Governmentality

Govermentality, a term appearing in the later works of Michael Foucault, refers to the ethical practices whereby individuals form and care for the self as it is affected by the wider array of social powers and knowledges. Governmentality came to replace Foucault's more famous concept power/ knowledge (pouvoir/savoir) in the empirical volumes of his history of sexuality (Foucault 1985, 1986).

The deep background of the theory of governmentality is the long history of social theory's attempt to find a mediating position between the objective structures of social power and the subjective elements of selfhood. In his theory of power/knowledge, Foucault was one of the first in the late modern era to show that social theories of knowledge must perforce be theories of social power. In this he was able to advance the idea by drawing upon the distinction made in the French language between formal or scientific knowledges (connaissances) and practical knowledges of daily life (saviors). This made it possible to avoid an oversimplifying notion of ideology that invites the suggestion that knowledges are all of one kind, thus uniformly susceptible to the distortions of political and economic interests.

Foucault's theory of power/knowledge, though often stated in highly abstract terms, was a direct outcome of his empirical studies in the history of modern social forms, including its forms of culture and knowledge. Thus, even before the expression came into explicit use in Archaeologie du savoir (1969), his early studies of madness, the hospital, and the human sciences were, in effect, a history of the forms of power at play in the modern era. He saw, quite clearly, that the traditional top-down idea of power (commonly associated with Karl Marx) is unable to account for the fact that, in the modern system especially, individuals subject themselves to power. At the beginning, for example, the urban migrations for work in the factory system were, in principle, voluntary (if only in the sense that agrarian labor was disappearing). Hence Foucault's idea that in modernity power works often in a gentle way by applying itself to the practical knowledges taught (or absorbed and otherwise learned) by ordinary men and women in the course of daily life. To work in a factory is both to learn a different method of ordering daily life and to subject oneself to a new regime of power.

Power/knowledge eventually gave way to governmentality in the second and third volumes of Foucault's history of sexuality (1985, 1986). Though he used the earlier expression in the first volume (1978), once he immersed himself in the research on sexual practices and self-care, he came to see what was at work, from the earliest, even with the Greeks. Selfhood had always been less a form of knowledge as such than a practical ethic. The effect of this insight was that in the third of his sexuality studies (1986), he seems to have lost interest in sexuality and turned to a general theory of the self and self-formation.

Governmentality is a concept of rich potential (largely unrealized in Anglophone social theory) for theories of the social self. It invites a vastly more complex and broad-ranging social psychology than is permitted, for example, by the concept socialization. Governmentality allows social theory to avoid the dead end of supposing that the social self is formed by the introjection of structured cultures and their social values. Instead of the wider social forces intruding upon the self, or offering the self an array of social opportunities, governmentality allows social theory to locate the formation of subjecthood at an earlier, if preconscious, point in the social development of the individual. When, in the earliest months of life, individuals learn to govern themselves, they are learning as well the play of social power mediated by even the gentlest of parental gestures. When, later in development, the individual is said to become a self, or to “have” a self, he or she can be seen as having achieved a degree of ethical competence in governing oneself in relation to the power plays to which one is subjected and into which one inserts oneself. The affinities to power/knowledge are apparent, as are the ways a theory of governmentality seeks to rethink the social self in political terms.

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