Abstract
Visibility is a trap.
—Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (200)
In 2020 as the global COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, no concept in the cultural theory arsenal was more prominent or more widely deployed in the various attempts that were made to write about the many issues the pandemic raised than Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. In large part, though, this owed more to later interpretations of Foucault, particularly Agamben and Esposito, than it did to his own work (for this reason I will discuss their work separately). In many ways the various governmental responses (locally, nationally, and internationally) to the pandemic were a perfect illustration of what Foucault wanted to draw our attention to when he first conceived of the concept of biopolitics, but very often too the concept was used by commentators to name a situation that would have been more accurately accounted for by Foucault’s earlier work on discipline. Biopolitics is often treated as a continuation of discipline by other means, but it is clear that Foucault himself did not see it this way. Biopolitics represents something new in the way power is both defined and administered, as Foucault demonstrates at great length. Biopolitics does not necessarily supersede discipline, or render it obsolete, but it does add a new layer or strata to the operation of power that demands separate analysis because it brings to bear new functions and yields new types of knowledge. However, in spite of its obvious relevance and applicability to the analysis of the global COVID-19 pandemic I do not believe the prominence of Foucault’s concept in 2020 was due solely to the exigencies of the pandemic or the apparent ready-to-handness of the concept itself. Rather, I think it had more to do with the fact that there is growing recognition in cultural theory today that biopolitics is the concept for our time; more so than any other available concept it provides a model to explain the operations of the largely invisible but nevertheless potent essential working parts of power of the present historical era, which Deleuze with characteristic boldness called ‘control society’ (a phrase he poached from William Burroughs). An abundance of new critical work on such diverse topics as algorithms, asylum seekers, eating disorders, sexuality, and so on points to this conclusion.
But this is, after all, the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, of philosophical practice.
—Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (3)
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Notes
- 1.
Foucault (2008: 3).
- 2.
Foucault (2008: 3).
- 3.
Foucault (2008: 19 emphasis added).
- 4.
This lecture is effectively a first draft of the final chapter of the first volume of his history of sexuality project, which was published in 1976 under the title La Volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality: An Introduction). It is also worth noting that his book on ‘disciplinary society’ (as Foucault calls it) Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) first appeared in 1975 because this indicates that questions to do with surveillance were still very much on his mind, but it also suggests that he had brought to a close his thinking about at least some aspects of it. And in fact that is very much the message of his March 17 lecture, which is as much a wrapping-up of work already done (on discipline) as it is an ambitious mapping-out of work that was yet to be done (on biopolitics). While Foucault is quite explicit in stating that discipline and biopolitics are not the same, that does not mean the concept of biopolitics is altogether free from ambiguity—first, he uses the words biopolitics and biopower interchangeably; second, he also uses the word anatomo-politics as an alternate to biopolitics; third, the confusion does not stop there because he also uses the words security and the neologism governmentality as alternates for biopolitics. Perhaps this is it to be expected given that the work Foucault has left us on this topic consists of preliminary sketches, lectures that were never intended to be published in the form we now have them. And he makes it very clear that the work he presents is provisional, as much an attempt to formulate the right questions as it is an attempt to answer those questions. Consequently, there is a great deal of slippage in his terminology, particularly between biopolitics and the later concept of governmentality which he introduces in the academic year of 1977–1978, that is, a year after he introduced biopolitics at the close of 1975–1976 academic year. In this lecture series, published under the title Security, Population, Territory, he uses governmentality where previously he had used biopolitics, possibly suggesting that he intended to drop the latter in favour of the former. But in the lectures for the following year, pointedly titled The Birth of Biopolitics, it becomes clear that Foucault ultimately came to regard both concepts as equally necessary. One can surmise that he came to consider that the concept of governmentality names his larger project of problematizing the discourse on the way power was conceptualized in political philosophy from the eighteenth century onwards and reserved the concept of biopolitics for the set of administrative technologies whose purpose was to facilitate this transformation. His usage is, however, inconsistent, so this amounts to a kind of secondary revision on the part of his commentators. We may say, then, that both discipline and biopolitics can be subsumed under the general rubric of governmentality, provided we do not lose sight of the key differences between these quite distinct two varieties of power technologies.
- 5.
Foucault (2003a: 239–240).
- 6.
Foucault (2003a: 242 emphasis added).
- 7.
Esposito (2008: 3).
- 8.
Foucault (2003a: 259).
- 9.
Foucault (2008: 22).
- 10.
It is worth noting here that until all the Collège de France lectures were published more than three decades after they were presented, it was basically on the strength of a single essay culled from those lectures, specifically the lecture given on February 1, 1978, initially titled “On Governmentality”, that the concept entered general circulation in cultural theory and rapidly became highly influential, particularly in the social sciences (cultural geography, education, and sociology). As such, although there has been a great deal written about governmentality over the past 40 years, it is really only now that we have a full picture of what it is Foucault was trying to say. The picture we have now is obviously richer than what was previously available and importantly it makes apparent nuances to Foucault’s thinking that were hitherto known only to the fortunate few who attended the original lectures.
- 11.
Foucault (2007: 108–109).
- 12.
Foucault (2008: 33).
- 13.
Foucault (2007: 350).
- 14.
Foucault (2003a: 225).
- 15.
Foucault (2000: 207).
- 16.
Foucault (1985: 154).
- 17.
Foucault (2000: 215).
- 18.
Foucault (2003a: 249).
- 19.
Foucault (2008: 67).
- 20.
- 21.
Foucault (2007: 13).
- 22.
Foucault (2003a: 249).
- 23.
Foucault (2007: 69).
- 24.
See Chap. 2.
- 25.
Foucault (2007: 71).
- 26.
- 27.
Foucault (2003a: 243).
- 28.
- 29.
Foucault (1977: 198).
- 30.
I have drawn here on Reece Jones’ Violent Borders (2016), which vividly documents the often terrible plight of refugees in the twenty-first century.
- 31.
Foucault (1977: 199).
- 32.
Foucault (2007: 12).
- 33.
Foucault (2007: 56–57).
- 34.
See Wacquant (2009).
- 35.
Foucault (1977: 201).
- 36.
Foucault (1977: 200).
- 37.
Foucault (1977: 201).
- 38.
Foucault (1977: 205).
- 39.
Foucault (1977: 215).
- 40.
Foucault (1977: 207).
- 41.
Foucault (2008: 256).
- 42.
Levi (1979: 35).
- 43.
Foucault (1977: 206).
- 44.
Foucault (1977: 218).
- 45.
Harvey (2010: 149).
- 46.
As Zuboff reminds us, the actual design of the panopticon, which we owe to Jeremy Bentham’s brother Samuel, was inspired by Russian Orthodox churches. “Typically, these structures were built around a central dome from which a portrait of an all-powerful ‘Christ Pantokrator’ stared down at the congregation and, by implication, all humanity. There was to be no exit from this line of sight.” Zuboff (2019: 470–471).
- 47.
Foucault (2003a: 242).
- 48.
Foucault (2003a: 242).
- 49.
Foucault (2003a: 181).
- 50.
Foucault (2003a: 245).
- 51.
Foucault (2003a: 243–244).
- 52.
Foucault (2003a: 259).
- 53.
Foucault (2007: 101).
- 54.
Foucault (2003a: 246).
- 55.
Foucault (2003a: 246).
- 56.
Foucault (2003a: 246).
- 57.
Foucault (2003a: 246–247).
- 58.
Davis (2005).
- 59.
Foucault (2003a: 244).
- 60.
Neoliberalism’s strategy for talking us into thinking that these things are negatives takes precisely this path: vaccinations, pensions, environmental regulations, bank regulations, and so on are all presented as infringements of individual freedom that we would be better off without.
- 61.
Foucault (2003a: 240).
- 62.
Foucault (2003a: 240).
- 63.
Foucault (1978: 135–136).
- 64.
Foucault (2003a: 254).
- 65.
Foucault (2003a: 254–255).
- 66.
Foucault (2003a: 255).
- 67.
Foucault (2003a: 256).
- 68.
Foucault (2003a: 256).
- 69.
Foucault (2003a: 257).
- 70.
Foucault (2003a: 258).
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Buchanan, I. (2022). Biopolitics, Discipline and Governmentality. In: Das, S.S., Pratihar, A.R. (eds) Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88809-1_1
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