ABSTRACT
Governmentality, writes Michel Foucault, is an “ugly word” (2007: 115) for articulating the political rationality, or the practices and reason of rule, which constitute the field of operations for political power today. Sifting the archives from early modern Europe through twentieth-century post-war economic thought, Foucault identifies the “birth of a new art” (2000a: 217) for exercising power in the name-and in the vital interests-of “society,” bringing the heterogeneous life of populations and an ever widening range of individual behaviors into the realm of explicit political calculation (Foucault 2000a, 2007, 2008). An historical hypothesis, an “experiment of method” (Foucault 2007: 358), a challenge to Left political cultures, a genealogy of contemporary power-“governmentality” marks out a remarkably generative conceptual space launched by Foucault in 1978 in his annual series of public lectures at the Collège de France. In the face of the “failure of the major political theories nowadays,” Foucault pursues a turn “not to a nonpolitical way of thinking but rather to an investigation of what has been our political way of thinking during this century” (1988b: 161). Governmentality, then, like so much of Foucault’s intellectual project, offers a history of the present, an “ontology of ourselves” (1988a: 95) aimed at countering a form of power that “not only rules but produces us” (Brown 2001: 109):
My project is … to bring it about, together with many others, that certain phrases can no longer be spoken so lightly, certain acts no longer … so unhesitatingly,
performed; to contribute to changing certain things in people’s ways of perceiving and doing things. … I hardly feel capable of attempting much more than that.
