October 25, 2004
Thomas Lemke's book, A Critique of Political Reason: Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality look to be a very interesting text indeed. Governmentality is the link between Foucault's exploration of the political rationalites and genealogies of the state and the techniques of domination on the one hand, and his exploration of ethics, the genealogies of the subject and the technologies of subjectivity on the other. Governmentality links the formation of the state and the formation of the subject.
I have tried looking for Foucault's lecture courses on governmentality on the internet off and on, but I've come up with nothing much. As I understand it Foucault gave two courses of lectures around 1978 and 1979. at the College of France. The 1978 lecture course is a genealogy of governmentality from the classical Greeks and Romans through the Christian idea of pastoral guidance to the idea of state reason and the police in the 18th century. The 1979 lecture course explored the social market (German Ordo)liberal and the neo-liberal (Chicago School) forms of governmentality. It is a pity that these lecture courses are not online, as the 1979 lecture series ---summarized by Lemke here ---looks to be interesting. These lecture series (audio only?) should be online.
In the meantime the Foucauldian Reflections weblog run by Ali Rivzi fills the online gap. The weblog is very good and thoroughly recommended. Ali is also in the process of developing a resource site that provides a wealth of articles by and about Foucault. So things are beginning to shift in terms of online resources.
My understanding of governmentality is gained from reading some of the above lectures several years ago.I'm interested in governmentality as it connects academic theory with public policy and political power in a fruitful way. I've found the governmentality approach to be particularly useful for understanding how neo-liberalism works to govern (shape the conduct of) populations through the deregulated market that take the whole of society as their domain, governing the environment through community, and the practices of social medicine as a system of power and economics. Governmentality gives us is the idea of neo-liberalism as a political project that creates a political economic reality that it says exists.
I have not read Lemke's book. So I am working from his summary of this text. Lemke starts off by saying that the body/power Foucault of Discipline and Punish tended to identify power with discipline. The relations of power are understood in terms of war, struggle and conflict not law, legitimation, will and consensus. Foucault reversed the juridical model of power centred around sovereignty and during the 1980s he took a lot of flak from Anglo-American liberal critics (Habermas, Taylor, Walzer) for this reductionism. They highlighted the gaps, contradictions and aporias in Foucult's work on power and drew attention to the tension between his empirical insights into the modern mechanisms of power and normative problems associated with saying that domination and discipline was bad. Hence an effective critique of the use of power was undermined.
In the second part of his book entitled 'Governmentality' Lemke shows:
"....how Foucault significantly changes his conception of power: the importance of discipline is relativated with respect to macropolitical phenomenons (bio-politics); the war-model, that he prefered and opposed to the juridical model, is questioned and finally critized for being reductive."
So Foucualt takes the criticisms on board and then revises his understanding of how power in a liberal society actually works. What replaces the earlier disciplinary model of power is governmentality. Governmentality is an important category shift.
What then is governmentality?
Lemke says that:
'This is the point where the notion of government appears. Foucault uses this term to solve both problems that are insufficiently treated in the "microphysics of power:" government takes up the question of the government of the self (the problem of the subject) and articulates at the same time the problem of the government of the others (the problem of politics and the state).
Foucault "discovers" a new dimension of power: government does not operate as "right" or as "war"; it works foremost as a "conduct of conducts."'
By conduct of conducts in a liberal society Foucault the practices (conduct) of a population and our subjectivity. An example is how neo-liberalism weans us off our social democratic reliance on state provision of services, and shapes the unemployed through welfare to work programs to become more self-reponsible and entrepreneurial.
Lemke rightly says that this perspective of politics as governmentality is especially useful to analysing the ongoing transformations of the welfare state that are linked to the appearence of new "neoliberal" forms of subjectivity associated with the welfare-to work-policies that target the unemployed, the disabled and single mothers.
In the third part of his hbook, which is entitled 'Politics and Ethics', Lemke says that:
"I try to show that Foucault's interest in subjectivity and ethics in his later work does not signify that he breaks with his analytics of power. On the very contrary: government is the notion that links the ways subjects conduct themselves ("ethics") with forms of power and domination."
Governmentality is concerned to ensure the right conduct of a population in a deregulated market and to shape new forms of (entrepreneurial) subjectivity. In governmentality the ethics and the politics are deeply intertwined.
I appreciate that this is a very condensed summary of some complex material, but I think that it is enough to highlight the importance and the significance of governmentality for a history of the present.
A paper by Lemke for those interested. It provides more background on governmentality and highlights the way that the contact point of the state governing others is also the contact point for our self-regulation.
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Hi Gary,
Thanks for mentioning my blog. Lemke is certainly a very interesting guy. He is normally lumped together with the so called governmentality school but is way different from them.
As far as I know, the book you mention, as of now, only exists in German language; however it would be great to have it in English. The paper you have posted from Rethinking Marxism should give a very good idea of the content of the book.
Regards
Ali