Biopolitics and beyond:
Vibrant matter and the political economy of life
The Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine, CEU
Budapest, May 24, 2013
Thomas Lemke
Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Department of Social Sciences
1
Introduction
Michel Foucault proposes a relational and historical notion of
biopolitics against the naturalist tradition (life as the basis of
politics) and the politicist reading (life as the object of politics).
Two main lines of reception of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. The
first focuses on the meaning of politics, the second on the matter
of life.
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Introduction
1. Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
2. Challenge II: From biopower to thing-power
3. Biopolitics and liberal government
4. The government of things
5. Conclusion
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Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
Policy papers on the “bioeconomy”:
• European Commission, New Perspectives on the knowledgebased bio-economy. Conference Report, Brüssel 2005.
• OECD, The Bioeconomy To 2030: Designing A Policy Agenda,
Paris 2006.
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Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
Cooper, Melina, Life as Surplus. Biotechnology and Capitalism in
the Neoliberal Era. Seattle/London 2008.
• Peters, Michael A., Bio-informational capitalism, Thesis Eleven,
Vol. 110, 2012, pp. 98-111.
• Sunder Rajan, Kaushik, Biocapital. The Constitution of
Postgenomic Life, Durham/London 2006.
• Thacker, Eugene, The global genome. Biotechnology, politics, and
culture. Cambridge, MA 2005.
• Waldby, Catherine/Cooper, Melinda, The biopolitics of
reproduction. Post-fordist biotechnology and women’s clinical
labour, Australian Feminist Studies Vol. 23, 2008, pp. 57-73.
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Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
Example:
Sunder Rajan (2006): Biocapital. The Constitution of
Postgenomic Life.
[O]n the one hand, what forms of alienation, exploitation, and
divestiture are necessary for a “culture of biotechnology
innovation” to take root? On the other hand, how are individual and
collective subjectivities and citizenships both shaped and
conscripted by these technologies that concern “life itself”? (Ibid.,
78)
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Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
Stefan Helmreich: Species of biocapital, Science as Culture, Vol. 14,
2008, pp. 463-478:
Two cluster of theories:
(a) a Marxist-feminist cluster which is concerned with production and
reproduction and focuses on the analysis of biological matter;
(b) a Weberian-Marxist cluster paying closer attention to questions of
meaning and concerned with how ‘‘relations of production are
described alongside accountings of ethical subjectivity’’ (Helmreich
2008, 471).
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Challenge I: From biopolitics to biocapital
Birch, Kean/Tyfield, David: Theorizing the bioeconomy: biovalue,
biocapital or... What? Science, Technology and Human Values, (in
print)
Critical points in the literature on biocapital:
(1) There is an issue with how to link “vitality” and value, especially in
the concept of biovalue.
(2) the distinction between economic value and ethical values tends
to collapse in many works on biocapital or the bioeconomy.
(3) Marxist concepts like surplus, capital, value are only selectively
adopted without adequately addressing their original formulations
in Marxism
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Challenge II: From biopower to thing-power
• Alaimo, Stacy/Hekman, Susan (eds.) (2008): Material Feminisms.
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press
• Barad, Karen (2007): Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham
and London: Duke University Press.
• Bennett, Jane (2010): Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
Durham and London: Duke University Press
• Braun, Bruce/Whatmore, Sarah (eds.) (2010): Political Matter:
Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
• Coole, Diane/Frost, Samantha (eds.) (2010): New Materialism:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke
University Press.
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Challenge II: From biopower to thing-power
Example:
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things 2010
By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities,
storms, metals - not only to impede or block the will and designs of
humans but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories,
propensities, or tendencies of their own.” (2010: viii)
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Biopolitics and liberal government
The theme was to have been “biopolitics”, by which I meant the
attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the
problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena
characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health,
hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race …. (Foucault 2008, 317)
• Foucault understands liberalism as a specific art of leading human
beings, which is oriented toward the population as a new political
figure, and disposing over the political economy as a technique of
intervention.
• The eighteenth century emergence of political economy, and of the
population cannot be separated from the beginnings of modern
biology
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Biopolitics and liberal government
Foucault defines “liberalism as the general framework of
biopolitics” (Foucault 2008: 22),
“Vital politics” means a form of politics “that considers all factors
upon which happiness, well-being, and satisfaction in reality
depend” (Rüstow 1955: 70).
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The government of things
Guillaume de la Perrière: Le Miroire politique, œuvre non moins utile
que necessaire à tout monarches, roys, princes, seigneurs,
magistrats, et autres surintendants et gouverneurs de Republicques
(Lyon 1555).
Government as “the right dispositions of things arranged so as to
lead to a suitable end” (Foucault 2007: 96).
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The government of things
“The things government must be concerned about, La Perrière
says, are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex
involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of
subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities,
climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. ‘Things’ are men in their
relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and
thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationships with things like
accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death.” (Foucault
2007: 96)
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The government of things
(1) The art of government does not conceive of interactions between
two stable and fixed entities – “humans” and “things”.
(2) “To govern means to govern things” (Foucault 2007: 97). Since
there is no pre-given and fixed political borderline between
humans and things, it is possible to state that „humans“ are
governed as „things“.
“The government of things replaces the older government of the
souls and the bodies. The question is no longer, as it was with the
Christian authors, about the legitimate use of power; nor is it the
one raised by Machiavelli of the exclusive appropriation of power.
The question is now about the intensive use of the totality of
forces available. So, we note a passage from the right of power to
a physics of power (Passage du droit de la force à la physique
des forces).”(Senellart 1995: 42-43; emphasis in original;
translation TL)
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The government of things
(3) Government enacts a mode of power very different from
sovereignty: “it is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the
disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather than
laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arranging
things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain
number of means” (Foucault 2007: 99).
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Conclusion
The conceptual shift to a “government of things” not only makes it
possible to extend the territory of government, it also initiates a
reflexive perspective that takes into account the diverse ways in
which the boundaries between the human and the non-human
world are negotiated, enacted and stabilized.
Furthermore, this theoretical stance makes it possible to analyze
the sharp distinction between the natural on the one hand and the
social on the other, matter and meaning as a distinctive instrument
and effect of governmental rationalities and technologies.
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