FROM
BIOPOWER TO BIOPOLITICS
by
Maurizio Lazzarato
translated
by Ivan A. Ramirez
1. Michel
Foucault, through the concept of biopolitics, was already pointing out in the
1970s what, nowadays, is well on its way to being obvious: “life” and “living
being” [le vivant] are at the heart of new political battles and new
economic strategies. He also demonstrated that the “introduction of life into
history” corresponds with the rise of capitalism. In effect, from the 18th
Century onwards the dispositifs of power and knowledge begin
to take into account the “processes of life” and the possibility of controlling
and modifying them. [1] “Western man gradually learns what it means to be a
living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence,
probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could
be modified...” [2] That life and living being, that the species and its
productive requirements have moved to the heart of political struggle is
something that is radically new in human history. “For millennia, man remained
what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a
political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his
existence as a living being in question."[3]
The
patenting of the human genome and the development of artificial intelligence;
biotechnology and the harnessing of life’s forces for work, trace a new
cartography of biopowers. These strategies put in question the forms of life
itself.
The works
of Michel Foucault, however, focus only indirectly upon the description of
these new biopowers. If power seizes life as the object of its exercise then
Foucault is interested in determining what there is in life that resists, and
that, in resisting this power, creates forms of subjectification and forms of
life that escape its control. It seems to me that the common theme traversing
all of Foucault’s thought is the attempt to specify the requirements of a new
“process of political creativity that the great political institutions and
parties confiscated after the 19th Century.” In effect, Foucault interprets the
introduction of “life into history” constructively because it presents the
opportunity to propose a new ontology, one that begins with the body and its
potential, that regards the “political subject as an ethical one” against the
prevailing tradition of Western thought which understands it as a “subject of
law.”
Rather
than starting from a theory of obedience and its legitimating forms, its dispositifs
and practices, Foucault interrogates power beginning with the “freedom” and
the “capacity for transformation” that every “exercise of power” implies. The
new ontology sanctioned by the introduction of “life into history” enables
Foucault to “defend the subject's freedom” to establish relationships with
himself and with others, relationships that are, for him, the very stuff [matière]
of ethics.” Habermas and the philosophers of the Constitutional State are not
wrong in taking Foucault’s thought as their privileged target because it
represents a radical alternative to a transcendental ethics of communication
and the rights of man.
2. Giorgio
Agamben, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being
undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and
political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios,
between natural life and political life, between man as a living being [simple
vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political
subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is “now nearly unknown
to us.” The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is,
for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a
radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of
classical thought. But is this impossibility of distinguishing between zoe and
bios, between man as a living being and man as a political
subject, the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the
action of new forces over which power has “no control?” Agamben’s response is
very ambiguous and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives.
Foucault’s response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of
government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction,
express power relations that the classical world could not have known.
Foucault
described this dynamic, in keeping with the progress of his research, as the
emergence of a multiple and heterogeneous power of resistance and creation that
calls every organization that is transcendental, and every regulatory mechanism
that is extraneous, to its constitution radically into question. The birth of
biopower and the redefinition of the problem of sovereignty are only
comprehensible to us on this basis. Foucault’s entire work leads toward this
conclusion even if he did not coherently explain the dynamic of this power,
founded on the “freedom” of “subjects” and their capacity to act upon the
“conduct of others,” until the end of his life.
Foucault
analyzed the introduction of “life into history” through the development of
political economy. He demonstrated how the techniques of power changed at the
precise moment that economy (strictly speaking, the government of the
family) and politics (strictly speaking, the government of the polis)
became imbricated with one another.
The new
biopolitical dispositifs are born once we begin to ask ourselves, “What
is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the
family (which a good father is expected to do in relation to his wife, children
and servants) and of making the family fortunes prosper-- how are we to
introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the
management of the State?” [4]
Why
should we look for the “arcana imperii” of modernity within political
economy? Biopolitics, understood as a government-population- political economy
relationship, refers to a dynamic of forces that establishes a new relationship
between ontology and politics. The political economy that Foucault talks about
is neither the political economy of capital and work of classical economists,
nor the Marxist economic critique of “living labor.” It is a political economy
of forces that is very close yet very distant from either of these points of
view. It is very close to Marx’s viewpoint because the problem of how to
coordinate and command the relationships between men, insofar as they are
living beings, and those of men with “things,” [5] keeping the aim of
extracting a “surplus of power" in mind, is not simply an economic problem
but an ontological one. It is very distant because Foucault faulted Marx and
political economy with reducing the relations between forces to relations
between capital and labor, with making these binary and symmetric relations the
source of all social dynamics and every power relation. The political economy
that Foucault talks about, on the contrary, governs “the whole of a complex
material field where not only are natural resources, the products of labor,
their circulation and the scope of commerce engaged, but where the management
of towns and routes, the conditions of life (habitat, diet, etc.), the number
of inhabitants, their life span, their ability and fitness for work also come
into play.” [6]
Political
economy, as a syntagm of biopolitics, encompasses power dispositifs that
amplify the whole range of relations between the forces that extend throughout
the social body rather than, as in classical political economy and its
critique, the relationship between capital and labor exclusively .
Foucault
needs a new political theory and a new ontology to describe the new power
relations expressed in the political economy of forces. In effect, biopolitics
are “grafted” and “anchored” upon a multiplicity of disciplinary [de
commandemant et d'obéissance] relations between forces, those which power
“coordinates, institutionalizes, stratifies and targets,” but that are not
purely and simply projected upon individuals. The fundamental political problem
of modernity is not that of a single source of sovereign power, but that of a
multitude of forces that act and react amongst each other according to
relations of command and obedience. The relations between man and woman, master
and student, doctor and patient, employer and worker, that Foucault uses to
illustrate the dynamics of the social body are relations between forces that
always involve a power relation. If power, in keeping with this
description, is constituted from below, then we need an ascending analysis of
the constitution of power dispositifs, one that begins with
infinitesimal mechanisms that are subsequently “invested, colonized, utilized,
involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more general mechanisms,
and by forms of global domination.”
Consequently,
biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power relations in order to
extract a surplus of power from living beings. Biopolitics is a strategic
relation; it is not the pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize
sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions of “coordination
and determination” concede that biopower, from the moment it begins to operate
in this particular manner, is not the true source of power. Biopower
coordinates and targets a power that does not properly belong to it, that comes
from the “outside.” Biopower is always born of something other than itself.
3. Historically,
the socialization of the forces that political economy attempts to govern calls
sovereign power into crisis; these forces compel the biopolitical technologies
of government into an “immanence,” one that grows increasingly extensive, with
“society.” This socialization always forces power to unfold in dispositifs that
are both “complementary” and “incompatible,” that express an “immanent
transcendence in our actuality,” that is to say, an integration of biopower and
sovereign power. In effect, the emergence of the interdependent [solidaire] art
of government-population-wealth series radically displaces the problem of
sovereignty. Foucault does not neglect the analysis of sovereignty, he merely
asserts that the grounding force will not be found on the side of power, since
power is “blind and weak,” [7] but on the side of the forces that constitute
the “social body” or “society.” Sovereign power is blind and weak but that does
not signify, by any means, that it lacks efficacy: its impotence is ontological.
We do a disservice to Foucault’s thought when we describe its course through
the analysis of power relations as a simple succession and substitution of
different dispositifs, because the biopolitical dispositif does
not replace sovereignty, it displaces its function and renders the “problem of
its foundation even more acute.”
“Accordingly,
we need to see things not in terms of the replacement a society of sovereignty
by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary
society of by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle,
sovereignty-discipline-government, which has the population as its primary
target.” [8] It would be better to try to think through the articulation and
distribution of the different dispositifs that are present
simultaneously in the linkage of government, population and political economy.
Can we
then understand the development of biopolitics as the necessity to assure an
immanent and strategic coordination of forces, rather than as the organization
of a unilateral power relation? What we need to emphasize is the difference of
the principles and the dynamics that regulate the socialization of forces,
sovereign power and biopower. The relations between the latter two are only
comprehensible on the basis of the multiple and heterogeneous action of forces.
Without the introduction of the “freedom” and the resistance of forces the dispositifs
of modern power remain incomprehensible, and their intelligibility will be
inexorably reduced to the logic of political science. Foucault explains the
issue in the following manner: “So resistance comes first, and resistance
remains superior to the other forces of the process; power relations are
obliged to change to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is
the main word, the keyword, in this dynamic.” [9]
4. In the
1970s Foucault essentially formulates this new conception of power by means of
the models of battle and war. In this way of understanding power and social
relations there really is a “freedom” (an autonomy and an independence) of the
forces in play, but it is rather a freedom that is constituted as the “power to
deprive others.” In effect, in war there are the strong and the weak, the
clever and the naive, the victorious and the vanquished, and they are all
acting “subjects," they are “free” even if this freedom only consists of
the appropriation, the conquest and the submission of other forces.
Foucault,
who made this model of power, a “warlike clash of forces,” work against the
philosophico-juridical tradition of contract and sovereignty, is firmly
entrenched within a paradigm where the articulation of the concepts of the power,
difference and freedom of forces already serves to explain social
relations. Yet this “philosophy” of difference risks understanding all the
relationships between men, regardless of the actual nature of these
relationships, as relations of domination. Foucault’s thought will be forced to
confront this impasse. Nonetheless, bodies are not always trapped in the dispositifs
of power. Power is not a unilateral relation, a totalitarian domination
over individuals, such as the one exercised by the dispositif of the
Panopticon, [10] but a strategic relation. Every force in society exercises
power and that power passes through the body, not because power is “omnipotent
and omniscient” but because every force is a power of the body. Power comes
from below; the forces that constitute it are multiple and heterogeneous. What
we call power is an integration, a coordination and determination of the
relations between a multiplicity of forces. How are we to liberate this new
conception of power, one based upon the potential, difference and autonomy of
forces, from the model of “universal domination?” How are we to call forth a
“freedom” and a force that is not merely one of domination and resistance?
In
response to this questioning Foucault moved from the model of war to that of
“government.” The thematic of government was already present in Foucault’s
reflection since it illustrated the biopolitical exercise of power. The
displacement that Foucault enacts, sometime in the eighties, consists in
considering the “art of governance” not merely as a strategy of power, even if
it is biopolitical power, but as the action of subjects upon others and upon
themselves. He searched amongst the ancients for the answer to this
question: how do subjects become active, how is the government of the
self and others open to subjectifications that are independent of the biopolitical
art of government? Consequently, The “government of souls” is always at stake
in political struggle and cannot be formulated, exclusively, as biopower's
modality of action.
The
passage into ethics is an internal necessity to the Foucauldian analysis of
power. Gilles Deleuze is right in pointing out that there is a single Foucault,
not two; the Foucault of the analysis of power and the Foucault of the
problematic of the subject. A persistent questioning ranges the whole of
Foucault’s work: how are we to seize these infinitesimal, diffused and
heterogeneous power relations so that they do not always result in phenomena of
domination or resistance? [11] How can this new ontology of forces open up to
unexpected processes of political constitution and independent processes of
subjectification?
5. In the
eighties, after a long detour through ethics, Foucault finally returned to his
concept of “power.” In his last interviews Foucault criticized himself because
he thought that “like many others, he had not been clear enough and had not
used the proper terms to speak of power.” He saw his work retrospectively as an
analysis and a history of the different modalities through which human beings
are constituted as subjects in Western culture, rather than as an analysis of
the transformations of the dispositifs of power. “Therefore it is not
power, but the subject, that constitutes the general theme of my
investigations.” [12]
The
analysis of power dispositifs should then begin, without any ambiguity,
with the dynamic of forces and the “freedom” of subjects, and not with the
dynamics of institutions, even if they are biopolitical institutions, because
if one starts to pose the question of power starting from the institution one
will inevitably end up with a theory of the “subject of law.” In this last and
definitive theory of “power” Foucault distinguishes three different concepts
which are usually confused within a single category: strategic relations,
techniques of government and states of domination. He asserts
that, above all, it is necessary to speak of power relations rather than power
alone, because the emphasis should fall upon the relation itself rather than on
its terms, the latter are not causes but mere effects. His characterization of
strategic relations as a play of “infinitesimal, mobile, reversible and
unstable” power is already in place in the seventies. The new modality that
expresses the exercise of power at the interior of relationships, amorous,
teacher and student relations, husband and a wife, children and parents, etc.,
is already found in the nietzschean concept of "forces" that was the
precursor to Foucault's conception of “strategic relations.” This modality,
defined as an “action upon an action,” spreads through the will to “control the
conduct of others.”
“It seems
to me that we must distinguish between power relations understood as strategic
games between liberties--in which some try to control the conduct of others,
who in turn try to avoid allowing their conduct be controlled or try to control
the conduct of others--and the states of domination that people ordinarily call
power.” [13] Power is defined, from this perspective, as the capacity to
structure the field of action of the other, to intervene in the domain of the
other’s possible actions. This new conception of power shows what was implicit
in the model of the battle and war, but that still had not been coherently
explained, namely, that it is necessary to presuppose the virtual
"freedom" of the forces engaged to understand the exercise of power.
Power is a mode of action upon “acting subjects,” upon “free subjects, insofar
as they are free.”
“A power
relationship, on the other hand, can only be articulated on the basis of two
elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relation; that
the "other" (the one over whom power is exercised) must be recognized
and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a
relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, effects and possible
inventions may open up." [14] The only way that subjects can be said to be
free, in keeping with he stipulations of this model, is if they “always have
the possibility to change the situation, if this possibility always exists.”
This modality of the exercise of power allows Foucault to respond to the
critiques addressed to him ever since he initiated his work on power: “So what
I've said does not mean that we are always trapped, but that we are always
free--well, anyway, that there is always the possibility of changing.” [15]
“States
of domination,” on the contrary, are characterized by the institutional
stabilization of strategic relations, by the fact that the mobility, the
potential reversibility and instability of power relations, of “actions upon
actions,” is limited. The asymmetric relations within every social relation
crystallize and lose the freedom, the “fluidity” and the “reversibility” of
strategic relations. Foucault places “governmental technologies,” that is to
say, the set of practices that “constitute, define, organize and
instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in
dealing with each other,” [16] between strategic relations and states of
domination.
For
Foucault, Governmental technologies play a central role in power relations,
because it is through these technologies that the opening and closing of
strategic games is possible; through their exercise strategic relations become
either crystallized and fixed in asymmetric institutionalized relations (states
of domination), or they open up to the creation of subjectivities that escape
biopolitical power in fluid and reversible relations. The ethico-political
struggle takes on its full meaning at the frontier between “strategic
relations” and “states of domination,” on the terrain of “governmental
technologies.” Ethical action, then, is concentrated upon the crux of the
relation between strategic relations and governmental technologies, and it has
two principal goals:
1. to
permit, by providing rules and techniques to manage the relationships
established with the self and with others, the interplay of strategic relations
with the minimum possible domination, [17]
2. to
augment their freedom, their mobility and reversibility in the exercise of
power because these are the prerequisites of resistance and creation.
6. The
determination of the relationship between resistance and creation is the last
limit that Foucault’s thought attempted to breach. The forces that resist and
create are to be found in strategic relations and in the will of subjects who
are virtually free to “control the conduct of others.” Power, the condensation
of strategic relations into relations of domination, the contraction of the
spaces of freedom by the desire to control the conduct of others, always meets
with resistance; this resistance should be sought out in the strategic dynamic.
Consequently, life and living being become a “matter” of ethics through the
dynamic that simultaneously resists power and creates new forms of life. In an
interview in 1984, a year before his death, Foucault was asked about the
definition of the relation between resistance and creation:
“Resistance
was conceptualized only in terms of negation. Nevertheless, as you see it,
resistance is not solely a negation but a creative process. To create and
recreate, to transform the situation, to participate actively in the process,
that is to resist.”
“Yes,
that is the way I would put it. To say no is the minimum form of resistance.
But naturally, at times that is very important. You have to say no as a
decisive form of resistance.” [18]
And in
the same interview, destined to appear in Body Politic, Foucault asserts
that minorities (homosexuals), to whom the relation between resistance and
creation is a matter of political survival, should not only defend themselves
and resist, but should also affirm themselves, create new forms of life, create
a culture; "They should affirm themselves; not merely affirm themselves in
their identity, but affirm themselves insofar as they are a creative force.”
[19]
The
relationships with ourselves, the relationships that we should entertain with
ourselves, which led Foucault to this new definition of power are not
relationships of identity; “Rather they should be relationships of
differentiation, of creation and innovation.” [20]
Foucault’s
work ought to be continued upon this fractured line between resistance and
creation. Foucault’s itinerary allows us to conceive the reversal of biopower
into biopolitics, the “art of governance” into the production and government of
new forms of life. To establish a conceptual and political distinction between
biopower and biopolitics is to move in step with Foucault's thinking.
[1]
Trans. Note: Foucault’s term, dispositif, generally denotes a device or a
mechanism, but it is also used to refer to the projected implementation of
particular measures, to plans: technical plans, military plans, etc. The term
is derived from the French verb disposer: to arrange, to set, to lay
out. I have chosen to leave dispositif in French since there is no
single term in English that can bear the full range of its meaning. The term
will appear in italics throughout the text, the italics are mine. All the notes
are by the original author unless stated otherwise.
[2] M.
Foucault, 'Right of Death and Power over Life', in P. Rabinow, ed., The
Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 264. Trans. modified.
[3] M.
Foucault, 'Right of Death and Power over Life', in P. Rabinow, ed., The
Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 265. Trans. modified.
[4] M.
Foucault, ' Governmentality', in Burchell, Gordon and Miller, eds., The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality , (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 92. Translation modified.
[5]
Trans. Note: Foucault claims that in the 17th Century there is the beginning of
a shift away from juridical sovereignty towards what he calls the art of
government. This movement away from sovereign power and into the
"science of government" is characterized by the "introduction of
economy into political practice," in short, by the government, the disposition,
of things." Foucault explains; "One governs things. But what does
this mean? I do not think that this is a matter of opposing things to men, but
rather of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but
rather a sort of complex of things and men. The things which in this sense
government is to be concerned with are in fact men, but men in their relations
with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the
territory with its specific qualities, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in
their relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits, ways of acting
and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things,
accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc." M.
Foucault, 'Governmentality', in Burchell, Gordon and Miller, eds., The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 93.
[6] M.
Foucault, 'The Politics of Health in the 18th Century', in C. Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980).
[7]
“Power is not omnipotent or omniscient--quite the contrary! If power relationships
have produced forms of investigation, of analysis, of models of knowledge,
etc., it is precisely not because power was omniscient, but because it was
blind...If it is true that so many power relationships have been developed, so
many systems of control, so many forms of surveillance, it is precisely because
power was always impotent.” M. Foucault, 'Clarifications on the Question of
Power', in S. Lotringer ed., Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961- 1984
(New York: Semiotexte, 1996), p. 625.
[8] M. Foucault,
' Governmentality', in Burchell, Gordon and Miller, eds., The Foucault
Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1991), p. 102. Translation modified.
[9] M.
Foucault, 'Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity', in P. Rabinow, ed.,
Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New
York, The New Press, 1997), p.167. x Foucault, responding to “Marxist”
critiques launched against him by the actual mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari,
explained that his conception of power relations could not be "merely
reduced to such a figure.”
[10] G.
Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986).
[12] M.
Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in C. Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980).
[13] M.
Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom',
in P. Rabinow, ed., Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth
, Vol. I (New York, The New Press, 1997), p.299.
[14] M.
Foucault, 'The Subject and Powet', in J.D. Faubion, ed., Essential Works of
Foucault: Power, Vol.III (New York, The New Press, 2000) The relation
between the master and his slave is a power relation when flight is a
possibility for the latter, otherwise it is simply a matter of the exercise of
physical force.
[15] M.
Foucault, 'Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity', in P. Rabinow, ed.,
Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New
York, The New Press, 1997), p.167. xvi M. Foucault, 'The Ethics of the
Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in P. Rabinow, ed., Essential
Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New York, The New
Press, 1997), p.300.
[17] In
the last part of his life Foucault constantly faced the problem of strategic
relations: how is one to render them symmetrical? He only begins to tackle this
thematic through the theme of "friendship.” Gabriel Tarde, an author whose
thought I had, previously, confronted with Foucault’s, emphasizes the need,
beginning from the same foucauldian “strategic relations,” to base their
dynamic upon sympathy and not merely on asymmetry. "A prominent
sociologist recently defined social relations, in a way that is so narrow and
far removed from the truth, by claiming that the principal characteristic of
social acts is that they are imposed from the outside, by obligation. To
make this claim is to recognize as social relations only those between the
master and the slave, between the professor and the student or between the
parents and their children, without any regard for the fact that free relations
between equals exist. One has to have one's eyes shut not to see that, even in
the schools, the education that the students acquire on their own, by imitating
each other, by breathing in, so to speak, their examples or even those of their
professors, the education that they internalize, has more importance
than the one they receive or are forced to bear." G. Tarde, La Logique
Sociale, (Paris: Institut Synthelabo, 1999), p. 62.
[18] M.
Foucault, 'Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity', in P. Rabinow, ed.,
Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New
York, The New Press, 1997), p.168. Trans. Modified.
[19] M.
Foucault, 'Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity', in P. Rabinow, ed.,
Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New
York, The New Press, 1997), p.164. Trans. Modified.
[20] M.
Foucault, 'Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity', in P. Rabinow, ed.,
Essential Works of Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth , Vol. I (New
York, The New Press, 1997), p.166. Trans. Modified.