Locatelli & Nadesan - Leicester gossip

Locatelli & Nadesan - Leicester gossip

Locatelli & Nadesan - Leicester gossip

Although neoliberal strategies of government appropriate and utilize older forms of power—sovereign power, pastoral power, and disciplinary power—biopower offers the most effective and appealing set of strategies for governing social life under neoliberalism because it finds its telos and legitimacy in its articulated capacity to maximize the energies and capabilities of all: individuls, families, market organizations, and the state. As a kind of power that concerns itself with representing, explaining, and regulating the life forces of populations, biopolitical forces adapted to neoliberal ends seek to minimize societal risk and maximize individual well-being through scientific engineering and individual technologies of the self. Biopower is seductive because its logics, technologies, and experts offer, or at least purport to offer, tools for societal self-government. Biopower’s mantra of the rational administration of life promises means for realizing the elusive cybernetic fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals. Under neoliberal governmentalities, sovereignty is disseminated amongst society’s members as the welfare state sheds responsibility for its pastorate by shifting risk and empowerment to its subjects. Thus, the classical liberal fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals is invoked as a rationale for the dissemination of risk and responsibility achieved by and though biopower’s operations. In essence, the emergence of biopower as a major force in shaping, eliciting, and controlling populations is inextricably linked with historically contingent developments in liberal, and now neoliberal, forms of government.

Foucault cautioned against viewing sovereignty, disciplinary, and government as constituting a series of substitutions across time. Rather, he argued, they should be understood as eventually constituting a triangle of interconnected systems of government, or governmentality, aiming at security by targeting the population (Foucault, 1979b, p. 19). Thus, the emergence of new expressions of power does not imply erasure of older ones.

Biopower: Impelled by the exigencies of governing modern life, biopower refers to knowledge and strategies of power that aim at governing a population’s life forces (Foucault, 1990). Emerging in the eighteenth century, biopower is expressed as biopolitics and anatomopolitics (Foucault, 1980): Biopolitics: Implicated in the development of indices of knowledge about populations by expert authorities acting within both public (i.e., state) and private institutions (e.g., hospitals). Population is conceived as a political and scientific problem space. Biopolitics in the modern era operate primarily through security mechanisms rather than disciplinary ones. Anatomo-Politics: Technologies of power that act upon individuals in order to discipline and/or normalize their comportment toward the ends of state security and capital accumulation. Anatomo-politics appropriates disciplinary power for the purposes of managing the corporeality of populations, historically, within specific territories. According to Foucault (2003b, p. 81), the ‘disciplines of the body and the regulation of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power was deployed’ seeking to ‘invest life through and through.’

Foucault contended that the emergence of the early modern liberal state depended upon the institution of more diffuse, but ultimately more pervasive, forms of government that slowly replaced the authoritarian and repressive power of the feudal sovereign. In the premodern era—prior to the development of the modern state—power was largely localized in the corporeal body of the sovereign monarch, who exercised his or her will absolutely on those within his or her scope of execution, or territory, in the form of the power of life and death (Foucault, 2003b). Foucault observed: ‘it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life’ (2003b, p. 240). However, sovereign power was subtly transformed across time with the development of the modern state through three important developments. First, state and sectional interests motivated by security and wealth extended ‘governable spaces,’ beginning in the sixteenth century but particularly in the late eighteenth century. Second, the development of new ways of thinking about government—principally in relation to juridical administration, the state’s appropriation of pastoral power over the administration of population, and curtailment of sovereignty over political economy—altered the nature and operations of societal control and power leading ultimately to more diffuse, but simultaneously permeating, technologies of government. Third, these changes realigned sovereignty around the power and the right ‘to make live and let die’ (2003b, p. 241) as sovereignty became entwined with biopower.

Under this new regime of laissez-faire government, statistics, which under mercantilism worked for the monarchial administration, became a ‘major technical factor’ for representing and understanding government’s object—population (Foucault, 1979b, p. 16). Accordingly, the newly emerging liberal state accepted some restraints against direct action over the economy and instead sought to provide the conditions of possibility for market expansion and stability. The state also acquired new authority as it assumed further responsibility for securing societal processes over labor and social welfare, over the population, and the administration of life. As Foucault argued, ‘population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government, that is the welfare of the population since this end consists not in the act of governing as such but in the improvement of the condition of the population, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.’ (Foucault, 1979b, p. 17). By assuming responsibility over the economy’s supplement—civil society/population—the state (through its policies and institutions) enabled the seeming independence of economic transactions while also promising prosperity for the society as a whole. In the process of securitizing both the economy (indirectly) and civil society (directly), the state effectively extended its operations over everyday life, opening up new spaces for state surveillance and government but ultimately affecting (ideological and material) constraints on its formal purview of authority.