Bio-power and Non-sovereign Rights

Abstract

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Paul Patton on Bio-power and Non-sovereign Rights. Mr. Aryal focused his questions on the idea of power and non-sovereign rights in post-political society.) Y.A.: I want to start with a question on power. Why did Foucault revise his idea of power in his later career? Why did he move from disciplinary power to bio-power; from discourse to ethics? P.P.: I think there are a number of ways in which Foucault revised his ideas on power after the publication of La volonte de savoir in 1976. first was a conceptual refinement and change of terminology that led to the rigorous definition of power as 'action upon the actions of others' in The Subject and Power (1982). language of this essay is very different from the language of bodies and forces that predominated in Foucault's books and interviews during the early 1970s. It enables distinctions to be drawn between communicative action, brute force and the exercise of power in a manner that was not available within the earlier terminology. Importantly, it allowed Foucault to distinguish between the exercise of power, which is not always malign, and domination, which is invariably harmful to the autonomy of individuals and groups. I can only speculate on the reasons for this shift to a more refined concept of power, but it is likely that they included the impasses encountered within the earlier terminology, such as the problem of resistance to power, but also his increasing awareness of the limitations of the metaphorics of war and struggle for describing the nature of power in late modern societies. This critical awareness was no doubt fuelled by his investigation of the history of the discourse of war in 1975-1976 (Society Must Be Defended), and perhaps also by his encounter with the very different approaches and terminology of North American philosophers during his sabbatical year in 1976-77. A second revision was his broadening of scale and focus to consider the variety of ways in which power was exercised over populations and national economies. He began to discuss the emergence of mechanisms of 'security' during the eighteenth century in 1978, but then broadened his focus further to include the variety of ways in which sovereign power sought to govern its citizens. This culminated in the series of lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality in 1979. Again, one can only speculate on the motivations for this revision, although Foucault does give some indications in the course of his 1979 lectures which include a number of polemical passages about the 'state phobia' current among much of the French left during this period. Historians have recently drawn attention to the impact of the crisis in Marxism in France from around 1975 and to Foucault's engagement with efforts to rethink the strategy of the socialist government that was then thought to be imminent. In The Subject and Power he suggests that ultimately power is less a matter of confrontation between adversaries than of government, where this means the direction of conduct. A third revision, which became more apparent in Foucault's lectures after 1980 and in the final volumes of History of Sexuality published just before his death in 1984, was the consideration of forms of power that could be exercised on the self by the self. This was what Foucault meant by ethics and it lead to his extensive investigation into the specific techniques of self-making developed in Greek and Roman cultures before and after the advent of Christianity. These techniques are perfectly consistent with the understanding of power as action upon actions, or the direction of conduct, although no longer focused on the exercise of power over others. One of the interesting questions raised by his discussion of Greek practices of moderation in Use of Pleasures is that of the relationship between existing forms of power over others (other animals as well as other people) and the forms of power exercised by subjects over themselves. …