Foucault: Security, Territory, Population
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Discussion Questions for Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population
1. What does Foucault mean by security? What is its relationship to bio-power? What are the techniques of security and how do they contrast with those of discipline?
2. How does security plan and produce space? And how does this compare with other modes of power?
3. How can we explain the shift from territorial (boundary) protection to the protection of a population’s welfare? [relationship between pop and state]
4. What is the relationship between the production of docile bodies and the management of populations?
5. How does governmentality use calculation? Do calculative strategies only use contingencies as they arise, or can they also create them?
6. Why is pastoral power so important to the emergence of governmentatlity?
7. What relevance does the concept of counter conduct, initially discussed in relationship to pastoral power, have in regards to governmentality? (And for those of us who have recently read Certeau’s critiques of Foucault, is it possible that Foucault’s counter conduct is in fact similar to Certeau’s tactics?)
8. Why is a coup d’Etat not a form of resistance or counter conduct vis-à-vis governmentality?
9. What is the role and objectives of policing? Why is it a necessary assemblage of the raison d’Etat? How is policing a form of biopolitics?
10. How is normalization of governmentality different than the normalization of discipline? [acting on individuals v. populations]
Key Terms
technologies of power
apparatus of security (dispositifs)
milieu, circulation
scarcity v. security
bio-power
governmentality
pastoral power
conduct/counter-conduct
raison d'Etat
physiocrat
calculation/culculativity
policing
normalization
political economy
Kaitlin Fertaly
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100
Response to Security, Territory, and Population by Michel Foucault
This collection of lectures given by Foucault in 1978 is generally aimed at how, when, and between what points, mechanisms of power became less focused on individual bodies and discipline and more focused on the population and the creation of state. Foucault’s argument is that this transformation largely hinged on the use of apparatuses of security and the movement of pastoral power from religious institutions to political ones. Foucault’s description of conduct required by the Christian pastorate and the counter-conduct movements that arose are indicative of Foucault’s notion of diffuse power and how groups within the system of diffuse power can use it to open up a different set of potential actions.
In the roughly the middle of his lecture series, Foucault begins to describe “pastoral power”—specifically the lack of a presence of pastoral power in ancient Greek cities compared to the presence of pastoral power in the East (he mostly focuses on Hebrew) and its modification under Christianity—in order to show how the (Christian) pastorate is a prelude to governmentality “through the constitution of a subject whose merits are analytically identified, who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and who is subjectified through the compulsory extraction of truth” (185). Pastoral power is essentially a set of techniques, rationalities, and practices designed to govern and Foucault chooses this term drawing on the metaphor of a shepherd who watches over his flock ensuring their productivity and their resourcefulness. In an interesting flow of his argument, Foucault does not immediately connect the rise, expansion, and then contraction of the religious pastorate to the rise of the art of government and the raison d’état, arguing that there is not transition between a religious pastorate and political governmentality. Instead, he chooses to focus one lecture on resistance movements to the specific form of power conducted by the pastorate to explore how these movements led to an opening up of the pastorate.
Foucault eventually (although reluctantly) settles on the terms “conduct” and “counter-conduct” to describe the exercise of the pastorate in “conducting” people, or essentially defining what resistance to that type of power might be. Conduct is most simply a way of directing and/or limiting the possibilities of actions of people. Counter-conduct, on the other hand, is a movement driven by the desire to be conducted differently or to delineate an area where an individual can conduct himself. Foucault points to five main forms of counter-conduct in the middle ages including asceticism, protestant communities, mysticism, scripture, and eschatological belief which largely sprang from internal crises of the pastorate (dense institutionalization, binary structures between priests and laity, and an introduction of judicial models). To understand, the transition of the pastorate to political government one must see the pastorate and these counter-conduct movements as the switch points between the economic and religious crises happening at the time (215).
What is most interesting about this lecture, in my own opinion, is that it shows in a tangible way how Foucault understands power and the means of confronting that power. To this end, he makes a number of points very clear. First of all, Foucault makes very clear in his first lecture that his notion of power is a diffuse one. It is “not a substance, fluid or something that derives from a particular source…it is not founded on itself or generated by itself” (2). He also adds in his discussion of counter-conduct movements that they are all border elements of the pastorate itself having been taken up again and again by the church itself (215). To what extent can we see this as Foucault’s means of demonstrating a structure that groups can struggle against while still existing within that same structure? Does this preclude a chance of ever escaping that structure? How can we understand this in terms of individual or group agency? Can a population that is being actively measured, calculated, and managed work within the system to alleviate change? I think that Foucault would say yes, that movements to create a new set of limits on possibilities or to open up new spaces for individuals to conduct themselves is precisely how changes in the system can come about. However, this also entails an inherent limitation in the sense that counter-conduct can only open up new limits on the possibilities of action; it can never overthrow these types of limits on action entirely.
Eric Reiff
Eric Reiff
Intro to Social Theory, Discussion Paper
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
14 October 2012
Foucault is not satisfied with a circular ontological argument that the state asserts itself and then grows automatically (354). In Security, Territory, Population (STP) Foucault’s main objective appears to be to trace out for the state a “geneology of governmental reason (354)”. This involves in particular the development of the concept of governmentality or rather the way in which the state reaffirms its position relative to other states and its internal strength though its population. Foucault explains the transitions from Medieval to contemporary governance with particular emphasis on the mercantile and balance-of-power system and a long detour into the peculiar Western pastoralism that seeps into governance at the onset of mercantilism. Foucault argues that pastoral concern (leader’s responsibility to all and each of the flock) becomes the concern of governance and that governance becomes something distinct from the state. He shows this through the notion of conduct through which one acts on orders from a superior and never is supposed to become the master of one’s self. If one attempts to self-direct they are considered to be acting in counter-conduct. As the political hegemony of the mercantilist system (a system of state guidance) and the European balance of power system gives way to the physiocratic arguments (counter-conduct) of the économistes the modern mode of governance is born. The économistes argue that the proper form of governance is not direct control of markets, but instead the fostering of internal and international free markets which allow goods to flow “naturally”. By extension the population should also not be policed as it had been, that is in detail. Rather the population should be free to make decisions for its self (348-9). The freedom of the market and the population thereby strengthen the state in a way the previous forms of government failed to do. In the seminar summary, Foucault circles back to say that he has been focused in the seminar on Polizeiwissenschaft or the analysis and theory of all the increases the power of the state, good uses of its forces, and the happiness of its subjects (366).
On the surface this book is a wonderful look into the thought processes that Foucault underwent when articulating a genealogy because it is a series of lectures. However, this means at times that he goes off on long tangents like the discussion of pastoralism, but then fails to satisfactorily (for me) connect the dots of pastoralism to political governance. Too often in STP and the Birth of Biopolotics I am left wishing I had a well edited book instead of notes with which to understand otherwise illuminating genealogies. In thinking about my mixed satisfaction I thought of Elizabeth telling us last week that Foucault’s student had said he only intended to leave posters on the wall for future thinkers. This leaves me with some possible discussion questions.
1. Does the explanation that Foucault is leaving posters on the wall for future philosophers forgive the long tangents and underdeveloped connections of ideas?
2. From last week, again, is Foucault unjustly cherry-picking historical events and ideas? Is he arriving at conclusions that are only plausible if we limit ourselves to Foucault’s basket of events?
3. I find his closing comments on page 358 about his analysis not being the only analysis, but one that maintains the connection between micro and macro power to be telling as to his real mission again. A mission, which is really a discussion of the importance of historical events and micro-power on the formation of powerful concepts which we often take for granted i.e. the state, penitentiary. I would like to discuss (similar to what we did last week) if in STP Foucault has really three missions:
a. To show that a strong macro power (the state, last week the penitentiary) which stands somewhat timeless and unchangeable before us is really the culmination of ideas and events reasonably, but not inevitably arising from the past.
b. To show the presence and importance of micro-power in creating and holding together these macro-powers.
c. To demonstrate how to use his tools of genealogy so that we may take up his work of pulling back the curtain on whichever Wizards of Oz that we choose.
It seems clear to me that Foucault does not wish to anesthetize us—an opinion that would result only from a clearly shallow read). He is instead putting in our hands the tools and methods to take apart the discourses that we take for granted. What we do after that is up to us.
Lindsay Skog
Week 8: Foucault Security, Territory, and Population
Of all our reading thus far, this has been the most difficult for me. Following Elizabeth’s advice last week, what I’ve laid out below is my attempt to feel around the edges of Foucault’s argument. Broadly, I understand that he is backing the move from the discipline of the individual to the discipline of a population, but I’m struggling with fitting the pieces of this in conversation with each other.
In Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault explores the movement from territory as a bounded space ruled by a sovereign, where the safety of the sovereign and his territory are the central concern, to the emergence of rule over and security of both a subjective and objective population. This movement marked a significant shift in the way power operated from the 16th to 18th century. Out of this shift a new question emerged: How to reach a balance and stability in the population, as well as secure it against internal threat?
Foucault enters this inquiry through four apparatuses of security (dispositifs): 1. Spaces of security; 2. Aleatory, treatment of the uncertain; 3. Forms of normalization; and 4. Population. Using the blueprint of a town, scarcity of grain, and outbreak of disease as exmaples, Foucault illustrates how the four dispositifs function together as mechanisms of governmentality. Management of the layout of a town marks a new space of security by moving beyond the establishing of boundaries to the control of circulation. Planning for uncertain shortages of grain, and like necessities, or managing the outbreak of the plague requires policing. Finally, recording information about individuals lays the groundwork for statistics and normalization. Taken together, these mechanisms make visible a population. Foucault is arguing that the interactions and negotiations between the dispositifs and the collection of individuals upon which they were functioning lead to the decrease in importance of the individual and the emergence of a population. That is to say, the population was made visible by the type of knowledge created through the dispositifs. Through the spaces of security, the treatment of the uncertain, and forms of normalization, population become visible through statistics. Statistics classify and categorizes, which creates a certain type of knowledge. In turn, this knowledge is used to discipline the population.
Once in view, the population becomes the object of intervention, or discipline, for governmentality. By governmentality, Foucault refers to the assemblage of power marked by institutions, their actions, their reviews, and their mechanisms used to act upon the population within the framework of political economy. For Foucault, the dispositifs are the mechanisms of governmentality. Foucault further sees governmentality as the dominant form of knowledge that has persisted in the West since the 18th century.
For Foucault, governmentality materialized as a form of pastoral care for the population. Foucault sees this as the type of care that a shepherd shows his or her flock. This care is purposeful in that it guides the population toward greater productive capacity.
For me the piece of Foucault’s argument that does not fit is the raison d’Etat. It seems that this is where Foucault’s notions of surveillance reemerge in the form of policing. I look forward to working this our in out discussion.
Ian Rowen
Having resisted providing a theory of the state for so long, Foucault
finally tackles it in STP. But he does not do it in a particularly
straightforward way. Foucault turns the analysis from one that treats the state
as a real entity, with its own essence and capacity to act autonomously, to one
that allows a more precise look at the different practices, both discursive and
material, that allow various powers and apparatuses of regulation, discipline,
security, surveillance, and care to be attributed to something called the
“state”. Thus, instead of the “state’s takeover of society”, we rather have the
“’governmentalization’ of the state” (109). This use of “government” draws from
a sense older than our contemporary understanding—rather than referring to the “the
state”, “government” here refers to management of one’s self or family, before
later being turned to political economy.
Foucault noted that he that he was not suggesting that various “institutions” or “elements” now attributed to the state, such as the military, or courts, or taxation, did not exist prior to the emergence of the state, but that the “the state” may be usefully approached as a “schema of intelligibility for a whole set of already established institutions, a whole set of given realities” (286).
In addition to the historical and theoretical precision suggested by this argument, there is an additional methodological reason for shifting the scale of analysis from the state to government and governmentalities: The broadening of the lens to include “micro-powers” in addition to “macro-powers” should afford an analytical approach as applicable for the management of mental patients as for debating economic policy. “[T]he analysis of micro-powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of a sector, it is a question of a point of view” (186).
Despite the title of this lecture series, Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault made it clear early that he was really more interested in his “history of ‘governmentality’” than in the three keywords of the title (108). In his narrative of the development of our modern governmentality that was “discovered” (109) in the 18th century and that persists to the present-day, Foucault explicitly de-emphasized “territory” in favor of “population”.
Foucault begins his Euro-centric history of governmentality with an account of medieval conceptions of statecraft, as exemplified by Machiavelli’s The Prince, which posits a monarch not part of, but external and transcendent to his principality, whose primary concern is maintaining control over a principality defined in terms of a given bounded space in which his sovereignty prevails. In this conception, the primary object of rule is the territory itself, and secondarily the things and people within this territorial container. But Foucault claims that with the development of new political rationalities in the 16th and 17th centuries, the target of sovereign power changed from territory to things, masses of people, a new entity called a “population”. This “population”, irreducible to the family which is now only an element and instrument of it, needed to be managed by new “arts of government”, which later became reformulated as “political economy”. These arts of government are not merely the techniques used by the sovereign to maintain control over a territory to which he is external, as in the medieval or Machiavellian conception, but include calculative tactics and strategies for regulating and promoting the well-being of the population, and through the development and deployment of “apparatuses of security”, allowing for the circulation of people and goods within the sovereign’s domain of influence. This is all fine and well, and consistent enough with the schema outlined above, but what purchase does it give to territory, which still seems intrinsic to the way we still imagine our world, and yet is displaced in Foucault’s account? Elden (2007) has been useful for reading through this, by pointing to the use of statistics, calculation, and other technologies of power by which a state is tied to a territory, which is better treated as a set of processes/practices than as a place.
I have found STP particularly helpful in its treatment of the state as an effect rather than an actor (a point that Timothy Mitchell has also made quite beautifully). Also useful for my research into political geography of tourism is STP’s discussion of the management of circulation as a technology of power.
What remains an open, difficult, and necessary question for me, and one hotly debated by many in the last decade or so, is the applicability of Foucault’s “governmentality” to non-European contexts, and particularly illiberal or authoritarian settings like China. This is relevant because STP, as a history of governmentality, is based entirely within Europe. This is not to say that Foucault’s ideas can’t travel, but that there is some risk involved (to use a modern, calculative word…)
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
Security, Territory, Population (Michel Foucault)
October 15, 2012
It’s clear that the scale of Foucault’s thinking shifts with this book, as he moves from a sovereign that governs the individual to one that governs a population. The shift in scale seems necessary, though, to support his ideas of a spatial shift in governing apparatuses. This change in the scale of sovereign power is seen in the emergence of raison d’Etat, the state’s “domination over peoples” (237). This is exemplified in Foucault’s description of the smallpox inoculation process, which was ordered by not discipline, as was used in earlier epidemics, but with a governmentality that emphasized the greater good, and provided security for the obedient population (10).
In order to truly engage with Security, Territory and Population, it’s necessary to have an understanding of bio-power and its role in the collective governing of a population. While I sought to grasp the overall concepts of the book on a whole, I found myself focusing most on the construction and constitution of bio-power and it’s role in developing a population as “an object of intervention.” In order to be governed, in order to exercise raison d’Etat, a society must be organized into a governable form. The notion of governing the collective, versus the individual, plays a role in how power constitutes itself in the sovereign. Yet, Foucault also makes an effort to say that society is not simply a herd, and the sovereign is not just a shepard. He says, “lets not say the politician is a shepard… The king is not a shepard” (147) Where religion, he says, offers a herd/shepard relationship (“Religious power, therefore, is pastoral power” (153)), bio-power is more complex, and society is a collective, not a heard of individuals who can be banished, or punished, one by one.
In this book, Foucault is exploring the way power influences behavior, and they type of power that is necessary to organize and order a society. By making specific behaviors “normal” or “appropriate,” the sovereign can maintain power while seemingly removed from society. This is a step past the evolution of Discipline & Punish where the sovereign once overtly inflicted its authority over individuals, to a more subtle governmentality that set a discourse in which individuals should negotiate. By scaling out and taking a societal view, Foucault is saying that, like discipline, governmentality sets standard by which society should conduct itself.
In thinking of bio-power in relation to the sovereign and how it steers a dominant discourse, Foucault encourages us to think of bio-power as “a set of mechanisms and procedures that have the role or function and theme, even when they are unsuccessful, of securing power” (2). I’m curious how these mechanisms and procedures are developed and, in that development, if resistance is possible. If governmentality builds spaces of security, is it perpetuating its continued necessity? To that end, I wonder if Foucault believes the docile body capable of resistance. Is a population capable of reimagining of the dominant discourse? Is this what he means by a “revolt of conduct” (200)?
One concept I am still grappling with is the notion that every society, or community, has its own forms of governemntality. I’m unclear of the epistemology of those forms of governmentality, and how biopower factors into their production and reproduction.
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reaction Paper – Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
10/15/12
In the fourth lecture in the series of Security, Territory, Population, Michel Foucault intimates that, if he were given the chance to rebrand these lectures, he would title his project “the history of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 2007, 108).” This is not to say that these lectures are not about security, territory, and population. Rather, these concepts are necessary and integral ingredients in Foucault’s larger targets of inquiry, the processes of the state and the art of governance. Drawing on previous work on discipline and power, Foucault uses these lectures as a venue to experiment with new ideas regarding the management of populations and modalities of security.
By positioning the state as a “mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think (Foucault 2007, 109),” Foucault makes it clear that he takes issue with the agency that recent scholarship has attributed to “the state” as an entity capable of definition and worthy of blame. He chooses instead to see the state “as a way of doing things (Foucault 2007, 358),” part of a larger evolution of governance. Rather than a “genealogy” or “history” of the state as a fixed entity, he engages with the state “on the basis of men’s actual practice, on the basis of what they do and how they think (Foucault 2007, 358).” Furthermore, he is not attempting to outline how the state came to be, but to elucidate the moment at which “the problem of the state appeared (Foucault 2007, 276).” By using the word “problem,” Foucault is pointing to the moment in which the state was problematized into an object of knowledge.
The significance of the state as an object of knowledge is illustrated in Foucault’s focus on “raison d’État.” As “that which is necessary and sufficient for the republic to preserve its integrity,” raison d’État becomes an indispensible discursive formation for the sovereign (Foucault 2007, 257). The reality of the state is no longer described by “the corpus of laws or skill in applying them when necessary,” but by a set of “technical knowledges (Foucault 2007, 274).” Statistics, as the most fundamental knowledge of the state, thus becomes a tool with which populations are managed, potential hazards are predicted, and security is performed. However, unlike discipline, security does not ultimately serve to prevent or dictate hazards. The function of security is one of nullification, of absorption. Much like the concept of capital, security, as an apparatus of government, is ultimately about circulation.
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Foucault Security, Territory, Population
"If I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title, I certainly would not have chosen 'security, territory, population'. What I would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of 'governmentality'" (p. 108). In Security, Territory, Population Foucault outlines his theory of the genealogy of governmentality. In a broad sense governmentality is the art of government, however, Foucault is not interested in government itself but the ways in which mechanisms of power act within states. As Foucault himself says implicit in all his projects is the
attempt to free relations of power from the
institution, in order to analyze them from the point of view of technologies;
to distinguish them also from the function, so as to take them up within a
strategic analysis; and to detach them from the privilege of the object, so as
to resituate them within the perspective of the constitution of fields, domains,
and objects of knowledge (p. 118).
He wants to explore this possibility with regard to the state.
Foucault begins his project by identifying four apparatuses of security: 1) the spaces of security, 2) the aleatory, or the risky and contingent, 3) normalization as a mechanism of security (as opposed to disciplinary normalization, and 4) the emergence of the issue of population. He illustrates these four apparatuses through the examples of town planning, food scarcity, and epidemics (or "the street, grain, and contagion"). He argues that these mechanisms of security do not function at the level of the individual but rather the population. There was a fundamental shift from the sovereign ruling over his territory to the regulation of populations (p. 66). This shift, combined with the concept of policing (p. 94), the use of statistics (p. 104), and the idea of the pastorate enabled the rise of governmentality.
He traces the origin of pastoral power to the "pre-Christian East" and it was originally characterized by 1) the shepherding over a flock on the move, 2) a beneficent power concerned with the flock's salvation, and 3) and individualizing power in that the flock can only be directed "insofar as not a single sheep escapes him" (p. 128). More important than these characteristics, is the idea that pastorate has been contested throughout its history. This leads to Foucault's development of the ideas of conduct and counter-conduct. He struggles with the word "counter-conduct" because it is not the same as resistance, misconduct, or dissidence; it is not so much characterized by opposition to state power as it is seen as outside of or uncontrolled by state power.
Foucault continues on to further discuss raison d’État and how it identifies what is necessary and sufficient for a state's continued existence as well as military-diplomatic apparatuses and the "balancing" of Europe. I did not engage with they latter part of the argument fully, because, for me, the concept of counter-conduct is what I will take away from Foucault. It is within this concept that I see the recognition of a space beyond power in which we can exercise our human agency. I did not see any recognition of this space in Discipline & Punish. Perhaps I need to revisit D&P but I did not grasp how we break free from disciplining ourselves. However, in STP Foucault argues counter-conduct not only affirms an "eschatology" in which civil society will prevail over the state:
There must be a moment when, breaking all the bonds of obedience, the population will really have the right, not in juridical terms, but in terms of essential and fundamental rights, to break any bonds of obedience it has with the state and, rising up against it, to say: My law, the law of my own requirements, the law of my very nature as population, the law of my basic needs, must replace the rules of obedience (p. 356).
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
Geog 5100
Foucault: Security, Territory, Population
Similar to Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population aims to create a geneaology of relations of power, this time specifically focused on the modern state and the mechanisms or technologies that define it. Instructively, then, we can think of Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” in Security, Territory, Population, much as we understood “discipline” in his earlier work; it is how he de-institutionalizes or de-functionalizes the object (the state and the penal system, respectively) and reformulates it in relation to “fields, domains, and objects of knowledge” (118). Thus, the main object of knowledge in the modern state becomes the population, the main technology, security. We have gone, Foucault argues, from a state of justice operating over a territory through written law, to an administrative state of regulation and discipline, to currently, a state of government over population through mechanisms of security (110).
Foucault seems to make the aargument that government has its roots in the Christian tradition of pastoralism and, to a lesser degree, the direction of souls. In contrast to Greek thought, pastoralism operates on a multiplicity rather than a territory, its flock rather than its city, and with a quality of beneficence rather than omnipotence (129). However it also necessitates utter obedience, not for the sake of self-mastery, but for the sake of obedience itself. It strives for the renunciation of one’s will entirely and the normalizing of conduct. Here, Foucault points to instances of what he finally decides to call “counter-conduct” in response to the pastorate, and of the crumbling of the preeminence of both Empires and Church through insurrection of conduct. It is also in this context that Foucault argues the transition to political government takes place (228).
Thus, (I think) we arrive at the question of the art of government, the politiques, and the rise of the raison d’État. The state now exists as its own aim and in perpetuity. In contrast to empires, states now exist and endure through balanced plurality and interact not through rivalry, but through competition with one another. (This shift seems to be inextricably linked to the rise of the mercantilist economy.) Thus, we see the creation of the military-diplomatic system, which aims to maintain balance despite competition and growth, and of police, which aims to facilitate as much growth as will not disrupt peace. Statistics, then, are the tools by which states inventory their forces (their population, military, commerce, etc.) and compare them to those of other states. The resulting police state is one in which society and “better-living” claim preeminence, though constantly feeding back into the strength of the state.
What confused me most in Security, Territory, Population was Foucault’s jump, in his final lectures, from the police state to what seems to be an economic state, or one defined by the “naturalness” of both populations and markets, and thus one of deregulation and laissez-faire. Somehow, we return to Foucault’s original example of the grain market and issues of regulation, we see the reintroduction of the rural or agricultural realm (because apparently the police state was inherently urban-focused), as well as the emergence of production as the chief concern of governmentality. Population now must be viewed not in terms of absolute numbers (as it was during the mercantilist era) but in terms of relative values and costs (354). Additionally, the concern with freedom, resulting from the need to respect the naturalness of population and economic processes, seems to break down the role of police.
In essence, Foucault had me until the last 75 pages or so, when, in my opinion, he rushes through the dismantling of the police state, which he spent most of his lectures building up. I see that the new elements of governmentality are society, economy, population, security and freedom (354), but the questions I can’t seem to answer are: what, exactly, is civil society? How has economy become objectified, and how is the notion of security different in this new governmentality than under the police state? Also, how is Foucault connecting this reformulation of governmentality with the growth of capitalism? Why is not he more explicit in making this connection, if indeed he is trying to make it?
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
Commentary on Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population
October 15, 2012
In Security, Territory, Population (STP) Foucault began his opening lecture by declaring bio-power to be the object of his analysis, but he soon shifted gears, abandoning further direct references to bio-power although never explicitly setting it aside. Instead, he produced a body of lectures that could easily have been labeled “the birth of governmentality.” (Which for me raises the question of whether governmentality is simply another word for bio-power? My instinct at this point is to say, no, and tentatively posit that governmentality might be framed as one form of bio-power.) So what is this project then? What does it mean to describe the birth of governmentality? Perhaps the most succinct description of what Foucault was doing came more than two-thirds of the way through when, in his tenth lecture, he declared, “The state is a practice. The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which they state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things, and a way too of relating to government” (p. 277). Governmentality, then, is the practice (or technology of power) of the modern state, and in STP Foucault set out to trace from whence it came.
At the risk of leaving out critical terms (scarcity, physiocrats, statistics and calculability, multiplicity, individualization, counter-conduct, normalization, naturalization, assemblages, and coup d’Etats!), it has been helpful for me to sketch the broad arch of STP through the ideas/concepts that stood out as most fundamental in my reading. Foucault begins with security at the center of his analysis, stressing particularly how it is distinct from discipline. In its most basic definition, security acts on the population, in large part as a mode of risk management, in contrast with the disciplinary project of controlling individual behavior. The importance of the emergence of the population is essential to the operation of security as “the pertinent space within which and regarding which one must act” (p. 75) Security and population are inextricably linked, as security does not act on individual subjects, or collections thereof, but on “a set of processes to be managed,” i.e. population. As the question of governmentality begins to take center stage in the fourth lecture, Foucault turns first to an extended discussion of the Christian pastorate as “the threshold of the modern state…when governmentality became a calculated and reflected practice” (p. 165). Key elements of the pastorate, he stresses, are in its web of complex institutional relations between the pastor and the flock, between the flock and the individual. Also critical is its emphasis on “pure obedience” for its own sake. From the pastorate, we move to the emergence of the Westphalian state and in particular the concept of raison d’Etat, in which the state has no purpose outside of its own continued existence. Population seems to have disappeared here, but in fact is the central focus on the police – something very different from the modern institution with which we are familiar. Rather, the police discussed here could be described as the governmentality of the post-Westphalian (and pre-security) state. Modern governmentality then emerges in a new state practice in which the police are “dismantled, or rather it will be embodied in different institutions or mechanisms” (p. 354).
I was struck, and somewhat perplexed, by the absence of the 20th century in Foucault’s analysis of modern governmentality/the state as process. His analysis seems to allow for no distinction between the very different types of state processes produced by different forms of government, even within the same modern state form. (Yes, he describes some variations of the progress from raison d’Etat/police state to modern governmentality – for example noting Italy’s relative lack of policing in this period -- but the ultimate argument is about a single, if complex, process leading to the modern state process as essentially a consistent phenomenon in how governance is conceived and practiced.) While I see great value in understanding underlying dynamics that can arguably be attributed to every modern state to some degree, these matters of degree are arguably a central rather than an ancillary matter. I am not arguing even that Foucault should have been less Eurocentric – he took as his object of analysis the world that he knew and lived. But given the nature of the Europe in which he grew up, as well as the Europe in which he was delivering these lectures, I would have liked to at least see a justification for not addressing the dramatically different kinds of “governmentality” the 20th Century delivered (and therefore whether the same analytic can effectively be applied to what strike me as very different modes of power?) It is, I believe, fitting that we turn next to Hannah Arendt…
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
The Town Model: Understanding Political Economy through Foucault
In Security, Territory, Population Michel Foucault uses the town as both a point of entry in the lecture series (in the introduction) and as a paradigmatic model for explaining how the modern state has extended into public space. In doing so, he contextualizes the notion of governmentality while also hinting at how capitalism has helped form these processes as well. How does the town, as the “privileged object of police whose objective is the growth of the state”, mark the intersection between governmentality and political economy? In this paper, I argue that through the themes of police and circulation, Foucault explores how the emergence of the commodity coincides with the art of government in an urbanizing society.
Circulation
In his first three lectures, Foucault outlines how planned spatial distribution, risk management, and normalization constitute the apparatus of security. These processes likewise manifest as three phenomena: street, grain, and contagion, or the town, scarcity and epidemics. These phenomena, Foucault argues, all hinge on the problem of circulation. Most importantly, the management of circulation underpins the process of governmentality. Urban planning, for instance, foresees not only how zones will be used, but also conceives of all the possible events and elements that have to be regulated within that space. Space, then, is either produced or usefully appropriated to minimize risks such as revolt (wider roads means the easier circulation of people). This kind of risk aversion, however, necessarily coincides with identifying a population and normalizing its features. Potential risk such as disease, then, are not just patterned spatially but demographically as well. Governmentality, a feature of which is the security apparatus, is more broadly concerned with policing a population through both organizing space and managing the circulation of events and elements through that space.
Policing
In understanding Foucault’s notion of political economy, it’s important to note that the town is more than just the site at which “art of government” coalesces but also the model by which the circulation of goods and people takes form. This is what Foucault broadly sketches as “economy”. More importantly, the notion of economy is one that shifted from the management of the family or household to the management of a population, the family simply a subset of the larger category. Policing, then, emerges as a way to conceive of a population’s capacity not just to live, but to live well, a project that Foucault argues is predominately urban: “police as a condition of existence, of urban existence (336).” Likewise, a society shaped by the capitalist means of production is one where social relations are managed by the circulation and exchange of commodities and not more crudely between a sovereign and its subjects. Health, subsistence, preventing scarcity, the presence of beggars, the circulation of vagrants, are presented as problems of “dense coexistence”, and are also illustrative of an uneven distribution of wealth across society. How these problems are policed, then, is a question of both governance and political economy.
Caitlin Ryan
I want to spend some time in this reaction piece sorting out the three main historical strands, or categories, of Foucault’s argument. Details and information about them are scattered throughout his lectures and I have found it a useful exercise to put things together. By comparing these time periods, one gets a better sense of the main themes of governmentality and population.
Before I dive in, it’s important to note that, while Foucault himself emphasizes the historical schematic of these three modes of power, he also wants to be sure his audience understands that they are not mutually exclusive or entirely different historical periods. Each historical period is dominated by one particular technique of power, but the techniques and characteristics of each are still present in the other periods as well. Thus, for example, techniques of discipline and mechanisms of security are present during Feudal and 18th century periods, and of course the legal system is still present in the last period.
1. The pastorate: From about the 3rd century, Christianity “gave rise to an art of conducting, directing, leading, guiding…and manipulating men (p. 165).” This pastoral power, which Foucault sees as a prelude to governmentality, assured a kind of individualization based on salvation, the law and the compulsory extraction of the truth. Importantly, the concept of conduct is located within the ecclesiastical history of the pastorate – it is a way of conducting men by getting them to conduct themselves. Foucault’s purpose in discussing the pastorate is to understand why conflict and resistance during the feudal period took the form of religious crisis, in the Reformation of the 16th century.
2. The sovereign/feudal/juridical state: which existed in Europe from the Middle Ages to the 16th century, is based on justice and the law, a binary division between what is permitted and what is prohibited. Foucault refers to this as a legal or juridical mechanism, and notes that it is primarily a negative technique that prohibits. The unit or space upon which the sovereign acts is the territory.
3. The administrative state, established in the 18th century by physiocrats and political economists. The instrument of rule, the way society is controlled, is by discipline and surveillance. Discipline acts upon individual bodies with a centripetal force, concentrating, focusing and isolating a space, regulating everything down to minute detail. It prescribes action, while the legal state prohibits it. The administrative state’s response to an event such as the plague is to put in place strict rules and grids that regulate space and behavior, that ensure that everything and everyone is in its proper place. Moreover, during this period the type of rule became focused on controlling spaces of circulation within towns. This jibes with the fact that the dominant economic form during this period was mercantilism, or the control of trading routes.
4. The governmental state – the instruments of rule unique to this state are economic knowledge, liberalism the apparatus of security, and they act upon a population rather than upon the individual body. The apparatus of security is centrifugal, it has a tendency to expand, to “let things happen”. The apparatus of security operates at the level of reality, trying to get the components of reality to work together. Through the example of the event of scarcity and food shortage, Foucault shows the laissez-faire approach of the governmental state, which does not regulate or prohibit but lets reality take its course. Thus the apparatus of security depends on the principles of freedom and liberalism, which are not ideologies but technologies of power. Security is exercised over a whole population, rather then at the level of the individual or the territorial unit. (“Sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population (p. 11).”) This mode of power is exercised through a statistical calculation of probability that seeks to achieve a norm. Finally, rather than being focused on circulation, as the administrative state does, contemporary government is focused on the event.
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
October 15, 2012
GEOG 5100
Response: Foucault STP
In Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault scales up from Discipline and Punish’s emphasis on the individual (and the collective control of such) to the relationship of the state with its population. Foucault himself identified this series of lectures as truly a “history of governmentality” (108), tracing a genealogy of biopower, or political power over the human species. The course of lectures can be read in three parts: Lectures 1-3 establish the concepts of biopower and apparatuses of security and distinguish between sovereignty, discipline and security; Foucault’s fourth lecture, a turning point independently published as “Governmentality,” triangulates the relationship between government, population, and political economy; finally, Lectures 5-13 review the evolution of the pastoral-politcal state and the mechanisms through which it sustains itself, including both military-diplomatics and the police.
In his first lecture, Foucault establishes the concept of dispositifs (apparatuses of security) and outlines four aspects of these technologies according to his genealogy. That is, he explores this economy of power according to: (1) spaces of security; (2) the aleatory, or uncertain; (3) the normalization of security; and, (4) the establishment of the population (11). This discussion of apparatuses of security provides the conceptual framework for the formation of the “milieu,” and how circulation of goods and control of beings (and things) is regulated and managed by government according to various dispositifs.
Foucault’s uses lectures 2-3 to illustrate how physiocrats and economistes utilize and manipulate apparatuses of security to control homo oeconomicus. In the context of the grain trade, he shows how scarcity, mercantilism, and circulation relate to political economy, and how the government employs dispositifs such as taxes and subsidies as technologies of security. After making the distinction between centripetal discipline and centrifugal security (which I do not yet fully understand), Foucault uses the 18th century smallpox epidemic to illustrate a nuanced difference between “normation” and “normalization,” noting that “what is involved in disciplinary techniques is normation rather than normalization” (57). I understand this to mean that discipline classifies and divides the normal from the abnormal (a “normation”), whereas “normalization” establishes models and operations (codes) by which the normal conforms to the norm (or does not, in the case of delinquents). This distinction is, however, one with which I am also still grappling to fully understand.
Following the first conceptual lectures on security, population, and government, Foucault’s fourth lecture makes a distinct turn as he embarks deeply into the problematic of the relationship between government and population. In a sweeping “history of governmentality,” Foucault uses the Machiavellian “Prince” as a mode of analysis, in addition to historical Greco-Roman, Medieval, and later European models. Because the Prince’s position was singular and transcendent and predicated on an external relationship to his subjects, his actual relationship to his principality, and his population, was precarious and threatened both externally and internally. Hence the Prince did not last.
Foucault introduces the concept of pastoral power in Lecture 5, and in his remaining lectures provides various histories and cases to demonstrate how it has become the dominant form of governmentality in the West. Taken from the East, or “Hebraic” traditions, Foucault shows how the model of a shepherd tending his flock was co-opted by the Christian Church and subsequently institutionalized as the western organizational model. Similar to the panopticon paradigm, and how surveillance and examination have been systematized across society from the prison and the military to the hospital and the school, Foucault presents pastoral analogues through metaphors of the doctor, farmer, gymnast, and teacher. Furthermore, in the same way that the Church assumed vast political power as a result of its pastoral power, so too has the state developed its techniques of control and power (governmentality) on the basis of the pastoral tradition.
Foucault’s lectures culminate in his thesis on raison d’Etat, the state as the principle objective and the principle objective of the modern state – control and circulation of resources. Foucault demonstrates how military-diplomatic technology and the police are the foundation of state function, both part and parcel of his tripartite synthesis of population, political economy, and government. From the Treaty of Westphalia and the organization of the modern nation-state, trade and military agreements have served to support raison d-Etat, with competition at the root of both economics and war (rivalry). Converse to the inter-state emphasis of military-diplomatics, the police establish order primarily for intra-state benefit (state welfare, vis a vis the town), which then extends in scale to the inter-state realm when in concert with the military apparatus.
In his Summary to the Seminar, Foucault explained that “Polizeiwissenschaft,” or the theory and analysis of all that makes a state powerful, efficient, and rational, is also inextricable to that which keeps its population happy. In pursuit of this ideal, the state employs its diverse forms of dispositifs to balance rivalry and welfare and expand its power. That is, such apparatuses of technology-security serve the dual function of supporting military-economic competition abroad and maintaining wealth-tranquility happiness at home. Together, they comprise the system through which government relates to and rules a population and fulfills its raison d-Etat.