Governmentality

Governmentality is a complex and polysemic concept. It was originally proposed by Michel Foucault with the intention of explaining the constitution of the modern subject. The concept expresses the effort made by the French philosopher to renew conceptual tools for understanding government practices and their modes of rationality. Foucault introduced the concept of governmentality to consider modes of government as an object of study.

The concept implies three related things: (1) the set of institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, and the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of a very specific, albeit complex, power, which has as its target, the population, and as its principal form of knowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means, apparatuses of security; (2) the tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led toward the preeminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, and so on) of this type of power—which may be termed government—resulting, on one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other hand, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges (savoirs); and (3) the process, or rather, the result of the process, through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state during the 15th and 16th centuries and gradually becomes “governmentalized,” as Foucault wrote in 2003. Governmentality may be seen in terms of the encounter between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self, suggests Foucault. However, Foucault did not elaborate a unified theory; considerations on governmentality are disseminated in his work from 1970 until his death in 1984. His courses at the Collège de France are a very important source to clarify the meanings of the concept and its theoretical relevance to understand different facets of the conduct of conducts in modernity.

After Foucault's death, this line of work was deepened by some of his disciples and colleagues. The contributions of Giovanna Procacci, Pasquale Pasquino, Jacques Donzelot, Francois Ewald, Robert Castel, Gilles Deleuze, and Daniel Defert are worth mentioning. This interest expanded rapidly and constituted, during the 1990s, ample development of the governmentality concept in the Anglo-Saxon world by authors such as Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbourne, and Nikolas Rose in 1996; Mitchell Dean in 1999, and Rose in 1999; and more recently, there have been similar developments in Spain and Latin America, such as J. Vázquez's contribution from 2005.

Foucault's work comprises 11 books, plus the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality, entitled Confessions of the Flesh, a carefully safeguarded text that remains unpublished, since Foucault did not want his work published posthumously. In addition to this body of texts, there is an incessant and meticulous flow of course reports, essays, interviews, and debates. His thought has been generally organized into three specific stages, as noted by Gilles Deleuze:

• 1.
  The archaeological stage (1961–1969), centered on examining the conditions of the possibility of discourses: What do I know? What is knowing?
• 2.
  The genealogical stage (1970–1979), in which power relations and practices are considered, as well as the formation of the institutions in which they can be found: What am I capable of? What is power?
• 3.
  The ethical stage (1979–1984), which examines the constitution of subjectivity based on the analysis of technologies and practices of individuation: What am I? What is oneself?

These stages, however, are only a resource for lending a certain order, and should be used cautiously, since they fade away when one observes the focal point around which the great Foucauldian project revolves. The preeminence of power only appears to be the focus, since the central problem he was concerned with can be found in the examination of relations between subject and truth.

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