Foucaults Political Challenge

Against Obedience/

For a Politics of Truth

By Henrik P. Bang

Department of Political Science

University of Copenhagen

hb@ifs.ku.dk

June, 2012

1st version
Oddly enough no one has tried to read Foucault politically. However, one
consistency running through all of his texts from Madness and Civilization
(MD) to The Courage of Truth (CT) is his claim that no society could exist,
if it could not provide for a political web of decision and action in and
through which its social policies could be authorized and normalized.
From this argument follows two different kinds of analyses:

1) The young Foucaults critical and deconstructive approach to

revealing how disciplinary subjection erases the possibility of self-
and co-governance from below by creating an unholy alliance
between modern science, with its objectivating gaze, monoligical
language and commitment to stability and order, and the
premodern sovereign with his dominant will and strongly
hierarchized order of rulers vs. ruled.

2) The older Foucaults analytical and reconstructive efforts at

developing a metagovernance model of governmentalization,
demonstrating how disciplinary subjection can be overcome by
creating a new alliance between a political community
characterized by laypeoples commitment to and struggle for
equal freedom and a truth-telling political authority, who do not
wish to impose his own interest upon his subjects or subordinate
them to his will. He simply wants to convince his population
about what is necessary to do in order to improve their
ontological security and enable them to better govern and take
care of themselves.

At least this is the political metanarrative about Foucaults persistent fight

against disciplinary subjection and for a politics of truth that I will tell
here. It occurs, I will hold, when one distinct from most of his
supporters and adversaries does not presume that his texts invoke or
imply a range of modern oppositions such as those between conflict vs.
consensus, state vs. civil society, subjectivism vs. objectivism, sectional vs.
general interests, and liberalism vs. Marxism. Actually, whenever
Foucault touches on these dichotomies in his texts, it is nearly always in
the negative, as this example from Discipline and Punish indicates (DP:
28):

To analyse the political investment of the body and the microphysics of power presupposes, therefore,
that one abandons where power is concerned the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of
property, the model of the contract of conquest; that where knowledge is concerned one abandons
the opposition between what is interested and what is disinterested, the model of knowledge and the
primacy of the subject.

However, Foucaults rejection of both class conflict and normative

consensus as motors of modernity does not mean that he is reducing the
whole of history to a political power-social resistance dichotomy, as many
believe (Dillon and Neal 2008, McNay 1994), . Surely, his analyses of
disciplinary subjection carry many recipes about how to avoid and resist
it. And his view of it is bleak, indeed. But the fallacy involved in imposing
the political power-social resistance opposition on his texts is the same as
when one forces the conflict-consensus dichotomy down upon them: it
prevents a genuinely political reading of them, as portraying an ongoing
tactical and strategic battle that goes on inside the political domain
between authorities and laypeople for influencing what has to be done,
when and how. As he states about the disciplinary apparatuses that
purport sovereign power in modernity (DP: 308):

What presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an
institution, but the necessity of combat and rules of strategy

The political is not a unitary state or homogenous governmental system.

It is an ensemble of political relations and levels of political relations in
ongoing change for handling differences tactically and strategically. This is
exactly why, as he tells us much later in his lectures on Security, Territory,
Population from 1977-1978, we should not analyze the necessary political
relationship between resistance, or coup dtat, and power, or raison
dtat, as an opposition between civil society and the State (STP: 202):

So, the coup dtat does not break with raison dtat. It is an element, an event, a way of doing things
that, as something that breaches the laws, or at any rate does not submit to the laws, falls entirely
within the general horizon, the general form of raison dtat.

Raison dtat and coup dtat are elements of the same governmentality
logic for handling differences by authorizing and normalizing how things
are to be decided and done inside the political domain at any given
moment in time (time-space, STP: 203):

Politics, therefore, is not something that has to fall within a form of legality or a system of
laws.Politics is concerned with necessitySo, we do not have government connected with legality but
raison dtat connected with necessity.

It follows that by reading Foucault in light of how the state, as a unified

system of legal and legitimate domination, responds to and cope with
struggles over interests and for recognition in civil society, one simply
misunderstands how Foucaults political challenge lies in his rejection of
both figures as identifying criteria of the political:

(1) Differences over how best to acquire acceptance for and

normalization of a ruling norm for articulating and performing
social policy is at the heart of societal existence whether the time
be one of stability and consensus or change and conflict.

(2) The modern prioritization of hierarchy and duty norms for getting
people to accept and recognize authority excludes the possibility
of combining equal freedom and a politics of truth. This because
it makes disciplinary subjection with its command-obedience
relations for imposing the bourgeois rules of the game the
foundation of the peoples formal, juridical liberties.

(3) What is mostly required today is a much more dialogical,

reciprocal and truth-telling political authority what Foucault
names parrhesia - who seeks to win peoples authority by
requesting and empowering them, and by involving them in the
solving of their common concerns for the sake of expanding their
abilities to exercise self- and co-governance.

Let me begin by specifying how the whole of Foucaults project may be

regarded as one long fight against the reduction of political authority to
command-obedience relations. Next I will illuminate, how the young
Foucault criticizes modern Western democracy for relying on an alliance
between the old Sovereign Kings hierarchy and modern medicines
technical and biologically inspired approach to homeostasis or systems
maintenance. This alliance simply serves to authorize and normalize the
bourgeoisies civil and rational form of cultural and political class rule in
and through the exercise of disciplinary subjection. Then I shall present
Foucaults idea of the political as the difference that makes a difference,
and his attempt to avoid that the political is identified with either the
State or social power in general. This leads him to a conception of
governmentality, as characterized by political authority as a general type
of power-knowledge, the transformative capacity of which underlies the
formation of the modern state with its representative government, as
well as the hope for moving beyond it to a new, more balanced and
dialogical authority relationship between political authorities and
laypeople. In fact, political authority embraces a much brighter and
positive vision of the politician than the negative and forbidding one that
dominates the Western world today.

Finally, I shall indicate how Foucault tries to establish a new alliance

between political authority as true discourse and democracy as an
unceasing quest for equal freedom in and through the exercise of self-
and co-governance. This alliance is depicted to be very vulnerable and
paradoxical, because there can be no democracy without true discourse,
and because they both threaten each other. On the one side, true
discourse introduces difference as ascendency into democracy, and thus
challenges laypeoples quest for equal freedom. On the other side
democracy tends to undermine true discourse by allowing everybody to
freely speak up, what can eliminate all difference. Yet, there is no other
feasible way than practical mediations of the two to avoid that the voice
of We the People is silenced by the rule of We the Political Authorities
or that the bold, decisive actions required of political authorities to cope
with unceasing, escalating risk and change are undermined by the
peoples cacophony of voices and demands (cf. Bang 2011).

Beyond Obedience
The whole of Foucaults political project may be summarized as eight
words from one of his last lectures (CT: 336, my italic) in 1983-1984:

Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia

Parrhesia means true discourse, and, as the older Foucault phrases it in

his lectures on The Government of Self and Others in 1982-1983 (p. 184):

True discourse and the emergence of true discourse underpins the process of governmentality. If
democracy can be governed, it is because there is true discourse.

Parrhesia implies confidence in self, in others, and in what can be done

together, instead of hatred of power or trembling before the Sovereigns
will (cf. . Just as hatred of politics will not disappear as long as negative,
coercive power politics is allowed to distort the nature of
governmentality, so the hope for real popular democracy cannot blossom
before true discourse is accepted and recognized as being a real
organizational possibility within conditions of governmentality.

This is the overall political idea and concept of governing with truth in
face of risks and unceasing change that Foucault was seeking his entire
life, and which he in his last years began to unfold in his lectures as a new
governmentalization approach to security, state reason and decentred
governance (or police, as he somewhat misleadingly calls it). However,
the notion of parrhesia, I will suggest, has been with him from the onset
and is a constituent element in his political critique of sovereignty and
discipline (and later on biopolitics) that he conducted in his younger
years. As he was the first to point out with regard to the shift in early
modernity from a punitive intervention resting on downright violence to
one of a studied manipulation of the individual (DP: 128-129):

What one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is
caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual
subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him,
and which he must allow to function automatically in him.

Foucault criticizes democracy for producing obedient subjects in and

through a variety of vertically and monologically operating discursive
practices. In fact, hierarchical command structures reinforced by the
inducement of duty norms obliging people to obey and participate in
collective decision-making - whether as voters, party members and
interest group members or as social activists, volunteers and network
builders - are what underlie the social pact that representative democracy
is sustaining between state and civil society on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
The abstract discourse of democracy tells us that it is governing for, by
and with the people in a lawful and rightful manner. But in actual
practice, the price that laypeople have to pay for their individual
autonomy on the market place and their equal right to speak up in the
public sphere is that they must follow the rules and orders of a form of
asymmetrical government, commanding them to obey its rational
imperatives and voluntarily hand over their right and ability to govern
themselves to the state in all the practices of everyday life.

The Alliance between Modern Science and Hierarchized Discipline

Already in his opening analyses of madness, as an archeology of silence,

Foucault is highlighting how the language of modern medicine and
psychiatry is put to use in not only the clinic but all over society as a mode
of political discourse, which silences all those voices who do not obey and
subject themselves to the technical and moral monologue of the
dominant rational conception (MC: x-xi):

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the
one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only
through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with
society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral
constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common
language, there is no such thing [any longer].The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of
reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

This early cultural critique of modern abstract, monological reason echoes

that of the Frankfurter school, in particular Jrgen Habermass critique of
the systems colonization of the life world (Habermas 1997, 2002) . But
what Foucault is criticizing is not an instrumental rationality which can
only distort, manipulate and deceive. It is exactly the reduction of
strategic and tactical reason to the explicit, and very precise one-way
messages of hierarchized commands he is after. His point is that the
bourgeoisie acutely need these kinds of undistorted but monological
commands to discipline laypeople as docile bodies who willingly and
dutifully follow orders from above without further questions. It is this
undistorted but asymmetrically operating power and knowledge,
precluding the possibility of self- and co-governance from below which
makes the young Foucault raise the following research question (MC: xi):

What, then, is this confrontation beneath the language of reason? Where can an interrogation lead us
which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant
verticality which confronts European culture with what it is not, establishes its range with its own
derangement?

There is no opposition or tension between archeology and genealogy

here. The critical eye is scrutinizing the articulation and performance of
the vertical, hierarchized authority that dominates European culture.
Focus is on how this dispotif of power (i) produces statements, discourses
and thereby all the representations that may then be derived from it,
while simultaneously (ii) excluding all those discursive practices which will
not, cannot or know not how to conform to it. As he puts it, in his critique
of abstract, modern Enlightenment reasonings neglect of its own
coercive, disciplinary power (DP: 30):

This whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the soul that of the
educationalists, psychologists and psychiatrists - fails either to conceal or to compensate, for the simple
reason that it is one of its tools.

History, Foucault argues, is immobilized by a modern science and morality

that seeks stability, order and consensus above all else, and which by the
advent of modern medicine found a new way to overcome anomie and
abnormality than by means of physical coercion, namely by silencing the
madman and other deviant persons, stipulating them as non-persons,
silent figures without voices (MC: 258):

The asylum reduces differences, represses vice, eliminates irregularities. It denounces everything that
opposes the essential virtues of society.
This denunciation of difference is inscribed in law and sustained in and
through the authorization and normalization of a bourgeois Herrschaft
which makes those who do not follow and obey its enlightenment
standards appear as lawless, careless and unreasonable (MC 259):

[The asylum] thereby generates an indifference; if the law does not reign universally, it is because
there are men who do not recognize it, a class of society that lives in disorder, in negligence, and
almost in illegality.

Whereas Foucault in his archeology first of all demonstrates the

importance and significance of political authority to the establishing of
normal science and society, in Discipline and Punish, he more
concentrates on analyzing the concrete discursive practices in and
through which disciplinary subjection is brought to bear upon the human
and social body. Focusing on how policies are articulated and performed
(output) more on how conflicting demands are converted into collective
decisions (input) he tries to show how democratic government in all its
various forms, relies for its legitimacy and effectiveness on the
emergence, solidification and institutionalization of a new type of
supervision both knowledge and power over individuals who resist
disciplinary normalization (DP: 296):

The supervision of normality was firmly encased in a medicine or a psychiatry that provided it with a
sort of scientificity; it was supported by a juridical apparatus which, directly or indirectly gave it legal
justification. Thus, in the shelter of these two considerable protectors, and, indeed, acting as a link
between them, or a place of exchange, a carefully worked out technique for the supervision of norms
has continued to develop right up to the present day.

In the young Foucaults eyes, laypeoples voluntary, active or passive,

consent predominantly reflects how discipline works upon their bodies as
a technology of power for making them wont to obey and follow
modernitys objectively and morally valid ruling norms without further
questions, at least as long as these are made in accordance with
democratic procedures for protecting and serving their individual and
public interests. However, the irony of this is that discipline as a tactics
and strategy for subjecting people to the sovereigns dominant will
functions the better and the more smoothly the more legal and legitimate
this public will is generally believed to be.
Discipline manifests the dark side of modern Western democracies as a
technical and moral mode of domination that infuses all of societal life for
imprinting on laypeoples bodies what is regarded as objectively and
morally valid to say and do under the bourgeoisies ruling conception.
Neither a revolution against capitalism nor a dictatorship of the
proletariat for doing away with the state can stop this disciplinary
apparatus from functioning. On the one side it is political and not
economic through and through, and on the other side it works relatively
autonomously from the state that it serves to sustain (DP: 223):

The minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level of emergence of the
great apparatuses and the great political struggles. But in the genealogy of modern society, they have
been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms
according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for
so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant trick that it has invented,
and even to those sciences that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one
cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are the very foundation of society, and an
element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations
definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form
of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.

The sovereign state and its government claim to represent, protect and
serve the voice of we the people. But in actual fact they preclude
popular control by using discipline to order and oblige people to accept
their subordinate role in any and all authority relationship in society in
exchange for their free pursuit of individual and collective interests. This
deprives the people of their political voice with regard to making a real
political difference to the articulation and performance of social policy.

Political Class Power

No matter how optimally democracy functions to secure people with

different interests free and equal access to the political decision-making
processes, as long as democracy is made dependent for its survival and
further development on the sustainment of discipline as a hierarchized
and monological discursive practice, as long will it, in the last instance,
be a feature of the bourgeoisies political and cultural class rule. As long
will it be impossible to construct a new political relationship characterized
by a truth-telling authority the meta-governing of whom is constitutively
open to self- and co-governance from below. This regardless of however
high the level of popular belief in, consent to, and justification of the
states legal and legitimate domination may ever be.

Discipline makes subjects into docile bodies which dutifully helps to

reproduce the structured asymmetries between themselves and the
ruling class by behaving and acting as law abiding and supportive citizens,
trusting each other and their representative institutions (DP:221):

Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a political force at
the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the
specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas techniques of submitting forces and
bodies, in short political economy could be operated in the most diverse political rgimes, apparatuses
or institutions.

Like Marx, the young Foucault argues that the modern state and its
government are the servants of class power. But not simply in the
economic sense as a part of unified and homogenous class organized
around a common interest. Rather, in the political sense as a diversified
but hegemonic bourgeoisie, imposing its conception of necessity and
order on the population in and through the exercise of discipline as a
complex but strongly hierarchized dispotif of power.

Foucaults argument against class power may be regarded as a political

reply to Marxism. What made the capitalist class into a ruling class, he
holds, was not merely, or even primarily, its position in the economy. It
was exactly its political control over a new form of authorization and
normalization enabling it to perpetually supervise and judge how to
eliminate any concrete or prospective threat to, or deviance from, its
political and cultural hegemony. Thus, it is not the common interest of
the bourgeoisie as much as the needs or requirements for sustaining the
bourgeois ordering of living things which underlies the fusion of the old
sovereign King and the new disciplinary technology. It is not capital as
much as hierarchized disciplinary subjection which converts the political
relationship between political authorities and laypeople into one of
monologue and one-way control for increasing the instrumental utility of
laypeople (as workers, students and citizens, for example) at the same
time as effectively restricting and emptying out their political ability to
make a difference (DP: 138):

If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary
coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased
domination.

Hence, there is more to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie than mere

economic exploitation and physical violence (cf. Bennet et. al. 2009). The
genius of a political discipline based on hierarchized discipline is that it is
as productive as it is coercive. In installing an aptitude in each single
individual to be both productive and obedient, discipline constricts
individual autonomy to be about economic utility only at the same time
as it punishes and excludes the disobedient as abnormal and
unreasonable and stipulates it as a pure moral failure (MC: 269).

Formerly, unreason was set outside of judgment, to be delivered, arbitrarily, to the powers of reason.
Now it is caught on the contrary, in a perpetual judgment, which never ceases to pursue it and
to apply sanctions, to proclaim its transgressions, to require honorable amends, to exclude, finally,
those whose transgressions risk compromising the social order.

The Political: the Difference that Makes a Difference

Foucaults political and representative claim to self- and co-governance, I

will hold, runs like a red thread through all of his texts. It is the major
reason why he in his later years began to develop the political concept of
parrhesia as an alternative to political verticality and monologue. Today,
many see his investigations into a politics of truth as making concessions
to neoliberalism, reducing societal politics to personal politics, and
betraying the poststructuralist critique of modern science and state
power from the vantage point of associated individuals in civil society
(Binkley, Sam & Capetillo-Ponce 2010). In my view, nothing could be more
wrong. Foucault has never been sympathetic to trying to separate state
from civil society, whether in theory or in practice. No matter how he is
read and from what perspective, the theoretical figure of truth-telling as
representing various kinds of political authorization and normalization
pops up at the core of his investigations.
In fact, Foucault is standing right inside the political with one foot among
the political authorities and the other among laypeople in the political
community. What he then asks, when focusing on their various discursive
practices, is: how do they govern in here? How do they form their system
and environments? How do they set limits and establish boundaries? How
are they authoritatively making and implementing policies in ways which
are acceptable to populations and can also be normalized? The political
Foucault is so central to his whole authorship that it is difficult to
understand how he could be understood only as standing outside the
political in civil society and combating those inside in the name of
relativism, nihilism, subjectivism, or whatever.

When Foucault wants to break with both Marxism and liberalism in his
approach to the political, it is because he thinks that political decision and
action principally relate to issues of political necessity, implying that
questions of conflicting interests come second. He begins from examining
which problems, challenges and risks that necessarily have to be handled
for improving the populations (ontological) security, whereas both
liberalism and Marxism fasten on whose interests the state is protecting
and serving in modern society. Obviously, coping with political necessity
often involves more or less intensive struggles over interests or between
identities in society that have to be overcome with political means. But
the fact that politics springs from the necessity of solving differences over
what has to be done does not imply any primary antagonism; nor does
the political handling of such differences call for an underlying normative
consensus in order for it to be accepted and recognized as collectively
binding by most people most of the time. In politics and policy, power and
resistance are elements of the same ongoing dispute over what has to be
done.

Both Marxism, liberalism, and even much post-structuralism, presume

that politics springs from a struggle between opposed interests and
identities, and thereby always involves a will to be subdued. Foucault
holds that this is to neglect: (a) that political decision and action are
linked to necessity first and to antagonism and conflict only second, and
(b) that political domination does not disappear or looses its oppressive
force, either because the state should wither away or because its
domination is democratically negotiated and deliberated and generally
considered legal and legitimate in society outside. The problem of
political domination cannot be spirited away by converting conflict into
consensus or antagonism into agonism. However, legal, legitimate and
democratic political subjection may be, it is still political subjection.

The Political beyond mere Power and the State

Unlike the modern traditions Foucault does not oppose bright

democracy to dark politics , or the open society to its enemies, by
separating them from one another in terms of oppositions between space
and time, the synchronic and the diachronic, stability and change,
integration and disintegration, etc. Not even the most totalitarian or
authoritarian forms of politics are regarded as inherently evil just as not
even the most morally justified forms of participatory and deliberative
democracy are considered intrinsically good. Pluralist democracy can in
Foucaults frame of reference be, and actually is, as exclusionary as
homogenous elite power - as we, for example, witness with the treatment
of migrants in Western democracies as non-citizens (Little 2008). Hence,
we should not separate democracy, as the knight on the white horse,
from brute and dark power politics whether in terms of epistemology
(critical theory) or ontology (post-structuralism). Like all other political
formations, the nation-state and its democratic government are but
temporary political constructs that continuously call for authorization and
normalization of their rule in all the practices of everyday life at varying
paces of change, and at varying levels of reality.

So the political is not a state: it does not presume conflict or antagonism;

it can constrain and facilitate as well as repress and empower individual
and collective actors; and it can do this whether the time is characterized
by stability or change, consensus or conflict, justice or injustice, legitimacy
or illegitimacy, and so on. Furthermore, the political is not just about
power in general but about the power to articulate and perform
authoritative, that is to say generally acceptable, social policies. Hence,
acceptance and recognition of political authority is contingent on all the
phenomena above; and political authority is the identifying meta-criterion
of the political as a network of discursive practices.

It is somewhat puzzling why Foucault never developed a more systematic

and comprehensive conception of political authority, when it is so central
to his archeology of knowledge and genealogy of power. As I have
indicated, just as the young Foucaults notion of modern authority as a
command-obedience relationship is crucial to show how the development
of modern medicine as a discipline helped to give birth to a less
repressive and much more productive authority for governing subjects in
every practice of their day-to-day life, so the older Foucaults notion of
authority as a dialogical, two-way relationship of autonomy and
dependence based on convincing requests more than blunt orders is
intrinsic to understanding his alternative politics of truth. The idea of
political authority is indispensable for assessing how hierarchized
discipline is at the heart of modern society and also for imagining a
future, more politically free and equal society in which the authority
relationship between political authorities and laypeople is grounded in
norms of truthfulness and the reciprocal acceptance and recognition of
difference.

When Foucault focuses on, for example, how clinics and prisons are
governed in modernity rather than on the high politics of sovereign
authority in the battle between big nation states or political parties is to
show how the potent threat to, as well as the struggle for enhancing, the
practice of freedom are inscribed in the ways political authority functions
in all the habitual discursive practices that we move through in our
everyday life. Political authority in his framework, gives form and content
to the overall norm which decides what is abnormal or unacceptable to
say and do under a given ruling conception and set of practices. The
exploration of such routine stigmatizations or exclusions in everyday
institutions and practices is rendered virtually impossible, when and
where politics is identified with spectacular events, big decisions and
intense conflicts of interest or identity. This prevents us from
comprehending how policies are conventionally articulated and routinely
performed authoritatively for, with and by a population not only
under spectacular and rapidly changing conditions but also in times of
profound stability, integration and order.

From state and government to governmentality

Foucault situates himself inside the political to develop a political critique

and conception of authorization and normalization as evidence of a
complex web of multiple levels and relations of political autonomy and
dependence between political authorities and laypeople in their political
communities. He denies that the political can be identified with the
modern nation state as a mode of legal and legitimate domination for
handling the intensifying tensions between city and country side, capital
and work, market and civil society and individuals and collectivities
outside in modernity. Furthermore, he refuses any attempt to derive the
study of the political from economics, morality, culture, psychology or
whatever. Finally, he considers it a fallacy to reduce the political
conditioning of subjects and societies to a matter of the relative
significance and importance of the state as an instrument and medium for
sustaining the capitalist economy and securing normative order by
aggregating and integrating conflicting interests into consensual
decisions. This is simply to fail to account for the changing webs of forces
and relations inside the political itself that contribute to bring about,
reproduce and change the modern state with its formal governmental
institutions (c Hajer 2009). As the later Foucault emphasizes (STP: 109):

The state, doubtless no more today than in the past, does not have this unity, individuality, and
rigorous functionality, nor, I would go so far as to say, this importance. After all, maybe the state is
only a composite reality and a mythisized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think.
Maybe. What is important for our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not the states takeover
(tatisation) of society, so much as what I will call the governmentalization of the state.

By overemphasizing the relative weight of the state in society, both

liberalism and Marxism come to understate the impact of political
relations as a complex network of discursive practices for formulating and
implementing social policies. It is not so much capitalism and democracy
that explain how the state can occur, maintain itself and develop in
modern society. It is exactly the governmentalization of this state as a
complex network of interrelated tactics and strategies for governing
subjects and society that does so (STP: 109):

The governmentalization of the state has nonetheless been what has allowed the state to survive. And it
is likely that if the state is what it is today, it is precisely thanks to this governmentality that is at the
same time external and internal to the state, since it is the tactics of government that allow the
continual definition of what should or should not fall within the states domain, what is public and
what private, what is and is not within the states competence, and so on. So, if you like, the survival
and limits of the state should be understood on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.

The young Foucault is often blamed for reducing the macro-level analysis
of the state to a micro-physics of disciplinary subjection (Ivision 1997,
1998). However, this interpretative fallacy only occurs when, one does
not acknowledge how his analyses of the relation of state sovereignty to
disciplinary power are framed within his notion, idea and conception of
the political as constituted by a multiplicity of discursive practices which
operate below, above and within the state and its formal institutions.
This complex maze of tactical and strategic forces and relations that
identifies the political as governmentality is both wider and narrower
than the state. Not everything in the state is political in nature whereas
many governmentality processes and events external to it are. Therefore,
it is a chimera to try to understand governmentalization, and the multiple
forms of governance and participation comprised by it, solely by focusing
exclusively on either the state and its formal governmental institutions or
on the decentred networks of governance that have been invented to
purport them. On the one side, much political governing and participation
is not directed towards or is taking place inside the state and its formal
institutions. On the other side, decentred governance networks cannot be
comprehended solely as micro-political practices that function in the
shadow of the macroscopic state and its formal institutions. What one
instead should ask is (STP: 120):

Is it possible to place the modern state in a general technology of power that assured its mutations,
development, and functioning? Can we talk of something like a governmentality that would be to the
 state what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal
system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions?

Moving from the analyses of segregation, discipline and biopolitics in his

earlier works to analyses of governmentality, Foucault introduces an
entirely new study of metagovernance as securitization. Although the
notion of security from the onset has been implicit to his early critique of
modern political discourse and practice for reducing human subjects to
living things which must be carefully observed and disciplines in order to
preserve their normality and keep them in equilibrium, he only begins to
develop his idea of security as governmentality in his string of lectures
from 1977 and onwards. In fact, after having analysed first biopolitics as a
matter of population control and then pastoral power as an art of
governing, he seemed to be entering a new reflective stage in which he
acknowledged his need for developing a more distinctly political and
theoretical approach to governmentality. Thus, he began to ponder how
to fill the lack of a macro-conception of political power in his thinking
which is not about sovereignty, and which is not made dependent on
discipline for its formation of subjects and society. This gave rise to his
notion of securitization as constituting a much more positive, creative and
facilitating dispotif of political authorization and normalization,
conditioning self- and co-governance from below.

Whereas sovereignty is about governing the state, its institutions and its
territory, securitization is about governing people as individuals and
groups. It has its origins in pastoral power, which is (STP: 128):

a power exercised on a multiplicity rather than on a territory. It is a power that guides towards an end
and functions as an intermediary towards this end. It is therefore a power with a purpose for those on
whom it is exercised, and not a purpose for some kind of superior unit like the city, territory, state or
sovereign.

Hence, governmentalization does not primarily connect with people and

their struggles for acquiring free and equal access to, and recognition in,
the political decision-making processes. It first of all concerns the political
authorities and their abilities to articulate and perform social policies that
are acceptable to a population, and which are recognized by them as
necessary for doing that which has to be done. Security is
governmentalizations closest ally, and the purpose of securitization is to
minimize the risks and solve the problems and challenges confronting a
population at any given moment in time. It is not to appropriate control
over those who disobey the law and resist being disciplined to subject
themselves to the ruling norms for sustaining the bourgeois states
territory and social order. In fact, in the later Foucaults political texts,
govermentality is made the overarching political conception from which
all the other dispotifs of political power spring (STP: 108-109):

By this word governmentality I mean three things. First, by governmentality I understand the
ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that
allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target,
political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical
instrument. Second, by governmentality I understand the tendency the line of corce, that for a long
time throughout the West, has constantly led towards the pre-eminence over all other types of power
sovereignty, discipline, and so on of the type of power that we can call government and which has
led to the development of a series of specific governmental apparatuses (appareils) on the one hand
[and, on the other] to the development of a series of knowledges (savoir). Finally, by governmentality
I think we should understand the process by which the state of justice of the Middle Age became the
administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was gradually governmentalized.

The politician as weaver

In Foucaults meta-political conception of governmentality, sovereignty,

discipline, institutions, procedures, and even the state, are considered
emergent properties of the political as a complex web of interrelated
activities, including a variety of context dependent tactics and strategies
for handling what has to be done. Governmentality as metagovernance in
this conception acquires a much more prominent place than the state,
and the role and identity of politicians gain many more positive
connotations than inherent to the modern conception of them as
representatives of the peoples interests, or as political office seekers,
driven by a lust for power and a will to dominate (Stoker 2006). Being a
politician is no longer primarily about interests, about pursuing them,
overcoming resistance against them, subjecting wills to them, or about
governing their aggregation and integration into collective decisions (cf.
Hay 2007). Being a politician is re-assessed as first of all having to do with
necessity, that is to say with what has to be done right here and now in
the actual situation under the historically given conditions. The modern
identification of politics with interest conflict and input democracy, and
the accompanying relegation of outputs as mere administration is
abandoned. The ability to articulate and perform social policy becomes
the principal and noble art of governing, that is, of governmentalization.
This art does exactly imply that people are not treated as living things to
be administered but as living, sensuous beings who possess the political
faculty of governing and taking care of themselves. Foucault himself
describes this new image of politicians as a shift from one in which they
appear as shepherds of a mindless flock to one in which they appear like
weavers weaving different qualities into magnificent patterns: (STP: 128).

What then is political action in the strict sense, the essence of the political, the politician, or rather the
politicians action? It will be to join together, as the weaver joins the warp and the weft. The politician
will bind the elements together, the good elements formed by education; he will bind together the
virtues in their different forms, which are distinct from and sometimes opposed to each other; he will
weave and bind together different contrasting temperaments, such as for example, spirited and
moderate men; and he will weave them together thanks to the shuttle of a shared common opinion.

Hence, what the weaver weaves together is not a unified entity, a flock or
mass of people, an all-encompassing consensus or intersubjective
agreement. The weaver weaves a complex web of differences together
without downgrading any of them or treating them as so many
subordinates in a pyramid of hierarchized power. The principle guiding
the politician as weaver is governmentalization as relying on reciprocal
tact and respect of difference. What is sought accomplished is a fabric or
community manifesting and depending on peoples acceptance and
recognition of each others differences. In this new conception of
politicians as capable of love as much as of hate, of empowerment as
much as disempowerment, the next question we can ask, is the one the
young Foucault asks in his analyses of madness and discipline: why is it
than in modernity politicians have become figures of hate and
disempowerment more than of love and empowerment? The answer, he
holds, is to be sought in the occurrence of the modern disciplines,
reducing living people to living things and human beings to cultural
dopes. It is modern discipline which is responsible for the identification
of the politician as a herdsman protecting his flock against its enemies
within a given territory rather than as a weaver making the most of each
single difference required for making the life of a population at least a
little bit better.

Politics of Truth: Beyond Hierarchized Commands

The young Foucaults texts, I have shown, may be regarded as oriented

towards demonstrating how abstract liberal and Marxist ideas of how to
tame, insulate or get rid off state power in order to secure individual
autonomy and social solidarity in society contribute to freezing existing
political relations between laypeople and political authorities in a state of
coercive domination grounded in disciplinary subjection. This
asymmetrical state simply prevents both parties to the relationship from
practicing their freedoms and collaborating on account of two-way
communication and mutual interdependence when engaging in the
articulation and performance of social policy. In order to combat this dark
side of democracy we need to develop a critical attitude towards, more
than a critical theory of, political domination. No theory can do away with
the frozen asymmetries of power characteristic of hierarchical and
bureaucratic government; only corporeal political beings can do so in
their common knowledge that it is in the nature of political life that social
policy could always have been articulated and performed otherwise.

However, since politics is mostly defined by the presence of a conflict of

interest, and a will to appropriate power over others, Foucaults
contrasting of discipline and parrhesia as a productive but coercive
technology vs. a creative and enabling politics of truth are often read as
implying a virtual depoliticization of societal affairs. Nothing could be
more wrong, since his original argument is that the principal task of
political life is not to convert conflicts into consensus (input) but to
formulate and implement the necessary policies required for governing a
population (output). When this policy-politics is not appreciated by the
modern traditions it is due to their own politics-policy according to
which politics is about inputs whereas outputs are merely the dominan
of technical administration. This depoliticization of output or supply side
politics is the very reason why we today experience increasing difficulties
with figuring out how to combine the peoples quest for equal freedom
with the authorities pursuit of policies that can cope with high
consequence risks, such as global warming and economic meltdowns,
confronting the population(s) in their everyday life.

In fact, the opening words of the American Constitution and The EU

Lisbon Treaty clearly shows the difference between a polity ordered
around sovereignty and the voice of We the People and a polity focusing
on the populations security and the deeds of We the Heads of States.
The questions we should ask today are: How can we avoid that the
interest and identity politics of We the People and their representatives
trumps the necessary policies called for by We the Heads of States to
cope with our escalating global crises tendencies? How can we prevent
that the growing reliance on the expertise of We the Heads of States for
handling economic crises tendencies, global warming, and so on excludes
We the People from influencing the articulation and performance of
social policies? How can we hinder the political expertise called for to
handle our enormous policy risks and challenges from drowning in a
cacophony of amateurish public voices? In short, how can we get truth-
telling political authorities who govern without concealment, reserve,
empty manner of speech or rhetorical tricks in their relation to a political
community whose members will not submit themselves to hierarchized
discipline but strive for continuously becoming better at governing and
taking care of themselves?

Foucaults politics of truth revolves around these questions, since where

there is parrhesia, authority is won and, therefore, freely accepted and
recognized as a political message which tells the truth about what has to
be done. One could argue that Foucault is placing the ideal of the
parrhesiast political authority before the egalitarian speech of laypeople
and their worries over democracy and democratization. In a way this is
true, because his texts reveal that his key focus is on the political nature
of the authority figure as distinct from the one of the ordinary member
of the polity. On the other hand, Foucault is himself the first to stress
that democracy and parrhesia cannot persist without each other but that
their unity and circularity constitute two unresolvable paradoxes (GSO:
184):

No true discourse without democracy, but true discourse introduces differences into democracy. No
democracy without true discourse, but democracy threatens the very existence of true discourse

The difference is that of the ascendancy exercised by political authorities

over laypeople. Not everyone can tell the truth, just because everybody
may speak, meaning that parrhesia becomes impossible if achieved
through conformity to what anybody may say and think. I could
paraphrase this and say that Foucaults entire discursive practice begins
and ends with his attempt to tell us sincerely, truly and boldly, how
representative input-democracy with its formal institutions and
procedures tend to hide how class domination operates in and through
the bourgeoisie on the output side. Where there is obedience there can
be no parrhesia, and where there is no parrhesia there can be no political
community characterized by a continuous striving for equal freedom. As
he concludes in one of his lectures on The Government of Self and Others
from 1982-1983 (GSO: 184:).

Well, in a time like ours, when we are so fond of posing the problems of democracy in terms of the
distribution of power, of the autonomy of each in the exercise of power, in terms of transparency and
opacity, and of the relation between civil society and the State, I think it may be a good idea to recall
this old question, which was contemporary with the functioning of Athenian democracy and its crises,
namely the question of true discourse and the necessary, indispensable, and fragile caesura that true
discourse cannot fail to introduce into a democracy which both makes this discourse possible and
constantly threatens it. Thats its, thank you.

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