Book Review: ‘Conducting Conduct’: Foucault’s Governmentality

Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Springer.

The mentioning of Foucault often reminds one of the ways of understanding and analyzing the disciplinary technologies and discourses at play in various institutions—be it prisons, hospitals, or asylums—that the modern citizen is subject to. And so, throughout his works, one is also presented with the relationships between power and knowledge that allow such disciplinary mechanisms to function in the first place. In 1978, after the publishing of such of his works, Foucault delivers a series of lectures titled ‘Security, Territory, Population’ in Collège de France in which he focuses on the practices of ‘governmentality’ and tackles the problem of the state and the population. In one of these lectures, he explains his previous studies of disciplinary institutions as carrying out a triple-displacement, shifting to the outside in three ways (p.116). The first methodological principle of such studies, he explains, is “to move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power” (p.117). The second is to substitute the “external point of view of strategies and tactics for the internal point of view of the function” (p.118)—which encourages one to focus on how disciplinary institutions he studied are inserted within strategies and tactics instead of looking into the success and failures of their functionalities. The last shift to the outside “involved not seeking to measure institutions, practices, and knowledge in terms of the criteria and norms of an already given object” (p.118)—be it mental illnesses, delinquency, or sexuality. In this set of lectures, Foucault asks the question of whether the same reversal can be carried out to the state itself. The term ‘governmentality’ becomes a key concept to Foucault in such a reversal as is evident in the question: “Can we talk of something like a ‘governmentality’ that would be to the state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions?” (p.120)—in which the modern state is placed in a general technology of power that “assured its mutations, development, and functioning” (p.120). In this book review, I will be looking into his ‘Security, Territory, Population’ lectures first to explain Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, then look into the ways Foucault traces the modern state to the pastorate, and finally explore how he portrays the historical transitions to the new governmentality that is to become the modern state. 

Governmentality and Population

Foucault, focusing on the Middle Ages in Europe and the Greco-Roman antiquity, raises interest in the flourishing of treatises that are presented as arts of government, leading to the general problem of “government” that breaks out in the sixteenth century (p.88). Hence, the questions of “how to be governed, by whom, to what extent, to what ends, and by what means” (p.89) have, until the end of the eighteenth century, generated an enormous amount of literature on government. One such work, as Foucault explains, is Machiavelli’s influential The Prince which is a guide for new princes concerning acquiring power and maintaining their sovereignty. Foucault highlights three ways that Machiavelli characterizes the Prince. Firstly, the Prince finds himself in a “relationship of singularity and externality, of transcendence, to his principality” (p.91)—as he receives his Principality either through acquisition, conquest, or inheritance. Thus, there exists no essential connection between the Prince and his principality except a link of violence, tradition, or one established by treaties. Secondly, the principality is “fragile and constantly under threat” (p.91)—both from outside and the inside as there is no a priori reason for Prince’s subjects to accept his rule. And lastly, the object of the art of governing “must be this fragile link between the Prince and the principality” (p.92). Therefore, sovereignty is exercised at first on a territory and “consequently the subjects who inhabit it” (p.96). 

Later on, anti-Machiavellian literature emerged and wanted to replace the form of sovereignty that Machiavelli put forward. Such literature contended that “being able to hold on to one’s principality is not the same as possessing the art of governing” (p.92). The art of governing, instead of simply upholding the fragile link between the sovereign and territory that is essential to the principality, was about the government of ‘things’—that is “men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking […] men in their relationships with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death” (p.96). In other works of literature concerning the sovereign, jurists and theologians propose that the good sovereign must pursue the common good and the salvation of all in which the common good is ultimately the submission to the law. The circular relationship of sovereignty then refers back to itself as an end. Yet, in the new emerging definitions of government and finality in the art of governing, the objective of government consists of a plurality of specific ends such as ensuring the greatest possible wealth produced, providing people with sufficient means of subsistence, and thus the increasing of the population. Governing was no more about imposing laws on men but in the disposition of things, which is “employing tactics rather than laws, or […] employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means” (p.99). According to Foucault, such changes in understanding governing marks an important break. Having population as the end of government, along with the quantification methods of statistics, would urge the government to take population as its object in its observations and knowledge “in order to govern effectively in a rationally reflected manner” (p.106). Such transition to techniques of government revolving around population would incorporate the birth of political economy—referencing the “continuous and multiple networks of relationships between the population, the territory, and wealth” (p.106). Foucault, perhaps bringing a reference also to his previous works, emphasizes how erroneous it would be to perceive such changes as a set of replacements: a society of sovereignty by that of discipline and a society of discipline by that of government. Rather, sovereignty and discipline were never more important in the new attempts to manage the population. In fact, “we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism” (p.107-8)—which is a series that has not been dismantled even today. 

Pastoral power: A prelude to governmentality 

By tracing the shift of understandings in governmentality, Foucault thus lays the groundwork for his lectures and locates the modern state within the set of discourses and practices that has led it to its modern form today. Following this, Foucault looks into the history of the notion of government and how the word ‘govern’ has been given meaning historically. His analysis shows how, before the word acquired its political meaning in the sixteenth century, ‘to govern’ had covered a wide semantic domain. Unlike in Greek antiquity in which the word had a political connotation, its meanings in moral kind in the Middle Ages indicated a sort of government of souls in a spiritual sense, or “a relationship between individuals that can take many forms” (p.121)—whether speaking to a person or having a sexual relationship. It also had the meaning of providing means of subsistence. Throughout the various historical meanings, one thing that is clear to Foucault is that “one never governs a state, a territory, or a political structure. Those whom one governs are people, individuals, or groups” (p.122). The origin of the idea that one could or did govern men, Foucault argues, can be found in, first, a pre-Christian East, then, in the Christian East—particularly in the idea and organization of pastoral power (p.123). The theme of “king, god, or chief as a shepherd of men, who are like his flock” (p.123) takes place in various places throughout the Mediterranean East—such as in Egypt, Assyria, and Hebrews. The shepherd’s power—unlike the case in the Prince—is exercised over not a territory but a flock, in its movement from one place to another. The shepherd knows fertile lands where he takes his flock through the best routes and suitable places for resting. Pastoral power is also “fundamentally a beneficent power” (p.126). Its only end is doing good, which entails the salvation of the flock. The pastor makes sure that the flock is fed well and keeps watch—making pastoral power a power of care and shepherd an intermediary between the flock and the pasture, food, and salvation (p.128). Pastoral power is also characterized as an “individualizing power” (p.128). The pastor looks after each sheep individually and the flock as a whole, giving rise to what Foucault refers to as the paradox of the shepherd: “the sacrifice of one for all, and the sacrifice of all for one” (p.129). And it is only with Christianity the “real history” of the pastorate as a specific power over men, a “matrix of procedures for the government of men” (p.147), begins in the Western world. It is a process in which a religion constitutes itself as the Church which “lays claim to the daily government of men in their real life on the grounds of their salvation and the scale of humanity” (p.148). In the Christian Church, unlike the forms of pastoral power in Hebrews, the shepherd theme would become the fundamental and essential relationship that envelops all forms of relationships with men and be “institutionalized in a pastorate with its laws, rules, techniques, and procedures” (p.152)—making it profoundly different and giving rise to an art of conducting. It gave rise to an art of conducting, directing, leading, and guiding men, “an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every moment of their existence” (p.165), an art of ‘governing men’.

            On the surface of things, as Foucault argues, what fundamentally characterizes the Christian pastorate may seem to be that the pastor guides to salvation, prescribes the law, and teaches the truth. However, Foucault disagrees with such a connection and contends that the pastorate is specified at a different level. Rather, the Christian pastorate takes the problem of salvation as one of its themes and “inserts into this global, general relationship an entire economy and technique of the circulation, transfer, and reversal of merits” (p.183): the pastor has to account for every act of the sheep; consider everything it has done—be it merit or fault—as his own act; and, at times, be prepared to die for his sheep and be open to imperfections as part of humility. In this economy of merits and faults, “salvation eludes one’s grasp; it is entirely in God’s hands” (p.173). The Christian pastorate does not simply become an instrument in the generalization of the law either but “establishes a kind of exhaustive, total and permanent relationship of individual obedience” (p.183): obedience becomes an end and a virtue in itself in which the obedient obeys to be obedient and the one who commands—whether pastor, abbot or bishop—commands only because he is ordered to command. Ultimately, will is something to be renounced. And finally, when the Christian pastorate teaches the truth, it is innovative in taking a certain inner truth of the hidden soul as its object and establishes a structure and technique of power in the investigation, self-examination, and examination of others. With its focus on the circulation of merits and faults at every moment, its network of servitude, and its relationship to hidden truths, the Christian pastorate would also give birth to a new power, which is that of “specific modes of individualization” (p.184). Thus, the Christian pastorate, with its calculative and reflective practices and techniques in the art of governing men, becomes an embryonic point of governmentality. In other words, through the making of a subject whose merits are analytically analyzed, who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and who is subjectified through the compulsory extraction of truth” (p.185), the pastorate, to Foucault, sketches out the prelude to what he has called governmentality. One could perhaps summarize such a form of governing as governing the conduct of souls. Here, Foucault understands and utilizes the conduct in a specific way, meaning “both the act of ‘directing’ others (according to more or less strict mechanisms of coercion) and the way of behaving in a more or less open field of possibilities” (p.xxi). So, the exercise of power, here, consists in ‘conducting conduct’. 

            The question of how the pastorate burst open and gave rise to the problem of the government and governmentality still holds. For this reason, Foucault investigates the crisis of the pastorate by focusing on the forms of resistance to power as conducting that corresponded to the historical singularity of the pastorate (p.195). For that, Foucault picks the phrase ‘counter-conduct’ as he finds it apt to describe the “sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others” (p.201). Some forms of counter-conduct against the pastorate that were developed in the Middle Ages were asceticism, which refused the world, in its materiality, that the pastorate wishes to conduct; different religious communities which challenged of priest’s sacramental power established by the Church; mysticism, which, with mystical experience, short-circuited hierarchy and the pastorate as the channel between the individual and God; return to Scriptural texts, which, again, short-circuited such relationship but in a hermeneutical way; and eschatological beliefs that disqualified pastor’s role with a belief of God’s return soon to gather his flock. Foucault thus frames a background in which an eventual great religious crisis in the sixteenth century was to be experienced, which would then result in the Reformation. Nonetheless, while digging into governmentality, Foucault utilizes the point of view of pastoral power, in his analysis of the structures of power, “to take up these things and analyze them […] in the form of strategies and tactics” (p.216) which would, along with the “de-governmentalization of the cosmos” (p.236), be the background of the process in which the modern state is born.

Raison d’État and the new governmentality

Foucault describes how, after the general crisis of the pastorate that opened up, there has been a general questioning of “the way of governing and governing oneself, of conducting and conducting oneself” (p.364)—accompanying new forms of economic and social relations and new political structures. We then encounter an art of governing that finds the “principles of its rationality and the specific domain of its application in the state” (p.365). This is where we see the development of raison d’État, a political consideration that strives solely for the preservation, expansion, and felicity of the state. In this understanding, there is no attention to the cosmos or the divine, “there is no last day. There is no ultimate point. There is nothing like a uniform and final temporal organization” (p.258)—the end of raison d’État is the state itself, an indefinite governmentality without a foreseeable term or final aim. We now have certain features of the government of men that are no longer practiced as pastoral art “but where the key theme is raison d’État” (p.261). The themes that appeared in the pastorate, salvation, law, and truth, take on new forms in raison d’État. The theory of coup d’État helps Foucault study salvation in raison d’État. Coup d’État, here in the seventeenth century, did not mean seizure of the state but something different entirely—which is the temporary suspension of law and legality in the name of the state’s salvation. Whenever the state’s existence is under threat, coup d’État, with its urgency and exceptionality, becomes the self-manifestation of the state—asserting raison d’État and that the state must be saved—with violent and theatrical characteristics. Additionally, the knowledge of the state will not be that of law but “knowledge of the things that comprise the very reality of the state” (p.274)—which would be called ‘statistics’. And finally, an aspect of politics of truth in raison d’État will be the problem of the public in which “raison d’État must act on the consciousness of people” (p.275) such that their opinions of doing things are modified as economic and political subjects.

            In this new government of rationality, Foucault identifies its real problem and concern as the preservation, maintenance, and development of a dynamic of forces in the European and global space of competition between states to ensure their survival. Consequently, raison d’État presents two great assemblages of political knowledge and technology. One is a military-diplomatic technology that serves to secure and develop state’s forces through diplomatic alliances and the organization of armed forces. The other, according to Foucault, is ‘police’—which, in the seventeenth century—meant the calculation and technique that made it possible to establish a mobile, yet stable and controllable relationship between the state’s internal order and the development of its forces (p.313)—dealing with quantitative development of the population, necessities of life, problems of health, activity/occupation of the population, and the circulation of goods. However, with the formation of political economy (and the ‘naturalness’ that becomes apparent in mechanisms of economic balances), it would soon be realized that the relationship between population and resources can no longer be managed through the regulatory and coercive system that ‘police state’ brings. The new governmentality that emerged in the seventeenth century which invested in the project of a police state would then find itself in a situation in which it encounters economy as a domain of naturalness. The state now “has to manage populations; it also has to organize a legal system of respect for freedoms; and finally, it has to provide itself with an instrument of direct, but negative, intervention, which is the police” (p.354)—transforming the idea of police to something closer to its current meanings. More importantly, society, economy, population, security and freedom come to be “the elements of the new governmentality whose forms we can still recognize in its contemporary modifications” (p.354). 

            With the modern state and its indefinite time without an eschatological end, Foucault says, “There will always be governments, the state will always be there, and there is no hope of having done with it” (p.355). Moreover, to him, the state will come to an end only in the day “when civil society can free itself of the constraints and controls of the state” (p.356). Akin to the forms of counter-conduct that acted as the catalyst in the crisis of the pastorate, what would be the forms of counter-conduct that may eventually take society to that day? The first form of counter-conduct is “the affirmation of an eschatology in which civil society will prevail over the state” (p.356), which Foucault does by invoking such a day in the first place. The second, according to Foucault, would be the absolute right to break all bonds of obedience, which is the right to revolution. The final form of counter-conduct is a move towards transparency in which society would be entitled to its own knowledge and possessor of its own truth. Nevertheless, having presented the formation of the modern state with its techniques of power and tactics of governmentality, I believe Foucault’s usage of the terms ‘conduct’ and ‘counter-conduct’ are extremely crucial here and in his lectures throughout, adding an ethical component to resistance and presenting the points of contact and intersection between the ethical and the political. A hopeful ending in his lectures concerning agency and power over one’s self, in addition to bridging his previous works on disciplinary institutions to his future ones in History of Sexuality—perhaps—through the notions conduct/counter-conduct, makes politics answerable to ethics (Gordon 1991) and provides new grounds for theorizing about ways of engagement with the state as both a subject and an object of it.  

References

Gordon, Colin. 1991. “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. The University of Chicago Press.