Political discourse and governmentality
One of the numerous topics that interested the
French philosopher Michel Foucault was the development of modern government and
how they governed increasingly diverse populations. To study this development, Foucault developed
a theory of Governmentality.
Governmentality is the art of government, and particularly in liberal
governments where “the 'art' of liberal government was to govern without
governing society, or the development of reflexive governance - a rationality
where the ends of policy also become the means” (Raco 2003:76). Foucault sees the purpose of liberal governments
as ”managing the behavior of free persons and securing the basic conditions of
their freedom by means of a variety of governmental practice” (Raco 2003:
76). Foucault is famous for his method
of discourse analysis, an approach that can easily be applied to the recent Presidential
election in the United States, a modern liberal democracy. One of the major stories coming out of this
election has been the success of modern political science to predict the
outcome of the election, and the accuracy of pre-election polling for those
predictions. Foucault wrote heavily
about the discourse of social science, and the concept of problematization. The
political science discourse, due in part to their success with data collection
and prediction, have theorized that there is a problem with one of the
political parties (the republican party) ostracizing a large part of the
diverse electorate. This goes back to Foucault’s
analysis of modern governance having to account for diversity in their
population, through self-governance, which political science has used to
problematize the discourse of particular political ideologies. Modern liberal governments do not govern in a
totalitarian direct way; instead they govern indirectly by creating a political
discourse of self-governance. Governments create a discourse about how things
can be done and about what is important. Inherent to this discourse is power,
that government officials, like the president, has the exclusive power to carry
out certain functions defined in the political discourse. In the political discourse governments define
what is right and what is wrong, which Foucault looks at, coming from the
philosophical tradition of Nietzsche, as a genealogy through time. One of the crucial points of Foucault’s work
is not that knowledge is power, but that power defines what knowledge is. In the context of this picture of the polling
center at Stony Brook University for example, government has defined, through its
political discourse, who can and cannot vote, and who can run for office, and
when/where people can vote. Furthermore
in the debates and political advertising and discussion, Government, along with
various institutions like media, have defined what issues are important for
people to think about. The focus on the
economy in his past election was as much due to the media’s focus on that issue
then the individual voter’s interest. Government,
to Foucault, tells the individuals it governs how to live through not only
their political discourse, but by setting rules for how other institutions
create a discourse. For example, while liberal
governments usually provide political rights to its subjects, the very
definition of what subjects can do implies that there are things the subjects
cannot do. While a paper can create a
discourse for why a particular political ideology is superior, the government
does not allow for institutions to push for radical measures, like revolution. Foucault in his late career argued that this political
discourse educated the subjects about what can and cannot be done, which is
itself a form of governance. By creating
this “body of practices” of what individual subjects can and should do, like
duties of citizenship, modern liberal government rules through the subject’s
self-governance, which is based on that political discourse. (Luxon
2008:379) The point of this self-governance is that
government cannot in a totalitarian way keep direct control over its subjects
at all time; the institution of government cannot be all seeing and therefore
cannot always punish people for breaking its rules. However, by instilling, socializing, the
values of its discourse into individual subjects the government rules through
the fear of breaking the law, making subjects govern themselves as to not break
those laws defined through the political discourse. The very definition of a free society
requires there to be a concept of a not free society, but this free society is
created by controlling the discourse and definitions of society via
government. Foucault points to this as
the contradiction of the modern liberal state.
(Luxon 2008) Foucault’s theory of governmentality is a
useful way to look at how modern governments can function, in ever diversifying
and growing societies and functions as a strong critique for modern political
thought.
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