5 Foucauldian Approaches
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If state-centered theorists hoped to bring the state back in as an independent
variable and/or an autonomous actor, Foucault aimed to undermine the analytical
centrality of the state, sovereignty, or law for power relations. He advanced three key
claims in this regard. First, state theory is essentialist: it tries to explain the state and
state power in terms of their own inherent, pre-given properties. Instead it should
try to explain the development and functioning of the state as the contingent
outcome of speciWc practices that are not necessarily (if at all) located within, or
openly oriented to, the state itself. Second, state theory retains medieval notions of a
centralized, monarchical sovereignty and/or a uniWed, juridico-political power. But
there is a tremendous dispersion and multiplicity of the institutions and practices
involved in the exercise of state power and many of these are extra-juridical in
nature. And, third, state theorists were preoccupied with the summits of the state
apparatus, the discourses that legitimated sovereign state power, and the extent of
the sovereign state’s reach into society. In contrast Foucault advocated a bottom-up
approach concerned with the multiple dispersed sites where power is actually
exercised. He proposed a microphysics of power concerned with actual practices
of subjugation rather than with macropolitical strategies. For state power is dis-
persed. It involves the active mobilization of individuals and not just their passive
targeting, and can be colonized and articulated into quite diVerent discourses,
strategies, and institutions. In short, power is not concentrated in the state: it is
ubiquitous, immanent in every social relation (see notably Foucault 1980 a,b).
Nonetheless Foucault did not reject all concern with the macrophysics of state
power. He came to see the state as the crucial site of statecraft and ‘‘governmen-
tality’’ (or governmental rationality). What interested him was the art of govern-
ment, a skilled practice in which state capacities were used reXexively to monitor
the population and, with all due prudence, to make it conform to speciWc state
projects.Raison d’e ́tat, an autonomous political rationality, set apart from religion
and morality, was the key to the rise of the modern state. This in turn could be
linked to diVerent modes of political calculation or state projects, such as those
coupled to the ‘‘police state’’ (Polizeistaat), social government, or the welfare state.
It was in and through these governmental rationalities or state projects that more
local or regional sites of power were colonized, articulated into ever more general
mechanisms and forms of global domination, and then maintained by the entire
state system. Foucault also insisted on the need to explore the connections between
these forms of micropower and mechanisms for producing knowledge—whether
for surveillance, the formation and accumulation of knowledge about individuals,
or their constitution as speciWc types of subject.
Foucault never codiWed his work and changed his views frequently. Taking his
ideas on the ubiquity of power relations, the coupling of power-knowledge, and
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