Governmentality as Epistemology

Abstract

This article presents Foucault's governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucault's novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucault's ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors’ practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucault's early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory framework with which they implicitly are complicit, but his later work on resistance emphasizes reflexivity and the proactive constitution and transformation of the self. The earlier framework on the governance of populations suggests that mentalities and related discourses produce practices, whereas the later framework on the governance of the self suggests the reverse, therein holding important clues for critical theory and the proactive construction of transformation based on a critique of the past and present. The article “assembles” Foucault's scholarship on governance and ethics over the course of his career to present an overall framework that is useful for analyses concerning a variety of questions. Analytical points are exemplified with reference to urban, race-related issues, drawing in part from my own research.