Foucault and Managerial Governmentality

Rethinking the Management of Populations, Organizations and Individuals

Alan McKinlay, Eric Pezet, Alan McKinlay, Eric Pezet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138915664
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317426073
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

In the last two decades there has been an explosion of research inspired by Michel Foucault's suggestion of a new concept, 'governmentality'. The distinctive feature of modern governmentality is that across all sorts of fields, rule is predicated upon the active subject as the vehicle through which—and by which—power is exercised. The appeal of governmentality is that, whether we are considering the workplace, the school or welfare regimes, it opens up new ways of looking at familiar institutions.

Foucault and Managerial Governmentality is about Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. The novelty of this concept is that looks at the ways that populations and organisations are imagined in ways that premise collective gains through expanding individual freedoms. Specifically, how are technologies of freedom devised that improve the overall performance—health, productivity, or parental responsibility—of a given population?

Understanding the operation of technologies of control is a simple enough task, argues Foucault, but also one that blinds us to the increasing prevalence of technologies of freedom. Foucault and Managerial Governmentality aims not just to locate this concept in Foucault's wider research project but to apply it to all sorts of management techniques. By applying governmentality to questions of management and organization we will also develop Foucault's original, somewhat sketchy concept.

This book has three innovative narratives: an awareness of the historicity of the concept; the application of governmentality to specific forms of management means that we escape the temptation to read any and all forms of technology and organization as an expression of neoliberalism; and, finally, the interviews with Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose provide unique intellectual and personal insights into the development of the governmentalist project over the last thirty years.

Part I

Introduction

1 Governmentality

The Career of a Concept

Alan McKinlay and Eric Pezet

Introduction

‘How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor’.

—(Foucault 2007: 86)

Of all the many concepts Foucault developed, deployed and abandoned—or neglected, governmentality has proven the most fruitful in terms of sparking innovative historical and empirical research. Foucault did no more than sketch the concept of governmentality in a series of lectures and seminars in 1978–79. Unlike his other College de France lectures, the governmentality lectures were not intended for publication, nor did they offer a foretaste of a forthcoming book. To say the least, then, governmentality was a concept in the making (Lemke 2001). Our concern in this chapter is twofold. First, to outline the debates about where governmentality is located in the long-run of Foucault’s thinking and politics. Broadly, although Foucault was clear that governmentality reflected a continuation of his concerns with power, knowledge and practice, several commentators suggest that he was on his way towards the ethical turn of his final years. On this reading, the final, ethical Foucault had not abandoned his earlier concern with power so much as rejected it completely. Strategy plays a curious role in governmentality: paradoxically, governmentality rejects any top-down, centralised notion of power and strategy the better to emphasise the dispersed nature of modern power and the near ubiquity of strategic thinking in all manner of settings. Third, Foucault consistently referred to his concepts as part of a toolkit. Strangely, neither Foucault nor subsequent governmentalists made much effort to develop any methodological guidelines. It is a strange toolkit indeed that comes with no instructions. We will collect Foucault’s few scattered comments on methodology and interpret governmentalist research to uncover more general methodological instructions.

Governmentality has four clear principles. First, governmentality involves the development and deployment of specific strategies and forms of knowledge to tackle particular problems. Governmentality is practical: how to think about and improve, if not solve, a given social problem. Second, governmentalist strategies are predicated upon increasing individual freedom while reducing the role of, say, the state or management. Third, governmentalist strategies are legitimised to the extent that they are rendered neutral, rather than furthering a particular vested interest. Fourth, governmentalist strategies develop credible ways to define, monitor and assess a population so that specific types of individuals can be targeted for intervention. The efficiency and effectiveness of representation and intervention has to be open to evaluation and contestation (Foucault 1980). Here, ‘government’ does not refer to the institutions of the state but to those activities that aim to shape the conduct of others in a certain direction. This open definition starts from practices, not institutions, and is consistent with what Foucault calls his ascending form of analysis. In an important sense, Foucault’s use of ‘government’ is an implicit acknowledgement that his previous research on ‘discipline’ could—and was—too easily read as a form of control that downplayed, if not neglected, resistance. Government, by contrast, is predicated on the assumption that the governed will always adapt, resist, subvert or ridicule the practices of governing, to some degree. ‘Government’, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2009: 114) aptly puts it, establishes a ‘strategic relation between governors and the governed whereby the former try to determine the conduct of the latter, and whereby the latter develop practices in order “to avoid being governed,” to minimise being governed, or to be governed in a different way … or else to govern themselves’. Such forms and moments of counter-conduct open up new possibilities, perhaps fleeting, to remake oneself.

Politics without the State?

Foucault’s two lecture series of 1978 and 1979 are about the distinction between state and civil society or, rather, how that distinction has been defined and acted upon. In the decades since Foucault’s lectures, our understanding of neoliberalism has been refracted through the experience of the Thatcher, Kohl and Reagan regimes and their successors. Above all, neoliberalism has become equated with a veneration for the market and obsession with reducing the role of the state to the bare essentials of maintaining the security of the population and the minimum regulation necessary for markets to function. Foucault’s radical act was to take neoliberalism seriously as a philosophical and political project, rather than just as an ideological cover for the basest of ruling class interests. Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism differed from progressive commonsense. Unlike classical liberalism, neoliberalism regards the market as defined by competition rather than exchange. Foucault invokes the construction of homo oeconomicus as the libertarian vision of neoliberalism: the individual is remade—or remakes himself—as a permanent entrepreneur, irrespective of the social context. The central figure of this new order was to be ‘homo oeconomicus, everyone is cast as and becomes, willingly or not, “an entrepreneur of himself”’ (Foucault 2008: 232). Only by maximising the freedom of this fictive, but enormously powerful, figure in every domain can the individual and social good be maximised. Classical liberalism, by contrast, regarded the individual as a permanently social actor whose sociality vied with narrow economic rationality when placed within a market. Economic rationalities can, do and should determine all individual and social action (Foucault 2008: 240).

Neoliberalism involves the marketization of social relations far beyond even the broadest definition of ‘the economic’. Famously, Thatcher proclaimed that ‘economics are the method: the object is to change the soul’. Indeed, the audacity of neoliberalism was that it wants not just to remake social relations but that individuals should view themselves as entrepreneurs and their actions as enterprising. Note that it was not just that individuals were encouraged to think of themselves as if they were entrepreneurs but to actually be ever more enterprising selves. Think of the ways that key categories of social democracy have been expunged while those of liberal democracy have been transformed: citizens have become tax payers; workers have become consumers of their own employment. In turn, this produces citizens as consumers, fathers who economise their thinking about their family life. What better type of individual to demand a polity that delivers efficiency and extended consumption for the individual, irrespective of the collective? Lois McNay (2009: 56) has observed that changing the ways that politics is imagined through classic liberal concepts of individualism and freedom has profound implications for resistance and political opposition: ‘If individual autonomy is not the opposite of or limit to neo-liberal governance, but rather lies at the heart of disciplinary control through responsible self-government, what are the possible grounds upon which practical resistance can be based?’

Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism suggested that it was not about the withdrawal of the state from the social but the re-imagination of its role: directly, to marketise its own activities; indirectly, to produce proxies of quality or efficiency to make marketization possible in domains where the state was long assumed to be a direct provider. Again, it was not the withdrawal of the state that was the radical promise of neoliberalism so much as its redefinition of the state’s purpose as parallel, if not prior, to the market (Gane 2014). This was not about the withdrawal of the state from the market but a different kind of active role in making and extending markets: as broker, guarantor and client. The state’s relationship to the market was not simply to correct market imperfections or to avert failures, to react. Rather, the neoliberal state had to initiate and constantly be seeking to expand markets into areas previously considered inherently exempt from market forces: ‘One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market’ (Foucault 2008: 121, 145). The hallmark of the neoliberal state was not that it withered away but that it actively sought to increase the scope and salience of market forces.

The question then becomes how to use individual freedom to construct and maintain social order? This is the problematic at the heart of liberal government: how to accept, or manage, the risks inherent in freedom. To govern liberally is to maximise the individual’s freedom to choose, a freedom that also expects the individual to understand and accept the risks—and perhaps to meet the costs—of poor choices. At once, this is government that is ambitious, always tempting hubris, in its search for ways of allowing individuals greater self-government the better to secure collective order. Paradoxically, neoliberal government expresses itself as both massively ambitious and humble. Neoliberalism reversed the conventions of mid-century social democracy. Where the state had intervened to correct market failures, neoliberals proposed the reverse: that markets should be used to correct not just institutional but also social failures. It was not that institutions were correctives to market excesses but that the social should be subordinated to the market or, more accurately, that the social itself be marketised. There is no social relationship that cannot be understood through economic rationality. Such an understanding is the precondition to increasing the importance of self-management. It is axiomatic that whether as citizen, worker or partner, the individual is active in making her own life, not a passive cultural dope. An optimistic reading of governmentality is offered by Tiziana Terranova. The spaces, both temporal and spatial, that are necessarily created—or abandoned—by neoliberalism need not necessarily be colonised by its logic. Rather, such milieu ‘would also be open to other individuations, less stabilised and more unruly, capable of individuating new transnational and translocal subjectivities. There is thus a fundamental ambivalence to the notions and categories invented by liberal/neoliberal governmentality that can open up onto different existential universes or forms of life’ (Terranova 2009: 242).

The governmentality lectures are best read as provisional rather than rounded, definitive statements. Equally, Foucault’s lectures, much more obviously than his books, reflect contemporary, often pressing, political concerns. Managing capitalism through the state had proved an impossible burden for social democracy while Marxists’ visions of capturing the state maintained the anti-democratic instincts of vanguardism. There are also other, deeper lineages of anti-statism, suggests Foucault, in both liberal and conservative traditions. The strategic gain of governmentality is that it refuses to render the state unique: an object to be questioned, vilified and eroded. Rather, the state subjects itself to new governmentalist strategies and ways of organising. The insistence that the state does not exhaust the possibilities of politics is to expand the spaces for collective action and resistance. Governmentality, in other words, represents Foucault’s conceptual effort to repoliticise the social to shift progressive political strategy away from an obsession with capturing the state.

Stewart Elden’s (2016: 103) forensic study of Foucault’s thinking in the final decade of his life concludes that it is facile to enlist Foucault as an apologist of neoliberalism that could be glimpsed only in the faintest outline in the late 1970s. At most, Foucault was struggling to historicise the first stirrings of a new political order. His provocations, however, have allowed others to grasp the novelty and audacity of the neoliberal project as opposed to a throwback to laissez-faire capitalism. Governmentality was a restatement of this abiding concern to dispel any lingering notion that any and all social and institutional change can be traced back to a single class dynamic. Foucault does not offer a critique of neoliberalism as an ideology; indeed he is respectful of its inventiveness and shrewd appeal to opinion makers. Foucault’s question is how does neoliberalism imagine itself working? Again, Foucault was careful to stipulate that he was more concerned with how governors imagined governing rather than the actual practice of government.

Distinguishing between liberalism and neoliberalism was about the limits of government and, ironically, the transformative power of the state. Neoliberalism was not about restoring a lost world of laissez-faire capitalism but about how governments produced unlimited markets, at least in theory. The greatest good for the greatest number cannot be delivered by the state but can only be realised through maximising the freedom of all. Of course, Foucault was hardly original in pointing to the importance and infinite forms of political power beyond the state. To do so, however, is not to argue that the state has become apolitical. Equally important, argues Eric Santner, Foucault does not register that the emergence of the modern state is paralleled by the rise of a mass citizenry, an entirely new popular force that has effects on all forms of politics. Santner points to ‘the new modern form (of the flesh): masses of busy bodies’.

Biopolitics is always mass politics in the sense of dealing with the massive presence of a sublime object—the virtual reality of a fleshy mass—now circulating in and agitating the life of the People, which means in turn, that political economy, the domain that Foucault came to see as a central site of biopolitical administration, acquires a certain sacramental dimension, the aspect of a ‘mass’.

(Santner 2016: 90)

Governmentality leaves little space for mobilisation through political parties; it implies the ephemerality, if not futility of collective action; all of which leaves only identity politics as the only possible form of resistance. Wendy Brown’s (2015: 62) lament for the untimely death of homo politicus and the demos identifies the hallmark of neoliberalism as the expansion of the market into the daily fabric of the social world:

With neoliberalism, the political rationality of the state becomes economic in a triple sense: the economy is at once model, object, and project. That is, economic principles become the model for state conduct, the economy becomes the primary object of state concerns and policy, and the marketization of domains and conduct is what the state seeks to disseminate everywhere… . ‘Economy’ is also detached from exclusive association with the production or circulation of goods and services and the accumulation of wealth. Instead, ‘economy’ signifies specific principles, metrics, and modes of conduct… . Again, neoliberal political rationality does not merely marketize in the sense of marketizing all social conduct and social relations, but, more radically casts them in an exclusively economic frame, one that has both epistemological and ontological dimensions.

In fact, it is perfectly plausible to argue that there is no sharp break in Foucault’s thinking: governmentality expresses nothing more than disciplinary power by other means and unconfined to the total institutions of the prison, the hospital and the asylum. To be sure, the oblique techniques of maximising individual choice do not involve confinement, but even total institutions are predicated upon some degree of individual agency and a moralising mission. Equally, neoliberalism mobilises incentives and sanctions around individuals who are obliged to choose, free to invoke those lures and deterrents, much like the recidivist prisoner knowingly risks calibrated punishments for his infractions.

For Foucault, the knowledge of power is hidden in plain sight. That is, he creates his own ‘surface archive’ based on the debates inside expert communities or public debates. He is insistent that the arts of governing are not hidden in ‘spontaneous, blind practices’ but are the subject of careful, clearly defined debates that produced abstract knowledges and principles (Foucault 2001c: 313–14). To enter a ‘deep’ archive is to trace how this governmentalist logic was translated into the everyday routines through which power acts and is experienced. The deep archive is a secret place where only real historians live. Foucault did not do deep archival research, but this was not so much a weakness as a methodological choice. Foucault’s ‘archive’ is not a special repository where secrets are hidden. Rather, Foucault’s archive is not found so much as constructed from forms of public knowledge. Indeed, the public nature of knowledge is what defines it as knowledge. For it is the public nature of knowledge that allows it to be subject to scrutiny by experts, policy-makers, citizens and those subjected to its gaze. Foucault is, in this sense, the most shallow of empiricists. Perhaps we can hear something of this in a quite different context: an aside by Foucault about why he turned to classical ethics to best express his hopes for contemporary, ethical self-governance.

A long time ago one knew that the role of philosophy was not to discover what is hidden but to render visible precisely what is visible; that is to say, to make appear what is so close, what is so immediate, what is so instantly linked to ourselves that because of all this we do not perceive it.

(Foucault 2001a: 1601)

True, Foucault emphasised that his purpose was to understand ‘the level of reflection in the practice of government’, by which he meant ‘the way in which this practice that consists of governing was conceptualized both within and outside government, and anyway as close as possible to governmental practice’ (Foucault 2008: 2). To say the least, we may certainly quibble about whether Foucault really approached, even distantly, ‘governmental practice’. The point remains, however, that he was interested in the reflections of practitioners rather than their experience. It is futile to ask gaolers or prisoners or doctors or patients about the logic of penology or medicine as a form of knowledge. Hermeneutics may tell us about how people act, how they experience life in institutions, but not about the logic of those practices or institutions. Indeed, it is precisely this space that post-Foucault governmentalist research has explored. This instinct to work on the surface of things is central to Keith Hoskin’s chapter. Hoskin writes in two registers. First, he attends to the precise meaning of modes of governing as rendered in the definitive French versions of Foucault’s lectures. But there is much more to this chapter than mere exegesis. Rather, Hoskin’s surface reading of the French texts restores the centrality of ‘managing’ and ‘cost’ to Foucault’s outline of governmentality, something that is obscured in the English translation. Second, using the original French texts restores cost accounting as central to Foucault’s elaboration of managerial governmentality that pivots on the relationship between security and risk. Over three lectures Foucault builds his distinctive ascending analysis of management, accounting and governmentality. Foucault’s account of contemporary governmentality, Hoskin explains, does not look to the state but to the application of some form or other of accounting to activities beyond the market. This is a significant revision to earlier genealogical studies of management that concentrated on discipline.

Governmentality points us towards how the articulation of meta-languages of political theory are translated into expert knowledge and routine practices. Dispositive represents a key phase in the development of Foucault’s thinking. A dispositive is constructed to address a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Locating Governmentality
• Part III Bodies and Souls
• Part IV Expertise, Experts and Governmentality
• Part V Conclusion
• Name Index
• Subject Index