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was also important to have a
healthy populace that would
multiply if the government wanted
to secure long-term prosperity and
productivity. Foucault says that
from this point onward, “men and
things” (the relation people have to
wealth, the environment, famine,
fertility, the climate, and so on),
rather than territories, needed to
be administered in an efficient way.
Governance was now an “art.”
Citizen or subject?
Foucault contends that early liberal
ideas of civil society, as espoused
by John Locke and Adam Ferguson
in the 18th century, made a social
government possible. The liberal
art of government has as its
organizational principle “the
rationale of least government”; in
other words, it advocates less state
intervention and an increased focus
on the role of the population. At this
time the concept of a “population”
and its centrality to the success of
the state became paramount, and
led to the idea of “an individual
member of the population” as a
living, working, and social being.
The new idea of an autonomous
individual was to lead to many new
political questions, including the
rights and responsibilities of the
individual and the state. In what
ways can an individual be free, if
he or she is governed by the state?
The link between the “autonomous”
individual’s self-control and political
control became an important issue,
as did the possibility of domination
and economic exploitation.
In examining this period,
Foucault revisited his work on
“passive bodies.” In Discipline and
Punish, he had traced how the body
was seen as a target (to be used
and improved) by those in power
during the 17th and 18th centuries.
He also examined how techniques
of surveillance drawn from
monasteries and the army were
used to control people’s bodies and
produce passive subjects who were
incapable of revolt.
In this earlier work, Foucault
maintained that discipline creates
docility, but when focusing on
governmentality, he began to think
this placed too much emphasis on
domination and was too simplistic
an argument. Individuals, he now
said, have more opportunities to
modify and construct themselves
than he had thought previously.Governmentality refers to the ways
in which societies are decentered
and citizens play an active role in
their own self-governance; it is the
relationship between public power
and private freedom that is central.The art of government
Foucault claims that govermentality
is important because it provides
a link between what he calls
the “technologies of the self”
(the creation of the individual
subject) and the “technologies of ❯❯THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS
Governing the body
Weight-loss organizations, such as
Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig,
illustrate Foucault’s notion of
governance of the self that sits in
line with “normal” ideas of the
time. While these organizations
develop a person’s sense of self
and worth, they also envelop them
in a web of power that ultimately
benefits huge corporations.
Many feminists, such as US
writer Kim Chernin, have argued
that the quest for the perfect body
through dieting places women
within a “tyranny of slenderness.”Slimming companies and diets
constitute disciplinary practices
that promise an “improved self,”
but they also subject women to
patriarchal (male-dominated)
ideas about what a woman
“should” look like and how she
should behave. This necessity
to conform to current standards
of “normal” transforms dieting
from an eating behavior into a
moral imperative. US feminists
Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo
argue that this is indicative
of the ways in which women
become, simultaneously, both
subjects and subjected.Dieters regulate and discipline
themselves according to mass
standards and cultural requirements
rather than through individual choice.Let us not... ask... why certain
people want to dominate... Let
us ask, instead, how things
work at the level of... processes,
which subject our bodies,
govern our gestures, dictate
our behaviors.
Michel Foucault