New Materialisms: Foucault and the ‘Government of Things’

Karen Barad’s Critical Appraisal of Foucault’s Work

Karen Barad was originally trained in theoretical physics, and is now a professor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has published extensively in 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 poststructuralist theory and feminist technoscience. The result of this theoretical synthesis is Barad’s concept of agential realism, which aims at ‘a crucial rethinking of much of Western epistemology and ontology’ (2007: 83; emphasis in original). Barad’s account is extensively developed in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, published in 2007. The objective of the book is to reconceptualize the interrelations (or ‘intra-actions’ in Barad’s vocabulary ⁴ ) between humans and non-humans and to rethink the categories of subjectivity, agency and causality. She seeks to develop ‘an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and non-human, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism’ (2007: 26; emphasis in original). ⁵

In Barad’s view, there are several problems with Foucault’s (and Judith Butler’s) account of matter. She credits both theorists with developing an analysis of power relations that focuses on productivity and performativity. In this perspective, ‘power is not an external force that acts on a subject; there is only a reiterated acting that is power in its stabilizing and sedimenting effects’ (2007: 235). While this account makes it possible in principle to investigate the materialization of bodies, Barad sees Foucault’s work as characterized by three serious shortcomings.

First, she argues that Foucault restricts the productivity of power ‘to the limited domain of the “social”’ (2008: 138). The conceptual privilege Foucault attributes to the social makes it impossible to engage with matter in a substantive way, since he regards ‘matter as an end product rather than an active factor in further materializations’ (2008: 138; see also 2007: 235). Barad claims that this approach restages matter’s passivity and is unable to acknowledge the contribution of non-social factors in materialization processes. Thus, Butler and Foucault both ‘honor the nature-culture binary (to different degrees), thereby deferring a thoroughgoing genealogy of its production’ (Barad, 2007: 146). By privileging the ‘social’, Foucault, in Barad’s view, cannot understand the complex intra-actions of human and non-human actors.

The second criticism is closely connected to the first. Barad stresses that ‘for both, Butler and Foucault, agency belongs only to the human domain, and neither addresses the nature of technoscientific practices and their profoundly productive effects on human bodies, as well as the ways in which these practices are deeply implicated in what constitutes the human’ (2007: 145–6). ⁶ In this light, Foucault’s analysis remains one-sided and limited. It ‘focuses on the production of human bodies, to the exclusion of non-human bodies whose constitution he takes for granted’ (2007: 169). What is needed, in Barad’s eyes, is a posthumanist concept of performativity that accounts for the materialization of all bodies and finally allows for an investigation of the practices through which the boundaries between the categories of human and non-human emerge and are stabilized.

The third concern addresses what Barad considers Foucault’s unsatisfactory account of how the ‘precise nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena’ is articulated (2007: 200, 146; 2008: 128). As Foucault, according to Barad, takes for granted the boundaries between nature and culture, human and non-human, he also fails to give an adequate account of the complex and dynamic relations between meaning and matter. She argues that in Foucault’s work matter serves as a passive resource or raw material for social power relations. Thus, one central element of an account in which matter really matters is in Barad’s view a reformulation of causality as 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 Foucault’s concept of power does not provide a dynamic concept of materiality that takes account of the materialization of human as well as non-human bodies (2007: 200). In a similar vein, Paul Rutherford stresses that Foucault failed to see that the operations of biopower consist in the ‘“making-up” of both people and things’ (1999: 44; emphasis in original). Rutherford notes that the regulation of the population requires the management of the environment that 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 of human bodies and human life, defining a ‘set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy’ (Foucault, 2007: 1; see also Foucault, 1980a: 141–2). ⁷

There are two important aspects of Foucault’s choice not to develop this conceptual link and to limit the analysis to human bodies and human life (see also Rutherford, 1999: 61, fn 7). One contributing factor is that his critical analysis of power and its nexus with knowledge focused on the ‘human sciences’. While Foucault sometimes addresses aspects of the life sciences (anatomy, physiology, clinical medicine) that challenge any neat separation between nature and society, the natural and the human sciences, he was principally concerned with the development and power effects in ‘disciplines’ like psychology, sociology, pedagogy and other ‘human sciences’. Ironically, it seems that it is exactly this focus on the ‘human sciences’ that reproduces a humanist blind spot in his work. The second symptom of Foucault’s anthropocentrism is a certain inconsistency and asymmetry in his account, since he accepts that there are crucial differences in epistemological and political terms between the natural and the human sciences. By following his teachers Bachelard and Canguilhem in this respect, he tended to underestimate the relevance of the natural sciences for a genealogy of power. ⁸ In contrast to the ‘dubious sciences’ (Foucault, 1980b: 109), by which he meant the human sciences, Foucault credited the natural sciences with a high-level ‘epistemological profile’ (p. 109). ⁹ As Rutherford rightly notes, Foucault’s ‘attitude towards the natural sciences was not developed in a manner fully consistent with his own analysis of the relation between power and knowledge’ (Rutherford, 1999: 61, fn 7; 2000: 119; Rouse, 1993: 137–62).

However, as the philosopher of science Joseph Rouse points out, Foucault’s analysis of power could be fruitfully used to explain power effects in the natural sciences. He points to ‘extensive parallels’ (1987: 212) between the disciplinary power at work in prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories and the construction and manipulation of laboratory objects (Rouse, 1987: 209–47). In the following, I would like to make a similar argument by using elements in Foucault’s work on government that provide theoretical resources for an ‘irreductionist approach to the conduct of government’ (Asdal, 2008: 124). While Barad and others might be right to criticize Foucault’s concept of power and his writings in general for their humanist blind spots, I will propose a posthumanist approach implicit but not developed in Foucault’s work by focusing on the idea of a ‘government of things’, which Foucault presents in his lecture series on governmentality.

Foucault’s Idea of a ‘Government of Things’

In the 1978 lecture series at the Collège de France, Foucault refers to a ‘curious definition’ (2007: 97) of government provided by Guillaume de la Perrière in an early modern tract on the art of government. ¹⁰ Here, government is conceived of as ‘the right dispositions of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end’ (2007: 96). Foucault stresses that the reference to things is decisive in this definition, which distinguishes government from sovereignty. While the former operates with and on ‘things’, the latter is exercised on a territory and ‘consequently on the subjects that inhabit’ it (2007: 96).

According to Foucault, de la Perrière’s notion of a ‘government of things’ does not constitute an additional domain of government apart from and separate to the government of men. Rather than restaging ‘an opposition of things and men’, it relies on ‘a sort of complex of men and things’ (2007: 96). It is worth quoting the whole passage:

The things government must be concerned about, La Perrière says, are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, 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, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death. (2007: 96)

There are several important points to be noted here. First, following Foucault’s interpretation the art of government does not conceive of interactions between two stable and fixed entities – ‘humans’ and ‘things’. Rather, Foucault employs a relational approach. This is why ‘things’ appears in inverted commas. In fact, the qualification ‘human’ or ‘thing’ and the political and moral distinction between them is itself an instrument and effect of the art of government, and does not constitute its origin or point of departure. Thus, the ‘government of things’ does not rely on a foundational sorting of subjects and objects. Quite the contrary, Foucault questions the idea that contrasts active subjects with passive objects. He employs the term ‘subject-object’ (2007: 44, 77) to address the phenomenon of the population as, on the one hand, a material body ‘on which and towards which mechanisms are directed’ and, on the other, ‘a subject, since it is called upon to conduct itself in such and such a fashion’ (2007: 42–3). In this perspective, the art of government determines what is defined as subject and object, as human and non-human. It establishes and enacts the boundaries between socially relevant and politically recognized existence and ‘pure matter’, something that does not possess legal-moral protection and is ‘reduced’ to ‘things’. ¹¹

In distinguishing between government, on the one hand, and sovereignty and discipline, on the other, in the lecture of 11 January 1978, Foucault introduces the notion of the milieu. The milieu, he says, ‘is what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another’ (2007: 20–1). ¹² It is ‘a set of natural givens – rivers, marshes, hills – and a set of artificial givens – an agglomeration of individuals, of houses etc.’ (2007: 21). The milieu defines an ‘intersection between a multiplicity of living individuals working and coexisting with each other in a set of material 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 in relations between humans and non-human entities. Also, the milieu articulates the link between the natural and the artificial without systematically distinguishing between them.

Secondly, since there is no pre-given and fixed political borderline between humans and things, it is possible to state that ‘humans’ are governed as ‘things’. While medieval forms of government sought to direct human souls to salvation, modern government treats human beings as ‘things’ to achieve particular ends. By this Foucault does not mean a global and all-pervasive process of reification ‘reducing’ men to passive and inert things; quite the contrary, the interests, sensations, and affects of men are essential facts that political reason – a rational knowledge that no longer relies on a divine order of things or the principles of prudence and wisdom – has to take into account. In his comprehensive history of the art of government, Michel Senellart underscores this historical transformation that distinguishes the modern concept of government from the principle of sovereignty:

The government of things replaces the older government of the souls 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 à la physique des forces]. (Senellart, 1995: 42–3; 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-demographic facts (birth and death rates, health status, life span, the production of wealth, etc.). By statistically aggregating men on the level of populations, they finally became calculable and measurable and could be conceived of as physical phenomena themselves: a ‘social physics’, in the words of the Belgian sociologist Adolphe Quételet (see Ewald, 1986: 108–131). The governor has to take into account the passions and interests of the ‘multitude’ in the same way as he takes into account the climate and the territory, and he has to govern them according to their own nature. ¹⁴ Given this ‘physical’ perspective, it would be a mistake to make a systematic political distinction between humans and ‘things’. As Foucault puts it, ‘to govern means to govern things’ (2007: 97).

The third point: in introducing the idea of a government of things, Foucault stresses that it enacts a mode of power very different from sovereignty: ‘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 than laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means’ (2007: 99). Foucault further clarified this concept of government as ‘arranging things’ in an interview some years later. Government, he says, is characterized by ‘a mode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts on their actions […]. It operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of active subjects is able to inscribe itself’ (Foucault, 2000a: 340–1). Thus, the art of government consists in the ‘conduct of conduct’, in structuring ‘the possible field of action of others’ (2000a: 341). ¹⁵ Two things are worth restating. First, government leads ‘indirectly’ via arranging things or managing complexes of humans and things. Second, ‘governmental naturalism’ (Foucault, 2008: 61) works on a terrain that is co-produced by the practices of government themselves: ‘Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality. It is […] its indispensable hypodermis. It is the other face of something whose visible face, visible for the governors, is their own action’ (Massumi, 2009: 165).

Foucault sees this ‘intrication of men and things’ (2007: 97) made explicit in the metaphor of the ship that often comes up in treatises on government. To govern a ship means to be responsible for the sailors, but it also involves ‘taking care of the vessel and the cargo’ and taking into account ‘winds, reefs, storms, and bad weather’ (2007: 97). The ship is, according to Foucault, a political symbol that stresses the specificity of the art of government. It creates and mobilizes the space in which humans and things are arranged, without possessing or mastering it: it is a ‘floating space, a placeless space, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean’ (Foucault, 1998: 184–5).

Without explicitly mentioning it, Foucault here refers to the etymology of government. The verbs ‘regere’ and ‘gubernare’ originally denoted the direction of a ship, ‘guvernaculum’ meaning the helm. From Cicero to Thomas Aquinas, the government of a state is compared to steering a ship (Sellin, 1984: 363; see also Senellart, 1995). This political imagination is still present in the 18th century, when in 1777 Adelung defines ‘government’ in the following terms: ‘to determine the direction of a movement according to one’s will and to preserve it in this movement’ [die Richtung der Bewegung nach seinem Willen bestimmen und in dieser Bewegung erhalten] (quoted in Sellin, 1984: 363). To illustrate this definition he refers to the following metaphors: ‘To govern a ship, to govern the chariot, the shaft, the horses in front of the chariot’ [Ein Schiff regieren. Den Wagen, die Deichsel, die Pferde vor dem Wagen regieren] (p. 363).

A Different Concept of Biopolitics

The lecture series on governmentality marks an important theoretical shift in relation to Foucault’s previous work, especially the work on biopolitics. When in the lectures of 1978 and 1979 Foucault defines ‘liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics’ (2008: 22), this results from the self-critical insight that his analysis until then had been one-sided and unsatisfactory, since it focused mainly on processes involving population 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 processes essentially limits itself to subjugation and corporeal dressage, hence to the dimension of zoé, with techniques of self-formation receiving little attention. ¹⁶ With the problem of government, the perspective broadens and the question of moral and political existence also emerges: the problem, then, of bíos. ¹⁷ Beyond technologies of bodily disciplining and the regulation of the population, attention is now also drawn to the self-constitution of individual and collective subjects – what Foucault in his later work came to call ‘political technologies of individuals’ and ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 2000b: 404, resp. 1997a: 223). ¹⁸

Foucault’s idea of a ‘government of things’ is useful as a way of clarifying this point, especially when he discusses the concept of the milieu (2007: 20–3; 77–8). It would be a mistake to see the new interest in the bíos that arises with the governmentality lectures, especially in the work on liberal and neo-liberal governmentality, as some complementary aspect that is just added to the former analysis. In fact, Foucault is interested in the interactions between these biopolitical dimensions – zoé and bíos – and how they produce and stabilize one another. This becomes clear when he discusses Moheau’s Recherches et considerations sur la population de la France, describing the author ‘as the first great theorist of what we could call biopolitics’ (2007: 22). ¹⁹ Foucault no longer refers to the biological or physical dimension of biopolitics alone, but cites approvingly Moheau’s idea that government means to ‘govern the physical and moral existence of their subjects’ (2007: 23; quotation taken from Moheau, emphasis added). The idea of a ‘government of things’ addresses the relationship between the physical and the moral, the natural and the artificial as something that cannot be reduced to the domain of the social. As Foucault writes: ‘The sovereign deals with a nature, or rather with the perpetual conjunction, the perpetual intrication of a geographical, climatic, and physical milieu with the human species insofar as it has a body and a soul, a physical and moral existence.’ Foucault sees a new political technology emerging that acts on the milieu as it provides the ‘point of articulation’ (2007) between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’, the physical and the moral. Here we note that Foucault does not take non-human nature for granted, but is interested in how it is articulated within practices – practices that are here conceived as ‘more-than-human’ practices. ²⁰

The idea of a government of things helps to enact a different understanding of biopolitics that no longer exclusively addresses ‘phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species’ (Foucault, 1980a: 141). This important theoretical shift entails three dimensions. First, we see a move beyond a concept of biopolitics as limited to the physical and biological existence to a ‘government of things’ that takes into account the interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Here conceptual devices that bridge the dualisms (while at the same time being instrumental in analyzing them) are useful. Examples include ‘technology’ and ‘dispositif’ in Foucault’s writings, ‘agencement’ (assemblage) ²¹ in Deleuze and Guattari’s work (1987), and ‘apparatus’ in Barad’s agential realism (Barad, 2007). Secondly, the concept of milieu eschews any simple and uni-directional concept of causality or focus on human agency. According to Foucault, the milieu is ‘an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another’ (2007: 21). This observation is very much in line with Barad’s reminder that causal relations do not preexist but rather are produced in agential materializations (see Barad, 2007: 236).

There is a third difference between this idea and the concept of biopolitics Foucault had proposed in earlier publications: not only does the government of things relate to moral issues and the interplay of physical and moral questions, but the biological can only play out in a certain ‘milieu’. In the perspective of a government of things, neither nature nor life is a self-evident and stable entity or property. Foucault refers to ‘a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live’ (2007: 21). In this perspective, life is not a given but depends on conditions 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 Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979, and presented its implications for the concept of biopolitics. I have shown that this theoretical perspective allows for a posthumanist approach capable of overcoming the anthropocentric limitations of Foucault’s work and addressing the critical points Barad raises. ²³ In the following part, my interest is not in the parallels or similarities between the new materialism and Foucault’s idea of a ‘government of things’; rather, I will highlight some 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 as an essence or a pre-given that at some point in history enters ‘into the order of knowledge and power’ (Foucault, 1980a: 141–2); quite the contrary, it inquires into the conditions of the emergence of ‘life’ as a distinctive domain of practice and thought. The ‘historical nominalism’ (2008: 318) Foucault proposes in the governmentality lectures, in analyzing ‘politics’ and ‘the economy’, is also useful for investigating the matter of life. According to Foucault, these entities are ‘things that do not exist and 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 economy’, ‘life’ is not an object that is always already there, nor can it be reduced to an (illusionary or ideological) effect of scientific practices. Rather, it has to be conceptualized as a ‘transactional reality’ [réalité de transaction] (2008: 297), that is to say a dynamic ensemble of matter and meaning that finally makes it possible to account for the ‘historical ontology’ (Foucault, 1997b: 315) of life. ²⁴

The theoretical merits of this perspective become clearer if we compare it with Barad’s agential realism and current forms of vitalism in new materialist scholarship. Let us first note the differential role accorded to techno-scientific practices in the two theoretical projects. Barad is certainly right in claiming that ‘contemporary technoscientific practices provide for much more intimate, pervasive, and profound reconfigurations of bodies, knowledge, and their linkage than anticipated by Foucault’s notion of biopower (which might have been adequate to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices, but not contemporary ones)’ (2007: 200; see also Haraway, 1997: 12). Technoscience is at the heart of agential realism, while Foucault’s discussion of the ‘government of things’ focuses on ‘environmentalism’ (2008: 261) as the management of environmental conditions in a very broad sense (architectural arrangements, urban planning, social welfare, health policies, etc.). However, while Foucault does not discuss the matter of technoscience in the course of the lectures, the idea of a ‘government of things’ is empirically open to the issue. There is nothing that precludes the analysis of technoscientific practices and their power from such a perspective. Conversely, it might be asked how useful Barad’s agential realism is for investigating the power of technoscientific practices.

In fact, Barad’s work is characterized by an important tension that is also symptomatic for the larger part of the literature published under the rubric of the new materialism. On the one hand, Barad rightly claims that matter is not a stable and given property but rather the fluid and contingent effect of practices, asserting that ‘matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad, 2008: 139; emphasis in original). 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 something like ‘matter’s dynamism’ (Barad, 2007: 135), that a ‘return to matter’ is possible and necessary. When Barad states that ‘to restrict power’s productivity to the limited domain of the “social” […] is to cheat matter out of the fullness of its capacity’ (2008: 128), we might want to ask what ‘fullness’ and ‘capacity’ refer to here – if not to the idea of 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’ of poststructuralist accounts is sometimes coupled with the idea that ‘matter’ 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 ontological notion of a solid and stable matter characterized by agential powers, inventive capacities and an unpredictable eventfulness (Mol, 2013: 380–1; Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 326).

Another prominent example of this theoretical ambiguity is Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing power’. In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Bennett claims that matter must be addressed as an active part of a political process that has so far been dominated by human subjectivity. The aim of the book is to rethink the traditional distinctions between matter and life, inorganic and organic, passive object and active subject (see also Bennett, 2004: 353–4). Instead, Bennett invites us to conceive of ‘vitality of matter’ (2010: vii) by asserting that ‘everything is, in a sense, alive’ (2010: 117). However, this position 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 or rather the outcome of certain materializations, it might be more accurate to distinguish between differently composed materialities and various complexities of conjunctions between bodies – in which the distinction between animate and inanimate bodies may play a crucial role. As Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore put it: ‘Is more gained from a closer attention to the specificity of the matter at hand, as opposed to a generic analogy to “life” that could be described as a metaphysics?’ (Braun and Whatmore, 2010b: xxix, emphasis in original; Braun, 2008: 675–7). ²⁶ The relational perspective of a ‘government of things’ might prove more fruitful in exploring the material and technical conditions that produce ‘life’, dependent on and operating in historical specific conjunctions with other bodies, than the idea of an all-encompassing ‘vitality of matter’ and an original ‘force of things’ (Bennett, 2004).

The ‘relational materialism’ (Mol, 2013: 381) of a ‘government of things’ not only allows us to conceive of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ in terms of a ‘historical ontology’, it also endorses a similar operation concerning ‘politics’. It contributes to a problematization of politics as an exclusively human domain characterized by conflicts of interests or common decision-making. ²⁷ The concept of a ‘government of things’ stresses the materiality of politics by articulating the link between the matter of government and the government of matter. It makes it possible to enlarge political analysis by including artifacts and objects produced by science and technology, but also environmental facts and medical issues. Here again, a contrast may be useful to illustrate the distinctive theoretical merit of this approach.

As Kristin Asdal, Christian Borch and Ingunn Moser rightly note, there is in science and technology studies a tradition of ‘equating politics with power’ and a tendency ‘for conceiving of politics nearly everywhere, the main site however being precisely science and the laboratory. Science has been seen as “politics by other means”, the laboratory as a world-producing factory’ (Asdal et al., 2008: 5). By contrast, the idea of a government of things underscores the specificity and the relationality of 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 questions that need to be explored: How is the political collective composed and who (or what) is recognized as a political actor (women, blacks, animals …) (2008: 6)? How is the government of non-humans articulated with and how does it condition the government of humans (Nimmo, 2008)? How should we conceive of the agential properties of human and non-human bodies, and their eventfulness and indeterminacy, without resorting to concepts like ‘resistance’, ‘resilience’ or ‘recalcitrance’ that seem to reinscribe passivity or rearticulate the opposition of activity vs. passivity (see Braun and Whatmore, 2010b: xx–xxii)?

The conceptual proposal of a ‘government of things’ aims at bringing together an analytics of government developed by Foucault with insights from science and technology studies, especially actor network theory and feminist technoscience (see e.g. Barry, 2001; Miller and Rose, 2008; Asdal, 2008; Valdivia, 2008). ²⁸ It is very much in line with Richie Nimmo’s notion of a ‘symmetrical governmentality’ that seeks to combine Foucault’s work on governmentality with the principle of ‘generalized symmetry’ originally developed in the context of actor network theory. Such a theoretical synthesis employs a non-dualist and performative approach in analyzing what is understood as ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ bodies or ‘natural’ and ‘social’ entities, thereby correcting the ‘relative blindness of Foucauldian approaches to the non-human elements in political assemblages’ (Nimmo, 2008: 91).

Conclusion

In this article I have presented Karen Barad’s critical appraisal of Foucault’s work. While I share her view that in most of his work Foucault remained attached to the idea that human beings alone are endowed with the capacity for action, while objects are passive, I have argued that a different reading is also possible. The perspective of a ‘government of things’ not only offers some important theoretical advantages over Foucault’s earlier concept of biopower, it also helps to clarify conceptual ambiguities of contemporary materialist accounts. Furthermore, this theoretical project might be instrumental in going beyond 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 comprehensive reality that includes the material environments and the specific constellations and technical networks between humans and non-humans. Although Foucault never systematically addressed the question of how things affect humans, the conceptual shift to a ‘government of things’ not only makes it possible to extend the territory of government and multiplies the elements and the relations it consists of, it also initiates a reflexive perspective that takes into account the diverse ways in which the boundaries between the human and the non-human world are negotiated, enacted and stabilized. Furthermore, this theoretical stance makes it possible to analyze the sharp distinction between the natural on the one hand and the social on the other, matter and meaning as a distinctive instrument and effect of governmental rationalities and technologies or as a specific form of ‘ontological politics’ (Mol, 1999). ²⁹

However, the idea of a ‘government of things’ remains an underdeveloped theme in Foucault’s work. His writings did not so much systematically pursue as offer promising suggestions for this theoretical perspective. Developing this project by making it useful for contemporary intellectual debates and political struggles is the challenge facing current work on the matter of government.