Concluding Lecture
I.
End of Foucault:
a. Governmentality in Foucault:
i. Located in the rise of the modern state
ii. New form of power focused on populations rather than
territory.
iii. Both individualizing and totalizing, its aim was the most
‘efficient’ form of governing and administration.
iv. Covered all areas of social and cultural life: birth and
death, economy, education, health, sexuality, families,
population, religion, mental health, crime, territory,
diseases, natural disasters, etc.
v. Coalesced around two distinct poles by the 18th
century:
1. the human species
2. the human body: i.e. biopower: understood the
body not in a purely biological dimension, but as
an agent to be managed and controlled, to
produce ‘docile bodies.’
a. through training, drills and education found
in multiple sites, e.g. the workplace, the
prison, the army, the schools.
b. The panoptican: an institutions and symbol
for individualizing/totalizing power.
II. Governmentality Today
b. Probably one of the most cited topics in contemporary social
science.
c. Applied to a vast array of studies:
i. Colonial governmentality, the objectification of
‘otherness’ in administrative categories, e.g. the
construction of different forms of distinctions, such as
caste in India. Also the creation of anomalies in the
population, where none had existed before, also
race/sex/gender hierarchies in colonial settings (Pels
1997).
ii. Medical anthropology: sees different medical systems
as imparting forms of control around the concept of the
‘norm’ e.g. as applied in colonial settings, (Whitehead
1995, 1996).
iii. New forms of managing certainty and the ‘risk’ society.
iv. Neoliberal governmentality: seen as cultural values of
individualism, responsibility, autonomy, and
assertiveness applied to working populations and the
poor in an era of state withdrawal from social services,
(Dunk, Kingfisher).
v. Spatial governmentality and urban anthropology (Low).
vi. Sustainable development and eco-rationality
vii. Perhaps its very generality leads to some problems, i.e.
if governmentality and power/knowledge are
EVERYWHERE, then do we have a tautological
explanation? (Not that tautologies are not be useful, but
are we missing something else that might also be
important, e.g. relations of capital, value, labour, gender,
small-scale societies that still retain some autonomy,
etc?, e.g. of sati and its interpretations in India).
II.
Normalization:
a. Governmentality not only institutes an anonymous, totalizing
and individualizing form of power, it is also connected to
procedures of ‘normalization’.
b. Normalization = the system of finely gradate and measurable
intervals in which individuals can be distributed around a norm.
c. It is different from religious dictates (based on absolute rules)
and laws, but comes to supplant both.
d. It creates the ‘expectation’ of what individuals should and
should not due, but also creates ‘anomalies’, e.g. the
delinquent, the pervert.
e. Normalization is a major technique of governmentality in the
modern age.
III.
Foucault and Gramsci:
a. Foucault argued that forms of governmentality preceded
capitalism, but was not interested in capitalism per se.
b. Gramsci: interested in how power was distributed throughout
a capitalist society.
c. Did not see the economy as being determinant of meaning, but
thought that it produced inequalities, not only in economy, but
also in access to ‘the symbol’.
d. Formulated the concept of ‘hegemony’ to understand the ways
in which power operated symbolically and was differently
distributed, not a decentred concept of power, as in Foucault.
e. Hegemony is a combination of coercion/consent, but cannot
exist without either.
f. Differentiated between subaltern and elite perspectives, saw
subaltern consciousness as always on the defensive against
attempts to deny it reasonable agency and meaning.
g. Unlike power/knowledge, hegemony is a concept that is
always shifting, depending upon historical constellations of
power and privilege and attempts to undermine it.
h. Hence, hegemony includes practice, and the practical
possibility of ‘subalterns becoming sovereigns.’ Hegemony is
never ‘total’ or ‘totalizing’. Foucault: totalizing refers to
universalizing modes of thought, but seems to substitute
totalizing in practice with universality in aspiration.
IV.
Roseberry, (Gramsci) and Geertz:
a. Roseberry: criticizes Geertz for ignoring social and cultural
differentiation in his semiotic interpretation of a Balinese
cockfight.
b. Also missing is a concept of culture as a social process;
culture is not only what is written, but also the writing of it.
c. Williams: cultural creation is also a ‘material’ production,
producing both the ‘material’ and the ‘ideal’, e.g. the concept
of tradition that is tied to relations of domination and
subordination. Hegemony = a dominant or selective ‘tradition.’
d. It is also meaningful: it touches every aspect of both the elites
and the subalterns.