A system for managing the population rationally and efficiently

Modern liberal states are characterised by a broader form of government than that traditionally associated with feudal or highly centralised autocratic states. This wider form of government emerged as a response to the need for states to manage their expanding economies, colonial empires and their populations (Foucault 1991). The governing techniques developed to manage the ‘new networks of continuous and multiple relations between population, territory and wealth’ was termed governmentality (Foucault 1991, p. 101). Foucault’s concept of governmentality involves three arms of government; self-government, government of the economy, and ‘the science of ruling the state’ (Foucault 1991, p. 91). In contrast to previous arts of government, which focused on defining the domain of the autocrat, governmentality involves the development of techniques for managing the interfaces between these three

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arms of government (Foucault 1991, p. 91). As a result, the concept of governmentality extends beyond the power invested in the political and juridical apparatus of the state to include the range of social practices and techniques employed to exercise power (Foucault 1991).

Foucault de-emphasises the role of sovereignty, state apparatuses and accompanying ideologies in the study of power in a knowledge driven society. Foucault’s extension of the art of government to the economy, in liberal governmentality, enables us to recognize that the economy is not separate to the state. For example, ‘we have known since Marx, there is no market independent of the state’ (Lemke 2010, p. 57). In fact, Miller & Rose (2008) argue that the more recent extension of market principles to all sectors of the economy, such as higher education, is a calculated governmental response to previous forms of liberalism which failed to secure a robust economy. For example, the social dimension, in social liberalism, was perceived as being emphasized at the expense of the competitive forces required to sustain an economy (Campbell & Pedersen 2001).

Power relations in modern liberal political systems like ours are managed through normalized discourses. Power is embedded in social practices and power relations are sustained through the mechanisms associated with discourse:

In a society such as ours, but basically in any society there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established and consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse ( Foucault 1980, p. 93) .

In this complex web of power relations, power both produces and draws on normalised discourses which are in turn the source of power/knowledge in the management of the population (Foucault 1988). As Clegg (1994, p. 159) explains, power is normalized ‘through discursive formations of knowledge’ and the resulting practices ‘are institutionalized and incorporated into everyday life’. As a result, normalizing technologies provide exemplars of what is normal and what is deviant through their defined goals and procedures (Drefus & Rabinow 1983). Discursive practices are autonomous and can transform political decisions (Drefus & Rabinow 1983).

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Discourse constitutes more than ideology. Discourse is not reducible to either the thought or intentions of individual agents (Gordon 1980). As power is based on knowledge, it is ‘much more and much less than ideology’:

It is the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge – methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organise and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge which are not ideological constructs (Foucault 1980, p. 102).

The modern liberal state represents a plurality of power relations embedded in social practices. It constitutes:

The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power’ (Foucault 1991, p. 102).

Consequently, power does not emanate from one point.

Power constitutes relations of forces exercised through networks and individuals. It is exercised through a ‘net-like organisation’ in which ‘individuals circulate between its threads’ whilst both exercising and undergoing it (Foucault 1980, p. 98). As a consequence, the rationalities of modern liberal government transcend previous class based descriptions of society which were based on relations to the means of production (Foucault 1991). In fact, the grand narrative view of history is perceived as being one dimensional as it has focussed on exploring relations to the means of production while ignoring more elementary power relations (Foucault 1988).

In contrast to autocratic forms of government, liberal governmentality involves techniques for guiding the conduct of the governed. The ‘conduct of conduct’ always involves techniques for guiding the responses of individuals amid a range of possibilities (Foucault 1982, p. 220). Therefore, although individuals are constituted by power, they always have the capacity to act (Foucault 1982). This is because liberalism ‘confronts itself’ with questions about the nature of rule, the legitimacy and activities of rulers and critically scrutinizes the limits of their authority over another (Rose 1996, p.

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47). In fact, according to Rose (1996) reflexivity is considered a permanent feature of all forms of liberalism and not just a feature of late modernity described by the reflexive modernists Beck, Giddens and Lash. As a result, modern rationalities of government are more productive than repressive as they involve ‘obtaining productive service from individuals in their concrete lives’ (Foucault 1980, p. 125).

However, as not all the governed will reflect the preferred values, it is the extent of resistance which provides an unstable domain ‘between the government of other and the practices of the self’ (Burchell 1996). Everyday resistance is directed at the techniques of power and its individualizing effects on the subject rather than a theoretical enemy (Foucault 1982). Relationships between adversaries are resolved ‘when stable mechanisms replace the free play of agonistic relations’ (Foucault 1982, p. 225). Consequently, modern power cannot be reduced to those who have it and those who are subjected to it or a ‘phenomenon of mass and homogeneous domination – the domination of one individual over others, or of one class over others’ (Foucault 2004, p. 29). However, other theorists like Bauman (2000) and Standing (2011) argue that some individuals have more choices available to them than others as we shall see in Chapter 3 of this thesis.

Overall, liberal governmentality involves a continuing discussion about what is the role of the government and what is the role of the individual. In fact, the modern state is the product of governmentalization itself ‘since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not’ (Foucault 1991, p. 103). Liberal governmentality represents a fluid and evolving relationship as the state is conceptualised by Foucault as a type of meta power ‘in relation to a whole series of power networks’ with whom it shares a ‘conditioning-conditioned relationship’ (Foucault 1980, p. 122).