Governmentality

Governmentality is a concept coined by Michel Foucault in the late 1970s to describe and analyze the “art of government” or the “conduct of conduct.” Governmentality, along with related Foucauldian concepts such as power/knowledge, the gaze, biopower, and technologies of the self, has become influential in social sciences such as sociology, geography, political science, and anthropology. Foucault used these and other concepts to show the coevolution of forms of government, political rationalities, and individuals as political subjects through history. He was especially concerned with how modernity and modern institutions enable novel relationships between government and policy and subject formation and subjectivity. Social scientists have increasingly applied Foucault's concept of governmentality to the creation of environmental subjects through regulation of social [Page 204]interactions with the biophysical world in what has become known as eco-governmentality or green governmentality. As many of these investigations have taken place in the developing world, eco-governmentality is often affiliated with the study of the spread of green neoliberalism through structural adjustment programs and their concomitant environmental conditionalities.

Foucault first presented his views on governmentality in a series of lectures at the College De France in the late 1970s. Rather than being based on a narrow sense of government as state politics, Foucault's understanding of governmentality emphasized the myriad ways in which governments began to increasingly apply the theories and practices of political economy to the disciplining of populations for specific ends, producing specific kinds of subjects in the process. In his lectures, Foucault presented historical reconstructions of governments and political subjects from Ancient Greece to modern forms of government, paying particular attention to the ethical norms of each age. In particular, Foucault showed how the European state of the Middle Ages was a state of justice, maintaining its territory by simply imposing harsh laws on its subjects. During the 15th and 16th centuries, however, Renaissance-era states gradually became administrative states, ordering both people and things to create a more stable society. Rather than a mere defense of territory, then, the state became increasingly concerned with ordering its inhabitants in such a way as to produce specific ends. The emergence of certain forms of knowledge and technical means to achieve these ends constitutes the emergence of governmentality. Foucault then argued that governmentality as a form of power eventually superseded other forms of power such as sovereignty and discipline.

Parallel to his conceptualization of power/knowledge, Foucault's coinage of governmentality involved combining the term for governing with the term for mentality, emphasizing that it is impossible to analyze the technologies and techniques of power without also analyzing the political rationality underlying them. Whereas contemporary usage of the term government refers primarily to the political realm, Foucault showed through his lectures how government was used in medical, religious, pedagogical, and other texts up until the 18th century. Thus, along with referring to the administration of the state and its populations, government also signified the management of the body, the family and household, and even the soul. One of the keys to this novel form of power was the gaze of the school, hospital, and prison. That is, an individual who is both constantly within the field of visibility of the school principal, doctor, or prison warden and is also aware of being visible begins to police himself or herself spontaneously. Thus, the gaze and other technologies of power determine the conduct of individuals and objectify them through the application of certain forms of domination. Foucault's goal, however, is not only to describe how apparatuses of power increasingly disciplined individuals, creating the modern subject. Rather, Foucault also traces technologies of the self through which individuals transform themselves, often through the internalized logics of the state. In this sense, the emergence of the sovereign state is codetermined by the emergence of the modern, apparently autonomous individual.

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