1 Introduction

It is without doubt that the ``veritable cottage industry of material'' (Elden, 2007a,
page 29) that has developed since the English publication of Foucault's 1978 `govern-
mentality' lecture has fashioned an important niche in the social sciences (Foucault,
1991c; see for example, Barry et al, 1996; Burchell et al, 1991; Dean, 1994; 2004; Rose,
1996; 1999).
(1)
Under the guise of `governmentality studies', authors have welcomed
Foucault's general dismissal of modern political theory and his turn towards the
specific rationalities and technologies of governing, allowing them to see government
as a practice or ``way of doing things'' (Foucault, 2008, page 318) rather than as the
application of a political philosophy or ideology. To date, geographers have tended to
follow the contributions of those, such as the sociologist Nikolas Rose (1996; 1998;
1999; also Rose and Miller, 1992), who have successfully adapted Foucault's account of
liberal and advanced liberal governmentality into working methodologies for the social
sciences while also injecting a focus into the spatialities of rule which is sometimes
lacking (for example, Barnett, 2001; Hannah, 1997; 2000; Huxley, 2007; 2008; Legg,
2005; Moon and Brown, 2000; Murdoch and Ward, 1997).
(2)
Presently, with the full
English publication of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Colle ge de France
(see Foucault, 2007; 2008)in which the notion of `political governmentality'
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is
outlined and developedan opportunity has arisen for geographers to consider
further the relationship between space, territory, and governmentality (for example,
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political
Louisa Cadman
Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, University Avenue,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland; e-mail: l.cadman@shu.ac.uk
Received 29 April 2009; in revised form 23 October 2009; published online 1 March 2010
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 539 ^ 556
Abstract. In this paper I offer an interpretation of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Colle ge de
France: Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. Through doing so, I suspend the
mainstay of social scientific research that falls within the field of governmentality studies and turn
instead to the historico-critical basis for Foucault's researches. Embracing notions of governmental
`counter-conducts' and the `critical attitude', I show how a positive desubjugating form of critique,
which temporarily suspends the power of governmental norms, is wholly immanent to the formation
and development of modern political governmentality. Furthermore, the ethos of this critique is key to
understanding Foucault's genealogical method and his conception of the political. To advance these
claims, throughout this paper I draw on the example of rights. I move away from the normative
approach to rights in an era of (liberal) political governmentality towards a more performative
understandingwhat Foucault terms the `right to question' governmental regimes of truth. I finish by
describing Foucault's own questioning of governmental regimes and offer a rereading of his defence of
the Vietnamese boat people in the early 1980s.
doi:10.1068/d4509
(1)
This lecture, which was the fourth in Foucault's 1978 annual lecture series at the Colle ge de
France (see Foucault, 2007), appeared in the journal Ideology and Consciousness in 1979 and again
in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality in 1991(see Burchell et al, 1991, pages 87 ^ 104).
(2)
For a comprehensive review see Huxley (2008).
(3)
By the term political governmentality Foucault is referring to the historical appearance, in the
16th century, of the problem of government in the exercise of political sovereignty. He refers to this
as ``the governmentalization of the state'' (Foucault, 2007, page 109).
Elden, 2007a; 2007b) and to contribute to the growing exegesis of the lectures with
respect to Foucault's theoretical and methodological development (see Elden, 2007a;
Huxley, 2008; Lemke, 2001; Valverde, 2007). This paper focuses on the latter aspect of
Foucault's researches and, in particular, on the significance of a thus far little discussed
part of the lecture series: the notion of governmental ``counter-conducts'' (Foucault,
2007, page 202) and the mode of questioning found therein which concerns how not to
be governed.
Foucault introduces the idea of counter-conduct to denote forms of struggle or
revolt ``against the processes implemented for conducting others'' (Foucault, 2007,
page 201). As a relatively new concept in the lexicon of governmentality studies,
my focus on counter-conduct is, in some ways, preemptive. It is to counteract the
possibility that, as the term is taken up and developed, it will share the same problem-
atic fate as that of Foucauldian ``resistance'' (Foucault, 1998, pages 95 ^ 96) and
``subjugated knowledge'' (Foucault, 2003, pages 7 ^ 11) before it. That is, by becoming
understood as a post hoc reaction or response to governmental `regimes of truth',
it will needlessly invite normative criteria as to why the governed can, should, or do
resist. In other words, because much of the current literature in the field of govern-
mentality studies seeks to outline the regimes of truth through which governors
governa somewhat limited understanding of governmentality, as we will seethe
phenomena of counter-conducts will reignite the question, often aimed at Foucault,
of `why fight?' (Campbell, 1998). As I aim to show in this paper, governmental
counter-conducts are not additional or reactive mechanisms, which we might
embrace, acknowledge, or omit in our analyses of modern political governmentality,
but wholly immanent and necessary to the formation and development of govern-
mentality. Furthermore, they are key to understanding Foucault's genealogical
method and his understanding of the political.
To advance these claims, throughout this paper I draw on the example of (liberal)
rights. My use of rights here may seem counterproductive. Do rights not reinforce the
question of `why fight?' by providing counter-conducts with a universal and neces-
sary grounding? Is this not why Foucault himself sought to escape political theory's
fixation with sovereign power and sovereign rights? It is certainly the case that
Foucault (1991a; 1998), in his writings of the early to mid 1970s, sought to overcome
the philosophical preoccupation with the theory of right (understood as the legit-
imate use of monarchic, public, or individual powers), and he replaced it with his
strategical analysis of power-knowledge relations.
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In fact, he went further than this
and asserted that the advent and persistence of philosophical and juridical rights
effectively masked nonegalitarian disciplinary powers and made them acceptable:
infamously writing that ``the `Enlightenment' which discovered the liberties, also
invented the disciplines'' (1991a, page 222).
(5)
Still, in his lectures of 1978 and 1979
at the Colle ge de France, Foucault subjects this negative understanding of juridical
(4)
Foucault's reasons for decentring the philosophico-juridical code for understanding power were
as much historical as methodological. In The History of Sexuality: Volume One (1998) he describes
how the juridical code can be dated to the reactivation of Roman law by Western monarchies
in the Middle Ages (see also Foucault, 2003, page 25). Juridical rights were wielded for their
acceptance, and to some extent represented the form of power they exerted, but have since been
succeeded by new powers irreducible to law and sovereignty: disciplinary power and the power
of normalisation.
(5)
Foucault reiterates this point in the second of his 1976 lectures at the Colle ge de France
when he argues that we are left in a ``sort of bottleneck'' (Foucault, 2003, page 39) or ``blind alley''
(Foucault, 1980, page 108) if we seek recourse to the right of sovereignty in order to challenge
disciplinary mechanisms.
540 L Cadman
rights vis-a -vis disciplinary powers to autocritique.
(6)
The twist, perhaps, is that he
does not reembrace juridical-political rights as such but inserts them into his interest
in governmental rationalities and governmental counter-conducts. On the one hand,
rather than acting as masks for disciplinary domination, rights are shown to exist within
relations of power (Ivison, 2008; Patton, 2005)they inevitably become an effective
tool for a liberal political apparatus which `governs through freedom' (Rose, 1999). On
the other hand, an active and performative role for rights is achieved through another
understanding: ``the right to question'' governmental regimes of truth (Foucault, 1997a,
page 32, my emphasis). Evident through the actions of counter-conducts, `the right to
question' prioritises the practice of questioning governments. It does so regardless of
whether this practice involves a tactical recourse to juridical rights.
With these initial observations in mind, this paper proceeds as follows. I begin, in
section 1, by showing how governmentality studies and recent social scientific interest
in liberal ``apparatus[es] of security'' have, explicitly or implicitly, taken up the norma-
tive understanding of rights to the neglect of the active and performative understanding
(Foucault, 2007, page 6). Here I show how the right to question is not simply a form
of resistance but part of what enabled political governmentality to become, in the 16th
century, a problem of and for reasoned thought that is, a governmentality (see, also,
Rose, 1993). To advance this claim, in section 2 I describe how in Security, Territory,
Population Foucault draws on what he calls `pastoral counter-conducts' as a means to
instigate his genealogy of modern political governmentality. Here the 16th-century
crisis of the pastorate (the Reformation and Counter-Reformation) enabled the ques-
tion of governmentality, or `how to govern', to transfer from the pastoral into the
political domain. I explore the form of this questioning by drawing on what Foucault
terms ``governmentalization'' (1997a, page 28) and connect this with his understanding
of `problematisation'. The notion of problematisation introduces the idea that, during
the 16th century, political governmentality became a problem that both affected
and positioned governors and governed. Towards the end of this paper, in section 4,
I explain how the problematisation of political governmentality occurs at the inter-
face of governing others (the conduct of other's conduct) and governing the self
(self-conduction); political governmentality is not something that is simply imposed
by governors on the governed. Before doing so, in section 3, I draw on what Foucault
in a lecture delivered in the same year as Security, Territory, Population calls the ``critical
attitude'' (1997a, page 25). This is a historical-philosophical term that elaborates on
the importance of governmental counter-conducts and their mode of questioning
(in the form of the right to question) for both Foucault's genealogical method and
his understanding of the political. I describe how the right to question does not rest
on the innate faculties of the governed subject but is, by its very action, radically
desubjugating: it is what enables a governed subject to experience, and possibly
transfigure, a given field of power-knowledge relations. In section 4, I proceed to
explain how the critical attitude has been pacified by and absorbed into contem-
porary accounts of (neo)liberal governmentality. I rectify the limitations of these
approaches by outlining Foucault's own account. Here I detail how the right to
question plays out in practice by drawing on what Foucault terms ``games of truth''
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It is important to add here that, prior to the publication of his 1978 and 1979 lectures, Foucault's
intimation of a negative relationship between outmoded juridical rights and burgeoning discipli-
nary powers sustained critique from social scientists. Firstly, for oversimplifying theoretical
understandings of sovereignty and the balance of powers (such as that of Hobbes; see Hindess,
1996; Ivison, 1998). Secondly, as inadvertently adopting a Marxist analytic that conceives recourse
to (liberal) rights as simply masking unequal power relations (Dean, 1994; Driver, 1985; Rose and
Valverde, 1998).
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 541
(1997b, page 281). Games of truth complement governmental regimes of truth by
showing that, whilst the latter have historically contingent `rules' and subject positions,
they are nonetheless historical practices, or games, which are open ended (Tully, 1999).
Finally, in section 5, I demonstrate how my preceding analysis explains Foucault's own
questioning of governmental truth regimes. The example I use is a statement written by
Foucault in response to the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s.
2 Liberal governmentality, apparatuses of security, and rights claims
In Security, Territory, Population Foucault begins his autocritique of the assumed role
of liberal rights vis-a -vis disciplinary powers early on, ending his second lecture of 1978
as follows:
``I said somewhere that we could not understand the establishment of liberal ideol-
ogies and a liberal politics in the eighteenth century without keeping in mind that
the same eighteenth century, which made such a strong demand for freedoms, had
all the same ballasted these freedoms with a disciplinary technique that ... consid-
erably restricted freedom and provided, as it were, guarantees for the exercise of
this freedom. Well, I think I was wrong. I was not completely wrong, of course, but,
in short, it was not exactly this. [Instead] this freedom, both ideology and technique
of government, should in fact be understood within the mutations and transforma-
tions of technologies of power. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing
but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security ... the possibility of
movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things''
(2007, page 48, my emphasis).
Foucault's notion of apparatuses of security, and their correlate freedom, can be under-
stood in two ways. Firstly, by letting things take their `natural' course, apparatuses of
security seek to guide probable events (utilising techniques of statistical forecasting and
economic costing, for example), finding supports within processes themselves rather
than seeking to absorb them into legal punishments or disciplinary prescriptions. This
understanding of security resembles descriptions of postdisciplinary `societies of con-
trol' (Deleuze, 1992; Hannah, 1997) that work through information codes and flows
(Dodge and Kitchin, 2005) and the complexity sciences (Dillon and Reid, 2001). It has
also been applied to address the strategic logics of the War on Terror (Anderson, 2007;
Dillon and Reid, 2001; Massumi, 2005). Secondly, security's correlate `freedom' is
indicative of Foucault's later focus on liberal and neoliberal rationalities of governing
(found in his 1979 lectures at the Colle ge de France). Here liberal governmentality seeks
to promote and secure the independence or freedom of self-regulating domains, such
as `civil society' or `the economy' (in liberalism), and the `enterprise' or `entrepreneurial
self ' (in neoliberalism) [see Rose's (1999, pages 61 ^ 97) understanding of `governing
through freedom'].
Although largely implicit, the role rights play within these formations is twofold.
Firstly, in the case of apparatus of security, particularly in current work on the War
on Terror, rights become co-opted and consumed into security's logic, such as when
the security problematic incorporates a right to defend against immanent threats to
`liberal peace' (Braun, 2007). Secondly, in the case of `governing through freedom',
rights are considered an effective tool to dispense and regulate liberalism's rationality
that ``one always governs too much'' (Foucault, 2008, page 319). It is this rationality,
rather than rights per se, that constructs the freedom of the governed to participate
in parliamentary systems:
``Rather than saying that the governed should be the source of sovereignty because
of their intrinsic rights and liberties as individuals or as members of a political
community, [Foucault] is suggesting that for liberalism the governed ought to
542 L Cadman
participate in the election of governors because government already depends on the
liberties and capacities of the governed exercised within an economy'' (Dean, 1999,
page 173 ^ 174; see also Foucault, 2008, page 321).
In both cases rights are seen as secondary, but nonetheless effective, tools that support
and enhance (neo)liberal rationalities of governing. In this sense, the relationship rights
have to (neo)liberal governmentality is similar to the relationship laws have to bio-
political norms (see Foucault, 1998): rights are conduits of power relations rather than
foundational for them (Ivison, 2008).
What is largely neglected within both of these aforementioned accounts is the
functioning of rights amidst forms of governmental contestation [for an important
exception see Patton (2005)]. In relation to apparatuses of security, contestation does
not arise as such because preemption, as a strategic governmental logic, does not
merely anticipate but in fact incites, on its own terms, all counterstrategies. In relation
to (neo)liberal governmentality, although security and freedom are positioned in their
original context, the rights of those who are governed tend to become absorbed a priori
into liberalism's rationality that one always governs too much. In both cases, recourse
to rights, as such, rarely allows something new to happen. Although Foucault's
account of political governmentality is able to support these readings, they offer us,
I suggest, only half the story. In lectures delivered around the same time as Security,
Territory, Population, Foucault presents another sort of right, one which, while less
explicit in his 1978 and 1979 lecture courses at the Colle ge de France, is wholly
contemporaneous to political governmentality's formation and development. As I will
explain later in section 3, Foucault considers this active and performative right as
``the right to question'' governmental regimes of truth (Foucault, 1997a, page 32; see
also Foucault, 1988a, pages 51 ^ 52). Before this, I want to show how the genealogy
of the right to question is found in Security, Territory, Population through the notion of
pastoral counter-conducts.
3 Pastoral counter-conducts
In Security, Territory, Population, after outlining the apparatuses of security that
emerged in the 18th century, Foucault turns his attention to the much earlier formation
of pastoral power and pastoral counter-conducts. Indeed, much of Security, Territory,
Population is given over to outlining pastoral power and raison d'etatthe individual-
ising and totalising `roots' of modern political governmentality (see also Foucault, 2002,
pages 298 ^ 325).
I cannot give a full description of Foucault's explorations into the Christian pastoral
here, suffice to say that it forms part of the prelude to the 16th-century explosion of the
`arts of government'.
(7)
Foucault describes how an intensification and subsequent trans-
lation of pastoral powerby which the pastoral `government of souls' gradually acquired
a political meaningemerged, in part from a series of pastoral counter-conducts (culmi-
nating in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation). These counter-conducts were not a
negation of or reaction to the pastoral conduct of conduct. Instead, they were active
movements ``whose objective [was] a different form of conduct, that is to say: want-
ing to be conducted differently, by other leaders (conducteurs) and other shepherds,
(7)
Pastoral power is a different form of power than that exercised over legal subjects in territorial
space (see, also, Foucault, 2002b, pages 298 ^ 325). Foucault finds its descent in Hebrew, rather than
Greek, thought: ``in contrast with the power exercised on the unity of a territory, pastoral power is
exercised on a multiplicity on the move'' (2007, page 126). Still, it was only in Christian societies
that ``claims to govern men [sic] in their daily life'' (2007, page 149) flourished. Foucault, in these
lectures, is sketching only the beginning of what will become an extended study into the history of
Christian asceticism (see Foucault, 1988b; 1997b, pages 81 ^ 85).
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 543
towards other objectives and forms of salvation, and through other procedures and
methods'' (Foucault, 2007, pages 194 ^ 195).
(8)
Describing neither a causal nor succes-
sional process, Foucault seeks to show that the broad transition from an `economy of
souls' (Christian pastoralism) to the `government of men' (political governmentality)
emerged through the general crisis of pastoral conduct, one that enabled a series of
economic and political crises (such as rural and urban revolt) to be translated
into religious concerns. Subsequently, a problematisation formed that concerned
the extent to which the sovereign or political domain should take on the task of
``conducting souls'' (Foucault, 2007, page 231). While we might be cautious in eliciting
a Foucauldian methodology from this, it is instructive to outline the moves Foucault
makes here. Firstly, he acknowledges a crisiswhat he later terms a ``cris[i]s of
governmentality'' (Foucault, 2008, page 68)which is part cause and part effect of a
series of strategic counter-conducts. Secondly, this crisis opens onto the problematisation
of political governmentality``how the problem of government, of governmentality,
was able to arise on the basis of the pastorate'' (Foucault, 2007, page 193)which
can be understood as an original response to the crisis, inasmuch that there is not a
simple transition from the pastor to the sovereign but the emergence of a new problem-
atic domain that concerns `the state' and its corresponding `art of government'.
(9)
Thirdly and finally, he goes on to outline a relatively settled governmentality, that of
the form this problematisation takes (in this instance, raison d'etat). This domain is
nonetheless traversed by facets of the former pastoral counter-conducts, exemplified
by contemporary struggles against the ``submission of subjectivity'' (Foucault, 2002,
page 332). This is unsurprising as pastoral power makes up political governmentality's
historical genealogy.
Whilst the concept of problematisation took a further few years to be developed
(see Foucault, 1992; 1997b, pages 117 ^ 118), its methodological implications are evident
in Foucault's opening lecture to The Birth of Biopolitics in 1979. In outlining what
he means by governmentality, Foucault stresses that his focus is not simply on the
rationalities and techniques of political government but specifically on the art of
political government (see also Osborne, 1998). That is, he seeks to understand ``the level
of reflection in the practice of government and, at the same time, reflection on the
best possible way of governing'' (Foucault, 2008, page 2). What Foucault is alluding to
here is that, since the 16th century, political governmentality in the West has become
both a thought-imbued practice (incorporating its rationalities and techniques) and
a problem about which, and on the basis of these practices, we are entitled to
think: ``how to be governed, by whom, to what extent, to what ends, and by what
methods'' (Foucault, 2007, page 89). The term ``governmentalization'' (Foucault, 1997a,
page 28)one which shares an affinity with Foucault's use of the term `problematisa-
tion' is useful here as it implies both of these processes. Foucault then does not seek
to reflect on the ways that political governors actually governed; nor does he seek to
disclose what gives governmental practices meaning or cause for concern (in the
governed subjects that experience them, for example). Either task would premise
universals that are filtered through the lens of historythe state, sovereignty, or civil
society in the former, human nature or human freedom in the latter. Rather, his
(8)
Here Foucault shifts his earlier strategical understanding of the ``tactical polyvalence of
discourses'' (Foucault, 1998, page 100) onto governmental rationalities, inasmuch that pastoral
counter-conducts partly corresponded to the same tactical elements that were put to work, albeit on
the fringes, of pastoral power. Foucault gives us five main themes: escatology, scripture, mysticism,
communities, and asceticism (2007, pages 191 ^ 226).
(9)
The state was not somehow born here but becomes an object of thought that enters into
reflected governmental practice.
544 L Cadman
foremost interest is in the processes that allow certain things``state and society,
sovereign and subjects'' (Foucault, 2007, page 3)to become objects of thought that
can be interrogated, or reflected upon, as problems. This has important implications
for our approaches to governmentality, in that, while we are most certainly governed
as individuals, as political citizens, or as economic subjects, for exampleto begin
our analyses with ``a body called the governed, in relation to which a body of governors
proceeds to act'' (Veyne, 1998, page 150) is a relatively meaningless exercise. For Foucault,
both the definitions and the respective positions of governors and governed are not
definitive prior to the process of problematisation ^ governmentalisation. Problematic
also is the presumption that the governed subsist and are ruled within nation-states.
Instead this is how governmentality became problematised in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Here, political governmentality (in the form of raison d'etat) occurred at the inter-
section of the Reformation (via pastoral counter-conducts) and the spatial development
of administrative monarchies.
(10)
It meant that the sovereign, who rules over territory
but does not govern, had to confront questions concerning the art of governing `men
and things'.
4 The critical attitude and the right to question
In a lecture delivered later in the same year as Security, Territory, Population, Foucault
absorbs pastoral counter-conduct into a more general cultural form, what he now calls
the `critical attitude' (1997a, pages 23 ^ 82). Whereas the term counter-conduct intro-
duced the idea that political governmentality became a problem of and for reasoned
thought, the critical attitude expands on a positive form of critical ethical reflection
found therein. Indeed, to simply say that from the 16th century onwards political
governmentality becomes problematised does not, in itself, guarantee against the devel-
opment of sedimented practices and ways of thinking. It merely introduces the notion
that ``the reasoned way of governing best'' emerges through a process of problematisa-
tion (Foucault, 2008, page 2). As I seek to show in the following, by focusing on the
critical attitude found in pastoral counter-conducts, Foucault is able to express fidelity
to an ethos that not only complements his genealogical method but also provides it
with its critical edge.
As authors have emphasised elsewhere (Cadman, 2009; Elden, 2002; 2007a),
Foucault, in his lectures on biopolitics and governmentality (2003; 2007; 2008), revisits
the historical epistemes outlined in The Order of Things. To simplify these somewhat,
he shows how the sovereign of the Middle Ages governed according to a continuum
of divine providence (as God's representative on Earth). Here questions concerning the
art of government could not arise. Raison d'Etat, in line with the classical episteme,
developed the notion of an art of government premised on the state. Lastly, modern
liberal governmentality governs through `civil society' and according to a necessary
(Kantian) self-limitation. In these accounts Foucault is concerned with the archaeological
level of governmentalisation, that of diagnosing the rules of formation of longstanding
governmental problematisations (bearing in mind that such rules are not premised on
universals). What he importantly highlights in his lecture ``What is Critique?'' (1997a,
pages 23 ^ 82) and in a later essay ``What is Enlightenment?'' (1997a, pages 101 ^ 134)
is the genealogical aspect of his researches into political governmentality. To do this
he reengages with The Order of Things and outlines a slippage between Immanuel
Kant's analytical enterprise (exemplified in The Order of Things by the modern `ana-
lytic of finitude') and Kant's journalistic reflection on the process of Enlightenment.
(10)
While Foucault ties sovereignty with territory, others have argued that calculable space forms
part of the problematisation of political governmentality (see Braun, 2000; Elden, 2007b; Hannah,
2000; Rose-Redwood, 2006).
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 545
The former seeks to outline the universal rules and necessary limits that govern
knowledge, and the latter is the acknowledgement by Kant that adopting these princi-
ples requires an act of courage, a decision taken by certain individuals to release
themselves from their ``self imposed tutelage'' (Kant, 1997, page 16): that is, from their
uncritical obedience to authority. For Kant, Enlightenment is both a process and a
task: a telos and an ethos.
Foucault considers Kant's journalistic and ethical reflection on the process of
Enlightenment as exemplary of the critical attitude not to be governed, one which, in
effect, is the condition of possibility for Kant's analytical enterprise. In doing so, rather
than adopt a post-Kantian analytical path thatpremising itself on the necessary and
universal limits of knowledgequestions the legitimacy, and critiques the excesses, of
forms of governmentality, Foucault suggests that we might instead begin with ``th[e]
[ethical] decision not to be governed'' (1997a, page 60) found in Kant's reflection on
the Enlightenment.
(11)
This allows us to conceive the conditions of acceptability of a
governmental systemnot in general or universal terms but through the process of
crisis, strategical analysis, and problematisationand, as genealogists, consider its
possible reversal (Foucault, 1997a). To do this, Foucault works in two alternative
ways. Firstly, as we have seen, by beginning his analysis of political governmentality
(in the form of raison d'etat) with a discussion of pastoral counter-conducts, Foucault
shows us that there was nothing necessary or inherent to its development in the 16th
century. Secondly, and retrospectively, by engaging with a current crisis of governmen-
tality (such as that of welfare liberalism at the time Foucault was writing), and its
current problematisation (through neoliberalism), Foucault is enabled entry into his
historical investigations. In the case of the crisis of liberalism, for example, Foucault's
intention is to ``find in the history of the nineteenth century some of the elements which
enable us to clarify the way in which the crisis of the apparatus of [liberal] govern-
mentality is currently experienced, lived, practiced and formulated'' (Foucault, 2008,
page 70).
(12)
Rather than concern himself with outlining a ground for resisting modern
governmentalities, Foucault argues that by remaining faithful to the critical attitude
he is able to gain access to the formation, and possible disruption, of historical singu-
larities (such as raison d'etat or liberal governmentality), singularities that cannot be
premised on any causal a priori or subjected to universal critique.
(13)
Foucault does not simply seek to remain historically faithful to the critical attitude in
order to enter into his political genealogies but also seeks to endorse the disorientating
temporal logic of critique found therein. The full definition of the critical attitude is
the movement through ``which the subject gives [it]self the right to question truth on its
effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth'' (Foucault, 1997a, page 32).
Whilst it appears that there must be some grounding for this gesture (as an innate
(11)
Foucault hesitates to use the word decision and, in the questions following the lecture, partly
rejects the terminology: ``when ... I was saying `decision making will not to be governed,' then there
was an error on my part ... I was not referring to something that would be a fundamental
anarchism, that would be like an originary freedom ... . I did not say it but that does not mean
that I absolutely exclude it'' (1997a, page 73). The `decision not to be governed' no doubt rests on
an undecidable freedom. For links with Derrida in this respect, see Chryssostalis (2005), Keenan
(1987), and Pavlich (2005).
(12)
Foucault's (2008) account of neo-liberalism is configured precisely on how its proponents
problematise facets of 19th-century liberalism, for example, in the arena of law (page 250) and
economic monopolies (pages 134 ^ 137).
(13)
Foucault calls this aspect of genealogy ``eventualisation'': ``It means making visible a singularity
in places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological
trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all. To show that things `weren't as
necessary as all that' '' (1991b, page 76, original emphasis).
546 L Cadman
faculty of the subject, for example), for a subject to give itself a right to question
power ^ knowledge relations is normatively and temporally difficult. It presupposes
a subject who questions, but it also supposes that the subject is simultaneously
desubjugated through the very act of questioning. In simple terms, to bring forth and
question a field of subjection means that the subject cannot be quite what it was before.
Furthermore, and following my earlier account of the normative role of rights, if
power-knowledge systems are constitutive of discourses of right, rather than vice versa,
then the subject who enunciates this right (the right to question) cannot be normatively
supported by the present epistemic framework. The right to question is not, indeed
cannot be, the positing of universals (`who I am'); it is instead to risk oneself in the
present [``what therefore, am I?'' (Foucault cited in Butler, 2002, page 221)], by bringing
the present regime of truth, or governmentality, into relief or question (I will return to
this, in relation to `games of truth', in part 5).
The right to question is a non-foundational right which complements Foucault's
understanding of the political. In notes accompanying his 1978 and 1979 lectures,
Foucault states that he does not follow the notion that everything is political (or that
the State is everywhere), nor does he believe that the political is a fundamental
antagonism (ie Carl Schmidt). Instead, he writes: ``politics is no more or less than
that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the first uprising, the first
confrontation'' (Foucault, 2007, page 390). Note here that politics is born with resist-
ance; it is not resistance, or that which passes for resistance, per se. Foucault here is
pointing to the contingent yet desubjugating experience of the right not to be governed
``like that, by that, in the name of those principles, [and] with such and such an
objective in mind'' (Foucault, 1997a, page 28, original emphasis). The potential of
this experience spans his books and interviews. In these, rather than begin with a
subject positionMarxist, liberal, or radical or a `we' that questions the political
present through judgement, Foucault seeks instead to make the ``future formation of
`we' possible'' (Foucault, 1997b, page 114) by elaborating on the questions current
counter-conducts (surrounding psychiatry and sexuality, for example) are posing to
politics. Foucault both belongs to and questions his own actuality in that he engages
with a current crisis of governmentality and seeks to `free up', through his historical
investigations, the ways this crisis can be problematised by those engaging with it
(Foucault, 1997b; see also Rabinow, 2003). This is why he calls his books `fictions' or
`experience books': counter-conducts question the(ir) present, and Foucault's purpose
of genealogy is to engage and open up this questioning.
5 The critical attitude and (neo)liberal governmentality
What is interesting about Foucault's account of liberal governmentality is that, unlike
its predecessor raison d'etat, it becomes, at an archaeological level, the political equiva-
lent of Kantian critique: it questions its own internal limits as to its power to know
(Gordon, 2002).
(14)
That is, whereas the critical attitude that arose in contestation with
raison d'etat was both legal and extrinsicseeking to limit the administrative powers
of the sovereign by defining the basic rights of citizens
(15)
liberalism's form of critique
becomes an intrinsic one that seeks to decide between ``the agenda and non-agenda
(14)
Foucault writes: ``Kant ... had to tell man that he cannot know the totality of the world. Well,
some decades earlier, political economy had told the sovereign: Not even you can know the totality
of the economic process. There is no sovereign in economics'' (2008, page 283).
(15)
Recourse to juridical rights here proved an effective tactical expression for the critical attitude,
but to reiterate my earlier points, they must not be misunderstood as its foundation. Instead,
drawing on his strategical analysis, Foucault (1998; 2008) shows how juridical mechanisms set up
by administrative monarchies were subsequently used against the monarchies themselves.
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 547
[of government], between what to do and what not to do'' (Foucault, 2008, page 12). This is
why liberalism is the full art of governmentalisation, understood as an autonomous
rationality (from sovereignty) and perpetual problematisation: must one govern?
Do we govern too much? What is effective government? A productive inquiry into
the relationship between the critical attitude and liberal governmentality might then
ask the following: Does liberal governmentality stifle the critical attitude by absorbing
it a priori into its own rationality (by which it is no longer an attitude but a failed
promise to respect the citizen as an autonomous capacitous subject by governing her
or his freedom), or does it, instead, constitute a political flourishing of it (through
government's awareness of the critical capacities of the governed)? In effect, this plays
with the slippage Foucault himself instigates between his historicisation of Kant's
analytical critique on the governmental field and critique understood as a (modern)
attitude or ethos that is effectively invoked each time we, or a political movement,
question the present. As we have seen, much of the governmentality literature implic-
itly follows the former route by diagnosing a `genealogy of freedom' internal to liberal
governmentality (Rose, 1999). In geography this has been taken to mean that those
spaces, in which we consider ourselves most free, are an effective artefact of govern-
ment (Barnett, 2001; Bondi, 2005; Clarke et al, 2004). Authors, such as Hindess (1997),
have pointed to the limitations of these approaches by emphasising the importance of
politically orientated action (qua Weber), such as dissent and faction, which must
coexist with the politics of liberal governmentalities. Still, in emphasising the internal
techniques that governments use to manage the governed as political actors (political
parties, elections, and the free press, for example), Hindess too closes the space of
political critique in advance. Indeed, he positions Foucault's account of liberalism
close to Nietzsche: ``there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal
institutions'' (Nietzsche, cited in Hindess, 1997, page 267).
In some ways, the question concerning liberal governmentality and the status of the
critical attitude is exacerbated in contemporary accounts of neoliberal governmentality
and apparatuses of security. Here, as we have seen, critique is not only immanent to
government's existence (Do we govern too much?) butas the event of innovation,
change, or disruptionis also part of its ongoing action. Hence, in relation to appa-
ratuses of security: how, through anticipatory knowledges and practices, might we
govern the probability of dangerous events? Or, in relation to neoliberalism: how can
we govern (the market) in order to allow (market) competition to thrive? One concern
here, however, is that these studies tend to remain focused on, or adapt, Foucault's
understanding of governmentality as the conduct of others' conduct (emanating from
governments). They neglect that Foucault's equivocal usage of the term `conduct'
means that it incorporates both conducting others (via governmental technologies)
and conducting the self (via the ethical relation of the governed subject to its own
conduction).
Foucault (2008) himself seems aware of the potential impasse found in his account
of liberal governmentality and, as such, seeks to emphasise that its internal critique
(as the decision between what must be done and what it is advisable not to do) arises
not simply through an internal rationality emanating from governments but through
the constitution of, and `action between', governors and governed:
``[I]t is not those who govern who, in complete sovereignty and full reason, will
decide on this internal limitation. Inasmuch as the government of men [sic] is a
practice which is not imposed by those who govern on those who are governed,
but a practice that fixes the definition and respective positions of the governed and
governors facing each other and in relation to each other, `internal regulation'
means that this limitation is not exactly imposed by either one side or the other,
548 L Cadman
or at any rate not globally, definitively, and totally, but by, I would say, transaction,
in the very broad sense of the word, that is to say, `action between,' that is to say,
by a series of conflicts, agreements, discussions, and reciprocal concessions: all
episodes whose effect is finally to establish a de facto, general, rational division
between what is to be done and what is not to be done in the practice of governing''
(Foucault, 2008, page 12).
The internal critique of liberal governmentality, which premises the market as its site of
truth, does not mean simply that an economic theory or ideology is imposed by
governors on the governed (or, indeed, vice versa). Rather, liberalism's internal limi-
tation emerges through a process of transaction that, in effect, realigns the positions of
both. In his 1978 and 1979 lectures, Foucault is not interested in the political spaces
available for or created by these contestations and conflicts, instead he is interested in
the ``transactional realities'' (2008, page 297) that become problematised through them.
Transactional realities, such as sexuality, madness, or civil society (all Foucault's
examples) subsist at the interface of governors and governed.
(16)
They support the
governmental technologies that direct the conduct of the governed, who in turn
conduct themselves accordingly. Indeed, it is only when there is a disjuncture between
the field of conduction and the relationship the individual has to herself or himself
as conducted subject that counter-conducts develop and transactional realities are
formed or reproblematised. This is why, as Veyne (2005) suggests, there is a question
of subjectivity in politics, subjectivity here referring to ``the way in which the subject
experiences himself [sic] in a game of truth'' (Foucault, 2000, page 461).
Transactional realities are not merely objects of thought that pass between
governors and governed. They are better understood as the problematised field of
reference, or contact point, between modes of objectivation [the (modern) individual
as it is objectified as a governable subject who lives, works and speaks] and modes of
subjectivation [the (ethical) self-conduction of the governed subject] (Foucault, 2000,
pages 459 ^ 463). Together, these form political governmentalities' ``regimes of truth''
(Foucault, 1980, page 131). Take the transactional reality of sexuality, for example.
To objectify and govern individuals through disciplinary and confessional apparatuses
requires a certain modality, or mode of subjectivation, of the subject. In this case,
the subject must reflect upon, and seek to know, the (desiring) self [Han (2005); I will
return to this example in the conclusion].
While Foucault does not elaborate on the terms, the process of `transaction' and
`action between' implies that, during governmental contestations or counter-conducts,
neither governors nor governed act directly on each other; instead, they act on the
transactional field or domain through which they are engaged. By acting on this field,
they also act on their respective positioning as governors or governed. Indeed, it may
well be that in some instances both `governors' and `governed' become subjected to the
same mode of objectification and subjectification of their conduct. The problematised
space of neoliberalism, for example, addresses both the conduct of governments and
the conduct of individuals through an `enterprise form' (Burchell, 1993; Foucault, 2008;
Rose, 1998).
(16)
In relation to the development of liberal governmentality, Foucault focuses on the transactional
reality of ``civil society'' (2008, page 297), which becomes a problematisation at the end of the 18th
century. As a response to the crisis of raison d'etat, civil society is neither a construct of liberal
governments (which would make no sense to the governed) nor a universal given (even if it becomes
articulated as such). Instead, it emerges as a problematisation that effectively enables the emerging
knowledges of homo economicus (`economic man')which question and effectively escape the
sovereign or administrative stateto coexist with a juridical subject subsisting within a territory.
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 549
Transactional realities provide the opening that makes subjectivity possible; they
enable the governmental technologies that shape and direct the way individuals
conduct themselves (Foucault, 2000). As a condition of existence for the governed,
those who engage in counter-conducts have no recourse to an eschatological or orig-
inal freedom but rather to a modification in the ``game'' through which the truth
(of the governed subject) is produced (Foucault, 1997b, page 281; Tully, 1999). As Tully
explains:
``[A]ny game will involve, first, the analysis of the rules in accordance with which the
game is routinely played and the techniques of government or relations of power
that hold them in place [ie modes of objectification and modes of subjectification].
Second, it will involve the `strategies of freedom' in which some participants refuse
to be governed in this way, dispute and seek to modify the rules, and thus think
and act differently to some extent [ie governmental counter conducts]'' (Tully, 1999,
page 167, my emphasis).
This furthers Foucault's understanding of the critical attitude ``as the movement by
which the subject gives [it]self the right to question'' (1997a, page 32, my emphasis).
Counter-conducts, through their very action, bring into relief the regime of truth
through which they are known and acted upon. Concurrently, by problematising the
conduct of their conduct, they also problematise their subjective ``identities as players''
(Tully, 1999, page 168; see also Butler, 2002).
Whilst it could be said that games of truth permeate all relations of governmental-
ity, the actions of counter-conducts are `qualitatively' different from the actions of those
who simply seek to influence governments or question the efficiency or accuracy of
forms of governing (qua liberalism). Counter-conducts practice freedomthe freedom
to think (and act) otherwise (Foucault, 1988b, page 330)by bringing forth and ques-
tioning the regime of truth through which they are engaged as objects and subjects of
government. They are risky and transfigurative because, by questioning the conduct
of their conduct, they simultaneously question the relationship of the self to itself,
risking the self in the process (for a similar point, see Butler, 2002). It is for this reason
that Foucault questions contemporary sexual liberation movementsnot because it
is radical, anarchic, or transgressive to berate what seemingly falls under the guise of
identity politics but because discourses of personal liberation are in fact premised on
individualised modes of subjectivation (or subjection), which are born from pastoral
biopower.
(17)
Foucault's overall concern then is with governmental regimes of truth
which have become fixed or blocked to such an extent that there can be no strategic
movement or game playing at the level of ethics and subjectivation (Foucault, 1982).
Foucault's understanding of games of truth and practices of freedom explains his
own response to the relationship between the critical attitude and liberal governmen-
tality. He writes of the current ``paradox of relations of capacity and power'' (1997a,
page 128), which is to say that, whilst governmental technologies have taken on the
task of ``maximising our capacities for free action, ... we are simultaneously governed
through [this] very freedom'' (Valverde, 1999, page 666; see also Rose, 1996; 1999).
Still, he goes on to ask: ``how can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from
the intensification of power relations'' (Foucault, 1997a, page 129). Although it appears
that Foucault is merely critiquing the form of freedom akin to liberal governmen-
tality, he is instead critiquing liberalism if it seeks to fix freedom at certain frontiers
(17)
This is not to say that what we might call `liberation struggles' are not important. Foucault gives
a place for resistance as ``no saying'' where ``one must be content with reacting ... after the event''
(2002, page 347). Here he is implying that in certain contexts (such as colonisation), where games
of truth are fixed or even expelled, liberation movements provide an important premise for
practices of freedom. Still, they do not, in and of themselves, guarantee them.
550 L Cadman
(Foucault, 1988a). Freedom, for Foucault, is a practice; it certainly isn't guaranteed,
but neither is it necessarily stifled by liberal governmentality.
6 Foucault's right
In this final section I want to shed some empirical light on the understanding of
counter-conduct and the right to question that I have outlined in this paper. To do
this, I want to draw on Foucault's own questioning of governmental regimes of truth.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault was involved in campaigning for those
who had fled the communist regime in Vietnam but who had not yet been received
as refugees in Western countries (Campbell, 1998; Keenan, 1987). In 1981, along with
two international humanitarian organisations (Me decins du Monde and Terre des
Hommes), he attended a press conference at the Geneva Intercontinental Hotel under
the banner of Comite International Contre le Piraterie (CICP). The purpose of this
conference was to campaign for those Vietnamese boat people who were being
attacked, raped, tortured, and murdered by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand. Foucault
took some time to write a defence of his and the CICP's action. This was published,
after his death, in Liberation (30 June ^ 1 July 1984) under the title ``Faux au gouverne-
ments, les droits de l'Homme''.
(18)
It is certainly interesting that this short statement,
which Foucault did not intend to be published, has received such a high level of
engagement (for example, Campbell, 1998; Gordon, 2002; Keenan, 1987; Patton, 2005).
This is arguably because what at first appears as a contradiction to Foucault's anti-
foundationalism in fact provides a telling response to those who feel that, without
such foundations, Foucault cannot justify his own recourse to rights. Foucault begins
by outlining an international citizenry ``with no other grounds for speaking, or
for speaking together, than a shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place. ...
Who appointed us, then? No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right''
(Foucault, 2002, page 474). Here human rights are not grounded on metaphysical
values but initiated solely on the grounds of a right to initiate where there is no one.
Authors have read Foucault's statement as one that works with an undecidability
between the constative and performative aspect of rights [Keenan (1987); and on
Derrida and rights generally, see Honig (1991)], inasmuch as Foucault is at once claim-
ing a right (without any grounding in the present) yet simultaneously affirming a (not
yet) new right (Keenan, 1987). In light of my previous discussion, we might reframe
Foucault's declaration accordingly. Firstly, Foucault and the CICP are members of the
`community of the governed' whose obligation to speak here is, of course, one of
contingency by nature of being governedeven as we struggle with governments
(Campbell, 1998)but also one of responsibility that hinges not primarily or only on
this fact but also on the fact that to be governed well means to engage in a dialogue,
or game, with governors (even, or especially, if that dialogue entails some risk).
(19)
The ground for speaking here is that of a disjuncture (a `shared difficulty' or a `crisis')
between how the CICP consider themselves as governed subjects (ethics) and the actions
of governments (politics).
(18)
An English version of the statement can be found in Foucault 2002 (pages 474 ^ 475) entitled,
``Confronting Governments: Human Rights''.
(19)
In other interviews around this time, Foucault elaborates on the importance of questioning
governments (with or without an alternative programme). He states: ``we are all governed'' and
``we can demand of those who govern us a certain truth as to their ultimate aims, the general
choices of their tactics, and a number of particular points in their programmes: this is the parrhesia
(free speech) of the governed, who can and must question those who govern them, in the name of
the knowledge, the experience they have, by virtue of being citizens, of what those who govern do,
of the meaning of their action, of the decisions they have taken'' (1988b, pages 51 ^ 52).
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 551
Secondly, this questioning seeks to publicise the situation of those who are not
governed fairly or who, in this case, are not governed at all (Patton, 2005). In a sense,
Foucault here is giving his own response to those who are exempt not from liberal
rationalities or rights but from the right to question governments or, in the case of
refugees, from the ``right to have rights'' (Arendt, 1976, page 296). That is, those who in
our contemporary forms of governmentality ``are deprived, not of the right to [liberal]
freedom, but of the right to action'' (Arendt, 1976, page 296). This has important
implications for governmentality studies because, whilst numerous authors have sought
to show how certain groups and individuals are deemed unable or unwilling to partake
in liberal freedom,
(20)
Foucault is concerned here with those who are excepted from
partaking in agonistic games of truth between governors and governed: he is focusing
on freedom as a practice rather than as a governmental rationality (Cadman, 2009;
Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Tully, 2003).
Thirdly, as contemporary governments pride themselves on being concerned with
the welfare of the governeda situation that, following my earlier account of trans-
actional realities, the governed may largely acceptit is not satisfactory that the
suffering of the (un)governed be deemed `collateral damage' (``[t]he suffering of men
[sic] must never be a silent residue of policy'') (Foucault, 2002, page 475; see also
Osborne, 1999; Tully, 2003). Instead, governments must be made accountable. This,
as Philo (2006) has argued, means that the governed mayindeed shouldstrategi-
cally use governmental technologies, which are supported by transactional realities
(in this case pastoral `care'), against governments themselves.
Finally, those who are governed, and who are free to act, not only have the right to
question the actions of government but can also intervene when governments them-
selves fail to act. In Foucault's example this is through the formation of independent
international humanitarian groups (which is not to say that these interventions will not
become co-opted by governments). Foucault continues his statement: ``Amnesty Inter-
national, Terre des Hommes, and Me decins du Monde are initiatives that have created
this new rightthat of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of
international policy and strategy'' (2002b, page 475, my emphasis). These initiatives
bring forth and work at the limits of (the self in) the present and, as Patton (2005)
aptly points out, it is this which constitutes Foucault and the CICP's ethico-political
right as `groundless'the fact that, while their initiative is incited by the (non)actions
of governments, it is independent from them and `appointed by no one'.
7 Conclusion
``I do not believe that the only possible point of resistance to political power
understood, of course, as a state of dominationlies in the relationship of the self
to itself. I am saying that `governmentality' implies the relationship of self to itself.''
Foucault (1997b, page 300)
With the publication of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Colle ge de France, the
interest in political governmentality within geography and the social sciences is without
doubt set to continue. One of the aims of this paper has been to pause and reassess
the methodological and political stakes of this endeavour and to turn away from
social scientific analysis (`How do governors govern?') towards the ``historico-critical''
(Foucault, 1997a, page 133) impetus for Foucault's researches (`How does political
governmentality become a problem of and for thought? How do we think otherwise?')
(20)
For numerous variations on this argument, see Dean (2002) on liberal authoritarianism,
Hindess (2001) on liberal unfreedom, Rose (2000) on circuits of exclusion, and Valverde (1996)
on liberal despotism.
552 L Cadman
There are two interrelated reasons for doing so. The first is methodological, or rather
genealogical, and the second is ethico-political. Firstly, in order for governmental
systems to be considered fragile and contingent achievements, and to avoid any
recourse to transcendental or empirical universals such as, by asking how we might
resist modern governmentalities or how entities such as the state shift over time
Foucault must begin with the question, ignited by governmental counter-conducts,
of ``how not to be governed like that, by that, [and] in the name of those principles''
(1997a, page 28, original emphasis). The reason for doing so is two-fold: ``[to]
bring out the conditions of acceptability of a system [archaeology] and [to] follow
the breaking points which indicate its emergence [genealogy]'' (1997a, page 54).
Genealogical critique here, as Foucault (1997b, page 201) will later attest, ``does not
mark out impassable boundaries or describe closed systems; [instead] it brings to
light transformable singularities.'' Secondly, by embracing the critical attitude found
in pastoral counter-conducts, Foucault is able to point to, or at least move towards,
a political ethos as well. As we have seen, political governmentality involves modes
of objectivation (how the subject becomes problematised as an object for governmental
intervention) and modes of subjectivation (the subject's ethical relation to itself as a
governed subject). These are formed and modified through games of truth. Although
not having utilised this language, other authors have taken up Foucault's equivocal
usage of the term conduct to incorporate the ways that individuals are led to act upon
themselves as ethical subjects (see, for example, Burchell, 1993; Dean, 1995; Rose, 1998).
Yet their understanding of ethical self-formation tends towards political subjection or
domination (What I am? What I must be?) rather than ethical self-transfiguration
(What, therefore, am I? What might I become?). The reasons for this are as much
historical as they are methodological and can be tied to Foucault's genealogy of the
individualising pastoral roots of modern political governmentality. For Foucault,
pastoral power entails a mode of subjectivation (or subjection) that makes individuals
`subjects'; it ties them to their own identity through self-knowledge, while simulta-
neously subjecting them to an external power via the objectifying knowledges of
`man' (Foucault, 2002, page 331; 2007, pages 123 ^ 129). In other words, modern polit-
ical governmentality instills a form of reflexivity or self-forming that, in and of itself,
does not require ethical self-transfiguration, merely the self-transformations required
to suit the current governmental regime of truth. Indeed, it is this factor that sets
Foucault's (2006) sights towards Greek antiquity, during which time the subject's ethical
self-transfiguration in relation to the acquisition of truth is more central (Han, 1995;
Lea, 2009). Still, by focusing on the ethico-political dimension of governmental counter-
conducts, through which the experience of desubjugation opens up a space to question
the ethical relationship of the self to itself, Foucault implies, at least in principle,
that modern political governmentality can never fully exhaust the freedom of the
subject that it ``seeks to know and to subjugate'' (Butler, 2002, page 222). It is for
this reason that counter-conducts are central not only to Foucault's methodology
but also to the possibility of transfigurative critique in an era of modern political
governmentality.
Acknowledgements. A version of this paper was presented at the Dehumanisation Workshop at the
Institute of Advanced Study in Durham in March 2009. I thank those who participated at that
time. I appreciate the comments of Stuart Elden and the anonymous reviewers who offered
helpful suggestions on improving the manuscript. Special thanks to Ben Anderson, Camila Bassi,
and Margo Huxley for engaging with an earlier draft of this paper and for their support and
encouragement.
How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political 553
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