Governmentality and the Political (System)

Author(s): Henrik Bang and Anders Esmark

Source: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 32, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 262-268
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27868918
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 Governmentality and the Political (System)
Henrik Bang
Copenhagen University
Anders Esmark
Roskilde University

In her commentary on our article "Good Governance in Network Society:

Reconfiguring the Political from Politics to Policy" (Bang & Esmark, 2009),
Kersty Hobson argues that we present a limited view of governmentality
research, "thus closing off (potential and actual) fruitful avenues of inquiry
into how network governance functions, in what ways, and to what ends."
In a way, she is quite right. In our attempt to grasp the implications of the
emerging network society and its program of good governance, we utilize a
number of conceptual tools from various toolboxes, governmentality studies
only being one of these. Hobson's intervention is thus a very timely one, and
we welcome the opportunity to elaborate on this particular dimension of our
argument, if only in relatively brief fashion. Our response picks up on what
we perceive to be the two interrelated propositions put forward by Hobson:
(1 ) the real potential of governmentality studies comes out in microanalysis of
power dynamics, and (2) the major strength of governmentality is to identify,
and perhaps even facilitate, resistance from below and outside toward political
strategies and instruments deployed from above and inside the political system.
Both propositions are summarized by Hobson when she, using McKee's phras
ing, argues for the benefits of a realist governmentality approach by stating
that it illuminates "a potential disjuncture between top-down, universalistic
plans and empirical reality at the microlevel."
Turning to the interpretation of governmentality studies as a microlevel
approach first, we certainly do not wish to deny the potential benefits of ana
lyzing the implications of network governance or other strategies and instru
ments of government at the microlevel. As it is, however, our article pursues
a macrolevel approach: Our argument concerns developments on the level of
society and on the level of the political system, which we, in the tradition of
political systems theory, conceive as a spatially and temporally inclusive, yet
communicatively exclusive, subsystem of society (Esmark, 2009). So what
are we to make of this difference between utilizing governmentality studies
as a macrosociological and macropolitical approach vis-?-vis a microlevel ap

Administrative Theory & Praxis /June 2010, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 262-268.
? 2010 Public Administration Theory Network.
1084-1806/2010 $9.50+ 0.00.
262 DOI 10.2753/ATP1084-1806320208

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BANG & ESMARK 263

proach? A relatively straightforward proposition would be that the governmen

tality studies can easily accommodate both approaches, or even invites them.
Insofar as Hobson aims to expand on our analysis and offer other avenues of
fruitful analysis, it would seem that her perception of governmentality stud
ies as a "diversifying, and often internally discordant field of inquiry" could
indeed be seen to allow even for macrolevel applications.
On the other hand, Hobson's commentary also seems to suggest otherwise.
The question of how "such different takes on governmentality" can exist is
posed more than once in a way that suggests less than enthusiasm for diverging
interpretations and sets the scene for pitting her own realist approach against
our macrolevel misinterpretation/misapplication of the governmentality
toolbox. We find this tendency to argue in favor of a particular interpretation
of governmentality studies wedded to the microlevel of analysis somewhat
unfortunate. Indeed, we suggest that Hobson's arguments in favor of her own
approach rest on a couple of problematic assertions.
First, Hobson seems to interpret our approach as being largely unempirical.
The realist approach to governmentality, by contrast, is basically synonymous
with governmentality empirics mapping the empirical reality at the microlevel
rather than making sweeping generalizations. This line of critique basically
amounts to the quintessential empiricist intervention: "Where is the evidence?"
Charging macrolevel observations with lack of empirical evidence from the
perspective of the microlevel is of course perfectly defensible, but it hardly
results in pertinent claims about the validity and/or usefulness of the mac
rolevel observations themselves, nor in fruitful links between the micro and
the macro. We readily admit that our argument is not focused on the microlevel
of experienced subjectivity and local networks, but this is a far cry from be
ing purely conceptual and unempirical. By and large, we simply follow the
usual rules of macrosociological and macropolitical observation. By the same
token, we very much welcome "ethnographic and in-depth, individual-focused
qualitative methods," but we certainly hope that they are not meant as a set of
necessary methodological practices required to study the "who, what, how,
and why of modern governance," as seems to be Hobson's suggestion.
Second, Hobson argues that we distort governmentality studies by conflat
ing it with the particular macrosociological proposition that current society
is a control society. On the one hand, this intervention reflects philological
and methodological concerns about the proper interpretation of Foucault?
that is, the extent to which Foucault's work actually supports the notion of
a control society (he did not use the term) and the extent to which he would
"fundamentally and wholeheartedly" subscribe to such a "conclusive and
absolute idea" (he would not). The more pertinent question raised by Hobson
is, however, whether current society is in fact a control society. Hobson rejects
the notion of control society on the grounds that it presents a much too one
sided and pessimistic image of current conditions as opposed to Foucault's

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264 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY & PRAXIS * VOL 32, NO. 2

more optimistic view on how "genuine human freedom could be found and
practiced," essentially suggesting an opposition between control and freedom
allegedly found in Foucault's work.
As we try to demonstrate in the article, however, control society does not
operate on the basis of such an opposition. Our claim is rather that govern
mentality studies have displayed a certain inability to come to terms exactly
with the fact that the usual schematics of power and freedom is of little use in
the reality of control society. Granted, our article may not have been entirely
clear on that issue insofar as it mainly highlights one of two possible strate
gies deployed by governmentality studies (i.e., unraveling the freedoms of
a control society as mock or illusory freedoms). There is, of course, another
strategy, as suggested and pursued by Hobson: insisting on the potential for
counterstrategies, resistance, and genuine human freedom against the pro
grams of control. We would hold, however, that neither strategy as pursued
by governmentality studies has proven particularly helpful.
The relative lack of efficiency displayed by governmentality when faced by
a control society has to do with Hobson's second general proposition: that the
purpose of the governmentality approach is to identify, and perhaps even fa
cilitate, resistance from outside the political system toward political strategies
and instruments deployed from the inside (cf. Bang, 2004). Governmentality
analysis as adumbrated today, we think, tends to miss the point, made visible
by control society?partly by regarding the creative and enabling aspect of
power as social more than as political in nature and partly by viewing popular
resistance against the abuse of power as taking place outside the political in
civil society. The result is exactly that political control came to be seen as
equivalent to a productive yet deceiving power, mocking freedom and the
democratic public by treating all activists who do not agree with the norms
of advanced liberal government as potential social hoodlums.

READING FOUCAULT POLITICALLY

The tendency to trap critical analysis in the schematics of resistance and

subversion based on an opposition between power and freedom, between
inside and outside, between state and civil society, etc., comes out clearly
in Hobson's interpretation of her own work on environmental campaigns as
demonstrating the potential of targeted citizens to "subvert and reject" the
"governmental rationalities, subjectivities, and technologies embedded in
such campaigns." Such acts of resistance, the argument goes, reveal that state
campaigning "far from controlling" the targeted citizens, "give them further
ammunition to rethink, reconfigure, and resist governmental interventions."
If the example is intended to show that programs of good governance will
always backfire since the empowering dynamics intended to enhance control
cannot help but provide citizens with the information and knowledge pivotal

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BANG & ES M ARK 265

to freedom, it is indeed a radical claim. If the point is rather that this might
happen, we would clearly agree. Although other case studies might find more
intrusive and efficient campaigning, we readily ascribe to the point that control
power is not omnipotent. What Hobson's case seems to demonstrate is the
basic ambiguousness of good governance that we try to maintain a sense of
throughout our article.
What we would suggest, however, is that Hobson's terminology of civic
resistance, subversion, and rejection of state campaigning is not up to the
challenges of control society. Governmentality analysis needs exactly an
antidote to this presumption that the logic and power of political systems,
such as that at play in political discourses and campaigns, are necessarily
dependent on prescribing limited positions, identities, and narrow fields of
action. Research into how people challenge, confront, reject, avoid, or try to
repoliticize the decisions and actions of any ongoing hegemonic regime should
exactly proceed from observation points inside the political system itself. The
power/resistance and state/civil society dichotomies in much governmental
ity analysis simply conceals how any political system is constituted in terms
of the endogenous political relationship between political authorities and
nonauthorities. Foucault is the first to warn us against approaching issues of
political control in the terminology of sovereignty and discipline only. We will
vehemently deny that the problem of political acceptance and nonacceptance
can be adequately addressed as revealing either the apathetic submission of
people to the status quo or the active resistance of social actors and move
ments against strategic campaigning and other forms of intervention by the
political powers that be.
In his later years Foucault began to recognize that his original gloomy
approach to sovereignty and discipline as a tight, centripetal form of power
knowledge obstructs even the critical imagination of how the political relation
between political authorities and nonauthorities could be structured in ways
other than as one of power and resistance. As a consequence, he began to
develop a new approach to "the political" as "the science of governing well"
(Foucault, 2007, p. 93), centered on government and raison d'?tat from the
vantage point of the political itself.
In his last sets of lectures at the Coll?ge de France, Foucault indicated how
one can overcome the political stalemate of contemporary governmentality
analysis. In Security, Territory, Population (2007), from 1977 to 1978, he be
came a political scientist more than a sociologist, philosopher, or historian, and
left his earlier juxtaposition of political power and social resistance, turning it
into an intrinsically political relationship between conduct and counterconduct.
In the article, we have argued that the political systems theory of Easton (1965),
although often considered outdated, provides us with conceptual tools that
are varied and flexible enough to grasp the rise of good governance and the
ensuing reconfiguration of the political. However, the same could be said of

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 266 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY & PRAXIS * VOL. 32, NO. 2

Foucault's political systems' theory. His first step is to show that the exercise
of sovereignty under the law is not the essence of the political.

There is a sovereignty over men that is required to take upon itself

something specific that is not directly contained in it, which conforms
to another model and another type of rationality, and this something
extra is government, the government that must seek out its reason.
(Foucault, 2007, p. 237)

It is the entrance of the state into the field of practice and thought as an
episode of governmentality that Foucault is attempting to grasp. He wants
to demonstrate that "the state is not that kind of cold monster in history
that has continually grown and developed as a sort of threatening organism
above civil society" (p. 248). Both the people who govern and the practice of
government are multifarious, and the state is itself a moment in this ongoing
governmental process, which goes on from the local to the global as well
as in the family, in the economy, in the social, in the culture, etc., as but so
many examples of how political leadership and management reveals a special
power-knowledge category.
What Foucault is doing, we will suggest, is taking the first step toward
distinguishing politics-policy, as revolving around the relation between sov
ereign, law, public sphere, and people, from policy-politics as dealing with
governing, policing, and accepting and rejecting policy. Politics-policy is
concerned with how a sovereign can hold on to his principality (Foucault's
older centripetal model). But holding on to one's principality is not the same
as possessing and being able to exercise the art and science of governing (the
functioning of which is centrifugal, involving more and more actors and in
stitutions in its political rule, rather than centripetal). The latter is the domain
of policy-politics, requiring

an administrative apparatus which would not just be the agent of ex

ecuting the sovereign's orders, or for raising the taxes, wealth, and men
needed by the sovereign, but one that at the same time would be an ap
paratus of knowledge, and here again, as an essential dimension of the
exercise of [political] power. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 274-275)

Problems of foundations, etc., Foucault argues, have to do with how the

political is formed in time-space and not with the nature of the political as
the raison d'?tat required for keeping going the processes for authoritatively
articulating and allocating values. To speak of the state or governmentality
poses no problem of origin; they are already in a political world of govern
ment and raison d'?tat. Furthermore, we must refrain from ascribing any
endpoint to government and raison d'?tat, since this would be to identify the
political as a set of ongoing processes with the actual or imagined forms in
which these processes occur. The raison d'?tat of government does not have

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BANG & ESMARK 267

to abide by the law, and its basic function is always exceptional in relation to
public, particular, and fundamental laws, but "posits them as an element of
its own game" (p. 262). Raison d'?tat manifests "that which is necessary and
sufficient of the republic to preserve its integrity" (p. 257).
This is also why we should conceive of counterconduct not as anarchy or
as a form of resistance, which is external to the political. Quite to the contrary,
really, we should consider counterconduct as a species of raison d'?tat:

It is [the] necessity of the state with regard to itself that, at a certain mo

ment will push raison d'?tat to brush aside the civil, moral, and natural
laws that it has previously wanted to recognize and had incorporated
into its game. Necessity, urgency, the need to save the state itself will
exclude the game of... laws and produce something that in a way will
only be the establishment of a direct relationship of the state with itself
when the keynote is necessity and safety. The coup d'?tat is not therefore
a takeover of the state by some at the expense of others. It is the self
manifestation of the state itself. It is the assertion of raison d'?tat, of [the
raison d'?tat] that asserts that the state must be saved, whatever forms
may be employed to enable one to save it. (Foucault, 2007, p. 262)

So the coup d'?tat is an assertion of raison d'?tat and a self-manifestation

of the state. It is a response to a necessity that is over and above the law, that
often can be extremely violent, and that also expresses a tendency to be very
theatrical when facing a critical situation that threatens to stop the state from
going on as a governmental process of decision and action (cf. Hajer, 2009).
This brings policy-politics to a head: Even democracy, understood as tied to the
goal of securing as many as possible free and equal access to, and recognition
in, the political decision-making process, can reach the critical point where
necessity calls for it to submit itself to a policy imperative, such as the handling
of global warming. Necessity silences the laws and puts an end to all privileges
in order to make itself accepted by everyone, by whatever means and goals.
We think that this understanding of the political comes quite close to David
Easton, who also conceives of political existence as "intrinsically connected
with the capacity of a political system, as an open, self-regulating, and goal
setting system, to change itself (1965, p. 479). Like Foucault, Easton tends
to put concerns for political existence before democracy at the theoretical
empirical level in order to be able to assess how a political system manages to
go on through time in the face of continuous and sometimes all-encompassing
transformations. As Easton writes:

I am very much aware of the fact that it is [not easy] to declare openly
that it is indeed possible to conceive of the survival of democracy, say, to
be a second order problem logically, at the theoretical level, even though
it is a first order problem ethically, at the practical level. (1965, p. 481)

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 268 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY & PRAXIS * VOL. 32, NO. 2

Does this position make either Foucault or Easton antidemocratic or elit

ist? Not at all, we will hold. The core of their argument is precisely that even
the weakest and most downtrodden individuals and collectives possess, and
must possess, the political potential for acting "swiftly, immediately, without
rule, with urgency and necessity, and dramatically" (Foucault, 2007, p. 262).
Sometimes the key to political survival is to be found in those more experimen
tal political practices that manage to establish themselves politically without
being noticed by the ruling hegemony. Political decision and action can, and
should, be studied from below as well as from above, concentrating on both
the emergence, consolidation, and change of political hegemony and the cre
ative potential for change inherent to the political practices of the so-called
marginalized, repressed, and excluded. In either case, we are examining and
dealing with the very same kind of power-knowledge required for making
political decisions and implementing actions.

REFERENCES

Bang, H. P. (2004). Culture governance: Governing self-reflexive modernity.

Public Administration, 82, 157-190.
Bang, H., & Esmark, A. (2009). Good governance in network society:
Reconfiguring the political from politics to policy. Administrative Theory
& Praxis, 311, 1-31.
Easton, D. (1965). A systems analysis of political life. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Esmark, A. (2009). The functional differentiation of governance: Public gov
ernance beyond hierarchy, market, and networks. Public Administration,
87, 351-372.
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population (G. Burchell, Trans.).
New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Hajer, M. A. (2009). Authoritative governance. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Henrik Bang, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Political

Science, Copenhagen University.

Anders Esmark, Ph.D., is associate professor in the Department of Society

and Globalisation, Roskilde University.

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