Biopolitics as "Government of Things"

Michel Foucault arguably is the most influential thinker of biopolitics up to the present day. While his thoughts on biopolitics and biopower have been challenged and critically extended by several scholars like Agamben, Negri and Hardt, Mbembe, Esposito, and Haraway, none of these contributions stands without reference to the basic concept delivered by Foucault. However, despite these various important expansions of the Foucauldian framework, the critical resources provided by his analytics of biopolitics are far from being exhausted. Against common critique and counterintuitive to established readings of Foucault, I will argue that his account of biopolitics can be be highly instructive for current biopolitical questions of societal relations to nature and politics of nature arising vis-à-vis the urgent challenges of global ecological crises. Following the reading of Foucault recently brought forward by the sociologist Thomas Lemke, biopolitics has to be understood as a ‘government of things’ that aims to regulate populations by intervening in their material environments. By (re-)arranging the relations between ‘men’ and the material ‘things’ surrounding them, biopolitical rationalities of government not only establish this distinction in the first place, they further apply ecological assumptions of the material entanglements between life forms and their material environments in order to govern human and more-than-human populations in a post-sovereign mode. By intervening in the material environments of human and more-than-human populations, this environmental mode of biopolitics aims to initiate the biological dynamics of organismic self-regulation without applying sovereign or disciplinary power. Thus, the biopolitical dispositif of ‘governmentality’ critically analyzed by Foucault can be re-framed as ‘environmentality’. As I will argue in my paper, this turn from ‘governmentality’ to ‘environmentality’ can be highly instructive for political theory in general and for biopolitical debates in particular, especially those referring to the Foucauldian framework. On a systematic level, the environmental turn allows to integrate elements of neo-materialist scholarship into the critical analytics of biopolitics developed by Foucault, bridging the respective critiques of the latter being stuck in an anthropocentric bias while the former is lacking of sensitivity to properly analyze power relations. On an analytic level, the dispositif of environmentality allows to critically analyze biopolitical practices encompassing an object domain that includes material environments and the specific entanglements and networks between humans and non-humans alike. This makes visible practices and relations that undermine and make blurry traditional philosophic assumptions like the culture/nature distinction, and values like individual autonomy and corporeal integrity. This also expands the range of critical analysis to include the object of ecological knowledge/science, which in the light of then environmental dispositif of power reveals its genealogy as a highly politicized tool for environmental control. On a comparative level, the reference to environmentality allows to critically rethink approaches of affirmative biopolitics which do not adequately consider the relevance of environmental relations or reproduce them by uncritically referring to the same ecological concepts incorporated in the environmental dispositif of power.