of operation and application, from individuals to mass populations, and
from particular parts of the body and psyche to appetites and ethics, work
or citizenship practices. Thus, for example, discourses of health, consumer-
ism, or safety are as or more important than discourses of rights in governing
the contemporary liberal democratic subject. Third, far from being restricted
to rule, law, or other kinds of visible and accountable power, governmentality
works through a range of invisible and non-accountable social powers. One
of Foucault’s best examples here is pastoral power, a form that migrates from
church to state and inWltrates workplaces as well. Pastoral power orders and
controls its subjects by promoting their well-being through detailed know-
ledge and regulation of their behavior—simultaneous individualization and
massiWcation and a high degree of moralization of crime, sin, or failure.
Fourth and related, governmentality both employsandinWltrates a number
of discourses ordinarily conceived as unrelated to political power, govern-
ance, or the state. These include scientiWc discourses (including medicine,
criminology, pedagogy, psychology, psychiatry, and demography), religious
discourses, and popular discourses. Governmentality, therefore, draws upon
without unifying, centralizing, or rendering systematic or even consistent, a
range of powers and knowledges dispersed across modern societies.
Within the problematic of government and governmentality, Foucault’s
interest in the state is largely limited to the way in which it is ‘‘governmenta-
lized’’ today. Governmentalization refers to the internal reconWguration of
the state by the project of administration and its links to external knowledges,
discourses, and institutions that govern outside the rubric and purview of the
state. The ‘‘governmentalization’’ of the state connects ‘‘the constitutional,
Wscal, organizational, and judicial powers of the state... with endeavors to
manage the economic life, the health and habits of the population, the civility
of the masses, and so forth’’ (Rose 1999 , 18 ). If governmentality in general
includes the organization and deployment of space, time, intelligibility,
thought, bodies, and technologies to produce governable subjects, the gov-
ernmentalization of the state both incorporates these tactical concerns into
state operations and articulates with them in other, non-state domains.
Foucault’s decentering of the state in formulating modern governmentality
corresponds to a contrast he establishes between governing and the state.
While Foucault acknowledges that the state may be ‘‘no more than a com-
posite reality and a mythicized abstraction,’’ Foucault takes the state to signify
powers of containment and negation, a signiWcation that does not capture
the more complex and diVuse ways that modern citizens are produced,
74 wendy brown