Governing Vitalities and the Security State

Abstract

In the lectures on Security, Territory, Population, his account of the consolidation of what he called the Security State, Michel Foucault emphasized the ways that a new articulation of biopolitics and governmentality altered the relations between population and territory (Foucault, 2007; Elden, 2007; Legg, 2005; 2011; Nally, 2011).1 Indeed, for Foucault these new relations were in part constitutive of modern notions of state and people, such that, and again in part, a state effect is something produced by the strategies of biopolitics and governmentality. As always with Foucault, a historical argument was made for a political purpose. In order to attend to something contingent in the present, Foucault characteristically illustrated the conditions of its emergence, an intellectual strategy described by Mitchell Dean as making critical and effective histories (Dean, 1994; Kearns, 2007). In broad terms, Foucault highlighted a shift from territory to population, from sovereignty to security, as a focus for the arts of government. For Foucault, the monarch's concern with sovereignty in the earlier period, variously located as ending some time between the mid-seventeenth and late-eighteenth centuries, emphasized the regulation of territorial boundaries. In the security state that followed, the imperatives of economic circulation breached the walls of sovereignty and the arts of government now attended more to the capacities of the state, regulating population and other resources. The political issue that arises from this, exemplified for Foucault in various ways by 1 I want to thank Chris Philo both for the title and for the provocation of an invitation to contribute to the plenary sessions on "Geographies of Insecurity" at the RGS/IBG Conference in Edinburgh, July 2012. 2 Field Code ChangedSweden and Germany, was about regulating individuals to give collective security against threats to the productivity, or force, of the body politic.In this essay, I want to take up the geographical and vital themes of this set of lectures and assess both the nature of the break posited by Foucault and the political purchase afforded by this view of the distinctiveness of the present. My strategy is to reverse Foucault's emphasis and look for aspects of the regulation of life in the earlier period and to aspects of the regulation of territory in the later one. This is not because I think Foucault ignores vitality in his first period or ignores territoriality in his second, but, rather, that the integration of the two themes, rather than the predominance of one over the other, shows the importance in both periods of a set of relations about which Foucault has rather little to say altogether. My conclusion is that, in both periods, life and space are woven together in ways that are distinctly geopolitical and, furthermore, that this dimension of the spatiality of vital security gives us important purchase upon our moment of present danger. Although Foucault saw the Socialist focus upon the state as obscuring the nature of governmen...

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