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Theory, Culture & Society

2015, Vol. 32(4) 325

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413519340tcs.sagepub.com

Article

New Materialisms:

Foucault and theGovernment of Things

Thomas LemkeGoethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main

AbstractThe article explores the perspectives of Foucaults notion of government by linking itto the debate on the new materialism. Discussing Karen Barads critical reading ofFoucaults work on the body and power, it points to the idea of a government ofthings, which Foucault only briefly outlines in his lectures on governmentality. Bystressing the intrication of men and things (Foucault), this theoretical project makesit possible to arrive at a relational account of agency and ontology, going beyond theanthropocentric limitations of Foucaults work. This perspective also suggests analtered understanding of biopolitics. While Foucaults earlier concept of biopoliticswas limited to physical and biological existence, the idea of a government of thingstakes into account the interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, thenatural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Finally, the conceptual proposalof a government of things helps to clarify theoretical ambiguities and unresolvedtensions in new materialist scholarship and allows for a more materialist account ofpolitics.

Keywords

Karen Barad, biopolitics, Michel Foucault, governmentality, new materialism

Le pouvoir est devenu materialiste (Power has become materialist).

(Foucault, 1994: 194)

Recently, social and political theory has demonstrated a renewed theor-etical interest in matter and materiality. The new materialism, as it issometimes called (see e.g. Hird, 2004; Ahmed, 2008; Coole and Frost,2010a), does not represent a homogeneous style of thought or a singletheoretical position but encompasses a plurality of different approaches

Corresponding author:Thomas Lemke. Email: [email protected]

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and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from science and technology stu-dies via feminist theory and political philosophy to geography (Latourand Weibel, 2005; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Bennett, 2010; Braun and

Whatmore, 2010a). The new materialist scholarship shares the convictionthat the linguistic turn or primarily textual accounts are insufficient foran adequate understanding of the complex and dynamic interplay ofmeaning and matter. New materialists often stress that the focus on dis-course, language and culture not only leads to impoverished theoreticalaccounts and conceptual flaws but also results in serious political prob-lems and ethical quandaries, as it fails to address central challenges facingcontemporary societies, especially economic change and the environmen-tal crisis.

The new materialism is the result of a double historical and theoreticalconjuncture. The 1970s and 1980s were marked by the decline of oncepopular materialist approaches, especially Marxism, and the rise of post-structuralist and cultural theories. While the latter rendered problematicany direct reference to matter as navely representational or naturalistic,new materialists are convinced that the epistemological, ontological andpolitical status of materiality has to be reconsidered and a novel conceptof matter is needed. In contrast to older forms of materialism, the call fora new materialism refers to the idea that matter itself is to be conceived asactive, forceful and plural rather than passive, inactive and unitary(Bennett, 2004: 3489; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Colebrook, 2008;Coole and Frost, 2010b: 34).1

The material turn2 criticizes the idea of the natural world and tech-nical artifacts as a mere resource or raw material for technological pro-gress, economic production or social construction. It aims at a newunderstanding of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics, to beachieved by overcoming anthropocentrism and humanism, the splitbetween nature and culture, linguistic or discursive idealism, socialconstructivism, positivism, and naturalism. Central to this movementis the extension of the concept of agency and power to non-humannature, thereby also calling into question conventional understandingsof life.

In this strand of thought Foucaults work plays an ambiguous role.While he is often mentioned as an influential source and inspiration formaterialist scholarship, as his genealogies problematize any stable con-cept of the human or the subject, he is also perceived as one of themost important representatives of discourse theory and the culturalturn, which is seen as disputing or negating the relevance of matter. In

particular, Foucaults concept of the body and his insistence on the prod-uctivity of power relations serve as positive references in the new materi-alism (see e.g. Coole and Frost, 2010b: 323; Barad, 2008: 127). His workstresses the materiality of the physical body and focuses on the mundanedetails of bodily existence and the technologies of power that constitute

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disciplined and docile bodies. Foucault thus helps to undermine corpor-eal fetishism (Haraway, 1997: 143), which takes it for granted thatbodies are self-identical, fixed and closed entities; his challenge lies in

the way he analyzes the interplay of history and biology by demonstrat-ing how the body in its materiality is affected and modified by powerrelations.3

While some new materialists praise Foucaults writings for the import-ant insights they offer, his account of the body and power is mostly seenas only partly convincing and in the end unsatisfactory. Even thoughthese scholars do not always explicitly engage with his work, thereseems to be a general consensus that Foucault has to be subsumedunder the category of social constructivism and anthropocentrism (see

e.g. Braun, 2008: 668). The charge is that Foucaults work remains withinthe traditional humanist orbit (Barad, 2007: 235), restricting agency tohuman subjects without taking into consideration the agential propertiesof non-human forces.

This article offers a reconsideration or in more ambitious terms adiffractive reading (Barad, 2007: 7194) of this charge. I will showthat, contrary to this predominant and rather dismissive assessment,elements of a posthumanist approach may be found in Foucaults ideaof a government of things, which he briefly outlines in his lectures ongovernmentality. This theoretical perspective is informed by elements inFoucaults writings, but it was never systematically developed there. Iargue that while Foucault chose not to directly engage with the problemof human and non-human relations, the idea of a government of thingsaddresses most of the critical points new materialists put forward in theirreading of his work. Furthermore, it makes it possible to arrive at arelational account of agency and ontology that may open up anavenue for a more materialist account of politics and significantly differsfrom some problematic tendencies in the new materialism. Thus, thepurpose of the following discussion is what Brian Massumi oncetermed working from Foucault after Foucault (2009: 158).

I will start by presenting Karen Barads critical account of Foucaultswork on the body and power. Barad is one of the most influential andimportant representatives of contemporary materialist scholarship, andher appraisal of Foucault is one of the most elaborate. The second partof the article focuses on the idea of a government of things. By stressingthe intrication of men and things (Foucault, 2007: 97), this theoreticalproject makes it possible to go beyond the anthropocentric limitations ofFoucaults work. As I will show in the third section, this perspective also

suggests an altered understanding of biopolitics. While Foucaults earlierconcept of biopolitics was limited to physical and biological existence,the idea of a government of things takes into account the interrelated-ness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and the artificial,the physical and the moral. Finally, I argue in the last part of the article

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that this theoretical perspective helps to clarify conceptual ambiguitiesand unresolved tensions in new materialist scholarship. It also points toweaknesses and limitations in how studies of governmentality and STS

conceptualize politics.

Karen Barads Critical Appraisal of Foucaults Work

Karen Barad was originally trained in theoretical physics, and is now aprofessor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness atthe University of California at Santa Cruz. She has published extensivelyin the fields of physics, feminist theory, philosophy and science studies.Barad combines insights from the physicist Niels Bohr, one of the most

important figures in quantum mechanics, with elements of poststructur-alist theory and feminist technoscience. The result of this theoretical syn-thesis is Barads concept of agential realism, which aims at a crucialrethinking of much of Western epistemology and ontology (2007: 83;emphasis in original). Barads account is extensively developed in herbook Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and theEntanglement of Matter and Meaning, published in 2007. The objectiveof the book is to reconceptualize the interrelations (or intra-actions inBarads vocabulary4) between humans and non-humans and to rethink the

categories of subjectivity, agency and causality. She seeks to develop anepistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an under-standing of the role of human and non-human, material anddiscursive,and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-materialpractices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worndebates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure,and idealism against materialism (2007: 26; emphasis in original).5

In Barads view, there are several problems with Foucaults (andJudith Butlers) account of matter. She credits both theorists with

developing an analysis of power relations that focuses on productivityand performativity. In this perspective, power is not an external forcethat acts on a subject; there is only a reiterated acting that is power inits stabilizing and sedimenting effects (2007: 235). While this accountmakes it possible in principle to investigate the materialization ofbodies, Barad sees Foucaults work as characterized by three seriousshortcomings.

First, she argues that Foucault restricts the productivity of power tothe limited domain of the social (2008: 138). The conceptual privilegeFoucault attributes to the social makes it impossible to engage with

matter in a substantive way, since he regards matter as an end productrather than an active factor in further materializations (2008: 138; seealso 2007: 235). Barad claims that this approach restages matters pas-sivity and is unable to acknowledge the contribution of non-social factorsin materialization processes. Thus, Butler and Foucault both honor the




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nature-culture binary (to different degrees), thereby deferring a thor-oughgoing genealogy of its production (Barad, 2007: 146). By privilegingthe social, Foucault, in Barads view, cannot understand the complex

intra-actions of human and non-human actors.The second criticism is closely connected to the first. Barad stressesthat for both, Butler and Foucault, agency belongs only to the humandomain, and neither addresses the nature of technoscientific practicesand their profoundly productive effects on human bodies, as well asthe ways in which these practices are deeply implicated in what consti-tutes the human (2007: 1456).6 In this light, Foucaults analysis remainsone-sided and limited. It focuses on the production of human bodies, tothe exclusion of non-human bodies whose constitution he takes for

granted (2007: 169). What is needed, in Barads eyes, is a posthumanistconcept of performativity that accounts for the materialization of allbodies and finally allows for an investigation of the practices throughwhich the boundaries between the categories of human and non-humanemerge and are stabilized.

The third concern addresses what Barad considers Foucaults unsat-isfactory account of how the precise nature of the relationship betweendiscursive practices and material phenomena is articulated (2007:200, 146; 2008: 128). As Foucault, according to Barad, takes for grantedthe boundaries between nature and culture, human and non-human,he also fails to give an adequate account of the complex and dynamicrelations between meaning and matter. She argues that in Foucaultswork matter serves as a passive resource or raw material for socialpower relations. Thus, one central element of an account in whichmatter really matters is in Barads view a reformulation of causalityas intra-activity: Causal relations do not preexist but rather are intra-actively produced. What is a cause and what is an effect are intra-actively demarcated through the specific production of marks on bodies(2007: 236).

Barad is not alone in arguing that Foucaults concept of power doesnot provide a dynamic concept of materiality that takes account of thematerialization of human as well as non-human bodies (2007: 200). In asimilar vein, Paul Rutherford stresses that Foucault failed to see that theoperations of biopower consist in the making-up ofboth people andthings (1999: 44; emphasis in original). Rutherford notes that the regu-lation of the population requires the management of the environmentthat provides the living conditions for the human species. However,Foucault did not pursue this line of research. The notion of biopower

remains intimately linked to the constitution and transformation ofhuman bodies and human life, defining a set of mechanisms throughwhich the basic biological features of the human species became theobject of a political strategy (Foucault, 2007: 1; see also Foucault,1980a: 1412).7

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There are two important aspects of Foucaults choice not to developthis conceptual link and to limit the analysis to human bodies and humanlife (see also Rutherford, 1999: 61, fn 7). One contributing factor is that

his critical analysis of power and its nexus with knowledge focused on thehuman sciences. While Foucault sometimes addresses aspects of the lifesciences (anatomy, physiology, clinical medicine) that challenge any neatseparation between nature and society, the natural and the human sci-ences, he was principally concerned with the development and powereffects in disciplines like psychology, sociology, pedagogy and otherhuman sciences. Ironically, it seems that it is exactly this focus on thehuman sciences that reproduces a humanist blind spot in his work. Thesecond symptom of Foucaults anthropocentrism is a certain inconsist-ency and asymmetry in his account, since he accepts that there are crucialdifferences in epistemological and political terms between the natural andthe human sciences. By following his teachers Bachelard and Canguilhemin this respect, he tended to underestimate the relevance of the naturalsciences for a genealogy of power.8 In contrast to the dubious sciences(Foucault, 1980b: 109), by which he meant the human sciences, Foucaultcredited the natural sciences with a high-level epistemological profile(p. 109).9 As Rutherford rightly notes, Foucaults attitude towards thenatural sciences was not developed in a manner fully consistent with hisown analysis of the relation between power and knowledge (Rutherford,

1999: 61, fn 7; 2000: 119; Rouse, 1993: 13762).However, as the philosopher of science Joseph Rouse points out,

Foucaults analysis of power could be fruitfully used to explain powereffects in the natural sciences. He points to extensive parallels (1987:212) between the disciplinary power at work in prisons, schools, hos-pitals, and factories and the construction and manipulation of laboratoryobjects (Rouse, 1987: 20947). In the following, I would like to make asimilar argument by using elements in Foucaults work on governmentthat provide theoretical resources for an irreductionist approach to the

conduct of government (Asdal, 2008: 124). While Barad and othersmight be right to criticize Foucaults concept of power and his writingsin general for their humanist blind spots, I will propose a posthumanistapproach implicit but not developed in Foucaults work by focusing onthe idea of a government of things, which Foucault presents in hislecture series on governmentality.

Foucaults Idea of a Government of Things

In the 1978 lecture series at the Colle` ge de France, Foucault refers to acurious definition (2007: 97) of government provided by Guillaume dela Perrie` re in an early modern tract on the art of government.10 Here,government is conceived of as the right dispositions of things arrangedso as to lead to a suitable end (2007: 96). Foucault stresses that the




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reference to things is decisive in this definition, which distinguishes gov-ernment from sovereignty. While the former operates with and onthings, the latter is exercised on a territory and consequently on the

subjects that inhabit it (2007: 96).According to Foucault, de la Perrie` res notion of a government ofthings does not constitute an additional domain of government apartfrom and separate to the government of men. Rather than restaging anopposition of things and men, it relies on a sort of complex of men andthings (2007: 96). It is worth quoting the whole passage:

The things government must be concerned about, La Perrie` re says,

are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements

with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, ofcourse, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness,

fertility, and so on. Things are men in their relationships with

things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking. Finally,

they are men in their relationships with things like accidents, mis-

fortunes, famine, epidemics, and death. (2007: 96)

There are several important points to be noted here. First, followingFoucaults interpretation the art of government does not conceive of

interactions between two stable and fixed entities humans andthings. Rather, Foucault employs a relational approach. This is whythings appears in inverted commas. In fact, the qualification human orthing and the political and moral distinction between them is itself aninstrument and effect of the art of government, and does not constituteits origin or point of departure. Thus, the government of things does notrely on a foundational sorting of subjects and objects. Quite the contrary,Foucault questions the idea that contrasts active subjects with passiveobjects. He employs the term subject-object (2007: 44, 77) to address thephenomenon of the population as, on the one hand, a material body onwhich and towards which mechanisms are directed and, on the other, asubject, since it is called upon to conduct itself in such and such a fash-ion (2007: 423). In this perspective, the art of government determineswhat is defined as subject and object, as human and non-human. Itestablishes and enacts the boundaries between socially relevant and pol-itically recognized existence and pure matter, something that does notpossess legal-moral protection and is reduced to things.11

In distinguishing between government, on the one hand, and sover-eignty and discipline, on the other, in the lecture of 11 January 1978,

Foucault introduces the notion of the milieu. The milieu, he says, is whatis needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another(2007: 201).12 It is a set of natural givens rivers, marshes, hills and aset of artificial givens an agglomeration of individuals, of houses etc.(2007: 21). The milieu defines an intersection between a multiplicity of

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living individuals working and coexisting with each other in a set ofmaterial elements that act on them and on which they act in turn(2007: 22). Here, Foucault quite clearly accepts the idea that agency is

not exclusively a property of humans; rather, agential power originates inrelations between humans and non-human entities. Also, the milieuarticulates the link between the natural and the artificial without system-atically distinguishing between them.

Secondly, since there is no pre-given and fixed political borderlinebetween humans and things, it is possible to state that humans aregoverned as things. While medieval forms of government sought todirect human souls to salvation, modern government treats humanbeings as things to achieve particular ends. By this Foucault does not

mean a global and all-pervasive process of reification reducing men topassive and inert things; quite the contrary, the interests, sensations, andaffects of men are essential facts that political reason a rational know-ledge that no longer relies on a divine order of things or the principles ofprudence and wisdom has to take into account. In his comprehensivehistory of the art of government, Michel Senellart underscores this his-torical transformation that distinguishes the modern concept of govern-ment from the principle of sovereignty:

The government of things replaces the older government of thesouls and the bodies. The question is no longer, as it was with

the Christian authors, about the legitimate use of power; nor is it

the one raised by Machiavelli of the exclusive appropriation of

power. The question is now about the intensive use of the totality

of forces available. So, we note a passage from the right of power to

a physics of power [Passage du droit de la force a` la physique des

forces]. (Senellart, 1995: 423; emphasis in original)13

While sovereignty focuses on the individual will and legal subjects,government works on empirical quantities: on geo-physical phenomena(climate, water supply, geographical data, etc.) as well as on bio-demo-graphic facts (birth and death rates, health status, life span, the produc-tion of wealth, etc.). By statistically aggregating men on the level ofpopulations, they finally became calculable and measurable and couldbe conceived of as physical phenomena themselves: a social physics, inthe words of the Belgian sociologist Adolphe Que telet (see Ewald, 1986:108131). The governor has to take into account the passions and inter-

ests of the multitude in the same way as he takes into account theclimate and the territory, and he has to govern them according to theirown nature.14 Given this physical perspective, it would be a mistake tomake a systematic political distinction between humans and things. AsFoucault puts it, to govern means to govern things (2007: 97).




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The third point: in introducing the idea of a government of things,Foucault stresses that it enacts a mode of power very different fromsovereignty: it is not a matter of imposing a law on men, but of the

disposition of things, that is to say, of employing tactics rather thanlaws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arrangingthings so that this or that end may be achieved through a certainnumber of means (2007: 99). Foucault further clarified this conceptof government as arranging things in an interview some years later.Government, he says, is characterized by a mode of action that doesnot act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts on theiractions [. . .]. It operates on the field of possibilities in which the behav-ior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself (Foucault, 2000a: 3401).

Thus, the art of government consists in the conduct of conduct, instructuring the possible field of action of others (2000a: 341).15 Twothings are worth restating. First, government leads indirectly viaarranging things or managing complexes of humans and things.Second, governmental naturalism (Foucault, 2008: 61) works on aterrain that is co-produced by the practices of government themselves:Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise ofgovernmentality. It is [. . .] its indispensable hypodermis. It is the otherface of something whose visible face, visible for the governors, is theirown action (Massumi, 2009: 165).

Foucault sees this intrication of men and things (2007: 97) madeexplicit in the metaphor of the ship that often comes up in treatises ongovernment. To govern a ship means to be responsible for the sailors, butit also involves taking care of the vessel and the cargo and taking intoaccount winds, reefs, storms, and bad weather (2007: 97). The ship is,according to Foucault, a political symbol that stresses the specificity ofthe art of government. It creates and mobilizes the space in whichhumans and things are arranged, without possessing or mastering it: itis a floating space, a placeless space, that lives by its own devices, that isself-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundlessexpanse of the ocean (Foucault, 1998: 1845).

Without explicitly mentioning it, Foucault here refers to the etymol-ogy of government. The verbs regere and gubernare originally denotedthe direction of a ship, guvernaculum meaning the helm. From Cicero toThomas Aquinas, the government of a state is compared to steering aship (Sellin, 1984: 363; see also Senellart, 1995). This political imagin-ation is still present in the 18th century, when in 1777 Adelung definesgovernment in the following terms: to determine the direction of a

movement according to ones will and to preserve it in this movement[die Richtung der Bewegung nach seinem Willen bestimmen und in dieserBewegung erhalten] (quoted in Sellin, 1984: 363). To illustrate this defin-ition he refers to the following metaphors: To govern a ship, to gov-ern the chariot, the shaft, the horses in front of the chariot

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[Ein Schiffregieren. Den Wagen, die Deichsel, die Pferde vor dem Wagenregieren] (p. 363).

A Different Concept of Biopolitics

The lecture series on governmentality marks an important theoreticalshift in relation to Foucaults previous work, especially the work onbiopolitics. When in the lectures of 1978 and 1979 Foucault defines lib-eralism as the general framework of biopolitics (2008: 22), this resultsfrom the self-critical insight that his analysis until then had been one-sided and unsatisfactory, since it focused mainly on processes involvingpopulation regulation and the corporeal disciplining of human bodies. In

Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1978) and The History of Sexuality,Volume 1 (Foucault, 1980a), the investigation of subjectification pro-cesses essentially limits itself to subjugation and corporeal dressage,hence to the dimension ofzoe,with techniques of self-formation receivinglittle attention.16 With the problem of government, the perspectivebroadens and the question of moral and political existence also emerges:the problem, then, ofb os.17 Beyond technologies of bodily discipliningand the regulation of the population, attention is now also drawn to theself-constitution of individual and collective subjects what Foucault in

his later work came to call political technologies of individuals andtechnologies of the self (Foucault, 2000b: 404, resp. 1997a: 223).18

Foucaults idea of a government of things is useful as a way of clar-ifying this point, especially when he discusses the concept of the milieu(2007: 203; 778). It would be a mistake to see the new interest in theb os that arises with the governmentality lectures, especially in the workon liberal and neo-liberal governmentality, as some complementaryaspect that is just added to the former analysis. In fact, Foucault isinterested in the interactions between these biopolitical dimensions

zoe and b

os and how they produce and stabilize one another. Thisbecomes clear when he discusses Moheaus Recherches et considerations

sur la population de la France, describing the author as the first greattheorist of what we could call biopolitics (2007: 22).19 Foucault nolonger refers to the biological or physical dimension of biopoliticsalone, but cites approvingly Moheaus idea that government means togovern the physical and moral existence of their subjects (2007: 23;quotation taken from Moheau, emphasis added). The idea of a govern-ment of things addresses the relationship between the physical and themoral, the natural and the artificial as something that cannot be reduced

to the domain of the social. As Foucault writes: The sovereign deals witha nature, or rather with the perpetual conjunction, the perpetual intrica-tion of a geographical, climatic, and physical milieu with the humanspecies insofar as it has a body and a soul, a physical and moral exist-ence. Foucault sees a new political technology emerging that acts on the




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milieu as it provides the point of articulation (2007) between the nat-ural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Here we note thatFoucault does not take non-human nature for granted, but is interested

in how it is articulated within practices practices that are here conceivedas more-than-human practices.20

The idea of a government of things helps to enact a different under-standing of biopolitics that no longer exclusively addresses phenomenapeculiar to the life of the human species (Foucault, 1980a: 141). Thisimportant theoretical shift entails three dimensions. First, we see a movebeyond a concept of biopolitics as limited to the physical and biologicalexistence to a government of things that takes into account the inter-relatedness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and theartificial, the physical and the moral. Here conceptual devices that bridgethe dualisms (while at the same time being instrumental in analyzingthem) are useful. Examples include technology and dispositif inFoucaults writings, agencement (assemblage)21 in Deleuze andGuattaris work (1987), and apparatus in Barads agential realism(Barad, 2007). Secondly, the concept of milieu eschews any simple anduni-directional concept of causality or focus on human agency.According to Foucault, the milieu is an element in which a circularlink is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from onepoint of view will be a cause from another (2007: 21). This observation

is very much in line with Barads reminder that causal relations do notpreexist but rather are produced in agential materializations (see Barad,2007: 236).

There is a third difference between this idea and the concept of bio-politics Foucault had proposed in earlier publications: not only does thegovernment of things relate to moral issues and the interplay of physicaland moral questions, but the biological can only play out in a certainmilieu. In the perspective of a government of things, neither nature norlife is a self-evident and stable entity or property. Foucault refers to a

multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentiallyonly exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live(2007: 21). In this perspective, life is not a given but depends on condi-tions of existence within and beyond life processes.22

Ontology, Life and Politics

So far I have spelt out the idea of a government of things in Foucaultslectures at the Colle` ge de France in 1978 and 1979, and presented its

implications for the concept of biopolitics. I have shown that this theor-etical perspective allows for a posthumanist approach capable of over-coming the anthropocentric limitations of Foucaults work andaddressing the critical points Barad raises.23 In the following part, myinterest is not in the parallels or similarities between the new materialism

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and Foucaults idea of a government of things; rather, I will highlightsome important differences between the two theoretical projects.

The concept of a government of things critically engages with the

ontological underpinnings of the new materialism. It does not take life asan essence or a pre-given that at some point in history enters into theorder of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1980a: 1412); quite the con-trary, it inquires into the conditions of the emergence of life as a dis-tinctive domain of practice and thought. The historical nominalism(2008: 318) Foucault proposes in the governmentality lectures, in analyz-ing politics and the economy, is also useful for investigating the matterof life. According to Foucault, these entities are things that do not existand yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth

dividing the true and the false (2008: 20). Like politics and the econ-omy, life is not an object that is always already there, nor can it bereduced to an (illusionary or ideological) effect of scientific practices.Rather, it has to be conceptualized as a transactional reality [realitede transaction] (2008: 297), that is to say a dynamic ensemble of matterand meaning that finally makes it possible to account for the historicalontology (Foucault, 1997b: 315) of life.24

The theoretical merits of this perspective become clearer if we compareit with Barads agential realism and current forms of vitalism in new

materialist scholarship. Let us first note the diff

erential role accordedto techno-scientific practices in the two theoretical projects. Barad iscertainly right in claiming that contemporary technoscientific practicesprovide for much more intimate, pervasive, and profound reconfigur-ations of bodies, knowledge, and their linkage than anticipated byFoucaults notion of biopower (which might have been adequate toeighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices, but not contemporaryones) (2007: 200; see also Haraway, 1997: 12). Technoscience is at theheart of agential realism, while Foucaults discussion of the government

of things focuses on environmentalism (2008: 261) as the managementof environmental conditions in a very broad sense (architectural arrange-ments, urban planning, social welfare, health policies, etc.). However,while Foucault does not discuss the matter of technoscience in thecourse of the lectures, the idea of a government of things is empiricallyopen to the issue. There is nothing that precludes the analysis of tech-noscientific practices and their power from such a perspective.Conversely, it might be asked how useful Barads agential realism isfor investigating the power of technoscientific practices.

In fact, Barads work is characterized by an important tension that isalso symptomatic for the larger part of the literature published under therubric of the new materialism. On the one hand, Barad rightly claims thatmatter is not a stable and given property but rather the fluid and con-tingent effect of practices, asserting that matter does not refer to a fixed




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substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming not athing but a doing, a congealing of agency (Barad, 2008: 139; emphasis inoriginal). On the other hand, we also find in her work and even more in

other proponents of the new materialism the idea that there is some-thing like matters dynamism (Barad, 2007: 135), that a return tomatter is possible and necessary. When Barad states that to restrictpowers productivity to the limited domain of the social [. . .] is tocheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity (2008: 128), we mightwant to ask what fullness and capacity refer to here if not to the ideaof a singular and stable substance and an originary force.

The tendency to assume something like materiality per se (Bennett,2004: 351) is even more acute in other strands of the new materialism.

The one-sided and often distorted critique of the alleged culturalism ofpoststructuralist accounts is sometimes coupled with the idea thatmatter can be separated from interpretation, meaning and discourse.25

As a result, the relational vocabulary stressing interactions (or intra-actions), entanglements and dependencies tends to give way to the onto-logical notion of a solid and stable matter characterized by agentialpowers, inventive capacities and an unpredictable eventfulness (Mol,2013: 3801; Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 326).

Another prominent example of this theoretical ambiguity is Jane

Bennetts concept of thing power. In Vibrant Matter: A PoliticalEcology of Things (2010), Bennett claims that matter must be addressedas an active part of a political process that has so far been dominated byhuman subjectivity. The aim of the book is to rethink the traditionaldistinctions between matter and life, inorganic and organic, passiveobject and active subject (see also Bennett, 2004: 3534). Instead,Bennett invites us to conceive of vitality of matter (2010: vii) by assert-ing that everything is, in a sense, alive (2010: 117). However, this pos-ition is only partly convincing. While it is certainly right to conceive of

life not as a property that pertains to specific bodies but as a process orrather the outcome of certain materializations, it might be more accurateto distinguish between differently composed materialities and variouscomplexities of conjunctions between bodies in which the distinctionbetween animate and inanimate bodies may play a crucial role. As BruceBraun and Sarah Whatmore put it: Is more gained from a closer atten-tion to the specificity of the matter at hand, as opposed to a genericanalogy to life that could be described as a metaphysics? (Braunand Whatmore, 2010b: xxix, emphasis in original; Braun, 2008: 675

7).

26

The relational perspective of a government of things might provemore fruitful in exploring the material and technical conditions that pro-duce life, dependent on and operating in historical specific conjunctionswith other bodies, than the idea of an all-encompassing vitality ofmatter and an original force of things (Bennett, 2004).

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The relational materialism (Mol, 2013: 381) of a government ofthings not only allows us to conceive of life and matter in terms ofa historical ontology, it also endorses a similar operation concerning

politics. It contributes to a problematization of politics as an exclusivelyhuman domain characterized by conflicts of interests or common deci-sion-making.27 The concept of a government of things stresses themateriality of politics by articulating the link between the matter of gov-ernment and the government of matter. It makes it possible to enlargepolitical analysis by including artifacts and objects produced by scienceand technology, but also environmental facts and medical issues. Hereagain, a contrast may be useful to illustrate the distinctive theoreticalmerit of this approach.

As Kristin Asdal, Christian Borch and Ingunn Moser rightly note,there is in science and technology studies a tradition of equating pol-itics with power and a tendency for conceiving of politics nearly every-where, the main site however being precisely science and the laboratory.Science has been seen as politics by other means, the laboratory as aworld-producing factory (Asdal et al., 2008: 5). By contrast, the idea ofa government of things underscores the specificity and the relationalityof politics. Politics is not a given, stable and self-evident entity; rather,its contingent boundaries and material conditions come to the fore.There is a whole range of new theoretical and empirical questionsthat need to be explored: How is the political collective composedand who (or what) is recognized as a political actor (women, blacks,animals . . .) (2008: 6)? How is the government of non-humans articu-lated with and how does it condition the government of humans(Nimmo, 2008)? How should we conceive of the agential propertiesof human and non-human bodies, and their eventfulness and indeter-minacy, without resorting to concepts like resistance, resilience orrecalcitrance that seem to reinscribe passivity or rearticulate theopposition of activity vs. passivity (see Braun and Whatmore, 2010b:xxxxii)?

The conceptual proposal of a government of things aims at bringingtogether an analytics of government developed by Foucault with insightsfrom science and technology studies, especially actor network theory andfeminist technoscience (see e.g. Barry, 2001; Miller and Rose, 2008;Asdal, 2008; Valdivia, 2008).28 It is very much in line with RichieNimmos notion of a symmetrical governmentality that seeks to com-bine Foucaults work on governmentality with the principle of general-ized symmetry originally developed in the context of actor network

theory. Such a theoretical synthesis employs a non-dualist and performa-tive approach in analyzing what is understood as human and non-human bodies or natural and social entities, thereby correcting therelative blindness of Foucauldian approaches to the non-human elem-ents in political assemblages (Nimmo, 2008: 91).




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Conclusion

In this article I have presented Karen Barads critical appraisal ofFoucaults work. While I share her view that in most of his workFoucault remained attached to the idea that human beings alone areendowed with the capacity for action, while objects are passive, I haveargued that a different reading is also possible. The perspective of agovernment of things not only offers some important theoretical advan-tages over Foucaults earlier concept of biopower, it also helps to clarifyconceptual ambiguities of contemporary materialist accounts.Furthermore, this theoretical project might be instrumental in goingbeyond 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 specificconstellations and technical networks between humans and non-humans.Although Foucault never systematically addressed the question of howthings affect humans, the conceptual shift to a government of things notonly 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 theboundaries between the human and the non-human world are nego-

tiated, enacted and stabilized. Furthermore, this theoretical stancemakes it possible to analyze the sharp distinction between the naturalon the one hand and the social on the other, matter and meaning as adistinctive 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 Foucaults work. His writings did not so much systemat-ically pursue as offer promising suggestions for this theoreticalperspective. Developing this project by making it useful for contempor-

ary intellectual debates and political struggles is the challenge facingcurrent 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 ortopics in new materialist scholarship: (1) an ontological reorientation that

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takes up or is even based on developments in the natural sciences; (2) con-sideration of a raft of biopolitical and bioethical issues concerning the statusof life and the human; and (3) a critical and non-dogmatic reengagementwith political economy (Coole and Frost, 2010b: 67).

2. For a brief overview of how the material has been conceptualized in socialtheory, see Reckwitz (2002).

3. In the first volume ofThe History of Sexuality, Foucault intends to showhow deployments of power are directly connected to the body to bodies,functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far from thebody having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible through ananalysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to oneanother [. . .] but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion inaccordance with the development of the modern technologies of power thattake life as their objective. Hence, I do not envision a history of mentalitiesthat would take account of bodies only through the manner in which theyhave been perceived and given meaning and value; but a history of bodiesand the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them hasbeen invested (Foucault, 1980a: 1512).

4. Barad introduces the neologism intra-action as opposed to interaction.While the latter implies that two already existing subjects engage in orencounter one another, the former does not start with the assumption ofpreexisting entities. On the contrary, intra-acting stresses that things assuch do not exist as they are only materialized in a dynamic and ongoing

process that enacts determinate causal structures with determinate bound-aries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies. [. . .

] Reality iscomposed not of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but ofthings-in-phenomena. The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity(2007: 140, 178).

5. For more extensive discussions of Barads theory of agential realism, seeRouse (2004); Ahmed (2008); Pinch (2011).

6. Judith Butler clarifies her position towards the new materialism in an inter-view with Vicky Bell (Bell, 2010: 14951). She explicitly rejects the charge thatshe considers agency an exclusively human capacity: When we talk about

agency, we in fact need to divorce it from the idea of the subject and allow itto be a complex choreographed scene with many kinds of elements social,material, human at work.

7. Gesa Lindemann (2003: 27) criticizes Foucault from the perspective of reflex-ive anthropology. She argues that Foucaults theoretical anti-humanism dis-plays an inherent weakness. Since for him the only relevant social bodies arethose of human beings, he remains navely anthropocentric; see alsoLindemann (2002: 245).

8. See Gary Guttings observation that, with regard to the well-establishednatural sciences, Foucault seems content to accept the approach of

Bachelard and Canguilhem (1989: 255; see also 524).9. Foucaults esteem for the natural sciences and their epistemological profileis very well illustrated in the following interview passage: [I]f, concerning ascience like theoretical physics or organic chemistry, one poses the problem ofits relations with the political and economic structures of society, isnt oneposing an excessively complicated question? Doesnt this set the threshold of




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possible explanations impossibly high? But on the other hand, if one takes aform of knowledge (savoir) like psychiatry, wont the question be mucheasier to resolve, since the epistemological profile of psychiatry is a lowone 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 bookLe Miroire politique, uvre non moins utileque necessaire a`tout monarches, roys, princes, seigneurs, magistrats, et autressurintendants et gouverneurs de Republicques (Lyon, 1555).

11. It is important to bear in mind the fact that in specific historical epochs andcultural contexts non-humans are considered to be legal and moral entities.Jane Bennett mentions the concept of the deodand that figured in Englishlaw from the 13th century until the mid-19th century and acknowledged theagency of non-human entities: In cases of accidental death or injury to ahuman, the nonhuman actant, for example, the carving knife that fell intohuman flesh or the carriage that trampled the leg of a pedestrian becamedeodand (literally, that which must be given to God). In recognition ofitspeculiar efficacy [. . .], the deodand [. . .] was surrendered to the crown to beused (or sold) to compensate for the harm done (Bennett, 2010: 9; emphasisin original; see also Lindemann, 2001; Teubner, 2006).

12. Georges Canguilhem devotes a chapter of his bookLa Connaissance de la vieto the history of the concept of the milieu, demonstrating that it wasimported into biology from mechanics in the second half of the 18th century(1998: 12954; see also Foucault, 2007: 27). For a detailed account of howthe idea of a social environment informed urban planning, architecturaldesign, health policies and welfare administration in France in the 19th and20th century, see Rabinow (1989).

13. All translations from French and German are my own. According toSenellart, Foucault in his lecture on governmentality captures very wellthis transformation from sovereignty to government. However, he cautionsthat de la Perrie` res book is not a particularly well chosen example to illus-trate it, since it repeats the traditional idea of a good order of things alreadyformulated by Augustine in the Christian context (Senellart, 1995: 43, fn 2).

In a similar vein, Danica Dupont and Frank Pearce criticize Foucaultsinterpretation of de la Perrie` res work. Rather than pointing to modernpolitics, they argue, de la Perrie` res understanding of government is morederived from a Renaissance Christian humanist context of cosmic order(2001: 135; 1358). See also Thomas Aquinas concept of a governmentof things as the ruling of the universe by divine reason (Goerner, 1979:11112).

14. In this light, Joseph Go rres declared in 1800 that: If you want to governhumankind, 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, Hobbesand Spinoza understood collectivities [. . .] in decidedly materialist terms, asa question of their ongoing assemblage rather than as primarily theologicalor philosophical questions (Braun and Whatmore, 2010b: xiv). OnSpinozas concept of government, see Saar (2009).

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15. See also Chandra Mukerjis proposal to distinguish between two distinctforms of power: strategics and logistics. While the former operates by pol-itical domination and legitimated forms of rule, the latter focuses on theenvironment (context, situation, location) in which human action and cog-nition take place (2010: 403). It mobilizes the material world in order toshape the conditions of possibility for collective life. A material regimecultivated this way favors some groups over others, but governs imperson-ally through an order of things (2010: 404).

16. Michel Pecheux criticizes Foucaults writings from this period for not beingable to work out a coherent and consistent distinction between processes ofmaterial subjugation of human individuals and the process of domesticatinganimals, and for engaging in a hidden biologism of Bakunins sort(Pecheux, 1984: 645; see also Lemke, 1997: 11217). Interestingly, Selin(1984: 369) in his history of the concept of government cites ErnstFerdinand Klein, a German author of the 18th century, claiming that it isa sign of the despot to treat his subjects as one tames animals and not as onegoverns men [wie Tiere bandigt, nicht wie Menschen regiert].

17. I here take up Giorgio Agambens distinction between zoeand b os as twoforms 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 Foucaults interpretation of the naturalism (2008: 61) of liberalismand its focus on the market milieu (2008: 259) as a self-regulating matter ofgovernment, see Folkers (2013); see also Terranova (2009).

21. On assemblage, see Bennett (2010: 234); Braun notes that the use of theEnglish word assemblage to translate Deleuzes and Guattaris notion ofagencement only partly captures the significance of the term. While theformer is restricted to a composition of things, the latter relates thecapacityto 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 Dupre 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 (Dupre , 2012: 126). Dupre rejects the assumption that all cells in anorganism 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). Dupre argues fora redefinition of organisms as cooperating assemblies. In this perspective,

human life only exists as the effect of symbiotic systems linking human andnon-human life: A functioning human organism is a symbiotic systemcontaining a multitude of microbial cells bacteria, archaea, and fungi without which the whole would be seriously dysfunctional and ultimatelynon-viable. Most of these reside in the gut, but they are also found on theskin, and in all body cavities. In fact about 90 per cent of the cells that make




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up the human body belong to such microbial symbionts and, owing to theirgreat diversity, they contribute something like 99 per cent of the genes in thehuman 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 Barads critical reading of Foucault onlyengages with his work prior to the lectures on governmentality. The theor-etical shift that goes along with Foucaults concept of government and thevery different account of power it implies are never discussed by Barad.

24. See Lemke (2007) for a similar argument about the genealogy of themodern state. On recent tensions and historical transformations on howlife is defined and constituted, see Helmreich (2011).

25. New materialist literature often displays a caricatured understanding ofpoststructuralism 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 bymany new materialists only makes sense if they limit beforehand the con-structivist ambition to epistemic regimes or discursive forms (see e.g. Cooleand 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 isunproblematic to assert that all existing bodies are affective and susceptibleto 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 ofintensities in the way Bennett describes, then, far from being a property, it isa particular way of relating to the affections that surround an assemblage.Thus, on Bennetts own account, it is possible to assert that matter itself isnot alive per se, but that life denotes a particular intricacy of responsivenesswith complex alliances between smaller constituent assemblages (Bannon,2011: 3; emphasis in original).

27. Contrary to Barads charge that Foucault takes the social for granted, itmight be stated that Foucaults work on government offers elements of a

genealogy of the social. In his lectures on governmentality, he describes howthe concept of society emerged in the 18th century in the context of liberalgovernment as a complex and independent reality (Foucault, 2000c: 352).In this light, the social is not something that is fixed and stable; rather, it isan entity characterized by contingent conditions of emergence and onlyarising in a specific historical constellation. On the emergence of the socialas a new political positivity (Ewald, 1987: 6), see Donzelot (1984); Ewald(1986); Procacci (1993).

28. See, for example, Andrew Barrys reminder that in Foucaults account,government is inevitably a technical matter. Practices of government rely

on an array of more or less formalized and more or less specialized technicaldevices from car seat-belts and driving codes to dietary regimes; and fromeconomic instruments to psychotherapy. Moreover, government operatesboth on and across many distinctions which are so critical to our sense ofthe terrains of politics: public and private; state and market; the realmof culture [. . .] and the domain of nature [. . .]. In this way, the study of

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government [. . .] opens up a much broader field of politics to inspection(2001: 5).

29. Annemarie Mol, in her article on ontological politics, credits Foucault witha crucial role in the intellectual articulations of ontological politics (1999:87, fn. 2).

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Woolgar S and Lezaun J (2013) The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology inscience and technology studies. Social Studies of Science 43(3): 32140.

Thomas Lemke is Professor of Sociology with a Focus onBiotechnologies, Nature and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciencesof the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. His research interests includesocial and political theory, biopolitics and social studies of genetic andreproductive technologies. Recent publications include Governmentality:Current Issues and Future Challenges (co-edited with Ulrich Bro cklingand Susanne Krasmann; Routledge, 2011); Biopolitics: An AdvancedIntroduction (New York University Press, 2011); Foucault,Governmentality and Critique (Paradigm, 2011); Perspectives on Genetic

Discrimination (Routledge, 2013); and Die Natur in der Soziologie.Gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen und Folgen biotechnologischenWissens (Campus, 2013).

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