Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France (Spring 2011)

STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France

Spring Semester 2011

*Mar. 1 Security, Territory, Population, 1-190, Hyunkyoung Cho

[Fig 1] Women at Window, Salvador DalÌ, oil on board, 1925 (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2005-03-Dali-Figure.html) Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In the perspective of governmentality; Why study governmentality?

The analysis of governmentality tackles the problem of the state and population. It carries out a triple displacement, shifting in three ways, in order to find a new perspective (point of view).

The first methodological principle of governmentality is to move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of technology of power; for instance, the psychiatric hospital, the medical power, and the psychiatric knowledge. It means that the analysis of governmetality tries to discover a wider and more overall perspective, the overall point of view of technology of power. It allows us to replace a genetic analysis through filiation with a genealogical analysis-genealogy should not be confused with genesis and filiation-which reconstructs a whole network of alliances, communications, and points of support.

The second principle is to substitute the external point of view of strategies and tactics for the internal point of view of the function. The second shift, the second transfer to the outside, concerns the function; for example, the analysis of the prison’s idea and functions as what Bentham did in his Panopticon.

Finally, the third de-centering, the third shift to the outside, concerns the object. Taking the point of view of the disciplines involved refusing to give oneself a ready-made object, be it metal illness, delinquency, or sexuality. It involved not seeking to measure institutions, practices, and knowledges in terms of the criteria and norms of an already given object. Instead, it involved grasping the movement by which a field of truth with objects of knowledge was constituted through these mobile technologies. We can certainly say that madness “does not exist,” but this does not mean it is nothing. All in all, it was a matter of doing the opposite of what phenomenology had taught us to say and think, the phenomenology that said, roughly: Madness exists, which does not means that it is a thing. (118)

In short, the governmentality is a new perspective (point of view) for the possibility to explore the technology of power, through the shifting to the outside of disciplines, especially, the state. As encompassing point of view with regard to the state, it is the attempt to free relations of power from the institution, in order to analyze the state from the point of view of technologies; to distinguish the state also from the function, so as to take it up within a strategic analysis; and to detach it from the privilege of the object, so as to resituate it within the perspective of the constitution of fields, domains, and objects of knowledge. (118)