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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

liberal governmentality « Previous | |Next »
June 20, 2006

One of the important shifts in our recent understanding of power is Foucault's category of governmentality.This designates a specific modern form of power targeted at 'population', which came to predominate over other types of power in Western Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; one that offers a different understanding of power to that of coercion, authority and manipulation.

Foucault explored the way that government, by the end of the eighteenth century, was seen as having not a single but multiple ends, such as the increase of wealth and population. Through new forms of knowledge such as political economy, population itself was rendered visible both as an object and as an end of government. How to manage a population and to maintain its wealth and security becomes an essential part of the art of government and its rationality.

Governmentality is based on the idea that power circulates rather than being imposed from above. The workings of power involves the 'practices of the self' and 'practices of government,' and it weaves them together without a reduction of one to the other. Governmentality encompassed the 'conduct of conduct',and the art and rationality of forms of governance. Power is analysed in its effects rather than its sources and at the margins rather than at the centre.The focus is on techniques of rule, the strategies and practices by which governance was enacted.

Liberal governmentality is a mode of rule whose lynchpin was the liberal subject itself, a self which was at once self-watching and watchful of power. Tthe idea of freedom is integral to the liberal mode of rule; it represented not simply an end of government, an absence of restraint, but also, paradoxically, a technique of rule and thus a form of restraint. In liberal governmentality, Foucault observed, freedom is the condition of security.

So liberalism refers to more than a political party, ideology, or political philosophy. It designates a form of governance that proclaimed its transparency, cultivated the reflexive and vigilant citizen, and sought to govern at a distance from its object. Consequently, liberalism is better understood as a set of practices than of principles.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 05:15 PM | | Comments (9)
Comments

Comments

A good part of Foucault's schtick is to invert the "standard" account of rational progress and growth in quasi-parodic fashion into an account of the transformation and growth of "power", detached from subjects/agents and attributed to atelic structural relations/positions from which "subjects" are to be derived. There is some salutary corrective criticism there, but also distinct limits that need to be ferreted out, rather than swallowed whole.

For one thing, Foucault's conception of "power", as an all-pervasive and undifferentiatable something/nothing, is cast entirely in instrumentalist/technical terms resulting in a fusion of "freedom" and domination, shorn of both its functional and its normative dimensions.

As a result, not only the functional constraints and "necessities" giving rise to historical power-formations, but also historical gains in terms of well-being, "justice" and rationality, tend to be elided from the "picture" or panorama. The structural-functional differentiation of modern societies and the corresponding transformation from hierarchical to lateral social integration are treated as entirely contingent and arational mutations, from a de-differentiated perspective that itself draws on the very basis, however ambivalent, of what they render possible.

As a result, the only standpoint of criticism becomes the crypto-normativity of a "marginal" anarcho-libertarian stance, in which any "freedom" becomes forthwith a subjection, an effect of "power", another "fold" within domination, regardless of any claims of public-communicative speech. Atomism and authoritarian institutionalism face-off in a totalized "power-knowledge" without any possibility of (ethical?) appeal to participation in political community.

Perhaps the "governmentality" of liberalism would better be "defined" in terms of security being the condition of "freedom", which would explain the connection between vigilance and constraint, certainly in its classical form based on restricted franchise and on fear of "the masses". That might better explain the paradox of neo-liberalism, with its "absolutization" of the national security state, based on a complete privatization of the political.

John,
okay. My concern here is governmentality not Foucault's Discipline and Punish. My interest arises from my work in the Australian Senate as a political advisor.

I take what I want from Foucault's tool box --eg., his power/knowledge enables me to understand how government works from working inside the political institutions. One works within a particular kind of power knowledge-- where the knowledge is an assemblage of public policy and neo-classical economics.

Power/knowlege is dam useful political category that we can use to make sense of how the political works without buying into the whole of Foucualt.

In terms of the political we have a shift from liberalism as a political philosophy to a mode of governance. It's a shift of perspective not one of progress. How useful is this shift? I reckon it helps us to understand how liberal governments govern a population and to understand their conception of political rationality.

Secondly, the shift from power as sovereignty to power as a network enables us to see the biopolitics of the present--the way socially conservative politics currently shapes both the stuff of life (stem cell research, abortion) and gender relations (marriage defined as between man and wife) in the name of family values.

One of the possibly salutary innovations in Foucault's work was the focus on techniques of power rather than ideology as a normative misrepresentation/denegation of power relations. But I'd wonder whether the socially conservative prescriptions accompanying neo-liberal policies aren't rather a reversion to the ideological rather than a technique for managing the "bio-political" issues that neo-liberal policies present.

Rather than involving an effort to elaborate sets of functionally equivalent "solutions" to the problems associated with globalized circulation and its distributed networks, e.g. population exchanges, public health, terrorism, current account imbalances, labor arbitrage, environmental regulation and the like, the imposition of a stereotypic "normativity" seems designed to distract any public awareness into narrowly privatistic channels, less for its actual disciplinary effects than for its re-enforcement of narrowly pre-selected policies over against the growing but free-floating counter-implications that they confront. (Certainly, here in the U.S.A., "policies" designed to placate the at least quasi-phalangist religious right are so sheerly dysfunctional as to belie any aim at actual efficacy.

It's not a matter of a power productive of discourses, but one that seeks to maintain its hold through the exclusion of discourses. I doubt there's anything so extreme down in Oz, though I might add that we invented the Wizard). The oddity, the contradiction here, is that the nation is being evoked in such a way as to exclude its publicness, as precisely what is destabilized through a "globalization" at once sought for and denied by certain narrowly dominant interests. The irony is that there is more than one "globalization" and the proliferations of its discourses vies with the exclusion of their effects.

Oh, dear. Apparently, the NSA has been interfering with our communications again. We really have to stop meeting like this!

John,
Oh well, the argument re power in modernity is that biopower is characterized by a fundamentally different rationality than that of sovereign power.

Whereas sovereign power has been traditionally characterized by a right over life and death, biopwer power is characterized by a productive relation to life, encapsulated in the dictum of fostering life or disallowing it.

We can disagree with Foucault's claim that the threshold of modernity was reached with the transition from sovereign power to biopower, in which the "new political subject" of the population became the target of a regime of power that operates through governance of the vicissitudes of biological life itself. And we need not accept the either sovereignty or biopolitics cos both exist in postmodernity.

However, Foucault's critical revision of Aristotle, that "for millennia, man remained...a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question" is one that can, and should be, taken seriously with biotechnology.

Oops! Sorry, Gary. I was just marking the point at which a prior comment did not get posted through. Irony does not as yet have any internet tags. But, while we're at it, I'll just remark that I don't think that the method/strategy of critical re-description is illegitimate. Rather I think that it could and should be deployed just as much with, as against, Foucault.

John,
I found the missing comment--buried amongst a whole pile of porn spam in the junk folder. I missed it. Sorry. Your NSA comment now makes sense.

John,
you write:

One of the possibly salutary innovations in Foucault's work was the focus on techniques of power rather than ideology as a normative misrepresentation/denegation of power relations. But I'd wonder whether the socially conservative prescriptions accompanying neo-liberal policies aren't rather a reversion to the ideological rather than a technique for managing the "bio-political" issues that neo-liberal policies present.

I don't want to say its either governmentality or ideology.There is a helluva lot of ideology around in terms of the war on terror, the Christian Right, and neo-liberal justifications of the self-organizing free market.

You then outline your case by saying that the imposition of a stereotypic "normativity"
...seems designed to distract any public awareness into narrowly privatistic channels, less for its actual disciplinary effects than for its re-enforcement of narrowly pre-selected policies over against the growing but free-floating counter-implications that they confront..

Maybe that is also a way of reshaping our subjectivity? I'd always thought of this in terms of shaping us , as liberal subejcts, tobecomne little entrepreneurs. But maybe the whole socailly conservative politics can be seen as shaping us as moral subjects.

Probably, the "social conservative" themes should be seen as attempts to mobilize our resentments against our own "freedoms", partly by deploying the image of their "enemy". But the split between the "ethical" and the economic recapitulates the Schmittian "critique" of liberalism, which he stole from Lukcas, n'est-ce pas?