The Government of Things

At once an incisive critique of new materialisms and a timely extension of Michel Foucault’s analytics of government, Thomas Lemke’s The Government of Things is indispensable for anyone concerned with emerging forms of environmentality and the missing politics of the 'material turn.' By revisiting key terms in Foucault's later writings—dispositive, technology, milieu—and aligning an analytics of government with key insights from feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies, Lemke gives us powerful tools to analyze and historicize the dynamic socio-techno-ecological arrangements that differentially and unequally materialize human and nonhuman life and to imagine how they might be composed otherwise. ~Bruce Braun, co-editor of Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

The Government of Things is an invaluable exploration and appraisal of new materialist approaches, advancing the argument that, while such approaches have much to offer, they also have distinctive weaknesses in handling questions of history and politics. Thomas Lemke proposes to remedy these shortcomings by drawing from Michel Foucault’s 'tool-box,' thus situating the book's analysis at the vital intersection between science and technology studies and the study of governmental rationality. Particularly for those of us who share Lemke’s ambivalence about new materialism, this book is an essential guide to the limits of this approach—and to avenues for productively combining it with other modes of inquiry. ~Stephen J. Collier, co-author of The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security