What is governmentality? Is it a useful concept?

Résumé du document

Although the concept of governmentality was elaborated in Foucault's last years, its philosophical premises are to be found in many of his earlier publications. From 1961 (Madness and Civilization) to 1984 (The History of Sexuality) , he explored various forms of powers and constraints, in order to determine "in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a 'scientific' status"1. The case of the execution of Damiens (1757) perfectly illustrates this shift in objectives: what was important in the regicide was structured around questions like 'what happened and who did it?'. Slowly, the attention of the judge turned to questions that referred to the nature itself of the defendant, what he went through in his life, his attitude, etc.

The emergence of these questions had a paramount influence on criminal psychology, and on "the formation of a criminality that will become the object of penal intervention rather than the crime itself"2. Medical, scientific, penal, pedagogical, military, educational or psychiatric domains were progressively understood as areas of knowledge; and the institutions they gave birth to, prison in the case below, aimed at normalizing self-subjecting bodies, both inside and outside their walls.

Foucault's neologism gains clarity, and its commonly accepted definition appears more accessible: "The ensemble formed by the institution procedures, analysis and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, has as its target the population, as its principal form of knowledge the political economy, and as its essential technical means the apparatuses of security"

Extraits

[...] Finally, and it is maybe the most important characteristic of it for Foucault: this gouvernement doesn't operate a scission between what is political and what is not (the private, personal On the contrary, there is a kind of continuity between the ways of governing the conducts that are deployed at all levels of the 'social'. The articulated system of these different ways of governing forms what he calls governmentality. Governmentality is an explanatory tool, and especially when it comes to the different forms of action on populations (conceived as statistical aggregates), aiming at improving their health or productivity for instance. Governmentality is thus an science of the state an art of government whose objects are these statistical aggregates. [...]

[...] What is governmentality? Is it a useful concept? Although the concept of governmentality was elaborated in Foucault's last years, its philosophical premises are to be found in many of his first publications. From 1961 (Madness and Civilization) to 1984 (The History of Sexuality) , he explored various forms of powers, judges and constraints, in order to determine in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a 'scientific' status The case of the execution of Damiens (1757) perfectly illustrates this shift in objectives: what was important in the regicide was structured around questions like 'what happened and who did it'. [...]

[...] In this sense, neoliberalism can be considered as a new form of governmentality. Neoliberalism's core element is indeed not as much laissez- faire as a kind of relative interventionism orientated toward giving incentives to certain practices, or discouraging others. It is a governmentality insofar as it targets economy while taking direct ideological benefits from its potential success : the smooth functioning of competition is the foundation of its legitimacy. But the concept is much wider than that. Foucault's aim, in studying various historical domains (early Christianity, early modern Europe . [...]

[...] As he said in a television debate with Noam Chomsky, his aim is to deconstruct completely any relation of power, in order to be able to destroy them properly. For him, there is no other option. Indeed, if we were to overthrow our political systems without producing the same effort of destruction for the mental structures we slowly acquired, we would just be in danger of perpetuating them, and their resulting inequalities or insatisfactions. Hence the obligation to disassemble these networks of dependence which constitutes power, and the will to take a stratospheric view of society while still keeping a molecular precision. [...]

[...] We will first attempt to precise the notion of governmentality by highlighting what it was constructed against, which tools it uses to accomplish itself, its texture and range. Then, we will try to assess the usefulness of the concept by taking in consideration its supports and opponents, and the further developments of the concept. The term governmentality is subject to many misunderstandings, due to the accidental resonance of mentality and to the French ambiguity between gouvernement as the institution or as the process of governing. [...]