History and Governmentality
FORUM
Ao longo das últimas décadas, a obra de Michel Foucault tem interpelado as
ciências sociais e humanas de forma muito diversa. Por exemplo, vários
conceitos de sua autoria têm convidado a uma renovação dos termos em que
debatemos questões como as relações de poder. Entre estes conceitos, destaca-se
o de gouvernamentalité, assistindo-se mesmo à consolidação de uma área
designada como Governamentality Studies. Nos trinta anos da morte de Foucault,
a Análise Social convida um conjunto de investigadores a partilharem connosco
uma reflexão sobre o modo como aquele conceito interceta a sua própria agenda
de pesquisa.
History and Governmentality
Patrick Joyce*
*Centre for Research in Sociocultural Change, University of Manchester, 178,
Waterloo Place, Oxford Road Manchester, UK. E-mail:
patrick.joyce@manchester.ac.uk
As the editors of Análise Social put it, in the last few decades the work of
Michel Foucault has permeated the social sciences and humanities in diverse
ways. Concepts proposed by Foucault have led to a renewal of the terms in
which we debate power relations - as is the case with the idea of
governmentality.1 However, like the other elements of Foucault's thought, these
concepts are not to be slavishly copied, but applied with other intellectual
resources, including those of different historiographical traditions. If
properly developed, they can lead to a renewed political history, but cannot do
it alone.
The study of the political in history and the social sciences still largely
proceeds on the basis of an inadequate understanding of the realities with
which it purports to deal. While a new history of the political has emerged
recently in different places, the emphasis has still been rather narrow
regarding the conceptual and the discursive. For instance, German initiatives,
such as that of Bielefeld The political as space for communicative action2,
are strongly influenced by both Koselleck's conceptual history and Habermas'
discursive notion of communicative action. In France, Ronsanvallon's history of
the political seeks to differentiate such a history from established political
history (the study of a differentiated sphere of society, the political as
opposed to the economic, for example). The political is understood as a form of
life, as it is by Foucault. However, rather than this possibility, his is a
self-confessedly conceptual and philosophical history. In this regard it has
much in common with the strong vein of philosophical approaches to a more
enlarged view of the political evident in France (e.g., Claude Lefort, Maurice
Gauchet).3 Despite these new developments, however limited, in Anglo-American
scholarship and beyond, the influence of the so-called Cambridge School and
Quentin Skinner still remains strong. This has also remained text-based and so
offers only limited scope for a new political history. The legacy of Foucault
is therefore quite crucial for the development of new ways of doing political
history.
First, however, what is governmentality? The concept and its application owe a
great deal to a group of British and French scholars working in the social
sciences, but with an interest in history. In the words of one of the most
influential of these, Nikolas Rose, governmentality concerns the ways in which
those who would exercise rule have posed to themselves the question of the
reasons, justifications, means and ends of rule, and the problems, goals or
ambitions that should animate it.4 As a political rationality, governmentality
is understood as a kind of intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering
reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming
(political here being understood in the wide sense). Following from this,
technologies of government are to be analyzed in terms of the strategies,
techniques and procedures through which different authorities seek to enact
programmes of government. As Rose continues however, this is not a matter of
the implementation of idealized schemata in the real by an act of will, but of
the complex assemblage of diverse forces (legal, architectural, professional,
administrative, financial, judgemental), techniques (notation, computation,
calculation, examination, evaluation), devices (surveys and charts, systems of
training, building forms) that promise to regulate decisions and actions of
individuals, groups, organisations in relation to authoritative criteria.
So defined, governmentality is given a history by Foucault and those developing
his work5. The separation of governmentality from sovereignty in the 16th
century is held to have seen the emergence of population as a principle of
rule, with bio-power its expression. A governable economy and society began
to emerge, and these became autonomous in liberalism, which now ceded
governance to an unknowable, and now opaque object of rule, that of the liberal
subject. Liberalism fought shy of too much governing, and it confronted itself
with realities ' individual subjects, markets, civil society, families, and in
the case of my own work, cities and states6, in which these free subjects could
be identified and acted upon. These realities were held to have their own
internal logics and mechanisms of self-regulation that had to be respected.
Thus approached, social and political and postcolonial historians have deployed
governmentality in different ways7. The work of Timothy Mitchell has been
particularly influential, representing as it does an awareness of what could be
learned from science studies as well as from Foucault. However, the main
emphasis in taking up science studies was that apparent in the work of myself
and others, which drew on the various elements that make up what is being
called the new materialism8. These new directions of change took the concept
of governmentality a good deal beyond the somewhat formulaic use of the term in
its original guise of political sociology. There it suffered also from a
tendency to a sort of crypto-functionalism, as if different governmentalities
were not always in conflict, and as if they were coherent, prescient, and
unified. This failing is also apparent in the original work of Foucault, as
well as that of his critic De Certeau, governmental techniques being construed
as having a built-in essence expressing an inherent political coherence and
logic.
While scholars in several disciplines have used many of Foucault's insights to
study extra-institutional formations of power, mainstream political
sociologists and historians are only minimally attentive to the cultural and
material currents that animate the events and the institutions that are their
objects of study. While Foucault has been able to broaden social conceptions of
politics by drawing attention to the dispersal of power through bodies and
things, it has, however, been hard to reconcile Foucault's work with theories
of the state and the study of politics as these have developed in historical
writing and much social science, focusing as these have on variations in
centralizing institutional power and types of political regimes. This has
left traditional, and still dominant, approaches to political power no clear
way to analyze how political institutions and other political actors gain and
exercise forms of knowledge and material power of the sort identified by
Foucault.
In developing the work of Foucault alongside the new materialism, I and my
recent collaborator Chandra Mukerji begin from the assertion - a variant on
Weber's theory - that modern states are themselves impersonal social formations
that develop their powers by proliferating tools of impersonal rule from
infrastructures to legal archives. Weber focused mainly on the social means of
depersonalization of power in his account of Western state formation, but also
hinted at the importance of material formations of power when he pointed to the
importance of bureaucratic files. However, we do not start with social
practices of power that sociologists already understand, but rather with the
material forms of governance that social and political theory, and most
political history, barely acknowledge, looking at the impersonal techniques of
power that states have developed to make them institutionally more powerful.
Contrary to many present-centered understandings of technique and the
technical we are interested in low- and slow-tech as well as high- and fast-
tech, not only railways and energy networks, say, but also letters and filing
systems; in fact with technology at a fundamental level, namely the level of
writing and numbering. Only by understanding these impersonal techniques can we
understand state-making properly, and so develop the new political history.
We have been working collaboratively in an effort to provide such an analytic
frame, extending Foucault's approach to power by studying the material
practices of knowledge/power within the French and British states, including
the British Raj and Ireland - practices that helped to make them both claim and
exercise authority. We do not treat culture as ideas, beliefs, or principles,
but more broadly, like Foucault, as forms of life, and we study material
practices of state power that shape the forms of life identified with those
states. State power, in our view, is not only or even mainlythe power of law,
social organization, political legitimacy, and ideas. It involves the power of
legal documents over people; the arsenals and soldiers formed to enact
legitimate power in the name of the state; and among countless other things the
built environments that define the history and destiny of nations and states.
