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May 17, 2004
Hardt and Negri say that they have two main reasons for turning to Foucault to develop Hegel's concept of the police or public authority in the Philosophy of Right. As we have seen in a previous post public authority (police) is located within civil society and it mediates (regulates) the differing interests of producers and consumers, is concerned with education and poverty.
What Hardt and Negri are doing is rumaging through Foucault's conceptual tool box to deepen our understanding of the mode of governance exercised by public authority in civil society. The aim is to use the tools developed by Hegel and Foucault to help us understand the governance of the modern liberal capitalist society in modernity, and then apply them to the way internatonal relations are currently governed.
We have to get the tools from somewhere. So let us see what they reckon will be useful from Foucualt's toolbag.
Hardt and Negri say that the first reason for making the turn to Foucault's tool box is to pick up Foucault's concept of a disciplinary society. Hardt and Negri describe this as follows:
"Disciplinary society is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices. Putting this society to work and ensuring obedience to its rule and its mechanisms of inclusion and/or exclusion are accomplished through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, and so forth) that structure the social terrain and present logics adequate to the "reason" of discipline. Disciplinary power rules in effect by structuring the parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviors."
The second reason for turning to Foucault to develop Hegel's cconcept of the police is Foucault's concept of biopower. Hardt and Negri say:
'Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord. As Foucault says, "Life has now become . . . an object of power."'
Does biopower achieve an effective command over the entire life of the whole population?
Biopower is described by James Marshall as a:
"...form of power that is exercised on the body and it carries a specifically anatomical and biological aspect. It is exercised over members of a population so that their sexuality and individuality are constituted in certain ways that are connected with issues of national policy, including the machinery of production. In this way populations can be adjusted in accordance with economic processes."
"So that populations can be adjusted in accordance with economic processes?" What could that mean in a liberal society of free individuals?
An illustration would be the attempts by the neo-liberal state to do shape the conduct of populations so they act are more in accord with the processes of free market and are weaned of the welfare state. James Marshall says that Foucault meant it in the sense of a diciplinary society: as
"... technologies of domination [that] act essentially on the body, and classify and objectify individuals. They were developed in disciplinary blocks such as the prison, the hospital, and the school. In so far as these objective classifications are adopted and accepted by individuals so their selves are also constituted."
James Marshall says that the other technology of biopower is the technologies of the self :
"...in technologies of the self there is the belief, now common in western culture, that it is possible to reveal the truth about one's self. By telling the truth about one's sexuality, where the "deepest" truth is embedded in the discourse and discursive practices of sexuality, individuals become objects of knowledge both to themselves and to others. But telling the truth is both therapeutic and also controlling. Eventually, according to Foucault, we learn how to do these things to ourselves."
Foucault argued that the conjoint effects of these two technologies of domination and self give rise to a mode of governance, or governmentality as the art of government exercise by public authority.
Governmentality refers to the way a public authority in civil society exercises the art of shaping, creating and directing the "diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices" for the public good or interest. James Marshall says that governmentality:
"...is a form of activity which attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of self to self, self to others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political sovereignty."
Foucault broadens public authority beyond civil society to include the state as the political sovereignty in a nation state.
It is not clear whether Hardt and Negri follow him in this. I suspect that they do, since they want to use these concepts to map the mode of governance exercised by empire. However, we need to bear in mind that no nation-state rules the globe. So political sovereignty exercised by empire is going to be along the lines of governmentality.
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This use of 'governmentality' (and indeed 'biopower') seems an inordinately complicated way of expressing fairly well-known phenomena and dynamics, and at the same time is not exactly easy to operationalise. Perhaps just as importantly, the essence is not new: Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' expresses it perfectly elegantly - whether one agrees with his other analyses or not. The danger is that, rather than helping to elucidate and further uncover the dynamics of society and politics, one becomes side-tracked into vague linguistic exploration and becomes progressively locked in a hermetic discourse that fails to connect with most other intellectual endeavour - let alone with the wider society it presumably intends to affect.