Nikolas Rose

Abstract

Todd Meyers (TM): The first topic I want to discuss is influences and interlocutors. I’m curious about your beginnings and the directions your work has taken over the past decades.Nikolas Rose (NR): I guess it’s best to talk about this biographically. I went up to university in the 1960s to read biology at Sussex University. I worked in the department of John Maynard Smith, a rather famous geneticist, mainly on fruit flies, on Drosophila — this was his model animal. Of course, the mid-1960s were a period of considerable social and political ferment. I became convinced that Drosophila genetics did not really hold the key to understanding the things that were happening around me. I moved first of all to animal behavior and then to human behavior — I ended up with qualifications in biology and psychology. When I left university, I trained as a teacher, and I taught in a comprehensive school in the south of England. And then a little later, rather by accident, I got a job teaching in a school for what were then called “maladjusted children.” That term probably sounds strange now, but it was one category of the organization of education for kids who couldn’t be coped with in school. There were maladjusted children. There were delicate children. There were educationally subnormal children. There were children who were deaf and blind. There were different special schools for the children who were placed in each of these categories. At that time, there was a rather heated debate about one category — educational subnormality, which was disproportionally applied to children of West Indian origin. Well, I was teaching in a school for maladjusted children, and I started thinking about the history of that category and how it worked. So this whole line of research came about slightly by accident.TM: How so?NR: As a refugee psychologist, I was interested in the political role of psychology. Although most political debate didn’t consider things like maladjusted children, I had become convinced, perhaps naively, that child rearing and education played a key role in maintaining capitalist social relations. And clearly, from that perspective, these practices of separating out problematic children at an early age on the basis of some kind of quasi-psychological classification had a role. So my first proper research was on this idea of the maladjusted child. Maladjustment was both an organizational category and a conceptual category, so that forced me to recognize the intertwining of the organizational and the conceptual when it came to the psychological sciences and their norms and judgments. Of course, at that time, I was working with these kids and that gave the whole thing a particular kind of spice. This shaped the way I have worked since then — studying the intersections between systems of knowledge, modes of intervention, forms of institutional organization, and what we would now call subjectification, and with a particular concern with the role of professionals in these processes. This all sounds obvious now, but when I was beginning to work on it — in the late 1960s and early 1970s — not many people were doing that kind of work. Various other things happened. I left my school for maladjusted kids, which was a big wrench for me. I left to get a master’s degree, and I wrote up the research on maladjustment for my dissertation. After that I worked for three years for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The NSPCC was then the only body in the United Kingdom, apart from the police, that had the statutory power to remove children from their home if they thought these children were being maltreated. I was in the small research department there, evaluating their forms of preschool intervention for children at risk and setting up registers for children thought to be “at risk.” Child abuse in those days was mainly thought of as physical abuse and identified by a particular set of physical injuries — only later did sexual abuse come to the fore, and then later still, emotional abuse.TM: It sounds as if your work was heavily inflected with political concerns of the time.NR: Yes. Theoretically, I was a Marxist of a particular stripe, trying to make use of the intellectual machinery of Marxism to understand my particular problems but finding it extremely un-useful, unwieldy for doing the kind of work I wanted to do. The closest concepts within Marxism were notions of ideology and false consciousness, but these didn’t seem to be able to do much work in helping understand specific conjunctures, let alone helping develop ways of intervening. The kinds of Marxism that I was involved in tried to give some salience to the idea — it sounds crass now, I know — of ideological struggle, to develop an antieconomistic kind of Marxism. There were a few other groups that were doing this kind of thing — notably the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, led by Stuart Hall. I helped set up some groups, as one did in those days — little study groups and so on — on ideology and consciousness. Partly as a result of that, in 1975, I got together with some friends of mine who were mostly also refugee psychologists, and we started a self-produced journal called Ideology and Consciousness, which was — in its early incarnation — a journal of Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. We were reading Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan and structuralist linguistics — a potent amalgam of largely French theory. Our belief was that from these three conceptual perspectives, we could develop the concepts that would help us do the sort of analysis that we wanted to do. The Birmingham group was more influenced by Antonio Gramsci, but we were more interested in Althusser. In particular, we were influenced by what was then probably the most difficult article that I’d ever read — it now seems so simplistic and functionalist — “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” This led me to focus on what I then thought of as “the reproduction of the ideological subject.” Gradually, not to put too fine a point on it, it became clear that this intellectual apparatus — Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis — could not give us the concepts that enabled us to cut into specific situations. The Birmingham group tried to use the term relative autonomy to free up the analysis of culture and ideology from the economy — the relative autonomy of the ideological: the economy was determinant, but only in the last instance. Nobody knew what that meant — not even Althusser, who framed it in that way.TM: What else were you reading at the time?NR: We were reading Roland Barthes, Russian formalism, all the components of “structuralism” — but, crucially, I rediscovered Michel Foucault. I first came across Foucault when I was at university — Madness and Civilization, the very abbreviated translation of The History of Madness — I read him then as a kind of antipsychiatrist. This is another stream in my life, ever since I was at university — psychiatry. I’ve always had many good friends who’ve lived under various psychiatric descriptions — not people who just had a little “nervous breakdown” but people who have had what would be called in the United Kingdom these days “severe and enduring mental health problems.” Anyhow, we were reading the various translations of Foucault that came into English in the 1970s — The Order of Things, The Birth of the Clinic, The Archeology of Knowledge. Gradually, I began to feel that this potentially provided a more usable conceptual toolbox for doing the kinds of work that we were doing on empirical situations — on complexes of knowledge, expertise, institutions, and practices of subjectification. As you can see, I was always rather pragmatic in my orientation to concepts! So our little journal — Ideology and Consciousness — dropped the word “Ideology” because we didn’t believe in that anymore, dropped the word “Consciousness” because we were interested not in consciousness but in the conditions for thought. It became I and C, and we started translating and publishing quite a lot of the work of Foucault. Two friends of ours — Colin Gordon and Graham Burchell — joined our board. And that was the approach that I took in my first work on “the psychological complex.”TM: In some ways you couldn’t anticipate the ways the disciplines in which you were interested would change from the time you began to engage them. I’m fascinated by the labor of this critical work and how it evolved.NR: Many of the conditions for this critical work were really quite material. Everybody was running little magazines in those days. That infrastructure was actually rather crucial to us. Our journal was completely self-produced, and we all contributed time to a cooperative that distributed it to bookshops across the country. And we mailed it out across the world. We actually had a very wide circulation and gained many subscribers: we ran readers’ meetings, where there was intense discussion. It was a hopeful time — we believed that how you thought made a difference to what you would and could do. Among these journals, there were some that focused on critical psychology. Their general approach was to critique psychometric psychology — IQ tests and the like. Psychologists were seen as servants of power, and their theories were ideologies that supported power and masked their real role. They always had an explicit or implicit alternative psychology — usually either humanistic or psychoanalytic. My own view was that each of these alternatives — whether it was humanistic, psychometric, or psychoanalytical — each entailed its own set of power relations. You couldn’t just try to do away with nasty disciplining psychometrics and have encounter groups or psychotherapy as if those were free from power relations. I argued that you needed to examine the implications of all the different configurations between forms of knowledge of the human being, whether they are biological or psychoanalytic or psychological, the types of expertise that they give rise to, the practices of judgment and invention that are bound up to them, and so on and so forth. Basically, the critique of psychology was largely ideology critique — these disciplines were ideologies that disguised real relations and had to be countered by trying to find truth. The problem was ideology and error — that gave a discourse its power in a regime of domination. Actually, at one stage in my PhD, I focused on this way of thinking — that is to say, the notion of critique as it was linked to that of ideology. Why were all these Marxist books called a contribution to a critique? What was critique? I became very critical of the idea of critique, which could be traced to German biblical criticism in the nineteenth century. It argued that you should try to read through the text of the Bible to uncover the real, transhistorical meaning that that text embodied — you read through the misleading surface to find the underlying truth. That was very much the Marxist method. I didn’t feel very sympathetic to that. On the contrary, I took from Foucault the recognition that the key thing at issue is not error but truth. Power lies not in error but in the means of production of those things that have come to be true — what we hold to be true about ourselves and our world. So it was much more interesting for me to try to understand how these truth regimes came into being and what the consequences of the truth were and not always to be criticizing them on the grounds that they were erroneous. There was one other very important thing that I took from Foucault, which was actually in the very first piece that we wrote in Ideology and Consciousness. This was the relationship between ways of saying and ways of doing — between discourse and practice. A lot of the so-called critique of ideology was a critique of discourses. But I was very affected by my reading of The Birth of the Clinic, which showed that it was extremely unhelpful — probably impossible — to make a distinction between the emergence of a certain discourse of clinical medicine and the institutional practices in which that took shape — and the forms of intervention, the management of cases in the hospital, the organization, or the autopsy or whatever it happened to be. These forms of knowledge were bound to those practices not just contingently but constitutively. In that piece, we talked about discursive practices, which wasn’t a tremendously good term. But it indicated our wish to say that you could not make a kind of ontological distinction between what was said and what was done.TM: Subjectivity and governmentality are incredibly important subjects throughout your work. I was hoping that maybe you could speak a little bit about how those two concepts have grown for you as well.NR: I’ll start with subjectivity. As I said, I was interested in Marxism and Althusser’s conception of ideology and, in particular, the way in which Althusser framed the question of the construction of ideological subjectivity. Subjectivity was seen as the crucial mode for the reproduction of the relations of production. So the question of subjectivity looked as if it had political importance. My first interest was in how subjects were conceived in contemporary thought, in particular in psychology, but for me this was always linked to a concern with how subjects were constituted through various kinds of practices — how they became certain kinds of persons. Some thought that the direction to go down was toward psychoanalysis — in particular, Lacanian or non-ego psychoanalysis. But I became unhappy with the view that the only way to deal with the question of subjectivity was to come up with one’s own conception of subjectivity. I thought this amounted merely to proposing another conception of subjectivity to put alongside the whole array of them that we’ve had for the past few millennia.TM: What were the ways you found to think through this dilemma?NR: I made what for me seemed to be a significant shift. This was to say that the question was not about what human subjects were — which you could not answer without deploying your own psychology — but about what human beings took themselves to be in certain times and places and within certain practices. That seemed to me to be a question that was open to historical investigation. As soon as I framed it in that way to myself, it became clear that at least since the middle of the nineteenth century in societies like ours, the human sciences themselves, in particular psychology but also sociology and other human sciences, were intimately bound up with that question. They produced forms of truth, systems of judgment, the types of authority, et cetera that gave human beings a language to think about themselves, to understand themselves, to judge themselves. So that became the thread of one whole strand of my work. It was what I finally focused on in my doctoral thesis and became my first book, The Psychological Complex — basically my doctoral thesis shorn of the methodological part. I then developed the approach further in Inventing Ourselves and brought things up to the present with Governing the Soul. Those books were a sort of trilogy of how one should try to think about that question. At the time, that work was treated with a certain amount of incomprehension. It was the early days of the boom in social studies of science, but that didn’t bother too much with the psychological sciences.TM: What was it that concerned these people in science and technology studies [STS]?NR: In those early days, much STS was concerned with showing that even the “hardest” sciences were socially shaped, imbued with interests, and so forth — so obviously the targets were theories and experiments in chemistry, physics, and so forth. Of course, psychologists were interested in the “social history” of their discipline, but that tended to be represented as the march of progress, a story of brilliant individuals and their lives and interactions. That’s a parody; of course, there was lots of good scholarship, but not about the kinds of things that interested me. I went to the meetings and presented my work, but it was hardly well received. I remember seeing a review by a social psychologist of Governing the Soul — which was published in 1989 — that said something like: “This is a pretty weird book. It’s written by someone who claims to be a sociologist, but it’s not really sociology. It hasn’t got much psychology in it either, so what is it all about?” But, of course, there were others who were interested in the questions — and one of them was Peter Miller, with whom I did much of my work on governmentality. Peter, like me, was interested in the radical psychiatry movement and was familiar with the brilliant work on the history of psychiatry written by Françoise and Robert Castel. We decided to put on an evening course — that was the kind of thing one did in those days — on critical psychiatry, and out of that we edited a book called The Power of Psychiatry in which we tried to develop a different kind of critical approach to psychiatry, one that didn’t simply say it was an instrument of social control and oppression but examined its role in actually creating novel relations of power and subjectivity. By a convoluted route, this led to our work on governmentality. Both of us, in our different ways, had come across a strange institution called the Tavistock Clinic [or “Tavi”]. It started as a psychoanalytic clinic in the 1920s, part of the child guidance movement. People from the Tavi were very involved in psychiatric services during the Second World War. Immediately after the Second World War, it branched out in two ways. One was into family therapies, marriage counselors and therapists, and couple therapy and the training of doctors and professionals — Tavi people practically invented group therapy and all of these things. The other way was about trying to use psychoanalytic expertise to reshape industrial relations and economic life. This was via the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations — Human Relations was its journal. All the techniques for trying to intervene in the dynamics of the group and the organization were pretty much invented at the Tavi. To cut a long story short, Peter and I decided to do historical work on this empirical site. It was interesting to us because, on the one hand, it was about interpersonal relations and new conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and group relations. On the other hand, a lot of the interventions that the Tavi was doing in the 1950s and 1960s were actually rather politically radical. They were very involved in Scandinavia, in attempts to reshape car production: introduce workers’ democracy, put workers on the boards, and things like that. So the work of the Tavi spanned from the individual to the group to the institution and to rather large questions of economic organization.TM: How did this lead to the work explicitly on governmentality? Could you describe a bit more how these things ultimately came together for you?NR: We were working on all these experts of individual and group relations who worked in therapy, social work, and organizational management, and we wrote a lot of detailed empirical papers — we recently collected them in Governing the Present. We began to be convinced that the developments we were tracing were not peripheral to the major questions of macropolitics of the state. We argued that it was only through the emergence of this filigree of practices for managing human conduct in all these different sorts of institutional forms that modern welfare states could exist at all. We wrote a paper called “Governing Economic Life,” where we tried to show that you could take this to the heartland of what Marxism claimed to be able to understand, which was economic life. You could show, in very detailed empirical ways, that modes of economic life are shaped, constituted, and managed through these forms of knowledge. For instance, the very idea of profit was constituted through particular forms of thought, practices of calculation. The economy was not self-constituting, but was constituted in very practical terms through these modes of calculation, these forms of expertise. This long predated the work by Michel Callon and his colleagues, The Laws of the Markets, which argues the same kind of thing really. I think our work was at least as interesting!The next stage was to formulate this as a much more general way of approaching the question of how it has become possible to govern. Foucault’s essay on governmentality had actually been translated in our journal, I and C, as early as 1979, but neither Peter nor I had listened to Foucault’s lectures in the late 1970s where he set out his own analysis of governmentality — we had only the most rudimentary idea of what Foucault thought about governmentality. But mentalities that govern, that was quite a provocative idea. We spent a lot of time talking about how to develop it. Although our ethos was Foucauldian, we invented most of the concepts ourselves. For instance, we invented the term governing at a distance to talk about a way in which liberal forms of government operate using techniques like audits and standards and other kinds to shape the conduct of entities without actually having formal control of their decision — it was a kind of joke about Bruno Latour’s idea of action at a distance. We drafted a paper called “Cutting off the King’s Head” in the late 1980s in which we tried to produce a kind of set of conceptual tools for analyzing what we called “political rationalities” and “governmental technologies,” and we did a rough-and-ready historical characterization of different modes of governing. We got lots of comments on that, and then, rather to our surprise, a version was published in the British Journal of Sociology in 1992 as “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” It’s become one of its most cited papers. It turned out that people found our concepts very useful for cutting into a lot of empirical questions, and this produced a cascade of papers over the next ten years about governing this and governing that. Some of these were very good and inventive. But toward the end, Peter and I both felt in our different ways that this was becoming a routine machine for generating arguments. People started to do governmentality studies, to write textbooks, and so forth — the life was wrung out of it. We had made up these concepts, and they were a pretty useful little toolbox, but we thought we’d leave the next phase to other people.TM: I’m curious about the role of collaboration in your work and how you see future work being made possible. It’s not just about your use of the pronoun we — your approach, your comportment toward working altogether, involves the idea of collaboration. And creating spaces for collaboration appears particularly important.NR: In the 1960s, if you were interested in something, you set up a little reading or study group. It was a kind of ethic of working, in opposition to what we took to be the values of the conventional academic environment. We were all on the margins of the academic world; few of us had academic jobs or anything. Of course, there were always debates about who was a better collaborator or a worse collaborator and who was bearing the load and who was not bearing the load. And the groups usually had a quite short half-life before they collapsed in disputes and into fractions and factions. After I and C, I worked with colleagues — especially Paul Hirst, who, sadly, died a couple of years ago — on a journal called Politics and Power. That was an attempt at collaboration between Marxists and feminists trying to think about politics after Marxism. When we formed the History of the Present group, we were influenced by the group of that name that had been started at Berkeley — we wanted to be a chapter of that group, but actually that group had dissolved itself. We wanted to provide a safe place for people exploring ideas outside the theoretical mainstream, to talk about them at an early stage — we were all very critical and very argumentative in as friendly a way as possible. These were really very good experiences for me. As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, these groups became more and more difficult to maintain, because the criteria of value at universities were increasingly the autonomous production of your own articles, your own impact factor, and so forth.TM: But more recently you have been involved in different types of collaboration, between social sciences and life sciences — how did that come about?NR: When I turned away from the governmentality work, I initially wanted to focus on psychiatry, but I soon realized that I might end up simply rewriting my previous books but on psychiatry rather than psychology. But what soon struck me was that most interesting and controversial developments in psychiatry related to the reemergence of biological psychiatry. It was in order to understand this that I embarked on the work that became a kind of cartography of the contemporary life sciences — although, in fact, I was thinking and writing about psychiatry all the way through. Anyhow, I wanted to create a forum where people from a range of social science backgrounds and a range of life science backgrounds could talk to each other about the new ways of thinking and intervening that were emerging in biology and biomedicine. BIOS started as a working group based at Goldsmiths College, where I was then, along the model of the History of the Present. We had conferences — we still have them — called “Vital Politics” every two or three years, where social science research students who feel isolated in studying the life sciences in their own departments can talk to one another and get useful comments, rather than having to argue with people who thought the whole enterprise was misguided. I also tried to do the more difficult thing, which was to try to produce collaborations between the social sciences and the life sciences researchers. This was for two reasons really. First, I was fed up with the way in which some science and technology studies were happy to remain on the level of commentary — to look from the outside at what the scientists were doing and to critique the hidden premises and assumptions that underpinned their activities and their truth claims. My friends in STS say that that’s a very old-fashioned notion of STS and no one is doing that anymore, but that was the view I had then. The second reason was my growing conviction that the life sciences were changing — this was the argument I tried to make in The Politics of Life Itself. When it came to accounting for the qualities and capacities of complex organisms, styles of biological thought were becoming less determinist and more open to locating those capacities in time, space, and what we loosely term “environment.” I was fed up with much of what was going on within sociology and thought there was a genuinely exciting opportunity for some critical conversations across those two — perhaps three — cultures. That was the ethos of the BIOS research center that I set up when I moved to the LSE [London School of Economics]. The aim was to develop that idea of collaboration, working together with life scientists and clinicians on common problems, but trying to avoid becoming handmaidens of the medics or just talking about social/legal/ethical implications. Some of my students took this up more enthusiastically than I’d imagined and decided to apply for some money to set up a collaborative network between social scientists and neuroscientists. I told them I didn’t have much hope of getting this money from the European Science Foundation, but they were successful, got a grant for five years to fund this wonderful set of collaborations between neuroscientists and social scientists — we worked together in the labs, doing the mouse experiments on aggression, doing the brain imaging experiments on emotion, and so on, giving talks on the genealogy of these ideas, and getting researchers from across the great divide to talk together about what it all meant. This is the ethos that I’ve taken into the new department that we’re building at King’s College, London. Somewhat to my surprise, I’ve not really had to persuade the geneticists and the neuroscientists and the cancer people and the public health people that this is the conversation that they should have. They all seem to recognize that the very science that they’re doing is driving them to understand sociality in a different kind of way. To recognize that — especially as far as human creatures are concerned — the very organic fabric of our existence is not separable into organism on one side and environment on the other. So we get back to Georges Canguilhem again and those old ways of thinking that refuse the distinction between the milieu intérieur [internal environment] and the milieu extérieur [exterior environment]. Those issues have enormous implications both conceptually and practically.TM: Earlier, it was interesting to hear you talk about the relationship between error and truth through Foucault, which is also important for Canguilhem and Gaston Bachelard in relation to epistemology. What’s interesting about the way you discuss Foucault, and which he takes up through both Bachelard and Canguilhem, sometimes in ways that are unspoken, is precisely about the productive relation between truth and error. Along similar lines, you also engage the work of Kurt Goldstein. Some of the frustrations that you describe, with psychometrics, were similar frustrations that Goldstein had with Gestalt psychology and the obsession with measurement without taking into account what you termed in your discussion empirical situatio