Governmentality and political ecology

Mobilizing a politico-ecological outlook, the chapter aims at exploring how the category of governmentality – both liberal and neoliberal – can shed light on ecology-related discursive formations that have become mainstream in recent years, namely the green economy and the Anthropocene. Both express an anti-naturalist political rationality. The former corresponds to a capitalist attempt to incorporate ecological limits as a new terrain for accumulation; the latter to a further step, whereby the very notion of limit gets a new operability. As Foucault showed, key to liberal governmentality was seconding the biophysical world’s own dynamics. As limits to the actionability of nature, these seemed to disappear during the long season of cheap energy. The rise of neoliberalism can be regarded, to a significant extent, as a reply to the re-emergence of limits by means of their integration in valorisation processes, either as endlessly receding boundaries of extraction or as internal differentiations all the way down. Thus, it is possible to distinguish two variants of capitalist “environmentality”: a political economy where the commodity-form rests on epistemic operations and another one, nested in the former and elicited by the rise of global threats, where the dualism of nature and artefact is denaturalized and commoditization invests virtually anything on the planet. Whereas the former made the ecological crisis visible, the latter has engendered different ways to manage it.