GOvernmentality in Foucault: The concept of governmentality develops a new understanding of power. Foucault encourages us to think of power not only in terms of hierarchical, top-down power of the state. He widens our understanding of power to also include the forms of social control in disciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals, psychiatric institutions, etc.), as well as the forms of knowledge. Power can manifest itself positively by producing knowledge and certain discourses that get internalised by individuals and guide the behaviour of populations. This leads to more efficient forms of social control, as knowledge enables individuals to govern themselves. Governmentality applies to a variety of historical periods and to different specific power regimes. However, it is often used (by other scholars and by Foucault himself) in reference to neoliberal governmentality, i.e. to a type of governmentality that characterizes advanced liberal democracies. In this case, the notion of governmentality refers to societies where power is de-centered and its members play an active role in their own self-government, e.g. as posited in neoliberalism. Because of its active role, individuals need to be regulated from inside. A particular form of governmentality is characterized by a certain form of knowledge (savoir in French). In the case of neoliberal governmentality (a kind of governmentality based on the predominance of market mechanisms and of the restriction of the action of the state) the knowledge produced allows the construction of auto-regulated or auto-correcting selves. In his lecture titled Governmentality, Foucault gives us a definition of governmentality: 1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. 2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, etc) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs. 3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes governmentalized. As Foucault’s explicit definition is rather broad, perhaps further examination of this definition would be useful. We shall begin with a closer inspection of the first part of Foucault’s definition of governmentality: This strand of the three-part definition states that governmentality is, in other words, all of the components that make up a government that has as its end the maintenance of a well ordered and happy society (population). The government’s means to this end is its apparatuses of security, that is to say, the techniques it uses to provide this society a feeling of economic, political, and cultural well-being. The government achieves these ends by enacting political economy, and in this case, the meaning of economy is the older definition of the term, that is to say, economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.Thus, we see that this first part of the definition states that governmentality is a government with specific ends, means to these ends, and particular practices that should lead to these ends. The second part of Foucault’s definition (the resulting, on the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs presents governmentality as the long, slow development of Western governments which eventually took over from forms of governance like sovereignty and discipline into what it is today: bureaucracies and the typical methods by which they operate. The next and last strand of Foucault’s definition of governmentality is no. 3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes governmentalized. This strand can be restated as the evolution from the Medieval state, that maintained its territory and an ordered society within this territory through a blunt practice of simply imposing its laws upon its subjects, to the early renaissance state, which became more concerned with the disposing of things, and so began to employ strategies and tactics to maintain a content and thus stable society, or in other words to render a society governable. Thus, if one takes these three strands together, governmentality may be defined as the process through which a form of government with specific ends (a happy and stable society), means to these ends (apparatuses of security), and with a particular type of knowledge (political economy), to achieve these ends, evolved from a medieval state of justice to a modern administrative state with complex bureaucracies. Hunt and Wickham, in their work Foucault and Law [1994] begin the section on governmentality with a very basic definition derived from Foucault’s work. They state, governmentality is the dramatic expansion in the scope of government, featuring an increase in the number and size of the governmental calculation mechanisms [1994:76]. In other words, governmentality describes the new form of governing that arose in the mid-eighteenth century that was closely allied with the creation and growth of the modern bureaucracies. In giving this definition, Hunt and Wickham conceive of the term as consisting of two parts governmental and –ity - governmental meaning pertaining to the government of a country; and the suffix –ity meaning the study of. They acknowledge that this definition lacks some of Foucault’s finer nuances and try to redress this by explaining some more of Foucault’s ideas, including reason of state, the problem of population, modern political economy, liberal securitisation, and the emergence of the human sciences [1994:77]. Kerr’s approach to the term is more complex. He conceives of the term as an abbreviation of governmental rationality [1999:174]. In other words it is a way of thinking about the government and the practices of the government. To him it is not a zone of critical-revolutionary study, but one that conceptually reproduces capitalist rule [1999:197] by asserting that some form of government (and power) will always be necessary to control and constitute society. By defining governmentality only in terms of the state, Kerr fails to take account of other forms of governance and the idea of mentalities of government in this broader sense. Dean’s understanding of the term incorporates both other forms of governance and the idea of mentalities of government, as well as Hunt and Wickham’s, and Kerr’s approaches to the term. In line with Hunt and Wickham’s approach, Dean acknowledges that in a very narrow sense, governmentality can be used to describe the emergence of a government that saw that the object of governing power was to optimise, use and foster living individuals as members of a population [1999:19]. He also includes the idea of government rationalities, seeing governmentality as one way of looking at the practices of government. In addition to the above, he sees government as anything to do with conducting oneself or others. This is evident in his description of the word in his glossary: Governmentality: How we think about governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts... [1999:212]. This reflects that the term government to Foucault meant not so much the political or administrative structures of the modern state as the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups may be directed. To analyse government is to analyse those mechanisms that try to shape, sculpt, mobilise and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups [Dean, 1999:12]. Deans main contribution to the definition of the term, however, comes from the way he breaks the term up into ‘govern’ ‘mentality’, or mentalities of governing—mentality being a mental disposition or outlook. This means that the concept of governmentality is not just a tool for thinking about government and governing but also incorporates how and what people who are governed think about the way they are governed. He defines thinking as a collective activity [1999:16], that is, the sum of the knowledge, beliefs and opinions held by those who are governed. He also raises the point that a mentality is not usually examined by those who inhabit it [1999:16]. This raises the interesting point that those who are governed may not understand the unnaturalness of both the way they live and the fact that they take this way of life for granted—that the same activity in which they engage in can be regarded as a different form of practice depending on the mentalities that invest it [1999:17]. Dean highlights another important feature of the concept of governmentality—its reflexivity. He explains: On the one hand, we govern others and ourselves according to what we take to be true about who we are, what aspects of our existence should be worked upon, how, with what means, and to what ends. On the other hand, the ways in which we govern and conduct ourselves give rise to different ways of producing truth. [1999:18] By drawing attention to the ‘how and why’, Dean connects technologies of power [Lemke, 2001:191] to the concept of governmentality. According to Dean any definition of governmentality should incorporate all of Foucault’s intended ideas. A complete definition of the term governmentality must include not only government in terms of the state, but government in terms of any conduct of conduct [Dean, 1999:10]. It must incorporate the idea of mentalities and the associations that go with that concept: that it is an attitude towards something, and that it is not usually understood from within its own perspective [1999:16], and that these mentalities are collective and part of a society’s culture. It must also include an understanding of the ways in which conduct is governed, not just by governments, but also by ourselves and others. The semantic linking of governing and mentalities in governmentality indicates that it is not possible to study technologies of power without an analysis of the mentality of rule underpinning them. The practice of going to the gym, expounded below, is a useful example because it shows how our choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles have been mobilised and shaped by various technologies of power
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:07:13 +0000
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