Governmentality, ontological security and ideational stability: Preliminary observations on the manner, ritual and logic of a particular art of government

Abstract

We live, very much, in what has been variously dubbed, 'the age of anxiety', 'the risk society', etc.--a time when feelings of insecurity and uncertainty are seemingly commonplace. This article looks at the manner in which modern governmentality (i.e., the rationality of governance) bears on such public disquietude--in doing so, governmental strategies of general persuasion and displays of implicit reassurance have a certain ideological import , they are ideologically implicated . My basic argument is that governments today, perhaps unconsciously rather than consciously, implicitly rather than explicitly, provide a significant background element of the, as it were, 'intertext' (an intersecting web of discursive semblances) of present-day 'ontological security' and associated ideational stability. I conclude that the processes of attempting to afford this sense of ontological security in the general populace has become, in some ways, a necessary ritual, a key rhetoric, a mythic form, of modern governmentality.