Conceptual framework – a Foucauldian lens
3.4 Other conceptual tools
I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area… I write for users, not readers. (Foucault, 1974, pp. 523-524)
Foucault’s style of criticism sought to trouble and disrupt current certainties, and he developed various tools which are useful for a Foucauldian analysis. Those relevant to the current study are discussed below.
Foucault used the term apparatus or ‘dispositif’ to refer to the network of structures and processes which are employed to maintain power relations. It is a tool for analysing multiple forces in contest. He explained:
What I'm trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly
heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions - in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, 1980b, p. 194)
Foucault further explained that an apparatus has a dominant strategic function and emerges in response to an “urgent need” (Foucault, 1980b, p. 195). This specific strategic response is rationalised over time and turned into a technology of power in other situations (Rabinow & Rose, 2003, p. 11). As Nicoll and Fejes (2009) explained, an apparatus is not put in place by any particular interest group, but is rather the outcome of the confluence of dispersed activities and ideas which then operate as a strategy.
Foucault advocated seeing situations not as given but as questionable through using problematisation. A problematisation is “the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought” (Foucault, 1984, cited in Rabinow & Rose, 2003, pp. 12-13). Thus, he was interested in how systems of thought or knowledge practices define phenomena as
problems. Using problematisation as an analytical device therefore involves transforming what is taken as given into an object worthy of interrogation and enquiring how it might have been different.
Foucault employed the term population to conceptualise the social body as a phenomenon constituted by biopolitics and understood in statistical terms. Smart (2002) explains:
“Through statistical forms of representation, the phenomenon of population was shown to have its own regularities, for example birth and death rates, characteristic ailments, age profiles, social groupings, etc.” (p. 127). In contrast to the control of the masses through sovereign power, the political-statistical concept of population enabled the regulation of people through bio-power. The aim of this regulation was the welfare of the population, and not the preservation of the rule of the sovereign. Population is the target of
governmentality, which is concerned with how people are governed both through practices of government and through practices of the self.
The issue of governmentality emerged in Foucault’s work during the late 1970s, where he focussed on the “problematic of government”, or how people are governed in modern societies (Smart, 2002, p. xiv). The term governmentality stems from the French word gouvernemental, which means ‘concerning government’, where government refers to both techniques of rule and practices of the self (Bröckling, Krasmann & Lemke, 2011). Many of
“Foucault’s studies of madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality and subjectivity” are
increasingly being read in the light of this notion of ‘governmentality’ (Smart, 2002, p. xiv).
Foucault differentiated between a notion of government which is based on sovereign power (i.e. a king ruling over his territory and subjects through law), to the “art of government”, or
“the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed” (Foucault, 1982, p. 790). In this context, government is the “the conduct of conduct” 2 and refers to the ways in which human beings are made subjects.
Governmentality can be understood as “the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organise and instrumentalise the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other” (Foucault, 2000, p. 300). Governmentality is concerned with both the conduct of the population, and how we conduct ourselves. In everyday life, conduct is managed by experts in various institutions (e.g. the family, medical personnel, psychologists, marketers), who have authority as a result of their expertise and which is accorded the status of truth. Foucault wrote:
Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word … is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which impose coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. (Foucault, 1997, pp. 181-182)
Governmentality thus both individualises and totalises. Individualisation is concerned with how the individual comes to know her/himself and his/her place in society (the construction of the individual subject) and takes responsibility for governing her/himself; on the other hand, totalisation concerns the control of the population of individual subjects and the regulatory power of the state. An analysis of governmentality therefore considers the
2 This term can be found in the original French: “conduire des conduites” in Dits et écrits IV (p. 237) by M.
Foucault, 1994, Paris, Gallimard.
exercise of power relations associated with the centralised state, as well as the practices involved in self-government. In this context, there is a subtle interplay between the coercive power of the state and the subject’s power over the self (Gallagher, 2008), what Rose (1999) called a ‘government through freedom’. This kind of government:
multiplies the points at which a citizen has to play his or her part in the processes that govern him. And, in doing so, it also multiplies the points at which citizens are able to refuse, contest, challenge those demands placed upon them. (Rose, 1999: xxiii)
Dean (2010) explained that an analysis of governmentality involves examining those practices “that try to shape, sculpt, mobilise and work through the choices, desires,
aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups” (p. 20). Governmentality thus presupposes subjects who are free to choose to respond in a variety of ways, and it attempts to mould these choices to secure the ends of government.
Technologies of the self are the techniques which individuals bring to bear on themselves when they interact with the norms/practices imposed by the prevailing regime of truth.
Foucault explained that technologies of the self are the:
techniques which permit individuals to perform, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in such a way that they transform themselves. (Foucault, 1997, p. 181)
Dean (2010) explained that the government of the self involves four aspects (pp. 26-27):
1. Ontology – which concerns what it is that is to be governed (e.g. the soul, the flesh, the use of pleasure)
2. Ascetics – concerns how the governing takes place (e.g. through confession, through exercise, through disciplinary techniques)
3. Deontology – concerns the mode of subjectification, or who we are when we are governed in such a manner (e.g. one subject to the weakness of the flesh, a recipient of welfare support)
4. Teleology – concerns why we are governed, the goals sought, what kind of world we wish to create or what we hope to become through this process.
Torok (2010) emphasised that the technologies of the self are “designed to achieve voluntary self-control with minimal force or domination” (p. 48). Choice is thus central in this process of self-subjectification, and Dean (2010) pointed out that these practices can be used to resist forms of government or engage in counter-conduct. Governmentality thus involves a complex interplay of truth games, technologies of government, and technologies of the self. It is in the context of governmentality that Foucault introduced the concept of pastoral power.