Independent StudyFoucault and GovernmentalityProfessor Richard ShapiroSpring 2010Foucault and GovernmentalityRodrigo Gomes Guimaraes Inthe book, based on the lecture of the same name, Security, Territory,Population (1977-1978), Foucault demonstrates that biopolitics is part of acertain governmentality that in our present still exists, in the form ofneoliberal governmentality. The bookreads:Bythis word governmentality I mean three things. First, by governmentality I understand theensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections,calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeitvery complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy asits major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essentialtechnical instrument. Second, bygovernmentality I understand the tendency, the line of force, that for a longtime, and throughout the West, has constantly led towards the pre-eminence overall other types of power - sovereignty,discipline, and so on of the type of power that we can call government andwhich has led to the development of a series of specific governmentalapparatuses (appareils) on the one hand [and, on the other] to the development of a series ofknowledges (savoirs). Finally, bygovernmentality I think we should understand the process, or rather, theresult of the process by which the state of justice of the Middle Ages becamethe administrative state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and wasgradually governmentalized. Foucaulthere emphasizes the objectives of his study, explaining what he meant when heexplained this study as a history of governmentality. For the sake of the history he was speakingof, which is also a history of the present in Foucault's genealogical work, Iwill quote him extensively before giving my own understanding of what hesaid. I do not claim to be an expert onFoucault, since this is precisely one of the processes Foucault critiques: ofknowledge based on first principles, foundations. Knowledge is nothing morethan arbitrary, although inextricably tied by power relations, to socialpraxis, to the construction of discourses on truth, and based on the various subject positions(of class, race, gender, nation, language, culture, history, etc.) that arepresent in any justification for knowledge. Knowledges, for Foucault, are avenues for the naturalization of time andspace, or of the discourses that surround them. Knowledge, as based onmetaphysics as cultural practice, on Christian secular culture, on politicaleconomy as its language that is premised on the concepts of neutrality, and onthe State, the arbitrer of apparatuses of security that works in the name ofUniversal Rationality knowledge in this legacy acts dominantly in the serviceof such that are the forms of dominant Western culture. Foucault's relation to Western thought is sointimate, that he cannot be categorized within the binaries of Western thought,of True and False, Right or Wrong. Knowledge for him is unstable, and even when dominant, it needs tocontinually reaffirm itself to hold on to its dominance. Knowledge is produced within specificsociocultural and historical trends. Andit is intimately tied to identity politics. Governmentalityis then produced through a history of a process of governmentalization. Whatwe know today as government is an ensemble of forces, linked to forms ofknowledge, of which the dominant form is political economy, and object/subjectdouble, called the population, the target of government, seen at one time asorigin