Governmentality

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The problem is this: What kind of political techniques, what technology of government, has been put to work and used [in order] to make the individual a significant element of the state?
-- Michel Foucault

The state maintains schools to render its citizenship homogenous in spirit and purpose. The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual.
-- 1914 U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin (in Tozer, et al., p. 112)

The emergence of social science cannot, as you see, be isolated from the rise of this new political rationality and from this new political technology.
-- Michel Foucault

Governmentality is Foucault's "paradigm" for understanding the "operations of power in modern society" (Fitzsimons, 2002). There are many aspects of this concept that limited space will not allow us to consider; but if the reader will permit a clumsy reduction, we can proceed.

Foucault (1994) describes governmentality as "the ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses [and] tactics that allow the exercise" of state power over its populations (p. 219). Modern states are "governmentalized" by developing this ensemble within a rationality based in "political economy" (p. 218) and concerned with the efficient management of "population, territory and wealth" in order to maximize state power (p. 221).

Central to this efficient management is

the rational exercise of power [which] tends to make the fullest use of knowledges capable of the maximum instrumental efficacy. (Gordon, p. xix)

Since knowledge of populations is essential for governmental power in the modern world, it is no surprise that we see in the 19 th Century-during the rise of the modern nation state-the emergence of the "human sciences": "psychology, sociology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and criminology, together with some aspects of medicine" (Gordon, 1994, p. xxi). Foucault was, Gordon tells us,

intent to show how closely the emergence of these forms of knowledge was enmeshed in the problems and practices of power, the social government and management of individuals. (p. xvi)

Each individual within the state can be made knowable through these many new human sciences, thus becoming the object of government gaze: each of us becomes a "creature" "caught in relations of power" who can now be "trained, corrected, supervised [and] controlled" (p. xvi). In short, the human sciences--"from psychiatry to pedagogy, from the diagnosis of diseases to the hiring of labor" (Foucault, 1984, p. 197)--organize individuals for the state. States come to know individuals as objects within the discourses of these disciplines; individuals come to understand themselves within them as well. In this analysis, schools, mental hospitals, prisons, and clinics of all sorts become important sites of governmentality.

One good example of governmentality is seen in education. As indicated in the U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin quote that begins this article, "the state maintains schools to render" students "homogenous in spirit and purpose." The nature of this state "purpose" goes unstated, but at minimum, the intention is to make the student useful and "significant element of the state," thus echoing the introductory Foucault quote.

One education feature is standardized testing. Foucault (1984) discusses "the examination" as a combination of "the techniques of an observing hierarchy and a normalizing judgment," a "ritualized" test that is both "a ceremony of power" and a social "experiment" yielding knowledge of the student that "makes it possible to qualify, classify, and punish" (p. 197) her. In taking the examination, the student is objectified, rendered "docile" and "arranged" and thus "legible" to authorities (p. 199).

The examination becomes a technique of government to "constitute" the "individual as a describable, analyzable object" in a larger field of analysis of all students allowing the government to

integrate individual data into cumulative systems in such a way that they were not lost; so to arrange things that an individual could be located in the general register and that, conversely, each datum of the individual examination might affect overall calculations. (p. 202)

Those of us familiar with current U.S. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reforms will see their connection to Foucault's description of this particular technique of governmentality. This reform regime is based on federally mandated tests of individual students. The results of this examination make possible comparisons, analyses, and prescriptions for students, teachers, and schools alike at the local, state, and national levels. This domain of test score data becomes the basis for educational policies, practices, and pronouncements that were unimaginable prior to the application of this technique of governmentality. A new reality is created. A new power is accreted around the state.

If I may risk further reduction and some redundancy, this brings us finally to Foucault's famous notion of power as a 'productive' force that actually constructs social reality as well as individual identity (to whatever extent). In deploying this specific technology, state-mandated tests, the state has "caught" students, teachers, and principals "in relations of power" that are real-thus making possible state determination of who should be rewarded, "trained, corrected, supervised [or] controlled" (Gordon, p. xvi).

For Foucault, social science does not discover knowledge, it produces it. Social science knowledge becomes a means by which the state interposes itself into the lives of the population, a means of producing power relations among the population, a means of making itself known to the population, and thus a means of making the population known to the state:

The exercise of power creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information . . . The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power (Gordon, p. xvi).

Foucault admonishes us:

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that can be gained of him belong to this production. (p. 205)

Foucault's larger analysis of power in society is explicitly not unidirectional, top-down, or limited to authorities or governments per se: "It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression" (p. 120). However governmentality is an instance where authorities do seek power; governmentality comprises the techniques states utilize in rendering citizens serviceable for state ends; the social sciences are strategies in that rendering; and NCLB is a good example of policy based in such social science knowledge.

Two quick items. This discussion omitted important aspects of individual identity and governmentality. Also, much could be said about performativity (see "Performativity [Lyotard]" below) and governmentality.

 

References

Cambridge University Press Online Catalogue. Précis of Matthew Hannah's Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. Retrieved on January 12, 2005, from http://books.cambridge.org/0521669499.htm.

Fitzsimons, P. (2002). Neoliberalism and education: the autonomous chooser . Radical Pedagogy Archives. Retrieved January 12, 2005, from http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_2/

- Foucault, M. (1994). Governmentality. In P. Rabinow (Series Ed.) and J. D. Faubion (Vol Ed.), Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 3.Michel Foucault: Power (pp. 201-222). New York: New York Press.

Foucault, M. (1994). The political technology of individuals. In P. Rabinow (Series Ed.) and J. D. Faubion (Vol Ed.), Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 3.Michel Foucault: Power (pp. 403-417). New York: New York Press.

Foucault, M. (1984). The means of correct training. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Foucault reader (pp. 188-205). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1984). The politics of health in the Eighteenth Century. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Foucault reader (pp. 271-289). New York: Pantheon Books.

Gordon, C. (1994). Introduction. In P. Rabinow (Series Ed.) and J. D. Faubion (Vol Ed.), Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume 3.Michel Foucault: Power (pp. 403-417). New York: New York Press.

Tozer, S. E., Violas, P. C., Senese, G. (2002). School and society, Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York: McGraw Hill. p. 112

 

Contributed by Jason Sparks