Governmentality

1
Governmentality
2
Three views of Global Politics

• Realism
• The International System and Global Governance
• International Political Economy

3
Poststructuralist Philosophy

• Michel Foucault Archaeology of Knowledge (1969),
  Discipline and Punish (1975), History of
  Sexuality (1976-84) lectures on governmentality
  (1978-79)
• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968),
  Thousand Plateaus (with Felix Guattari) (1980)
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology Writing and
  Difference (1968)

4
Discipline and Punish sovereignty

• "After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens,
  who cried out profusely, though without swearing,
  raised his head and looked at himself the same
  executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot
  containing the boiling potion, which he poured
  liberally over each wound. (p.4)

5
Discipline

• art 21. Meal At 10 O'Clock the prisoners leave
  their work and go to the refectory they wash
  their hands in their courtyards and assemble in
  divisions. After the dinner, there is recreation
  until twenty minutes to eleven...

6
A Microphysics of Power themes

• The Body as a target of discipline
• Historical Process discipline has multiple
  origins
• Knowledge and Visibility - knowledge does not
  describe reality it helps constitute it
• Materiality and Space the architecture of
  politics

7
Panopticism

• A permanent visibility
• This enclosed, segmented space, observed at
  every point, in which the individuals are
  inserted in a fixed place (p.197)

8
College de France lectures 1977-79
9
Governmentality

• 1. The ensemble formed by the institutions,
  procedures, analyses, and reflections, the
  calculations and the tactics that allow the
  exercise of this very specific albeit complex
  form of power, which has its target population,
  as its principal form of knowledge political
  economy, and as its essential technical means
  apparatuses of security.

10
Governmental knowledge

• 2. The tendency that, over a long period and
  throughout the West, has steadily lead toward the
  pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty,
  discipline, and so on) of this type of power
  which may be termed "government" resulting, on
  the one hand, in the formation of a whole series
  of governmental apparatuses, and, on the other,
  in the development of a whole complex of
  knowledges

11
Displacing the state from the centre of analysis

• just as for the prison we tried to seek out the
  general economy of power i.e. discipline can we
  carry out the same reversal for the state? Is it
  possible to place the modern state in a general
  technology of power that assured its mutations,
  development and functioning? Can we talk of
  something like a governmentality that would be to
  the state what the techniques of.discipline were
  to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to
  medical institutions. These are the kinds of
  questions that are at stake in these lectures?
  Foucault, lecture of 8 February 1978, translated
  in Security, Territory, Population, 2007, p.120

12
Government

• the state and society are effects of
  governmental techniques
• liberal governmentality implies a permanent
  criticism of government an art of
  government...that is novel in its mechanisms
  and its principles
• liberal government acts through producing forms
  of freedom e.g. enterprising and responsible
  citizens (see Nikolas Rose)

13
Foucault and Global Politics and Government

• The market as an instrument of global government
  (not governance!)
• An attention to the micro practice of global
  politics and government e.g practices of
  corporate social responsibility - which cut
  across national boundaries creating new zones
  of government

14
example Poland and the EU

• The boundaries of Europe are technological as
  well as territorial
• Disciplined and enterprising subjects are created
  through technical devices
• (E Dunn Standards and Person Making in East
  Central Europe in Ong and Collier Global
  Assemblages)

15
Foucault and Geography

• Central concern with knowledge, space and power
• But no explicit discussion of geography see
  e.g. Foucault, Questions on Geography in
  Power/Knowledge, 1980
• Work influential in Geography via Derek Gregory,
  Geraid OTuathail, and research on governmentality