ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications of fusing sociologist Erving Goffman's frame analytical approach with post-Foucauldian conceptions of governmentality and power, and it synthesizes the analytical categories frame, governmentality, and translocality into a unitary mode of analysis captured by the term multicultourism. Governmentality literature offers a rich framework for scrutinizing decentered modes of rule, not the least through the concept of self-government. An additional analytical gear is arguably required to process the empirical layer within which concrete subjects exercise self-rule. As a philosophy or strategy of liberal government, it presupposes an autonomous subject with a free will and capacity to act rationally for and on itself, as well as the feasibility and necessity of government to demarcate the space of autonomy and direct the free will of that subject. Frames operate as subtle social technologies, since they engage citizens in particular activities, which incentivize particular modes of conduct invested in interpretational schemata that bring a larger meaning to individual actions.
