Governing the Present

Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745654928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The literature on governmentality has had a major impact across the social sciences over the past decade, and much of this has drawn upon the pioneering work by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. This volume will bring together key papers from their work for the first time, including those that set out the basic frameworks, concepts and ethos of this approach to the analysis of political power and the state, and others that analyse specific domains of the conduct of conduct, from marketing to accountancy, and from the psychological management of organizations to the government of economic life.

Bringing together empirical papers on the government of economic, social and personal life, the volume demonstrates clearly the importance of analysing these as conjoint phenomena rather than separate domains, and questions some cherished boundaries between disciplines and topic areas. Linking programmes and strategies for the administration of these different domains with the formation of subjectivities and the transformation of ethics, the papers cast a new light on some of the leading issues in contemporary social science modernity, democracy, reflexivity and individualisation.

This volume will be indispensable for all those, from whatever discipline in the social sciences, who have an interest in the concepts and methods necessary for critical empirical analysis of power relations in our present.

1

Introduction

Governing Economic and Social Life

Why study ‘governmentality’? Our own path to governmentality began with a series of diverse, but loosely connected questions. How, and to what ends, did so many socially legitimated authorities seek to interfere in the lives of individuals in sites as diverse as the school, the home, the workplace, the courtroom and the dole queue? How were such wishes articulated, whether in relatively local settings such as individual organizations and firms, in the form of more systematized and articulated policy proposals or political programmes, or in the more abstract realms of political theory? What sort of knowledge base and knowledge claims underpinned such schemes for intervention, and were they drawn from the realms of psychological, sociological or economic theory, from other knowledge claims, or from ‘common sense’? What sorts of devices made such interventions possible, to what extent did they deploy existing instruments, and to what extent were they invented? What understandings of the people to be acted upon – whether explicit or implicit – underpinned these endeavours, and how did they shape or reshape the ways in which these individuals understood and acted on themselves? What has it meant to intervene in the lives of individuals in ‘liberal’ societies, that is to say, societies that proclaimed the limits of the state and respect for the privacy of the individual? And how, in particular, could one analyse the programmes, strategies and techniques emerging in the context in which we were writing – Northern Europe and the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century? This was a time when the state was seeking to withdraw from so many spheres, and when notions of choice, the customer and the ideal of the entrepreneurial self were gaining such ascendancy. Finally, what kinds of empirical inquiries, and what kinds of conceptual tools, would enable us to understand these issues in a way that enhanced our capacity to evaluate their consequences, and perhaps even to intervene into them? We did not start from governmentality, but this was the term under which our own attempts to address these questions, empirically and conceptually, came to be grouped. In this Introduction to some of our key papers, and at the risk of over-emphasizing our own work to the exclusion of others, we try to trace this path, and to cast some light from our own perspective on the field of research that has now, for good or ill, come to be termed ‘governmentality’.

From Ideology and Consciousness to Government and Ethics

A politics and a political conjuncture had contributed to the way in which we framed these questions. The politics was formulated initially in terms of ideology. Radical thought at that time – we are talking about the 1970s – was in the grip of Marxism, but it was a Marxism trying to free itself from economic determinism. Along with others, we felt that the organization of economic life was important, perhaps crucial, in the forms of social power that had taken shape in capitalist societies over the last 150 years. But, again with others, we felt that contemporary forms of financial, multinational shareholder capitalism could hardly be understood through the formulae of Marx’s Capital (Cutler et al. 1977, 1978). In any event, economic power could only maintain itself, could only reproduce itself, on the basis of a particular legal system, a set of ideas about the organization of work and the definition of profit, a set of institutional arrangements for shaping and moulding the hopes, aspirations and capacities of individuals and collectivities, and much more. At the very least, the accumulation and distribution of capital was intrinsically linked to the accumulation and distribution of persons and their capacities. We needed to find some more sophisticated ways to understand the operation of these complicated apparatuses – of law and the criminal justice system, of social security, of social work, of education, of medicine, of the family, of economic life itself. They could not, we felt, be seen as simple – or even complex – effects of economic relations of ownership or the form of the commodity, and hence bound to them, and bound to change with them. If these apparatuses and practices were to be the site of political intervention and transformation, we needed to understand what made them tick.

Marxism here had taken a particular form under the influence of a variety of structuralisms – the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar and Nicos Poulantzas, the structuralist semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and all those who followed him from Bakhtin to Barthes, and even to some extent the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Structuralism was significant, as a style of thought, because it redirected our attention towards the sets of relations, not available to common sense and direct observation, which underpinned and made possible what one could see, think, understand and even feel. This reshaped the field of ideology – which for so long, in Marxism, had been the way to approach the questions that concerned us. Despite its many and varied forms, and whatever its level of sophistication, Marxist notions of ideology designated a domain of false ideas that served the social function of masking and legitimating the dominance of a ruling class. But, from the perspective of these structuralisms, ideology could no longer be regarded as a matter of ideas, no longer critiqued as a field of falsity or disguise, and no longer explained in terms of its social function. It consisted of apparatuses that were complex assemblages with their own conditions of possibility and their own regularities. Their operation was inextricably bound up with a particular vocabulary or language that circumscribed what could be said and what could be done in ways that were meaningful. And the apparatuses were populated with human beings whose individuality or subjectivity was itself shaped to fit the expectations and demands of others. In that setting, the new task of critical analysis became to understand the formation and functioning of ideological apparatuses, and those who were constituted in and through them.¹

Some elements from this configuration remained relatively constant in the detours that led to the analytics of governmentality. Notably the recognition that to understand what was thought, said and done meant trying to identify the tacit premises and assumptions that made these things thinkable, sayable and doable. Some elements were transformed. For example, the idea of structures as closed systems of difference gave way to a looser conception of open regimes of regularities not organized in binary oppositions of presence and absence, nature and culture, and the like. Some elements did not stand the test of analysis. Althusser’s conception of ideological state apparatuses was found wanting in many respects. For it assumed in advance that the role of these apparatuses, from religion to schooling, was ultimately – and possibly indirectly – to satisfy economic functions, to reproduce the relations of production. It tied these apparatuses rhetorically to an idea of the state, without adequately specifying what that enigmatic term signified. It failed to unpack in any usable manner the relations between the different ‘orders’ into which it divided reality – ‘the economic’, ‘the political’, ‘the ideological’ – while the notion of ‘relative autonomy’ proved to be no more than gestural. Its deployment of the notion of ideology already assumed that the objects of study were falsehoods that had a function, whereas we rapidly become more interested in the question of truth, along with the means of production of truth, and the consequences of the production of truth effects in specific domains. And its gesture towards subjectivity, framed in terms of Lacanian metaphysics, was far too general, despite its initial appeal as a way of countering the a priori humanisms of those such as George Lukács and the Frankfurt School, which could only view power as falsifying and suppressing the essence of human subjects (Miller 1987). The notion of the subject as the bearer or support of relations of production, and reducible to the places and functions created by them, did not enable one to analyse the multiplicity and variability of modes of subject formation, and the relations to the self engendered and enjoined in specific practices.

It was in this conjuncture, in the 1970s, that Michel Foucault’s work entered British debates. Of course, his book on madness had been translated into English in an abridged form in the mid-1960s (Foucault 1967), and we had each worked with ideas from that and other similar analyses in our different engagement with the radical politics of psychiatry (Adlam and Rose 1981; Miller 1981; Miller and Rose 1986; Rose 1986). But the impact of that book was, at least initially, largely confined to those working in and around the psychiatric and medical fields. The same also held for Foucault’s analysis of the birth of clinical medicine, even though both books made clear the interrelations between a knowledge and expertise of the individual and the administration of populations. The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 1973) showed – in a precise and direct manner – how novel ways of thinking, doing and relating to oneself emerged at a particular historical moment, linked up in all sorts of constitutive ways with the emergence of a new politics and valorization of health, which was in turn linked with new forms of production in factories, new ways of life in towns and new ways of managing populations and epidemics. It showed how a way of seeing disease and of practising medicine – the kind of clinical medicine that was beginning to mutate at the very moment he wrote – was assembled at the intersection of heterogeneous developments. These ranged from changes in the laws of assistance to a new philosophy of disease, and brought into existence new forms of subjectivity both for those who suffered and for those who treated, embodied in a set of practices from which they were inseparable. The cherished distinction between ideas and practices was not so much ‘deconstructed’ as by-passed in the form taken by these historical and empirical analyses. There were no gestures here to relative autonomy, the materiality of ideology or dialectics, but rather there was a precise, meticulous and scholarly tracing of the small and dispersed events that brought something new into existence, and in doing so, irreversibly reshaped human ontology and ethics.

The more or less immediate translation into English of Discipline and Punish (1977) – no doubt helped by its explicit concern with issues of discipline and surveillance – helped bring about a more widespread shift in ways of thinking about power. The analysis of the birth of the prison extended Foucault’s prior analyses of the administration of the self, and showed vividly how individualization was a way of exercising power. Despite its focus on the prison, discipline was no longer to be viewed as only carceral. Or, to put it differently, the engineering of conduct and the normalizing of behaviour that emerged within a carceral institution such as the prison provided a more generalized technology of social power. Such a perspective demonstrated the important normalizing role played by a vast array of petty managers of social and subjective existence, whether this occurred in the factory or the schoolroom. The concepts that Foucault used for his analysis were important, of course, but more important was the mode of analytics, the ethos of investigation that was opened up, and the focus – the who and what one should study in the critical investigation of the relations of knowledge, authority and subjectivity in our present (Miller 1987).

Our own analyses over the course of the 1980s were of this form, if more modest in scope. We followed the birth and the activities of many of these little engineers of the human soul, and their mundane knowledges, techniques and procedures – psychologists, psychiatrists, medics, accountants, social workers, factory managers, town planners and others (Miller 1980, 1981, 1986a; Miller and O’Leary 1987; Rose 1985, 1986, 1989a, 1989b). As we did so, it became clear to us that these were more than regional histories, of importance only to those interested in these specific local domains. There seemed no obvious discipline, theory or approach that addressed the range of linked questions and sites that seemed important to us. Political scientists seemed to know at the outset what was of importance – the State or the political apparatus. Political historians focused on the great figures and affairs of state. And historians of philosophy focused on the great names of the philosophical canon, even when their ideas were placed ‘in context’. But, for us at least, it became clear that the political history of our present needed to be written in terms of the activities of the minor figures that we studied, yet who were largely below the threshold of visibility for these other approaches. For it was only through their activities that states, as they were termed by those who seemed untroubled by the meaning of this term, could govern at all.

Our own work, individually and jointly, had focused on the histories of these varied and often lowly forms of expertise: the history of accounting, of management, of psychology and psychiatry, and of social work and education. And yet it seemed that these apparently diverse areas had something in common. It seemed unlikely that techniques as apparently diverse as standard costing and mental measurement shared much, but they did. They had in common a concern with the norm and deviations from it, a concern with ways in which the norm might be made operable, and a concern with all those devices that made it possible to act on the actions of individuals so as to generalize the norm yet without telling people daily how to live their lives and what decisions to take. We were working at the margins of our disciplines, apparently concerned with small, mundane problems, with the grey literature, with minor figures in history a long way away from the grand theories of world systems, modernization, globalization, and so forth. And yet, we believed increasingly, it was only because of the work of our small figures, with their own aspirations as well as those foisted on them, together with their little instruments, that rule could actually occur. It was only through these means that the ‘cold monster’ of the state could actually seek to shape the ways in which people conducted their daily lives, their interactions with themselves and others, and their relations with the various manifestations of social authority. It was these authorities, whether questioned, contested, admired or aspired to, that made it possible for states to govern. In trying to anatomize this activity of governing, we came to focus increasingly on the three axes that had interested us from the outset – systems for the production of truth, regimes of authority and practices of subjectification.

Perhaps the first key move was ‘from why to how’. Theorists of the state addressed ‘why’-type questions. Why did something appear a problem to certain people at a particular time – a question often answered by appeal to pre-given notions of class or professional ‘interests’. Why did a new institution appear, or why did an existing one change – a question often answered by gesturing to global processes such as modernization or individualization. We asked a different question, not ‘why’ but ‘how’, thereby lightening the weight of causality, or at least multiplying it, and enabling us to abstain from the problems of ‘explaining’ such indigestible phenomena as state, class, and so on – indeed we argued that these typically went unexplained despite the claims of those theorists who wrote in these terms. Instead, why not be content to trace small histories and their intersecting trajectories? Why not study events and practices in terms of their singularity, the interrelations that define them and the conditions that make them possible (Veyne 1997)? Why not focus on the encounters, the plays of force, the obstructions, the ambitions and strategies, the devices, and the multiple surfaces on which they emerge? Why not, as Foucault put it, focus on events, on the conditions that constitute an event – ‘eventalization’: ‘making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things weren’t as “necessary as all that” … uncovering the procedure of causal multiplication: analysing an event according to the multiple processes that constitute it’ (Foucault 1996: 277)?² For, in this way, one can begin to discern the web of relations and practices that result in particular ways of governing, particular ways of seeking to shape the conduct of individuals and groups.

A further shift was required. We were interested in subjectivity. But while others tried to write the history of subjectivity, to identify the effects of certain practices on the subjectivity of mothers, workers, children, and so forth, we found this unhelpful. For unless one posited a universal form to the human subject, unless one privileged subjectivity as moral autonomy, unless one adopted some position, psychoanalysis for example, within the contested field of the psy disciplines, that question – of the effects of certain types of experience on the mental life of the human beings caught up within them – could not be answered. That question could only be answered on the basis of some explicit or implicit assumptions about human mental processes. Yet for us, the historical forms taken by those presuppositions were exactly what we were studying. We were interested in what conceptions of the human being – whether as citizen, schoolchild, customer, worker, manager or whatever – were held at certain times and places and by whom, how such conceptions were problematized, and how interventions were devised that were appropriate to the object that was simultaneously a subject.

How, then, to proceed? Once more, it required only a slight shift in perspective. Instead of writing the history of the self or of subjectivity, we would study the history of individuals’ relations with themselves and with others, the practices which both were their correlate and condition of possibility, and enabled these relations to be acted upon. Not who they were, but who they thought they were, what they wanted to be, the languages and norms according to which they judged themselves and were judged by others, the actions they took upon themselves and that others might take, in the light of those understandings. These were genuinely empirical and historical questions open to study. One could ask these questions without any ‘theory of the human subject’ – since such theories were precisely the object of genealogical analysis. One could examine, not subjectivities, but technologies of subjectivity, the aims, methods, targets, techniques and criteria in play when individuals judged and evaluated themselves and their lives, sought to master, steer, control, save or improve themselves. This was the field of concerns that Foucault, in his later work, came to term ‘ethics’. And, of course, one could ask these questions where such steering was undertaken by others. Once more, Paul Veyne (1997) addresses this point. There are no universal subjects of government: those to be governed can be conceived of as children to be educated, members of a flock to be led, souls to be saved, or, we can now add, social subjects to be accorded their rights and obligations, autonomous individuals to be assisted in realizing their potential through their own free choice, or potential threats to be analysed in logics of risk and security. Not subjects, then, but subjectifications, as a mode of action on actions. Not a critique of discipline for crushing the authentic self-realizing subject of humanism, but an approach that recognizes that our own idea of the human subject as individuated, choosing, with capacities of self-reflection and a striving for autonomy, is a result of practices of subjectification, not the ahistorical basis for a critique of such practices.

It was from this perspective that we adopted some of the terminology and concepts sketched out – no more – by Michel Foucault in his brief writings on ‘governmentality’. In the development of our approach, we preferred not to be Foucault scholars. We picked and chose, added ideas and concepts from elsewhere, made up a few of our own, and spent a great deal of time discussing specific cases with those others who came together in the study groups that worked under the banner of the History of the Present, as well as in other locales. While some have come to refer to the ‘British School of Governmentality’, such a designation is rather misleading. What emerged in Britain, but also in Canada, Australia, and even in the United States, was an informal thought community seeking to craft some tools through which we might come to understand how our present had been assembled, and hence how it might be transformed.

Laboratories of Governmentality

We did not set out to create a general theory of governmentality, but began by working on some specific issues. We were, in fact, fortunate in our objects – the Tavistock Clinic, the history of applied psychology, the genealogy of accounting and management: each of these in its different ways made it impossible, if one was to be a good empiricist, to separate out the social, the personal and the economic dimensions, for they were inextricably intertwined. We began increasingly to realize that this interconnectedness – the fact that the making up of people might be simultaneously a matter of social authorities seeking to promote personal fulfilment, improved productivity and increased social welfare – was much of the point, even if the partitioning of academic life tended to efface the intrinsic links between these domains while publicly pleading the cause of interdisciplinarity.

We were engaged not in a speculative and experimental work of theory building, but in something more limited: to craft concepts that would enable the analysis of these laboratory sites. Our papers were published in the various places where people interested in such matters might look – journals on sociology, on the history of the human sciences, on accounting, on management, and so forth. Even there, and in relation to some of our more book-like p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Governing Economic Life
• 3 Political Power beyond the State
• 4 The Death of the Social?
• 5 Mobilizing the Consumer
• 6 On Therapeutic Authority
• 7 Production, Identity and Democracy
• 8 Governing Advanced Liberal Democracies
• Bibliography
• Index