molecular rendition of life as code has changed the governing of fitness of populations and bodies from largely working with and through steering natural flows of life (such as eating habits and procreation dynamics) to re-engineering life molecularly by recoding genetic make-up, distributing hormone altering or adjusting medication, and so on. ‘Life now appears to be open to shaping and reshaping at the molecular level: by precisely calculated interventions that prevent something from happening, alter the way something happens, make something new happen in the cellular processes themselves’ (Rose 2001, 16). As a result ‘[n]atural life can no longer serve as the ground or norm against which a politics of life is judged’ (ibid., 17). Security as conformity to and with oneself works by interfering with the coding of life itself, thus directly altering the building blocks of life. The definitions and medicalization of fitness take on specific forms like hormonal therapies and genetic engineering. The key point here is that the different technologies, knowledges, experts, and processes do not simply imply a different technology of acting upon biological life of bodies and populations but also recompose the conception of life itself from natural vitality to (sub)molecular code and in doing so change how populations and the fragility of life are enacted. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid (Dillon and Reid 2009; Dillon 2003) have shown that this composition of life-in-motion does not only operate in what seem the key areas of governmentality – such as welfare and physical and mental well-being – but also generate changes in military strategy and operations. They have looked in particular at how (sub)molecular biology and life as information and code have been incorporated into the organization of war fighting in the US in terms of network-centric warfare. Network-centric warfare implies four main changes (Dillon and Reid 2009, 116): 1. The key military unit is information networks rather than weapon platforms.

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2. Military actors or units are not taken to be independent operators but organized as part of a military ecosystem (such as a swarm) which is continuously adapting and transmutating within a turbulent battlespace. 3. Military systems are seen less as fixed organized units and more like an open organic system that is folded into a symbiotic battle environment in which the interaction between forces is informationally mediated. 4. In this military eco-system, information and the symbiosis and looping of information flows is the primary mover. They conclude that such eco-systemic organization of military operations, bodies, and dispositions, shifts security from a classical military concern with survival in the light of existential threats to a concern with emergence. This turbulence, the patterned but unpredictable nature of such a mode of warfare, is institutionalized in organizing military forces so they internalize a quasi-organic mode of operation geared towards continuous adaptation and change: ‘military thinking became an expression less of military than of biological principles: security, thus, less a matter of simple survival than continuous emergent adaptation and change in which resilience, recombination and regeneration were now most highly prized’ (Dillon and Reid 2009, 118). This analysis of how this composition of life-in-motion is inscribed into the organization of war may read like it stretches the focus on life a little too far. The biological rendition of molecular life as information and code seems to have been turned primarily into metaphors through which one reimagines war. However, if we read these developments within a governmentality lineage, as Dillon and Reid do, we should not really read them as metaphorical application but rather as a specific site and set of practices. The site and practices emerge from a dispersed interplay between experts, knowledges, and technologies that bring together molecular biology, military operations, threat analysis, information technology and conceptions of information systems derived from cybernetics into institutionalizations of distinct modes and configurations of war fighting that take the battlefield as an eco-system emerging from the infinity of life-in-motion rather than the finitude of life-unto-death. That does not mean that such military operations are less destructive – they do kill and destroy. Yet, they work through a different security technique with consequences. For example, such an understanding and organization of war fighting invites making insecurities infinite too. The eco-system is inherently turbulent which means that there is a need for adjusting continuously to try to limit dangerous developments that push the dynamics of life possibly away from optimal or equilibrium states or developments. Not only does security become continuous but it also becomes pervasive. War in this organization is not limited to a geographical theatre but enacts an eco-system in which civilian and military practices are seriously entangled – that is, operating in the same eco-system. Such arrangements of security are concerned with everything, not in the sense that they will indeed seek to govern all of life but rather that there is not really a limit to which areas of life can be drawn into the battlefield (Dillon 2003, 541).

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Planetary Life The politicization of environmental degradation and the projection of catastrophic environmental futures has introduced a third composition of life-in-motion in security studies: planetary life. Planet Earth emerges as an eco-system that sustains organic life. Global warming and other changes in ecological, geological, and meteorological processes are at first sight mainly seen as creating catastrophic conditions that existentially threaten species life, including human life. These processes also emerge as threats to the planetary eco-system as a whole, thus making the planet itself the referent object that needs protecting from dying. The planet emerges then as a totality, a complex system in which all the organic and inorganic flows and entities are interconnected. This rendering-corporeal of the planet makes it possible to posit it as an entity that needs protecting, in particular from humans. Planetary life is then composed as life-unto-death, as facing an existential crisis, mostly as a result of particular human activities. However, planetary life has also been composed differently; not as a quasi-corporeal entity that is dying but as life-in-motion, as turbulent entanglings of organic and inorganic flows – such as photosynthesis, winds, maritime streams, human movement, trade relations and so on. I speak of turbulence and entangling to express that the way these movements work in relation to one another do not add up to a functioning systemic whole. Planetary life emerges from how some flows are coded into models so as to have an understanding of how changes in certain variables change the patternings of a complex set of connections but never a total set of flows that come to stand for planetary life as a whole. The challenge that planetary life as life-in-motion poses is therefore ‘how to speak about the Earth without taking it to be an already composed whole, without adding to it a coherence that it lacks’ and how to keep it from becoming simply a system of unanimated physical and chemical compositions and flows upon which animated beings, in particular humans, act (Latour 2017, 95)? It asks for following connections (such as between deforestations, atmospheric changes, movement of certain species …) rather than accounting for connections from within a vision of a planetary whole. Earthly life as emergent life, or life-in-motion, exists in multiplicities of connections and not in the corporeality of a single planet. Such an enactment of planetary life recomposes the relation between organisms and their environment through continuous moves of folding. Their relation is one in which organisms bend the environment around themselves. In doing so, they also bend their relation to other organisms upon which they depend. In the flows of matter and life, organisms thus continuously arrange themselves and their environment while also being continuously arranged by other organisms that are also bending their environment around themselves. Planetary life is then in continuous becoming, never simply a given composition that exists externally to organisms. In so far as planetary life stands for such compositions of life, it raises questions about whether conformity to oneself governed by optimizing the internal and external environment is at all possible. All the organisms are actively busy bending their environment around themselves but in doing so are also changing what this environment is so that

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each of them bends around themselves when and as they are part of the environment of each other. Planetary life is then quite a mess that does not move in relation to a calculable equilibrium or equation. ‘What one obtains instead are opportunities, chances, feedback loops, noise, and … history’ (Latour 2017, 104). How then does insecurity emerge in this composition if it is not survival of the planet or conformity to an optimal global eco-state of equilibrium or stable change (for example, measured in relation to the parameters defining life in the Holocene, which then is rendered as a relatively stable period in which humanity and the planet flourished [Dalby 2018, 529–530])? One way of exploring this is to see how security techniques enact the apocalyptic, but a quite particular conception of the apocalyptic (Latour 2015, ch. 6). It is not the apocalypse as the total collapse of earthly life in the (near) future which demands us to take action now. Rather it works on the basis of accepting that the apocalypse is and has been happening for a while; the contemporary is not before or after the apocalypse, but life is apocalyptic in the sense that it is turbulent, without certainty. When conceptualizing planetary life as a single system and an optimal state of being, security can become a technique of resilience, of inserting conditions and dispositions that allow for bouncing back to a stable, non-apocalyptic planetary life or facilitate non-disruptive changes. However, if planetary life is anti-systemic – meaning there is no totality – then security as the continuation of planetary life shifts from a question of creating conformity to a planetary state of relative equilibrium or of protecting something-that-is from destruction to techniques of recomposing earthliness in ways that work multiplicities of dependencies between organisms and the entangling of organic and non-organic flows. I am not sure if security is still the right concept here to articulate such techniques of composing aimed at continuing earthly life-in-motion and multiplicity. The fragility of life turns here into an affirmative creative force of opportunities and chances of recomposition rather than something that can and/or needs to be controlled through resilient governance. The main question I want to conclude with for this section, however, is not simply if we have reached the limit of the governmentally-security nexus here but also how thinking planetary life as life-in-motion within lineages of governmentality draws attention to whether and how knowledges, claims, technologies, and expertise are composing planetary life as a question of insecurity and whether they indeed generate compositions of earthly-life-in-motion that complicate falling back on techniques of either planet survival or conformity to a planetary self.

4. CONCLUSION This chapter set out three key elements of how governmentality lets security emerge in security studies. The first section introduced its distinctive approach to securitization, the process through which phenomena, histories, and situations are enacted as matters of security concern. It reads security as techniques of governing that emerge and operate within heterogenous compositions of multiple knowledges,

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technologies, and experts. Governmentality thus implies a de-centring power analytics. The second section changed focus from how governmentality analytically approaches the process and conditions of the emergence of insecurity, to how it introduces a distinctive understanding of what security is about. Security is about governing biologically rendered life. However, life is not taken as life-unto-death but as life-in-motion. Governmentality thus opens towards an approach to security studies that takes conformity to oneself instead of survival as its bottom-line. It looks at techniques of working conformity to an equilibrium, optimal state of development, and so on within an understanding of life made up of multiple flows in turbulence. The final section briefly explored one of the analytical questions that the category of governmentality raises for security studies: how security techniques emerge from within different compositions of life-in-motion. The section introduced three such compositions: populations, molecular life as code, and planetary life. Overall, the chapter proposes that the category of governmentality implies a distinctive analytic of (in)security that works by combining the three components set out in the sections: a de-centring power analytics of security techniques, governing life as life-in-motion, and specific compositions of life-in-motion within which security techniques emerge. Although this understanding is derived from existing research on governmentality and security, the literature will not always neatly map onto how governmentality is worked here. The main aim of the chapter has been to invest the category of governmentality with a set of distinctive analytical moves in security studies that allow us to understand how insecurities are enacted and governed in domains of practice that define life in continuous motion and becoming rather than as corporeal life that is dying.

NOTES 1.

One speaks of pedesis or stochastic conceptions of change; change that is neither random nor predictable (Nail 2018, 252–254; 2019, 58–60). 2. For an excellent discussion of how different conceptions of movement are linked to different ways of understanding security (and politics), see Aradau (2016). 3. On how ‘being at risk’ can also mean ‘being a risk’, see Aradau (2004). 4. For a more extensive explanation of the molecuralization of life, life as code, and the connection to theories of communication and information (especially, the development of cybernetics) in lineages of governmentality thought, see Rose (2001) and Dillon and Reid (2009, 55–77).

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Aradau, Claudia (2016), ‘Political grammars of mobility, security and subjectivity’, Mobilities, 11(4), 564–574. Aradau, Claudia and van Munster, Rens (2007), ‘Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 89–115. Bigo, Didier (1996), Polices en réseaux: L’expérience Européenne, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Bigo, Didier (2000), ‘When two become one: Internal and external securitizations in Europe’, in Morten Kelstrup and Michael C. Williams (eds), International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, Security and Community, London: Routledge, pp. 171–204. Bigo, Didier (2002), ‘Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease’, Alternatives, 27 (Special Issue), 63–92. Buzan, Barry (1991), People, States & Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd edition, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Ole, and de Wilde, Jaap (1998), Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Castro-Gómez, Santiago (2011), ‘Michel Foucault: colonialism et géopolitique’, in Marc Maesschalck and Alain Loute (eds), Nouvelle critique sociale, Europe – Amérique Latine, Aller – Retour, Monza: Polimetrica. Dalby, Simon (2018), ‘Environmental change’, in Paul D. Williams and Matt McDonald (eds), Security Studies: An Introduction, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 526–540. de Goede, Marieke (2012), Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, Mitchell (1999), Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage. Deleuze, Gilles (1986), Foucault, Paris: Les éditions de minuit. Deutsch, Karl (1957), Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dillon, Michael (2003), ‘Virtual security: A life science of (dis)order’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32(3), 531–558. Dillon, Michael (2007), ‘Governing terror: The state of emergency of biopolitical emergence’, International Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–28. Dillon, Michael and Reid, Julian (2009), The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live, Abingdon: Routledge. Ewald, François (1996), Histoire de l’État providence, Paris: Grasset. Fierke, Karin (1998), Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foucault, Michel (1976), Histoire de la sexualité, Vol. 1. La volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel (2004), Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France 1977–1978, Paris: Gallimard Seuil. Gros, Frédéric (2012), Le principe sécurité, Paris: Gallimard. Huysmans, Jef (2004), ‘A Foucaultian view on spill-over: Freedom and security in the EU’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 7(3), 294–318. Huysmans, Jef (2006), The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim (2011), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno (2015), Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique, Paris: La Découverte. Latour, Bruno (2017), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Porter, C. (trans.), Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Lund Petersen, Karen (2012), ‘Risk analysis: A field within security studies?’, European Journal of International Relations, 18(4), 693–717. Manning, Erin (2016), The Minor Gesture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille (2003), ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. Mbembe, Achille (2019), Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Andrew (2013), Risk and Resilience: From Good Idea to Good Practice. A Scoping Study for the Experts Group on Risk and Resilience, Paris: OECD. Nail, Thomas (2018), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nail, Thomas (2019), Being and Motion, New York: Oxford University Press. O’Malley, Pat (1996), ‘Risk and responsibility’, in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason, London: UCL Press, pp. 189–207. Ozguc, Umut (2021), ‘Rethinking border walls as fluid meshworks’, Security Dialogue, 52(4), 287–305. Rose, Nikolas (2001), ‘The politics of life itself’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 1–30. Tirado, Francisco, Gomez, Andrés, and Rocamora, Veronica (2015), ‘The global condition of epidemics: Panoramas in A(H1N1) influenza and their consequences for One World One Health programme’, Social Science & Medicine, 129, 113–122. Wæver, Ole (1995), ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.), On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 46–86. Walters, William (2012), Governmentality: Critical Encounters, Abingdon: Routledge. Wolfers, Arnold (1952), ‘National security as an ambiguous symbol’, Political Science Quarterly, 67(4), 481–502. Zourabichvili, François (2012), Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event; together with ‘The Vocabulary of Deleuze’, Aarons, K. (trans.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

11. Secrecy beyond the state: governmentality, security and truth effects Susanne Krasmann

While Simmel’s sociology remains an indispensable source for our understanding of phenomena of secrecy today, Foucault’s work, and in particular his studies of governmentalities, have not so far played much of a role in this field of research (for an exception, see Walters 2015). This may seem unsurprising, as Foucault was critical of ‘the state’ and the idea that secrecy is what constitutes ‘state power’. Nonetheless, that lack of attention is indeed surprising as a focus on technologies of government provides us with some insightful analytical tools to capture how secrecy shapes the relationship between state and citizen. Political secrecy is an integral part of security, but also considered adverse to the ideals of liberal democracies and related values such as transparency accountability and participation. Yet, a governmentality perspective allows us to see how governors and the governed come to be entangled in practices of secrecy; how, for example, public attention is guided by the belief in the existence, or the aspired revelation, of a secret. As Foucault observed, the idea of the secret has also formed the relationship of the modern subject to itself, notably in the concern with its true inner self that must be revealed and brought to light. By bringing Simmel’s sociology of secrecy into dialogue with a governmentality perspective, this chapter will elaborate how secrecy deploys its own force and yields effects ‘in the real’. Furthermore, if secrecy is complicit with security, this is also in the sense that both share the moment of the unknown, of uncertainty and instability, even of shaking sovereignty. Secrecy and security may be tools of power but at the same time, they notoriously elude domination. Finally, the notion of dispositifs allows us to capture how the population is involved in security matters. Rather than operating through secrecy and merely dealing with the unknown, security establishes certain regimes of intelligibility that make the population a constitutive part of it. Governing people, however, also means that there are always counter forces at work that both foster and challenge power.

NO SECRETS There is no ‘secret’ to be wrested from the state, Michel Foucault (2008) writes to counter a common view of the state and a misguided way of critiquing it. The state has no ‘interior’, no ‘heart’ that would essentially designate ‘what it is’. It ‘is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of mobile governmentalities’ (77–78). At the end of the 1970s, when Foucault (2007, 2008) delivers his lectures on the genealogy 208

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of government, this reading of the state is still a provocation – for political theory in general and for a Marxist tradition of critique in particular – since they are both focused on the figure of the sovereign and a corresponding idea of power. Power presumably operates through the law, through containment, prohibition or repression (see Foucault 1980, 121), while the state appears as the primary ‘source of power’ (Foucault 2008, 77) with an ‘intrinsic’ tendency to expand (ibid., 187). This is what Foucault calls ‘state-phobia’: an ‘anxiety about the state’ (ibid., 76–77), which, to be sure, is sustained by the historical experience of totalitarianism, tyranny and despotism but also by a particular logic secrecy is renowned for, as it creates suspicion. It is a critical stance that tends to ignore the much more subtle, and pervasive, mechanisms of power that govern the subject through incentives or promises such as political participation, recognition and freedom. Similarly, Foucault was sceptical about the social movements of the 1970s assuming that power works on the basis of repressing our desires. In their obsession with the idea of ‘sex’ and ‘the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of confessions from a shadow’, the movements overlooked how they only followed power’s path, in the ‘[belief] that our “liberation” is in the balance’ (Foucault 1978, 159). Power and freedom are not antipodes. Rather, freedom, as a ‘field of possibilities’, is a source of power (Foucault 1982, 789), and government an art of involving the subject, of persuading it to even enthusiastically submit to the exigencies of power. Criticizing the idea of a hidden truth or secret to be revealed does not mean denying the importance of truth in political life and as a topic of research; far from it. One of the main concerns that drove Foucault’s thinking was the relationship of the modern subject to truth: how it constitutes itself and is constituted through different practices of truth-telling (Foucault 2014); how truth could assert itself as an indispensable ground of our being and self-understanding, and in this sense as an appealing ‘force’ (Vogelmann 2014, 1073); how we aspire to find our true inner self which, echoing a Christian and Freudian tradition, becomes palpable in rituals of confession (Foucault 1993); but also how people dare to speak truth to power and become political subjects (Foucault 2010), how, in other words, an act of ‘free spokenness’, or parrhēsia, can strike a chord with the political concerns of one’s time (Foucault 2011; Walters 2014). There is, of course, no easy access to the truth. First of all, nobody is in a position to say that something is universally and unquestionably true: if this were the case there would be no need to say it (see Colebrook 2004, 166). Truth is contested, and it must be open to contestation, which is what constitutes its political force (Vogelmann 2014). The truth must be established, and whether something is considered true cannot be separated from the historical forms of knowledge and modes of thinking, the episteme. It depends on the techniques and procedures of knowledge gathering that count as reliable in particular institutional contexts; on the established mechanisms of recognizing what is a true or false statement, including the status of the speaker; and not least on the prevalent discourses that determine or shape what is sayable and thinkable at a certain moment in time. It is in this sense that there is no truth outside of power, which is why Foucault speaks of regimes of truth (Foucault

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1977; Lorenzini 2015). Although truth can never be reduced to power (Flatscher and Seitz 2018, 23), there is something we argue about, struggle or fight for, and there are forces that reach us, something takes shape as we try to decipher and put into words what has happened to us. If revealing a secret means that we expect a certain truth to arise, secrecy and truth, we could hold, share precisely this: that we cannot possess the truth, or the secret, but only grasp them in the moment of their surfacing and in the particular shape of their appearance.1 There is, in this sense, nothing ‘behind’ the curtain (Veyne 1997, 169). Moreover, speaking the truth and divulging a secret yield specific effects. They may trigger emotions and feelings, not only of surprise, anxiety or shock as we learn something entirely new and begin to see things differently; they may also establish and transform relationships, as secrecy binds people together, but also moves them away from each other. Georg Simmel was one of the first sociologists to extrapolate the specific logic of secrecy that deploys its own social life. Secrecy, Simmel (1906, 462) famously contended, ‘is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity. [… It] secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world, and the latter is most strenuously affected by the former’. Let us then first explore how Simmel’s sociology of secrecy connects to a Foucauldian perspective on truth speaking.

THE CHARM OF SECRECY – AND THE TRUTH EFFECTS OF SPEAKING THE TRUTH The secret, according to Simmel (1906, 449), is what is willingly concealed. It is not the information, the content itself, that turns something into a secret (such as the information gathered by a spy), but the fact that we designate it as such (that is, that we deem the information to be important). This is why we hide something from the view or knowledge of others and keep it for ourselves – but might also be tempted to divulge the secret. Precisely because we consider the secret a treasure that we guard and are excited to possess, it also induces us to share it: we enjoy deciding whom to involve, the moment of insinuating that there is a secret and of seeing others keen to be let in on it. To share or reveal the secret does not mean that it just evaporates. On the contrary, it may enhance its force and increase its value, ‘just as the moment of the disappearance of an object brings out the feeling of its value in the most intense degree’. This is what Simmel (1906, 465) calls the ‘charm’ of secrecy. Secrecy attracts attention and arouses curiosity or suspicion, and it makes a difference. It involves and it excludes people by establishing distinctions between those who are in the know and those who are not. To produce a ‘second world’ of people who believe in its existence, the secret must not necessarily have a content. It may be empty. Those who are assigned to guard a secret (such as the spy who is chasing the secret in foreign countries, or the voyeur observing clandestine habits), might not know anything further about the secret’s supposed content but while participating in these practices, they contribute to reinforcing secrecy (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987,

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287–288). Secrecy produces its own reality, it brings about certain practices, figures and spaces, such as archives, secret societies or secret services, it incites emotions, and, notably, it creates a division between what seems to be obvious, evident or visible, and what is presumably hidden. Secrecy also produces truth effects, as it constitutes and shapes political subjectivities. Secrecy is vital for social life, and in this sense, it is entirely mundane. In an imagined world without secrets, there would be no confidentiality but also no sincerity, no confidence but also no excitement; there would be no tension in anticipation of what might be beneath the surface of appearance and no curiosity about what might be discovered in the world. It would be a disillusioned world, but it could also be ‘totalitarian’ if everything must be laid open (Derrida 2001, 59). For Jacques Derrida, the ‘absolute secret’ designates the structural limits of what is sayable: the unpalatable, ‘non-sharable’ (57), which deserves to be appreciated. It is not the unknown that remains to be discovered but the singular that cannot be captured by language. There will in this sense ‘always be something secret’ (Birchall 2011, 146), something that withdraws from a captivating will to know. Hence, to cherish ‘a taste for the secret’ (Derrida 2001) is also a tribute to what eludes power. In Foucault, in a way, we find both the complementary and reverse perspective (to Simmel and to Derrida), as time and again he points us to the truth effects of speaking the truth. If truth is what constitutes the modern subject (Foucault 2005) and, within a particular juridico-political regime of knowledge (Brion and Harcourt 2014, 297), is ‘effectuated through the subject’ (see Vogelmann 2014, 1073), there are, nonetheless, different modes of speaking the truth. Different forms of veridiction come along with different forms of constraints. Whereas individuals within the psychiatric institution or the juridical system, for example, are compelled to subject themselves to a regime of professional knowledge (of the delinquent or the mad person, for instance), we expect the resistant subject to speak of their own accord. Yet avowal is at play in any of these modes. In his lectures on Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, Foucault (2014) designates avowal as a form of binding the subject to the truth that he or she ‘verbalizes’ (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2018, 74). Avowal involves attachment to what I affirm to be in the moment of speaking and to how I envision myself in relation to others in the future, and it involves commitment to the truth that I speak out and that I promise to stick to in order to make it come true. Avowal is not just a ‘declaration’ of what is; and it is more than a ‘promise’ (‘I will be truthful’), since, whether sincere or not, the promise does not follow the logic of true or false (Foucault 2014, 15–16). The ‘avowal ties the subject to what he affirms’ (ibid.), in a double direction: to what it thinks is (now) the case or what it has done (in the past) and to what it claims or concedes should be the case in the future. Hence, avowal not only requires one to be sincere about what one states, it also involves a potential: speaking the truth makes a difference (ibid., 17). The statement asserts and at the same time changes the truth that has been enunciated. It constitutes the subject in its uniqueness while also being bound to the context of speaking, and it enacts a truth that will be the case in the future.

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The criminal and even the mad person – these are Foucault’s examples – are susceptible to change once the truth is out about their deeds or their state of mind. This is a precondition for it to ‘no longer be so’ (Foucault 2014, 12), and this is why avowal, even if obtained in a compulsory setting, must be invoked in such a way that it can be ‘considered free’ (ibid., 16). It must be ensured that the inmate realizes, or at least accepts, that he or she is mad so as to be cured. Avowal follows the ‘idea that to speak the truth about something annuls, erases, or wards off this very truth (my soul is cleansed or whitened if it avows its darkness)’ (ibid., 13–14). So to say: I am different now that I’ve affirmed the truth about what I’ve done or who I am. While avowal is ‘a ritual of discourse’ where the subject who speaks is supposed to be the subject that is addressed, from this moment onwards, the courageous act, following the ancient practice of parrhēsia – of ‘voicing an uncomfortable truth’ – (Walters 2014, 279; see also Weiskopf, this volume) is to say the opinion or belief one already has (Brion and Harcourt 2014, 302–303). Nonetheless, both avowal and parrhēsia share the moment of commitment as well as of transformation. The parrhesiast who exposes herself changes the relationship to the subject of power and to herself. It risks being hurt but also to hurt. Speaking the truth, in this sense, always comes ‘at a certain cost’ (Foucault 2014, 15; see also 2010, 56). It is a form of enactment, of introducing something new to the world for which the subject who speaks stands. Truth, in this sense, always happens on the surface, it needs to be enacted and the enactment produces its own truth effects (Krasmann 2019). Connecting these insights to the logics of secrecy, as elaborated by Simmel, directs our attention to the moment when secrecy occurs. Secrecy that surfaces, typically, does not reveal its secret but rather exposes itself. It creates attention as it indicates that it exists, or as Derrida (1994) puts it: ‘“the secret of the secret” is that it makes one of itself’ (246). Secrecy does not tell us what but that we do not know (see Gilbert 2007, 26), which is how it deploys its force. Exposure, to be sure, always involves a risk, it is to expose one’s vulnerability (Hentschel and Krasmann 2020). Secrecy leaves its traces as it causes public outrage in the moment of its revealing, as it forces, for example, the administration to break with certain dirty practices, and as from then onwards it forms part of a collective narrative: ‘A told secret is perhaps simply “un-secret” in the same way that vampires are described as “un-dead”’ (Birchall 2011, 145). To comprehend its logic, then, is first of all to analyse ‘how secrecy occurs’ (Stampnitzky 2020, 601) and thus to examine its manifold mechanisms of presenting itself, of affecting people and of creating realities. It means to look at the moments when secrecy makes its public appearance: whether it is gradually leaked, indicated, divulged, or rather abruptly revealed, publicly announced and staged, for example, and how these temporal modes of communication affect and trigger public emotions but also fail to do so when they encounter public ignorance; how attention, curiosity and interest are raised and maintained; and, not least, how the new information is received, interpreted, comprehended and perhaps contested and with what political consequences. As Lisa Stampnitzky points out, the process of exposure implies two components: the moment of revelation, that is, an ‘uncovering of hidden information’

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(2020, 598) or pretending to do so, and the ‘collective recognition that something new has come to be publicly known’ (2020, 601). Exposure requires and creates a resonance (Hentschel and Krasmann 2020). While Simmel still assumed that, somehow, we can possess the secret, that we can decide when and how to divulge it and to whom, his account of secrecy as a form that happens between people and constitutes social relations also suggests that secrecy is notoriously elusive. Notably, it is ‘the obvious world’ that is affected by the ‘second world’ that it produces (Simmel 1906, 462). Similarly, speaking in Foucault’s terms of governing through secrecy, as that which shapes subjectivities and somehow involves the subject, challenges the traditional understanding of state secrecy as something owed to and under control of sovereign power. Secrecy escapes ‘sovereign mastery’ (Lundborg 2021, 6).

GOVERNING THROUGH SECRECY Within the logic of sovereign power, secrecy appears as the necessary exception understood in Carl Schmitt’s (2005) sense: while the exception is what allows for the law and its norms to eventually assert themselves, secrecy is what ‘serves to protect and stabilize the state’ (Horn 2011, 106; Lundberg 2021, 4). Secrecy is considered an indispensable element of diplomacy, and a precondition for security.2 For example, to combat a terrorist threat, the state’s tactics and strategies and, most importantly, the intelligence gathered must be kept secret, and remain unknown to the enemy – and thus also to the public. Within a liberal order, however, secrecy seems to come into conflict with the ideals of transparency, openness, participation and accountability. Indeed, as Eva Horn (2011, 108) contends, ‘political secrecy opens up a discretionary space for actions […] that will not have to be justified since, ideally, they will never be known or discussed’. If secret spaces, ‘withdrawn or exempt from public control and debate’ (ibid.) give room to ‘violence, corruption and oppression’ (ibid., 106), suspicion, even if reinvigorating state-phobia, only appears as a rational response. It takes the liberal assurance of transparency and political participation at face value as it sees the promises of enlightened government and the rule of law, of the humane and fair treatment of people, including the enemy, betrayed under the auspices of secrecy. Secrecy, transparency and suspicion in this sense are not just opposites but rather mutually related. They literally correspond to each other (Birchall 2011; Horn 2011). The existence of ‘deep secrets’ (Pozen, 2010) that the public is not even aware of, and which will perhaps never be known in history, is conceivable, though it is by definition difficult to prove. If empirical evidence tells us that it seems to be a rare phenomenon,3 this is also endemic of the logics of secrecy: as that which constitutes itself through the act of designating something as a secret. As Michael Taussig (1999, 58) observes: ‘“true secrecy” is a virtual impossibility outside of the considerable powers of fantasy’. The idea that state secrets can successfully be caged or contained and thus be kept from the public is part of the early modern doctrine of the ‘arcana

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imperii’ that considered secrecy a legitimate element of government (Horn 2011, 104). Today, by contrast, we might rather hold that absolute secrecy, thus understood, is highly implausible precisely because in liberal societies ‘it is a very public issue’. ‘The more secrets, and the deeper they are kept’, Mark Fenster (2014, 360) argues, the higher become the political costs of keeping them. This, to be sure, does not mean that transparency is on the rise. Taking the logic of secrecy seriously, rather, suggests looking at the instances of its ‘secretion’ and its counterintuitive effects: the moments where secrecy insinuates itself or ‘oozes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 287; see also Seigworth and Tiessen 2012) and when it is prepared to tell us something other than its secret itself. For example, the labels ‘black site’ or ‘ghost detainee’ were infamously disseminated in the combat of terrorism after the 9/11 terror attacks. While they appear to ‘deny their own existence’ (Birchall 2011, 144–145), they openly signified the existence and threat of horrible practices of illegal abduction, mistreatment and torture. The juxtaposition in the common imaginary of secrecy between concealing and revealing, secrecy and transparency, is utterly misleading.4 There is, in this sense, no sovereign position from where to master secrecy’s game; but there are modes of governing through secrecy, and thus of modelling possibilities, without public opinion necessarily following that political rationale (see Kearns 2016, 280). Political secrecy, for example, does not always – or not always primarily – aim at keeping a secret. Divulging a secret on the quiet is as much part of secrecy as the targeted leaking of information that appeals to public attention or attends to the demand of being transparent. To lay security practices, at least partly open – as happened with the drone programme to combat terrorism in the US after 9/11 (Krasmann 2012) – may be a concession to what is already publicly known or a strategic move to align them with certain legal requirements while still keeping essential decision procedures dark. More often than not, governmental programmes are publicly known and unknown at the same time (Walters 2015), where secrecy shapes and may even encourage the appearance of secretive practices in the public sphere (see Krasmann 2019, 694). It affects the ‘obvious world’ (Simmel 1906) as it provides a regime of knowability where certain indicators, such as a devastated landscape and the remnants of a supposed drone strike become conspicuous signs or obscure traces of concealed practices that are now readable and exposed to contestation (Kearns 2017; Weizman 2010); or, for instance, where the images of the orange-suited and muted detainees behind the fences of Guantánamo conspicuously speak of a political regime that seeks to regain control over its enemy (Carney 2015). Furthermore, secrets that are empty may be produced while apparently being unveiled. A well-known example is Colin Powell’s appearance at the United Nations in 2003, as Secretary of State in charge of mobilizing the audience and the wider public in support of a military intervention in Iraq. Without any positive evidence of some activity indicating nuclear or chemical armament, the difficult task that needed to be managed was to prove ‘the absence of efforts of Iraq to disarm’ (Zarefsky 2007, 281) and thus to conclude that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction that would warrant a concerted intervention. It was Powell’s general credibility as a cautious politician and the rhetoric of his speech, the authority of the Security

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Council as an unrivaled political venue, and, notably, the spectacular presentation of satellite images allegedly showing decontamination vehicles or chemical munition bunkers that contributed to convincing the public. For a long time, it was not quite clear whether Powell himself was aware that he was presenting false information or whether he had just been misled by faulty intelligence. Either way, the enactment itself, playing out in plain public sight, eventually produced a secret, one that could hide itself in the spotlight of the seemingly obvious.5 We may imagine secrets leaking to the public that go entirely unnoticed or else, meet complete indifference. Secrets may be weak. This was not the case when the images of Abu Ghraib that surfaced in 2004 caused public outrage as they brought brutally to light what had already been aired – the existence of a systematic practice of torture that had been legally approved and politically authorized by the US administration. In 2010 it was the video footage called ‘collateral murder’, demonstrating how an unconcerned journalist and several more civilians were killed by a strike from a US Army Apache helicopter in 2007, that made its public appearance on the Wikileaks platform and incited the protest and further investigations by international civil rights organizations of the practice of targeted killing. The revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013, to cite a final well-known example, brought a hitherto unknown extent of secret surveillance by the NSA and allied intelligence agencies to the awareness of a wider public. Each of these revelations can be called events as they resonated not only with a certain public receptiveness and brought to public attention what had already been knowable to a certain degree, but also triggered ‘a collective transformation of meaning’ (Stampnitzky 2020, 598). They formed a political subjectivity, and thus sparked their truth effects, in a new collective understanding of what is the case and what should be rejected or dealt with differently in the future. How then does secrecy go together with security dispositifs, and shape political subjectivities?

SECRECY AND SECURITY DISPOSITIFS According to Foucault, security dispositifs emerge at the moment in modern history when the population takes centre stage in the ‘art of government’. The technique of statistics is key to understanding this shift in focus, as it renders the population visible as a biological and social being that displays its own regularities and allows for measuring the mass effects of aggregate individual behaviour. This is the moment of realizing that the population ‘escapes the sovereign’s voluntarist and direct action in the form of the law’ (Foucault 2007, 71), as well as the disciplinarian intent of meticulous regulation through prescriptions. As an art of government, security cares about ‘the right disposition of things’ (Foucault 2007, 96, referencing La Perrière; see also 45–9). While bearing in mind ‘precisely what might happen’ (ibid., 20), it has to take into account how ‘a number of material givens’ interact (ibid., 19) – ranging from the weather or climate, to economic resources or infrastructures to cultural codes that shape the behaviour of people. Hence, security operates on four

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levels: first, it is concerned with the ‘materiality’ (ibid., 21) of certain forces to be calculated with. Second, it works within ‘reality’ (ibid., 18) as that which is rendered accessible through certain forms of knowledge: the population does not precede the governmental gaze, but ‘is a datum that depends on a series of variables’ (ibid., 71). Third, security introduces the possible, it is ‘a series of possible events’ (ibid., 20) that form the vanishing point of intervention. Where disciplinarian power, in a way, knows no secret as it regulates the normative order it has itself produced (see Robertson 1999, 25–39), security braces for uncertainty as it faces ‘a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable’ (Foucault 2007, 20). The future may be anticipatable, predictable and imaginable, but it cannot be seized. What is at stake is a living milieu (see Chandler 2013, 211), both in an artificial sense of factors to be counted in and in a bio-political sense of life being at stake, that can be rendered knowable but not be fully captured by knowledge. Security dispositifs, finally, also open up a space for ‘speculative thinking’ (O’Grady 2013), as we try to get ‘the components of reality to work in relation to each other’ (Foucault 2007, 18) and to imagine the worst possible outcome of their interaction. However, there is a limit to speculation. A ‘culture of fear’ may be an integral part of liberal government: where our freedom, or the freedom of the market, must be defended, security mechanisms are imperative. The ‘stimulation of the fear of danger’, Foucault (2008, 66–7) maintains, is ‘the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism’. Sovereign power and liberal government, we may conclude, perfectly interact where secrecy is made the correlate of security. As security matters are couched in terms of the unknown, even the secret, that is to be feared – the enemy that lures, the threat that may turn out to be disastrous – citizens come to be entangled, also affectively, in the appeal to be aware or vigilant, or just to trust in the need for certain security measures (see Walters 2021, 13–14). At the same time, however, security is owed to an art of economic government that reserves its space to decide where and when to intervene and which dangers to neglect. Moreover, as a form of problematization, it is bound to matters of concern. Problematizations are not arbitrary, they appear at a certain moment in history and are driven by the experience of ‘a concrete situation which is real’ (Foucault 2001, 172; see also Flatscher and Seitz 2018, 24–25). Such situations may be an epidemic that is triggered by a new type of virus that challenges established practices of dealing with disease, a terror attack seemingly displaying a new dimension of incalculability or threat, or an economic crisis that proves a common practice, theory or technology of governing the market to be disastrous or obviously limited. Problematizations bring a hitherto ‘unproblematic field of experience’ to ethical and political attention – they name a problem, and they entail a moment of ‘creation’ (Foucault 2001, 172). As they render a problem in a particular manner visible (reality) and related measures to remedy it plausible or urgent, they facilitate establishing new fields of intervention. They allow, in other words, for a rationality to be established while pointing to a reality that exists (the materialization of the problem) but needs to be acted upon in order to modulate it (the possible). Problematizations, eventually, induce ‘effects in the real’ (Foucault 1991, 81), they establish new realities, new forms of

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visibility and modes of thinking as well as practices of dealing with what seems to be the case – including the corresponding objects that thus materialize, such as the figure of the delinquent that helped criminology to establish as a scientific discipline (Foucault, 1988) or of the ‘endangerer’ that demarcates the nature of contemporary terrorist threats (Krasmann, 2010). In this instance, we may find ourselves reminded of the notion of truth-telling that covers both the reference to something ‘real’ that is actually there – the subject states what is – and the creative moment of enactment that brings that very subject and the truth it claims simultaneously into being. Despite their differences, a striking resemblance between the logics of security and of secrecy can be discerned as both are concerned with uncertain knowledge and might incite conjecture. While security faces the fact of an unknown, and possibly threatening, future, secrecy produces its own object, which it conceals and thus renders unknown. And while secrecy confers a ‘peculiar aura […] upon its objects’ (Walters 2015, 289), which makes for feelings of curiosity or excitement, it finds its counterpart in security that refers to our vulnerability and makes us susceptible to feelings such as fear. The relationship that secrecy and security entertain with subjectivities, we may conclude, is an affective one. Furthermore, like security, which is also owed to the rationale of economic government, political secrecy comes at a certain cost. Where security is a vehicle to contain the autonomy of liberal forces and to introduce measures of control, too much yielding to an unknown and presumably threatening future risks turning liberalism illiberal (Opitz 2011). And where secrecy is deemed indispensable for diplomacy and security, it may also turn out to be disastrous when it allows authorities to be corrupted and to deceive the public. There is one more analogy: the secret may be empty, virtually the pure effect of practices of secrecy, of concealing and insinuating. As an illusion, it nonetheless generates its own realities of people who believe in it and institutions that benefit from its existence. Secrecy creates its audience and its followers but may also cause outrage if proven to be misleading. If we conceive of security as a dispositif – that is, as an ensemble of heterogeneous forms of knowledge and practices that become strategically interlinked in the government of security (Krasmann 2012, 667) – we may begin to understand that security’s secret, in a way, is also empty. Seeking the public’s approval for security measures is dispensable to the extent that the addressee, the population, is always already implicated in that dispositif. It is rendered intelligible as a bio-political entity whose protection is part of the dispositif’s rationality. However, it is also part of the challenge of government that it might fail: in the encounter with the imponderable, ungovernable, with different forces entering the scene that it never manages to fully control and discipline. Secrecy constitutes one of these forces.

NOTES 1.

For accounts of secrecy producing its own truth effects from an anthropological perspective on the materiality of the archive, see Verdery (2014) and Stoler (2002).

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2. As Max Weber (1994, 184–185) famously held, ‘foreign policy deliberations which are still in the balance […] must be dealt with in a small committee protected by a guarantee of confidentiality’. 3. The Manhattan Project, the research programme to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War under the scientific guidance of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, is one of the famous examples of a state secret that was successfully kept from public knowledge and even awareness for decades (Reed 2014). 4. Walters (2021, 12) speaks of the ‘covert imaginary’ of common or tacit assumptions about state secrecy. 5. I take this example form my prior research on secrecy (Krasmann 2019).

REFERENCES Birchall, C. (2011), ‘“There’s Been Too Much Secrecy in This City”: The False Choice between Secrecy and Transparency in US Politics’, Cultural Politics, 7(1), 133–156. Brion, F. and Harcourt, B. E. (2014), ‘The Louvain Lectures in Context’, in M. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 292–321. Carney, P. (2015), ‘Foucault’s Punitive Society: Visual Tactics of Marking as a History of the Present’, British Journal of Criminology, 55, 231–247. Chandler, D. (2013), ‘Resilience and the Autotelic Subject: Toward a Critique of the Societalization of Security’, International Political Sociology, 7, 210–226. Colebrook, C. (2004), Irony, London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1994), ‘To Do Justice to Freud: A History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis’, Critical Inquiry, 20(2), 227–266. Derrida, J. (2001), ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in J. Derrida and M. Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–92. Fenster, M. (2014), ‘The Implausibility of Secrecy’, Hastings Law Journal, 65, 309–363. Flatscher, M. and Seitz, S. (2018), ‘Latour, Foucault und das Postfaktische: Zur Rolle und Funktion von Kritik im Zeitalter der Wahrheitskrise’, Le foucaldien, 4(1). https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.16995/​lefou​.46. Foucault, M. (1977), ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’, C. Gordon (trans.), Radical Philosophy, 17, 12–14. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Truth and Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, New York: Pantheon, pp. 109–133. Foucault, M. (1982), ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Foucault, M. (1988), ‘The Dangerous Individual’, in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other Writings 1977–1984, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 125–151. Foucault, M. (1991), ‘Questions of Method’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 73–86. Foucault, M. (1993), ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self’, Political Theory, 21(2), 198–227. Foucault, M. (2001), Fearless Speech, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, G. Burchell (trans.), F. Gros (ed.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, G. Burchell (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, G. Burchell (trans.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2010), The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, G. Burchell (trans.), A. I. Davidson (ed.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2011), The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, G. Burchell (trans.), F. Gros (ed.), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2014), Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilbert, J. (2007), ‘Public Secrets’, Cultural Studies, 21(1), 22–41. Hentschel, C. and Krasmann, S. (2020), ‘Acts of exposure and their affective publics’, in Exposure: Verletzlichkeit und das Politische in Zeiten radikaler Ungewissheit, Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 15–34. Horn, E. (2011), ‘Logics of Political Secrecy’, Theory, Culture & Society, 28(7–8), 103–122. Kearns, O. (2016), ‘State Secrecy, Public Assent, and Representational Practices of U.S. Covert Action’, Critical Studies on Security, 4(3): 276–290. Kearns, O. (2017), ‘Secrecy and Absence in the Residue of Covert Drone Strikes’, Political Geography, 57, 13–23. Krasmann, S. (2010), ‘“The Endangerer”: Epistemology of a Political Figure’, Philosophical Alternatives, 19(5), 55-64. Krasmann, S. (2012), ‘Targeted Killing and Its Law: On a Mutually Constitutive Relationship’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 25(3), 665–682. Krasmann, S. (2019), ‘Secrecy and the Force of Truth: Countering Post-Truth Regimes’, Cultural Studies, 33(4), 690–710. Lorenzini, D. (2015), ‘What is a “Regime of Truth”?’, Le foucaldien, 1(1). https://​doi​.org/​10​ .16995/​lefou​.2. Lorenzini, D. and Tazzioli, M. (2018), ‘Confessional Subjects and Conducts of Non-Truth: Foucault, Fanon, and the Making of the Subject’, Theory, Culture & Society, 35(1), 71–90. Lundborg, T. (2021), ‘Secrecy and Subjectivity: Double Agents and the Dark Underside of the International System’, International Political Sociology (Online First), 1–17. O’Grady, N. (2013), ‘Adopting the Position of Error: Space and Speculation in the Exploratory Significance of Milieu Formulations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31, 245–258. Opitz, S. (2011), ‘Government Unlimited: The Security Dispositif of Illiberal Governmentality’, in U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann, and T. Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 93–114. Pozen, D. E. (2010), ‘Deep Secrecy’, Stanford Law Review, 62, 257–340. Reed, B. C. (2014), The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, Berlin: Springer. Robertson, K. G. (1999), Secrecy and Open Government, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmitt, C. (2005), Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seigworth, G. J. and Tiessen, M. (2012), ‘Mobile Affects, Open Secrets, and Global Illiquidity: Pockets, Pools, and Plasma’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29(6), 47–77. Simmel, G. (1906), ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies’, American Journal of Sociology, 11(4), 441–498. Stampnitzky, L. (2020), ‘Truth and Consequences? Reconceptualizing the Politics of Exposure’, Security Dialogue, 51(6), 597–613. Stoler, A. L. (2002), ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2(1–2), 87–109. Taussig, M. (1999), Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Verdery, K. (2014), Secrets and Truth: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police, Budapest: Central European University. Veyne, P. (1997), ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in A. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 146–182. Vogelmann, F. (2014), ‘Kraft, Widerständigkeit, Historizität. Überlegungen zu einer Genealogie der Wahrheit’, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 62(6), 1062–1086. Walters, W. (2014), ‘Parrhēsia Today: Drone Strikes, Fearless Speech and the Contentious Politics of Security’, Global Society, 28(3), 277–299. Walters, W. (2015), ‘Secrecy, Publicity and the Milieu of Security’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 5(3), 287–290. Walters, W. (2021), State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, London and New York: Routledge. Weber, M. (1994), ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order’, in P. Lassmann and R. Spiers (eds), Weber: Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 130–271. Weizman, E. (2010), ‘Legislative Attack’, Theory, Culture & Society, 27(6), 11–32. Zarefsky, D. (2007), ‘Making the Case for War: Colin Powell at the United Nations’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 10(2), 275–302.

12. Governmentality and the subject of rights Ben Golder

The fourth lecture of Foucault’s 1978 lecture course at the Collège de France, Security, Territory, Population, delivered on 1 February of that year, is where he coins the celebrated (if somewhat ungainly) neologism of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 2007, 108). Delivered first in French, and then translated into Italian, and thence into English and back into French, it is perhaps of all places in Anglophone social scientific scholarship where this lecture and its awkward portmanteau have felt their greatest impact (see Burchell et al. 1991, vii). Even before the 1978 lectures were published in French in 2004 in their entirety and then translated into English in 2007 (in Brod-like disregard of the Pas de publication posthume stipulation in Foucault’s will – or, better, perhaps: in a poetically poststructuralist subversion of authorial intentions) the exponential governmentality effect had fully taken hold (see generally Burchell et al. 1991; see also Burchell et al. and Gordon et al., this volume). Governmentality has had a rich career in social theoretical and political studies settings, informing analyses, as two of its best-known proponents of the early 1990s put it, of ‘political power beyond the state’ (Rose and Miller 1992). And yet, perhaps because of this very Foucauldian decentring of the state, questions of law and rights have not figured as centrally in the literature on governmentality as have other scenes and vectors of late modern political conduct (see further Golder and Fitzpatrick 2009, ch. 1; Rose et al. 2006). This is curious for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Security, Territory, Population and its twin lecture course from the year after, The Birth of Biopolitics, contain several brief but crucial reflections on governmentality, subjectivity and rights (Foucault 2008, 27–50). Recalling the peripatetic itinerary of the 1 February lecture (‘On Governmentality’), a fascinating account remains to be written of the often serpentine publication and translation history of Foucault’s texts – the Collège lectures in particular – and of how the extraction and publication of particular lectures has contoured the disciplinary, geographic and linguistic reception and circulation of Foucault’s ideas.1 Like Foucault himself, who often suggested that scholars should pursue particular research questions, whilst manifestly not pursuing them himself (see for example Foucault 1996, 386), I do not propose such a study here. What I do want to suggest is that the most interesting lecture in that 1978 Collège course, at least from the perspective of rights and subjectivity, comes exactly a month later than the celebrated introduction of the problematic of governmentality on 1 February. It is in the lecture of 1 March (in the midst of a fairly recondite discussion of the theological practices of the medieval Christian pastorate) that Foucault foregrounds the concepts of conduct and counter-conduct. These connected concepts, in the years that follow, allow Foucault to unlock the question of rights both as an object of scholarly analysis and 221

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as a political tool. It is through the conceptual lens of conduct and counter-conduct, first developed in the governmentality lectures of 1978, that Foucault makes his own late turn to rights. And key to this take-up of rights is an attention to the question of subjectivity. This chapter is broadly written then, as Arnold Davidson would have it, ‘in praise of counter-conduct’ (2011), but my particular focus is on the question of subjectivity in the context of rights. My purposes are as follows: first, briefly to commend the importance of counter-conducts in Foucault’s work of the late 1970s (briefly, given this topic is treated elsewhere at greater length in this collection; see Lecadet, Lorenzini, Weiskopf); secondly, to show how the notion of counter-conducts helps explain and theorize Foucault’s own shift to rights; thirdly, to argue for the continued importance of a consideration of rights in the context of accounts of governmentality; and, finally (as any handbook entry aspires to do!), to discuss the relevant scholarly literature on governmentality, counter-conducts and rights. In the sections below, I start with Foucault’s 1978 lectures before moving on to address the scholarly literature.

CONDUCT AND COUNTER-CONDUCT Foucault’s own turn to rights is coincident with his development of the concept of governmentality. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere (Golder 2015), Foucault makes what to many is a somewhat curious yet nevertheless important resort to rights discourse in the late 1970s which he continues until his death in 1984. This resort, or ‘turn’ to rights in the late work, is manifest not simply in his philosophical research (delivered at the Collège de France and in written publications) but also in a series of more directly political writings conducted in a range of venues and forms at this time: statements, pamphlets, interviews in the activist press, and so on. In these texts Foucault endorses, theorizes and commits himself to struggle on behalf of a range of rights causes – the rights of asylum seekers, gay and lesbian people, even the right to die. This is seemingly curious, or has struck many of Foucault’s interpreters in this way (see Golder 2015, 13–20), not simply because his own well-known critique of subjectivity in works of the mid-to-late 1970s appears to undo the requisite normative basis of rights politics but also because his celebrated historical accounts of the emergence of disciplinary power, governmentality and biopower seemed to imply to many readers the evacuation or supersession of orthodox juridical categories like sovereignty, right/s and law – and hence conveyed the futility of a rights-based solution to social and political problems. These two premises – regarding subjectivity and sovereignty – are often articulated in critiques of Foucault in order to construct the common image of the philosopher as a normatively confused antinomian or would-be radical unable even to sensibly contribute to leftist political agendas let alone the serious business of liberal politics in a modernist frame (see Golder 2015, 37–51).

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And yet whether or not one regards this shift of Foucault’s – which I will not argue for here but simply assume for the sake of the present discussion – as curious or question-begging (reader: I do not), it is clearly important as it marks a turning point in his work from analyses of discipline and biopower through governmentality and conduct to questions of ethics and subjectification. I hesitate to describe the shift from the middle work to the late work – as many do – as an abrupt shift from power to ethics simply because what is involved in Foucault’s increased engagement with rights discourses remains very much a politics of rights (cf. Paras 2006). It is a politics attuned to questions of subjectification and resistance, it is a politics that takes its bearings from the question of the subject and of how it is variously constituted in discourse and power, but for these reasons alone it does not cease to be a politics – precisely a politics of subjectivity rather than a merely ethical disposition essaying at self-transformation. As Foucault insists in the Hermeneutics of the Subject, ‘there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself’ (2005, 252). So, bearing in mind the necessary interrelationship between the political and the ethical in Foucault’s thought (Lorenzini 2015), we can still observe two important, simultaneous and related shifts in his work in the late 1970s: one towards rights, and the other towards a greater concern with the ways in which the subject constitutes him or herself. Concerning the latter shift, Foucault in a late interview describes it in the following terms: I would say that if I am now interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (1997a, 291)

I want to suggest that Foucault’s work on governmentality is central to both of these shifts. More precisely, it is through his thematization of the question of conduct and counter-conduct in the Security, Territory, Population lectures that the philosopher develops a way to think about (and himself to practice) a politics of subjectivity. As I said above, it is ‘through’ his analyses of governmentality and conduct that Foucault begins to articulate this politics (although cf. Lorenzini 2016). I suggest that this framework of conduct and counter-conduct represents a development and extension of his well-known formulations of the immanence of power and resistance in work of the early-to-mid-1970s (see Foucault 1979, 95–6) and, in turn, that this way of thinking about a resistant subjectivity is explored most fruitfully in the context of rights (cf. Tazzioli 2016, 100). For me, then, the value and importance of Foucault’s work on governmentality is not so much that it gives us a way to displace the state and its law or to think through the various capillary manifestations of power in the social but rather that it foregrounds the political question of the subject and of how that subject might struggle with and against the available political tools – often still provided by the state and law – in order to transform itself and others.

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So, when and where does the question of conduct emerge in Security, Territory, Population? As is excessively well-known, the historiographical gambit for the 1978 lecture course is to set aside the framework of state sovereignty in favour of governmentality. What emerges when the historian abjures putatively universal historical categories like ‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’? What happens when she tells a story not of states and their sovereignty but of practices of governing and governmentality (see Veyne 1997)? From such a perspective, as Foucault puts it provocatively towards the end of the ninth Collège lecture that year, if one commences with governmentality and does not presuppose the analytic primacy of the state then the state is reduced to ‘an episode in [the genealogy of] governmentality’ (Foucault 2007, 248). I think before moving on to talk specifically about conduct and counter-conduct that it is worth pausing here to note the disjuncture between the analytic and the political wages of this methodological move of Foucault’s. Analytically, displacing the state opens up new fields of study and ways of looking at power and its operation. This has led to significant innovations in the Anglophone social theoretical and political science scholarship on governmentality. Politically, however, such a move risks obscuring the continued salience of state (and legal) forms of power – which is my focus and concern in this chapter. What gets obscured in this move is not only the ongoing importance and mutation of these juridical forms of power but, crucially, the subtlety of Foucault’s strategic orientation towards them. Rights are one of these forms of power and Foucault himself, if not always those writing in his wake in the governmentality tradition (for more, see Hörnqvist 2011), remains scrupulously attentive to their possibilities. To this end, we can recall his insistence in these same lectures not only that ‘sovereignty is absolutely not eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government’, but that ‘[t]he problem of sovereignty … is made more acute than ever’ (Foucault 2007, 107). To return to the overarching theme of the 1978 lectures, then, we can see that displacing sovereignty in favour of government brings into analytic relief new domains of intervention. One governs the economy, one governs the soul, one governs the poor, one governs families, and so on and so forth. But what is one doing when one governs? One is conducting, says Foucault. Government is the conduct of one’s (and others’) conduct, the very ‘conduct of conducts’ (Foucault 2000b, 341): Conduct is the activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction (la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts oneself (se conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire), is conducted (est conduit), and finally, in which one behaves (se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the action of conducting or of conduction (conduction). (Foucault 2007, 193)

Here we begin to see what Arnold Davidson refers to as the ‘double dimension of conduct’, namely ‘the activity of conducting an individual, conduction as a relation between individuals, and the way in which an individual conducts “himself” or is conducted, “his” conduct or behavior in the narrower sense of the term’ (2011, 26–27). It is this double dimension of conduct (the governing relation to others as

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well as to oneself) that provides a conceptual link to Foucault’s later work on ethics and technologies of the self that he finds in his reading of ancient Greek texts. But staying awhile with the governmentality writings of the late 1970s, we can see that Foucault’s notion of ‘conduct’ is itself doubled by its contrary: the notion of counter-conducts. Foucault first introduces the idea of the counter-conduct in the context of his broader genealogy of the Christian pastorate in Security, Territory, Population. There, to condense things considerably, Foucault charts the rise of the pastorate as a particular form of power in the West and the gradual integration of certain of its techniques into modern, secular forms of government (see further Golder 2007). Pastoral power is a close and individualizing modality of power that binds the individual member of the flock to the pastor through practices of veridiction and telling the truth about oneself. It issues in ‘a kind of exhaustive, total, and permanent relationship of individual obedience’ that hinges on the production of ‘a particular truth [of the subject] through which one will be bound to the person who directs one’s conscience’ (Foucault 2007, 245). It is in the eighth lecture of the 1978 course that Foucault introduces the concept of counter-conducts: namely, ‘specific movements of resistance and insubordination’ that were correlated with and that opposed pastoral power’s techniques of producing obedience (2007, 194). Foucault discusses how, in the Middle Ages, there were ‘five main forms of counter-conduct, all of which tend to redistribute, reverse, nullify, and partially or totally discredit pastoral power in the systems of salvation, obedience, and truth, that is to say, in the three domains … which characterize … the objective, the domain of intervention of pastoral power’ (2007, 204). These five were: asceticism, the formation of communities, mysticism, the return to Scripture and, finally, eschatology. Taking asceticism as an indicative – and, as Foucault himself suggests, almost emblematic and structurally decisive (2007, 207) – example, Foucault shows how pastoral relations of hierarchical obedience were organized precisely to try and exclude the resistant and dangerous excesses of ascetic practices. What made these practices so dangerous to the governance of pastoral conduct was that they posed a direct challenge to the model of obedience. ‘Ascesis’, Foucault argues, ‘is an exercise of self on self; it is a sort of close combat of the individual with himself in which the authority and gaze of someone else is, if not impossible, at least unnecessary’ (ibid., 205). Ascesis hence puts into play ‘a specific excess that denies access to an external power’ (ibid., 208). For Foucault, the counter-conduct of asceticism, as deployed both by orthodox Christian groups like the Benedictines and heterodox groups like the Taborites and the Waldensians, was hence ‘foreign to the structure of pastoral power around which Christianity was organised’ (ibid., 207). It is nevertheless crucial to note for our purposes, though, that whilst it was both foreign and excessive in relation to the official pastorate, ‘asceticism is rather a sort of tactical element, an element of reversal by which certain themes of Christian theology or religious experience are utilized against these structures of power’ (Foucault 2007, 207). Counter-conducts work by taking up elements of a given form of conduct

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and placing them under subversive torsion. They are a form of immanent critical practice in which available political tools are refashioned, repurposed and redeployed to new ends. As Martina Tazzioli reminds us, ‘[c]ounter-conducts are always in excess with regard to the norms that they resist by twisting and altering their expected functioning’ (Tazzioli 2016, 100). But it is important to note that for Foucault this excessive potentiality of counter-conducts comes from within the field of power’s operation rather than without; it is made available and disclosed, as it were, by the official forms of conduct themselves – we could call this the ‘strategic reversibility’ of conduct into counter-conduct (and vice versa) (Foucault quoted in Gordon 1991, 5). ‘[T]he modes of life through which subjects try to circumvent the regime of norms’, whether that be through forms of ascetic self-overcoming or the formation of dissident communities, ‘mobilizes the same elements that power uses, but they do so in a way that troubles and jams the effects of normalization and constraints on subjectivities’ (Tazzioli 2016, 100). The concept of the counter-conduct was developed by Foucault in the context of his genealogy of pastoral power in the West. As such, it is undoubtedly a specific concept arising from a particular historical examination. But what wider conceptual work might it perform for us in rethinking both the philosopher’s work and his practical political engagements? As several scholars have shown (Davidson 2011; Lorenzini 2016) the idea of the counter-conduct performs a crucial transitional function in his work, helping to shift him from an analysis of objectivizing political technologies (like disciplinary power and biopower) towards a consideration of the ways in which resistant subjects might seek to contest the terms of their own subjection by constituting themselves differently. However, I want to suggest that the idea of the counter-conduct performs another function in his work – not only does it help to unlock and explain Foucault’s textual pivot towards technologies of the self but it also helps us to clarify what is happening and what is at stake in his contemporaneous embrace of rights discourse. The counter-conduct hence gives us a useful concept with which to theorize Foucault’s own rights praxis from the time of these governmentality lectures until his death in 1984.

RIGHTS, COUNTER-CONDUCT, AND THE QUESTION OF THE SUBJECT Foucault’s deployment of rights discourse is wide and varied at this time, and so, as with the abovementioned example of ascesis, I will take a brief example in order to illustrate my point. What follows is a necessarily truncated and schematic account of a much richer exploration of rights. Nevertheless, if we examine Foucault’s engagement with the question of gay rights in the early 1980s (conducted mainly in the form of interventions and interviews in North American and French activist gay and lesbian periodicals) we see a triple move. To start with, Foucault commends what seems like a fairly orthodox, liberal juridical strategy of claiming rights in order to protect and defend the sexual autonomy

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of the individual. ‘It is important, first, to have the possibility – and the right – to choose your own sexuality’, he argues in the interview, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, and hence ‘[h]uman rights regarding sexuality are important’ (Foucault 1997b, 164). In an interview given the same year (1982), published as ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’, Foucault observes that ‘[while] there has been considerable progress in this area on the level of legislation, certain progress in the direction of tolerance … there is still a lot of work to be done’ (Foucault 1997c, 143). And yet, for all this curious-sounding liberal rhetoric of progress and tolerance (at least to Foucauldian ears), and the specific invocation of juridical technologies like rights and legislation, the philosopher also insists on the limitations and the downsides of a politics of rights. This is the second move. ‘I think we should consider the battle for gay rights’, he proposes in an interview given to the New York gay magazine, Christopher Street, ‘as an episode that cannot be the final stage’ (Foucault 1997d, 157). Rights are limited because ‘a right, in its real effects, is much more linked to attitudes and patterns of behavior than to legal formulations’ (1997d, 157), but they are not simply limited in their effects. They also have real downsides. Rights work to inscribe the would-be rights claimant in particular forms of conduct and modes of life. In ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, Foucault is asked by the interviewer (from The Advocate): ‘Identities help in exploring such practices and defending the right to engage in them. But are they also limiting in regards to the possibilities of individuals?’ Foucault agrees: ‘[I]f identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think they have to “uncover” their “own identity,” and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence … then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. …Yes, it [politicized identity] has been very useful, but it limits us’ (Foucault 1997b, 166). Here identity-rights claims are figured as a problem of subjectification – rights claimants are beckoned to inscribe themselves in and perform particular (restrictive) subjectivities. Rights conduct us; they are a form of subjective capture. Foucault’s third move, however, is to insist nonetheless on the political utility of the strategy of rights claiming. Foucault does not abjure rights discourse in the face of its ambivalences and contradictions but instead seeks to deploy its resources in order to reimagine possibilities for gay life. In the Christopher Street interview cited above, for example, he makes a claim for what he calls a relational right: ‘The relational right is the right to gain recognition in an institutional sense for the relations of one individual to another individual, which is not necessarily connected to the emergence of a group’ (Foucault 1997d, 162). He gives, as an example of a relational right, a right to adult adoption: ‘Why shouldn’t I adopt a friend who’s ten years younger than I am?’ (1997d, 158). Further examples could be adduced, but my aim here is not to delve into Foucault’s creative reworking of rights discourse. Rather, I simply want to illustrate a dynamic at play in his rights praxis at this time and to show how this reflects his theorization of the counter-conduct in Security, Territory, Population. In this example of gay rights, we see Foucault start by defending liberal rights claiming practices in classic juridical

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terms of the protection of individual autonomy, before promptly expressing (what are more recognizably Foucauldian) reservations on this score and problematizing the ways in which rights discourse conducts the subjectivities of claimants. This leads ultimately to an acknowledgement of the ambivalence of rights discourse which he, in the third move, neither tries to resolve nor to reject but rather to work through on their own terrain. This is a clear and revealing example of Foucault himself approaching liberal rights as counter-conducts. The juridical technology of rights makes available a range of political possibilities for action. These possibilities are real and often significantly effective in their own way, but they hew towards existing bureaucratic and institutional imperatives, and, with that, the very real and ever-present danger of the rights claimant being conducted looms large. Rights, which promise emancipation and autonomy, simultaneously capture and discipline the subjectivities of those who would rely upon them. But Foucault’s political approach towards rights is not to seek a realm of pure politics beyond rights, unsullied by governmental logics of control. Here we can recall his oft-cited admonition that ‘[m]y point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous’ (Foucault 1983, 231). Rather, it is to work with the impurity of rights as a form of conduct in order to try and leverage critical and resistant possibilities from within the field of governmental control. The challenge of this kind of politics-as-counter-conduct is hence one of navigating the ambivalences and subjective dangers of a field of power relations (or simply forms of conduct, in Foucault’s language of the late 1970s) in order to try to reverse their elements and, as he puts it in Security, Territory, Population, ‘utilize [these elements] against [the] structures of power’ themselves (2007, 207). In the example above, Foucault takes the language and concepts of rights and, conscious of the risk of gay identity being congealed and reinforced in and through rights, tries to disrupt and pluralize the question of identity through the creative invocation of a ‘relational right’. Doubtless more could be said about the stakes and the wages of this type of politics (and in concluding I shall try to say some of this) but before doing so I want to trace some of these different dimensions of Foucault’s own late-1970s conceptualization of rights politics as a form of critical counter-conduct through the scholarly literature. ‘Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy defines them’, intoned Foucault in the Preface to Anti-Oedipus, precisely because ‘the individual is the product of power’ (Foucault 2000a, 109). If for him the individual is power’s product, indeed, famously in ‘Society Must be Defended’, one of its first ‘effects’ (2003, 30) then it is hardly surprising to discover that post-Foucauldian political theory and critical scholarship on rights has been attentive to the diverse ways in which rights (as a form of power) conduct the subjectivities of claimants. Still less surprisingly, we see this dynamic at play in identity-based rights as these types of rights claim directly engage the subjective question of conduct. For example, the legal scholar Richard T. Ford draws attention to the ways in which the (putatively beneficent or emancipatory) ‘discourse of racial difference can take on a life quite independent of the good intentions of those advancing cultural identity rights’, where certain legal inscriptions of culture- or race-based identity can function

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conservatively to ‘regulate all members of the [claimant] group’ in pernicious ways. In his critical reading of the US Supreme Court case of Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), Ford shows how campus-based affirmative action programs, in fetishizing notions of cultural diversity and distinctiveness, have ‘altered the character of the institutional treatment of race … [and the] incentives surrounding racial identity and thereby altered performance of racial identity’ for minority students and their peer groups (Ford 2002, 56, 46). If the conduct of racial identity is ambivalently governed through rights, so too is the conduct of sexuality. One of the most recent high-profile contestations over gay and lesbian rights to relational life (to come back to one of Foucault’s own areas of political activism) is the right to marriage. Appellate, apex and constitutional courts the world over (like the US Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015) have been called upon to resolve this question by litigants seeking to expand the marriage franchise to include gay and lesbian unions. Of course, the Foucauldian rejoinder made by queer legal theorists to this putative moment of juridical inclusion and liberal equality is to chronicle the ways in which those who are included within the expanded remit of marriage need to do so in particular, regulatory, ways, whereas those forms of non-normative queer union falling short of marriage are further abjected by the state and subjected to more extensive forms of policing and discrimination. Marriage in this account is less a promised state of equality than, as political theorist Samuel Chambers (2003, 167) writes, a ‘disciplinary institution’ in and of itself. Diverse feminist engagements with rights have also excavated the ways in which gender identity is conducted in and through rights claiming practices. Here the work of political theorist Wendy Brown (both on the question of gender and on the broader question of human rights, which I will come to shortly) is illustrative. In her book, States of Injury, Brown offers a provocation to the work of critical race theorist Patricia Williams, and feminist legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon. Both Williams and MacKinnon, despite themselves mounting devastating critiques of law’s racial and sexual hierarchies, nevertheless conclude that modern law retains the promise to extend rights to racial and sexual others. For her part, Brown worries about this turn to rights precisely because it cedes power to rights discourse to conduct women’s subjectivities. As she puts it, ‘we see the discourse of rights converge insidiously with the discourse of disciplinarity to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridical-disciplinary interpellation’ (Brown 1995, 133). Elsewhere she formulates this scene of juridical-disciplinary interpellation in terms of a paradox out of which women-as-rights-claimants struggle to pivot. Whereas purportedly general or universalistic rights often mask patriarchal interests and serve as a vehicle for their legitimation and transmission, the ‘more highly specified rights are as rights for women, the more likely they are to build [a] fence insofar as they are more likely to encode a definition of women premised upon our subordination in the transhistorical discourse of liberal jurisprudence’ (Brown 2000a, 232). This conundrum, writes Brown, ‘is the problem that Foucault painted most masterfully in his formulation of the powers of identity and of rights based on identity. To have a right as a woman

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is not to be free of being designated and subordinated by gender’ (2000a, 231–232, emphasis in original). Gender, that is to say, functions in and through the discourse and institutional practice of rights that ‘produce[s] the [gendered] subject they pretend only to presuppose’ (Brown 2000b, 472; see also Butler 1993, 87). It might seem that there is no escape from this paradoxical situation in which rights claimants seek to rely upon a form of governmental control that actually fashions their own subjectivity, but in a moment, I will engage with more recent scholarship that accents the agentic and self-directed dimensions of rights conduct. Given that some of this scholarship is itself in critical dialogue with the work of Wendy Brown, I should for the sake of completeness first discuss what is perhaps the best-known example of the former’s critique of rights discourse. This critique comes in her polemic engagement with the work of the Canadian liberal political philosopher Michael Ignatieff and is not made against the particularistic entailments of rights to identity but rather against the supposed universalism of international human rights law (Ignatieff 2001). Amongst a range of critiques levied at international human rights discourse in her essay, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For …”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’, Brown suggests that human rights actually constitutes subjects as privatized, withdrawn, anti-democratic actors. Brown takes issue with Ignatieff’s argument that human rights empower subjects to pursue democratic politics and suggests instead that they ‘function precisely to limit or cancel such deliberation with transcendental moral claims, refer it to the courts, submit it to creeds of tolerance, or secure an escape from it into private lives’ (Brown 2004, 458). On her account, rights are ‘an aspect of governmentality, a crucial aspect of power’s aperture’, that are ‘tactics and vehicles of governance and domination’. Brown argues that ‘rights are not simply attached to Kantian subjects, but rather produce and regulate the subjects to whom they are assigned. Thus, in its very promise to protect the individual against suffering and permit choice for individuals, human rights discourse produces a certain kind of subject in need of a certain kind of protection’ (ibid., 459–460; see also Sokhi-Bulley 2016). The emancipatory pretensions of rights as counter-conducts are beginning to look somewhat attenuated. The critical literature just instanced focuses acutely on the ways in which particularistic regimes of identity rights regulate the conduct of rights claimants (through the constrained performance of race and culture, gender and sexuality) and on the ways in which a supposedly universal human rights law de-democratizes its subjects. And yet, as with Foucault’s own creative reversal and re-deployment of rights discourse, so too does recent scholarship seek to foreground the potentiality and more agentic aspects of rights as counter-conducts. In their edited collection, The Subject of Human Rights, for example, Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre announce their intention to ‘affirm the possibility that human rights do indeed have a formative effect on subjectivity and that it can be used for the good, as it were, to advance the inclusive and universal ambitions that the human rights project claims for itself’ (2020, 22). The form of conduct they point to is one in which human rights subjects (both those to whom human rights are addressed – such as security agency personnel or police – and for whom human rights represents a normatively desira-

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ble worldview – such as human rights educators and activists) actively work upon themselves in the furtherance of particular political or ethical goals. Lefebvre, for example, in his 2018 book, Human Rights and the Care of the Self, points to a surprising and very different genealogy of human rights in which thinkers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Charles Malik thought about and practised human rights not so much as a way in which to change the world but precisely as a way to work upon themselves and to alter their subjectivities (see Lefebvre 2018). On Lefebvre’s telling, human rights provides an array of normative and practical resources for subjects to affect their own conduct on their own terms, or (as Foucault puts it above) in a more ‘active fashion’ (1997a, 291). This, too, then, is an example of rights as a form of counter-conduct – juridico-political instruments being seized upon by resistant, or simply ethical, subjects wishing to alter their conduct and deploying rights in way not envisioned by their creators.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have sought to explain the importance for understanding Foucault’s work in the late 1970s of the notion of counter-conducts. For me, as indeed for several other scholars, this particularly fecund notion is what makes the governmentality lectures at the Collège de France so useful to those of us interested in understanding not only Foucault’s shift from accounts of discipline and biopower to ethics and technologies of the self, but also his own practical political commitments beyond the written oeuvre and the archive (to wit: Foucault’s rights politics). Key to this shift is the question of the subject and how its conduct is conducted and how, in turn, it may seek to reverse the terms of that conduct in creative and dissonant ways. In reviewing some of Foucault’s own deployments of rights and the ways in which scholars indebted to Foucault (in governmentality studies, political theory, critical legal theory and critical human rights work) have sought to put these concepts into play, I have tried to characterize the kind of political approach to rights that the concept of the counter-conduct represents. Thinking about rights through the late Foucauldian lens of the counter-conduct means that we are attentive to (at least) two things. Before restating what they are, I should first be a little more explicit about the relationship of the concept of counter-conduct (as a way of figuring resistant potential) to previous and canonical Foucauldian understandings of, for example, the relationship between power and resistance. Whereas in works earlier in the decade Foucault had described the relationship between power and resistance in fairly cryptic, abstract and question-begging terms – resistance always being immanent to power, its sometimes coming first, it being an ever-present and irreducible possibility, and so on and so forth – when he talks about the ‘specific revolts of conduct’ in Security, Territory, Population (2007, 194) he does so in much more granular detail and, helpfully, in the context of actual struggles over the politics of pastoral subjectivity.

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In using this concept as a way to think about rights, then, I suggest first that it helps us to think very concretely about the ways in which particular rights regimes themselves present possibilities for contestation and subversion that arise from within their own terms. Lexically, the close articulation (hyphenation) of conduct and counter-conduct, like with the reciprocal conditioning of power and knowledge, indexes this connection. The counter-possibilities are unavoidably connected to the conducting. With rights, it is their doctrinal fluidity, indeterminacy, generality and (especially with human rights) sometimes their claimed universality that presents an opportunity for subversion and rewriting even as these same traits are also what can work to dash and disappoint those expectations. This in turn leads us to think of rights very much as ambivalent political mechanisms rather than a means, in leftist renditions, of emancipation or, in liberal-technocratic renditions, of a means of transcending, pacifying and resolving political antagonisms via constitutionalization. Secondly, and perhaps more obviously, thinking rights as counter-conducts very much attunes us to the element of conduct and to the ways in which rights are an attempt to conduct our conduct; or, to govern our subjectivity. Rights work by providing us with dominant scripts about how to be, think and act. They provide us with legitimized and legitimizing forms of subjectivity and the political task of a counter-conduct of rights is to use rights (against themselves) so as to propose and put into effect different relations to self and others (like the medieval ascetics, in Foucault’s example from Security, Territory, Population, once fought over the terrain of subjectivity, truth and obedience). Thinking rights as counter-conducts hence brings the politics of subjectivity into the foreground. Finally, were I pressed to encapsulate a counter-conduct of rights with a single phrase, I would refer to it as a politics of ambivalent yet hopeful creativity. The counter-conduct is neither a revolutionary nor a utopian politics – it works on the level of subversion and reversal of existing norms and practices. Its creativity is not world-making in a grand or epochal sense, but rather aims at a more subtle and local reimagining of possibilities, crafting lines of flight and ways of being otherwise. Its starting point is a recognition of the investments and entailments of these existing norms and practices of conduct – the political subject can never entirely break free from them but rather labours to extract from them what hidden possibilities they harbour. Its end point is not necessarily a transformed world but rather a transformed subject – although of course the question of subjective self-transformation is itself politically central to projects of world-making. As I have sought to understand it here, the political challenge of rights as counter-conducts is to start with an appreciation of the ambivalences and limitations of existing forms of conduct but not to allow the contours and restraints of the present to lead to a resigned pragmatism. A counter-conduct is not an attempt to play the game as currently defined and circumscribed, but creatively to break the rules of the game in order to inaugurate a new one. Counter-conducts, whilst not revolutionary, nevertheless aspire to subversion and in order to do so they must find ways to break from the logic of the conduct within which they find themselves embedded. That is their promise and their difficult task.

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NOTE 1. For example, the first two lectures of Foucault’s 1976 course at the Collège de France (Foucault, 2003) were initially extracted, translated into English and published as a stand-alone methodological reflection and critique of sovereignty decoupled from the wider genealogy of state racism and biopolitics presented in the lecture course as a whole (see Foucault 1980, 77–108).

REFERENCES Brown, W. (1995), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, W. (2000a), ‘Suffering Rights as Paradoxes’, Constellations, 7(2), 230–241. Brown, W. (2000b), ‘Revaluing Critique: A Response to Kenneth Baynes’, Political Theory, 28(4), 469–479. Brown, W. (2004), ‘“The Most We Can Hope For …”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2), 451–463. Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P. (eds) (1991), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1993), ‘Sexual Inversions’, in Caputo, J. and Yount, M. (eds), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 81–98. Celermajer, D. and Lefebvre, A. (2020), ‘Introduction: Bringing the Subject of Human Rights into Focus’, in Celermajer, D. and Lefebvre, A. (eds), The Subject of Human Rights, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–25. Chambers, S. A. (2003), ‘Ghostly Rights’, Cultural Critique, 54, 148–177. Davidson, A. I. (2011), ‘In Praise of Counter-Conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, 24(4), 25–41. Ford, R. T. (2002), ‘Beyond “Difference”: A Reluctant Critique of Legal Identity Politics’, in Brown, W. and Halley, J. (eds), Left Legalism/Left Critique, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 38–79. Foucault, M. (1979), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Hurley, R. (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Two Lectures’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) and Gordon, C. et al. (trans.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 77–108. Foucault, M. (1983), ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, in Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 229–252. Foucault, M. (1996), ‘What is Critique?’ in Schmidt, J. (ed.) and Geiman, K. P. (trans.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 382–398. Foucault, M. (1997a), ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, pp. 281–301. Foucault, M. (1997b), ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, pp. 163–173.

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Foucault, M. (1997c), ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, pp. 141–156. Foucault, M. (1997d), ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, in Rabinow, P. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, pp. 157–162. Foucault, M. (2000a), ‘Preface to Anti-Oedipus’, in Faubion, J. D. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3: Power, New York: New Press, pp. 106–110. Foucault, M. (2000b), ‘The Subject and Power’, in Faubion, J. D. (ed.) and Hurley, R. et al. (trans.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3: Power, New York: New Press, pp. 326–348. Foucault, M. (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Macey, D. (trans.), London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–82, Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Burchell, G. (trans.), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Golder, B. (2007), ‘Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power’, Radical Philosophy Review, 10, 157–176. Golder, B. (2015), Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Golder, B. and Fitzpatrick, P. (2009), Foucault’s Law, Abingdon: Routledge. Gordon, C. (1991), ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–51. Hörnqvist, M. (2011), Risk, Power, and the State: After Foucault, Abingdon: Routledge. Ignatieff, M. (2001), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, A. (2018), Human Rights and the Care of the Self, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lorenzini, D. (2015), ‘Ethics as Politics: Foucault, Hadot, Cavell and the Critique of Our Present’, in Fuggle, S., Lanci, Y., and Tazzioli, M. (eds), Foucault and the History of Our Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 223–235. Lorenzini, D. (2016), ‘From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much’, Foucault Studies, 21, 7–21. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), 576 US 644. Paras, E. (2006), Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, New York: Other Press. Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke (1978), 438 US 265. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992), ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173–205. Rose, N., O’Malley, P., and Valverde, M. (2006), ‘Governmentality’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2, 83–104. Sokhi-Bulley, B. (2016), Governing (Through) Rights, Oxford: Hart/Bloomsbury. Tazzioli, M. (2016), ‘Revisiting the Omnes et Singulatim Bond: The Production of Irregular Conducts and the Biopolitics of the Governed’, Foucault Studies, 21, 98–116. Veyne, P. (1997), ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in Davidson, A. I. (ed.) and Porter, C. (trans.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 146–182.

13. Algorithmic governmentality: questions of method Claudia Aradau1

INTRODUCTION Global governmentality, postcolonial governmentality, humanitarian governmentality, colonial governmentality, neoliberal governmentality and, more recently, algorithmic governmentality are just a few of the terms that have come to diagnose our present, while mobilizing the methodological toolbox developed by Michel Foucault. The significance of method in Foucault’s work can be gauged in the constant return to ‘questions of method’, at times even during the same lecture series. For instance, in The Government of Self and Others, after introductory ‘remarks on method’, he returns to a ‘reminder of method’ (Foucault 2010). In each of these instances, Foucault questions his methods by placing each series of lectures within the broader (always rearticulated) project and therefore reinterpreting it. The ‘questions of method’ are experimental and recurrent. Methods allow Foucault to revisit and reframe his project. As he puts it: ‘I like to open a space of research, try it out, and then if it doesn’t work, try again somewhere else … What I say ought to be taken as “propositions”, “game openings” where those who might be interested are invited to join in’ (Foucault 1991, 90–91). Yet, there have been many criticisms of research deploying the ‘governmentality’ toolbox exactly for forgetting these openings and provisional propositions and reifying a set of concepts. For anthropologist and theorist Paul Rabinow (2007), new ‘concept work’ is needed for studies of apparatuses and assemblages of power. Political theorist Thomas Biebricher (2008) sees governmentality as a moment of closure of Foucault’s more radical genealogies, which focused on struggles. For other critics, governmentality has led to a pathological state of description, where diagnoses of neoliberalism, discipline or biopolitics are found again and again, through what International Relations scholar Anna Leander has called ‘applicationism’. As she pointedly puts it, this pathology underpins even critical work as it seeks to ‘apply Foucault to show that biopolitics is at work in the umptieth context’ (Leander 2020, 63).2 By contrast, Leander proposes a methodological strategy of ‘composing collaborationist collages’, which has the advantage of ‘directing attention to non-linear, complex, materially entangled and ongoing socio-material processes and the open-ended emergence these generate’ (Leander 2020, 66). In this chapter, I approach algorithmic governmentality as methodological. This is perhaps appropriate given that Foucault moved from one ‘little experiment of method’ to another (Foucault 2007, 455). I take algorithmic governmentality as 235

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both a diagnosis of the present and an empirical worksite to revisit and recast these criticisms of governmentality. Algorithmic governmentality encapsulates a diagnosis of our present, where words, actions and gestures are rendered into actionable data. It is also a methodological orientation in the sense in which it focuses on how power relations, institutions, forms of knowledge, and subjectivities are transformed. While the literature on algorithmic governmentality could be hardly seen as a form of ‘applicationism’, I argue that it does not sufficiently account for the heterogeneity of the present. As the authors of a manifesto on technoprecarity have argued, ‘We are all born under surveillance, but not all of us are equally scrutinized’ (The Precarity Lab 2020). Their statement offers a cautionary note about how heterogeneity and homogeneity, contingency and obduracy of power relations need to be simultaneously addressed. Thus, rather than the languages of surveillance or digital platforms, they argue that we need a ‘new vocabulary that foregrounds “race, gender, nation, and empire”’ (The Precarity Lab 2020). Drawing on research with Tobias Blanke (Aradau and Blanke 2022), I propose to start from controversies about rationalities and technologies of governing to resituate debates about algorithmic governmentality. Controversies have been a key methodological device in Science and Technology Studies and Actor Network Theory (Pinch 2015; Callon 2006; Latour 2005; Marres 2015). They bear resonances with the concept of problematization in Foucault’s work. Yet, as this chapter shows, controversies and problematizations are subtly different methodologically. To develop this methodological proposal, the chapter starts by outlining the main elements of algorithmic governmentality and highlights a range of critiques of its diagnosis of the present. Secondly, I enter the empirical site of border and migration control to draw out some of the challenges to algorithmic governmentality. Thirdly, following on from this empirical site, I attend to methods of controversy analysis, particularly in relation to Foucault’s concept of problematization. This final section brings together controversy and governmentality and the methodological implications for diagnosing the present.

ALGORITHMIC GOVERNMENTALITY The coinage of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ can be traced to a chapter by legal theorist Antoinette Rouvroy and a joint article with political philosopher Thomas Berns (Rouvroy 2012; Rouvroy and Berns 2013). In their article, Rouvroy and Berns argue that algorithmic governmentality is a new mode of governing, which does not focus on individuals but on their relations, and which has developed new forms of knowledge different from statistics. Berns and Rouvroy had previously reflected on the power of statistics (Rouvroy and Berns 2010). Statistics helped produce the ‘average man’, the population and its distributions of normality and abnormality as objects of government. ‘The population’, Foucault argues, is ‘everything that extends from biological rootedness through the species up to the surface that gives one a hold provided by the public’ (Foucault 2007, 83). Statistical instruments make it possible

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to rethink phenomena through the ‘calculus of probabilities’ and integrate ‘individual phenomena within a collective field, but in the form of quantification’ (Foucault 2007, 65). Algorithmic governmentality undoes the tenets of statistics both as a mode of knowledge and as techniques of governing the conduct of populations. For Rouvroy and Berns, algorithmic governmentality marks several important ‘turns’ from existing practices of knowing and governing. Firstly, as Rouvroy had argued, despite claims to ‘objectivity’, algorithmic governmentality is characterized by a ‘turning away from the ambitions of modern rationality anchored in empirical experiment and deductive-causal-logic’ (Rouvroy 2012, 144). This move has been encompassed in the formula of ‘correlation instead of causation’ (Kitchin 2014). Big data and algorithmic practices of knowledge production are seen to have supplanted an epistemology of causation with one of correlation. As Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler (2021, 1263) explain, ‘[r]ather than evoking legends of alien cognition, it is more reasonable to consider machine learning as an instrument of knowledge magnification that helps to perceive features, patterns, and correlations through vast spaces of data beyond human reach’. Secondly, algorithmic governmentality no longer relies on hypotheses, experiments and trials, as it reverts to ‘real time, pre-emptive production of algorithmic reality’ (Rouvroy 2012, 144). This second point is later unpacked as both an inductive empiricism and the production of knowledge as ‘data-behaviorism’. Data or digital behaviourism names the transformation of the world into ‘raw data’ so that action and thought are directly rendered and operationalized as data. Data behaviourism short-circuits the relation between the world and statistical quantification, which required hypothesis and mediation through categorization. As a consequence, thirdly, algorithmic governmentality ‘bypasses and avoids any encounter with human reflexive subjects’ (Rouvroy 2012, 144). In curtailing the encounter between individual subjects and power, algorithmic governmentality puts an end to the possibility of resistance and even recalcitrance. For Rouvroy and Berns, the statistical production of the ‘average man’ has been replaced by new techniques of aggregation and correlation. According to them, algorithmic governmentality is ‘a-normative’. This is the recognition that algorithms do not need a general norm against which to assess relations, nor do they produce a norm out of these relations. To use Foucault’s (2007) terms, neither normation nor normalization are relevant for algorithmic governmentality. Algorithmic governmentality avoids and bypasses individual subjects. Rouvroy pointedly observes that algorithmic governmentality entails ‘infra-individual data and supra-individual patterns without, at any moment, calling the subject to account for himself’ (Rouvroy 2012, 144). Algorithms, therefore, also reduce the scope of critique, if they do not eliminate it altogether. Rouvroy’s and Berns’s investigations of algorithmic governmentality have inspired and found resonance in much of the critical literature on algorithms and big data. Their understanding of data-behaviourism is reflected in Shoshana Zuboff’s (2018) recent analysis of ‘behavioural surplus’ in surveillance capitalism. It also informs the understanding of associational and correlationist algorithms that eschew

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causality (Amoore 2014; Kitchin 2014; Flyverbom et al. 2017; Leese 2014). Other scholars highlight the elements of real-time and pre-emption that algorithms intensify (Andrejevic et al. 2020; Leszczynski 2016). Philosopher Bernard Stiegler (2018) has offered an extended gloss on Rouvroy’s and Berns’s article on algorithmic governmentality. Stiegler concludes that automatization and the industry of digital traces leads to nihilism, a new form of totalitarianism and the destruction of knowledge. For Stiegler, as objects become fully calculable, they are futile, no-things or nihil. It is in that sense that he pushes Rouvroy’s and Berns’s insights further towards a nihilism that destroys objects and a ‘functional stupidity’ generated by the transfer of human analysis and discernment to algorithms (Stiegler 2018, 59–67). These various aspects of algorithmic governmentality raise questions about the methodological underpinnings of the governmentality toolbox. We can read algorithmic governmentality as a radical undoing of the past, be that of the knowledge of statistics or the modern subject. This leads to a dire prognosis: the end of emancipation and human reflexivity. Since Rouvroy’s and Berns’s coinage of algorithmic governmentality, the effects and power of algorithms have become the focus of numerous critical inquiries across disciplinary boundaries. While there are many disagreements over the rationalities and technologies that algorithmic governmentality deploys, most critical work would concur with Rouvroy’s and Berns’s diagnosis of the undoing of political subjectivity and reflexivity. Their analysis of algorithmic governmentality resonates with the diagnosis that Wendy Brown (2015) has offered of neoliberal governmentality as ‘undoing the demos’. For Brown, neoliberal governmentality – with its extensive economization of all social and political relations – is undoing the collective and individual subjects of liberal democracy. These diagnoses of the present can be read in the lineage of work on governmentality across a range of spheres, which has focused on domination, silencing, and processes of undoing and de-democratizing. Indeed, the account of power in algorithmic governmentality seems more akin to Foucault’s understanding of states of domination. While Foucault has not discussed the distinction between power and domination at length, he explains in an interview in 1984 that, in states of domination, ‘the power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them, remain blocked, frozen’ (Foucault 1997, 283; see also Lorenzini, this volume). Feminist sociologist Vikki Bell (1993) has argued for the need in feminist thought to draw a distinction between power and domination. What does this distinction mean for analyses of (algorithmic) governmentality? Foucault has underscored the connection power-governmentality, as ‘government is not a pure relation of force, or it is not pure domination, it is not pure violence’ (Foucault 2016, 103). Thus, governmentality and power are entwined to the exclusion of domination. For instance, William Walters (2012, 11) has argued that governmentality does not address situations of domination, as these are ‘limit situations’. The conceptualization of algorithmic governmentality seems undergirded by states of domination rather than relations of power. Algorithmic governmentality morphs into algorithmic control, as the analytical focus is on dominant actors, technologies, and effects of domination. Following Bell’s (1993, 41) reformulation of domination

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as ‘a situation, still based on the operations of unstable tactics of power, but where a reversal in power relations appears to be almost impossible’, I propose to expand analyses of algorithmic governmentality to attend to distinctions and conjunctions of power and domination. Foucault gestures towards a triadic relationship of power– domination–government, as he briefly notes that ‘between games of power and states of domination, you have technologies of government’ (Foucault 1997, 299). Attending to conjunctions and disjunctions between domination and power is especially relevant to understanding the reconfigurations of racism and capitalism in algorithmic governmentality. However, by working with an (implicit) assumption of states of domination, the toolbox of algorithmic governmentality has eschewed the struggles, tensions, or controversies that both constitute and resist algorithmic practices (Aradau and Blanke 2022). A critique of inattention to struggles is not new in debates about governmentality. Thomas Biebricher situates governmentality in opposition to genealogy and argues that, in his lectures on governmentality, Foucault no longer pays attention to ‘societal struggles, revolts and other forms of resistance’, except in an abstract way (Biebricher 2008, 395). Geographer Clive Barnett has also criticized ‘[t]he instrumental use of notions of governmentality’ in analyses of neoliberalism as supporting ‘a two-dimensional understanding of political power – which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance – and of geographical space – which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects’ (Barnett 2005, 7). Moreover, according to Biebricher, Foucault evacuates contingency from studies of governmentality, building a more teleological history. What is key for genealogy is that it ‘sheds a thoroughly destabilizing light on the history of the present’ (Biebricher 2008, 367). Yet, this embrace of instability, indeterminacy, and contingency seems to offer another abstract reading of history. While indeterminacy can open to a different understanding of the present, the reading of contingency focuses only on malleable and reversable relations – power relations as opposed to relations of domination. What is key is not to prioritize power over domination or vice versa, but to trace connections between the two. To speak of an ascendant algorithmic reason, does not mean that domination and control spell the undoing of democracy, politics and subjectivity. As Tobias Blanke and I have argued elsewhere, algorithmic reason renders the conditions of possibility of heterogenous practices and their circulations globally (Aradau and Blanke 2022). It does not reproduce the binary of contingent practices and the imaginaries of algorithmic objectivity and efficiency promoted by the tech companies. It aims to hold contingency and obduracy, power and domination together, while also accounting for transformation. Sociologist Bilel Benbouzid (2019) has proposed a critical intervention that similarly challenges the analysis of algorithmic governmentality as ineluctable control and domination. Benbouzid sees the diagnosis of the end of critique as itself limiting concrete possibilities for emancipation by confining actors, and sociologists themselves to a stance of powerlessness. If the sociology of science and technology is to contribute to the study of algorithmic prediction, and at the same time to justify its relevance and usefulness in this context, Benbouzid argues that it must develop a specific art of inquiry that allows it to create critical tests specially designed for this

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purpose (Benbouzid 2019, 2). He traced the algorithms used by PredPol – one of the best known (and most infamous) companies producing predictive policing software – to an earth scientist in France. Following Benbouzid’s intervention, which connected the two practices – policing and earth science – a controversy involving the use of algorithms and their predictive affordances ensued. Benbouzid highlights the two ways in which algorithms work in different contexts: Contrary to the seismologist, police officers cannot experience ‘failed’ predictions, because in their practice, prediction is expressed not in terms of truth or falsehood, but in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ The problem is not to believe or disbelieve in the machine’s predictions, but to do something rather than nothing, following the machine’s recommendations. (Benbouzid 2019, 2)

In fact, Benbouzid aimed to spark a controversy between the actionable knowledge produced through predictive policing algorithms and the knowledge produced by a seismologist. The controversy that Benbouzid traces remains a localized one, as George Mohler, the mathematician who developed the PredPol algorithms, has continued his work with the company. More recently, PredPol has erased the language of prediction from its website and marketing; the company now operates under the new name Geolitica, arguing that it is not prediction that they do, but ‘geographical analytics’ based on the time and location of crimes (PredPol 2021). By changing its name, the company claims that their models are about ‘patrol operations management’ rather than predictive policing. In fact, analyses of predictive policing have shown that the algorithms are less about predicting a crime and more about allocating police resources in the present (Aradau and Blanke 2017; Egbert and Leese 2021; Benbouzid 2019). This controversy between policing and earth science applications can be supplemented by the significant public controversy that emerged around the discriminatory and racializing effects of PredPol algorithms. In the USA, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition alongside academics and activists engaged in painstaking work and argumentation around these discriminatory effects (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition 2016, 2019). By attending to struggles and controversies over data, algorithms and models, analyses of algorithmic governmentality can challenge assumptions of domination through algorithms. A second aspect of algorithmic governmentality is that it implies – perhaps in the lineage of neoliberal governmentality – that algorithms work, and they work even a little too well. The performativity of algorithms has been intensified through the language of ‘executability’ from computer science. Media theorist Wendy Chun has argued that the language of code has reinforced the performativity of algorithms: Code as law as police, like the state of exception, makes executive, legislative, and juridical powers coincide. Code as law as police erases the gap between force and writing, language and parole, in a complementary if reverse fashion to the state of exception. It makes language abstract – erases the importance of enunciation – not by denying law, but

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rather by making logos everything. Code is executable because it embodies the power of the executive. (Chun 2016, 98)

These analyses build on earlier insights by Alexander Galloway, Katherine Hayles and Lawrence Lessig about the difference between code and language, as code is ‘executable’ while language is not (for a discussion see Introna 2015). As Hayles succinctly puts it, ‘Code that runs on a machine is performative in a much stronger sense than that attributed to language’ (Hayles 2010, 50). The focus on executability has been less prominent in recent debates, which have been more concerned with inscrutability. The power of algorithms has been related to the characters of inscrutability and executability (Introna 2015, 25). Inscrutability is not the same as secrecy, but it can be perhaps better characterized as opacity. Algorithms are opaque both in the sense in which their operations are unknown or secret and in the sense in which they cannot be known, even to their designers (Burrell 2016). The latter has been particularly the case for machine learning algorithms such as neural networks. By working so well and due to their intensified performativity, algorithms also appear to afford much more granular knowledge of individuals and social life. Yet, research on algorithms as well as big data and artificial intelligence has more recently shown that these techniques often do not work so well (Broussard 2018). They are plagued by bias, and reproduce and exacerbate inequalities and discrimination (Benjamin 2019; Madianou 2019). Moreover, all these techniques require a lot of labour to be set in place, deployed, maintained and updated (Chun 2016). Algorithms are often messy and ambiguous. They have become the object of public controversy exactly because they work for some and do not work for others, as their errors translate into systematic bias and discrimination. Errors, glitches and failures have brought algorithms to public attention (Aradau and Blanke 2021). Thirdly, algorithmic rationalities have an ambiguous relation with statistical reasoning. The algorithmic processing of (big) data appears to sidestep many of the processes of creating equivalences and relatively stable objects, which could become debated publicly. According to Bernard Harcourt, the digital world is a ‘quantum leap’ (Harcourt 2015, 156) from statistical reasoning: ‘The object of the algorithmic data-mining quest of the digital age is to find our perfect double, our hidden twin. It deploys a new rationality of similitude, of matching, without regard for the causal link’ (Harcourt 2015, 157). Although the assumption of disregard for causality is recurrent in the critical literature, an analysis of controversies shows that these questions are significant for algorithmic processes (Aradau and Blanke 2022). Moreover, statistical knowledge and instruments are not simply discarded or surpassed. In the next section, I turn to an illustration of how algorithmic rationalities are mobilized for migration control, starting from a controversy around the use of algorithms and big data to forecast migration flows.

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ALGORITHMIC RATIONALITIES OF MIGRATION CONTROL Critical scholarship on borders and migration has analysed the effects of the European Union databases, particularly the increased use of biometrics, and the production of digital borders (Broeders and Dijstelbloem 2015; Glouftsios 2021; Amelung et al. 2021; Leese 2022). For instance, the European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database (Eurodac), which contains fingerprints of applicants for international protection in the Member States and fingerprints of persons apprehended crossing borders irregularly, has been shown to increasingly blur the boundaries between asylum, policing and security (Tsianos and Kuster 2016). Although the Eurodac database was envisaged primarily to allocate state responsibility for processing asylum claims under the Dublin Regulations, it has been the object of key changes that have transformed it into ‘a powerful tool of mass surveillance, whereby national authorities will be able to track third-country nationals whose data are recorded within the EU for as long as they remain on EU territory’ (Vavoula 2020, 15). Alongside databases such as Eurodac, EU agencies have also increasingly turned their attention to big data and algorithms to govern migration and asylum. The European Union Asylum Support Office (EASO) started a process of social media monitoring as part of an earlier drive, which can be traced back to 2016, to use big data for ‘forecasting and early warning’. In its 2018 Annual Report, it acknowledged that ‘EASO also expanded its social media monitoring programme, both by adding languages and by developing additional report types (thematic and ad hoc)’ (EASO 2019, 34). In an earlier report on migration forecasting, representatives from EASO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) argued that: Examples of big data potentially relevant to early warning of forced migration movements include communication based information sources such as social media, internet searches, smartphone apps, the IP addresses of website logins and emails, and call detail records. Interestingly, since some such data sources can be ‘geolocated’, they have even greater potential for early warning and monitoring of migration movements. The use of private data in this context raises, however, some privacy and confidentiality concerns. (EASO and OECD 2018, 4)

Subsequently, the use of big data and machine learning algorithms has been justified in terms of the preparedness of national and local authorities. In an article co-authored with former and current EASO staff, big data and adaptive machine learning algorithms are seen as transcending the impasses of statistical and demographic data for forecasting migration and asylum flows. The authors argue that ‘adaptive machine learning algorithms that integrate official statistics with non-traditional data sources can effectively capture early warning signals of asylum-related migration and forecast asylum applications in countries of destination’ (Carammia et al. 2020). Big data and its algorithmic processing do not entail the discarding of statistical or demographic data, but they combine statistical data with new forms of data to

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recast asylum and migration flows as an object of government. Machine learning algorithms in combination with big data promise to forecast asylum and migration flows in near-real time (though the article so far focuses on a four-week timeframe). EASO’s earlier experimentation with social media monitoring needs to be understood in relation to the impasses of statistical reasoning and the limits of predictive knowledge. In 2019, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) made public a report about the use of social media monitoring by EASO (EDPS 2019). This controversy, which led to the temporary suspension of social media monitoring at EASO, remained largely a professional one and only occasionally filtered into a more public debate. The EDPS report offers an important problematization of how algorithms and big data are mobilized to govern asylum. It clarifies that EASO’s social media monitoring ‘target[ed] persons pertaining to certain language groups and using certain keywords in their social media posts’ (EDPS 2019, 2). Then EDPS proceeds to contest EASO’s justifications through the prism of data protection by recasting EASO’s claims about using open source intelligence into a ‘personal data processing activity that creates high risk for individuals’ rights and freedoms’ (EDPS 2019, 3). Not only are these aspects of risk and personal data neglected by the agency, but in EASO’s communication with EDPS, they also eschew questions about the accuracy of social media data. As the EDPS report highlights, by producing and circulating statements such as ‘195 migrants/asylum seekers from Nigeria, who were aiming at crossing to Europe from Libya, returned voluntarily to their home country’, EASO ignores the lack of accuracy of much social media data. We can read this controversy between EASO and EDPS as using data protection as ‘as a crucial form to problematize both the will to govern through data and the will to govern data’ (Bellanova 2017, 333). At the same time, EDPS also raises questions about knowledge production, vulnerability and rights. Even as EASO’s claims reproduce the rationalities of algorithmic governmentality, these do not remain uncontested. In 2019, Privacy International announced that another EU agency, Frontex, ‘mysteriously’ withdrew a call for tender for social media monitoring in the wake of questions the civil liberties organization submitted on the eTendering site (Privacy International 2019). NGOs and journalists had raised public questions about the Frontex call for tender. Privacy International submitted a question to Frontex, asking how the agency envisaged monitoring that was not aimed ‘at collecting, processing, storing, or sharing personal data of social media users?’ (Privacy International 2019). The call for social media analyses focused on an anticipatory capability, resonating with EASO’s earlier efforts at forecasting and early warning. As Frontex put it in the Terms of Reference, ‘The report should be forward-looking and go beyond the formal customer-driven requirements process in order to provide not only an understanding of the current landscape but also a strategical warning system on changes such as the socio-political, economic or human security environment that could pose challenges to Frontex policies’ (Frontex 2010). Privacy International unpacked their key question into a series of sub-questions about Frontex’s responsibility. Rather than answering these questions, Frontex cancelled the call for tender.

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These attempts to introduce big data and algorithmic processing of social media data for migration and border control highlight two different aspects of algorithmic governmentality. Firstly, big data and algorithms do not replace statistical techniques and modes of knowledge. Rather, they supplement them and promise to surmount their impasses. As statistical knowledge could move from the individual to the population but not back to the individual, big data holds the promise to move between the two and recompose the small and the large in the government of populations (Aradau and Blanke 2022). Social media monitoring multiplies probabilistic forecasts and early warnings of movement, circulation and flow. Secondly, algorithmic governmentality is a site of scientific and public controversy. Algorithmic operations on social media data for the purposes of migration control are contested by journalists, civil society actors and data protection agencies. In the next section, I show how these modes of contestation around algorithmic governmentality can be understood as controversies.

CONTROVERSY AND ALGORITHMIC GOVERNMENTALITY Controversies are an established method of analysis in Science and Technology Studies (STS). They can be understood as a broader approach ‘for studying the partiality of knowledge’ (Marres 2015, 656). For STS scholar Trevor Pinch (2015), scientific controversies are effectively ‘moments of contestation’, when certain taken-for-granted assumptions or existing struggles and imaginaries become visible. Controversies are moments of openness followed by closure and temporary stabilization. Bruno Latour has situated controversy particularly in relation to the agency of nonhumans in the production of scientific knowledge: By using the word ‘controversy’ in a positive sense, I have suppressed not the certainties of the sciences but one of the old barriers set up between the visible assembly of humans discussing and arguing among themselves and the scientific assembly that did of course discuss and argue a good deal, but in secret, and that in the end produced only indubitable matters of fact. (Latour 2004, 66)

Through controversies, things are not just mobilized in laboratories but become public and political. In that sense, controversies have highlighted how ‘making things political and public often involves difficult technical work’ (Walters 2014, 103). Yet, controversies and controversy analysis have also been criticized for ‘flattening’ contestation by ignoring the asymmetric relations that shape contestation. If symmetry is understood as a methodological precaution of not assuming that asymmetries are given a priori, a different understanding of symmetry and asymmetry is possible. Symmetry is provisional and it needs to be supplemented by analytical devices that orient research to how asymmetry is enacted. As Sheila Jasanoff explains, once controversies are not limited to laboratories and the pages of scientific journals, then

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we need to ‘confront actors equipped with vastly different resources from the visible stuff of laboratories: law, money, political influence, enforcement capability, regulatory authority, media access, the power to make and unmake institutions’ (Jasanoff 2012, 439). Even actors in laboratories are also equipped with different resources, instruments, funding, or media access. For instance, situating such laboratories geopolitically makes visible the power of borders and bordering in scientific controversies. But more importantly, as Jasanoff highlights, controversies are not limited to laboratories. Nor do they need to start in laboratories. In his analysis of AIDS activism, sociologist Steven Epstein has shown how ‘activist movements, through amassing different forms of credibility, can in certain circumstances become genuine participants in the construction of scientific knowledge – that they can (within definite limits) effect changes both in the epistemic practices of biomedical research and in the therapeutic techniques of medical care’ (Epstein 1995, 409). Thus understood, an analysis of controversies attentive to asymmetries resonates with Foucault’s concept of problematization or perhaps, more precisely, with a problematization of problematization. Foucault coined problematization to render an orientation of his work. According to him, problematization ‘develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to’ (Foucault 2000, 118). Thus, problematization renders both problems and solutions into a question. In revisiting the concept, Rabinow restricts problematization to an institutionalized or expert domain, as the concept of problematization ‘requires that the situation in question contain institutionally legitimated claims’ (Rabinow 2003, 33). In that sense, controversies are not far from the analysis of difficulties and problematizations that emerge in specific historical moments. However, they need not be limited to ‘institutionally legitimated claims’ and in that sense are closer to a problematization of problematization. Controversies can emerge in relation to heterogeneous claims to knowledge or intervention. As we saw in the previous section, computer and data scientists mobilize to produce knowledge for the purpose of governing. Through big data and algorithms, they render asylum and migration flows as specific objects of government. Controversies between big data and statistics have emerged in these professional worlds. At the same time, the controversies that have developed in relation to social media monitoring by EASO and Frontex have taken a public dimension. It is perhaps here that we can see another distinction between controversy and problematization. According to sociologist Cyril Lemieux, controversies have a triadic rather than a dyadic dimension, as there is always an element of publicity (Lemieux 2007). This element of publicity can be that of professional peers as in scientific controversies or other publics who become constituted in the controversy. In that sense, controversies are also different from struggles, which have a dyadic structure. The distinction dyadic/triadic relies on how conflicts are to be resolved. The triadic relation can be perhaps rendered through Bourdieu’s analysis of the judicial situation as entailing ‘a specialized body independent of the social groups in conflict’ (Bourdieu 1986, 830). ‘This body’, explains Bourdieu, ‘is responsible for organizing the public representation of social conflicts according to established forms, and for finding solu-

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tions socially recognized as impartial’ (ibid.). We can think of similar bodies across different situations – social, economic, political.3 In contradistinction to Bourdieu, pragmatic sociology and STS do not limit controversy to particular fields, but map controversies across time as well as geographical and social space. Building on these analyses, controversies, problematizations and struggles can be understood as different forms of contestation, with heterogeneous dynamics and materializations.4 Both controversies and problematizations challenge existing regimes of truth, but they do so in different ways. Problematizations are more specifically focused on solution-based approaches to how particular objects or phenomena have been constituted as problems, while controversies attend to how contestations unfold, without being articulated in the vocabularies of ‘problem’ and ‘solution’. Problematization and controversy also differ in that problematization ‘mobilises specific subjects and events in order to question the mechanisms of subjugation at play in our society’ (Tazzioli and Lorenzini 2020). In that sense, problematization is intimately connected with struggle and resistance to subjugation. Controversy does not start from relations of subjugation, but from an event of (limited) openness, where different actors, devices and resources can be provisionally mobilized. The brief analysis of how migration and asylum flows are rendered into objects of algorithmic government through forecasting and early warning has shown how scenes of controversy are set in motion, where different actors and devices are mobilized. These controversies invite us to approach algorithmic governmentality methodologically beyond the worlds of science and laboratories. Controversies supplement vocabularies of contestation alongside problematization, struggle, resistance, denunciation, scandal or dispute. Controversies make visible how the knowledge produced through algorithms is not consensual and homogeneous, but heterogeneous and disputed.

CONCLUSION This chapter has approached algorithmic governmentality as a ‘question of method’. Discussions of algorithmic governmentality have highlighted conceptual aspects of knowledge and power that go beyond statistical reasoning and the government of populations. Yet, in so doing, they have also often depicted an emergent algorithmic governmentality as a new mode of domination and control. Like other uses of governmentality across the social sciences, algorithmic governmentality raises similar questions about the relation between discourse and practice, dominant knowledge and struggles, power and subjectivity. Through the method of controversy, we can trace an emergent algorithmic governmentality through sites where claims to knowledge and justifications for interventions vie against each other. I have proposed to attend to how algorithmic rationalities are deployed in relation to migration as an object of government. While databases and biometrics have been long used for the purposes of identifying, confining and pre-empting movement, big data and its algorithmic processing have only more

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recently started to be used by migration and asylum agencies in EU. Here, social media becomes big data or big data is algorithmically processed to forecast migration and asylum flows. Rather than supplanting statistical reasoning, big data and algorithms come to supplement statistical and demographic data. Rather than surpassing the law, they need to work with data protection law. Rather than eschewing subjectivity, they work upon particular ‘exposures’ of subjectivity. Moreover, these knowledge claims and interventions have become the object of public controversy. As we have seen, several controversies have unfolded, as data protection authorities, NGOs and journalists have contested (and even stopped) the use of social media monitoring. Through this analysis, controversy is deployed as a methodological device with which to approach the emergence of arts of governing and political rationalities.

NOTES 1.

Research on this chapter was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SECURITY FLOWS, grant agreement No. 819213). 2. A similar point is made by Nikolas Rose in this volume; see also Walters (2012, 15 and passim). 3. Bourdieu, however, sees the political field as defined by relations between friends and enemies, and the tendency ‘to exclude the intervention of any third person as arbiter’ (Bourdieu 1986, 831). 4. Other concepts such as dispute, contention or conflict can be added to these vocabularies.

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Benjamin, Ruha (2019), Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Cambridge: Polity Press. Biebricher, Thomas (2008), ‘Genealogy and Governmentality’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2(3), 363–396. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986), ‘Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field’, Hastings Law Journal 38, 805–853. Broeders, Dennis and Dijstelbloem, Huub (2015), ‘The Datafication of Mobility and Migration Management’, in Irma van der Ploeg and Jason Pridmore (eds), Digitizing Identities: Doing Identity in a Networked World, New York: Routledge, pp. 242–260. Broussard, Meredith (2018), Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Wendy (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Burrell, Jenna (2016), ‘How the Machine “Thinks”: Understanding Opacity in Machine Learning Algorithms’, Big Data & Society 3(1). https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​2053951715622512. Callon, Michel (2006), ‘Pour une sociologie des controverses technologiques’, in Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon, and Bruno Latour (eds), Sociologie de la Traduction: Textes Fondateurs, Paris: Presse des Mines, pp. 135–157. Carammia, Marcello, Iacus, Stefano Maria, and Wilkin, Teddy (2020), ‘Forecasting Asylum-Related Migration Flows with Machine Learning and Data at Scale’, arXiv preprint arXiv:​2011​.04348. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2016), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. EASO (2019), EASO Annual General Report 2018, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. EASO and OECD (2018), ‘Can We Anticipate Future Migration Flows?’ Migration Policy Debates 16, 1–9. EDPS (2019), Formal Consultation on EASO’s Social Media Monitoring Reports (Case 2018-1083). European Data Protection Supervisor. Egbert, Simon and Leese, Matthias (2021), Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work, London: Routledge. Epstein, Steven (1995), ‘The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 20(4), 408–437. Flyverbom, Mikkel, Madsen, Anders Koed, and Rasche, Andreas (2017), ‘Big Data as Governmentality in International Development: Digital Traces, Algorithms, and Altered Visibilities’, The Information Society 33(1), 35–42. Foucault, Michel (1991), ‘Questions of Method’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73–86. Foucault, Michel (1997), ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New York: New Press, pp. 281–302. Foucault, Michel (2000), ‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, London: Penguin Books, pp. 111–119. Foucault, Michel (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2010), The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel (2016), About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980, trans. Graham Burchell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Frontex (2010), ‘Frontex/Op/534/2019/Dt Invitation to Tender. Annex II’. https://​etendering​ .ted​.europa​.eu/​. Glouftsios, Georgios (2021), Engineering Digitised Borders: Designing and Managing the Visa Information System, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harcourt, Bernard E. (2015), Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (2010), My Mother Was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Introna, Lucas D. (2015), ‘Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality: On Governing Academic Writing’, Science, Technology & Human Values 41(1), 17–49. Jasanoff, Sheila (2012), ‘Genealogies of STS’, Social Studies of Science, 42(3), 435–441. Kitchin, Rob (2014), ‘Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts’, Big Data & Society 1(1). Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, New York: Oxford University Press. Leander, Anna (2020), ‘Composing Collaborationist Collages About Commercial Security’, Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS), 1(1), 61–97. Leese, Matthias (2014), ‘The New Profiling: Algorithms, Black Boxes, and the Failure of Anti-Discriminatory Safeguards in the European Union’, Security Dialogue 45(5), 494–511. Leese, Matthias (2022), ‘Fixing State Vision: Interoperability, Biometrics, and Identity Management in the EU’, Geopolitics 27(1), 113–133. Lemieux, Cyril (2007), ‘À quoi sert l’analyse des controverses?’ Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 25(1), 191–212. Leszczynski, Agnieszka (2016), ‘Speculative Futures: Cities, Data, and Governance Beyond Smart Urbanism’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 48(9), 1691–1708. Madianou, Mirca (2019), ‘The Biometric Assemblage: Surveillance, Experimentation, Profit, and the Measuring of Refugee Bodies’, Television & New Media 20(6), 581–599. Marres, Noortje (2015), ‘Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 40(5), 655–686. Pasquinelli, Matteo and Joler, Vladan (2021), ‘The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism’, AI & Society 36(4), 1263–1280. Pinch, Trevor (2015), ‘Scientific Controversies’, in James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Amsterdam: Elsevier. PredPol (2021), ‘Geolitica: A New Name, a New Focus’ (2 March). https://​blog​.predpol​.com/​ geolitica​-a​-new​-name​-a​-new​-focus. Privacy International (2019), ‘#Privacywins: EU Border Guards Cancel Plans to Spy on Social Media (for Now)’. https://​privacyinternational​.org/​advocacy/​3289/​privacywins​-eu​-border​ -guards​-cancel​-plans​-spy​-social​-media​-now. Rabinow, Paul (2003), Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabinow, Paul (2007), ‘Aftword: Concept Work’, in Sahra Gibbon and Carlos Novas (eds), Biosocialities, Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 188–192. Rouvroy, Antoinette (2012), ‘The End(s) of Critique: Data-Behaviourism vs. Due-Process’, in Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries (eds), Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, London: Routledge, pp. 143–168. Rouvroy, Antoinette and Berns, Thomas (2010), ‘Le nouveau pouvoir statistique’, Multitudes 40, 88–103.

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Rouvroy, Antoinette and Berns, Thomas (2013), ‘Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: Le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?’ Réseaux 1(177), 163–196. Stiegler, Bernard (2018), Automatic Society: The Future of Work, trans. Daniel Ross, Cambridge: Polity Press. Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (2016), ‘Predictive Policing: Profit Driven Racist Policing’ (7 December). https://​stoplapdspying​.org/​predictive​-policing​-profit​-driven​-racist​-policing/​. Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (2019), ‘Stop LAPD Spying Coalition Wins Groundbreaking Public Records Lawsuit’ (10 December). https://​stoplapdspying​.medium​.com/​stop​-lapd​ -spying​-coalition​-wins​-groundbreaking​-public​-records​-lawsuit​-32c3101d4575. Tazzioli, Martina and Lorenzini, Daniele (2020), ‘Critique without Ontology: Genealogy, Collective Subjects and the Deadlocks of Evidence’, Radical Philosophy 2.07. https://​www​ .radicalphilosophy​.com/​article/​critique​-without​-ontology. The Precarity Lab (2020), Technoprecarious, London: Goldsmiths University Press. Tsianos, Vassilis S. and Kuster, Brigitta (2016), ‘Eurodac in Times of Bigness: The Power of Big Data within the Emerging European IT Agency’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 31(2), 235–249. Vavoula, Niovi (2020), ‘Transforming Eurodac from 2016 to the New Pact. From the Dublin System’s Sidekick to a Database in Support of EU Policies on Asylum, Resettlement and Irregular Migration’, European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE). Walters, William (2012), Governmentality: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge. Walters, William (2014), ‘Drone Strikes, Dingpolitik and Beyond: Furthering the Debate on Materiality and Security’, Security Dialogue 45(2), 101–118. Zuboff, Shoshana (2018), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York: Public Affairs.

14. Logistical power Brett Neilson

‘What is it to govern a ship?’ asks Michel Foucault (2007a, 97) in his lecture of 1 February 1978. He continues: ‘It involves, of course, being responsible for the sailors, but also taking care of the vessel and the cargo; governing a ship also involves taking winds, reefs, storms, and bad weather into account. What characterizes government of a ship is the practice of establishing relations between the sailors, the vessel, which must be safeguarded, the cargo, which must be brought to port, and their relations with eventualities like winds, reefs, storms, and so on’ (ibid.). With these sentences, Foucault seeks to register how government concerns ‘the intrication of men and things’ (ibid.). His interest is to distinguish governmentality from sovereignty, which he understands as a unitary form of power exercised on a territory and the subjects who inhabit it. To make this distinction, Foucault draws on the metaphor of the ship, which alongside the running of a family or a household, is a privileged figure mobilized by authors of early modern treatises on government. Aside from showing that territory is only one variable of governmentality and not its fundamental condition, this reference to the ship raises the issue of how governmentality relates to practices of movement or circulation, which are key concerns for Foucault insofar as his discussion encompasses matters of security and liberalism. Yet Foucault does not raise the question of logistics, which combines the question of circulation with that of economy to engage matters of efficiency, supply, and computation that have come to the fore in contemporary capitalism. This chapter asks if logistical techniques and technologies can be effectively analysed under the rubric of governmentality. I suggest that digital forms of surveillance and control have produced new forms of power that the concept of governmentality can help us grasp but is insufficient to fully describe or assist us in countering. The chapter begins by placing conceptions of logistical power with respect to Foucault’s genealogy of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power. I contend that Foucault’s failure to develop a fully-fledged concept of logistical power relates to the influence of Carl von Clausewitz on his thought at the time he first conceived this tripartite division of power. From here, the discussion moves to the question of Foucault’s troubled relation to Marx. Seeking to understand how Marxian concepts – such as the production of labour power as a commodity and the circulation of capital – cross Foucault’s notions of disciplinary and government power, I argue that these intersections have strong relevance for the conceptualization of logistical power. Finally, the chapter reviews arguments about the significance of digital technologies for current practices of logistical tracking and control. I ask if the data politics associated with these methods can be understood under the rubric of algorithmic 251

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governmentality or if emergent forms of logistical power require modes of analysis that exceed the ethics of government. For the past decade, critical studies of logistics have highlighted the violence that underlies the global circulation of things, people, and capital (see, for instance, Cowen 2014). This emphasis on violence reflects the shifting legal, conceptual, and geographical boundaries between logistics’ military and civilian domains. Many commentators (see again Cowen 2014) view logistics as a military art that enters the civilian realm in the post-Second World War era. Linked with the spatial reorganization of the firm, the emergence of global supply chains and the computerization of business operations, this so-called logistics revolution brings techniques and technologies honed for the supply of war into the realm of capitalist production and distribution. However, logistics genealogies are multiple. The transatlantic slave trade is another crucial source for contemporary logistical practices (Harney and Moten 2013). Similarly, the organization of trade by early modern chartered companies, such as the British East India Company, set precedents for modern business logistics. Evident in these historical instances, the importance of logistics for the articulation of political and economic power is a feature that lasts until this day. Indeed, the continued relevance of this articulation has drawn the current debate on logistics well beyond the spheres of transport and communication. Empirical study, however, has tended to focus on these sectors. The challenge for deriving a critical account of logistics is to move from an encounter with its specific industrial applications to an analysis of its more general effects upon the organization of political and economic life. If, for Foucault, the ship provides an effective register of governmental power, analyses of logistical power often take the shipping container as an icon (Levinson 2006; Lichtenstein 2011; Lievestad and Markkula 2021). Standardized, modular, and globally diffused, the shipping container is neither a vessel to be governed nor a mere piece of cargo. The container’s transportability rests on an indifference to its contents. At once a material hulk and a mathematized unit, it circulates by virtue of its abstraction into information. Trackable in real time, the container’s mobility is as much an effect of the data fields through which it moves as the heavy lifting that eases it across multiple modes of transport and storage sites. Just as the ship provides Foucault with a metaphor that allows him to describe a mode of power that extends across many fields and takes the population as its main object, so the shipping container is not an exclusive index of logistical power. At stake is a mode of power that not only perpetuates processes of digitalization but also cuts across and rearranges relations among other forms of power, including those described by Foucault as sovereign and governmental powers.

BEYOND TACTICS AND STRATEGY Geographer Nigel Thrift (2007, 95) identifies logistics as ‘perhaps the central discipline of the modern world’. The phrase evocatively marks the reach of logistics

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beyond the organization of production and trade. Thrift links logistics to the ‘the rise of continuously computed environments’ (ibid.). His understanding not only registers how lives and livelihoods have come to depend on techniques of distribution and supply but also suggests logistics’ importance for providing a sense of orientation and position in the world. If we take Thrift’s description of logistics as a discipline to specify its workings as a form of power, however, his wording clashes with Foucauldian definitions and typologies. For Foucault, discipline is a form of power that intercedes between sovereignty and governmentality. Discipline ‘concentrates, focuses, and encloses’ (Foucault 2007a, 44) human life and social practice in defined institutional settings. Crucial to its operations is the creation of ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1977, 135–69). Discipline regulates the behaviour of individuals in the social body through systems of surveillance, training, examination, and the functional organization of space and time. Sovereignty, by contrast, demands obedience to a central authority figure. It stops and limits behaviours through a show of force, involving the use of examples, violent punishment and extreme pain. Governmentality exceeds the operations of both sovereignty and discipline by organizing human subjects as a population. It allows the free movement of things and conduct of subjects within parameters of power established through analytical means such as statistics and apparatuses of security that monitor ever-widening patterns of circulation. In describing logistics as a discipline, Thrift clearly does not wish to insert it within the typology of sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality. For Foucault, this tripartite conceptual grouping provides both a historical series within which to track the evolution of power (at least in the Western world) and a classificatory scheme that differentiates forms of power that continue to operate simultaneously – but also unevenly and inextricably – in contemporary societies. How then, recognizing the centrality of logistics to the modern world, might we place it with respect to this Foucauldian genealogy of power? Answering this question means situating logistical practices with respect to the transformations that Foucault associates with the birth of political modernity. In a previous article (Neilson 2012), I argue that Foucault’s inattention to logistics derives from the initial orientation of his arguments regarding power around the distinction of tactics and strategy advanced by Carl von Clausewitz. Although Foucault mentions Clausewitz a couple of times in his lectures on governmentality (Foucault, 2007a, 90 and 301), he mobilizes the concepts of tactics and strategy to explain early modern transformations of power some years before he begins to speak of government as a distinct political rationality. In Discipline and Punish, he draws on Comte de Guibert’s Essai Général de Tactique (1772) to discuss how military methods of training, drill, and deployment of the body on the ground inform the general diffusion of disciplinary power throughout society. ‘Tactics’, Foucault writes, ‘the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of discipline’ (Foucault 1977, 167). By the time of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, published a year after Discipline and Punish in 1976,

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Foucault shifts the conceptual register to strategy to analyse how changes to the operations of power constitute bodies in relation to populations. In this sense, he writes of a need ‘to decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships’ (Foucault 1978, 97). Foucault does not always use the terms tactics and strategy in a systematic way, particularly when he lectures (see Golder 2015, 115–147). In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, however, his use of these terms parallels his discussion of the ‘the great bipolar technology’ by which ‘disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed’ (Foucault 1978, 139). Not accidentally does Foucault’s understanding of tactics and strategy correspond to the period of Clausewitz’s maximum influence on his thought. For Clausewitz, tactics is the art of positioning troops according to the accidents of the terrain, of bringing or not bringing them into action, and of fighting on the ground. Strategy, by contrast, is the overall planning of war, encompassing the use of maps and the entire theatre of operations. Beyond Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means in Society Must be Defended (Foucault 2003, 15) and The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978, 93), this understanding of tactics and strategy shapes the typology he develops to explain the evolution and split of governmental from disciplinary power. In this respect, it matters little whether, as many commentators claim (see, for instance, Bröckling et al. 2011; Protevi 2014, 540), Foucault’s introduction of the concept of governmentality marks a move away from the notion that war provides a blueprint for understanding the operations of modern power. What counts for my argument is that this focus on tactics and strategy sidelines the third art that from the mid-nineteenth century begins to occupy military thinkers, namely logistics. Present-day thinkers of critical logistics (see, for instance, Cowen 2014 and LeCavalier 2016) quote the works of Antoine-Henri Jomini to illustrate the growing importance of logistics in nineteenth-century military thought. Although Martin Van Creveld (1977, 5–17) argues that logistics arose in the years 1560–1715 as a means for armies to liberate themselves from plunder and living off the land, Jomini broke ground by suggesting that logistics would begin to lead tactics and strategy. In his 1838 tract The Art of War, he declares logistics to be ‘a general science, informing one of the most important parts of war’ (Jomini 2008, 200). This contrasts with the position of Clausewitz, who never developed a theory of logistics or even used the term directly. In On War, published in 1832, Clausewitz (2007, 75) identifies what today would be classified as logistics as ‘preparatory activities’ that are separate from the ‘conduct of war’. In his estimation, tactics and strategy alone are sufficient for the theorization of war, and thus – given his view of war as the continuation of politics – also sufficient for the making of political theory. That Foucault reverses Clausewitz’s dictum about war and politics does not mean his understanding of politics as force relations is necessarily constrained by Clausewitz’s vision. Nonetheless, Clausewitz’s analysis of war as hinging on the division of tactics and strategy provides the basis for Foucault’s first great step away

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from a juridical model of power based in sovereignty and law. Perhaps this explains why Foucault, like Clausewitz, never directly produces a concept of logistics, and why his later lectures and writings, while offering valuable insights about circulation and liberal economic calculation, continue to skirt the question of logistics as discussed today. Certainly, it is possible to derive a concept of logistics from Foucault’s work, as does Julian Reid (2006) when he introduces the notion of ‘logistical life’ to deepen his analysis of the forms of life protected by the network-centric warfare of the early twenty-first century. However, the fact that an engagement with logistics must be derived or inferred from Foucault’s writings indicates that it is a secondary category in his thought, and not central to understanding the workings of modern societies, as Thrift would have it. To be sure, Foucault was writing at a time when the emergence of commercial logistics as a value-generating activity that leads the strategies of firms and the security of nations was only getting underway. Gilles Deleuze (1995, 174–175) provocatively comments that Foucault’s work accounts insufficiently for the role of communication technologies in ‘new forms of circulation and distribution of products’. All of this makes it difficult to situate logistical power with respect to Foucault’s typology of sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality. To do so, we need both to go beyond these approaches to power and dive deeper into them to search for conceptual idioms and methods that are adequate to account for the grip of logistics on contemporary life.

‘MARX IS OUR MACHIAVELLI’ One of Foucault’s achievements in the lectures published as Security, Territory, Population (2007a) is to track the emergence of ‘the economy’ as an object of policy. In earlier texts such as Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault had questioned both liberal and Marxist approaches that positioned power as secondary to the economy. Against this economistic conception of power, Society Must Be Defended derived an encompassing sense of the historicity and diffusion of power relations by modelling them on the polemical confrontation of war. In Security, Territory, Population, both economy and war are ‘resituated as correlates of a regime of governmentality, within which Foucault situates himself as an analyst’ (Tooze 2015). War becomes an instrument of conflict management under the emergence of raison d’état and international law. The economy comes ‘to designate a level of reality and field of intervention for government’ (Foucault 2007a, 95). With an emphasis on free circulation as an economic principle to be governed through security, this perspective seems purpose fit to an engagement with logistics. However, governmentality studies have shied away from a sustained exploration of logistics. Perhaps one reason for this reluctance is that critical investigations of logistics tend also to grapple with accounts of the production of labour power as a commodity and the circulation of capital that draw on Marxian approaches from which Foucault actively distanced himself. To query the applicability of governmentality studies to logistics is to enter the difficult and productive nexus in which Foucault meets Marx.

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‘Marx is our Machiavelli’, Foucault (2007a, 243) declares as he explains how early writers on government positioned themselves with respect to Machiavelli. Relevant here is how these thinkers rejected, extended, or reread Machiavelli’s arguments even though the latter never discussed the art of government directly. In suggesting that Marx plays a similar role for his contemporaries, Foucault implies that the importance of Marx’s work in the 1970s lies less in its substantive content than in how it galvanizes thinkers who argue for or against it. As is well known, Foucault’s own relation with Marxism reflects his distaste for doctrinaire approaches to Marx’s writings. His decision to leave the Communist Party of France in 1952 after only two years of membership and his engagement with the emergence of new forms of struggle and subjectivity in the wake of the 1968 rebellions are just two of the moments that mark Foucault’s rejection of the rigid forms of Marxist orthodoxy that had taken hold of the French left (Eribon 1991). This is not the occasion to document Foucault’s numerous and sometimes contradictory comments regarding Marx, or perhaps more accurately his impatience with ‘a certain contemporary conception’ of political power ‘that passes for the Marxist conception’ (Foucault 2003, 13). Others have taken on that task in detail, arguing for instance that ‘the whole of Foucault’s work can be seen in terms of a genuine struggle with Marx, and that this can be viewed as one of the driving forces of his productiveness’ (Balibar 1992, 39). Commentators have variously stressed resonances between these two thinkers or mined Foucault’s works to seek new ways of reading Marx (see, for instance, Laval et al. 2015; Leonelli 2010; Mezzadra 2020; Negri 2017; Nigro 2008). My ambitions here are more modest because they focus not on a rapprochement between Foucault and Marx but on the tendency of writers who approach logistics critically to draw on the works of both figures. In particular, I ask how these thinkers mobilize Foucauldian notions of power to advance debates about labour in logistical industries and supply chains. Foucault’s influence on these discussions involves a move away from a focus on ‘freely’ contracted labour and a greater emphasis on sexed and raced forms of labour coercion. I also explore the challenges encountered by efforts to combine Marxian accounts of the circulation of capital with Foucault’s account of liberal circulation as a form of freedom and security. Two aspects of Marx’s thought are relevant for critical logistics writers inspired by Foucault’s conceptions of power. These are the production of labour power as a commodity and the circulation of capital. The first of these crosses Foucault’s discussion of the rise of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish as well as the lectures of 1972–73 published as The Punitive Society (Foucault 2015). In these works, the transition from feudalism to capitalism plays an important role, although one that differs from Marx’s account in the chapters of Capital, volume 1 (Marx 1977) dedicated to the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Turning attention to the ‘accumulation of men’ alongside ‘the accumulation of capital’, Foucault emphasizes less ‘the growth of an apparatus of production’ than the rise of a ‘disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies … could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions’ (Foucault 1977, 221). The subjection of labour power and the ‘projection of military methods

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onto industrial organization’ are merely an ‘example’ of this ‘unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a “political” force’ (ibid.). Yet, as Sandro Mezzadra (2020) argues, the frame of war in which Foucault conceives of disciplinary power bears traces of a Marxian understanding of class struggle insofar as the collective subjects engaged in war are constituted through struggle rather than existing prior to it. This perspective becomes particularly evident in The Punitive Society, where Foucault’s attention to refusal, contestation, and subjective resistance provides an angle on proletarianization that exceeds Marx’s emphasis on struggles at the point of production. Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power not only draws upon but also transfigures Marx’s account of the production of labour power as a commodity. In so doing, it opens the possibility of an analysis that foregrounds the role of power relations in bringing workers to an engagement with contemporary logistical chains and processes. Writing of ‘supply chain capitalism’, for instance, Anna Tsing (2009, 151) notes that ‘the exclusions and hierarchies that discipline the workforce emerge as much from outside the chain as from internal governance standards’. ‘No firm’, she writes, ‘has to personally invent patriarchy, colonialism, war, racism, or imprisonment, yet each of these is privileged in supply chain labor mobilization’ (ibid.). Imprisonment, war, and racism, all were central concerns for Foucault in the mid-1970s. His work of this period also sparked considerable debate on patriarchy and colonialism. Tsing’s mention of these factors registers the extent to which her analysis accords Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power. Yet, insofar as her approach concerns labour mobilization, it broaches the question of labour power’s production and reproduction, which is a crucial matter for discussions of the continued presence of primitive accumulation in contemporary capitalism. Deborah Cowen (2014, 96–100) highlights how labour struggles in logistics industries position the ‘body as a battleground’. Cowen has in mind not only the susceptibility of workers’ bodies to injury and death but also the effects of precarity and racialization on the logistics workforce. I have already discussed how Foucault’s (1978, 139) concern with ‘anatomo-politics’ positions the body as the object of disciplinary power. Marx’s insistence that the commodity of labour power exists in the living flesh of the worker also places the body at the heart of historical struggles and the making of subjectivity. Importantly, in this perspective, bodies are raced and gendered in primary ways, meaning that struggles over these forms of social difference are never secondary to contradictions of labour and capital. As detailed in the earlier discussion of tactics and strategy, the focus on bodies and discipline precedes and underscores Foucault’s conceptualization of the rise of governmental power. Although Foucault does not position Marx as an enabler of this conceptualization, his 1976 lecture ‘The Meshes of Power’ finds in what he refers to as the second volume of Capital ‘several elements … for the analysis of power in its positive mechanisms’ (Foucault 2007b, 156). It is important to note that Foucault’s reference here is not to Capital, volume 2 but to the second tome of the French edition of Capital, volume 1, which includes the famous chapters on the working day, cooperation, and machinery. In any case, the lecture in question engages with

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these sections of Capital, volume 1 to argue that ‘society is an archipelago of powers’ (ibid.). Foucault discusses Marx’s identification of ‘regional forms of power’ such as ‘property, slavery, the workshop and also the army’, which have ‘their own way of functioning’ and provide the bases on which the ‘great State apparatuses could form, bit by bit’ (ibid., 156–157). Furthermore, he suggests that these ‘mechanisms of power … must be considered as techniques, which is to say procedures that have been invented, perfected and which are endlessly developed’ (ibid., 158). Foucault’s reflections in this lecture prefigure the work on governmentality. He points to the ‘discontinuous’ nature of monarchical power and signals the need for ‘a mechanism of power that, at the same time as controlling things and people up to the finest detail, is neither onerous nor essentially predatory on society, that exercises itself in the very sense of the economic process’ (ibid., 158–159). Given the importance of Marx to this prefiguration of governmental power, it is notable that reference to this thinker almost completely disappears from Foucault’s more concerted deliberations on this concept, for instance, in Security, Territory, Population. This absence is surprising considering the importance to Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality of notions of liberal circulation and physiocratic doctrines of economic government. As is well known, in Capital, volume 2, Marx develops at length his account of the circulation of capital, including an engagement with the history of political economy beginning with the physiocratic conception of circulation as maintaining the activity and life of the body politic. If, in his lectures of 1977–78, Foucault emphasizes the vast effort required to create a political apparatus to support circulation in ways consistent with freedom and security, his earlier engagement with Marx in ‘The Meshes of Power’ marks his theorization of governmentality and provides an angle from which to read it. I have already mentioned that the circulation of capital is a Marxian concept of relevance to critical studies of logistics. Thinkers seeking to understand the role of logistics in contemporary capitalism regularly cite Capital, volume 2 to register the sense in which the movement of people and things intersects the accumulation and reproduction of capital. Cowen (2014, 101) emphasizes how ‘Marx’s discussion of the circuits of capital is largely abstracted from its material forms’. While commodities must circulate and have their value realized on the market before the social labour expended in their production can be recognized, this circulation can ‘take place without their physical movement . . . a house that is sold from A to B circulates as a commodity, but it does not get up and walk’ (Marx 1978, 226). Marx’s account of the productive capital of the transport and communications industries, however, foregrounds the materiality of circulation. This is because in speeding up the physical circulation of commodities, transport and communication decrease the turnover time of capital, or the time required for it to convert from the commodity to the money form. Marx writes: ‘The transport industry forms on the one hand an independent branch of production, and hence a particular sphere for the investment of productive capital. On the other hand, it is distinguished by its appearance as the continuation of a production process within the circulation process and for the circulation process’ (Marx 1978, 228–229). These are perhaps the sentences from Marx most quoted by

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critical logistics thinkers. Yet the story does not end there because the current debate extends the sphere of logistics beyond transport and communication to encompass the wider control and enhancement of the circulation of capital. As Charmaine Chua (2022, 1457) explains: ‘Logistics systems do not just reduce or cheapen the costs of transportation; they seek to alter the spatial and managerial ordering of production, distribution and consumption within the total circuit of commercial capital. In this way, logistics should be understood as a distinctive realm of movement (both material and financial) that expands the capacity of capital to reproduce itself’. At the conceptual level, critical work on logistics seeks to reconcile such an understanding of capital’s circulation with the liberal conception of circulation as freedom and security developed by Foucault. Such a reconciliation is perhaps impossible at the theoretical level, if by theory we understand a consistent and systematic deployment of concepts to make sense of the world. If, however, we understand Foucault’s governmentality work to offer not a theory but an ‘analytical toolbox’ (Rose et al. 2006, 18), the prospect of thinking logistics within a field of tension marked by the thought of Foucault and Marx becomes more promising. Such an approach resonates with what William Walters (2012, 5) calls ‘critical encounters’ or use of the ‘analytical tools of governmentality’ to research ‘new empirical domains’ and ‘unexpected social transformations’ that prompt the rethinking and invention of concepts. For Walters, the ‘toolbox needs to be reimagined as a dynamic, transactional space – more akin to the fluid world of software design and computing than the settled scene of the tool shed’ (ibid.). Critical logistics work is doubtless only one domain in which contemporary social thinkers pursue such a conceptual reimagination of governmentality. But Walters’s mention of software and computing is perhaps symptomatic in this context because it is precisely the stretch involved in attempting to apply governmentality frameworks to the forms of digital control characteristic of today’s logistical systems that leads many thinkers to try to push beyond the analytical perspective developed by Foucault. The questions of data, extraction, and the real time monitoring of subjects, spaces, and lifeforms are central to these efforts.

FROM RAISON D’ÉTAT TO RAISON DATA Foucault’s explorations of governmentality are often taken to affirm an emphasis on the decentralization and plurality of power regimes. This dispersion of power is indeed a feature of Foucault’s concern with the arts of government. However, the lectures where he investigates these arts dovetail his interests to a detailed consideration of the governmentalization of the state. Foucault explores the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the modern state, the institutions that compose it, and the practices developed and deployed to govern it. In Security, Territory, Population, he traces the evolution of pastoral power and the precedent it provides for power in modern states to take the form not only of sovereign rule but also the government of conduct. He then discusses the emergence of raison d’état as a modality of government specific to the state. Both in its military-diplomatic face, which regulates

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relations among states, and in the dimension of police, which focuses on internal knowledge and ordering of the state, raison d’état mobilizes statistics as a means of governing populations, monitoring circulations, and positioning states with respect to each other according to measures such as those that register economic performance. This later quality becomes central to Foucault’s identification of liberalism as an art of government that approaches society as a set of self-organizing processes that can be steered to benefit the state and its subjects. Liberalism takes the population as its target and seeks to reduce the scope and scale of government according to a political rationality that promotes freedom within terms established by the apparatuses of security and the market. Foucault extends these observations in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), where he studies the rise of neoliberalism, both in its versions that seek to provide and protect the competitive order of the market through explicit policy interventions and in its varieties that project market logics into the operations of the state and the conduct of social life. While these governmental arts might combine or retain different degrees of salience across historical and spatial circumstances, the question that concerns me is the extent to which they cross or articulate the emergence of logistical power. It is important to emphasize that these forms or experiences of government – much like the power regimes of sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality themselves – do not unfold sequentially but overlap and interact in complex ways. The same must be said of the emergent mode of power I am calling logistical power, which does not necessarily present a completely novel set of operations and/or institutional forms but materializes in entanglement with existing rationalities, knowledges, and techniques. What Michael Mann (1984, 208) calls the state’s ‘infrastructural power’, for instance, coincides loosely with aspects of Foucault’s analysis of police in raison d’état. Mann refers to the state’s ‘capacity to penetrate society and implement logistically political decisions’ (ibid.) and seeks to register not only ‘political power relations … radiating outwards from the state (as the term bureaucracy might imply), but also those emanating in civil society and radiating inward to the state’ (Mann 2008, 356). There are parallels in this formulation with Foucault’s discussion of police as form of government that seeks to create a harmonious and productive social order through improvements in commerce, transport, finance, agriculture, and other domains. As Hillel Soifer (2008, 241) points out, there are dissonances between Mann’s and Foucault’s conceptions of state power, not least concerning the possibility of drawing a hard line between state and society. But the resonances here suggest that logistical power does not emerge in separation from the logics of governmentality described by Foucault, and indeed remains enmeshed with these rationalities in its contemporary forms. What then of logistical systems that monitor and control present-day transnational supply chains and intervene, as Charmaine Chua (2022, 1457) writes in a passage already quoted above, to ‘alter the spatial and managerial ordering of production, distribution and consumption within the total circuit of commercial capital’? Ingrid Burrington (2020, para. 1) explains that supply chains are not really chains but ‘are more like constellations or ecologies, or if chains, they are maybe more like a mesh of chain mail’. These metaphors of mesh or network are not foreign to Foucault’s

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conceptualization of governmental power but indeed central to it as registered by the title of the earlier cited lecture ‘The Meshes of Power’ or the claim in Society Must Be Defended that power is ‘exercised through networks’ (Foucault 2003, 29). The presence of this network thinking in Foucault suggests that it has sources other than the advances in communication technologies and micro-electronics already underway in the 1970s and 1980s. Vincent August (2022, 285) argues that Foucault ‘used the metaphorical models of cybernetics to develop his self-organizing and relational concept of power’. August traces these patterns of influence from post-Second World War cybernetic thinkers via structuralism and Georges Canguilhem’s understanding of life as information and regulation. But whatever the derivation of Foucault’s network concepts, they are trained on arts of government that require and work through knowledge gathered by statistical methods. This is particularly evident for the mode of raison d’état named police, which not only makes statistics ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’ (Foucault, 2007a, 315) but also takes ‘the space of circulation’ as its ‘privileged object’ (Foucault 2007a, 325). Logistical power may enact network relations, but its epistemic functioning takes forms quite different to those involved in the production of statistical knowledge. Population statistics of the kind Foucault understands as constitutive for the rise of governmental power rely on periodic stocktaking methods that sample self-elicited accounts and use various methods to sort them into preestablished sociodemographic categories. While it is true that logistics has historically utilized statistical methods to monitor and control the circulation of goods and people, its contemporary manifestations are more interested in continuous forms of tracking, tracing, screening, profiling, and prediction. Computerized technologies are important for these kinds of monitoring and control, which function through the collection and processing of data generated by the activity of people and movement of things, whether enabled through mechanisms of consent or remote sensing. At stake is something more than what Deleuze (1992) describes as the reduction of individuals to mere ‘dividuals’, available for being divided into their constituent data. It is necessary to account for processes of data extraction (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017), which are themselves an important register of continuing primitive accumulation, as well as the processes of aggregation, valuation, modelling, analysis, and pattern recognition applied to such data. Tracking and tracing techniques derived from logistics industries have spread into a myriad of fields, including finance, manufacturing, policing, border control, health, retail, entertainment, and hospitality. This diffusion has been accompanied by an expansion of activities subjected to data extraction to include clicks, searches, transactions, and other kinds of digital interactions. The resulting forms of analysis and prediction apply not only to practices of movement but also to the formation of sentiments, desires, and needs. A strain of contemporary critical thought identifies this logistical deployment of data as a practice of algorithmic governmentality. For instance, Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns (2013) argue that the aggregation, analysis and correlation of data are ‘taking us away from traditional statistical perspectives focused on the average man to “capture” “social reality” as such, directly and immanently’ (2013,

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3). They see this as establishing ‘new breaks’ in Foucault’s ‘third model of power – the security apparatuses model’ or that of governmentality as opposed to discipline and sovereignty (ibid., 11). Algorithmic governmentality, by this account, has three stages: data collection, data processing, and action on behaviours. Its object is not the subject or the population but rather relations. In seeking to govern relations, algorithms organize ‘the realm of possibilities’ (ibid., 20), which is to say that their field of action ‘is not situated in the present, but in the future’ (ibid., 18). This leads to a concern with the consequences of profiling or the creation of ‘statistical doubles’ that consist of ‘combinations of correlations’ whose ‘subsequent trajectory and uses, for the “subject”, are unpredictable and uncontrollable’ (ibid., 16). Far from amplifying concerns regarding data privacy or algorithmic bias, this perspective emphasizes the disconnection of subjects from their data doubles even as it contends that contemporary normative actions are directed toward these doubles to be effective. These arguments resonate with those of Louise Amoore, another thinker who asks what it means ‘to govern with algorithms’ (Amoore 2017, 1; see also Aradau, this volume). Amoore questions the widespread concern with transparency and accountability of algorithms as well as their capacity to do wrong. Instead of seeking to identify and regulate algorithmic wrongs, she asks how algorithms are ‘establishing new patterns of good and bad, new thresholds of normality and abnormality, against which actions are calibrated’ (Amoore 2020, 6). Amoore thus situates algorithmic actions within the ethics of government rather than asserting the need to identify an ‘outside’, ‘locus of responsibility’, or ‘source of a code of conduct with which algorithms must comply’ (ibid., 5). In the perspectives of Rouvroy and Amoore, then, the logistical rationalities that give rise to data-driven forms of algorithmic action constitute what Foucault might call a new art of government. For others, however, these dynamics give rise to a new mode of power distinct from governmentality. Among these thinkers are Engin Isin and Evelyn Rupert (2020), who identify the emergence of what they call ‘sensory power’ from logistical practices of tracking and tracing that have come to the fore in the coronavirus pandemic. Although they do not say so, one could infer that Isin and Ruppert propose that the pandemic has unblocked this form of power, much as Foucault (2007a, 104) argues that governmental power was unblocked from the grip of mercantilism by the emergence of the economy and the population as distinct realms of action. In any case, what distinguishes ‘sensory power’ for these thinkers is that its object is ‘enacted between bodies and populations’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020, 7). Foucault tended to think of power as bipolar or as operating between the anatomical and the biological, but he did not specify the ‘intermediary cluster of relations’ (Foucault 1978, 139) that links disciplinary and governmental powers. For Isin and Ruppert, the cluster is precisely the object of a new form of power, which operates through ‘sensory assemblages of which integrated apps, devices and platforms are a part’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020, 7). While they use the term cluster with the coronavirus pandemic in mind, they recognize its broader origins and applications in the field of logistics. Thus, when Isin and Ruppert speak of clusters being governed by live tracking techniques or being generated by analytics such as machine learning and

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algorithms that do not abide statistical methods, they register the vicinity of ‘sensory power’ to what I call logistical power. Ultimately, what matters for an account of logistical power is not its analytical distinction from sovereignty, discipline, or governmentality, but how it articulates to and nestles within these modes of power to create new political techniques and technologies. In other words, debates about whether logistical power constitutes a new form of power or a new art of government are likely to continue for some time. Indeed, these debates may not be resolvable while ever logistical power remains emergent, precisely because the conditions of emergence mean that it cannot be easily separated or abstracted from existing power dynamics. Nonetheless, we can track the processes of social and political transition that drive this emergence or lead, as I put it awkwardly in the subheading to this section, from raison d’état to raison data. This chapter attempts to accomplish that task. By mapping how logistical power operates beyond the opposition of tactics and strategy, demands a notion of circulation that accounts for the valorization and accumulation of capital, and enacts epistemologies that are not contained by statistical methods, I have sought to highlight some of the problems, debates, and potentially irresolvable conundrums that surround Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. These challenges and puzzles are not meant to detract from the insights an analytical approach framed by governmentality can deliver. Logistics may throw up novel computational methods, modes of labour control, and ways of shaping mobility, but, at certain level, the modes of power it generates cannot be specified without asking ‘What is it to govern a ship?’

REFERENCES Amoore, L. (2017), ‘What does it mean to govern with algorithms?’, Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography [online]. https://​antipodeonline​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2017/​05/​2​ -louise​-amoore​.pdf. Amoore, L. (2020), Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. August, V. (2022), ‘Network concepts in social theory: Foucault and cybernetics’, European Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 271–291. Balibar, E. (1992), ‘Foucault and Marx: The question of nominalism’, in Armstrong, T. J. (ed.), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 38–64. Bröckling, U., Krasmann, S. and Lemke, T. (2011), ‘From Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France to studies of governmentality: An introduction’, in Bröckling, U., Krasmann, S. and Lemke, T. (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–33. Burrington, I. (2020), ‘After supply chain capitalism’, Points: Data & Society, 2 [online]. https://​points​.datasociety​.net/​after​-supply​-chain​-capitalism​-bca0d5ce2ae1. Chua, C. (2022), ‘Logistics’, in Skeggs, B., Farris, S., Toscano, A. and Bromberg, S. (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, London: Sage, pp. 1444–1462. Clausewitz, Carl von (2007), On War, M. Howard and P. Paret (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowen, D. (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Protevi, J. (2014), ‘War’, in Lawlor, L. and Nale, J. (eds), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 540–545. Reid, J. (2006), The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rose, N., O’Malley, P. and Valverde, M. (2006), ‘Governmentality’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2, 1–22. Rouvroy, A. and Berns, T. (2013), ‘Algorithmic governmentality and the prospects of emancipation’, L. Carey-Libbrecht (trans.), Réseaux, 177(1), 1–31. Soifer, H. (2008), ‘State infrastructural power: Approaches to conceptualization and measurement’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 43, 231–251. Thrift, N. (2007), Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge. Tooze, A. (2015), Adam Tooze on Security, Territory, Population [online]. http://​blogs​.law​ .columbia​.edu/​foucault1313/​2015/​12/​01/​foucault​-713​-adam​-tooze​-on​-security​-territory​ -and​-population/​. Tsing, A. (2009), ‘Supply chains and the human condition’, Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–176. Van Creveld, M. (1977), Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walters, W. (2012), Governmentality: Critical Encounters, London: Routledge.

15. Governmentality and political ecology Emanuele Leonardi and Luigi Pellizzoni

INTRODUCTION The relevance of the governmentality framework for addressing ecological issues is marked by a double paradox. Firstly, nature and ecology do not feature prominently in Foucault. His interest in nature was reportedly marginal. A biographical account claims he ‘detested nature’, preferring ‘visiting churches and museums’ (Eribon 1991, quoted in Darier 1999b, 6). Yet, the category of life is central to his work. On one side he shows how biopower builds on the overcoming of the traditional separation between history and humans’ biological constitution and relationship with their biophysical milieu (Foucault 1978). On the other, the very notions of life, or human nature, before concepts or objects of inquiry, are for him ‘epistemological indicators’, that is, historically movable signposts that define the boundaries and modalities of inquiry, the limits of investigation about ourselves and the world, or the conceptual grid through which such investigation can be conducted (Chomsky and Foucault 2006; Foucault 2000). Said differently, life and nature, and their shifting meaning, are cornerstones of the problematizations – the type of issues that arise and take centre-stage and the type of answers that become conceivable (Foucault 2001; see also Bacchi, this volume) – that characterize different historical phases. The second paradox concerns the very notion of governmentality, in both its analytical and historical sense: as the possibility of identifying different rationalities of government, and as the emergence of the problem of government as a matter of administration of things. The rise of government as an issue and as managerial arts or styles owes much, if not most, to the acknowledgement of the relevance of humans’ vital relationship with their biophysical milieu, and the constitution of savoirs, from economics and demography to biology and ecology, that conceptualize reality in such terms (Foucault 2007a, 2008). Yet, governmentality studies have paid minor attention to the governance of the environment and its evolution. Conversely, in the environmental politics and policy literature, governmentality as a notion and approach has gained some relevance since the early 2000s, expanding especially on the analytical perspective of the governmentality concept (for overviews of the literature see Lövbrand and Stripple 2014; Fletcher 2017). This chapter also applies a governmentality outlook on the ‘ecological crisis’ and the evolution of environmental governance, yet it does so from a political ecology perspective, that is, a perspective that challenges the pretended apolitical stance of the study of and policies for the environment (Robbins 2012). This, among other things, entails bringing to the foreground the historical meaning of the governmentality perspective. We rely on André Gorz’s (1980) classical elaboration, whereby the crisis of nature is not external to the 266

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economy, to society or politics. Rather, it is their extreme instance, their unavoidable symptom, the injunction in front of which procrastination is no option. Thus, Gorz is amongst the first to think the ecological crisis in its non-self-sufficiency, in its impossibility to explain itself through itself. Such an epochal challenge, in fact, opens up a deep crisis of Western productivism and of industrial capitalism which possesses a historical origin and requires a political solution. As Catherine Larrère (2014) correctly noted, it is with Gorz that ‘ecology’ becomes properly political: before his interventions, the word used to indicate either a natural science – focused on the relationship between living beings and their environments – or a specific sector of the interplays between human beings and their surroundings – in particular, nature conservation or risk prevention. Quite differently, Gorz made ecology political and turned it into a global project for the transformation of society, able at the same time to fundamentally challenge capitalism and to redefine socialism beyond its productivist roots. Against such a background, we elaborate upon the distinction between liberal and neoliberal political rationalities – as developed by Foucault in his ‘biopolitical’ lectures at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1979 – to advance the hypothesis according to which, although liberal governmentality (with its peculiar constellation of political, epistemological and technological elements) made the multifarious phenomenology of the ecological crisis visible, the actual attempts to economically manage and politically deal with it – that is, the so-called ‘green economy’ – entirely belong to the epoch in which neoliberalism emerges as the most recent phase of biopolitical governmentality. In other terms, we mobilize political ecology as a methodological filter to interpret two relatively overlooked analytical elements of the Foucauldian archive: (a) the relationship between nature and political economy in the context of liberal governmentality; (b) the development of such a relationship in the shift from liberalism to neoliberalism. Subsequently, we assess the discursive formation of the Anthropocene as the governmental framework within which neoliberal green economy has been implemented by means of a number of policies which show ‘the logic of an interventionism that works for the market through environmental action’ (Taylan 2013, 87). We argue that the Anthropocene enacts a peculiar form of de-politicization aimed at obscuring the link between global warming (more generally: the ecological crisis) and global inequalities. Finally, we conclude by highlighting how climate justice claims constitute radical critiques of neoliberal green economy.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT If we take as the starting point of governmentality studies the English publication – in The Foucault Effect (Burchell et al. 1991; see also interviews with Burchell and Gordon, this volume) – of Foucault’s lecture of 1 February 1978 at the Collège de France, where he introduces the notion, there is not a wide gap before the latter begins to be explored in connection with the environment, or ecology.

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One of the first, or possibly the first, of such explorations is a 1995 paper by Timothy Luke. The author talks of ‘environmentality’ to account for how ‘discourses of nature, ecology, or the environment, as disciplinary articulations of “eco-knowledge” […] generate systems of “geo- power” over, but also within and through, Nature for the governance of modern economies and societies’ (Luke 1995, 57). Luke’s main concern is about how specific ways of accounting for the biophysical realm impose regimes of truth that exert a disciplinary power, making it intelligible in certain ways. Of particular relevance, he claims, is the ascent to dominance of the notion of environment since the 1960s. In spite of a fuzzy meaning, the concept of environment has had major performative effects on social mobilizations and public policies, effectively corresponding to a new regime of governmentality, where expert bodies such as the Worldwatch Institute play a significant role. A few years later, Luke (1999) rehearses and develops the point, using ‘green governmentality’ as synonymous to environmentality to refer to an increasingly influential declension of governmentality. For him, the ecological regime ‘crystallizes’, rather than alters, the interlinkage between government, population and political economy that constitutes governmentality. A major role in such a regime is played by ‘most environmentalist movements’ and by the discourse of sustainability, which makes nature governable through the acknowledgement of limits to tapping from and sinking into nature. Luke’s second take on environmentality appears in what, to our knowledge, remains the only book devoted to exploring the environmental declensions of governmentality, namely Discourses of the Environment (Darier 1999a). In the introductory chapter, Eric Darier (1999b) laments there being no systematic studies on the topic, which he ascribes to the field of constructionist takes on nature, as opposed to realist or positivist ones – ’nature-skeptical’ vs. ‘nature-endorsing’ are the words of Kate Soper (1995) which Darier evokes. Following the traditional tripartite account of Foucault’s oeuvre (archaeological, genealogical and ethical periods), Darier elaborates on Foucault’s account of the ‘entry of life into history’ (Foucault 1978) through the rise of biology, economics and linguistics. For Darier, the main contribution a governmentality perspective can give to the study of environmental politics is by drawing attention to Foucault’s claim that ‘ecology also spoke a language of truth’ (Foucault 1988, 15). In the name of environmental knowledge criticisms against ruling ways of handling societies can be raised, but the effects of such knowledge can also be criticized for their normalizing implications. Darier observes that ‘Foucault would be suspicious of the brand of environmentalism which desires a world free of pollution, in which life is simpler, and social and natural harmony are established upon presumed “natural limits”’ and ‘would not suggest replacing anthropocentrism by ecocentrism, which also presents its own set of traps’ (1999b, 20, 24). In the same book, Paul Rutherford stresses the close connection between biopolitics and ecology. Despite Foucault’s and Foucauldian scholars’ focus on human life, the biopolitical conceptualization of bodily and population dynamics as entangled with the surrounding milieu’s dynamics (especially its carrying capacity) puts implicitly ecology centre stage, while conversely ‘the ecological is primarily biopolitical in nature – that is, it is manifested in specific regulatory controls aimed at the

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population, albeit from a somewhat different perspective’ (Rutherford 1999a, 45). For him, like Luke, scientific advice or ‘regulatory science’ is crucial to establishing an ‘ecological governmentality’ (the expression he prefers to use instead of environmentality or green governmentality), representing ‘a particularly significant articulation of the biopolitical character of modern governmental rationality’ (Rutherford 1999a, 56). In short, according to Luke, Rutherford and Darier, connecting governmentality and ecology should be a relatively straightforward affair; a matter of extending Foucault’s focus on human life, and the power effects of the social sciences over it, to life as a whole and the power effects of the natural sciences, for their ‘contribution to the problematization of nature and the subsequent extension of the techniques of modern biopower in shaping the contemporary social relation to nature’ (Rutherford 1999b, 95). Likewise, Stephanie Rutherford stresses that a governmentality approach helps focus attention on ‘the ways that the truth about the environment is made, and how that truth is governed’ (Rutherford 2007, 295), beginning with the environment being constructed as in crisis. More precisely, she notes, Foucault’s analytics of power draws attention to the way power produces knowledge and truth; the notion of biopower highlights the managerial take on the relationship between population and resources; and the case about the technologies of the self helps address the constitution of environmental subjectivities, sensitive to ecological issues and willing to improve themselves accordingly. On the other hand, she claims, the governmentality approach is typically too focused on the ‘abstract operations of political rationalities’ to the detriment of cracks and failures of concrete governmental actions; it is often inattentive to the ‘erasures and foreclosures in the way people can conceive of themselves’ and the way ‘the performance of different subjectivities are read as (un) intelligible differently’ (Rutherford 2007, 300); it is more concerned with state operations than other sites of government; and tends to privilege descriptive accounts to the detriment of critical grip. These things, Rutherford concludes, should be attended to when extending a governmentality approach to environmental issues. For Sébastien Malette, in turn, there are at least three areas where the governmentality framework can be extended to the study of ‘eco-politics’, hence reframed as ‘eco-governmentality’. A first direction, more historical in character, points to analysing how the study of the relations between things has given rise to a new rationality of government, where the emergence of environmental preoccupations is closely connected with economic, and especially colonial, expansion. A second direction, again historically oriented, is that of focusing on the relationship between environmental concerns and the emergence of peculiar savoirs, such as statistics and other ways of mathematizing nature, with major normalizing effects on behaviours, as morally and legally expected to conform to the related truth-claims. A third direction is studying how, in the context of globalization and of a problematization of the planet ‘as a “dynamic field” in which human and non-human action are inherently interconnected’ (Malette 2009, 230), ecological rationalities of government intensify, opening new opportunities of intervention, while simultaneously deploying new

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limits to it. Indeed, we shall see that the (re)articulation of the issue of limits represents a key site of (re)arrangement of governmental strategies. Applications of the governmentality approach to environmental governance have been intensifying in recent years, addressing a host of issues, such as conservation, ecosystem services, water management, urban land-use, ecotourism, farming (see for these topics the references included in Fletcher 2017), energy (see Kuchler 2017) and anticipatory politics (see Groves 2017). Faced with the proliferation, diversification and entanglement of initiatives, the analytical perspective on governmentality has gained special relevance. A case for its usefulness has been theoretically made by Robert Fletcher (2010, 2017, 2020). If we follow – he claims – how Foucault has developed the notion from a historically specific form of power to a category for understanding rationalities and technologies of power, then in the environmental field we find that sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal governmentalities are all present, sometimes individually applied, other times complementing or clashing with one another. According to Fletcher, sovereign and neoliberal environmentalities are represented respectively by command-and-control regulation and by market-based or market-mimicking approaches (taxes, incentives, cap-and-trade regulation, ecosystem services trading and so on), while the disciplinary logic surfaces from efforts to produce specific environmentally-concerned subjectivities (Agrawal 2005; Irrera 2015), even though, as people react to, negotiate and affect environmental programmes, the eventual outcome may be the elicitation of ‘multiple environmental subjects’ (Choi 2020). Fletcher also claims that Foucault’s fourth, less developed, account of governmentality ‘according to truth’ (Foucault 2008, 311) – whereby what to do is derived from the (revealed or acquired) knowledge of the order of the world – can be detected when traditional knowledges are brought to the fore, and that the ‘socialist governmentality’ that Foucault (2008, 94) evokes as a future possibility can likewise be seen in participatory, egalitarian forms of natural resource management. This ‘multiple governmentalities’ approach can no doubt be useful in the ‘understanding of conflicts and/or miscommunications that may arise among various environmental managers’ (Fletcher 2017, 313). Such an approach, moreover, aligns with an influential scholarship for which the basic purpose of governmentality inquiry is ‘an empirical mapping of governmental rationalities and techniques’ (Rose et al. 2006, 99). A political ecology perspective, however, regards the focus on ‘how things get done’ (ibid., 93) as complementary and instrumental, rather than alternative, to raising ‘“why” and “in whose interest” questions’ (ibid.). Said otherwise, a political ecology perspective does not see a divide between the analytical and the historical account of governmentality; between analysis of the microphysics of power and immanent critique of the ruling order and its problematizations (Foucault 2007b). Nor is a critical outlook on politics prevented, being rather strengthened, by a post-foundationalist posture about power (Pellizzoni et al. 2022). Indeed, without keeping the two outlooks in conversation one runs the risk of a Manichean interpretation of policy instruments and practices, for example seeing in participatory processes either a straightforward expression of a ‘liberation environmentality’ (Fletcher

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2010) or just an additional way of enrolling people in neoliberal programmes (see Silver et al. 2010). That the analytical application of governmentality needs to be framed within a historical outlook appears also when one considers how a competitive subjectivity is simultaneously presumed and produced by neoliberal governmental approaches (Dardot and Laval 2014). These, therefore, include – rather than complement – disciplinary dispositifs, in this case aimed at building a moral economy of self-interest. In short, a political ecology perspective on governmentality considers crucial to go beyond a mere mapping of the constellation of rationalities and technologies of government that find application in different contexts and moments, shedding light on the overarching logic that governs their conception, implementation, and interaction. This, indeed, applies to the whole environmentality issue, since the very idea of a need of governing the relationship between populations and their biophysical milieu gains salience only with the emergence of the securitarian approach to government, as inherently distinct from both sovereignty and discipline, which do not disappear but become instrumental to the former’s purposes. Though in recent literature some openings are detectable to a comprehensive consideration of the human-nonhuman, discursive-material entanglements that give shape to governmental processes (see Groves 2017), the governmentality perspective is still regarded as essentially concerned with the concepts and philosophies underlying environmental governance approaches; with ‘the legitimacy and appropriateness of the particular discursive perspectives they exemplify’ (Fletcher 2020, 492). This constitutes a point of friction with other scholarship, often from a Marxist background, for which material reality should not be ignored or downplayed for two reasons. First, because it offers a possibility of deconstructing narratives by highlighting concrete social and socio-material imbalances and inequalities, as for example with Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg’s (2014) critique of the Anthropocene narrative (see below). Second, because materiality, and not just discursive formations, may constrain and orient social agency, affecting the shape of power apparatuses, as with Timothy Mitchell’s (2013) account of how the physical features of different energy sources (coal vs. oil) have affected the affirmation, evolution and decline of modern democracy. That said, with its stress on the disciplinary import of environmental knowledges, discourses and truth claims, beginning with the very reconfiguration of places and the biophysical world in general as in need of intervention, a governmentality standpoint brings grist to the mill of political (vs. allegedly apolitical) ecology. Moreover, as we shall see, the very contrast between ‘nature-sceptical’ and ‘nature-endorsing’ accounts of the relationship between humans and their biophysical milieu may have been effectively sidestepped by recent transformations in environmental politics and policies. The takes on environmentality discussed above mainly stress the role of the state as catalyst of a new disciplinary power mediated by dedicated savoirs, yet a governmentality approach is well suited to addressing the evolution of the governance of the environment. Environmental policy literature abounds of discussions about the rise of second and third generation instruments, as an alternative of growing relevance to first generation command-and-control regula-

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tion, respectively comprising financial approaches (from incentives to cap-and-trade solutions) and non-compulsory solutions (codes of conduct, accounting schemes, ecolabels and so forth). What a governmentality perspective helps make sense of and highlight is the rationale that underpins such development, which can be synthesized in the expression ‘neoliberalization of nature’ (Castree 2008). It is worth elaborating on this rationale before addressing the green economy and the Anthropocene as elective terrains of application.

THE NEOLIBERALIZATION OF NATURE AS ‘NESTED’ PROBLEMATIZATION The term ‘neoliberalization’ is generally taken for the worldwide, albeit inconsistent, process of institutional change that has occurred in the last decades, the basic tenets of which are an understanding of humans as entrepreneurial, competitive beings; an account of the market as the only institution capable of processing information effectively (hence a case for sustained privatizations and corporatizing of public administration); and a view of state regulation as instrumental to the dissemination and strengthening of competition and market rationality in any social field (Baccaro and Howell 2011; Mirowski 2013; Dardot and Laval 2014). Neoliberalism, it has been said, is ‘also an environmental project, and necessarily so’ (McCarthy and Prudham 2004, 277). Yet, is this project just a further extension of the commodity frontier, as happened at other times in the history of capitalism (Moore 2015)? Or is it something more – a deeper change in governmental rationality; a new problematization of human relationship with the biophysical world? The liberal problematization concerns government and its excesses; the question of resource-efficiency; economy, population and the environment as provided with their own tendencies; the limits to knowledge and control of these processes (Foucault 2007a, 2008). In this framework, the issue of the physical limits to growth has always been floating around, from the Physiocrats’ concern for the loss of energy entailed by any transformative process, to Malthus’s claim about the divergent ratio of expansion of population and food supply. Industrialization, however, relegated it to a corner, giving credit to claims – coming from both supporters and adversaries of capitalism – about the power of human ingenuity. Neoclassical economics (hardly coincidentally emerging together with the opening of the era of cheap, abundant fossil energy) effectively took the issue of limits off the agenda, replacing it with the idea of scarcity as related to subjective attributions of utility, with no direct referents in reality. Against this background, it may be relevant to focus on the peculiar way through which Foucault configures the relationship between the concept of nature and political economy. As we just saw, Foucault reads the emergence of liberalism – conceived in terms of a political rationality rather than of a juridical vision or a mere economic theory – as a shift from the attempt to impose external legal limits to the sovereign’s absolute power to a new scenario. Such a scenario is marked by a twofold

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transformation: first, political economy is assumed as the basis for governmental practices (Bazzicalupo 2016); second, the market is seen as guarantor of the autonomy of the economic processes. Liberalism, in other words, is seen as a permanent governmental critique of sovereign power in its tendency to govern limitlessly. And it is precisely from this critical perspective that the notion of the naturalness of the economic process (namely, the relationship between nature and governmentality) is developed by liberal thinkers. As Foucault writes in Birth of Biopolitics: Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality […] It is the other face of something whose visible face, visible for the governors, is their own action. Their action has an underside, or rather, it has another face, and this other face of governmentality, its specific necessity, is precisely what political economy studies. It is not background, but a permanent correlative. (Foucault 2008, 16)

How is this constitutive link between nature and political economy enacted? According to Foucault, it acquires social effectiveness through the role played by the market. Obviously, Foucault refuses to conceptualize the market as a passive, hidden matter progressively brought to light by the improvement of economic theory. Rather, the market is a principle of veridiction and calculation that allows the new art of government to concretely work (Elden 2007). Ferhat Taylan defines this bundle of knowledge-power as mesopolitics: it ‘emerges as a modern procedure with its roots in the eighteenth century when human beings’ relations to the environment were invested as objects of scientific knowledge, philosophical reflection and political intervention’ (2017, 266; 2018). From a mesopolitical perspective, thus, the market is the centrepiece of a new regime of truth based on biopolitics. On this view, the natural traits attributed to market laws are justified in that they play a limiting role with regard to sovereign power and its will to govern limitlessly. Being unable to fully grasp the opaque totality represented by the economic process, the sovereign must limit its interventions to possible market failures. Those incidental failures, however, do not put into question the spontaneous deployment of the invisible hand that, in connecting the individual pursuit of profit to the general interest, naturally leads to the best allocation of social wealth. Such a limiting role of nature is reflected in the way classical political economy deals with the environment. David Ricardo, for example, realized that in the early nineteenth century the function of nature was to provide an internal and flexible limit to the process of valorization: ‘There is not a manufacture which can be mentioned, in which nature does not give her assistance to man, and give it too, generously and gratuitously’ (Ricardo, quoted in Marx 1963, 60). This free assistance may take the form of an infinite source of raw materials, at the beginning of the process, or that of an equally infinite garbage bin, at its end. In both cases, however, nature and valorization do not overlap; rather, nature is configured as the mobile border within which value-creation occurs. In its compulsive search for limits to overcome, liberal capital takes nature as its primal hold, as the relatively stable surface upon which differentiated circuits of valorization deploy themselves.

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Such a link between nature and governmentality runs through the nineteenth century and reaches its apex during the so-called ‘Glorious Thirties’. The Fordist period that prevailed in the US since the 1920s and in Western Europe after the Second World War was characterized by accelerated industrialization and economic growth. Its environmental impact was extremely relevant (Pessis et al. 2013), to the extent that the institutional setting of Fordism can be defined as an ‘entropic device’ (Leonardi 2019, 85). Its crumbling assumed an unprecedented form: political ecologist André Gorz (1980) proposed to characterize it as a double crisis, simultaneously of overproduction and of reproduction (Benegiamo and Leonardi 2021). It exploded around 1970 in the form of social and political turmoil, stagflation, the rising threat of energy scarcity and first evidence of global environmental problems. This came as a major shock leading to a revamp of Malthusian themes about physical limitations to societal expansion (Ehrlich 1968; Meadows et al. 1972; Daly 1977) and recommendations for strengthening state control over the use of resources to re-establish the Fordist-Keynesian equilibrium on a global scale (Nelson 2015). Things, however, went otherwise. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the opening of the new, ‘post-Fordist’, regime of accumulation and the rise of neoliberal rule. A new problematization, nested in the liberal one, starts to take shape in this period – ‘nested’ in the sense that new sorts of questions and replies are engendered by the intensification of elements already present. As Foucault (2008) notes, neoliberalism purports a peculiar ontology of the human and of its task environment, which effectively intensifies – yet in this way transforms – the liberal one. Liberalism assumes that the privatization of land is morally right and collectively beneficial, as nature gains value through the application of labour (Locke 1689 [1823]), that humans are provided with a natural tendency to exchange, according to their necessities and desires (taken as given, being based on the need for shelter from existential threats and on individual values, identities and so on), and that the market is a social institution spontaneously emerging and adjusting to this purpose. Neoliberalism subscribes to the centrality of privatization and commodification, but assumes that the crucial human tendency is to compete, according to a self-understanding in terms of relentless entrepreneurial self-transformation and valorization as capital, and that to make such a tendency express itself, for the individual and collective benefit, markets have to be purposefully designed, steered and policed, while appropriate subjectivities have to be forged by way of educational reforms and communication campaigns (Connolly 2013; see Hayek 1973). In this framework, the liberal value of freedom, to be vindicated against state power, translates into a case for pluralism, multiplicity, heterogeneity and constant change, as an outcome of industrial modernity that cannot but, and should, be seconded (de Lagasnerie 2012; Connolly 2013). The liberal theme of power’s limits to knowledge morphs into an account of, and a case for, society as eminently disorganized, decentred, incoherent and impossible to plan and steer. ‘An extensive and immensely influential managerial literature appearing since the early 1980s […] celebrates uncertainty as the technique of entrepreneurial creativity, […] the fluid art of the possible. It involves techniques of flexibility and adaptability, requires

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a certain kind of “vision” that may be thought of as intuition but is nevertheless capable of being explicated at great length in terms such as “anticipatory government” and “government with foresight”’ (O’Malley 2004, 3–5). Rather than paralysing, the eventuality of the future, or the subjectivity of expectations, enables the construction of purposefully designed task environments, where new opportunities take shape. Indeterminacy does not mean anymore constraining non-determinability to be kept at bay, as far as possible, by means of probabilistic risk estimates, but enabling non-determination. Turbulence and contingency, as produced by global trade, innovation-based competition, floating exchange rates and an increasingly turbulent physical environment, do not mean paralyzing uncontrollability but room for manoeuvre. The more unstable and unpredictable the world is, the more manageable it becomes (Pellizzoni 2011, 2016). The limits to knowledge and prediction are recast as opportunities for creative action, the worth of which is sanctioned ex-post by its very success. Life as a whole is increasingly accounted for in terms of complex adaptation and emergence, a condition that enhances danger and insecurity, but which is also seen ‘at the heart of what is positive and constructive’ (O’Malley 2010, 502). This peculiar ‘investment’ in disorder as a resource for governing is one of the main elements of the shift from liberalism to neoliberalism and entails a crucial modification of the relationship between governmentality and nature. According to Foucault, what does not change in the shift from liberalism to neoliberalism is the function of the market as a site of veridiction. Thus, also neoliberalism is concerned with the construction of a naturalness which is enacted by a political regime of truth based on political economy (now reduced to economics), which in turn represents the pillar of governmental practices. In other words, the formal invariance of governmentality is the production of limits to power’s exercise. What, on the contrary, does change is the specific modality of that production – its historical contingency. In liberalism the naturalness of the market is centred around the notion of exchange and, as such, it is still clearly distinguished from the artificiality of fluxes of money, commodities and individuals it is supposed to rationally channel. In neoliberalism the naturalness of the market is directly created in accordance with the artificial principle of formalization represented by competition. To put it bluntly, nature has to be artificially constructed in order to practically allow the formal structure of economic competition to work. This is why the first wave of neoliberal thinkers considered by Foucault (German ordoliberals) could accuse their liberal predecessors of ‘naturalistic naïveté’ (Foucault 2008, 121). According to the ordoliberals, the market is not a given whose spontaneous structure would be revealed by the competitive logic. Such order of factors must be reversed: for the market to function properly, competition is to be first established and then ceaselessly enforced. The very status of competition as an economic category is radically displaced: For what in fact is competition? It is absolutely not a given of nature […] The beneficial effects of competition are not due to a pre-existing nature, to a natural given that it brings with it. They are due to a formal privilege. Competition is an essence. Competition is an eidos. Competition is a principle of formalisation. Competition has an internal logic; it

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has its own structure […] competition as an essential economic logic will only appear and produce its effects under certain conditions which have to be carefully and artificially constructed. (Foucault 2008, 120)

What takes place here is a sort of displacement of the notion of limit: whereas in liberalism natural limits to artificial interventions are produced to allow social wealth to freely circulate and increase, in neoliberalism artificiality is directly applied onto nature in order to be deployed within the abstract boundaries of the competitive logic. Otherwise put, whereas in liberalism nature is internalized to function as an enabling limit to economic exchange, in neoliberalism nature is artificially created to enact a production of value homologous to the formal generative structure represented by economic competition (Terranova 2009). In yet other terms: liberal naturalism posited the environment as a constraint to economic exchange – think of the first wave of ecological industrial issues: air and water pollution, nuclear waste, depletion of natural resources, etc. In contrast, neoliberalism envisages the environment as a driver of economic competition, a political surface upon which to produce new commodities – consider the second wave of environmental issues, for example: climate change, post-industrial biotechnologies, renewable energy, etc. The original goal of liberal biopolitics was to ensure homeostasis, protection from or compensation of disequilibria in the dynamics of population within the biophysical milieu. Environmentality scholars find a confirmation of this goal in the rise of environmental politics and ecological savoirs. Yet, the neoliberal problematization focuses on the inherent imbalance and unpredictability of such dynamics. It has been famously argued that post-Fordist capitalism managed to capture the emancipatory critique of intellectuals and social movements against the Fordist mode of production, translating the values of freedom, autonomy and creativity into flexibility, networking, communication, and permanent education (Virno 1996; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Less debated, but possibly of even greater relevance, is another type of capture. For the new scientific thinking that begins to emerge in the 1970s in a variety of fields, from chemistry to cybernetics and the life sciences, ecosystems are by default – rather than in exceptional phases – characterized by disorder, open-endedness, patchiness, fragmentation, competition, creative destruction and unpredictable dynamics, which are deemed to bring renewal and change against the ‘heat death’ of equilibrium (Cooper 2008; see also Holling 1973). As it has been noted, theories of complexity and disequilibrium contained ‘an explicit critique of industrial-era management practices’ (Nelson 2014, 4), growing ‘out of libertarian, environmentalist and often leftist critiques of the “command and control” logistics of Cold War, first-order cybernetics’ (Walker and Cooper 2011, 157). Yet, they offered an invaluable support to the new regime of accumulation. This regime is dominated by the pursuit of relentless technological innovation as a basis for economic expansion and social transformation. Material limits are simultaneously acknowledged and pushed forwards. Nature appears ‘no longer an ultimate irreversible barrier […] [but as] a constraint that can be strategically manipulated’ (Fuller 2009, 12). The case for the limits to growth is reversed into a case for the growth of limits (Lemke

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2003; McCarthy and Prudham 2004). From the perspective of political ecology this fundamental shift engenders the distinction between liberal governmentality as the regime of visibility of the ecological crisis (in its internal differentiation) and neoliberal governmentality as the political rationality eventually capable to manage the crisis – in particular its paradigmatic expression, namely climate change. It is in this framework that storylines like sustainable development, ecological modernization, the green economy and, lastly, the Anthropocene develop.

GREEN ECONOMY AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Neoliberal capitalism is presently trying to transform the ecological crisis into profitable business opportunities, that is: to overcome its crisis of reproduction. As François Ewald argued, ‘ecology is not a rupture’; rather, it ‘accomplishes the dream of biopolitics’ (1985, 9). The governmental device whereby capital internalizes nature as an element of valorization or, in Ewald’s terms, biopolitics absorbs ecology, is the green economy paradigm. Although scholars as well as practitioners do not share a single and consistent understanding of such a paradigm, we propose to define it as neoliberal capitalism’s attempt to overcome the spectre of resource exhaustion on the basis of a further incorporation of the environmental limit as a new terrain for accumulation. Through the rhetoric of sustainability, and in full synergy with capital’s need for profit-making, this process is supposed to governmentally harmonize two elements once considered mutually exclusive: economic growth and environmental protection (Leonardi 2021). It is this markedly neoliberal framing that – even though rarely in an explicit fashion – sets the boundaries within which the green economy debate could first arise and then develop. In Foucauldian terms, the green economy constitutes a new configuration of governmental practices. We argue that this conception of the green economy is a suitable entry point to elaborate a critique of the Anthropocene as a distinctively governmental framework. From a geological perspective, the concept of the Anthropocene (a combination of the Greek terms anthropos [human] and cene [new]) refers to the planetary scale of anthropogenic influences on the composition and functions of the Earth system and the life forms that inhabit it. Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s proposal, formulated around 2000, was based on mainly ecological considerations such as the accelerated rate of extinction of a large number of species, the progressive reduction in the availability of fossil fuels and the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide and methane. Although quite recent as a geological force, it is now clear that human activity is a direct cause of these phenomena and has therefore had a profound influence on the transformation of the environment on a global scale (Steffen et al. 2011, 2018). The magnitude and duration of human impacts – it is estimated, for example, that wells and drillings will be clearly visible to hypothetical geologists in a million years’ time – would therefore seem to suggest that the present time should not be included in the Holocene (a geological epoch begun approximately 12,000 years ago, enabling the flourishing of the human

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species), but rather that it needs an ad hoc formalization capable of highlighting its specificity. Hence the proposal of the Anthropocene notion. Our approach in this chapter is different – though certainly not incompatible – from other attempts to read the Anthropocene through Foucauldian lenses. Scott Hamilton, for example, devoted two articles to such an endeavour. The first (Hamilton 2016) argues that between the lines of the geological debate what is actually emerging is a new global biopolitics of carbon – whose atom is posited as the measure and centre of the act of governing. The second (Hamilton 2018) focuses instead on the issue of political temporality to interpret the putative new epoch as an eschatology which aims at ‘re-governing the cosmos’ in a way that would be incompatible with the temporal indeterminacy of governmentality proper. Another compelling perspective is provided by Fehrat Taylan’s (2017) critical account of the Anthropocene – based on the essays edited by Cristophe Bonneuil, Clive Hamilton and François Gemmenne (2015) and an earlier article by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher (2014), titled ‘The fragile climate of modernity’. Taylan argues that: rather than being consigned to the status of a geological epoch that ‘humanity’ entered largely unaware, the Anthropocene emerges in these critical studies as a moment of political and scientific tensions regarding the natural and social environment. The Moderns have been worried about their environment since at least the eighteenth century, and the forms in which these anxieties were expressed and institutionalized are often fundamental for the way that we interact with the environment today. (Taylan 2017, 264)

Although Taylan does not specify the modalities of contemporary interactions, it seems fair to assume he would be keen on highlighting the continuities between liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality. In a different fashion, our hypothesis, centred on the above-described ‘nested’ problematization, aims at emphasizing the discontinuities between the two. In this sense, the point is not so much to argue for the simultaneity of biopolitics and the Anthropocene in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rather, we propose to situate in that conjuncture the emergence of the ecological crisis – to be distinguished from ‘mere’ environmental degradation – and the process of its growing visibility. Instead, the Anthropocene – conceived as a governmental rationality rather than a geological epoch – is a more recent phenomenon and concerns the management of the ecological crisis. The ‘confusion’ between these two registers of the Anthropocene debate is nothing less than constitutive. In fact, the idea of a new epoch is not without foundation: decisive in the geological classification of time scales are global transformations in the state of the Earth, due to disparate causes ranging from meteorite impacts to the movement of continents, to volcanic eruptions of exceptional magnitude. Now, since there is no doubt that current human activity is to be considered global (as it is the primary cause of environmental changes1) it would follow that a new era has begun. It should be noted, however, that the existence or non-existence of the Anthropocene is not a purely scientific matter but, on the contrary, involves a series of ethical and political considerations. Crutzen himself is convinced that ‘humanity’ must accept

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the enormous responsibility deriving from its technological power and act as guardian of the Earth (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2016), perhaps pointing to geo-engineering as the solution to the problem of global warming (Crutzen 2006). It seems clear to us, therefore, that the Anthropocene is not only the name of a new geological epoch, but also and more fundamentally that of an unprecedented governmental regime of the global environment. Critical attention must therefore be paid to the risk of the concept being swallowed up in the post-political vortex of global technocracy (Swyngedouw 2013), within which disagreement – sometimes open conflict – on how to deal with ecological dangers is not seen as foundational but rather downgraded to a procedural issue – one aspect among many in the practice of (technical) good governance. As Stefania Barca (2020) suggests, in order to grasp the heuristic and potentially liberating core of the concept of the Anthropocene, such a concept must be politicized, which is to say it must be assessed as the most patent manifestation of social and economic inequality on a global scale. On the other hand, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), a renowned post-colonial historian hardly suspected of having sympathies for capitalist globalization, remarks that the climate crisis entails a collapse of the old distinction between human and natural history and a shared vulnerability, which inevitably relativizes the case for differentiated burdens to mitigate or adapt to it. Put together, Barca’s case against climate injustice and Chakrabarty’s case for the primacy of survival as a species condense and express the entangled shape the environmental issue has taken – a shape which may actually be read as the backdrop of a new, emergent problematization. Such a problematization rests on the Anthropocene as a novel expression of the link between visibility and management. The questions to be posed, thus, concern: how is it possible to see the new geological era? By what regime of visibility is it governed? On what is the set of rules governing the representation of climate change based? The key to answering these questions is not only a specific deployment of technologies and rationalities of government (Lövbrand et al. 2009), but – more fundamentally – the shift from the ‘limits to growth’ to ‘the growth of limits’ problematization. It is no coincidence, in fact, that although climate change has been known – hence was visible – since the nineteenth century, it has only become a public problem, a politically manageable issue, since the 1980s, when neoliberal rationality made it possible to craft a development strategy for capital within a crisis of reproduction created by capital. Since then, global elites have been able to claim that global warming is a market failure (as it is incapable of internalizing environmental costs) that can, however, only be solved by a further wave of marketization driven by different and highly complex forms of financialization of nature (Leonardi 2017; Bridge et al. 2020; Langley et al. 2021). As a result, the Anthropocene becomes the horizon of a putatively sustainable accumulation. In other words, the Anthropocene figures as the ontological condition, the ‘historical a priori’ (Hacking 2002), that underpins and legitimates the governmental rationalities and technologies at work in current environmental management, as mapped by the ‘multiple governmentalities’ approach. In this way, the ‘why’ and ‘in whose interest’ questions are simultaneously raised and hollowed out, as self-evident and politically empty.

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CONCLUSION: FOR A GENEALOGY OF THE PRESENT We have seen that with both liberalism and neoliberalism naturalness is constructed in such a way that limits are acknowledged in order to enable action (capitalist valorization). As such, neoliberalism effectively constitutes an intensification of the liberal problematization that expands the leverage on bio-social processes. We have noted as well that the Anthropocene can be read on one side as the full-fledged expression of the connection between social and environmental injustice, as triggering and triggered by the ecological crisis; and on the other as the hollowing out of the distinction between justice and injustice, since global threats and the call for their handling put each and everybody on a same level without moving them from their place or position. On this view, it cannot go unnoticed that the rise of the Anthropocene narrative dovetails with the blurring of other distinctions, foundational of the liberal and neoliberal problematization – between technical and natural, material and cognitive, real and virtual, actual and fictional, living and non-living. This is evident in a number of fields: from carbon trading and the economy of ecosystem services, where notions like the ‘global warming potential’ of a gas or the ‘ecological function’ of a wetland are simultaneously posited as abstractions and as actual phenomena amenable to monetary evaluation (MacKenzie 2009; Robertson 2012), to agricultural gene technologies, where patents cover at once matter and the information it contains and technologies are claimed to correspond to ‘nothing more than biology itself, or “life itself”’ (Thacker 2007, xix); from chemistry, where the self-organizing features of materials are increasingly acknowledged (Lehn 2004), to the mining and algorithmic analysis of data which often detect a reality they themselves create (Amoore and Piotukh 2015). Faced with the above, one may talk of an emergent problematization, again nested in the former – the ‘originally’ neoliberal one – as deriving from an intensification of some of its features, yet engendering novel types of questions and answers. Key to such problematization is the idea that limits are fully internal to a unified domain (Pellizzoni 2021), nature itself becoming an internal differentiation, ‘let be’ as long as convenient and for all intents and purposes (see Breakthrough Institute 2015, for example), and the constructed character of naturalness being hence declared rather than hid, paving the way to unprecedented operations of power. In this historical juncture, where nature is capitalized and capitalism is naturalized through and through, strengthening the bridge between governmentality and political ecology approaches is a primary task, first and foremost because the new problematization is all but uncontested (worldwide climate justice movements, for instance). The Foucauldian blueprint for critique – raising the question of ‘how not to 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 2007b, 44, emphasis original) – still holds for a genealogy of the present. It suggests one should part company with post-humanist celebrations of ontological blurring as non-dominative in and by itself, looking instead at social practices that gesture to ways of living with the more-than-human world where diversity is gener-

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ative and friendly rather than disruptive and divisive (Kothari et al. 2019). Practices, in other words, where difference is not inflected – according to the capitalist veridictional dispositif – as indifferent multiplicity, play of equivalences, but as the shared experience of the incommensurability of life.

NOTE 1.

A notable exception are denialists, as described by Conway and Oreskes (2012). It should be noted, though, that such naysayers do not partake in the narrative of the Anthropocene – precisely because they refuse to establish a link between the manifest planetary reach of human activities and significant modifications in the global climate.

REFERENCES Agrawal, A. (2005), Environmentality: Technologies of Governance and the Making of Subjects, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amoore, L. and Piotukh, V. (2015), ‘Life beyond big data: Governing with little analytics’, Economy and Society, 44(3), 341–366. Baccaro, L. and Howell, C. (2011), ‘A common neoliberal trajectory: The transformation of industrial relations in advanced capitalism’, Politics & Society, 39(4), 521–563. Barca, S. (2020), Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bazzicalupo, L. (2016), ‘Economy as a logic of government’, Paragraph, 39(1), 36–48. Benegiamo, M. and Leonardi, L. (2021), ‘André Gorz’s labour-based political ecology and its legacy for the twenty first century’, in N. Räthzel, D. Stevis and D. Uzzell (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 721–742. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso. Bonneuil, C., Hamilton, C. and Gemmenne, F. (eds) (2015), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Era, New York: Routledge. Breakthrough Institute (2015), An Ecomodernist Manifesto, Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute. http://​www​.ecomodernism​.org/​manifesto. Bridge, G., Bulkeley, H., Langley, P. and van Veelen, B. (2020), ‘Pluralizing and problematizing carbon finance’, Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 724–742. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Castree, N. (2008), ‘Neoliberalising nature: The logics of deregulation and reregulation’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 40, 131–152. Chakrabarty, D. (2009), ‘The climate of history: Four theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35, 197–222. Choi, M.-A. (2020), ‘Multiple environmental subjects: Governmentalities of ecotourism development in Jeungdo, South Korea’, Geoforum, 110, 77–86. Chomsky, N. and Foucault, M. (2006), ‘Human nature: Justice versus power’, in The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, New York: New Press, pp. 1–67. Connolly, W. (2013), The Fragility of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conway, E. and Oreskes, N. (2012), Merchant of Doubts, New York: Bloomsbury. Cooper, M. (2008), Life as Surplus. Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Crutzen, P. (2006), ‘Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: A contribution to resolve a policy dilemma?’ Climate Change, 77(3–4), 211–220. Crutzen, P. and Schwägerl, C. (2016), ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a new global ethos’, Yale Environment 360. http://​e360​.yale​.edu/​feature/​living​_in​_the​_anthropocene​ _toward​_a​_new​_global​_ethos/​2363/​. Daly, H. (1977), Steady-State Economics, Washington: Island Press. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014), The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, London: Verso. Darier, E. (ed.) (1999a), Discourses of the Environment, Oxford: Blackwell. Darier, E. (1999b), ‘Foucault and the environment’, in E. Darier (ed.), Discourses of the Environment, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–33. De Lagasnerie, G. (2012), La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault, Paris: Fayard. Ehrlich, P. (1968), The Population Bomb, New York: Ballantine. Elden, S. (2007), ‘Governmentality, calculation, territory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(3), 562–580. Eribon, D. (1991), Michel Foucault, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ewald, F. (1985), ‘Bio-Power’, History of the Present, 2, 7–11. Fletcher, R (2010), ‘Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate’, Conservation and Society, 8 (3), 171–181. Fletcher, R. (2017), ‘Environmentality unbound: Multiple governmentalities in environmental politics’ Geoforum, 85, 311–315. Fletcher, R. (2020), ‘Diverse ecologies: Mapping complexity in environmental governance’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(2), 481–502. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1988), ‘The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom’, in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 11–20. Foucault, M. (2000), ‘Life: experience and science’, in J. Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works, Volume Two, London: Penguin, pp. 465–478. Foucault, M. (2001), Fearless Speech, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2007a), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2007b), ‘What is critique?’, in S. Lotringer (ed.), The Politics of Truth, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 41–82. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fressoz, J. B. and Locher, F. (2014), ‘The fragile climate of modernity’. https://​booksandideas​ .net/​The​-Fragile​-Climate​-of​-Modernity​.html. Fuller, S. (2009), ‘Knowledge politics and new converging technologies: A social epistemological perspective’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 22(1), 7–39. Gorz, A. (1980), Ecology as Politics, Boston: South End Press. Groves, C. (2017), ‘Emptying the future: On the environmental politics of anticipation’, Futures, 92, 29–38. Hacking, I. (2002), Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hamilton, S. (2016), ‘The measure of all things? The Anthropocene as a global biopolitics of carbon’, European Journal of International Relations, 24(1), 33–57. Hamilton, S. (2018), ‘Foucault’s end of history: The temporality of governmentality and its end in the Anthropocene’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46(3), 371–395. Hayek, F. (1973), Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holling, C. S. (1973), ‘Resilience and the stability of ecological systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23.

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Irrera, O. (2015), ‘Environmentality and colonial biopolitics: Towards a postcolonial genealogy of environmental subjectivities’, in S. Fuggle, Y. Lanci and M. Tazzioli (eds), Foucault and the History of Our Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 179–194. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F. and Acosta, A. (2019), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Kolkata: Tulika Books. Kuchler, M. (2017), ‘Post-conventional energy futures: Rendering Europe’s shale gas resources governable’, Energy Research & Social Science, 31, 32–40. Langley, P., Bridge, G., Bulkeley, H. and van Veelen, B. (2021), ‘Decarbonizing capital: Investment, divestment and the qualification of carbon assets’, Economy and Society, 50(3), 494–516. Larrère, C. (2014). ‘André Gorz (1923–2007)’, L’écologie politique d’André Gorz, AAVV – Fondation de l’écologie politique. http://​www​.fondationecolo​.org/​activites/​publications/​ Dossier​-Gorz/​. Lehn, J. M. (2004), ‘Supramolecular chemistry: From molecular information towards self-organization and complex matter’, Reports on Progress in Physics, 67(3), 249–265. Lemke, T. (2003), ‘Foucault, governmentality and critique’, Rethinking Marxism, 14(3), 49–64. Leonardi, E. (2017), ‘Carbon trading dogma: Theoretical assumptions and practical implications of global carbon markets’, Ephemera, 17(1), 61–87. Leonardi, E. (2019), ‘Bringing class back in: Assessing the transformation of the value-nature nexus’, Ecological Economics, 156, 83–90. Leonardi, E. (2021), ‘Operaísmo y ecología-mundo: Por una teoría política de la crisis ecológica’, Relaciones Internacionales, 47, 85–99. Locke, J. (1689 [1823]), Two Treatises of Government, London: Thomas Tegg. http://​socserv2​ .socsci​.mcmaster​.ca/​econ/​ugcm/​3ll3/​locke/​government​.pdf. Lövbrand, E. and Stripple, J. (2014), ‘Governmentality’, in C. Death (ed.), Critical Environmental Politics, London: Routledge, pp. 111–120. Lövbrand, E., Stripple, J. and Wiman, B. (2009), ‘Earth system governmentality: Reflections on science in the Anthropocene’, Global Environmental Change, 19, 7–13. Luke, T. (1995), ‘On environmentality: Geo-power and eco-knowledge in the discourses of contemporary environmentalism’, Cultural Critique, 31, 57–81. Luke, T. (1999), ‘Environmentality as green governmentality’, in E. Darier (ed.), Discourses of the Environment, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 121–151. MacKenzie, D. (2009), ‘Making things the same: Gases, emission rights and the politics of carbon markets’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(3–4), 440–455. Malette, S. (2009), ‘Foucault for the next century: Eco-governmentality’, in S. Binkley and J. Capetillo (eds), A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 221–237. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014), ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’, The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 62–69. Marx, K. (1963), Theories on Surplus-Value, Vol. I, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. McCarthy, J. and Prudham, S. (2004), ‘Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism’, Geoforum, 35(3), 275–283. Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. W. (1972), The Limits to Growth, New York: New American Library. Mirowski, P. (2013), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. Mitchell, T. (2013), Carbon Democracy, London: Verso. Moore, J. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso.

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Walker, J. and Cooper, M. (2011), ‘Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation’, Security Dialogue, 4(2), 143–160.

PART IV GOVERNMENTALITY ACROSS NATIONS AND OTHER POLITICAL FORMATIONS

16. Diminishing life: racialized medicine, neoliberalism, and precarity in the United States Jonathan Xavier Inda

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have undoubtedly become key political concerns (Ong 2006; Rose 2007). Indeed, fostering the vitality of the living body – through practices ranging from basic primary care to high-tech medicine and pharmaceuticals – has developed into a central objective of political and other authorities. Important to this politics of vitality is the desire to overcome racial disparities in health. From heart disease and diabetes to cancer and asthma, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities (African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and so forth). The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental (for example, better access to health care and improved living conditions), but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how health disparities are problematized. Increasingly, a strongly held belief among scientists, medical researchers, and politicians is that notable differences exist between racial groups at the genomic level and that these differences are medically significant (Risch et al. 2002). They thus contend that racial classification is necessary in order to target those diseases that most affect disadvantaged racial minorities and to remedy the underrepresentation of these populations in medical research, drug development, and access to health care. The hope is that genetically grounded medicine will play a central role in ameliorating race-based health inequalities. This effort to overcome racial inequalities in health through genetic means has produced what has been called racialized medicine – that is, medicine targeted at specific populations based on the idea that they are genetically or biologically different. A case in point is a pharmaceutical called BiDil, which was developed by NitroMed and is now sold by Arbor Pharmaceuticals.1 In 2005, the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug ‘for the treatment of heart failure in self-identified black patients’ (US FDA 2005). It thus became first drug ever approved by the FDA approved for a specific racial group. In endorsing the drug, the FDA pointed to the ‘disproportionate burdens of heart failure in blacks’ and the need to develop effective treatment in this population ‘in light of health disparities’ (Nissen 2005, 2046). BiDil was very much imbued with hope and the prospect of reducing health disparities and improving the quality of black life.

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Notably, racialized medicine has received a lot of attention from scholars of race, science, and medicine – in fields ranging from sociology and anthropology to the history of medicine and science, technology, and society. These scholars suggest that although such medicine is ostensibly about fostering the vital forces of the racial body, it is nevertheless quite problematic. One of their principal concerns has been to critique how racialized medicine biologizes race. They question how such medicine can legitimately employ a biological notion of ‘race’ when it has time and again been deemed scientifically tenuous (Lee et al. 2001; Fujimura et al. 2008; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010). Drawing on a wealth of population genetics research, they conclude that distinct races do not exist and that there is simply no biological justification for so-called racial groups. At issue for these critics is the likelihood that striving for health equity by treating the racial body as a genetic entity will lead to the naturalization of health disparities, permitting biological explanations to overshadow social, economic, and ecological understandings of disease (Fullwiley 2007). Another key preoccupation of race, science, and medicine scholars has been to problematize how racialized medicine capitalizes racial life.2 By and large, the production of health and vitality in the United States has come to be linked closely to the generation of wealth (Franklin 2000; Rose 2007). Indeed, biomedicine and the life sciences in general are nowadays highly subject to demands of capitalization, such that commercial considerations (that is, shareholder demands and profit obligations) heavily shape the medical problems they seek to address. Pharmaceutical companies have played an important role in this capitalization of life. Through the production of pharmaceuticals, they aim not only to boost the vitality of the living but also, and perhaps more importantly, to generate economic value. In this context, the racial body has emerged as a potentially valuable biocommodity (Abu El-Haj 2007). Race-based pharmaceuticals hold out the promise of yielding significant economic profit. The problem here is that, in some ways, profiting from the racial body trumps cultivating the vitality of racial life (Pollock 2012; Kahn 2013; Inda 2014). In this chapter, I too suggest that although seemingly life affirming, racialized medicine is problematic. It is problematic in the sense that it ultimately doesn’t necessarily serve to enhance racial life but can instead make it more precarious. To understand this problem, I draw on the literature of governmentality to situate BiDil, racialized medicine, and the general effort to ameliorate health disparities through genetic means in the context of what might be called the neoliberalization of life – that is, the shifting of responsibility for nurturing the life and well-being of the population from the state to individuals (see also Waldby and Cooper 2008). Scholars of governmentality have observed that, since the 1970s, there has been a general reconfiguration of the territory of government in the United States (Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Inda 2006). Put briefly, the political mentality called welfarism, which was dominant in some guise for much of the twentieth century, has generally given way to neoliberalism. Under this new mentality, political government generally no longer acts to safeguard the life and well-being of the population by maintaining a realm of collective security. Social insurance programs – defined as those public mechanisms through which the state sought to insure individuals against life’s insecurities – have

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thus largely vanished and been replaced by a system of marketized and individualized risk management. Indeed, by means of the market, individuals are now expected to take upon themselves the principal responsibility for managing their own security and that of their loved ones. They are counted on to assume an entrepreneurial outlook toward life and to independently insure themselves against the problems of ill health, accidental loss, unemployment, and anything else that could potentially threaten their well-being. In a neoliberal context, then, the fostering of life takes place not through a benevolent state but via individual initiative. Indeed, the neoliberal state exercises only limited powers of its own when it comes to the social protection of the population. A major consequence of the neoliberalization of life has been to render life precarious as people are left to fend for themselves against the insecurities of living.3 What I do in this chapter, then, is problematize racialized medicine in the context of the political mentality of neoliberalism. And I argue that, situated in this context, the promotion of racialized medicine as a way to resolve the problem of health inequalities will not necessarily foster racial life and can actually diminish it (see also Roberts 2010).

FROM WELFARISM TO NEOLIBERALISM Let me begin by fleshing out the how life has been neoliberalized in the United States. For much of the twentieth century, political government in this nation was underpinned by the political mentality of welfarism (Dean 1999; Rose 1999). Welfarism was grounded in the belief that the state should maintain a realm of collective security in order to safeguard the life of each and every member of the population. It was based on the idea that the situation of all social groups within society – workers, employers, professionals, and managers – could simultaneously and gradually be improved. Programmatically, welfarism targeted a range of distinct problem domains: the living and working conditions of the laboring classes; the sexuality, health, and education of children; the norms of family life; the role of women as mothers and housewives; poverty and squalor; prostitution and immorality; delinquency and antisocial behavior; and so forth. The government’s goal in administering these domains was to ensure collective vitality by curtailing the risks to individuals and families that resulted from the craziness of economic cycles, alleviating the harmful consequences of unrestrained economic activity by interceding directly in the conditions of employment, and generally promoting the betterment of the social and biological lives of individuals (Castel 1999; Rose 2000). The principal means by which the welfarist – or, simply, welfare – state sought to ensure collective vitality was social insurance, which took many forms, from accident insurance and unemployment benefits to health and safety legislation. The goal was essentially to secure the life of the population against the risks associated with such phenomena as poverty, old age, sickness, unemployment, accidents, crime, and ill health. Social insurance was thus an inclusive and solidaristic governmental practice. As Nikolas Rose notes, ‘it incarnate[d] social solidarity in collectivizing the

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management of the individual and collective dangers posed by the economic riskiness of a capricious system of wage labor, and the corporeal riskiness of a body subject to sickness and injury, under the stewardship of a [welfare] State’ (1996a, 48). Put otherwise, social insurance was deployed as a mechanism of solidarity that translated accidents, sickness, unemployment, and other afflictions into insurable risks that were individually remunerated but collectively borne. It provided a certain measure of individual and collective security against the uncertainties of social life. Notably, this allocation of social provisions to individuals on the basis of their membership in a collectivity embodied a particular conception of the subject of government, who was conceptualized as a social citizen – that is, as a social being whose life and health were guaranteed through collective dependencies and solidarities. Indeed, the individual was ordained into society in the figure of a citizen with social rights and needs (Miller and Rose 1990). Welfarism, then, conceived of the subject as an individual who was to be ‘governed through society,’ within a nexus of collective responsibility (Rose 1996a, 40). It constructed citizenship in terms of contentment, solidarity, and the obligation of the state to foster individual and collective life. Today, welfarism is no longer the principal mentality underpinning political government. It has generally been replaced by neoliberalism.4 Under this new mentality, political government no longer appears obligated to tackle all the ills of social and economic life by fostering a sphere of collective security. The responsibility for dealing with the problems of living has largely been displaced from the state to a multitude of specific actors: individuals, schools, communities, localities, hospitals, charities, and so forth. Social insurance, as a socializing and collectivizing principle of solidarity, has thus generally given way to the privatized administration of risk. Market instruments – contracts, consumers, and competition – play a crucial role here. It is through the market that individual actors are expected to foster their own lives and secure their own well-being. Indeed, the market has become the preferred mechanism for ensuring the life of the population – for averting the risks linked to old age, ill health, sickness, poverty, and accidents. For example, there has been a proliferation of market-based, semi-autonomous nonstate organizations whose role is to administer areas of social life formerly under the direct sway of the state alone. The functions for which such organizations have taken responsibility include planning the regeneration and government of urban locales; managing formerly public utilities such as water, gas, and electricity; regulating investment and securities in the financial sector; and providing welfare, prison, and police services (Rose 1996a, 56). Neoliberalism, then, entails new modes of apportioning the work of government among the political apparatus, communities, economic actors, and private citizens. It seeks to govern not through society but, as Nikolas Rose argues, ‘through the regulated choices of individual citizens, now construed as subjects of choices and aspirations to self-actualization and self-fulfillment’ (ibid., 41). Here the state, instead of being a provider – the ultimate guarantor of security – exercises limited authority with respect to fostering individual and collective vitality, and thus the public provision of social protection ceases to appear necessary to governing well.

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Like welfarism, neoliberalism depends on a certain conception of the persons to be subjected to government. The political subject under neoliberalism is not a social citizen whose security is guaranteed through the bonds of collective solidarity and the receipt of public largesse but rather an autonomous individual whose citizenship is derived from active self-promotion and self-actualization (O’Malley 1999; Rose 1999, 2000; Brown 2003; Wacquant 2010). Indeed, the neoliberal citizen is expected to be an entrepreneur unto him- or herself: each individual is to maximize the quality of his or her own life – and give meaning and value to it – through acts of responsible choice. Citizens are thus now exhorted to take upon themselves the primary responsibility for fostering their own lives and those of their loved ones. They are asked to adopt a calculative and prudent disposition toward risk and not to rely on socialized securities. For example, neoliberal citizens are supposed to provide for their own retirement through private pension plans; secure themselves against ill health, unemployment, and accidental loss through private insurance; and generally play a big part in safeguarding themselves from anything that could potentially endanger the safety of their freely chosen way of life (Rose 1999). Neoliberalism, then, rests on the reconstitution of the political subject from a social being with rights and needs to a neoliberal citizen with choices and yearnings toward self-fulfillment. It is a mentality of governance that works to responsibilize individuals for their own care and well-being. As such, neoliberalism is essentially about making ethical subjects. The term ethical here refers not so much to moral practices as to how persons conduct themselves and comprehend their existence. It speaks to the duty of individuals to take proper care of themselves. In a neoliberal context, ethical beings are ones who assume charge of their own lives and adopt a prudent disposition toward the future. They are persons who comport themselves rationally and responsibly. To sum up, neoliberalism envisions securing the life of the population not through strategies directed and financed by the state, but through the instrumentalization of a desire for self-reliance – through the production of prudent, self-managing, ethical political subjects. It is a political mentality that constitutes citizens, as Pat O’Malley notes, not ‘as members of an overarching social whole, to which they owe allegiance, and to which they can make a legitimate call for social assistance,’ but ‘as autonomous individuals, responsible for their own fate, invested with personal agency and thus with a purely personal responsibility for their status and actions’ (1999, 95). The characteristic elements of the neoliberal reconfiguration of government in the United States thus include the downscaling of the state (with respect to social protection), the privatization of numerous services formerly part of the state apparatus, the devolution of power to communities and localities, and the constitution of the political subject as a responsible and entrepreneurial individual (Rose 1996b; Osborne and Rose 1999; Brown 2003; Wacquant 2010). In short, neoliberalism seeks to place a limit on what the state can do for individuals. It endeavors to govern by making citizens individually responsible for securing their own life and well-being.

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THE PRECARIZATION OF LIFE The shift in political mentalities from welfarism to neoliberalism has had far-reaching effects on the health and welfare of the population in the United States. David Harvey has noted that, ‘[a]s the state withdraws from welfare provision and diminishes its role in arenas such as health care, public education, and social services, which were once so fundamental to embedded liberalism, it leaves larger and larger segments of the population exposed to impoverishment’ (2005, 76). A major consequence of neoliberalism has thus been the precarization of life. The basic problem with this political mentality is that it depoliticizes social problems. As Wendy Brown has argued, ‘[a]s neoliberalism converts every political and social problem into market terms, it converts them to individual problems with market solutions’ (2006, 704). Examples include the introduction of charter schools, private schools, and voucher systems as a way to deal with the crumbling quality of public education; boutique medicine as a reaction to the erosion of health care provision; and private security guards and gated communities as a response to the social insecurity produced by rising economic inequality. So, rather than providing collective solutions to socially and politically produced problems – whether to improve public education, strengthen the health care system for everyone, or offset the destructive effects of economic cycles in order to ensure collective welfare and reduce social inequality – neoliberalism leaves it to individuals to fend for themselves using the mechanisms of the market. However, individuals are quite often not in a position to deal with social problems all by themselves; as a result their lives are rendered more insecure and vulnerable. To illustrate the precarity of life under neoliberalism, we can examine health care. Indeed, one of the areas in which the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility is most evident is health care (Galvin 2002; Crawford 2006; Rose 2007; Savard 2013). Under neoliberalism, a duty to be healthy and well has become a central element in the contemporary care of the self. ‘Lose weight!’ ‘Eat right!’ ‘Sleep well!’ ‘Stop smoking!’ ‘Drink responsibly!’ ‘Practice safe sex!’ ‘Just say no to drugs!’ Such are the popular injunctions to be healthy that we hear today. This duty to be well is an ideology that sociologists have come to describe as healthism. According to Robert Crawford, healthism: is defined … as the preoccupation with personal health as a primary – often the primary – focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles, with or without therapeutic help. The etiology of disease may be seen as complex, but healthism treats individual behavior, attitudes, and emotions as relevant symptoms needing attention. Healthism will acknowledge, in other words, that health problems may originate outside the individual, e.g. in the American diet, but since these problems are also behavioral, solutions are seen to lie within the realm of individual choice. Hence, they require above all else the assumption of individual responsibility. (Crawford 1980, 368)

Healthism, in other words, takes the pursuit of good health to be a necessary part of a person’s welfare. Moreover, it posits that the upkeep of such a state of health is the

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responsibility of the individual, insisting that human beings can and should develop the personal capacity to prevent illness (Greco 1993). A key aspect of healthism is thus the expectation that individuals will adopt a calculative and prudent disposition toward health risks and insecurities, that they will police their own behavior in such a way as to minimize their exposure to health dangers and thereby maximize their life and well-being. Not surprisingly, the principal mechanism through which people are expected to insure and ensure their health is not the state but the market. In a neoliberal context, striving after a healthy existence has come to depend on consuming a range of goods and services, not only medical care proper but also a host of products that are marketed for their health-fostering properties: exercise machines, individualized fitness programs, weight loss centers, nutritious foods, and so forth (Petersen and Lupton 1996). Indeed, taking proper care of oneself nowadays means purchasing health and happiness in the marketplace. However, not everyone has the financial resources to be a proper, self-caring neoliberal subject. In 2012, for example, about 15.4 percent of the US population had no health insurance (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2013, 22). These uninsured were generally poor people who could not afford to buy private health insurance and were not provided coverage by the state (Seccombe and Hoffman 2007).5 The rate of uninsurance was particularly high among poor racial minorities. In 2012, for African Americans it was 19.0 percent and for Latinos it was 29.1 percent (DeNavas-Walt et al. 2013, 26). Insurance is important in the United States because it is the primary mechanism by which individuals and families access the health care system. Compared to people with insurance, the uninsured utilize the health care system less frequently, depend more on emergency rooms for their care, are not as likely to have a reliable source of medical treatment, suffer more from a range of acute and chronic illnesses, and are generally more exposed to pain, distress, and death (Seccombe and Hoffman 2007). Health insurance, then, is a critical source of security to which millions of poor people, especially racial minorities, have little or no access, the consequence being the impoverishment of their health and well-being.6 Under neoliberalism, then, the impoverished and dispossessed of American society, who are often racial minorities, have generally been relegated to spaces of disposability (Giroux 2006; 2008). Indeed, Henry Giroux argues that as the welfare ‘state is displaced by the market, a new kind of politics is emerging in which some lives, if not whole groups, are seen as disposable and redundant’ (2008, 594). So, whereas in the past marginalized populations could expect some support from the state, today they are generally left to fend for themselves. The state at present feels little compulsion to care for its underprivileged citizens – to take actions that mitigate their hardship and suffering. It has become so feeble with respect to social protection that vast numbers of individuals are being left without health care, education, housing, and retirement benefits (DiFazio 2006; Giroux 2006). In theory, the market is supposed to take the place of the state and provide for the population. However, although it might afford social protection to the rich and middle classes, it provides little security to the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the marginalized (Giroux 2006). Ultimately, in advancing a market-based ethic and in disavowing public policies that

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support life-sustaining social services, neoliberalism has diminished the life of the American population. Indeed, for many, the neoliberalization of life has meant the precarization of life.

NEOLIBERALISM, BIDIL, AND RACIALIZED MEDICINE There is no doubt that BiDil and racialized medicine are by and large products of the contemporary neoliberal milieu. They very much reflect healthism’s emphasis on personal responsibility and market fundamentalism. And they also partake in the diminishing of life. We can clearly see neoliberalism at work in BiDil’s citizenship politics and in the general touting of genomic technologies as a way to address racial disparities in health. We can begin with BiDil’s citizenship politics. On some level, BiDil is fundamentally about questions of rights and citizenship. Among the supporters of the drug were African American organizations such as the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Minority Health Foundation, the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC), the International Society of Hypertension in Blacks, and the National Medical Association. They all advocated strongly for the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to approve BiDil. For them, the approval of the drug was about the right of a socially marginalized population, namely African Americans, to have access to the advantages of biomedicine. They essentially promoted the drug as offering hope to a suffering population historically underserved by the medical/ pharmaceutical establishment. This advocacy for BiDil as a drug aimed at African Americans can be understood in terms of biological citizenship. Generally speaking, the term biological citizenship refers to the linking of rights and citizenship to matters of health, disease, and illness (Rose and Novas 2005). It thus includes any citizenship project in which ideas of citizenship are tied to beliefs about the corporeal, biological life of human beings. Such citizenship projects have become an important part of the political landscape in the United States, with individuals and communities increasingly understanding themselves in somatic terms and defining what it means to be a citizen in the idiom of vital rights – rights to life, health, and healing. Advocacy for BiDil, especially on the part of African Americans, was precisely about vital rights. It was about entitlement to health services, improving care, and hope for better treatment. It was grounded in the belief that the African American community, which has historically been excluded from the benefits of biomedicine, deserved access to life-saving medications. Central here is the idea that African Americans have particular health needs and that medications targeted to this population are essential to realizing the hope of finding cures and achieving healthy bodies. As a biological citizenship project, then, the promotion of BiDil basically offered hope to a suffering population underserved by the biomedical establishment. However, the rights connected to BiDil are not generally social rights but neoliberal ones. Indeed, the main demand that BiDil’s advocates placed on the state was for the FDA to approve the drug so that it could be made available in the marketplace.

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Such a demand is a consumerist rather than a social one. The state was not asked to be a purveyor of health care. Rather, it was simply expected to create the conditions to bring a drug product to market. In this context, BiDil represents a call to African Americans to take responsibility for their health by purchasing and consuming the drug (Krupar and Ehlers 2015). On the patient education website for BiDil, African Americans are told, ‘When it comes to heart failure, your doctor can do a lot of things to help and support you. But you – the patient – are in the driver’s seat. Your choices and actions can make a difference in how well you manage your heart failure symptoms’ (Arbor Pharmaceuticals 2012). One of the choices that African American patients are implicitly expected to make is to ask their doctors to prescribe BiDil to them. The neoliberal emphasis on the duty to be well is clearly in evidence here. African American patients are essentially exhorted to be active and responsible consumers of medical products and services. They are expected to be knowledgeable about their conditions and to turn to the market to obtain treatment and generate health. They are thus imagined as active patient-consumers who take upon themselves the principal responsibility for administering their own health. As it turns out, very few African Americans who could benefit from BiDil have been prescribed the drug (Washington Legal Foundation 2008; Roberts 2011b; Pollock 2012). Because of the high price of BiDil and the availability of less expensive generic alternatives, many private health insurance plans have opted not to cover the drug, and those that do cover it generally require high monthly copayments (Rusert and Royal 2011). Government-sponsored health plans have also failed to cover the drug. For example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) – the US federal agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program – does not require Medicare Part D plans to reimburse patients for BiDil (Roberts 2011b).7 The reluctance of both private and government insurance plans to cover BiDil means that a significant portion of the potential African American heart failure population – about 70 percent of those over the age of 45 – lack health insurance coverage for the drug or are required to pay hefty insurance copayments (Westphal 2006). So, after all the work that went into convincing the FDA to approve BiDil, with arguments about the need to reduce health disparities and alleviate black suffering, the drug failed to reach its market. A drug that was presumably produced to foster the lives of African Americans is thus not readily available to this population (Krupar and Ehlers 2015). This failure of BiDil to reach African Americans reflects a neoliberal milieu in which the state has generally ceased to provide social protection to its population and in which the market works only for those who have the ability to pay. It speaks to the corporal abandonment under neoliberalism of people who lack the financial wherewithal to purchase the medical and other goods necessary to achieve proper health (Roberts 2011b). It is about the diminishing of racial life. A neoliberal ethos is also very much at work with respect to the general promotion of genomic technologies as a way to address racial disparities in health. In today’s scientific culture, there is a strong propensity to think of race as a genetic fact. Some population geneticists have argued that the mapping of the human genome has

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affirmed that the human population can generally be divided into five genetic groups that correspond to the major geographic regions of the world (Rosenberg et al. 2002). Based on this work, medical researchers have suggested not only that race is biologically real, but also that the genetic differences that exist between racial groups are medically significant (Fausto-Sterling 2004; Braun 2006; Rose 2006). Such researchers have consequently highlighted the necessity of conducting genomic research on the relations between race, disease susceptibility, and drug response (Risch 2000; Risch et al. 2002; Burchard et al. 2003). To ignore race in genetic studies, they suggest, would be detrimental to the health of racial minority populations. The challenge of taking race into account when conducting genetic research has been taken up by numerous scientists, resulting in a proliferation of what Steven Epstein (2007) calls ‘difference findings,’ some of which involve racial differences in disease susceptibility. Indeed, medical researchers have linked racial disparities in incidences of disease – from AIDS, breast cancer, and diabetes to prostate cancer, addiction, and lung cancer – to genetic variation (Lee et al. 2001; Frank 2001; Happe 2006; Epstein 2007; Wailoo 2011). An example is racial differences in breast cancer. Statistics show that African American women bear a disproportionate burden of the disease (Happe 2006). Although their lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is actually lower than that of white women, they are more likely to die of the disease (Krieger 2002). In 1998, for example, the breast cancer mortality rate for African American women was 28 percent higher than it was for white women (Jones and Chilton 2002, 540). African American women also tend to be diagnosed with breast cancer at a younger age, and often with more aggressive tumors and at a later stage of the disease (Trock 1996; Happe 2006). While some researchers have suggested that racial differences in disease manifestation and outcome are likely due to socio-environmental determinants (lack of access to medical care and environmental racism, for example), others have maintained that social causes cannot adequately explain such differences and therefore that genetic susceptibility must be a factor (Happe 2006). Researchers making the case for genetics have suggested, for example, that BRCA1 gene mutations ‘may contribute to breast cancer in a significant proportion of African-American women’ (Olopade et al. 2003, 237).8 Moreover, they have proposed that common variations of the genes that influence the metabolism of estrogen and environmental pollutants may function as disease risk factors in this population (Ishibe et al. 1998; Guillemette et al. 2000). These claims that genetics can account for breast cancer in African American women essentially suppose that race is a biological risk factor for disease. What we see today, then, is that there is a strong drive to promote genetic research as a way to alleviate inequalities in health. The activities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are instructive here. In 2002, the agency released its Strategic Research Plan and Budget to Reduce and Ultimately Eliminate Health Disparities (NIH 2002). The report noted that even after accounting for socio-environmental factors (socioeconomic status and education level, access to and quality of health care, racial and ethnic discrimination, and cultural issues), racial disparities in disease susceptibility and responses to therapy persisted. Examining the role that genetics might play in

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explaining such disparities was thus deemed crucial. One of the key NIH entities that emphasized genetic research on health disparities was the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). In its vision for the future of genomics research, the NHGRI identified as a grand challenge the need to develop ‘genome-based tools’ that deal with health disparities and ‘improve the health of all’ (Collins et al. 2003). To this end, the institute sponsored a number of initiatives focused on the genetics of health disparities, including the Africa America Diabetes Mellitus Study, the African American Hereditary Prostate Cancer Study Network, and the Study of Hereditary Hemochromatosis and Iron Overload Disease in Diverse Populations. Other NIH institutes likewise engaged, but to a lesser degree, in initiatives to determine the role of genetics in health disparities. For example, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases was involved in a project to detect regions of the human genome that exhibited evidence for linkage in type 2 diabetes (NIH 2002), and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) named as a priority the identification of the biomedical, namely genetic, risk factors that contribute to disparities in the effects of alcohol (NIAAA 2002). I should note that genomic based projects do not necessarily minimize social and environmental determinants of health. In fact, such projects routinely acknowledge that factors such as poor access to good health care services and exposure to environmental pollutants contribute to ill health. However, when socio-environmental factors are taken into account in genetic medicine, race-based medicine included, they are often treated simply as triggers – as sparks that activate molecular changes in an individual’s body. Disease is thus seen as fundamentally a problem of the body. It is how the body responds to exogenous stimuli, and not necessarily the stimuli themselves, that is important. The key to producing health is therefore knowledge of the body and its genetic processes. This knowledge allows researchers to devise medical technologies designed to prevent, resolve, or alleviate the body’s maladies. In a neoliberal context, such a model of well-being has intrinsic appeal. If it is possible to remediate illness through molecular medical interventions, then there is no need for the state to deal with social inequalities, environmental pollutants, and other factors that contribute to the production of poor health. Genetic medicine can thus be used by the state as a pretext to absolve itself of the responsibility for social investment in the population and to make health a matter of only personal responsibility, something to be procured through purchasing genetic products in the marketplace. For neoliberalism, then, the appeal of genetic medicine is that it promises to produce both health and wealth (because biomedical technologies present opportunities for capitalization), all without the necessity of costly social interventions (Nadesan 2013). It is already evident that the characterization of diseases as genetic, even where it is clear that social factors are involved, has ushered in a trend to address maladies through biomedical interventions (genetic screening, genetically tailored therapy, and so forth) rather than by ameliorating conditions in the social environment (Roberts 2011a). A case in point is autism. Nowadays autism is largely regarded as a genetic condition, even though research suggests a strong role for environmental pollutants (for example, lead, mercury, ionizing radiation, industrial chemicals, and pesticides)

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in producing the disorder (Lauritsen and Ewald 2001; Nadesan 2013). A primary goal of autism research has thus become to find genes for autism, the ultimate goal being to develop pharmaceuticals and other commercial technologies to manage the condition. The problem with putting research emphasis on the genetics of autism, as Majia Holmer Nadesan points out, is that: the seductive combination of genes and dollars has the potential to crowd out other research trajectories and autism-funding priorities. The concern here is that knowledge and products developed by the pharmaceutical-research complex will likely promote autism detection (tests) and pharmaceutical ‘management’ over the more costly (in terms of initial investments) therapeutic approaches that are labor- and resource-intensive (such as sensory-integration therapy and special education services) and over alternative research approaches that might curtail industry profits by foregrounding environmental explanations for autism and other syndromes and diseases. (Nadesan 2013, 123)

This scenario, that other autism funding priorities will be crowded out, appears to have become reality in the United States. Today, little federal funding exists for environmental research on autism (Nadesan 2013), so autism prevention efforts that emphasize environmental solutions, as opposed to pharmaceutical cures, are practically nonexistent. Furthermore, at the national level, there is almost no public funding for services to help individuals diagnosed with autism to live meaningful lives. The framing of autism as a genetic disorder is thus leading to a minimization of the need to attend to the social environment as a way of preventing and managing autism. In the process, the state is absolved of the responsibility for monitoring industry and regulating contaminants known to contribute to the production of developmental disorders (ibid.). Given the increased tendency to deal with diseases marked as genetic strictly through technical means, the rise of race-based medicine portends a similar trend with respect to how the maladies of racialized populations are managed. Despite the proven role of social factors such as racial discrimination and poverty in explaining racial disparities in health, the suggestion that genetic research holds promise in the campaign against such inequalities finds fertile ground in a neoliberal milieu (Sankar et al. 2004). The characterization of racial health disparities in terms of genetics essentially means that the state does not have to act to address environmental factors in order to produce health. Rather, it can simply let the market handle socially produced health problems through the manufacture of racially targeted medications and other technologies for mass consumption. Thus, as Dorothy Roberts argues: racial medicine has tremendous potential to affect the direction of state efforts to address health disparities, and racial inequality more broadly, by diverting attention from the structural causes of racial inequities toward genetic explanations and technological solutions. The public may think that race-based medicine shifts responsibility for addressing disease from the government to the individual by suggesting that health disparities are a result of genetic variation rather than inequitable social structures and access to health care. (Roberts 2011b, 542)

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Given years of retrenchment, the state has already reduced support for social programs meant to cultivate the life and welfare of disadvantaged populations, including racialized minorities. The suggestion that the problem of health disparities can be resolved through racial medicine only gives more ammunition to the neoliberal project of social disinvestment. Instead of fostering racial life, then, race-based medicine will likely diminish it and make it more precarious. Indeed, to the extent that racialized medicine compels continued disinvestment in social programs, the effect will be to further impoverish the lives and health of racial minority populations.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have argued that as political government has progressively abandoned its role as social protector of the population, individuals in the United States have been left with the responsibility of securing their own lives against the vagaries of social and economic existence. The result of this neoliberalization of life has been to make living exceedingly precarious for marginalized populations in American society. The promotion of racial medicine as a way to resolve the problem of health disparities will likely only exacerbate this abandonment. BiDil certainly save lives, but the net effect of investing in racialized medicine, if it is at the expense of social programming, will be to diminish racial life. There is no doubt that genetics impacts practically all facets of health. However, a large body of research suggests that the contribution of genetics to patterns of health disparity in the United States is minor in comparison to social and environmental factors (Sankar et al. 2004; Brooks and King 2008). Health disparities are thus not principally a matter