THE LIST SERVES: POPULATION CONTROL AND POWER
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politics is to let things happen as a means of governing all of the elements circulating in its milieu. In this milieu, the list serves a uniquely new role of fracturing risks from normal populations and, at the same time, serves as the primary instrument for the enforcement or the policing of the classes it constitutes. So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.75 Managing populations is not simply a task of controlling the overall movement of people, things, and events, all freely circulating, but rather, ‘managing the population means managing it in depth, with all its finer points and detail’.76 In other words, governmentality is not merely about controlling the circulation of populations, but is also inextricably intertwined with managing accumulations of data. In Foucault’s conception of governmentality, the administration, organization, and knowledge development of the mundane minutiae that the list has served since ancient times continues to be critical, as it is redeployed in the apparatuses of security and their attendant juridical-disciplinary mechanisms. But governmentality means more than just the management of populations and the minutiae of elements that circulate in milieus of security, and lists too serve a different role in this art: And maybe, in a completely general, rough, and therefore inexact way, we could reconstruct the major forms, the major economies of power in the following way: first, the state of justice, born in the feudal type of territoriality and broadly corresponding to a society of customary and written law, with a whole interplay of commitments and litigation; second, the administrative state that corresponds to a society of regulations and disciplines; and finally, a state of government that is no longer essentially defined by its territoriality, by the surface occupied, but by a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density, and, for sure, the territory it covers, but which is, in a way, only one of its components. This state of government, which essentially bears on the population and calls upon and employs economic knowledge as an instrument, would correspond to a society controlled by apparatuses of security.77 In this way, Foucault saw in governmentality a ‘tendency’, ‘a line of force’, that for a very long time, and particularly throughout the West, had constantly pushed its way into pre-eminence over other types of power, particularly over sovereignty and discipline, and this is the kind of power we call ‘government’.78 Indeed, government, as Foucault theorizes it, is a series of knowledges (‘savoirs’) coupled with the development of a series of governmental apparatuses (‘appareils’) that install an economic milieu of political circulation, and it is the space of movement that lists serve.
75 76 77 78
Foucault, ‘1 February 1978 Governmentality’, p. 108. Foucault, ‘1 February 1978 Governmentality’, p. 107. Foucault, ‘1 February 1978 Governmentality’, pp. 109-110. Foucault, ‘1 February 1978 Governmentality’, p. 108.