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Lemke (2014) Foucault and The Government of Things
Lemke (2014) Foucault and The Government of Things
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Thomas Lemke
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Abstract
The article explores the perspectives of Foucault’s notion of government by linking it
to the debate on the ‘new materialism’. Discussing Karen Barad’s critical reading of
Foucault’s work on the body and power, it points to the idea of a ‘government of
things’, which Foucault only briefly outlines in his lectures on governmentality. By
stressing the ‘intrication of men and things’ (Foucault), this theoretical project makes
it possible to arrive at a relational account of agency and ontology, going beyond the
anthropocentric limitations of Foucault’s work. This perspective also suggests an
altered understanding of biopolitics. While Foucault’s earlier concept of biopolitics
was limited to physical and biological existence, the idea of a ‘government of things’
takes into account the interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, the
natural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Finally, the conceptual proposal
of a ‘government of things’ helps to clarify theoretical ambiguities and unresolved
tensions in new materialist scholarship and allows for a more materialist account of
politics.
Keywords
Karen Barad, biopolitics, Michel Foucault, governmentality, new materialism
Corresponding author:
Thomas Lemke, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.
Email: lemke@em.uni-frankfurt.de
http://www.theoryculturesociety.org
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[Ein Schiff regieren. Den Wagen, die Deichsel, die Pferde vor dem Wagen
regieren] (p. 363).
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Conclusion
In this article I have presented Karen Barad’s critical appraisal of
Foucault’s work. While I share her view that in most of his work
Foucault remained attached to the idea that human beings alone are
endowed with the capacity for action, while objects are passive, I have
argued that a different reading is also possible. The perspective of a
‘government of things’ not only offers some important theoretical advan-
tages over Foucault’s earlier concept of biopower, it also helps to clarify
conceptual ambiguities of contemporary materialist accounts.
Furthermore, this theoretical project might be instrumental in going
beyond the anthropocentric limitations of studies of governmentality.
The conceptual proposal of a ‘government of things’ is not restricted
to humans and relations between humans. It refers to a more compre-
hensive reality that includes the material environments and the specific
constellations and technical networks between humans and non-humans.
Although Foucault never systematically addressed the question of how
things affect humans, the conceptual shift to a ‘government of things’ not
only makes it possible to extend the territory of government and multi-
plies the elements and the relations it consists of, it also initiates a reflex-
ive perspective that takes into account the diverse ways in which the
boundaries between the human and the non-human world are nego-
tiated, 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 tech-
nologies or as a specific form of ‘ontological politics’ (Mol, 1999).29
However, the idea of a ‘government of things’ remains an underdevel-
oped theme in Foucault’s work. His writings did not so much systemat-
ically pursue as offer promising suggestions for this theoretical
perspective. Developing this project by making it useful for contempor-
ary intellectual debates and political struggles is the challenge facing
current work on the matter of government.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank five anonymous reviewers for this journal and my colleagues at the
Goethe University – Andreas Folkers, Susanne Bauer, Martin Saar and Torsten
Heinemann – for helpful comments on and instructive criticism of an earlier version of
this paper. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to Katharina Hoppe, who helped
me with the work on the manuscript, and Gerard Holden, who copy-edited the text.
Notes
1. In their edited volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics,
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost delineate three distinctive themes or
topics in new materialist scholarship: (1) an ‘ontological reorientation’ that
Lemke 17
possible explanations impossibly high? But on the other hand, if one takes a
form of knowledge (savoir) like psychiatry, won’t the question be much
easier to resolve, since the epistemological profile of psychiatry is a low
one and psychiatric practice is linked with a whole range of institutions,
economic requirements and political issues of social regulation?’
(Foucault, 1980b: 109).
10. Foucault is referring to the book 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).
11. It is important to bear in mind the fact that in specific historical epochs and
cultural contexts non-humans are considered to be legal and moral entities.
Jane Bennett mentions the concept of the ‘deodand’ that figured in English
law from the 13th century until the mid-19th century and acknowledged the
agency of non-human entities: ‘In cases of accidental death or injury to a
human, the nonhuman actant, for example, the carving knife that fell into
human flesh or the carriage that trampled the leg of a pedestrian – became
deodand (literally, ‘that which must be given to God’). In recognition of its
peculiar efficacy [. . .], the deodand [. . .] was surrendered to the crown to be
used (or sold) to compensate for the harm done’ (Bennett, 2010: 9; emphasis
in original; see also Lindemann, 2001; Teubner, 2006).
12. Georges Canguilhem devotes a chapter of his book La Connaissance de la vie
to the history of the concept of the ‘milieu’, demonstrating that it was
imported into biology from mechanics in the second half of the 18th century
(1998: 129–54; see also Foucault, 2007: 27). For a detailed account of how
the idea of a ‘social environment’ informed urban planning, architectural
design, health policies and welfare administration in France in the 19th and
20th century, see Rabinow (1989).
13. All translations from French and German are my own. According to
Senellart, Foucault in his lecture on governmentality captures very well
this transformation from sovereignty to government. However, he cautions
that de la Perrière’s book is not a particularly well chosen example to illus-
trate it, since it repeats the traditional idea of a good order of things already
formulated by Augustine in the Christian context (Senellart, 1995: 43, fn 2).
In a similar vein, Danica Dupont and Frank Pearce criticize Foucault’s
interpretation of de la Perrière’s work. Rather than pointing to modern
politics, they argue, de la Perrière’s understanding of government is ‘more
derived from a Renaissance Christian humanist context of cosmic order’
(2001: 135; 135–8). See also Thomas Aquinas’ concept of a ‘government
of things’ as the ruling of the universe by divine reason (Goerner, 1979:
111–12).
14. In this light, Joseph Görres declared in 1800 that: ‘If you want to govern
humankind, you should govern it as it governs nature: by its own self’
[Willst du die Menschheit regieren, so regiere sie, wie sie die Natur regiert,
durch sich selbst] (quoted by Sellin, 1984: 372). As Bruce Braun and Sarah J.
Whatmore rightly remark, the early political theory of Machiavelli, Hobbes
and Spinoza ‘understood collectivities [. . .] in decidedly materialist terms, as
a question of their ongoing assemblage rather than as primarily theological
or philosophical questions’ (Braun and Whatmore, 2010b: xiv). On
Spinoza’s concept of government, see Saar (2009).
15. See also Chandra Mukerji’s proposal to distinguish between two distinct
forms of power: strategics and logistics. While the former operates by pol-
itical domination and legitimated forms of rule, the latter focuses on the
‘environment (context, situation, location) in which human action and cog-
nition take place’ (2010: 403). It mobilizes the material world in order to
shape ‘the conditions of possibility for collective life. A material regime
cultivated this way favors some groups over others, but governs imperson-
ally through an order of things’ (2010: 404).
16. Michel Pêcheux criticizes Foucault’s writings from this period for not being
able to ‘work out a coherent and consistent distinction between processes of
material subjugation of human individuals and the process of domesticating
animals’, and for engaging in a ‘hidden biologism of Bakunin’s sort’
(Pêcheux, 1984: 64–5; see also Lemke, 1997: 112–17). Interestingly, Selin
(1984: 369) in his history of the concept of government cites Ernst
Ferdinand Klein, a German author of the 18th century, claiming that it is
a sign of the despot to treat his subjects ‘as one tames animals and not as one
governs men’ [wie Tiere bändigt, nicht wie Menschen regiert].
17. I here take up Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between zoe´ and bı´os as two
forms of life (Agamben, 1998).
18. For a more extensive argument concerning this theoretical shift see Lemke
(2011).
19. The book was first published in 1778 in Paris (for bibliographical informa-
tion and the debate on the contested identity of the author see Foucault,
2007: 27, fn 39).
20. The term ‘more-than-human’ was coined by Braun and Whatmore (2010b:
xx). On Foucault’s interpretation of the ‘naturalism’ (2008: 61) of liberalism
and its focus on the ‘market milieu’ (2008: 259) as a self-regulating matter of
government, see Folkers (2013); see also Terranova (2009).
21. On assemblage, see Bennett (2010: 23–4); Braun notes that the use of the
English word ‘assemblage’ to translate Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of
agencement only partly captures the significance of the term. While the
former is restricted to a composition of things, the latter ‘relates the capacity
to act with the coming together of things that is a necessary and prior con-
dition for any action to occur, including the actions of humans’ (Braun,
2008: 671; emphasis in original).
22. The philosopher of biology John Dupré has recently suggested that ‘func-
tional biological wholes, the entities that we primarily think of as organisms,
are in fact cooperating assemblies of a wide variety of lineage-forming enti-
ties’ (Dupré, 2012: 126). Dupré rejects the assumption that all cells in an
organism belong to the same species. Quite the contrary, ‘living things’,
according to this account, are ‘extremely diverse and opportunistic compil-
ations of elements from many distinct sources’ (2012: 126). Dupré argues for
a redefinition of ‘organisms’ as ‘cooperating assemblies’. In this perspective,
human life only exists as the effect of symbiotic systems linking ‘human’ and
‘non-human’ life: ‘A functioning human organism is a symbiotic system
containing a multitude of microbial cells – bacteria, archaea, and fungi –
without which the whole would be seriously dysfunctional and ultimately
non-viable. Most of these reside in the gut, but they are also found on the
skin, and in all body cavities. In fact about 90 per cent of the cells that make
Lemke 19
up the human body belong to such microbial symbionts and, owing to their
great diversity, they contribute something like 99 per cent of the genes in the
human body’ (2012: 125). For a ‘thing materialism’ that points to the min-
eral conditions for the emergence of biological entities (bone!), see Bennett
(2004: 360).
23. It is interesting to note that Barad’s critical reading of Foucault only
engages with his work prior to the lectures on governmentality. The theor-
etical shift that goes along with Foucault’s concept of government and the
very different account of power it implies are never discussed by Barad.
24. See Lemke (2007) for a similar argument about the ‘genealogy of the
modern state’. On recent tensions and historical transformations on how
‘life’ is defined and constituted, see Helmreich (2011).
25. New materialist literature often displays a caricatured understanding of
poststructuralism and constructivism as ‘matterphobic’ (Ahmed, 2008: 34).
As Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun rightly note, the claim to have over-
come the distinction between epistemology and ontology put forward by
many new materialists only makes sense if they limit beforehand the con-
structivist ambition to epistemic regimes or discursive forms (see e.g. Coole
and Frost, 2010b: 6), thereby ignoring STS work on the ‘instrumental, per-
formative and material dimensions implied in the making of facts and arte-
facts’ (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 322).
26. As Bryan E. Bannon commented in his review of Vibrant Matter: ‘It is
unproblematic to assert that all existing bodies are affective and susceptible
to affectation, and one need not equate this two-sided capacity with life,
even the asubjective life of metal that Bennett describes. If life is a field of
intensities in the way Bennett describes, then, far from being a property, it is
a particular way of relating to the affections that surround an assemblage.
Thus, on Bennett’s own account, it is possible to assert that matter itself is
not alive per se, but that life denotes a particular intricacy of responsiveness
with complex alliances between smaller constituent assemblages’ (Bannon,
2011: 3; emphasis in original).
27. Contrary to Barad’s charge that Foucault takes the social for granted, it
might be stated that Foucault’s work on government offers elements of a
genealogy of the social. In his lectures on governmentality, he describes how
the concept of ‘society’ emerged in the 18th century in the context of liberal
government as a ‘complex and independent reality’ (Foucault, 2000c: 352).
In this light, the social is not something that is fixed and stable; rather, it is
an entity characterized by contingent conditions of emergence and only
arising in a specific historical constellation. On the emergence of the social
as a ‘new political positivity’ (Ewald, 1987: 6), see Donzelot (1984); Ewald
(1986); Procacci (1993).
28. See, for example, Andrew Barry’s reminder that in ‘Foucault’s account,
government is inevitably a technical matter. Practices of government rely
on an array of more or less formalized and more or less specialized technical
devices from car seat-belts and driving codes to dietary regimes; and from
economic instruments to psychotherapy. Moreover, government operates
both on and across many distinctions which are so critical to our sense of
the terrains of politics: public and private; state and market; the realm
of culture [. . .] and the domain of nature [. . .]. In this way, the study of
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