After Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s works display two aspects that seem to lie worlds apart. On the one hand, lectures, talks, articles and interviews explore political rationalities and the ‘genealogy of the state’. On the other hand, the History of Sexuality book project examines ethical questions and the genealogy of the (desiring) subject. This double change of focus occurred in reaction to the problems and objections occasioned by earlier works. That said, Foucault was not pursuing separate theoretical objectives. Addressing macropolitical questions in explicit fashion called for verifying the analytical framework employed – just as the overall conceptual shift required that the field of investigation be expanded. In this light, the following describes two complementary steps, which intersect in the concept of government: critical interrogation of the hypotheses of repression and war, and the ‘discovery’ of biopower.1
First, let us look at how Foucault checked his methodological instruments. Following Discipline and Punish, he diagnosed a series of ‘difficulties’ characterizing recent works:
Lines of research that were very closely interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of which was followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it was getting very repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same concepts. … We are making no progress, and it’s all leading nowhere. It’s all repetitive, and it doesn’t add up. Basically, we keep saying the same thing, and there again, perhaps we’re not saying anything at all.2
The fragmentary or repetitive nature of his studies is not what strikes Foucault as problematic. Instead, he determines that he has offered an inadequate response to the juridical theory of power. Two alternative modes of analysis are available for understanding power along non-juridical lines. The first views power as repression, and the second in terms of war. Foucault considers his works following The Order of Discourse to continue these two forms of analysis – and then distances himself from this tradition:
It is obvious that everything I have said to you in previous years is inscribed within the struggle-repression schema. That is indeed the schema I was trying to apply. Now, as I tried to apply it, I was eventually forced to reconsider it; both because, in many respects, it is still insufficiently elaborated – I would even go so far as to say that it is not elaborated at all – and also because I think that the twin notions of ‘repression’ and ‘war’ have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps, abandoned. At all events, we have to look very closely at these two notions of ‘repression’ and ‘war’; if you like, we have to look a little more closely at the hypothesis that the mechanisms of power are essentially mechanisms of repression, and at the alternative hypothesis that what is rumbling away and what is at work beneath political power is essentially and above all a warlike relation.3
Behind these guarded statements lies the suspicion that the concepts employed to date – ‘repression’ and ‘war’ – still belong to the juridical tradition they are meant to criticize. If so, then breaking with this idea of power requires revising the modes of conceptualization. That said, Foucault was still at the initial stage of reworking his position vis-à-vis early works. Although he spoke of a ‘rupture’4 that occurred around 1975–6, it would take time before he wholly separated himself from the model of discipline and abandoned the hypotheses of repression and war.
One year after Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 appeared. The book was meant as the introduction to several projected volumes comprising the ‘history of sexuality’ and presented the methodological framework for further research. Its centrepiece is a critical engagement with the assumption that prohibitions, taboos and acts of exclusion shape modern sexuality. The ‘repressive hypothesis’ – which Foucault also calls ‘Reich’s hypothesis’5 – proves untenable for both theoretical and political reasons, since it fails to explain the relationship between sexuality and power.6
Foucault does not contest the fact that sex (le sexe) has been mis-recognized, prohibited and negated since the classical age. But for him, negative phenomena represent ‘component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse’;7 they operate within a power strategy that cannot be boiled down to repression alone. Indeed, during the period in question, an extraordinary increase occurred in the political and social significance attached to sexuality. Sexuality became a central factor in the framework of newly organized power. Hereby, it was not repressed so much as ‘produced’: ‘one had to speak of [sex] as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum’.8
The vehemence and intensity of his engagement with repression also indicate how difficult it was for Foucault to free himself from this notion. Repression had played an important role in developing a non-juridical and non-economic method for analysing power. It belonged to a strategic programme that sought ‘to reveal the problem of domination and subjugation instead of sovereignty and obedience’9 by joining the hypotheses of Reich and Nietzsche. Now, Foucault recognized that this approach did not help him account for the productivity or immanence of power relations.10
Changing his theoretical approach, Foucault no longer presents the repressive hypothesis as an alternative to the juridical conception of power. Instead, he views it as its logical continuation: ‘In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power’.11 This amounts to discrediting repression on two scores. For one, it no longer stands opposed to the juridical conception of power, but functions as a juridical term itself, presupposing the sovereignty of the individual and his or her rights. There needs to have been an original freedom or subjectivity preceding power mechanisms for repression to occur. Second, ‘repression’ represents a ‘disciplinary’ term conceived and elaborated in the human sciences; it relies on an array of psychological themes and points of reference that serve normalizing purposes. Because of this twofold (juridical and disciplinary) provenance of ‘repression’, its ‘critical use … is tainted, spoiled, and rotten from the outset’.12
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 treats the repressive hypothesis as an integral and inseparable part of the juridical conception of power. At the same time, Foucault discusses both the juridical model and the notion of repression as aspects of a strategy reaching deep into, and structuring, the forms that the analysis and critique of power assume. As paradoxical as it seems, picturing power’s mode of functioning only in negative terms represents a precondition for a positive conception: power ‘masks itself by producing a discourse, seemingly opposed to it but really part of a larger deployment of modern power’.13 As such, the negative conception belongs to the productivity of power: a condition for its acceptance. Both the repressive thesis and the idea of an external relationship between power and freedom are part of the dispositive Foucault means to critique: ‘Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability’.14
Foucault’s diagnosis is clear. What remains less clear, however, are the theoretical consequences he draws from assigning the repressive hypothesis such political significance. Indeed, the analysis of the relationship between sexuality and power sketched in the first volume of The History of Sexuality remains stuck within the juridical conception – a mechanism Foucault otherwise exposes so well. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 cannot free itself from a ‘central difficulty’.15 Even though Foucault lays bare the repressive hypothesis’s shortcomings, his critique still implies a difference between sex and sexuality. Accordingly, it retains the notion of distortion, prohibition or repression:
I had begun to write it as a history of the way in which sex was obscured and travestied by this strange life-form, this strange growth which was to become sexuality. Now, I believe, setting up this opposition between sex and sexuality leads back to the positing of power as law and prohibition, the idea that power created sexuality as a device to say no to sex.16
This is precisely the theoretical position so convincingly subjected to critique in the same study. As such, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 – like The Order of Discourse – represents a transition; its line of argument remains ambivalent. If, on the one hand, Foucault has rejected the juridical conception of power, on the other hand, he cannot escape it: ‘My analysis was still held captive by the juridical conception of power. I had to make a complete reversal of direction’.17
Foucault does not restrict his critical review of his own methodology to the repressive hypothesis and related notions. He also questions ‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’, that is, war as the framework for investigating social power relations. If the problem of repression stands at the centre of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, the 1976 lectures at the Collège de France address whether war can serve as a model for power relations:18
We might also ask whether notions derived from what was known in the eighteenth century and even the nineteenth century as the art of war … constitute in themselves a valid and adequate instrument for the analysis of power relations.19
At first glance, nothing seems unusual about this question – nothing that would signal a break with earlier works. But in fact, the very formulation represents a departure: it introduces a distancing movement. In order to ‘completely reverse direction’, Foucault does not replace the juridical model with that of war; instead, he questions the basic investigative schema he has employed to date, thereby undertaking a genealogy of his own (genealogical) approach. No longer – as still occurs in Discipline and Punish – does he start with the hypothesis that power relations may be understood in terms of war, struggle and confrontation; now, he asks how the war discourse emerged in relation to juridical discourse. Foucault assigns the war model a historical place of its own: ‘How, when, and why was it noticed or imagined that what is going on beneath and in power relations is a war?’.20
Foucault dates the emergence of war as the analytic grid for viewing the course of history and the reality of power relations to the seventeenth century. In a seeming paradox, this new kind of discourse arose at the moment when power relations centralized more and more and ‘the emergence of a State … perpetually traversed by relations of war’21 occurred. Private feuds and battles faded, and a state equipped with a military apparatus – which professionalized and monopolized war – took the place of everyday and omnipresent fighting. In parallel to the ‘pacification of society’, a discourse emerged that discovered war under the surface of social order; the view is not based on an opposition between society and war so much as continuity between them. This ‘historico-political discourse’22 – which arose in confrontation with, and critique of, the power of sovereignty – set itself the same task that Foucault has assigned his work: ‘This is, basically, a discourse that cuts off the king’s head’.23
For politico-martial discourse, negative reference to juridico-political notions is key. Just as the juridical conception of power rests on a binary legal code, the martial framework sees a ‘binary structure’24 that pervades society, dividing it into two camps and lines of battle. In contrast to the view of a philosophical or juridical subject occupying a universal and neutral position, historico-political discourse holds that the subject must necessarily stand on one side or the other; a ‘perspectival discourse’25 emerges. If the historiography of old played the political role of describing and reinforcing sovereign glory, ‘this new type of discourse and historical practice’26 tells a story running in an ‘absolutely opposite’ direction. As a ‘counterhistory’,27 it dissolves the identificatory continuity between the monarch and his people by breaking with the postulate that the history of the great encompasses that of the small, too.
Foucault argues that, in the course of the nineteenth century, politico-martial discourse transformed into medico-biological discourse.28 The shift occurred in the framework of a general change in the mechanisms of power. It did not simply herald – as Foucault still claimed in Discipline and Punish – the transition from the order of sovereignty to the order of discipline. Foucault addresses the transition in his final lecture of 1976 and the concluding chapter of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 – which, by his own assessment, presents the motivating factor underlying the book as a whole. From this point on, he acknowledges the need to expand and nuance the analysis of power by developing a new conceptual instrumentarium.
Now, in addition to sovereign law and disciplinary mechanisms, Foucault identifies a third technology of power, which seeks to regulate population. It involves more than adding another feature to, or discovering a further dimension of, the analysis of modern power mechanisms. The perspective of regulation permits Foucault both to re-evaluate the concept of discipline and to view sovereignty in a new light.
In earlier works, discipline occupied the foreground as a specific technology. Individual disciplination served as a foil for the critique of the juridical conception of power; analysis bore on specific institutions and avoided global analyses of the state. But if Foucault started out contrasting the productivity of disciplinary mechanisms with the negativity of sovereign power, he came to assign discipline a place in a more comprehensive political technology – one that aims not just at training the body but also at controlling the population. The perspective of regulation enables him to relativize the significance of, and oppositions between, the other two forms of power and understand them from a more general vantage point: that of biopower.
The concluding portion of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 takes theoretical distance from the concept of sovereign power – as occurs in previous studies, too. But Foucault no longer defines this distance by way of a specific mechanism (law vs. discipline); instead, he does so in terms of a radically changed goal. Sovereignty had been defined as power organized in the form of ‘deduction’ (soustraction): laying claim to goods, products, services and so on. In a limit case, it had the potential to do as it wished with the lives of subjects. Even though, in factual terms, the sovereign ‘right of life and death’ held only with restrictions and extreme checks, it symbolized the utmost form of power commanding the right to intervene and expropriate.29
By Foucault’s account, a new form of power was progressively superimposed over such ‘power of death’ from the seventeenth century on; it aimed to administrate, secure, cultivate and manage life. Power mechanisms changed along the lines of a new objective:
‘Deduction’ … tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.30
In contrast to sovereign might, which either put to death or let live, the new power let die and granted life. Power over death transformed into power over life – biopower – which did not bear on legal subjects so much as living beings. Foucault identifies ‘two basic forms’ along which the entire political technology of life evolved. Instead of being ‘antithetical’, they ‘constituted … two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’: on the one hand, the disciplination of the individual body and, on the other, the regulation of the population.31
Foucault elaborated the first technology of power in previous studies. Now, he introduces a new aspect of analysis with the mechanism of regulation, which involves more than changing the scope or expanding the field of investigation. The regulation of population does not transfer disciplinary processes to macropolitical terrain so much as it marks a new object and modality for the exercise of power. Disciplination and regulation arise at different points in time, have separate objectives, implement different means to achieve goals and, finally, occupy different sites:
1. Point in time. In keeping with the analysis offered in Discipline and Punish, Foucault dates the emergence of discipline as a specific technology to the seventeenth century. This ‘anatomo-politics’32 concerns the individual body. It views the human being as a complex machine and seeks to enhance the man-machine’s abilities and potentials while integrating them into systems of economic production and systems of political rule. Then, in the second half of the eighteenth century, another technology of power emerges, which ‘does not exclude [disciplinary technology] but … dovetail[s] into it, integrate[s] it, mod-if[ies] it to some extent, and above all, uses it by sort of infiltrating it’.33 Disciplinary power is not replaced or pushed aside; instead, this political technology comes to operate at another level. Unlike discipline, it does not aim at the individual body so much as the social body – which is not conceived in legal terms, as the sum of (contract-making) individuals, but as an autonomous (biological) entity. An entirely new ‘body’ joins individual and society: the population.
2. Objectives and means. Population is defined by intrinsic processes and phenomena such as birth and mortality rates, health levels, life expectancy, wealth production and circulation, and so forth. Such ‘bio-politics of the population’34 does not focus on the individual, but on varied expressions of life on a vast scale. Attention falls on what happens to masses of people: conditions of variation, controlling matters of probability and modifying effects in order to avert or balance out the dangers that result from communal existence conceived as a biological whole. This change of objective signals a change of the tools that power enlists. Not training and surveillance, but regulation and control are the main instruments of biopolitics. Instead of disciplining, this ‘technology of security’ ‘aims to establish a sort of homeostasis’; it does so ‘not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers’.35
3. Sites. The two technologies of power do not differ only in terms of objective, instruments or time of emergence. They also differ in terms of spatial situation – or political localization. The disciplines had developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the framework of particular institutions (army, school, hospital, workshops and so on). The regulation of populations started towards the middle of the eighteenth century, in the context of state centralization. As such, they represent distinct arrangements: ‘the body-organism-discipline-institutions series and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State’.36
Foucault’s purpose in identifying two strands within the concept of biopower is primarily heuristic. The distinction cannot be rigorously maintained – and for both analytical and historical reasons. It proves analytically untenable inasmuch as disciplination and regulation form ‘two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’.37 They cannot be viewed in isolation; rather, they constitute a political field and define each other reciprocally. Discipline is not a form of individualization exercised on given particulars; it presupposes that a multiplicity already exists. By the same token, population is the aggregation of individualized existences into a new political form. As such, ‘individual’ and ‘mass’ do not represent opposites so much as two sides of a single political rationality aiming to control life both on the individual scale and on the level of the population as a whole.38
Second, there are historical reasons not to split the two political technologies. Discussing the eighteenth century, Foucault still posits a relatively clear line of separation, but he observes that the police, for instance, already constituted a disciplinary and state apparatus during this period; by the same token, nineteenth-century regulation on the part of the state relied on an array of infrastate institutions (insurance, relief funds, charitable organizations, medico-hygienic institutions and so on). Ultimately – Foucault contends – the two types of power became linked over the course of the 1800s and yielded concrete dispositives; sexuality was one of the most important.39
In this context, the concept of norm plays a key role. Whereas ‘power over life and death’ had operated on the basis of a binary legal code, laws yield to norms more and more now. The absolute law decreed by the sovereign comes to be replaced by the relational logic of weighing, measuring and comparing. Society defined along the lines of (natural) law gives way to ‘normalizing society’,40 which is no longer populated by legal subjects so much as living organisms.41
Still, it is impossible not to see a far-reaching shift in the meaning Foucault attaches to ‘norm’ and ‘normalizing society’. He continues to define norms at a remove from legal frameworks, but he no longer situates them in the context of ‘disciplinary society’. He declares that the equation between ‘normalizing society’ and ‘disciplinary society’ amounted to a ‘first and inadequate interpretation’,42 which he now abandons. Henceforth, the norm is the term connecting individual disciplination and social regulation. Foucault defines it as the
element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity.43
Initially, Foucault had defined normalizing society on the basis of mechanisms of disciplination ‘increasingly colonizing the procedures of law’,44 whereby the law faded more and more vis-à-vis the norm. Now, his definition is ‘a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation’.45 That said, it was not long before Foucault modified this perspective, too; instead of focusing on standard normativity, he distinguished between various norms and explored the problematic of biopower in different context (see section ‘Sovereignty – Discipline – Security’ in Chapter 7).
Ultimately, the genealogy of historico-political discourse led Foucault to discern a new technology of power. The concept of biopower means giving up the tendency to equate power and discipline. Disciplinary procedures come to represent one mode of exercising power among others. Biopower integrates and subsumes disciplinary processes, which become an element within a more comprehensive scheme encompassing individual disciplination and the regulation of the population.46
However, this initial step did not go far enough, inasmuch as no conceptual reorientation accompanied the expanded field of analysis. Even after introducing the problematic of biopower, Foucault continued to understand processes of power primarily in terms of domination and subjugation. He employed the same analytical instruments he had applied to disciplinary institutions, only now he sought to examine a technology of power distinct from disciplinary techniques, working with other means and following different aims. In consequence, he recognized that he had to offer a second corrective. The relativized perspective on disciplinary processes also required revising the war model that had provided the basis for investigating power relations until this point. The two steps did not occur independently: the ‘emergence’ of biopower required checks and changes in the conceptional framework; likewise, the increasingly apparent shortcomings of the war model are what prompted the ‘discovery’ of biopolitics in the first place.
A close relationship holds between Foucault’s interest in the the-matics of biopower and the distance he took from the war paradigm as the framework for analysing power relations. If it was true that the politico-martial discourse transformed into a biological discourse during the nineteenth century, he needed to account for this historical shift in theoretical terms. It was not enough to start by positing the existence of two external, mutually antagonistic groups. Foucault set out to examine the genealogy of a historical process within which politico-military ‘contradictions’ and conflicts were ‘translated’ into a biologico-medical field of problems. Inasmuch as ‘State control of the biological’47 really did occur in the course of the nineteenth century, the state could not be conceived as the expression of social relations of force or the instrument of political struggles. Rather, the state itself represent a ‘stake’ (Einsatz) in relations of force inasmuch as it formulates their objectives and means of functioning – ‘condensing’ and ‘displacing’ them simultaneously. The paradigm of struggle holds only limited significance in an ‘economy of power’ that assigns the state the key role in organizing social relations.48
Foucault’s ‘discovery’ of biopower coincided with his questioning of the war hypothesis. For all that, mounting distance from ‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’ did not lead him back to the juridical conception of power; instead, it extended the scope of critique. If Foucault had faulted the juridical conception for conceiving power only in negative terms, now he came to realize that conceiving power as a martial relation could not account for the productivity and positivity of biopower, either.
Disqualification of the war model, which a careful formula in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 already announced,49 became a defining theme immediately following the publication of this book. Foucault recognized that this conception of power raised a ‘whole range of problems’:
Who wages war against whom? Is it between two classes, or more? Is it a war of all against all? What is the role of the army and military institutions in this civil society where permanent war is waged? What is the relevance of concepts of tactics and strategy for analysing structures and political processes? What is the essence and mode of transformation of power relations?50
Foucault laments that talk of class struggle, relations of force and strategies often occurs without clarification of the terms employed. Marxism deserves credit for identifying class struggle as the motor of history, yet it proves inadequate inasmuch as it concentrates more on the constitution of class and less on the particularities of struggle. Marxism ‘especially … [defines] this class, where it is situated, who it encompasses, but never concretely [addresses] … the nature of the struggle’.51
The military-strategic analysis of power that Foucault formulates poses ‘two difficulties’,52 above all. First, it is impossible to write the ‘history of the vanquished’ because, by definition, they are deprived of speech and must use a language imposed on them. Second, there is the question whether ‘domination processes are not much more complex and ambiguous than war’.53 To illustrate this point, Foucault points to the lettres de cachet, petitions to the absolutist king in pre-revolutionary France seeking the incarceration of certain individuals:
There, one sees that detention and internment are not authoritarian measures from above – not measures that struck people out of the blue, that were imposed on them. In reality, people themselves perceived it as necessary – among themselves, even in the poorest families, and especially in the most destitute groups. Internment is imposed as a kind of necessity for solving the problems that people have with each other. Grave problems in families, including the poorest, could not be solved without the police, without internment. Thus, a whole literature results, where people tell the authorities how unfaithful a husband has been, how much a wife deceived her spouse, how unbearable the children are. They demanded the internment of the accused themselves, in the language of the reigning power.54
The lettres de cachet show that internment is not to be understood solely as the result of overreaching, absolutist (state) power. Incarceration was also sought ‘from below’, by family members and neighbours. Consequently, the metaphor of war and the analytical tools accompanying it prove inadequate for understanding certain ‘enigmatic’ phenomena: ‘In any case, there exists a gigantic demand aimed at the state’; the state is not simply an instrument of domination for subjugating the vanquished; instead, ‘something like a completely incomprehensible will’ confronts it. Foucault recognizes that he ‘cannot avoid this question’.55 It provides the focus of his 1978 lectures at the Collège de France and changes the problematic of power as a whole. The concept of government occupies the foreground.
The 1978 lectures centre on the ‘genealogy of the modern state’.56 Although the series of talks was announced under the working title Sécurité, territoire et population, Foucault came to recognize the key role played by the concept of government. It provides the ‘guideline’57 of analysis. Accordingly, in the fourth lecture of the series, Foucault decided to change the original rubric and adopt a new one (‘histoire de la gouvernementalité’).
Governmentality encompasses three aspects:
1. The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge, political economy, and as its essential technical means dispositives of security.
2. The tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline and so on) of this type of power – which may be termed ‘government’ – resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges [savoirs].
3. The process or, rather, the result of the process through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’.58
The concept of government receives a distinct profile through the complex interplay of rupture and continuity. On the one hand, Foucault takes distance from earlier versions of his conception of power; on the other, he pursues central intuitions of the ‘microphysics of power’. The break involves elaborating a conception of power that differs from both the model of law and the model of war:
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other […]. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking …, but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government.59
In other words, Foucault does not take distance from the juridical conception of power alone. He also breaks with his conception of power in terms of war. Still, this does not mean that ‘government’ heralds the pacification of politico-historical discourse. On the contrary: the concept points to plural struggles beyond any revolutionary teleology that aims at a unified goal organized around a central contradiction: ‘Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism” – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyses both sides than a permanent provocation’.60
The significance of government is evident both in contrast to Foucault’s earlier conceptions and in points of continuity. Foucault means for the methodological principles that shaped previous works to hold.61 He assigns the concept of government the same role, for examining the state, that the concept of discipline plays for analysing specific institutions. As such, his lectures focus on the question whether government represents a general technology of power that encompasses the state as discipline does the prison – i.e. whether government, for the state, is what the techniques of incarceration, separation and so on are for hospitals, prisons and other institutions.62
In contrast to his microphysical studies, Foucault undertakes a significant clarification of the object under investigation. Instead of analysing government only as a technology of power, he concentrates on its political rationality.63 This involves examining the technology of government especially as a programme: ‘government’ designates a discursive field within which the exercise of power is ‘rationalized’. The process involves working out terms and concepts, identifying objects and limitations, affording arguments and justifications, and so on. In other words, political rationality permits a problem to be articulated and offers certain strategies for solving or managing it. What interests Foucault in the discourses he discusses – economics, moral philosophy, theories of policing, philanthropy and so on – are the rationales and programmes formulated. These programmes not only express wishes and intentions, but define an implicit knowledge:
Every programme also either articulates or presupposes a knowledge of the field of reality upon which it is to intervene and/or which it is calculated to bring into being. The common axiom of programmes is that an effective power is and must be a power which knows the objects upon which it is exercised. Further, the condition that programmatic knowledge must satisfy is that it renders reality in the form of an object which is programmable. This operation is reminiscent of the function Kant attributes in the Critique of Pure Reason to the concept of the schema which, as Deleuze puts it, ‘does not answer the question, how are phenomena made subject to the understanding, but the question, how does the understanding apply itself to the phenomena which are subject to it?’64
A programme is not pure knowledge, which then comes to be implemented and instrumentalized. Rather, it always already represents an intellectual transformation of reality, which political technologies take up in turn. The latter include apparatuses, procedures, institutions, legal forms and so on, which are supposed to make it possible to rule subjects in keeping with a political rationality. That said, the relationship between political rationalities and political technologies does not represent a perfect correspondence between the world of discourse and that of practice. Points of incongruity are precisely what open the space for historical analysis. History does not amount to a plan going into fulfilment. Instead, it involves what lies ‘between’ the two levels Foucault has identified; thus, the ‘failure’ of the prison programme produces delinquency as an ‘unintended effect’. Foucault’s ‘history of the prison’ is located in the ‘gap’ between programme and ‘reality’.65
By restricting analysis to political rationalities, Foucault exhibits less interest for ‘history as it really happened’ (after all, a programme is not identical with what occurs) than in disclosing a new field of historical research focused on the relationship between ‘programme’ and ‘real’ history:
You say to me: nothing happens as laid down in these ‘programmes’; they are no more than dreams, utopias, a sort of imaginary production that you aren’t entitled to substitute for reality. Bentham’s Panopticon isn’t a very good description of ‘real life’ in nineteenth-century prisons.
To this I would reply: If I had wanted to describe ‘real life’ in the prisons, I wouldn’t indeed have gone to Bentham. But the fact that this real life isn’t the same thing as the theoreticians’ schemas doesn’t entail that these schemas are therefore utopian, imaginary, etc. One could only think that if one had a very impoverished notion of the real. For one thing, the elaboration of these schemas corresponds to a whole series of diverse practices and strategies: the search for effective, measured, unified penal mechanisms is unquestionably a response to the inadequation of the institutions of judicial power to the new economic forms, urbanization, etc. … For another thing, these programmes induce a whole series of effects in the real (which isn’t of course the same as saying that they take the place of the real): they crystallize into institutions, they inform individual behaviour, they act as grids for the perception and evaluation of things. It is absolutely true that criminals stubbornly resisted the new disciplinary mechanism in the prison; it is absolutely correct that the actual functioning of the prisons, in the inherited buildings where they were established and with the governors and guards who administered them, was a witches’ brew compared to the beautiful Benthamite machine. But if the prisons were seen to have failed, if criminals were perceived as incorrigible, and a whole new criminal ‘race’ emerged into the field of vision of public opinion and ‘justice’, if the resistance of the prisoners and the pattern of recidivism took the forms we know they did, it’s precisely because this type of programming didn’t just remain a utopia in the heads of a few projectors.66
But what is government? Foucault starts out with a broad and ‘vague’67 conception, distinguishing ‘political government’ from the ‘problem of government in general’.68 However, he does not do so for want of analytical precision; rather, he means to assign government a historical place. By way of a brief history of the term, Foucault demonstrates that the seemingly self-evident concept of government we have today – the equation of government and political government, as well as our focus on state institutions – represents a restriction of the original semantic field, which set in relatively late.
Until the eighteenth century, the problem of government was posed in significantly wider terms. Whereas the word now has an exclusively political sense (the government of a state, a party, an apparatus, and so on), it displayed a broader array of meanings between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, ‘government’ referred to a number of highly varied phenomena. Among other things, it signified: moving oneself or an object (in space), securing (material) well-being, leading someone (morally), prescribing something (medically) and, finally, a (verbal, authoritative, sexual, etc.) relationship between individuals. As many and as varied as these fields and forms of activity may be, it is striking that none of the meanings concern administrating a political structure or territory. On the contrary, it seems that the ‘political’ definition of government, which now seems so common and obvious, was entirely unknown before the sixteenth century.69
But, if the various meanings of ‘govern’ do not derive from the sphere of political semantics, they still have a point in common. As Foucault observes, problems of self-control, directing one’s family and children, managing a household and guiding souls indicate that government has always referred to ‘conducting human beings’, whether individually or as a collective.70
Accordingly, Foucault defines government as conduct, a continuum extending from ‘government of the self’ (gouvernement de soi) to ‘government of others’ (gouvernement des autres); hereby, the understanding of government as political leadership, which prevails today, represents a special instance of governing others. Against this backdrop, Foucault asks why, at a certain point in time, the conception of government came to be restricted and to possess a purely political significance. The 1978 lectures investigate the matter; from this point on, government represents the ‘key term’71 within Foucault’s analytics of power.