The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon
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POLITICS
In a late interview, Foucault made the following rather astonishing remark: “in fact what interests me is much more morals than politics or, in any case, politics as an ethics” (EFR, 375). This remark is astonishing not only because the term “politics” runs like a red thread through much of Foucault’s work from the early 1970s onward – from his discussions of the politics of health in the eighteenth century to his accounts of the politics of truth and the politics of our selves, not to mention his analyses of biopolitics and political rationality – but also because his work has proved so inspirational for so much contemporary thinking about politics in the disciplines of philosophy and political theory. So what could Foucault have meant by saying that he is more interested in morals than in politics? He goes on to explain that his work is not “determined by a pre-established political outlook” and that it does not have as its aim “the realization of some deinite political project” (ibid.). Indeed, as Foucault noted in another late interview, his readers have tried in vain to discern his politics; he has been read variously as a Marxist, an anarchist, a neoconservative, and a new liberal. As he puts it, “I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously....
None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean” (EEW1, 113). The inability to place Foucault’s work on a spectrum of political ideologies is largely a function of his approach to political questions, which is through the lens of problematization: “I have never tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted” (EEW1, 115). (In this light, Foucault’s early defense of his archaeological method as connected to genuinely progressive politics is quite interesting. See “Politics and the Study of Discourse,” EFE, 53–72.)
But how, then, does Foucault understand politics? What, if anything, ties together his various uses of the term “politics”? Perhaps the best way to approach
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this question is to distinguish two different uses of the term “politics” in Foucault’s work, a narrower and a wider use. The narrower use, operative in the preceding discussion and in much of Foucault’s late work, deines “politics” as a speciic domain or ield of human activity, distinct from economics, morality/ethics, and religion, concerned with relations of governance. The wider use, by contrast, deines politics simply as the struggle for power, where relations of power are understood to be coextensive with the social body. The transition in Foucault’s work in the late 1970s from the genealogy of disciplinary power and biopower to the analysis of governmentality could be understood as a transition from the wider to the narrower conception of politics, as Foucault moved away from the Nietzsche-inspired model of power as war that he formulated in the mid-1970s and toward an analysis of the government of self and others (see Lemke 1997). However, the wide conception never completely disappears from Foucault’s work.
Moreover, Foucault never explicitly distinguishes these two uses of the term “politics” in his writings, and the two uses are often intricately intertwined, such that it is not always possible to disentangle them completely. But an implicit acknowledgment of such a distinction can be found in his 1973 lectures, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” where he distinguishes his emerging conception of power as capillary and microscopic – which he calls here “infrapower” – from what is “traditionally called ‘political power’” (EEW3, 86). The latter refers to the “state apparatus, or to the class in power,” whereas the former refers to “the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest level” (EEW3, 85–86); that is, to what Foucault will later call the “micro-physics of power” (EDP, 26).
Foucault’s wide conception of politics is exempliied in his discussion of “the politics of truth” in “Truth and Juridical Forms.” There, Foucault draws on his reading of Nietzsche to trace the relationship between forms of knowledge and power relations conceived as relations of struggle. “One can understand what knowledge consists of,” he writes, “only by examining these relations of struggle and power, the manner in which things and men hate one another, ight one another, and try to dominate one another, to exercise power relations over one another” (EEW3, 12). The result of such an examination would be a “political history of knowledge” or a historical analysis of “the politics of truth” (EEW3, 13). Nietzsche opened the door for such an analysis by demolishing the myth of knowledge puriied of power relations, and showing that all knowledge production is woven together with struggles for power (EEW3, 32; see also EPK, 131–133).
Foucault articulates the idea of politics as a struggle for power in its strongest form in his 1975–1976 lecture course “Society Must Be Defended,” when he discusses whether it makes sense to invert Clausewitz’s dictum and claim that “politics is the continuation of war by other means” (ECF-SMD, 15). This would mean that “the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to re-inscribe that relationship of force, and to re-inscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities,
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language, and even the bodies of individuals” (ECF-SMD, 15–16). The lectures pose the question of whether the model of politics as war is the best way to analyze political power (see ECF-SMD, 23), and Foucault’s answer to this question seems to have evolved throughout the mid-1970s. Just prior to the start of 1975–1976 lectures, in a short interview published in 1975, Foucault seems to endorse the idea that politics is the continuation of war by other means (FDE2, 704; cited in Davidson 2003, xiii), but in 1977 he was more sanguine or at least more noncommittal on this point (see
EPK, 164). Perhaps his most considered answer to this question is given in the crucial chapter on Method in volume 1 of the History of Sexuality:
Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded – in part but never totally – either in the form of “war,” or in the form of “politics”; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations. (EHS1, 93)
In other words, politics and war are distinct but nonetheless related strategies for integrating and coordinating the multiplicity of force relations in a particular society. If politics is not in itself war, it and war at least share some central deining characteristics: force and struggle.
In the next two sets of lecture courses, “Security, Territory, Population” (1977– 1978) and “The Birth of Biopolitics” (1978–1979), the wide model of politics as a warlike struggle for power recedes and the narrower conception of politics as a distinctive domain linked to governmentality and the problematic of the state gains prominence. And yet, characteristically, Foucault gives this account of politics his own distinctive twist. Rather than starting from a theory of the state, Foucault aims to decenter the state from our understanding of politics and to focus instead on the broader techniques of governmentality and political rationality that undergird and give rise to modern state forms. This is connected to his attempt to displace the problematic of sovereignty from our understandings of politics, for “to pose the problem in terms of the State means to continue posing it in terms of the sovereign and sovereignty, that is to say in terms of law” (EPK, 122). Hence, cutting off the
head of the kind means not only constructing a genealogy of disciplinary power, as Foucault did in Discipline and Punish and related texts, but also constructing a gene-
alogy of the modern state. Such a genealogy would show “how the emergence of the state as a fundamental political issue can in fact be situated within a more general history of governmentality, or, if you like, in the ield of practices of power” (ECFSTP, 247).
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In connection with this general aim, in the 1977–1978 lectures, Foucault traces the roots of the mode of governmentality that emerges in the modern state in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries back to its roots in Christian pastoral power (see ECF-STP, lecture 7). He also charts the emergence in the seventeenth century of a conception of the political domain as distinct from the economic, moral, or religious domains, governed by its own distinctive form of rationality, raison d’État (see ECF-STP, lectures 10 and 11). Similarly, in the 1978–1979 course, Foucault analyzes the emergence of a liberal mode of governmentality that receives extreme expression in the economic neoliberalism in mid-twentieth-century German and
American economic thinking. This mode is distinct from previous modes of governmentality, which had been centered on notions of irst sovereignty and later raison d’État. These modes can be contrasted by considering the types of questions posed
by each art of government:
At one time these amounted to the question: Am I governing in proper conformity to moral, natural, or divine laws? Then, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with raison d’État, it was: Am I governing with suficient intensity, depth, and attention to detail so as to bring the state to the point ixed by what it should be, to bring it to its maximum strength? And now the problem will be: Am I governing at the border between the too much and too little, between the maximum and minimum ixed for me by the nature of things – I mean, by the necessities intrinsic to the operations of government? (ECF-BBIO, 19)
For the liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality, the limits of governmental rationality will be set by political economy. At the conclusion of his lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality, Foucault asks: “What is politics, in the end, if not both the interplay of these different arts of government with their different reference points and the debate to which these different arts of government give rise? It seems to me that it is here that politics is born” (ECF-BBIO, 313). Here, politics is tied to the question of governance but is not equated with the state in any straightforward manner; rather, it is connected to processes of what Foucault calls “statiication” (ECF-BBIO, 77).
To be sure, what I am calling the narrower and wider conceptions of politics in Foucault’s work intersect and overlap in important ways. These two conceptions of politics arguably intersect in Foucault’s discussions of governmentality. Here, Foucault doesn’t exactly abandon his earlier notion of politics as a struggle for power – even if he moves away from the strong formulation of politics as war that he lirted with in the mid-1970s – but he does seek to connect that notion with politics in the sense of the emergence of speciic governance structures and state forms. The result is a genealogical analysis – an analysis that is deined methodologically by its
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commitment to the irreducibly political nature of truth – of the role that micropowers play in the emergence of the modern state and the development of its distinctive art of government and political rationality.
These two conceptions of politics are also connected through the idea of politicization. In an interview conducted in 1977, Foucault was asked to clarify his understanding of the term “political.” “The domain of the political,” he responded, is constituted by “the set of relations of force in a given society,” and “politics is a more-or-less global strategy for co-ordinating and directing those relations” (EPK, 189). In this context, “the problem is not so much that of deining a political ‘position’ (which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities) but to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization” (EPK, 190). Here, politicization means thematizing a set of previously unthematized power relations – which are already political in the wide sense of the term – and inventing new schemas for analysis and criticism that show the relevance of these power relations for our understanding of politics in the narrower sense. (See also, in this vein, a 1973 interview in which Foucault claimed that one of the distinctive characteristics of the political movements of that time was the politicization of practices, institutions, and domains of life previously thought of as nonpolitical [FDE2, 428].)
What, then, of Foucault’s claim, mentioned at the beginning of this entry, that insofar as he is interested in politics at all, his interest is in politics as an ethics? Here the notion of governmentality is once again central. For Foucault, ethics concerns one’s relation to self. When Foucault says that he’s interested in politics as an ethics, I take this to mean that he is interested in the interaction between technologies of domination and technologies of the self (on this point, see EEW1, 177). Governmentality, he tells us, is the point of intersection of these two types of technologies, the point where the government of the self connects with the government of and by others. There are interesting examples of the idea of politics as an ethics in some of Foucault’s late interviews about gay politics. For example, when asked questions about gay political struggles for increased civil rights, Foucault typically responded by talking about the need for gay men to create new “cultural forms” and “ways of life” (EEW1, 157–158). Gay culture, he says, has the chance to invent “ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms” (EEW1, 159–160; see also EEW1, 137 and 163–164). Such cultural transformations are instances of political engagement inasmuch as they challenge and subvert existing structures of power relations, but their challenge takes the form of a reinvention of ethical forms of relation to self and others: politics as an ethics.
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See Also
Ethics
Governmentality
Homosexuality
Institution
Power
Sovereignty
State
War
Jürgen Habermas
Carl von Clausewitz
Suggested Reading
Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy and Gender in Contemporary Critical
Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds. 1996. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Biebricher, Thomas. 2005. Selbstkritik der Moderne: Foucault und Habermas im Vergleich.
Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Huffer, Lynne. 2010. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Kelly, Mark G. E. 2009. The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge. Lemke, Thomas. 1997. Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft – Foucaults Analyse der modernen
Gouvernementalität. Berlin: Argument.
McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Moss, Jeremy, ed. 1998. The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy. London: Sage.
Saar, Martin. 2007. Genealogie als Kritik: Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
Sawicki, Jana. 1991. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge. Simons, Jon. 1995. Foucault and the Political. New York: Routledge.
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POPULATION
Foucault makes important claims about population both in Part Five of volume one of The History of Sexuality, which appeared in late 1976, and in
“Society Must Be Defended,” the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France that same year. However, his most extended and detailed discussion of population occurs in his 1978 lecture series at the Collège de France, “Security, Territory, Population.” Population is a central issue throughout the series, but it takes center stage in Chapters 2 and 3, the lectures of January 18 and 25, respectively, where Foucault offers a genealogical treatment of the concept. These two lectures are the key to understanding Foucault’s concept of population and the work it does in his critique of liberalism.
Although Foucault acknowledges that political writers before the eighteenth century often raised concerns about population, he argues that the word carried a different meaning then than it would acquire later on. Before the eighteenth century, “population” meant simply the opposite of “depopulation.” A state’s strength and wealth were measured in part by the number of its inhabitants. Therefore, when wars, famine, or epidemics killed many people or precipitated mass emigration, sovereigns and their advisers worried that their states would weaken. Depopulation had to be offset by population; that is, by a resurgence in the number of inhabitants of a state’s territory (ECF-STP, 67).
By the seventeenth century, some political thinkers – in particular, the mercantilists – believed that the number of inhabitants was more than just one element of a state’s strength (as their predecessors had thought). In their view, population was fundamental, a necessary condition for all other aspects of that strength. If the number of inhabitants decreased, military might and productivity in agriculture and manufacturing would inevitably suffer (ECF-STP, 68). Mercantilists also believed that a large number of inhabitants created more competition for jobs and thus ensured low wages, which kept prices low and thus increased exports, adding even
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more to the state’s wealth. In the second half of the seventeenth century, English (and then Dutch) mathematicians began compiling mortality tables. (For an overview of this development, see Kreager 1993.) Eventually this statistical data was used to inform oficial strategies to encourage “population,” understood as repopulation or population growth. But this notion of population was still far from the concept that prevailed in the nineteenth century or prevails in demographic discourses today.
We begin to see faint outlines of something like the modern concept of population in seventeenth-century treatises on raison d’État, particularly in discussions of the need to control public opinion and squelch sedition. In lecture 11 of “Security, Territory, Population,” Foucault states:
When one speaks of obedience, and the fundamental element of obedience in government is the people who may engage in sedition, you can see that the notion of “population” is virtually present. When one speaks of the public on whose opinion one must act in such a way as to modify its behavior, one is already very close to the population. (ECF-STP, 277)
But the focus is still on strengthening and safeguarding the wealth of the state, not on managing populations per se. Similarly, of the work of Francis Bacon on “poverty and discontent,” Foucault writes, “we are very close to population, but Bacon never envisages the population as constituted by economic subjects who are capable of autonomous behavior. One will speak of wealth, the circulation of wealth, and the balance of trade, but one will not speak of population as an economic subject” (ECF-STP, 277–278).
Population as we know it irst emerges in the analyses of the physiocrats, Foucault asserts, where a clear distinction is made between individual bodies or subjects and something else, something that is not simply a collection of individuals but rather an autonomous entity with its own behaviors and course of life. The mercantilists had been concerned about food scarcity in great part because it resulted in political unrest and sometimes in revolt. In times of food shortages, individuals were hungry and angry; hungry and angry in aggregate, they might turn violent and destructive. Scarcity of grain was therefore a massive catastrophe, a scourge to be avoided if at all possible. But the physiocrats saw things differently. Whereas the mercantilists focused on keeping prices low so that food would be affordable for everyone, the physiocrats advocated policies that might make prices high, both in times of poor harvests and even in times of abundance. The physiocrats believed higher prices would ensure continued production and the possibility of imports, which would reduce or eliminate the scourge of scarcity, if not for all individuals then at least for the general population. True, after poor harvests, if prices rose signiicantly, some individuals might be unable to afford suficient grain and might suffer and starve. But the problem of scarcity and its negative effects would still have
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been solved, for enough grain in proportion to the population would be in circulation at all times. According to Foucault, “There will no longer be any scarcity as a scourge, there will no longer be this phenomenon of scarcity, of massive, individual and collective hunger that advances absolutely in step and without discontinuity, as it were, in individuals and in the population in general. Now, there will be no more food shortage at the level of the population” (ECF-STP, 41). It is the population that matters in the physiocrats’ analysis, not the individual who may or may not starve to death. Foucault continues: “The individual is no longer pertinent.... The population is pertinent as the objective and individuals, the series of individuals, are no longer pertinent as the objective, but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population” (ECF-STP, 42).
And what is population? What is this new level of analysis? “The population as a political subject, as a new collective subject absolutely foreign to the juridical and political thought of earlier centuries is appearing here in its complexity” (ECF-STP, 42). It does not present itself “as a collection of subjects of right, as a collective of subject wills who must obey the sovereign’s will through the intermediary regulation, laws, edicts, and so on. It will be considered as a set of processes to be managed at the level and on the basis of what is natural in those processes” (ECF-STP, 70). Just as living beings became manifestations of measurable physiological processes in the late eighteenth century, population became a temporally unfolding epistemic object whose rhythms and luctuations were amenable to statistical analysis. Like organisms, populations were seen to have their own kind of natural life.
This “naturalness,” Foucault says, appears in three ways. First, any given population is dependent for its existence and for the speciicity of its character on a set of variables including climate, physical environment, intensity of commerce, laws, customs, religious values, means of subsistence, and so forth (ECF-STP, 70–71). Obviously, then, although this new entity must be directed, it cannot be acted on as a free will; it cannot simply be commanded and expected to obey. Foucault explains, “The population appears therefore as a kind of thick natural phenomenon in relation to the sovereign’s legalistic voluntarism” (ECF-STP, 71). Second, despite the fact that any population is made up of individuals who are all very different from one another, eighteenth-century theorists held that “there is at least one invariant that means that the population taken as a whole has one and only one mainspring of action. This is desire” (ECF-STP, 72). If the sovereign gives those desires free play, eventually they will spontaneously produce something like a public or general interest that cannot be attributed to individual people but must instead be attributed to the population itself. This is the population’s own natural inclination, disposition, or tendency. Finally, year after year, populations manifest fairly consistent birth rates, mortality rates, and even suicide rates. In other words, they evince a series of natural regularities that cannot be
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attributed to the wills of the individuals who compose them. In essence, they have a life of their own apart from or at least beyond the lives of the individuals they comprise. Foucault states:
The population is not, then, a collection of juridical subjects in an individual or collective relationship with a sovereign will. It is a set of elements in which we can note constants and regularities even in accidents, in which we can identify the universal of desire regularly producing the beneit of all, and with regard to which we can identify a number of modiiable variables on which it depends. (ECF-STP, 74)
Taking population thus conceived as the target of administrative and managerial efforts and allowing it to displace the individual subject as the object of governmental activity marks, according to Foucault, “the entry of a ‘nature’ into the ield of techniques of power” (ECF-STP, 75). He sees this as a momentous event across a range of disciplines and institutions. While Quesnay was promoting the idea that real economic government was the government of populations (ECF-STP, 77), Darwin was discovering that population was the key to understanding the relationship between organism and environment and the process of evolutionary change, and the discipline of general grammar was giving way to the discipline of philology as relationships between populations and language were identiied and delineated. Population was “the operator that upset all these systems of knowledge [the analysis of wealth, natural history, and general grammar], and directed knowledge to the sciences of life, of labor and production, and of language” (ECF-STP, 78). But population itself is in some important respects a product of the changes it operated to effect: “A constant interplay between techniques of power and their object gradually carves out in reality, as a ield of reality, population and its speciic phenomena” (ECF-STP, 79).
Most important for Foucault’s analysis in the lecture series of 1978, population both participates in and enables the eighteenth-century shift away from sovereign deduction as the primary technology of power and toward technologies of security. Seventeenth-century thinkers were more or less trapped within traditional discourses of sovereignty. Either they conceived of the exercise of power exclusively as juridical or, taking the well-governed household as the model of political relationships, they slipped into paternalism, which led them back again to traditional sovereign power. Both paths of thinking precluded the possibility of anything like political economy. The problem, as Foucault sees it, was that their notion of economic administration was caught up in a particular conception of the family as the object of economic governance. In other words, “the art of government could only be conceived on the basis of the model of the family, in terms of economy