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.
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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.