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October 28, 2004
I previously mentioned this paper by Thomas Lemke entitled 'Foucault Governmentality and Critique' in my earlier post on Foucault & governmentality.
What does Lemke say? He starts by asking two good questions:
"(1) why does the problem of government assume a central place in Foucault's work? and (2) how could this concept serve to analyse and criticize contemporary neo-liberal practice?"
I am more interested in the 2nd question than the first given this.
On the first question, Lemk says that governmentality is the missing (unpublished) link between the genealogy of political rationality and the genealogy of the subject. What the unpublished lectures explore is the way that the history of the modern state and individual co-determine each others emergence.
Governmentality as a mode of governance has the following characteristics:
1. Foucault's earlier rejection of the juridical model of power (law, contract, consensus in favour of the war (and conquest) give way to a view of consensus and coercion as instruments, mechanisms, means of government;
2. governmentality is what links the individual's self-control is linked to political form and economic regulation and exploitation;
3. it distinguishes between power as strategic games and domination to consider ways the modes of power regulate or shape our conduct to empower subjects.
That is a quick sketch. It is enough to enable us to as the question we are interested in: 'How goes this way of looking at power help us to understand neo-liberalism?'
Lemke usefully constrasts it with other approaches such as:
*one that treats neo-liberalism as wrong knowledge ie., as an ideology;
*one that treats neo-liberalism as the extension of the economy into politics as the truiumph of capitalism over the state. So they set out to civilize a barbaric global capitalism. Mark Latham's ALP adopts this approach, which it calls the Third Way;
*one that concentrates on the negative consequences of neo-liberalism on individuals in the nation-state.
Lemke says the limits of these 3 approaches is that they continue to rely on the very concepts they intend to criticize. They presuppose the dualism of knowledge and power, state and economy and subject and power as domination. The critical contribution lies in it moving beyond these dualisms in political philosophy.
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