I was prompted to re-read these papers, when I was reading two books that
seem to sum up recent work on governmentality: Mitchell Dean's
Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (1999) and Nikolas Rose's
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (1999). I was very impressed
by these books -- especially Dean's. It was a painful to re-read my own
papers in light of what I had learned from them. In particular, I was
embarrassed by the way that I had invoked an imaginary "we" and had
insisted despite myself on placing "us" in a context that could be fixed
historically. Since both of my papers were intended to disrupt the
assumptions that enable the standard understandings of who and what "we"
are -- in particular the ontology of sovereignty and the connected
epistemology of social science -- it is clear that they did only a small
part of what they were intended to do. This is mostly, but not wholly a
matter of my own limitations. Those limitations are interesting only to me.
But, there may be something more general is at stake, namely the difficulty
of speaking and writing (let alone acting otherwise) politically.
When I read Dean and Rose, I was reminded of the way that social scientists
(including so-called political scientists) are encouraged to write from
outside politics, and thus to deal with the political as a domain to be
described, analyzed, and -- ultimately -- explained away. I refer to this
way of writing in my second paper, in which I make a plea for a political
rather than a social science. I talk there about the naturalizing effects
of a social scientific approach, and appeal to an older, Aristotelian
tradition in which, as it were, one writes of the political from the
inside, as one actor/speaker among others. The conservatism of political
science (to which Hindess refers) is in part an effect of the effort to
speak from inside, as a citizen to fellow citizens. To speak/write
politically is always to imagine a community of some sort, with given
assumptions about its own nature and its own problems, a reading of its own
origins and possible destiny, and so on. So, to speak/write politically is
always to be constrained in particular ways, and always to be posed with
the question of which limits to disturb and which to take for granted. To
speak/write in a social scientific vein -- as I think most analysts of
governmentality do -- is to put oneself in a space where greater analytical
freedom seems possible. But, as the governmentality analysts themselves
might say, all freedoms come at a cost.
Persuaded as I am by Dean's and Rose's analyses, I am not persuaded by the
claim that an analytics of governmentality abandons social science (or
"sociology") in favour of something else. Quite the contrary. The rejection
of history in favour of genealogy and of the "why" in favour of the "how,"
do not make an account any less sociological. The practices described are
still at one remove from the analyst, and are still treated as "objects" of
understanding. Moreover, the imagined readerly community is one of social
scientists. To be sure, there is another community behind that community: a
political community (or communities) that might take up these analyses and
use them politically. But, what that political community is or indeed
what politics is remains unspecified. As Dean acknowledges (p. 198),
government is only one aspect of politics. The other aspect, he suggests in
his recent book, is "a struggle or competition between competing forces,
groups or individuals attempting to influence, appropriate or otherwise
control the exercise of authority" (ibid.). Hindess alludes to something
similar. So far, so good, but note: this is the standard sociological view,
the one that distinguished "government" and "politics" and gave
conventional political science its two main objects of study. What sort of
political science can we expect from that? What imagined community is the
ground from which one writes a sociology/genealogy of politics? What are
the politics of that particular imagining?
I continue to be intrigued by a line of thought that I identify with Hannah
Arendt (especially her famous essay on freedom, but also her speculation in
On Revolution) and Bernard Crick (In Defence of Politics). One might even
invoke Oakeshott's name in this context. What I am thinking of here is the
effort to identify a mode of action, domain of activity, or aspect of life
that is not reducible to the social, the economic, the cultural, or the
governmental. Arendt, famously, draws a line between the political on the
one hand and the "social" (which, for her would encompass the economic and
cultural) on the other. She also distinguishes politics from administration
(or what others would call "government"). However problematic her account
might be and it is very problematic it gestures at something that many
people have been trying to articulate: the stubborn presence of the
political (as both fact and aspiration) as something other than what we can
ever describe in social scientific terms.
If we have common language for describing politics, it is the language of
action, action in which we and other people are, have been, and will be
engaged. If politics has a distinctive domain, it runs through the
governmentalities, rhizomatically. And, it is "in here" as much as "out
there" when we do analytical or other work. Writing is always a political
activity that appeals to an implicit "we" and refers to a universe of
political discourse. So, our papers are all political actions that could be
analyzed as such.
One way of subjecting the governmentality literature to political analysis
would be to ask for whom it is written, and to what purpose. That might
raise some interesting questions about the role of sociology, the relations
between British, American, and continental European thought, the connection
between Western social science and the contemporary practices of Western
hegemony, and so on. I'll pursue another line of thought here. It is
suggested by Mitchell Dean's idea that the governmentalization of the state
is now being followed by the governmentalization of government. This is a
perceptive observation. What I would add is that the governmentalization of
sociology is also at stake: the re-definition of sociology's object and
method to bring it in line with the practices that it seeks to describe. A
certain reflexivity is involved here. This is neither good nor bad, but (to
pick up on the language) "dangerous". The dangers would be worth analyzing.
I take it that political analysis is at least in part an analysis of
dangers.
There's something about the trio, politics-danger-action, that demands
still further analysis. When we hold that trio before us, we get a very
different sense of what is at stake than we do when we focus on the duo of
politics-government. The governmentality literature brings the trio in (as
Foucault did) by talking about "strategies". So, typically, we have
strategies without strategists and wars without combattants. This is
puzzling, to say the least. Moreover, the militarism of the imagery
suggests rhizomatic connections that demand explanation. (Barbara
Cruikshank's distinction between strategic and tactical politics is
interesting in this respect. In insisting on a freeing, she moves us from
one sort of war to another. The imagery is not peculiar to her: We all use
it in one way or another. I find it hard to resist the inference that
something "lies behind" this way of thinking.) There is a relation between
the duo (the one that inclines us to think about politics in terms of
government, regulation, law, and hence justice) and the trio (the one that
inclines us to think of politics in terms of action in face of danger,
hence violence and war) that needs to be explored. Mitchell Dean moves in
that direction in his latest paper. But, there is another trio,
discussion-deliberation-decision, that must also be brought into some
relation with the other two. (Tully's work points us in that direction.)
The standard view in political philosophy seems to be that the central
political problem is to make this third trio govern the other two: to make
"politics,' in this sense, govern government and govern violence. So-called
political philosophy thus embodies a particular aspiration. How to make
sense of that aspiration is part of what is involved in giving an account
of politics. I suspect that the aspiration is not what it appears to be,
but I get little help from the governmentality literature in making sense
of it (or learning how to respond to it within myself).
One of the interesting features of the governmentality literature is the
way that it re-inscribes the ethicization of politics. The shift from
morality as a set of rules to ethics as a form of practice is presented as
a description, but also, implicitly, as a prescription for human activity.
"Ethics" is held out as the paradigmatic reflexive activity. Little noticed
is the way that this confirms the tendency -- especially evident among
philosophers -- to collapse politics into ethics, and hence to obscure the
ways in which ethics (in the plural) are deployed politically. (It is
interesting that neither Dean nor Rose refers to John Rawls, the most
influential "political philosopher" of the late 20th century. This, despite
the fact that Rawls offers a risk analysis of justice, and sets that out as
a normative foundation for politics.) Machiavelli's point about the
relationship between politics and ethics is still pertinent. Cruikshank
deepens our understanding of the matter.
One might well write a genealogy of the political, similar to the proffered
genealogies of the social and the economic. Such a genealogy would be
interesting, and it would help forestall tendency perhaps evident in my
remarks here to essentialize the political. Nonetheless, it would still
leave us puzzled about thinking politically. Part of the problem, I think,
is that genealogy, like the rest of social science, depends on an ontology
of sovereignty.
Warren Magnusson
28 July 2000