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An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory
2007
This article explores the contribution of an ‘analytics of government’ to state theory. This approach takes up methodological and theoretical considerations that Michel Foucault developed in his lectures 0f1978 and 1979 at the College de France on the ‘history of “governmentality”’. The article argues that an analytics of government is characterized by three theoretical dimensions: a nominalist account that stresses the central importance of knowledge and political discourses in the constitution of the state; a broad concept of technology that encompasses not only material but also symbolic devices, including political technologies as well as technologies of the self; a strategic account that conceives of the state as an instrument and effect of political strategies. After presenting the three analytical dimensions, the last part of the article will compare this theoretical perspective with the concept of governance and with critical accounts of neo-liberalism. The article concludes that Foucault's work on governmentality opens up new directions for state theory.
Foucault on Power and Government
Sociological Problems (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), Special Issue edited by Antoinette Koleva, Kolyo Koev, Michel Foucault: New Problematizations, 2016
Foucault’s lectures in 1976 open with the statement of an intellectual crisis. They proceed to a series of questions about the nature of power and the ways that he has conceived of it up to this point: what is power? How is it exercised? Is it ultimately a relation of force? Only some of these questions are answered in the course of these lectures. His answer to the conceptual questions about the nature of power and the appropriate means to analyze it is not forthcoming until after the discovery of ‘governmentality’ in 1978 and his lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality in 1979. This talk aims to retrace his answers to these questions in the light of the published lectures and to examine the consequences of these answers for his overall approach to the analysis power, and for his analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmental power.
Governmentality and the Genealogy of Politics
The Birkbeck Centre for Law and the Humanities THE FOUCAULT EFFECT 1991-2011 A Conference at Birkbeck College, University of London Reflecting on 20 years of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality This is the unabridged text of my talk given in June 2011 at this conference. I don’t have the competence to survey, still less to assess the vast and varied body of studies in governmentality which have been undertaken since we published The Foucault Effect. What I would like to offer instead, by way of an introduction, is a brief personal afterthought on our book, with the benefit of hindsight, in the light of subsequent history and publications, and with an eye to our current interests and problems. What did we (and I) miss or overlook that might have helped in writing the history of later presents? (I will look here especially at the first lectures of the 1979 series: liberalism and liberty, ways of limiting government, the liberal international order.) Conversely, what things did we notice and highlight, which may have subsequently been given less attention to date than they merit? (I will mention the idea of a collective, continuous history of governmentality, some points about law and neoliberalism, and some challenges about socialist governmentality and the culture of contemporary political critique). This brings me to my main topic. A lot of discussion focussed on ideas of stand‐off or disjunction between Foucault’s notion of governmentality and some thing or things (such as sovereignty, the juridical, rights and political theory) which function as governmentality’s other. I know I am not alone in feeling that, without lapsing into undifferentiated eclectic blandness, we need to move beyond some of these disjunctions and the brand‐differentiated sectarian silos they might be at risk of imprisoning us in. I want to argue here in particular that the vast wealth of posthumous Foucault publication now allows us to see a number of ways in which the history of governmentality which Foucault and others undertook enables, implies and demands an accompanying genealogy of politics, that is to say of political culture, conduct, sociability and subjectivity. To start with, we can look at a number of suggestions in Foucault’s lectures about instances of what one might call the multiple births of politics. Along with these hints, I will draw here on some key, complementary sources outside the 78‐79 lectures which became available after TFE was published (notably ‘What is critique?’ and ‘Society must be defended’), look rapidly at the implications of the novel reflections on philosophy and the political developed in the recently published lectures of 1983‐4, and reflect on that basis about what Foucault might have been planning to do next, having promised his audience, in early 1984, an imminent ending of his ‘Greco‐Roman trip’. Reading that promise today is a reminder of the simple fact that Foucault’s work was unfinished, and, as a consequence, that alongside the ever‐valid option to instrumentalise Foucault’s work, in whatever area one chooses and with as much freedom, inventiveness and faithful infidelity as one is capable of, there is also the possibility, within the limits of our powers, of trying to finish what Foucault left unfinished, or at least of taking up some of what may have been his work’s unfulfilled aims and ambitions. Hints or clues to how this might be attempted include some points of useful connectivity with other scholars’ work on the history of early modern thought and politics (Donald Kelley and Peter Donaldson) and some brief but promising encounters with the governmentality theme in some other important currents of contemporary work (Ann Stoler, Duncan Ivison, Keith Baker, Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee). Finally I will ask how and under what conditions this kind of genealogy can make a useful contribution to public discourse. References Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) Donald R Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation. (1981) Peter S Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (1992) Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 2006) and ‘Nationalism, Identity and the Logic of Seriality’ in The Spectre of Comparisons (1998) Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004) Keith Baker, “A Foucauldian French Revolution?” in Foucault and the Writing of History. Ed. Jan Goldstein (1994)
As Jacques Donzelot, a one-time collaborator of Foucault, notes, the Foucault effect has been particularly strong in the Anglo-phone world. Indeed the impact of his work on governmentality in this specific context might more properly be termed the “Anglo-Foucauldian effect” in order to distinguish it from the many other ways in which the work of Foucault and his French associates has affected philosophy, history, geography, and other branches of the arts, humanities, and social sciences at many times and places. As such, this effect refers to a particular mode of reception and appropriation of Foucault’s work on governmentality to generate a distinctive theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approach to empirical studies, both historical and contemporary, of various technologies and practices oriented to “the conduct of conduct”. Even in regard to this one aspect of his work, however, there are other “Foucault effects” grounded in different readings and appropriations of his work on governmentality in various countries (for work within this broader field, see, e.g., Agrawal 2006; Bröckling, Krasmann, and Lemke 2000; Dean 1999; Krasmann and Volkmer 2007; Meyet, Naves and Ribmont 2006; Opitz 2004; Sanyal 2007; Walters and Larner 2004; and the many contributions to Foucault Studies).
Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe
The analysis of governmentality has had a profound impact on the study of liberal, domestic societies over the last two decades, and the conceptual framework has been applied successfully to current global affairs. In this article one possible way of expanding the timeframe and the scope of governmentality studies is explored. Through an immanent critique of Foucault’s own comments on the co-constitutive development of states and a state system in early modern Europe, it is argued that a governmentality perspective can in fact add to our understanding of inter-state relations in early modern Europe, and thus also to our understanding of our own time. Carrying out such analyses implies taking the Foucauldian framework beyond Foucault, as his own brief comments on inter-state relations fail to adhere to his own methodological precept of historicising seemingly evidentiary practices.
Foucault, Governmentality, and the Techniques of the Self
Handbook of Governmentality
In this chapter, I retrace the emergence of the notion of governmentality in Michel Foucault’s work as both a way of prolonging his previous analyses of disciplinary and biopolitical power, and as a necessary condition for the development of his reflections on “ethics” and the techniques of the self. First, I show that the anatomo- and bio-political mechanisms of power that Foucault explores in the 1970s have a common goal: the government of human beings’ (everyday) life in its multiple, interconnected dimensions (Section 2). I then argue that Foucault elaborates the notion of governmentality as a response to the objection according to which his power/knowledge framework makes any attempt at resistance ultimately pointless. His genealogy of the government of human beings emphasizes that the point of articulation and clash between power and resistance is to be situated at the level of what he calls “subjectivity,” thus establishing a direct link between politics and ethics (Section 3). Indeed, defined as the contact point between coercion-technologies and self-technologies, subjectivity constitutes for Foucault both the main target of governmental mechanisms of power and the essential support for the enactment of counter-conducts and practices of freedom (Section 4). This, I argue, helps to explain the distinctively “anarchaeological” flair of Foucault’s lectures and writings post-1978: the study of governmentality goes hand in hand with the postulate of the non-necessity of all power, and hence with the ever-present possibility of critique and resistance. The political relevance of Foucault’s so-called “turn to ethics,” I claim, can only be understood in this light, since governmentality for him ultimately implies the relationship of self to self (Section 5).