Literature Compass 8/1 (2011): 6679, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00772.

Literature and Governmentality

John Marx*
University of California

Abstract
Recent scholarship on governmentality promises to reinvigorate literary critical analysis of how nov-
els, poems, and plays help to organize the worlds populations as they interact. In turn, literary criti-
cism helps to illuminate the global implications of Michel Foucaults lectures at the College de
France, published in English as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008).
By privileging varied practice over unifying theory, Foucaults approach leads scholars to examine
the circulation of governmental techniques in conjunction with the circulation of governable popu-
lations. An emphasis on mobility and exchange should appeal particularly to specialists in immigrant,
imperial, and postcolonial literature. While considering a range of literary critical and social scientific
scholarship on governmentality, this essay also shows how literature itself authorizes discrepant forms
of administration. I contend that literature and literary criticism engage in imaginative reformulations
and reinventions of the art of government, and in so doing contribute to debates about governing
that are every bit as cross-disciplinary as they are transnational.

This essay considers what literary scholars should make of recent arguments about
governmentality, which are built on the foundation provided by Michel Foucaults new
(old) lectures, presented at the College de France in the late 1970s, published in English
as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). Foucaults elabo-
ration of the art of government promises to alter how scholars describe literatures
contribution to politics around the world and augurs new possibilities for collaborative
research among humanists and social scientists (Security 107). Specifically, I argue that
Foucault helps reveal literary criticism as governmentality. Too often, literary criticism
has behaved as if its political contribution lies in critiquing government from a disciplin-
ary vantage outside it. I argue that literary critics should stop being so aloof, and start
thinking of their practices as akin rather than antagonistic to research and policy making
of the sort that goes on in the social sciences. With this shift in attitude, I maintain,
might come recognition that literary critical business as usual actually already engages in
imaginative reformulations and reinventions of the art of government, even if literary
critics have been reluctant to understand their work in this way.
Commentators have observed that publication of Foucaults lectures not only generates
a new context for reading his earlier books but also makes available his thinking about
matters that include the politics of race, theories of economy, as well as techniques of
statecraft present and past.1 Key among their contributions, the lectures have reinvigo-
rated scholarly discussion of governmentality that concept Foucault defined as a gov-
erning authoritys mentality, the way administrative institutions conceive of their
relationship to the populations they administer, and the way those populations think
about governing and conducting themselves. That these conceptions of governance are
highly mobile has been made clear by the plurality of studies to emerge in dialog with

2011 The Author

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 Literature and Governmentality 67

Foucaults approach. Postcolonial scholars as well as scholars of imperialism and globaliza-

tion have shown how administrative thought transforms through commercial and diplo-
matic exchange. They have demonstrated how such circulation alters the scale and
meaning of governmental conceptions of economy and civil society, while enlarging the
purview and authority of sundry administrative experts.
In his February 8, 1978 lecture, Foucault describes the analytic problem he means to
invoke:
Assuming that governing is different from reigning or ruling, and not the same as command-
ing or laying down the law, or being a sovereign, suzerain, lord, judge, general, landowner,
master, or a teacher, assuming therefore that governing is a specific activity, we now need to
know something about the type of power the notion covers. (Security 1145)2
Where the sovereign or lord embodies transcendent authority over a territory or a people,
governing organizations are composed of unspecified and changeable actors who claim
responsibility over a shifting array of persons and things. Governing is an activity rather than
a right. It is justified not through reference to law but through the reflexive evaluation of
effects. The practice of government is an ongoing process of data collection, policy formula-
tion, implementation, and review. It is subject to change, as populations come into contact
and interact, as trading networks grow and empires fall. With the aim of capturing ongoing
variation, Foucault emphasizes alterations small and large in how and how much govern-
mental actors think of their subjects.
This emphasis, I argue, should be evocative for literary critics. Fiction and verse shape
a literary sort of governmental thought whenever they associate character with group,
population with territory, and administration with defining what it means for a popula-
tion to be secure, productive, or otherwise well-off. Through such associations, literature
and literary criticism contribute to efforts at revising administration that are every bit as
cross-disciplinary as they are transnational. Literary governmentality contests and comple-
ments census data, immigration policy, and bureaucratic decision-making. When literary
criticism analyzes, affirms, and interprets accounts appearing in novels, poems, and plays,
it supplements such aesthetic interventions and makes their formulations newly intelligible
to and actionable within administrative institutions, particular the university. This worldly
work entails collaboration and competition with other specialized forms of writing to
organize global populations as they interact.
Literary criticism participates in three important threads of research on governmentality. First
and foremost: literary texts and their interpreters join social scientific case studies in detailing
heterogeneous governmental arrangements in venues ranging from bureaucratized polities
to so-called failed states notable for their absence of entrenched and reproducible govern-
ing bodies.3 Literature scholars thereby join their social-science colleagues in advancing
Foucaults thesis that governmental inconsistency is not an internal contradiction but an
axiom of modern rule. That any particular instance of administration involves multifarious
actors with contrasting ideas may appear obvious. Still, it remains idiomatic to label
approaches with various unifying isms from socialism to neoliberalism and to thereby
behave as if the messy practice of governing can be purified by ideology. In contrast to this
habit, scholars in dialog with Foucault have tended to eschew the goal of describing ideal or
indigenous governmentality in favor of diagramming the thought processes resulting from
interaction among governmentalities. Recent work in this vein from across the disciplines
demonstrates what can be seen by studying administration in all of its impurity.
Second, in addition to stipulating the heterogeneity of governmental agents and tech-
niques, literary critics as much as social scientists are reminding their readers about the

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heterogeneity of governments subjects. Discussions of a national citizenry, community,

or people posit an idealized unity on whose behalf various actors might claim to speak.
In contrast, governmentality focuses attention on population, a category more demo-
graphic than ethnographic. Organizations both state and non-state, large and small,
endeavor to identify, manage, and serve populations designated largely via statistical
measures. Everyone knows in part because our fictions as well as our journalism, social
science, and literary criticism have explained it that states routinely oversee the health
and welfare of migrants both legal and illegal. In the process, they often invent new
categories of non-citizen whose activities a state nevertheless presumes to police. An
interdisciplinary array of writings demonstrates, moreover, that non-state organizations are
involved in the management of social groups, some of which appear barely visible or
notably neglected by state administration. Institutions ranging from Google to the World
Bank, from pharmaceutical companies to aid agencies specify populations they claim to
represent regardless of nationality. Non-state and state practices of government can over-
lap statistics get shared, operations get jointly run but non-state and state entities can
also conflict in their priorities and techniques. The language of population better equips
us than the language of citizenship to explain how procedures for governing diverse
groups work within and beyond the borders of the nation. Literary genres including that
of immigrant fiction link up with scholarship in anthropology and political science to
demonstrate how divergent slices of a states population may move in and out of
national territory, include groups that never possess nor necessarily aspire to national citi-
zenry, and feature actors who violate the rules that compose national law.
Third and finally, renewed consideration of governmentality gives literary critics occa-
sion to revisit a characteristically Foucaultian problem, namely, how to understand the
function of critique. By attending to governmental practice over and above political the-
ory, scholarship on governmentality reminds us to distinguish between two different
modes of criticism. There is a marked difference between criticizing a specific govern-
mental technique and opposing a universal principle of rule. To contest an administrative
approach is to imagine alternatives. Critique need not be solely an act of negation, Judith
Butler explains, not merely or only a sort of nay-saying, an effort to take apart and
demolish an existing structure (787). It also can be a step towards inventing new struc-
ture. To contest the utility or query the outcomes of a particular way that, say, a state or
association of states regulates (or fails to regulate) a banking system implies that there
might be another way to do so. In the closing pages of this essay, I consider the benefits
of thinking about literary criticism as a contributor to governmentality even (and perhaps
especially) when it critiques existing forms of government.

Governmentalities
By presenting the problem of governmentalities in the plural, Foucault complicates the
study of political change. When describing how and why mentalities of government
transform, he avoids any theory of clean breaks or any history of epochal shifts. To be
sure, Foucault distinguishes liberal governmentality from earlier modes of sovereign rule,
but he does not contend that notions of sovereignty suddenly or entirely disappeared with
the emergence of liberal political economy in the writings of thinkers ranging from Adam
Smith to John Stuart Mill. In the lectures, he describes how classic and neo-liberal
government promises to ensure the health and productivity of subject populations, while
sovereignty works to preserve the kings right to decide who may live and who must
die.4 Even given this distinction, however, Foucault maintains that liberal government

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often claims a veritably sovereign authority to monopolize violence and to establish natu-
ral laws by way of such vehicles as constitutions and bills of right. Admixture is the hall-
mark of modern governance, Foucault explains:
You can see that in the modern world, in the world we have known since the nineteenth cen-
tury, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other,
and struggle with each other . And it is all these different arts of government, all these differ-
ent types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which,
overlapping each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate from the nine-
teenth century. What is politics, in the end, if not both the interplay of these different arts of
government with their different reference points and the debate to which these different arts of
government give rise? (Birth 313)
The lectures historicize this debate by reviewing multiple examples. Including, for
instance, the very interesting and very paradoxical conversation among 18th-century
Physiocrats concerning the possibility of free decision-making under sovereign rule. The
latter half of The Birth of Biopolitics attends in detail to late-20th-century haggling about
the policies inspired by Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, who sought to extend the
domain of economic analysis deep into the nooks and crannies of social life (Birth 284).
When Foucault turns to later historical periods, Stephen Collier observes,
The temporality speeds up; the shifts are short term and sectoral rather than global. And we are
no longer dealing with global logics of the classical age or of biopolitics, whose hidden nomos
should be sought in this or that limit experience (of colonialism, of the camps). (93)
Instead of sweeping governmental logics, Foucaults analyses of more recent times yield
what Collier calls problem spaces where managerial techniques and technologies get
tried out, reformulated, and redeployed (93). Although Colliers examples of Putins Rus-
sia and Lulas Brazil emphasize the potential volatility of contemporary combinations of
liberal governance and state planning, the current recession might encourage us to think
of every place as a problem space, and government in general as a process of trial and
error rather than ideological expression.
The administrative tendency to employ multiple and even seemingly contradictory
tactics and strategies is especially apparent in the varieties of economics-driven statecraft
that critics lump together under neoliberalism. This ism, David Harvey observes, is
notable for its frequently partial and lop-sided application from one state and social for-
mation to another (13). Although broadly associated with notions about free markets
and laissez-faire, this sort of governance is also interventionist. The political economists
Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings observe that massive interventions by the Bush and
Obama Administrations in the course of the current crisis are merely the culmination
of the long series of interventions that marked the neoliberal era (723). In part
because the purity of neoliberal theory is generally matched by the impurity of neolib-
eral practice, the anthropologist John Comaroff discourages use of the noun form neo-
liberalism in favor of the active voice, as adverb, which connotes an aspiration, a
species of practice, a process of becoming (46). We can expect that process to unfold
unevenly across the range of institutions governing populations in and among given ter-
ritories or regions. For example, deregulation at the level of the state may be comple-
mented by micro-management at the level of the factory or the transnational business.5
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose argue that dispersing administrative authority is part and
parcel of advanced liberal rule, which favors government at a distance, the delegation
of management to corporate entities, and the kind of self-regulating individual Foucault

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calls Homo oeconomicus [as] an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself (Miller 35;

Foucault, Birth 226).
Novel writers have joined social scientists in offering case studies that indicate the vari-
ety of forms governance currently takes even as they rework and reimagine those forms.6
Scholars, such as Melissa Wright, Naila Kabeer, and Leslie Chang describe how laborers
working and moving among locations ranging from Mexico to Great Britain, Bangladesh
to China experience the contradictory demand to think like an entrepreneur in the con-
text of strictly run sweatshops. Novels like Monica Alis Brick Lane are notable for playing
up the congruence between literary and social scientific efforts to represent variation in
the society of neoliberal governance around the world: Ali writes in her acknowledge-
ments, I am deeply grateful to Naila Kabeer, from whose study of Bangladeshi women
garment workers in London and Dhaka (The Power to Choose) I drew inspiration (371).
Other works of fiction, like Indra Sinhas Animals People focus on specific instances of
governmental crisis. Sinhas novel describes various inter- and intra-state actors jockeying
for control in the wake of a Bhopal-like disaster. Animals People draws on literary
conventions of first-person narration and character development to think through social-
science questions about state oversight, transnational corporate responsibility, and NGO
self-interest. By paying special attention to the administrative insights of his eponymous
hero, the twisted and scarred Animal, Sinha goes further than some sociologists in imag-
ining how subjects of governance can become expert in its workings. If Ali and Sinha
depict governance from below, novels including William Gibsons trilogy of Pattern
Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History as well as Iain Bankss The Business chronicle
governmentality from the standpoint of globetrotting specialists. Banks narrates the tale
of a company that tries to buy and marry into a kingdom to gain a seat at the
United Nations and acquire the global power of a state. Gibson spins yarns about
advertising executives and post-Soviet businessmen who rely on their preternaturally
gifted adjutants to bring into being and help to manage networked populations of
producers and consumers.7
Literary critical descriptions of how literature treats matters of governance differ mark-
edly, especially in the ways critics imagine the relationship between their scholarship and
work on the topic of administration from other disciplines. Some literary critics under-
stand literature as stoking a desire for administrative intervention: Bruce Robbins detects
both the smell of infrastructure as it decays and an effort to rekindle passion for public
works in, among other fictions, Jonathan Franzens Strong Motion (Smell 25).8 In a simi-
lar vein, some critics read literature as a diagnostic tool capable of illuminating the ethical
paradoxes involved in regulation, which is how Mrinalini Chakravorty and Leila Neti
analyze the accounts of human organ trading in Chris Abanis Graceland (198). Chakra-
vorty and Neti allow one to imagine literature as a tool for spotting administrative chal-
lenges, which other forms of scholarship (and perhaps other pieces of literature) would
then set out to address. This approach finds a counterpart in social scientific expectations
about what literary criticism might do. The sociologist Patricia Ticineto Clough, for
example, wants to explain the affect enfolded in the relation of governance and the mar-
ket. She finds that the moods and passions coloring political movements and housing
bubbles alike pose a challenge to sociologists who think only in terms of quantification,
and she looks for assistance from literary critics accustomed to thinking seriously about
emotional heft (6401).
Alternatively, there are scholars who present literature as interrupting rather than com-
plementing social science. Peter Hitchcock charges the wild imaginings of novelists like
Nuruddin Farah with reminding one that the lives in play [in chaotic settings like

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contemporary Somalia] need more than statistical adjustments and infrastructure plans of
the sort promulgated by political scientists and foreign policy experts (745). Some social
scientists agree. The international relations professor Christine Sylvester suggests a division
of labor: development studies will conceive of the Third World as a problematic of
progress that can be arrayed well in statistical terms, but this will require a reminder of
the everyday lives that feature innovels (66).
Without explicitly endorsing Foucaults thesis, these very different, even conflicting
social scientific and literary critical interventions collectively lend credence to the claim
that literature thinks in governmental terms. Literary critics and sociologists alike learn
from fictional accounts of weak government in failed states as well as depictions of wel-
fare states slowly collapsing. By reading fiction for what it can tell us about populations
and the various entities that govern them (or aspire to do so), these scholars ask some-
thing rather different of literature than have critics of literary nationalism. To emphasize
governmentality is to concentrate less on citizen-subjectivity and the dream (seemingly
always betrayed) of national unity. Instead, it means attending to the differing kinds of
unequal ties that bind experts in international trade, disaster response, and infrastructure
planning to the populations they serve and regulate.
When reconceived as a tool for evaluating administrative practice, literature appears no
longer limited to imagining the sort of national community Benedict Anderson describes
as a deep, horizontal comradeship (7). Literary critics who read fiction and poetry as
working hand in hand with Andersons newspaper, census, map, and museum are attend-
ing to governmentality, but of a sort bound by what he calls the nations limited imagin-
ings (7). This was the frame for such scholarly approaches as Subaltern Studies, which
strived to identify a deviation from an idealthe people or subalternwhich is itself
defined as a difference from the elite (Spivak 272). As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
famously observed, Subaltern Studies wanted to answer questions like How can we
touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? and most
evocatively, With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak? (2723). Partha
Chatterjee characterizes these questions as focused on how a nation-state founded on
popular sovereignty deviates from its purported goal of granting equal rights to citizens
(37). That focus, he says, defined the domain of politics described in great detail in
democratic political theory in the last two centuries (38). Scholarship on governmentality
reframes the problem of popular sovereignty as one of government agencies pursuing
multiple policies of security and welfare (37). This framing, Chatterjee argues, connotes
a different domain of politics, the politics not of citizens and their rights but of popula-
tions both settled and mobile, with all of their desires and needs (38).

Population
Population, Foucault observes, varies with the climate with the material surround-
ings with peoples customs, and according to the laws to which it is subjected (Secu-
rity 701). Population can be measured with statistics, but it is also a quasi-natural object
that has specific needs of subsistence and a cultural entity that includes communities with
beliefs and norms. Population is, above all, amenable to administration. Its health can be
improved, its capacities encouraged, its welfare secured. It is both subject and object of
governance. What drives a population emerges with greater clarity the more government
submits it to careful study. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault describes populations
emergence in efforts to manage the early modern plague town. He follows the categorys
shifting use over the centuries, winding up with late-20th-century efforts to quantify

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global economic activity and voting patterns. Population has never taken more forms than
it does today: administrators gauge desires that must be met and cravings that must be
curbed, policy around the world is informed by the likes of consumer surveys and epide-
miological reports.
Foucault spends considerable time describing long-standing debate about how to use
statistics in the governing of populations and in the crafting of policy that encourages
self-governance. He identifies contemporary health and welfare administrations that
preach prevention and entrepreneurship, while treating individuals as the owners of
human capital whose value can be increased through education, migration for work, or
even the judicious selection of a mate. Parents function as a key instrument of such gov-
ernmentality:
Time spent, care given, as well as the parents education in short, the set of cultural stimuli
received by the child, will all contribute to the formation of those elements that can make up a
human capital. (Foucault, Birth 229)
Governance in this mode sees its job as helping parents to teach their children well, and
helping children grow up to be productive members of society. Keeping a population
active, healthy, and secure at minimum expense is no new problem, but rather the classic
administrative conundrum.
Recently, literary criticism has explicitly appropriated Foucaults theory to show how
novels flesh out the challenges of governing an aggregation of self-interested individuals.
As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse show, Daniel Defoes 1722 A Journal
of the Plague Year presents this problem in the very venue of the plague town that Fou-
cault sees as a test case for modern European disciplinary procedures. Defoe sets up
those procedures in order to thwart them, Armstrong and Tennenhouse explain,
bringing to the fore the very problem that Foucault develops fully in his lectures on
biopower delivered at the College de France (167). Governing the plague city involves
figuring out how to secure the benefits of trade and commerce while containing the
perils of circulation, which range from highly contagious disease to equally communica-
ble political unrest. Defoes narration suggests that no promise of strict social order can
emerge to fully answer this problem. Instead of social fixity, his novel produces a com-
peting administrative dream of sustainable growth and political stability amidst ongoing
change. Defoe imagines no social hierarchy ordered by nature, no transcendent law to
guide policy. Instead, he introduces his readers to a population limited only by the
extent of its flow and the supply of goods and information, as Armstrong and Tennen-
house describe it: humanity in this form has neither bottom nor top nor end nor
beginning (170).
There can be no starker contrast than that between the social life appearing in A Jour-
nal of the Plague Year and that exemplified by Defoes more canonical 18th-century novel
of government, Robinson Crusoe, which is often held up as the exemplary chronicle of the
self-regulating individual. Generating a sense among readers that they, like Robinson
Crusoe, might govern themselves is one of literatures great accomplishments, but one
that is unintelligible absent the administrative challenge of bringing order to the plague
city. Armstrong and Tennenhouse observe that the taxonomy of Defoes Plague Year
continues to trouble modern thought, especially in the figure of an economy gov-
erned by its own internal logic, susceptible to erratic mood swings and impervious to the
will and needs of governments and individuals (170). In addition to Victorian urban fic-
tions with their crowds and masses, imperial gothic novels with their mobs and monsters,
postcolonial fictional portrayals of revolt reveal literatures continuing theorization of

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populations whose mutability tests government. When it is telling tales of revolution, as

when it is recounting stories of individual development, literature remains a laboratory
for biopower.
Even when they do not explicitly reference Foucault, literary critical and social scien-
tific scholars of colonial and postcolonial governance make abundantly clear that the self-
governing individual and the population that demands administrative attention operate in
tandem. British imperial governance was organized by the contradiction between those,
mostly white, subjects John Stuart Mill thought capable of individual independence and
social control, and those, mostly not white, he deemed worthy of Despotism a legiti-
mate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their
improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end (5, 10). As Gyan
Prakash characterizes this managerial distinction, Britain conceived of its global popula-
tion as constituted both by individuals with the attributes of homo economicus and by
communities [that] invoked primordial bonds of blood, religion, culture, and territorial-
ity (27). Anthropological accounts complemented political assessments by describing
native (if primitive) communities sufficiently capable of taking care of themselves that
they could be governed at a distance. In the British Empire, approaches for delegating
power in ways that preserved imperial oversight ranged from the model of Princely
States in India to the designation of warrant chiefs in Nigeria. David Scott sees
the logic of population at work in the colonial governmentality of 1833s Colebrook-
Cameron Commission recommendations for reform in Ceylon: [W]hat was at stake in
the governmental redefinition and reordering of the colonial world, he argues, was
to design institutions such that, following only their self-interest, natives would do what
they ought (43). Postcolonial versions of governmentality continue to employ notions of
indigeneity and community institutionalized during the Age of Empire. Thus, Partha
Chatterjee argues, caste and religion in India, ethnic groups in Southeast Asia, and tribes
in Africa remained the dominant criteria for identifying communities among the popula-
tions of policy (37).
Literary contributions to discussion of colonial and postcolonial population abound.
Early-20th-century novels considered the need to reform colonial administration given
increasingly restive subjects (as in the Indian Princely State crisis depicted by Sarath
Kumar Ghoshs 1909 Prince of Destiny) and outlined plans for generating anti-colonial
state-makers more responsive to popular needs and desires (as in the plan for an African
university outlined by J. E. Casely-Hayfords 1911 Ethiopia Unbound). Postcolonial efforts
including Chinua Achebes novel Arrow of God and Wole Soyinkas play Death and the
Kings Horseman invite readers to compare pre-colonial and colonial ideas of government
by weighing alternate definitions of community as well as different mixtures of sovereign
and administrative authority. In a formulation that ramified through the late-20th literary
field, Chinua Achebe presented the author as a figure for the tension between competing
modes of governing organized around communal obligation and individual property
rights. In his influential essay The Writer and His Community, he presented an author
simultaneously subordinated to his community and also the beneficiary of rights, which
derive from the West and its notion of proprietorship (48, 578). Whole subgenres of
postcolonial fiction have arisen to specify new problems of population, such as the child
soldiers novels by Chris Abani (Song for Night) and Emmanuel Dongala (Johnny Mad Dog),
which question whether youth combatants are self-regulating individuals in bad situations
or avatars for a restive mob. Literature itself has proven a postcolonial problem of gover-
nance, as N~gu~gi wa Thiongo explains in a prefatory note to the English translation of his
folk-tale-cum-satire Matigari:

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For a short period in 1987, Matigari, the fictional hero of the novel, was himself resurrected as
a subversive political character. [I]ntelligence reports had it that peasants in Central Kenya
were whispering and talking about a man called Matigarimaking demands for truth and jus-
tice. There were orders for his immediate arrest. (viii)
Postcolonial literary criticism like Joseph Slaughters study of human rights plots,
Achille Mbembes analysis of postcolony aesthetics, and Simon Gikandis interrogation
of literary cosmopolitanism has drawn attention to specifically postcolonial consideration
of governance by states and NGOs as represented in literature and political science.
Scholarly interest in migrancy, meanwhile, poses questions of population that clearly
exceed the frame of the nation-state. Rosemary Marangoly Georges The Politics of
Home is an important contribution to the literary critical study of what the anthropolo-
gist Aihwa Ong calls disciplinary institutions of ethnic enclaves, factories, and families,
which have rendered migrant workers governable in ethnicized ways (Ong 124).
Jacqueline Rose focuses on one headline-grabbing instance of such governance in her
consideration of British administrative efforts to intervene in the ethnicized practice of
honor killing represented in, among other literary works, Nadeem Aslams Maps for
Lost Lovers.
Because this literary criticism suggests the considerable variety in literature that speaks
to problems of population, it demonstrates to scholars who may be ready to oppose liter-
ature to government that they should not be hasty to do so. Matthew Hart and Jim Han-
sen are among the literary critics who challenge the seeming necessity of the opposition
between monolithic state and individual artist, which has underwritten innumerable
scholarly polemics since, as it were, the poets banishment from Platos ideal republic
(493). Contrary to this formulation, Hart and Hansen argue on behalf of academic atten-
tion to literary accounts of how assent takes place, how hegemonic institutions are repli-
cated and manipulated. These representations, they argue, have the goal of imagining
alternative arrangements of power (499). To cultivate such an understanding of what
literary objects do with government and how they think about governing, it is important
to note that questioning existing forms of power can and should be thought of as a
contribution to planning and development.

Criticism
Although as my examples suggest, some literary criticism takes governmentality as its
explicit topic, it is also possible to understand literary criticism more generally as contrib-
uting to governmentality. When literary critics study power, describe social change past
and present, and investigate inequality, they contribute to what is in effect a vast archive
of writing concerned with how societies get organized. Not all work on power is about
governing society, of course, but this is just the point: as much as Foucault distinguishes
between governing and reigning or ruling, his writing on governmentality can allow
literary critics to specify the kinds of power we study, better to explain, for example,
how pre-modern literary descriptions of domination by local potentates might differ from
tales of postcolonial professional intervention.
Beyond the possibility of further defining government as a topical or thematic concern,
there is also the question of how literary criticism contributes to governmentality when it
adds to the store of knowledge about populations. Criticism thrives on describing how
novels and poems and plays illuminate multiple facets of individuality and group subjec-
tivity. Critics identify and analyze plots that reinforce notions of personal development

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and investigate alternative ways of living. They champion texts that preserve models of
community and innovate collective dynamics. The resulting literary criticism constitutes a
record as well as analysis of myriad representations of social life, a trove of argument
about how people organize their world, and a portion of ongoing debate about who
should have governmental authority and what that authority should look like. Even liter-
ary critics who do not see their work in this light might appreciate how literary texts
take hold of unspecified groups of people, as Jacques Ranciere puts it, widen gaps,
open up space for deviations, modify the speeds, the trajectories, and the ways in which
groups of people adhere to a condition, react to situations, recognize their images (39).
Literary criticism does not oppose but rather contributes to governmentality in explaining
how literature contemplates and inspires such social reorganization.
Literary critics may be methodologically antagonistic to social scientists, but in social
organization, they share a matter of concern. Armstrong thinks that Foucault can help us
fathom what to make of this commonality, because of the way he amplifies the more
general poststructuralist principle that any cultural inscriptionincluding litera-
tureintervenes in the material fate of its subject matter (19). Where poststructuralism
in the main privileges philosophical and linguistic insight into this process, Armstrong sees
Foucault as enabling a social scientific spin.9 He makes it incumbent on critics to reassess
their arguments about what a novel or poem or play does that is related to, even if it
appears formally different from, what a history book or an economic chart accomplishes
when it represents social life.
It remains common for literary critics to think that their skill in understanding poetic
form and novelistic style secures not only disciplinary distinction but also analytic distance
from the content denoted and connoted by literature. Literary scholars often imagine such
distance to be unavailable to social scientists who hold themselves responsible for provid-
ing the scholarly bases of governmental policy. There are many versions of this argument
linking skill in interpreting form with a claim to a superior vantage on the social relations
content discloses. One version belongs to the Frankfurt School and its theory of aesthetic
negation. Another has been generalized among literary scholars used to treating their
objects of study as vehicles for dissent and resistance. These critical postures may be more
allied to governmental practice than is habitually thought: disciplinary expertise enables
alternate vantage points, which suggests that literary critics offer competing claims to
regulation, rather than critiques that enable them to leap outside the problematic of
administration.
Such intertwining of governmental practice and its critique is the signature of contem-
porary neoliberal administration, which according to Foucault entails ongoing critical
reflection guided less by doctrinal agenda than the drive to fine tune intervention:
the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touch and others that you are enti-
tled to touch. The problem is how you touch them. The problem is the way of doing things,
the problem, if you like, of governmental style. (Birth 321, 133)
Government that thinks this way proffers an
image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which the field is left open to fluctuating pro-
cesses, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to
bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players. (Birth 25960)
This is governance by inclusion rather than exclusion, a manipulation of the rules of the
game rather than an invocation of natural laws, an adaptive approach to ever-changing
conditions rather than a recalcitrant doctrine.

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Given this characterization of governance, criticism (literary or otherwise) appears part

and parcel of administration, rather than an interruption that reveals hidden presumptions
or logical errors to debilitating effect.10 Butler understands Foucault as arguing that cri-
tique maintains important relations to the modes of knowledge that articulate modes of
governmental authority (791). Criticism is part of rule rather than its opposite. Questions
about how not to be governed? are, Butler argues, engaged in governance. A criticism
of procedure or policy amounts to a question of how not to be governed in this or that
way. But it is not a question of how not to be governed at all (Butler 7912). Butler
allows us to see how Foucault makes criticism intelligible as a means for reproducing
governmental forms even while reimaging governmental tactics and strategies.
Literatures ability to generate alternatives to existing governmentality is perhaps most
readily apparent in novels, poems, and plays that authorize discrepant forms of administra-
tion. Literature habitually alters the division of labor between experts and the populations
they describe and manage. For example, I have written elsewhere about how works by
such figures as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Rebecca West identify authoritative
actors within the kinds of distressed groups that foreign policy study locates in failed
states. Novels like Adichies Half of a Yellow Sun foreground the discrepant expertise of
child soldiers and victims of atrocity, turning them into veritable administrative reformers.
Such literature does not eradicate the professional hierarchy intrinsic to contemporary
government so much as it poses questions about who exactly qualifies as an administrative
expert. In this way, fiction helps make it possible to imagine renovating the governmental
hierarchy that postcolonial states inherited from imperialism.11 Some social scientists also
seek to renovate the inequality that abides among scientists and laypeople (Michel Callon
et al.), investment bankers and their clients (Karen Ho), international development
bureaucrats and environmental activists (Tania Murray Li), urban planners and slum
dwellers (Gautam Bhan). Literature distinguishes itself from those social scientific efforts,
however, by addressing readers who may be experts and bankers and bureaucrats and
urban planners, but also might be laypeople and clients and activists and slum dwellers.
Literature reinvents administrative hierarchy on the page as well as in the relationship
between the page and its readers.
Any particular literary works potential to alter governmentality may appear small. Like
the relatively local and microscopic analyses in which Foucault typically engages, how-
ever, the nonce taxonomies composed by singular literary examples accrue. Which is
why it is vital to think of literature and literary criticism in aggregate rather than asking
any particular essay or monograph, or novel or poem or play to do the work of critique
on its own. And why it is equally vital for literary criticism to think of itself as involved
in cross-disciplinary efforts at revising governmentality. Literary criticism at its most
critical is also at its most fully engaged in the governmental process, which is to say that
literary critique is best understood not as a strategy of opposition but rather as a tactic for
reform.

Short Biography
John Marx is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis,
where he teaches 20th- and 21st-century literature. He is author of The Modernist Novel
and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge UP, 2005) and is completing a book manuscript
entitled Fiction After Liberalism. He serves as an Associate Editor for Contemporary Liter-
ature. His essays have appeared in venues that include Cultural Critique, Modernism Moder-
nity, Novel, and The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies.

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 Literature and Governmentality 77

Notes
* Correspondence: Department of English, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616,
USA. Email: jmarx@ucdavis.edu

1
On what Foucault has to say about race, see McWhorter. For the implications of Foucaults writing on economic
actors, see Read and McNay. Regarding statecraft, especially of the liberal and neoliberal variety, see Donzelot and
Gordon, Lemke, and Medovoi. For a general overview on what is new about the lectures, see Venn and Terrano-
vas introduction to the recent special issue of Theory, Culture and Society about Thinking After Foucault.
2
This ugly word, as Foucault calls it, saw the light of day in his lecture of February 1, 1978, published as chapter
four of Security, Territory, Population. Before the 2007 English publication of the lectures as a whole, that single lec-
ture was published multiple times, first in an Italian journal in 1978. An English translation by Rosi Braidotti
appeared in 1979, and another translation appeared as a chapter in the 1991 collection called The Foucault Effect
(Foucault, Security 87).
3
The range of such social scientific study may be suggested by, for example, Law and Callons analysis of the plan-
ning involved in designing and trying to build a jet aircraft, Mamdanis analysis of neoliberal reforms at Makerere
University in Uganda, Fassins study of Medicin sans Frontiers, Simones interpretation of people as infrastructure
in Johannesburg, Wrights account of workplace dynamics on the US Mexico border, and Simons and Tuckers
socio-geography of failed states. For its part, literary criticism finds itself responsible for evaluating literatures
abiding investment in comparing different approaches to social organization and weighing their relative merits. As
I show, relevant novelistic examples range from Daniel Defoe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
4
The distinction will be familiar to readers of the last chapters in The History of Sexuality, Volume One, where
Foucault contrasts the ancient right to take life or let live with power exercised over life, throughout its unfolding
(History 138). In the lectures, Foucault maintains this distinction, further specifying sovereign rule that asks What
original rights can found this governmentality? and liberal political economy that queries What are the real effects
of the exercise of governmentality? (Birth 15). Where The History of Sexuality might appear to offer a scheme in
which ancient sovereign forms of government get displaced by modern liberal states, the lectures are careful to stip-
ulate that the emergence of new practices of governance does not necessarily entail the disappearance of old ones.
On what Foucault says about such historical change in both his earlier and later writings, see Collier (867).
5
On this dispersion of regulation from state to factory, see Read (334).
6
For a detailed interrogation of what constitutes a literary case, and thoughtful questioning of whether literature
submits case studies in an idiom of judgment that resembles in meaningful ways the writing of social science, see
Berlants introduction to the special issue of Critical Inquiry on this topic (On the Case 663).
7
Even as they pursue differing goals, Jameson and Berlant agree that Gibsons Pattern Recognition provides insight
into the sort of research projects, as Berlant calls them, engaged in by corporate and state institutions in the wake
of 9 11 (Jameson 105; Berlant, Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event 858).
8
Robbins finds Foucault a sometimes reluctant but always valuable ally in the reformist project of defending and
extending the welfare state (Upward 92). I am claiming that the lectures actually show that Foucault helps consider-
ably in the project of thinking about what literature does to imagine and reimagine government.
9
Poststructuralists greet this move with skepticism, Armstrong notes, fearing the gradual erosion of procedures
that gave absolute priority to language over the things and people from which language only seems to draw its
meaning (18).
10
Cherniavsky describes the dilemma the critic of neoliberal governance faces when she asks: [W]hat is the abid-
ing value of critical defamiliarization, if what confronts us under the sign of neoliberalism today are ultrarapid
forms of free-floating control and dereferentialized identities that remain constitutivelyrigorouslymutable or
unmade? (23).
11
I make this argument in an essay devoted to Failed-State Fiction.

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