Sovereign Power and Bio-Power

One crucially important feature of Foucault’s analysis of modern powers is his discussion of the relationships between repressive legal-sovereign power, on the one hand, and the modern descendents of productive normalizing-pastoral power, on the other. Sovereign powers are essentially repressive and pastoral powers are essentially productive. If in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (aka The Will to Knowledge) Foucault views sovereign power as representing itself as negating, legislative, prohibitive, censoring, and homogenous (1976, 83-85), he views bio-power as always productive, immanent, exercised, capillary, and resisted (1976, 94-95). These five qualifications of each conception of power are not necessarily opposed to one another point-to-point, but one clearly gets the drift that there is a deep rift between sovereign power and pastoral power.

A difficult ambiguity, however, remains in Foucault’s models of power as presented in The Will to Knowledge. This deep ambiguity, in my view, continued to plague Foucault’s work over the years to come. Given their heterogeneity, do both forms of power (repressive sovereign power and productive biological power) continue to characterize the exercise of power in our own times? Or has bio-power gradually colonized sovereign power thus displacing it? Foucault was unfortunately never clear on this question. But a great deal rides on it, both historically in reference to the past and philosophically in reference to the future. There is in Foucault’s writings evidence for both interpretations.

First, the interpretation emphasizing their continued simultaneous practice. In “Two Lectures” (from the 1976 course lectures), Foucault clearly views the operation of sovereign and pastoral power as depending on the continuing simultaneous employment of both: “The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism” (106). Similarly in “Omnes et Singulatim” (the 1979 Tanner lectures) Foucault proposed this reciprocal heterogeneity once again in claiming that “pastorship happened to combine with its opposite, the state” (1979, 300). Elsewhere, in “Governmentality” (from the 1978 course lectures), Foucault sounds very explicit: “We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government” (1978, 219). On this first interpretation, modern power essentially functions such that both sovereign power and bio-power (etc.) are simultaneously deployed. In this way, modern power can be understood as deriving its effectiveness through a double conditioning or reciprocal enhancement of both: each form of power augments, or lends credit to, the other, but only insofar as they are cleanly purified of one another. The first interpretation might seem to better account for many of Foucault’s claims. For example, Foucault’s claims in The Will to Knowledge that the passage from “the symbolics of blood” to “the analytics of sexuality” was not sudden but occurred with “overlappings, interactions, and echoes” such that “the preoccupation with blood and the law has for nearly two centuries haunted the administration of sexuality” (1976, 149). Foucault notes racism and psychoanalysis as two very different domains in which this preoccupation with blood, law, and sovereignty persists. Taking another example from the same text, there are Foucault’s strong claims to the effect that sovereign and pastoral power are “utterly incongruous” with one another (1976, 89). Such utter incongruity might be taken to suggest that bio-power could not have colonized sovereign power even if it had wanted to: colonization requires at least some degree of minimal continuity in order to establish the relations through which the colonization could take place. Of course, the view that bio-power simply displaced rather than colonized sovereign power remains conceptually consistent with such incongruity.

There is also evidence for reading Foucault another way, as plenty of commentators and critics have noticed. Here one would focus more attention on Foucault’s earlier work on power/knowledge such as “Truth and Juridical Forms” (the 1973 Rio lectures). One could also take many choice quotes from The Will to Knowledge. Part V (“Right of Death and Power over Life”) of the book is a study of “a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power” in the modern era (1976, 136). The transformation is one which shifts the level of the exercise of power from “the juridical existence of sovereignty” to “the biological existence of the population” (1976, 137). Foucault here clearly claims that “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (1976, 138). Sovereign power was “replaced” by the disciplinary and regulatory functions of bio-power. Foucault later refers to this as the “threshold of modernity”: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1976, 143). According to Foucault, the most important consequence of the shift to modern power has been “the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law” (1976, 144). Here we have a picture, then, where sovereign law does not totally disappear under the inwashing tide of bio-political normalization, but where law certainly recedes as normalization becomes increasingly important. This is evidence for a second interpretation, where modern power does not persist as the heterogeneity of sovereignty and bio-power, but where it takes the form of a modern bio-power that increasingly colonizes and then displaces sovereign power. Foucault is almost this explicit just a little later: “[T]he judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory” (1976, 144). Law and sovereignty persist, but are increasingly put to the service of norm and biology. We are a “normalizing society” experiencing “juridical regression” such that our history is one in which “[i]t was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles” (1976, 144, 145).

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"Omnes et Singulatim"

Foucault’s 1979 Stanford Tanner Lectures, “Omnes et Singulatim”, represent an earlier version of an inquiry which he was later to publish as the first section of the better-known 1982 essay “The Subject and Power”. As in “The Subject and Power” Foucault is here concerned to understand the relation between power and the forms of rationalization which operate alongside it. And, as in “The Subject and Power”, the result of his inquiry is to have uncovered a form of modern power and its rationalization which consists in “the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (1982, 336).

Foucault is clear in the later essay that he intends his work as aiming towards a criticism of this simultaneous individualization and totalization, a form of political rationality whose paradigm is the modern state: “the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is… to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state” (1982, 336). Foucault, in other words does not want to defend a new form of romantic privacy vis-à-vis the public power of the state, but neither does he want to defend increased public powers vis-à-vis modern forms of freedom. Rather, what he seems to be insisting upon is an alternative to modern power and knowledge themselves, where these are understood in terms of the simultaneous production of opposed spheres of state totalization and non-state individualization.

“Omnes et Singulatim” is in my opinion less convincing at setting forward the thesis which Foucault would later publish, but his attempt here is nevertheless productive. The piece consists of two lectures, the first of which traces the early development of pastoral power in first centuries of Christianity, and the second of which traces the later development of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. The overall theme which Foucault here seems to be working toward is the idea that the early Christian pastoral power was reactivated in the early part of the modern era in such a way as to be redeployed along the lines of what Foucault had elsewhere called governmentality. Pastoral power, then, is the genealogical ancestor of modern governmentality. (An obvious question, though, is this: Why does Foucault not use the term “governmentality” in this essay? He had already introduced it elsewhere? Is the not talking about governmentality here? Is he no longer satisfied with that term? If so, is the concept the same?)

So what is it about early pastoral power that Foucault finds important for later governmentality? First, pastoral power is clearly totalizing. “[T]he shepherd was to assume responsibility for the destiny of the whole flock” (1979, 308). Pastoral power is a technique of caring for an entire flock. The shepherd does not look after just a few. He cares for the whole flock, in its entirety, taken as a total unit. But second, pastoral power is also individualizing. “Christian pastorship implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each of his sheep” (1979, 309). The shepherd individualizes his flock. He knows the details of each sheep. Each is cared for in these details and idiosyncracies. Individualization is looked after just as much as totalization.

It is, I believe, primarily this double process of individualization and totalization in pastoral power that Foucault finds of interest in his genealogical study of “the formation of the state” (1979, 312). Foucault traces this formation through two sets of doctrine, those of “reason of state” (314ff.) and “theory of police” (317ff). It is difficult to say what is new in Foucault’s analysis here. It does not seem that he really offers anything decisive that was not already given as early as the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975). While the finer details are seemingly not all that different, there is nonetheless a difference in the bigger picture. For Foucault is here explicit, as he was not always in Discipline and Punish, that what interests him in modern power is the way that it both individualizes and totalizes. Considering von Justi’s theory of police, Foucault writes: “He perfectly defines what I feel to be the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality, namely to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state” (1979, 322). Still, even this view was somewhat on view as early as Discipline and Punish.

One other question concerns the status of Foucault’s inquiry in both “Omnes et Singulatim” and “The Subject and Power”. Both texts open with Foucault inquiring into the relation between power and rationalization (1979, 299, and 1982, 328). As Foucault better puts it later in “Omnes et Singulatim”: “Rather than wonder whether aberrant state power is due to excessive rationalism or irrationalism, I think it would be more appropriate to pin down the specific type of political rationality the state produced” (1979, 313). What are we to understand by Foucault’s use of the terms “rationalization” and “rationality” in these inquiries? Can we take him to be exploring the relation between power and knowledge that was crucial for his earlier work in the middle of the 1970s? Is “rationalization” here a synonym for “knowledge”? Is Foucault still interested in the “power/knowledge” relation? If so, why change the terms?

This question takes on added significance when we consider the final passages of “Omnes et Singulatim”. For here Foucault argues that political criticism cannot effectively take the form of the criticism of power in general nor of reason in general. Rather, “What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake” (1979, 324). It is not clear, however, what such a criticism should be. That Foucault places a great deal of weight on it in “Omnes et Singulatim” is, however, undeniable. The “inevitable effects” of our modern political rationality, he concludes, “are both individualization and totalization.” So what are we to do? “Liberation can come from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots” (1979, 325). There is much to be gleaned from Foucault’s remark that it would be fruitless to oppose individualization to totalization (liberalism) or totalization to individualization (communism). What he seeks instead is a third way beyond the forms of modern power which turn us into the subjects that we are. However, I doubt there is much to be gained by following up on Foucault’s vague reference to attacking “rationality’s very roots”.

Instead, we might perhaps do better to follow Foucault’s own shift of tack in the early 1980s when he began to more fully flesh out a third axis intersecting with power and knowledge—the axis he variously referred to as subjectivity or experience. This strategy is already anticipated in “Omnes” where Foucault briefly refers to his problem in this text as concerning “the relations between experiences, knowledge, and power” (1979, 311). For what Foucault’s later studies of this axis would reveal is the way in which pastoral power and governmental power can also come to inhabit the closest aspects of experience itself, can also come to structure our very understanding of ourselves as subjects. Foucault’s work here was tied up with the elaboration of the Christian and modern hermeneutics of the subject, which in the language of “Omnes et Singulatim” can be seen as feeding into modern individualization and totalization. The alternative to the modern hermeneutics of telling the truth about oneself is a modern practice of freedom which, though Foucault never fully elaborated it in any of his essays, requires getting free of oneself.

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"Governmentality"

The essay published as “Governmentality” is the second lecture of Foucault’s Collège de France Course Lecture series given in the Winter months of 1978. Foucault titled that lecture series “Security, Territory, and Population” but at the end of the “Governmenality” lecture he already expresses that a better titled would have simply been “Governmentality.” This, then, was the year in which Foucault theorized the modality of governmental power, to be placed alongside of the other modalities of pastoral power, biopower, and disciplinary power.

There are (at least) two related issues the reader faces in grappling with Foucault’s conception of “governmentality.” The first of these concerns the status of Foucault’s concept of power. Is it a historical description of an actual-working modality of power? Is it a philosophical theory of an ideal form of power? Or is it both? Undoubtedly, for Foucault, it would have to be both. But I think there remain serious questions concerning the historical legitimacy of this model. The “Governmentality” lecture is given at times to sweeping historical claims which Foucault barely backs up. This raises questions concerning the historiographical status of Foucault’s genealogy (What is genealogy? How is it practiced? What does it assume? Where does it differ from traditional history?). It also raises questions for Foucault’s readers concerning the ongoing use of his models of power—what historiographical and philosophical adjustments must we make to Foucault’s methodologies and assumptions in order to legitimate the deployment of his various concepts of power?

A second related concern stems from my own interest in trying to deploy Foucault’s concepts of power in the context of my own work in political history, specifically American political history. I am particularly interest in how well Foucault’s work meshes with a very summary account of American liberalism which goes like this: American liberalism can be characterized in terms of a bifurcation of politics into the two opposed realms of public power and private freedom, following on from the quintessential theorization of John Stuart Mill or, more recently, John Rawls and Richard Rorty; the high point of American liberalism thus described was the Progressive Era or, more broadly, the years from the Civil War through the Wilson presidency; American liberalism thus described began to retreat during the Hoover administration, slowly intensified its retreat after the Second World War, and then really began to thoroughly dissipate with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; while public/private liberalism continues to dominate much theoretical and political discourse, liberal political practice today is not very well characterized according to the discursive universe of public versus private power. Regardless of the validity or accuracy of this account (which I would, of course, defend), I am curious specifically how it sits with Foucault’s models and histories of power.

An initial point concerns the genesis of governmentality out of the context of pastoral power, a point which Foucault discusses in the first 1978 Course Lecture, the one immediately prior to “Governmenality”. In his summary for the Course Lectures of that year, Foucault describes the relation thus: “Now, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a general crisis of the pastorate open up and develop, but in a much more complex fashion: a search for other modes (and not necessarily less strict ones) of spiritual direction and new types of relation between pastor and flock; but also inquiries concerning the right way to ‘govern’ children, a family, a domain, a principality” (EW1, 68). This, then, is the genealogical point of entry of governmental power. The situation is one of “a double movement, then, of state centralization, on the one hand, and of dispersion and religious dissidence, on the other” (EW3, 202). This is a first approximation of the theme of public versus private power, but as Foucault goes on to elaborate “governmentality” the story is much more complex.

Toward the end of the “Governmentality” lecture, Foucault writes: “[I]t is the tactics of government that make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on. Thus, the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality” (EW3, 221). Governmentality, then, describes a very general modality of power in which the split between public and private is able to sustain itself. At the same time, it is clear that governmental power, like disciplinary power and biopower, itself transverses the distinction between public and private. This has serious consequences for the liberal practice of dividing public and private spheres. For, if power is exercised often enough on the governmental model, then it will become increasingly clear that power assumes both public and private forms. This will eventually result in the realization that the liberal model of public power versus private freedom is untenable. Power, in other words, is pervasive throughout both public and private domains (this is the crucial Foucauldian point which resonated so well with so many feminists).

Here, then, is one possible way of relating Foucault’s accounts of power to my mini-history of American liberalism offered above. On the sovereign model of power, as outlined in History of Sexuality Volume 1 (pp. 83-85), power essentially contains the split between public and private spheres within itself. So long as power is exercised and theorized on the sovereign model, then, the public versus private split will seem natural. The interesting thing about governmentality, and its correlate forms of power (discipline, biopolitics), is that it is capable of sustaining the public-private split within itself at the same time that the actual powers exercised under governmentality exceed the logic of that split. Eventually, then, power itself starts to run outside of the boundaries of the public/private theory. This is what happened in American liberalism in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s which very often outstripped the conceptual terms of public versus private (feminism being the primary example). Yet theorists and politicians alike continued to describe power on the sovereign model of public versus private (witness the academic fame of John Rawls’s theory of political justice, which is premised on state versus nonstate dualism). With Foucault comes finally a new model of power, written in the wake of and in response to the failed assumptions of the new social movements (cf. “Truth and Power”, 117 and “The Subject and Power”, 329), which finally enables us to recognize the extent to which our exercises of power transgress the familiar dichotomy of public versus private. We are finally able to recognize that the state, though of importance for politics, is not the only thing of importance in politics: “Maybe what is really important for our modernity… is not so much the statization of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (EW3, 220). Governmentality is one of the first moments in this genealogy of the disintegration of public versus private power. It is a complex genealogy, but we have its origins here.

This way of relating Foucault’s account to the summary history of American liberalism is of course in parts very sketchy. One problem is this. It goes against one of Foucault’s explicit warnings to his readers: “We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government” (EW3, 219). Foucault here cautions against the familiar claim that his work demonstrates how sovereign power gradually receded against the in-washing tide of disciplinary (etc.) power, a caution previously sounded, but largely unheard, in his 1976 Course Lectures: “The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism” (“Two Lectures”, 106). The idea, then, is not that discipline-government-biopolitics replace sovereignty, but that they develop alongside of it throughout modernity. This seems to run against my interpretation above.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem and it is unclear which is preferable. The first way consists in massaging the inconsistency. My model of liberalism can admit the persistence of sovereign power, but only in discursive terms. That is, the discourse of sovereign power persists, while the exercise of sovereign power dissipates. This, in fact, is precisely what my model holds and why it is so deeply concerned with the incoherence between official sovereign theories of power and actual non-sovereign (e.g., disciplinary) practices of power. It is doubtful, however, that when Foucault speaks of a persistence of sovereign power, he thinks of this persistence on the level of discourse only and not on the level of the exercise of power. Another way of dealing with the inconsistency between Foucault’s account and mine is simply to deny the historical adequacy of Foucault’s inconsistent claim. This is, of course, a risky strategy. But it is, ultimately, I think advisable. Foucault does not offer a wealth of evidence that sovereign power continues to be an important model for the actual exercise of power in modernity and late modernity. He claims this, but his evidence is fairly thin. In fact, the only evidence he offers in “Governmentality” is the persistence of this theme in the theoretical discourse of Rousseau. What Foucault needs to offer, then, is a more precise historical account of the actual continued functionings of sovereign power. Surely the execution of Damiens the regicide recounted in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish would be an extremely foreign experience for most of we moderns these days. Indeed, one way of reading Discipline and Punish is that it accounts for precisely this distance. In any event, this issue is much too thorny to deal with in a short space. But it is worth considering because it raises all the important historiographical questions mentioned above concerning the assumptions, utility, and efficacy of the genealogical mode of history.

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