Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique

Thomas Lemke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317259527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Michel Foucault is one of the most cited authors in social science. This book discusses one of his most influential concepts: governmentality. Reconstructing its emergence in Foucault's analytics of power, the book explores the theoretical strengths the concept of governmentality offers for political analysis and critique. It highlights the intimate link between neoliberal rationalities and the problem of biopolitics including issues around genetic and reproductive technologies. This book is a useful introduction to Foucault's work on power and governmentality suitable for experts and students alike

1 An Analytics of Government

DOI: 10.4324/9781315634609-2

The eminent political scientist Steven Lukes once argued that there exists a common idea that is shared by many diverse and conflicting conceptions and interpretations of power: “The power of an individual or collective actor A with regard to an objective O is manifested if A achieves O by consent of one or more actors B” (1983: 107, emphasis in original).¹ Lukes suggests that this definition has been interpreted in the Western political tradition in two different ways. The first line of interpretation proceeds symmetrically. It starts with the assumption that both parties share objective O. By contrast, the second line of reception proceeds asymmetrically, and regards B’s consent as coerced. The former includes authors as diverse as Plato, Hannah Arendt, and Talcott Parsons, while Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber, and Karl Marx belong to the latter tradition. According to Lukes, the first theoretical model provides a concept of power as cooperation and consensus while the second conceives of power as hierarchy and domination. Both lines of interpretation have a very long history that goes back to antiquity.

I will argue that the theoretical specificity of Foucault’s “analytics of power” (1980b: 82) consists in the fact that it escapes any neat classification. It is not part of the symmetrical tradition, nor does it belong to the asymmetrical line of interpretation.² Foucault wants to move beyond this too-common division, and calls into question the underlying premise of both conceptions: the coupling of the analysis of power to questions either of legitimacy and consensus or of constraint and violence. His point of departure is the variety of ways in which power has been analyzed in political and social theory.

The Juridico-Discursive Concept of Power

Foucault repeatedly stresses that he wants to liberate political thought from the orientation toward questions of sovereign power and its legitimacy. He holds that the representation of power in Western societies has remained under the spell of monarchy. Foucault’s thesis is that this “juridico-discursive” (1980b: 82) concept of power conceives of sovereignty as being above or outside particular conflicts, capable of providing an overarching and unitary standpoint and addressing political questions in terms of legitimacy and lawfulness. Foucault notes three important features of this conception of power, and proposes a theoretical perspective that promises to “reverse the mode of analysis” (1980d: 95).

First, he argues that power is not a substance but has to be analyzed in relational terms. Therefore, Foucault usually speaks of power relations rather than power. In this respect power is not a territory to be conquered or transferred, nor is it a good that could be possessed or exchanged. Instead of juridical or economic terms, Foucault prefers a strategic and nominalistic concept of power. He argues that power is not an exclusive possession or a right of certain individuals, groups, or classes (excluding others from power), and analyzes instead relations of power that result in a plurality of overlapping and conflicting strategies: “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (1980b: 93).

Secondly, Foucault calls into question the traditional identification of power with political power and the concentration of power analysis on state institutions. He replaces a macro-political by a micro-political perspective, substituting an analysis in terms of representation by an interest in constitution. Thus, processes of power do not proceed from top to bottom, and they do not originate in a centralized point to then pervade the social space. On the contrary, it is the plurality and diversity of power relations in society that account for the emergence and the functioning of the state. They go beyond the state—which is to be conceived of as a condensed form of power. As a consequence, neither the control nor the destruction of state apparatuses makes forms of power disappear (ibid.: 94–95).

Thirdly, Foucault challenges the idea that power relations are primarily characterized by means of repression and that they always serve interests of reproduction. In these accounts power is either reduced to certain modes of exercise like constraint, force, or violence, or it is exclusively analyzed as stabilization or legitimation of social relations like exploitation or patriarchy—without paying attention to how these power relations generate and change material forms of existence, social identities, and bodily experiences. Power relations are, according to Foucault, not the expression of a “deeper” reality that they reflect ideologically or secure repressively, nor can they be reduced to functional or negative criteria. Rather, they entail a productive dimension: they allow and enable individual and collective experiences and promote new forms of knowledge and practice: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977: 194).³

Foucault’s central theoretical interest in the mid-1970s is to replace the juridical and negative concept with a strategic and positive account of power. The idea is that the investigation of power processes should be freed from the theoretical concentration on the state and the assumption that “power must be exercised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness” (1980b: 88). However, Foucault’s historical investigations only partly succeeded in doing this. There were two particular theoretical problems that characterized the analytics of power up to Discipline and Punish (1977) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1980b).

To start with, Foucault only replaced the focus on legitimacy and consent in political theory by accentuating war and struggle by putting forward “Nietzsche’s hypothesis” (2003: 14–19). Since he conceived of social relations primarily in terms of confrontation and subjection, he was unable to account for how beliefs in legitimacy, acceptance, and consent were actively generated and stabilized. Also, it was impossible to assess processes of subjectivation beyond the formation of disciplined bodies. Secondly, the “micro-physics of power” (1977: 26) that Foucault endorsed at that time was oriented to processes of disciplining and the examination of local practices and singular institutions like the prison or the hospital. It tended to neglect the question of how the multiplicity and heterogeneity of power relations are integrated and articulated into more general mechanisms that sustain specifc forms of rule. As a result, the question of the state and its strategic role in the establishment of global structures of domination could not be adequately addressed (see Pasquino 1993; Rouse 1994: 113; Hindess 1996). In sum, while Foucault’s self-declared aim was to “cut off the head of the king” (1980b: 89) in political analysis, displacing the focus on law and legitimization, will and consent, in practice he simply reversed the juridical model and adopted the “exact opposite” (1980d: 87) view. Instead of cutting off the king’s head, he just turned the conception that he criticized upside down by replacing law and contract with war and conquest. Put differently, the “cutting off” could only be the first step. After this, it is necessary to address the following question: “How is it possible that his headless body often behaves as if it indeed had a head?” (Dean 1994: 156).⁴

The concept of governmentality that emerged for the first time in the lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979 represents Foucault’s response to these two problems. It allows on the one hand for a more adequate analysis of the state and processes of subjectivation. On the other hand, it also makes possible the elaboration of an analysis of power beyond the juridical and warlike concept of power.

A History of Governmentality

The lectures of 1978 and 1979 bear the titles Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). They focus on what Foucault once called a “history of ‘governmentality’” (2007: 108). What he is searching for in these lectures is not a historical reconstruction of the emergence and transformation of political structures. Like Norbert Elias (1976), he is interested in the long-term processes of co-evolution of modern statehood and modern subjectivity. But whereas Elias relies on a general theory of civilization presupposing a single historical logic of development (“the process“), Foucault analyzes heterogeneous and plural “arts of government” (2008: 2). He refers to the older meaning of the term government (Sellin 1984; Senellart 1995). While the word has a purely political meaning today, Foucault shows that up until well into the eighteenth century the problem of government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term discussed not only in political tracts but also in philosophical, religious, medical, and pedagogic texts. In addition to management by the state or administration, government also addressed problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children, management of the household, directing the soul, and other questions (see 2000k: 341).

Taking up this historical meaning, Foucault distinguishes “the political form of government” from the “problematic of government in general” (2007: 89). He proposes a “very broad meaning” (2000k: 341) of the term that does not conceive of subjectivation and state formation as two independent and separate processes but analyzes them from a single analytical perspective. Thus the “genealogy of the modern state” (2007: 354) is also a “history of the subject” (ibid.: 184), since Foucault does not consider the modern state as a centralized structure but as “a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization procedures” (2000k: 332).

In the course of the lectures Foucault examines the “genesis of a political knowledge” (2007: 363) of governing human beings. In the 1978 lectures he traces the genealogy of governmentality from Classical Greek and Roman days via the early Christian pastoral guidance through to the notion of state reason and police science, while the 1979 lectures focus on the study of liberal and neo-liberal forms of government. Foucault’s lectures are based on the following thesis: the modern (Western) state is the result of a complex combination of “political” and “pastoral” power. While the former derives from the Greek polis and is organized around rights, universality, public space, etc., the latter is a Christian religious concept that focuses on the comprehensive guidance of individuals. It is an individualizing form of power that is intimately linked to the production of truth. Foucault analyzes the pastoral form of power in the texts of the fathers of the church, who took up ancient forms of guidance and re-articulated and modified them.⁵ Pastoral power conceives of the relationship between the shepherd and his flock and between leaders and those they lead along the lines of a government of souls: their individual instruction and guidance takes place with a view to otherworldly salvation, pastoral authority thus complementing the authority of moral and religious law (2007: 115–190; 2000k: 300–311). The difference between this and ancient Greek and Roman ideas of government is that the Christian pastorate developed methods of analysis, and techniques of refection and supervision, that were designed to secure knowledge of the “inner truth” of individuals. Alongside obedience to the moral and legal norms appears the authority of a pastor who permanently controls and cares for the individual, in order to set him or her on the road to salvation (Foucault 2000k: 333; see also 2007).

According to Foucault, pastoral power spread and multiplied beyond the institution of the Christian church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a secularized form it was of decisive historical importance for the formation of the modern state, which relies on the production of rational knowledge about the individual and the population as a whole. The specificity of this modern form of government—the government of human beings, by contrast with the government of souls—consists in the refection on the conditions, the objects and the aims of government. In several steps, Foucault analyzes the appearance of an autonomous “political reason.” It is autonomous insofar as it neither relies on theological-cosmological principles, nor can it be deduced from the person of the Prince that Machiavelli described. Its starting point can be found in the tracts on the “arts of government” and state reason written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, followed by the emergence of police science and the rise of liberalism in the eighteenth century, up to the renewal of liberal concepts of society and the state in the twentieth century.

Foucault argues in his lectures that political refection partly detaches itself from the problem of sovereignty. Thus the principles of government are no longer to be found in the divine order of creation and subordinate to it, but are the object of rational knowledge: “the state is governed according to rational principles which are intrinsic to it and which cannot be derived solely from natural or divine laws or the principles of wisdom and prudence; the state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort” (Foucault 1991: 97). The new art of government found its “first form of crystallization” (ibid.: 96–97) in state reason, since here we find for the first time a discrete rationality of governing. However, state reason remained bound to the historical frame of sovereignty and the traditional model of the oikos. In this context, the main objective of politics was to increase the might and wealth of the sovereign (see 2007: 101–103).

While government aimed “to exercise power in the form, and according to the model, of economy” (2007: 95), the meaning of economy was transformed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The idea of the economic first designated a particular practice (“the proper way of managing individuals, goods, and wealth,” cf. 2007: 94), but it became later a specific field of intervention that is governed by autonomous laws and necessitates the development of new forms of knowledge: political economy (see Meuret 1988). The idea of the economy as a conceptually and practically distinguished space is intimately linked to the emergence of liberalism. Foucault regards liberalism as a specific art of governing that must be distinguished from the political universe of discipline and from the world of sovereignty. Liberal government does not aim at salvation in an afterworld, nor does it strive to increase the welfare of the state. Rather, it binds the rationality of government to an exterior object—civil society—and the freedom of individuals is regarded as a critical yardstick for governmental action. The liberal art of government takes society rather than the state as its starting point and asks: “Why must one govern? That is to say: What makes government necessary, and what ends must it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its own existence?” (2008, 319).⁶

At the end of the lecture series Foucault discusses the reformulation of early liberal positions in the twentieth century. He analyzes two different forms of neo-liberalism_ German liberalism after WWII, and the American liberalism of the Chicago School. Although Foucault refers to many thinkers from among the ranks of American neo-liberals (von Mises, Hayek, Simons, Schultz, and Stigler), he focuses above all on the thought of Gary S. Becker, whom he felt to be the “most radical” exponent of that movement (see 2008: 269). The theoretical foundations of German postwar liberalism were drawn up by jurists and economists who, in the years 1928–1930, had belonged to the “Freiburg School” or had been associated with it and later published in the journal Ordo. Notable among them were Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Müller-Armack, and others. These Ordo-liberals played a substantial role in devising the “social market economy,” and decisively influenced the principles of economic policy applied in West Germany in the immediate postwar years (see Foucault 2008: 322–324).

Foucault stresses two differences to the early liberal concepts. The first difference consists in a new definition of the rela...