Foucault, power and governmentality

So far we have seen how poststructuralists can be understood to ‘open up’ the state through an examination of the political rationalities that constitute it. By looking at the discursive rationalities that invoke the image of the state as a centre to social life, they have decentred the idea of a singular political power.

Foucault polemically challenged political theory and analysis by inveighing against the notion of sovereignty. ‘Political theory’, he suggested, ‘has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign’ (1980: 121). It is concerned with the single location and origin of power and with secondary questions as to how it may be legitimately exercised, contained and directed. Further, sovereign power is taken to express itself through the setting of limits typically expressed as laws concerning what can’t be done. It was just this that Foucault sought to dispute, problematizing the concept of sover­eignty in order to open the way to closer examination of the particular and peculiar strategies and practices that comprise contemporary power (see Foucault 1980, 1991). The reduction of power to a state construed as a rational, calculating subject obscures the organizational continuity between state and non-state agencies that work throughout society to administer ‘disciplinary’ and ‘normalizing’ techniques of governance. Foucault sought a ‘political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problem of law and prohibition’ and declared that ‘We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has still to be done’ (Foucault 1980: 121).

From this perspective our object of analysis ceases to be the state and becomes a diverse range of agencies, apparatuses and practices producing varied mechanisms of control and varied forms of knowledge that make areas or aspects of social life available for governmental action. Government works through and out of an ensemble of authorities, knowledges and fields of expertise (medical, academic-intellectual, economic and so on). Conceived as a sovereign authority, the state is a part of a myth of power that charac­terizes modernity: namely, a repressive instrument emanating from a single, coherent source. Foucault, by contrast, is interested in the operation of power as a positive force dispersed throughout society; that is to say, one that does not repress or limit behaviour but creates and encourages certain forms of it. State and government activities are not self-contained but derive from ‘a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth’ (Foucault 1980: 122).

In historical studies, Foucault traced the emergence of such networks of power in relation to techniques of control, surveillance and discipline showing how these were adopted within a number of institutional settings in the eighteenth century: prisons, schools, factories, hospitals. These prac­tices made possible new kinds of knowledge about human behaviour leading to the further codification of procedures to monitor and observe subjects, to interview them, to gather information, document and tabulate the results. Such knowledge enabled techniques of moulding behaviour and producing new kinds of person: useful, obedient, and self-monitoring. This form of social control, more subtle than brute force, became increasingly generalized in contemporary society, a ‘microphysics of power’ in which the human body is the object of knowledges that categorize, problematize, discipline and normalize (Foucault 1977: 24-31).

Subsequently, Foucault drew attention to the exercise of what he called ‘bio-power’.

Such activity is not made possible or directed from a single centre of sovereign power. For Foucault it is more like the declaration of a general and permanent state of emergency in society with many agencies, institu­tions and actors continually developing new techniques and identifying new areas that require examination and intervention.

Foucault’s writings on ‘governmentality’ are thus concerned, not with the disciplinary practices of specific institutions but with techniques for admin­istering whole populations, shaping and guiding the behaviour of subjects who, in modern liberal society, are formally free yet still objects of social policy (see Foucault 1991; Gordon 1991). Individual conduct is not itself the object of policy but, rather, ‘the conduct of conduct’; that is, ways of shaping the exercise of freedom. Liberalism, from this perspective, is not just an ideology but also a distinctive ‘rationality of government’: ‘a system of thinking about the nature and practice of government... capable of making some form of that activity thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it is practised’ (Gordon 1991: 3). Governmental rationalities constitute the objects of government as questions to be solved or failures to be rectified, inviting the formulation of ‘programmes’ and ‘initiatives’ which justify the utilization of ‘technologies’ be they financial measures, legal controls, bargaining procedures, policies of criminalization, efforts to influence diet, exercise and so forth. All are attempts to turn an unruly reality into something amenable to the application of instrumental calculation (Rose and Miller, 1992: 181-7) and government is legitimated in so much as it maintains effectiveness in such domains.

Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’ has inspired numerous investigations into problematics of government within liberal and neo-liberal discourses (see Burchell etal., 1991; Barry etal. 1996; Rose 1999). These have focused on the government of the economy, social policies concerning the family, poverty, the uses of statistics and the nature of welfare and social scientific expertise (see also Rose and Miller 1992; Rose 1996; Rose 1999; Hacking 1991; Donzelot 1980). The technologies employed in these areas, for instance the use of ‘experts’ in post-war planning, the deployment of incentives to encourage businesses to render themselves more ‘competitive’, or the recent effort by social democratic states to enhance the role of the ‘community’ and civil society organizations in delivering welfare, are attempts to alter the behaviour of subjects. The needs and interests, even the physical bodies of citizens (think of housing relocation schemes or hygiene and vaccination programmes) are incorporated within discourses of ‘improve­ment’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘care’ thereby redefining what those needs, interests and bodies are like. Such technologies and policies do not simply order and command but positively construct types of subject. Such studies demonstrate how the state is one of a number of settings within which the operations of government are exercised. The state does not have a grand function (such as to maintain capitalism or represent the public) to which we can refer back its actions. Rather it grants rationalities ‘a temporary institutional durability’. The state, or more particularly the discourses that shape that state, are, as Rose and Miller put it, ‘an historically variable linguistic device for conceptualising and articulating ways of ruling’ (1992: 177).

The analysis of governmentality highlights the complex and irreducibly plural nature of state practices: indeed, the state begins to look like a variety of porous mini-authorities utilizing knowledge to categorize and shape the subjects that are not alone in the activity of governing.

However, invocations of ‘the state’ or ‘government’ as though it did represent a unified purpose are frequently made by social and political forces. Despite its organizational diversity, the inviolable symbolic unity of the state is invoked to justify the use of organized force against ‘enemies’ within and without its boundaries (see Poulantzas 1978: 76-86). At key moments, such as in wartime or during a ‘social emergency’, the state is invested by certain groups with a unity of purpose that legitimates its distinctive repressive functions and articulates its diverse elements around a relatively coherent project. At such times, the state does employ ‘repressive’ sovereign power in deciding who can live and who shall die. We might need to combine Foucauldian analyses with the study of ‘hegemony’ and the formation of identities in international space.