Majia Holmer Nadesan, Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, No. 57, New York and London, Routledge, 2008, pp. ix, 248, £60.00 (hardback 978-0-415-95854-7).

Abstract

Overhearing one of my colleagues say that Foucault’s concept of biopower was “so last century”, I was tempted to slide this book across the table. Powerfully, it underlines how social and political theorists have come to appreciate biopower’s place at the heart of contemporary political battles and economic strategies. Indeed, the great strength of this book is its revealing how today’s “biopolitical problematics are simultaneously economic ones” (p. 182). Biopower, then—Foucault’s historicized notion of the administration of biological life so as to optimize and multiply it—has never been more “now”. Yet, in at least one respect the concept is last century, and it is on that account that Majia Nadesan in fact justifies her monograph: it is not that Foucault’s concept has been smitten, she points out (and makes abundantly clear in the course of her text); rather, it is that Foucault himself unfortunately died too soon to comment on the nature of biopower’s operation in late-twentieth-century neoliberal societies. For him, the exemplification of biopower was within older liberal frameworks of knowledge, such as psychoanalysis and social anomie, which he saw as having gained credence among the public, insurers, and the state. Thus biopower’s operation was understood by Foucault as an extension of what he perceived as beginning in the eighteenth century when liberal mentalities on the conduct of governing peoples’ conduct—i.e., “govern-mentalities”—began to target individual and collective biological life through social and scientific engineering, expert administration, and everyday technologies of the self. Ever seductive, biopower’s operation continues to shape personal, interpersonal and institutional conduct. What is different today, though, is the nature and apprehension of the social space in which it operates. Especially since the 1990s with the molecularization of all life (simultaneous with globalization, the eclipse of nation-state social welfare, and the exerting of biopower by corporations), complex phenomena such as human disease have been transformed into biological assets and costs that can be represented and manipulated wholly in market terms. Hence conditions such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and obesity get coded as social and economic risks with calculative costs for industry and the state—risks and costs that must be administered. It is this transformation of biopower’s operation by market-oriented neoliberal governmentalities that preoccupies Nadesan. Genetics, psychopharmacology, brain imaging technologies and other new modes of biosocial subjectification and commercial gain are among her illustrative means. Unlike Nikolas Rose’s works on biopower and governmentality, which Nadesan heavily relies upon, her script is more politically exacting, and altogether more morally trenchant in an old-fashioned socialist sort of way. Perceiving biopower less as a technology of optimization (merely for “the productive, cybernetic administration of life,” [p. 3]) than a force that “both privileges and marginalizes, empowers, and disciplines” (p. 5), she holds it to “serve the interests of capitalist accumulation and market forces by eliciting and optimising the life forces of a state’s population, maximizing their capacity as human resources and their utility for market capitalization” (p. 3). Biopower, in short, is seen to supplement and extend the mighty power of capital in its expropriation of value from the relations of production. But, that said, Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life is hardly vulgar Marxism writ fancy. On the contrary; what further distinguishes it from cognate studies is its emphasis on the “web of entanglements and sites of contradiction and conflict evident in the state itself” (p. 4), including constraints on the discussion of these contradictions in neoconservative regimes. Complicating matters still further is the fact that neoliberalism’s characteristic reliance on “government from a distance” as well as on biopolitical technologies of the autonomous self, does not preclude the continued operation of older forms of discipline and “sovereignty”. Nadesan is in fact much exercised with differentiating newer from older configurations of “sovereign power”, “disciplinary power”, “pastoral power”, and “biopower”. Not a book for the theoretical faint of heart, Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life is written for Nadesan’s peers and makes few concessions to those who might happen to be listening in. Even the analytic of governmentality at the heart of the study—for Foucault, the means “to explore the regularities of everyday existence that structure the ‘conduct of conduct’” (p. 1)—remains fairly elusive. Only slightly less so is the actual purpose of “governmentality studies”, the esoteric pursuit of perspectives on liberalism and neoliberalism, it seems. Governmentality, the reader can only infer, is a difficult-to-specify and changing assemblage of rationalities, institutions and technologies that might or might not be distinguished from “government”, and can probably never be disassociated from biopower. Comprehension is not much helped by a clunky social science prose style that at times breaks unexpectedly into bullet points.