Governmental rationality | Colin Gordon

Foucault defines government thus: "'the conduct of conduct'" (p. 2); in Gordon's words "a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons." Sounds suspiciously like Foucault's definition of power - actions taken on actions of others - I wonder if he saw any difference. In all likelihood this is Foucault saying that power is diffuse and dispersed throughout the social body. Power and government come, not from one external source that is supra the social body but from within its very nexus (Subject and Power). Power is not violence or force and relies on a free subject - in my words it's a two way multi-directional process. Power is an "endless and open strategic game" (p. 5).



Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: an introduction. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 1-52). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

On governmentality | Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault traces a genealogy of governmentality from feudal systems, the sovereign ruler, to the development of the art of government through the agency of the economy.

Foucault is interested in the state and how the state might, through multivalent means, put effect to government. He traces the way the feudal system gave way to this art of government with the interstitial manifestations of the art represented through the family as a metaphor for the economy. The family soon came to be seen as a thin, poorly structured means by which one might theorise the economy, and thus was born the notion of the population which could be observed and measured and assessed. Population then became the end game, the final outcome, for government, which must firstly consider the ways in which the wealth, well-being, and growth of this population might be effected. The family became a mere instrument in the collection of data and was lost altogether as the central unit for the economy.

"The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, aware, vis-a-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it" (p. 100).

And again, importantly I believe for my thesis:

"Interest at the level of the consciousness of of each individual who goes to make up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the governement of population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniiques" (p. 100).

Foucault notes the impact of the emergence of the population as central to the governance of the state. Far from sovereignty being replaced by the political science of governance he notes its continued centrality through an attempt "to see what what juridical and institutional form, what foundation in the law. could be given to the sovereignty that characterizes a state" (p. 101). My interest here is on the word 'state'. Foucault refers to a nation-state but equally the state could refer to a corporate-state against which bloggers are opposed. Corporate-states seek their own sovereignty from the laws of commerce and employment from which they derive the exercise of power over a personal blogger. In other words, a network of systems, agreements, and political aspirations stand opposed to the hoped-for right of free expression of the personal blogger. Sovereignty therefore is distributed, diffuse, multivalent.

The management of a population reinforced the centrality of the disciplines to governance through the arrangement and aggregation of things - assets, artifacts, people, groups.

Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87-105). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.