Governmentality as Epistemology

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology Nancy Ettlinger Department of Geography, The Ohio State University This article presents Foucault’s governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucault’s novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucault’s ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors’ practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucault’s early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory framework with which they implicitly are complicit, but his later work on resistance emphasizes reflexivity and the proactive constitution and transformation of the self. The earlier framework on the governance of populations suggests that mentalities and related discourses produce practices, whereas the later framework on the governance of the self suggests the reverse, therein holding important clues for critical theory and the proactive construction of transformation based on a critique of the past and present. The article “assembles” Foucault’s scholarship on governance and ethics over the course of his career to present an overall framework that is useful for analyses concerning a variety of questions. Analytical points are exemplified with reference to urban, race-related issues, drawing in part from my own research. Key Words: critical theory, epistemology, governmentality, relational, scale.

Este art´ıculo presenta la gobermentalidad de Foucault como un marco anal´ıtico u´ til para interpretar y utilizar lo emp´ırico en teor´ıa cr´ıtica. Aunque Foucault tuvo una mirada muy estrecha de la disciplina de la geograf´ıa en lo concerniente a patrones espaciales, sus sensibilidades geogr´aficas lo conectan con la geograf´ıa humana cr´ıtica contempor´anea, que examina relacionalmente los procesos desde una visi´on topol´ogica no-euclidiana del espacio. M´as todav´ıa, el novedoso enfoque de Foucault por el an´alisis multiescalar ofrece una perspicacia cr´ıtica en lo que concierne a un debate: si la escala como concepto anal´ıtico reifica improductivamente la jerarqu´ıa y oscurece la movilizaci´on del poder. El ascendente an´alisis de Foucault clarifica c´omo el an´alisis que es sensible a la escala puede iluminar la movilizaci´on del poder en relaci´on con sus miras (seg´un las t´ecnicas de biopoder y de poder disciplinario) y sus fuentes difusas, y c´omo las pr´acticas de los actores pueden llegar a encadenarse a partir de presiones sociales normalizantes. La concepci´on inicial de gobernabilidad de Foucault representa los actores como no conscientes del marco regulador con el que ellos impl´ıcitamente tienen complicidad, pero su trabajo posterior sobre resistencia enfatiza la reflexibilidad y la constituci´on proactiva y transformaci´on del yo. El marco m´as temprano sobre el gobierno de poblaciones sugiere que las mentalidades y discursos afines producen pr´acticas, mientras que el marco posterior sobre el gobierno del yo sugiere lo contrario, guardando en eso pistas muy importantes para la teor´ıa cr´ıtica y la construcci´on proactiva de la transformaci´on basada en una cr´ıtica C 2011 by Association of American Geographers Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3) 2011, pp. 537–560
Initial submission, June 2008; revised submissions, February 2009 and March 2010; final acceptance, March 2010 Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

538

Ettlinger del pasado y el presente. El art´ıculo “ensambla” la sabidur´ıa de Foucault sobre gobierno y e´ tica en el curso de su carrera para presentar un marco total que es u´ til para hacer los an´alisis concernientes a una variedad de cuestiones. Puntos anal´ıticos son puestos como ejemplo en referencia a asuntos relacionados con lo urbano y raza, con base en parte en mis propias investigaciones. Palabras clave: teor´ıa cr´ıtica, epistemolog´ıa, gobernabilidad, relacional, escala.

A

s a contribution to the Methods section of this journal, this article emphasizes the epistemological1 significance of Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality, which he developed in the latter part of his life, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Foucault introduced the term governmentality in 1978 in his lecture series at the Coll`ege de France, Security, Territory, Population (Foucault 2007a),2 although his earlier scholarship contains important building blocks of the overall conceptualization. He continued to develop his thoughts about governance in subsequent lecture series, interviews, essays, and in the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1988a, 1990a, 1990b).3 Governmentality offers an analytical framework that is especially useful towards connecting abstract societal discourses with everyday material practices. It privileges neither the discursive nor the material but rather the relation between the two. Disassembling the term into govern and mentality, governmentality refers to the governance of a mentality (a collectively held view that is communicated through a variety of discourses) by way of “techniques of power”—calculated tactics that guide everyday citizen-subjects to act in accordance with societal norms (Dean 2010). Analytically, governmentality connects with relational thinking in geography (e.g., Dicken et al. 2001; Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Yeung 2005), which shifts focus from actors as isolated nodes of analysis to connections among actors (Latour 2005), but it also offers another dimension of relationality, notably in its focus on the relation between abstractions and empirics. Foucault was fundamentally concerned with how to interpret empirics, as reflected in his comment in an interview in 1981: “Every time I have tried to do a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements of my own experience: always in connection with processes I saw unfolding around me” (Foucault 2000g, 458). Foucault’s attention to how everyday, mundane activity figures in societal-scale discourses and vice versa offers guidance for multiscalar analysis. I suggest that governmentality is geographic at its core and can inform and offer insights into geographic issues, although the view of space in a governmentality approach is not amenable to all kinds of geo-

graphic inquiry. Specifically, Foucault’s view of space (as I will elaborate, quite distinct from his understanding of geography as a discipline) is topological and nonEuclidean. This view of space, consistent with some views of relational thinking,4 has received increasing attention among critical human geographers, especially since the late 1990s (e.g., Massey 1993, 2005; Massey, Allen, and Sarre 1999; Amin 2002, 2004; Allen 2003; Routledge 2003; Smith 2003; Ettlinger 2004; Featherstone 2004, 2008; Bosco 2006; Allen and Cochrane 2007; Buttle 2007; Routledge, Cumbers, and Nativel 2007). Space from a topological or non-Euclidean perspective is understood not as a container of activity but rather in relational terms with reference to the connection of actors in any one place to dynamics across space—a “progressive sense of place” (Massey 1993). Contrary to the Euclidean understanding that any two points are connected by a straight line, space is understood as folded and relational. This view of space is integral to governmentality, which refers to “governance at a distance” (Foucault 2000h); that is, how everyday activity is sensible in terms of techniques of power or governance by which the conduct of citizens is conducted—“the conduct of conduct” (Foucault 2000h, 341; 2007b, 193)—so as to materialize societal norms in daily practices, a process of normalization. It is this indirectness that makes governance an art that requires calculated courses of action designed to guide people’s decision making unconsciously.5 Governance, then, is not about individuals in positions of power who exert direct, sovereign, and coercive control over a territory but rather how it is that norms of a population are unconsciously produced and reproduced by citizensubjects, thereby making governance at a distance possible (Rose 1996). As Foucault (1988b) reflected at the outset of a lecture at the University of Vermont in 1982, his previous work focused on issues of power and domination; that is, how actors are objectified so that they will reproduce and elaborate prevailing norms. People in this framework are produced by an external gaze. As I elaborate, countering Marxism, which was the prevailing Left perspective, Foucault advanced a novel understanding of power not as destructive or prohibitive but as productive, and not as located in particular positions of a hierarchy but as diffuse, ubiquitous—precisely because

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology discourses are constituted, even if unconsciously, by everyday citizens in mundane activity or practices. The bulk of Foucault’s (1988b) lecture at the University of Vermont, however, focused on Foucault’s new line of inquiry,6 which focused on individuals’ choice, agency. This new direction followed logically from his work on the art of governance because indirect governance rests on the presumption that actors have choices; that is, they can conform to, reproduce, and elaborate discourses and prescribed norms or they can challenge them. Through the 1970s Foucault mentioned choice and its implications for challenging and resisting prevailing norms (e.g., Foucault 1980c, 1980e, 1980f, 1990b, 2000d, 2007b, 2008), but his comments on these issues were relatively cursory. In the last part of his life, in the early 1980s, Foucault began to focus specifically on how the choice to resist comes about; these thoughts are elaborated in a lecture series at the Coll`ege de France in 1981–1982, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Foucault 2004; see also Foucault 1997a, 1997b, 1988b, 2000h, 2001, 2007c). He argued that resistance depends on a holistic, critical understanding (savoir as opposed to connaissance)7 of the system of governance that objectifies, dominates, and produces behavior. Proactive choice, then, must be critically informed. Critique, in turn, depends on ongoing arduous intellectual practices that discipline the mind while also permitting the possibility of developing autonomy from the system so as to be able to critique and challenge it (O’Grady 2004). Countering the notion in psychoanalysis that there exists an essential self that requires discovery, Foucault argued for a subjectivity that entails a progressive constitution of the self, a matter of telling one’s own story through an inner gaze. Challenging the system counters subjugation, domination; it allows one to understand how he or she has been constructed by the system, and opens a space in which to reject such interpellated identity. Whereas the governance of a population entails governance at a distance, the governance of the self permits an individual to create distance between herself or himself and a system of governance by recognizing and critically situating oneself in that system. Such resistance to a system via critique and proactive self-enlightenment entails a perpetual process that requires ascetic practices of self-discipline to maintain proactive reflexivity. Little wonder, then, that norms are questioned relatively infrequently, by relatively few people. Consequently, norms persist, although minority actions and voices can possibly connect and become scaled up (Cooper 2006), and therein offer impor-

539

tant clues toward possibilities of transformational (govern)mentalities. Even when such upscaling does not occur, self-transformation is conceptualized as an important act; it “counts” (Foucault 2000g, 2004). Crucially, transformation of community or societal scale mentalities or of the self connects with critical theory, which focuses on how to make this world a better place, based on a critique of the existing system and its history.8 By the time Foucault began to work through the issue of choice, he conceptualized governmentality as encompassing both governance of a population and of the self and, specifically, he cast the two modes of governance in an agonistic relation of continual negotiation (Foucault 2000h, 2007c), as indicated in Figure 1. Secondary literature on Foucault’s work on subjectivity and ethics (e.g., Faubion 2001; McLaren 2002; Hoy 2004; Luxon 2004, 2008; Taylor and Vintges 2004; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005; O’Leary 2006; Paras 2006; McGushin 2007; McNay 2009; Moss 2009; Rabinow 1997, 2009; Taylor 2009; see also biographical scholarship such as Eribon 1991; Miller 1993) has to date mostly been outside geography (although see Cameron 1998), which has focused on the left side of Figure 1, the governance of populations. That Foucault has been accused of being apolitical or not normative (e.g., N. Fraser 1989; Pickett 1996) is sensible in terms of analytical emphases on governance of a population; it was in the context of his concern with governance of the self that Foucault (1988a, 1990a, 1997a, 1997b, 2001, 2004) elaborated the “political spirituality” (Foucault 2000f, 233) of his scholarship, its critical normative content. Feminist scholarship in particular (e.g., Cameron 1998; McLaren 2002; Taylor and Vintges 2004) has tapped Foucault’s governance of the self for its political agenda and attention to agency that offer hopeful possibilities for Others toward reconstituting themselves.9 What appears at the current time to be a relative lack of attention to a crucial component of Foucault’s work—the governance of the self—might pertain in part to the English-language publication history of Foucault’s work; his lecture series on the governance of the self, The Hermeneutics of the Self delivered at the Coll`ege de France in 1981 and 1982, was not published in English until 2005.10 In part, the relative lack of emphasis on the governance of the self might also pertain to the orientation of the majority of research on the political, but not necessarily of the political (i.e., embracing and advancing a political agenda).11 ***

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

540

Ettlinger

Figure 1. Schematic representation of governmentality in terms of two forms of governance (of the population and of the self).

In the interests of space, I focus in this article mostly on analysis of the governance of a population (the left side of Figure 1), which has been the chief concern in geography; toward the end I discuss the governance of the self and its connection to governance of a population to clarify the relevance of governmentality to critical theory. My overall aim is to clarify how governmentality is useful for empirically based research and, further, how it connects with issues in critical human geography and critical theory. I begin by reviewing and critically situating Foucault’s view of geography as a discipline. The ensuing sections elaborate Foucault’s geographic sensibilities and the relevance of governmentality notably to issues of context, sense of space, and scale.

in which a form of punitive system is physically dispersed yet at the same time covers the entirety of a society” (Foucault 1980d, 68). For Foucault, terms such as territory and so forth are misnomers as geographic concepts because they pertain in the first instances to the processes that construct them:

Foucault on the Discipline of Geography

At the time of this interview, Foucault’s central interest pertained to the processes underscoring the relation between knowledge and power. When pressed by the interviewers about region, territory, and the like as geographic, he replied, “Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates effects of power” (Foucault 1980d, 69). It is not that geography held no significance for Foucault but rather that he considered its significance limited, principally regarding the effects of power that are

In the interview “Questions on Geography,” Foucault (1980d) revealed an understanding of the discipline as focusing principally on spatial patterns. When asked about “geographical metaphors” such as territory, field, displacement, domain, region, and horizon, Foucault responded that none of these terms referred to geography, and that “There is only one notion here that is truly geographical, that of the ‘archipelago.’ I used it only once, and that was to designate, via the title of Solzhenitsyn’s work, the carceral archipelago: the way

Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one . . . field is an economicojuridical notion. Displacement: what displaces itself is an army, a squadron, a population. Domain is a juridcopolitical notion. Soil is a historico-geological notion. Region is a fiscal, administrative, military notion. Horizon is a pictorial, but also a strategic notion. (Foucault 1980d, 69)

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology manifest on the ground in spatial patterns. Yet in a criticism of scholars who devalued this understanding of space, Foucault commented: “They didn’t understand that to trace the forms of implantation, delimitation, and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief of processes—historical ones, needless to say—of power. The spatialising description of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power” (Foucault 1980d, 70–71). This quote suggests Foucault’s respect for thinking through the spatial effects of power, even though his concerns had been more in line with what critical human geographers now refer to as spatiality, with reference to the mutual embeddedness of space and society (i.e., social processes do not cause spatial patterns as in a → b, but rather, social processes and spatial organization are bound up in one another, as in a ↔ b).12 Foucault’s declaration of respect for what he considered to be geographical reasoning appears to be a matter of thinking aloud in a stream-of-consciousness mode to the interviewers, because by the end of the interview he confessed that he had not previously thought through the role of geographic issues in his work. The interview is valuable for clarifying Foucault’s perspective on geography as a discipline and also for illuminating how Foucault might have proceeded, specifically toward analyzing spatial patterns. More an observation than a criticism, Foucault’s Euclidean view of geography as a discipline evidently overlooked process-oriented research that connects with a non-Euclidean sense of space in geographic inquiry. This is unsurprising because although such alternatives existed in the latter part of Foucault’s life, they did not, however, become prominent in the discipline in critical human geography until after his death in 1984 (e.g., Massey, Allen, and Sarre 1999; Allen 2003; Massey 2005).13 Yet despite Foucault’s narrow understanding of geography as a discipline, he nonetheless developed important geographic sensibilities that connect with critical human geography. His general geographic sensibilities regarding the panopticon (Elden 2001), multiscalar dynamics (Philo 2000; Legg 2005) and the spatial constitution of power relations are well known in critical human geography and reflect his interest in issues of spatiality (Philo 1992, 2000, 2007; Hannah 2000; Elden 2001).14 My purpose here is to specify analytical issues that connect with and inform contemporary critical human geography, specifically regarding context and a non-Euclidean sense of space, and also issues of scale relative to a debate in critical human geography as to usefulness (or lack thereof) of scale as

541

an analytical concept. Throughout the remainder of this article I exemplify analytical points with reference to urban issues of uneven development pertaining to segregation, planning, and racialized education, in part drawing from some of my own research. *** Throughout the ensuing text I inject in italics what I call analytical anchor points, which specify different dimensions of governmentality as an analytical framework. One important point must be made at the outset: what can be understood as a governmentality analysis need not encompass all the anchor points delineated here, which are culled from a wide variety of Foucault’s scholarship over time and thus reflect different concerns he had over the course of his career. There are rigorous analyses of the governance of populations that do not engage, for example, resistance or the development of a transformational mentality (e.g., Hannah 2000; Raco 2003; Watts 2003; O’Grady 2004; Dodge and Kitchin 2005; Rose-Redwood 2006), whereas others do (e.g., Cameron 1998; Cooper 2006; Mitchell 2006; Crowley and Kitchin 2008); some analyses focus on clarifying the genealogy of a mentality (e.g., Cruikshank 1999) and others emphasize pertinent mentalities that underscore on-the-ground practices (Rojas 2004) or the specification of techniques of power that ground mentalities (e.g., Hughes 2001; Larner and LeHeron 2004; Huxley 2006; Catungal and Leslie 2009). Other studies call attention to regimes of practices as a clearer avenue of analysis in comparison to those that focus on ideology (Barry 2004). I am unaware of a single analysis of governmentality that comprehensively includes all the dimensions to which I refer in this article (but see Cooper 200615 ).16 My purpose is to highlight the multidimensional nature of governmentality as a mode of analysis. As such, what I offer is not an essential Foucault but rather a critical synthesis of his thoughts about governance (of a population and of the self) toward both the interpretation of empirics and the operationalization of critical theory. In an interview at the University of Vermont in 1982 Foucault (1988c, 9) remarked, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” In the spirit of Latour’s (2005) actor network theory (in which “the social” should be understood not as given, but as something that is continually being constituted—analytically, a matter of “assembling the social”), my project in a sense has been to assemble Foucault’s scholarship on governance and ethics to present an overall framework that is useful

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

542

Ettlinger

for analyses emanating from a variety of questions and concerns.

Power, Practices, and Mentality/ies: Issues of Context and Sense of Space Foucault reasoned that power is not a matter of one actor consciously dominating another as in the conventional understanding of power over another; rather, he expressed the “intention” of power as “invested in its real and effective practices” (Foucault 1980f, 97). Examination of practices is central to Foucault’s mode of analysis. In an interview entitled “Questions of Method,” Foucault (2000f) clarified with reference to his previous work on prisons that his analytical concern was “practices—with the aim of grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at any moment” (225). He went on to say that such practices: are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances . . . but, up to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence and “reason.” It is a question of analyzing a “regime of practices”—practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and interconnect. ➢ analytical anchor point: specification of practices, regimes of practices

Place in the preceding quote refers not to a locality but rather to a nonspatially circumscribed context (exemplified by Foucault in terms of a prison system, an education system, the army, and so on) that produces and is produced by an interrelated set of practices that has evolved over time and across space. For another example, consider racialized secondary education in the United States,17 which occurs at specific locations but is not limited to those sites; it is widespread and is reproduced in similar ways at different sites, recognizing context-specific variation in which segregationist practices unfold. For instance, curricular segregationist practices in apparently integrated U.S. school space occur similarly in many different schools, commonly materializing in disproportionately small numbers of minority students in honors classes. Recognizing contextual variation, similar but different curricular segregationist practices might develop, such as segregation of ethnic groups in English as a second language classes in localities witnessing an influx of immigrants from countries in different world regions.18

Foucault (2000c, 2000f) was interested in “localizing” problems, meaning that analysis should locate problems in specific contexts or regimes of practices.19 At issue is not context as spatial containment in a Cartesian sense but rather material practices in a particular part or sector of society such as the health system, education, or the army. Localizing racist practices is not, for example, a matter of delineating a neighborhood or specific school or business where racism occurs or might occur but rather identifying specific experiences and practices. The (topological) “location” of racist practices might be in racialized education, jobs, mortgage lending, and so on, each of which entails a specific regime of practices (recognizing context-specific variation) whereby persons of color have different, typically inferior experiences and opportunities in comparison with those in the white majority population. Examination of experiences analytically requires “touching down,” on the ground, beginning analysis at a particular site in the Cartesian sense (e.g., a school, a neighborhood, or a business) but is open to comparative analysis to recognize regularities amid variation in a regime of practices. As Buttle (2007) pointed out, a non-Euclidean sense of space recognizes Euclidean issues such as location or spatial proximity but extends analysis beyond those issues. Consistent with the preceding logic, the formulation of a research problem from a Foucauldian vantage point begins in principle with an event,20 observation(s) of specific practices,21 a comment,22 or an experience or feeling23 —something “on the ground”—that prompts contextualization and problematization or, from a critical theory perspective, an examination of problems posed by the existing system that can inform strategies to develop a transformational mentality.24 This approach to initializing a project differs from those that begin with broad theory and then find case studies to support the theory. From a Foucauldian perspective, beginning with theory is problematic because this approach necessarily overlooks cases that do not fit the theory, except as outliers. This is not to suggest that we conduct our lives prior to a research project without already formed views that filter lived practices. The induction–deduction relation operates as more of a dialectic than a rigid division of thinking. If we acknowledge “the predicament of culture” (Clifford 1988; see also Clifford and Marcus 1986)—the condition that no one can escape bias—we also can acknowledge that one’s sensibilities to certain observations can guide analysis. Toward this end, feminist and critical theorist Donna Haraway (1997, 64) famously suggested that

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology the science question “is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment of living within limits and contradictions.” Pure objectivity is unachievable, but awareness of our biases is the condition for constructively approaching it. Given a practice or set of practices in Euclidean space, how, then, can we critically account for its “regularity” across space, to which Foucault (2000f) referred in the previous quote from “Questions of Method?” Towards this end, the analytical imperative is to identify an underlying mentality, a collectively held view. The mentality that connects practices across space is ➢ analytical anchor point: identifying mentality/ies that connect a regime of practices

unlikely to be self-evident. Consider, for example, the well-worn strategy of a local state declaring eminent domain of a parcel of land in cases of urban renewal or gentrification to permit the razing or refurbishing of the built environment in association with the entry of new occupants or land use. Equally well worn is the comment that such areas are blight and thus require cleaning up. Blight refers to something that causes disease or destruction and prevents growth. It is a faceless, peopleless state of devastation that requires eradication, which is facilitated by the declaration of eminent domain. Significantly, the mentality that defines a neighborhood differs relative to the source of a gaze. Whereas longstanding residents of a community gazing from within might conceptualize the neighborhood relative to localized social relations, those gazing on a neighborhood from outside (from city government to real estate offices and individuals interested in a site of investment) often see not people but rather a built environment or data on that neighborhood (e.g., on crime, unemployment, vacancy rates of buildings).25 Recognizing a gaze as external helps clarify the often narrow scope of observation (confined to things such as building or data) and how apparently heartless acts of destruction with serious consequences for those affected occur and, moreover, how they are sustained, tolerated, and even celebrated as the aestheticization or sanitization of place. Further, multiple mentalities might articulate in a gaze, helping to explain how “slum clearance” and “blight removal” are racialized; that is, how feelings of the need to aestheticize a neighborhood coincide with racial difference across space, as in white government officials,

543

real estate agents, and investors making decisions about manufacturing a new neighborhood in lieu of an older one. Whereas declaration of eminent domain is common and without media attention when it targets lowincome neighborhoods inhabited by persons of color, it is presented as an outrage and makes national headlines when it is targeted toward a white, middle-class neighborhood, as in the case of New London, Connecticut (Salzman 2006; McGeehan 2009). “Localizing” problems in non-Euclidean space— in practices of gentrification or segregation, for example—permits what Foucault (2000f, 2007d) called “eventualization,”26 which is a mode of research that brings attention to the contingent nature and multiple causes of specific events. Foucault (2000f) explained eventualization as follows: making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant . . . to show that things “weren’t as necessary as all that;” it wasn’t as a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up. (226)

It is not self-evident, for example, that residential zones of a city should be segregated relative to levels of income or race or ethnicity. How is it that moderate neighborhood income and ethnic homogeneity have become interpreted in terms of stability, which in turn is associated with positive connotations (Gotham 2000)? What is the mentality that connects ethnic homogeneity and middle-class status with a comfortable stability? How is it that the entry of different groups in a neighborhood commonly is received with fear, tension, and concretely, tactics to repel or avoid such entry? How are such practices sustained and held to be emblematic of truth? Further, the “singularity” of events refers to their contingent, unpredictable nature, the interpretation of which requires historical analysis to uncover multiple causality. In this sense, eventualization entails “rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, play of forces, strategies, and so on that at a given moment establish what subsequently counts a being self-evident, universal, and necessary. In this one is . . . effecting a . . . multiplication or pluralization of causes” (Foucault 2000f, 226–27). Accordingly, explaining how an event unfolds is a matter not of finding a single origin or cause but rather of constructing its genealogy, which entails “numberless beginnings” and “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

544

Ettlinger

➢ analytical anchor point: specify a genealogy, processes of eventualization

heterogeneous layers” (Foucault 2000f, 374).27 Foucault’s approach to history in terms of genealogical analysis counters conventional totalizing approaches that explain all events in terms of “a deep, unitary, pyramidal and necessary principle” (Foucault 2007d, 64), such as race (as per one branch of critical race theory28 ), class (as per Marxist analysis), or the market (as per neoclassical theory). From this vantage point, an event such as the U.S. housing foreclosure crisis was caused not by a particular piece of legislation or a particular institution or particular persons, as per the blame game.29 Rather, as Langley (2008) has pointed out, it “eventualized” through a regime of borrowing as well as lending practices that had been developing for well over a decade. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations called for a renewal of the spirit of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (calling for banks to extend credit to low-income borrowers, including minorities, and also emphasizing sound investment), without, however, directing attention to the soundness of investment and mechanisms to ensure such. The crisis of 2008 had been ongoing throughout the 1990s from the vantage point of those whose homes were foreclosed,30 although it was not until 2008 that the debt debacle hit Wall Street. Crucially, the assemblage of festering problems pivoted on the disarticulation of the systems of consumption and production. Wages delivered by the production system lagged (and continue to lag) behind the costs of homeownership, which were imposed on those unable to pay via predatory lending and a host of practices that tapped and manipulated the mentality of the American dream (Saegert, Fields, and Libman 2009). Ironically, what began in the Carter administration as a call to include minorities in the American dream became transformed into a racialized geography of foreclosures in light of the disproportionate foreclosures among racial and ethnic minority neighborhoods (Wyly et al. 2006; Kaplan and Sommers 2009; Dymski 2010); indeed, some have likened lending practices to a new form of redlining, and lawsuits against major banks were pursued in 2009.31 Connecting with the view that power is ubiquitous, problems, not power, are localized, and there are many such localized processes (Foucault 1980e, 1990b), understanding “local” as “context” in the topological sense of non-Euclidean space. Just as different mentalities can articulate in a particular gaze and associated regime of practices, different regimes of practices—contexts—

also articulate. Accordingly, an internal mode of analysis focuses on eventualization relative to localized problems, whereas an external mode of analysis focuses on the articulation of different regimes of practices ➢ analytical anchor point: “external analysis” and the articulation of regimes of practices

and associated mentalities; that is, on the interrelation of multiple problems, contexts, and indeed, governmentalities (Foucault 2000f, 227). External analysis imbricates mentalities to explain different dimensions of a problem (Ettlinger 2009b). For example, the racialized dimension of the foreclosure crisis connects with racialized practices in education, in business, and so forth. External analysis is crucial especially from the standpoint of critical theory. For example, toward constructing a transformational mentality, programs, policies, and grassroots efforts to dissolve segregationist practices often fail, in part because strategies aimed at a particular regime of practices fail to connect with processes operating in different, interrelated contexts; the replication of problems across contexts suggests that steps toward change in one context (e.g., a residential neighborhood, school, or workplace) can be overshadowed by daily activities in other contexts (e.g., home, community, workspace, school space) that have not been subject to efforts to construct change (Ettlinger 2007a). Or, recognizing internal differences within one type of space, such as extracurricular and curricular activity in school space, Riley and Ettlinger (forthcoming) found that strategies to develop multicultural sensibilities in after-school, once-in-a-while events were ineffective in the absence of strategies to routinize muliticultural sensibilities in everyday practices during regular school hours. The recognition of interrelated problems across contexts suggests that it is appropriate to think about governmentalities32 (in the plural) because different mentalities and rationalities materialize differently in different contexts. Lecturing on his research epistemology, Foucault (2000d, 311) commented: What I have been trying to do this evening is not to solve a problem but to suggest a way to approach a problem . . . this problem deals with the relations between experiences (like madness, illness, transgression of laws, sexuality, selfidentity), knowledge (like psychiatry, medicine, criminology, sexology, psychology), and power (such as the power wielded in psychiatric and penal institutions, and in all other institutions that deal with individual control).

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology Epistemologically, the goal is to analyze different localized problems relative to intersecting mentalities and regimes of practices—to examine how mentalities configure differently in different contexts relative to contingent conditions. This said, there is a crucial analytical component yet to be specified, namely this: How do mentalities get materialized in regimes of practices? How does an abstract, collectively held view find concrete expression? Is the concrete expression of a mentality inevitable?

Materializing Mentalities via Techniques of Power; Issues of Scale Foucault (1980e, 114) indicated that between specific, mundane actions and societal discourses and associated mentalities there is “a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects.” Levels, or what geographers commonly refer to as scales, are central to Foucault’s epistemology and offer interesting insight into one debate in critical human geography that has centered on scale—whether it is a useful concept or whether it unproductively reifies issues of hierarchy and should be abandoned to focus more generally on the mobilization of power (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005; Hoefle 2006; Jonas 2006; Ettlinger 2007b; Woodward, Jones, and Marston 2007). I concur that using scale to reify a top-down view of society is problematic, but I suggest that scale need not adopt the top-down view. Indeed, as I elaborate later, a Foucauldian approach to scale fosters a mode of analysis that refuses hierarchical determination and offers a novel approach that unchains actors from societal prescriptions (as elaborated, as a set of possibilities)33 ; further, from analytical and strategic vantage points, it matters at what scale power is targeted and mobilized. Targets of Power Although Foucault (2007d) emphasized that power “has to be considered in relation to a field of interactions” (66), he recognized power as highly varied: “a whole series of mechanisms . . . likely to induce behaviors or discourses” (Foucault 2007d, 60). In “Questions of Method,” Foucault (2000f, 250) clarified that the significance of studying practices is the interplay, the relation between codes of conduct (discourses, mentalities) and on-the-ground regimes of practices (Foucault 2000f, 250). What connects the two are techniques

545

of power, which are “rational schemas . . . explicit programs; we are dealing with sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be recognized, spaces arranged, behaviors regulated” (Foucault 2000f, 231). Consistent with the idea of genealogy, these calculated courses of action arise from an assemblage of practices and related mentalities. Specifically regarding prisons, Foucault (2000f, 251) indicated that “the rationality envisaged in penal imprisonment wasn’t the outcome of a straightforward calculation of immediate interest (internment turning out to be, in the last analysis, the simplest and cheapest solution), but that it arose out of a whole technology of human training, surveillance of behavior, individualization of the elements of social body.” What accounts for crowded prisons in the United States, for example, is not straightforwardly a system of crime and punishment but rather a set of programs or strategies—mechanisms, tactics, and techniques of power—to resolve problems. In so doing, they produce a system and a mode of management. Government officials of struggling local economies, for example, vie for the construction of prisons (Gilmore 2007) or immigrant detention centers (Bernstein 2008) to generate funds and local employment; from this vantage point, a prison system is a form of investment, a production system. Constructing prisons becomes an economic asset to a local economy at the same time that it directs surplus financial capital and also finds a “place” to contain the surplus population of unemployed or underemployed (Gilmore 2007). Foucault specified techniques of power in different ways, namely, in terms of biopower, disciplinary power, pastoral power, and the modern, nonecclesiastical analog to pastoral power (henceforth modern power). He distinguished among these different expressions of power with reference to different “levels”— scales—of power (Foucault 2003, 243), and he indicated that his approach to power pertained to “its object, its target . . . where it installs itself and produces real effects” (Foucault 1980f, 97). As I elaborate later, biopower is targeted to a population in the aggregate34 ; disciplinary power, to individuals; and pastoral power and its modern analog, to both. The different expressions of power are most fruitfully interpreted not as different types of power but rather in terms of the different scales at which mechanisms or techniques of power are targeted.35 Techniques or mechanisms of power vary relative to the scale at which they are ➢ analytical anchor point: specify techniques of power relative to the scale at which power is targeted

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

546

Ettlinger

targeted. Specifying different techniques of power relative to scale offers analytical rigor toward precise clarification of the ways in which mentalities are materialized. For example, in a pedagogical context, Ares (2008), following Gore (1995), specified the following techniques of power: surveillance, regulation, classification of groups of actors that establish boundaries, distribution of bodies in space (relative to hierarchies and in ways that separate individuals relative to groups), standardization, normalization (setting, invoking, requiring, or conforming to standards), and exclusion (the negative side of normalization). One could elaborate and clarify how some of these techniques, such as surveillance, refer to disciplinary power acting on individuals, whereas others are more oriented to actors (students) as groups, as a population—a matter of biopower. Hannah (1997) also specified a variety of techniques of power that are explicitly spatial: architectural (as in the panopticon), compound, urban, colonial (as in “reserves”), and national; he termed all these techniques disciplinary, although he clarified that as scale increases, power is targeted to groups of people, populations—what we might otherwise call biopower. Biopower36 refers to the mechanisms, the calculated courses of action that are directed to a population in the aggregate; this connects with what many researchers often refer to as societal or macroscale phenomena. Specific techniques of (bio)power typically entail data collection and examination (as in statistical analysis) to discern patterns, which can be acted on—regulated, manipulated. Examples of critical research that engage biopower include the use of geographic information systems (GIS) in political redistricting (Forest 2004), geocoding in census-taking and mapping (RoseRedwood 2006), uses of machine-readable identification codes (Dodge and Kitchin 2005), cartography as a spatialization of race (Crampton 2007), the use of maps in urban restructuring under colonialism (e.g., Legg 2007), the use of statistics in U.S. state formation in the nineteenth century (Hannah 2000), examination of the relevance of Foucault’s (1980b, 2000a) engagement with the medicalization of society to population and medical geography (Philo 2001, 2005; Legg 2005), and contemporary issues of biomedicine in the global economy (Braun 2007; Rose 2007). Biopower as a technique of power relies on data collection and analysis precisely because the target of power is an aggregated body, a population, that requires efforts to organize and sustain it. For example, from a positive vantage point,

one use of a population census in the United States has been to identify subpopulations experiencing problems such as poverty and unemployment and to marshal the requisite evidence for eligibility of particular groups for public assistance. On the other hand, the census and its classification schemes have contributed to discourses of stereotypes that can have insidious consequences for discriminatory behavior, the homogenization of groups (by way of obscuring important differences among constituent members), and the interpellation of unilateral identity. Further, as Massey (1979) long ago commented, planners often use such descriptive statistics to explain poverty in terms of poverty, rather than the system of production that produces class differences across space. From a Foucauldian perspective, detailed analysis of how statistics are used (with positive as well as negative consequences) is crucial toward clarifying how societal discourses of poverty and its racialization are socially constructed and, moreover, sustained. Another type of technique of power that acts on populations is various forms of fields of visibility (Hannah 1997; Dean 2010), which illuminate or obscure regimes of practices. Invisibility, for example, draws our attention to how the daily lives of countless homeless people are out-of-mind and outside the domain of political platforms, in part because, quite literally, they are out-of-sight as an outcome of locational designs that place homeless shelters away from middle-class communities. Whereas biopower targets a population, disciplinary power targets individual actors and clarifies how biopower is realized on the ground in everyday life; this connects with a specifically actor-based understanding of the microscale (as opposed to a place-based understanding as in “the local”).37 Disciplinary power complements biopower: It targets individual actors, guiding them to self-regulate in accordance with societal norms, ensuring the operationalization of biopower by enrolling everyday citizen-subjects in larger societalscale projects.38 As clarified in wide-ranging studies, from Foucault’s discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon (Foucault 1977, 1980a), to Crowley and Kitchin’s (2008) analysis of modes of containment of “decent girls” in Ireland’s postindependence era and analysis of the regulation of consumers’ choices in commercial space such as malls (Voyce 2003), disciplinary power entails techniques of power such as intense surveillance so that each individual will engage in conformist practices and behavior. Disciplinary power can be direct or more subtle and less deterministic to allow for

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology multiple outcomes, as in Allen’s (2006) account of ambient power in commercial space. Whether direct or more nuanced, disciplinary power regulates socialization to assure normalization relative to context-specific systems of thought and values. Whereas, for example, population censuses construct exclusive categories by race or ethnicity to classify a population, mechanisms such as architectural or compound spatial design and school or work programs that foster curricular or occupational segregation cultivate individual choices toward self-segregation to preserve, reproduce, and elaborate demographic categories and their significance. Specifying types of disciplinary power clarifies how citizensubjects are enrolled in societal-scale projects, how they are unconsciously complicit with the construction of societal-scale norms and the mentalities that govern them. Pastoral power entails “the tricky combination” (Foucault 2000h, 332) of both totalizing and individualizing techniques of power. Foucault posited that pastoral power evolved historically by the eighteenth century in the context of the Church. In this Christian sense, pastoral power entails the complex moral relation between a pastor and the members of a pastor’s community: The pastor accounts for every member of the community in terms of their lives as well as the details of each community member’s actions and his or her needs and even the souls of these members. In turn, each member of the flock depends on and submits to the pastor as a function of will, not law, and, moreover, works at her or his own identity via self-renunciating Christian practices (Foucault 2000d). Foucault went on to consider a modern, nonecclesiastical form of pastoral power that translates the relation of pastor-flock to citizen-state, although he recognized that modern governance extends beyond the state to myriad organizations and individuals (Foucault 2000d, 2000e).39 The translation of this “tricky combination” from the Christian to its modern rendition retains the link between totalization and individualization but conceptualizes salvation mundanely into well-being of a population (e.g., in terms of health, security) to permit the governance and regulation of a population at a distance. The overall significance of the “tricky combination” of modern power is that biopower and disciplinary power always are operative and complement one another. Thus a research project that focuses in depth on biopower or disciplinary power is a matter of the scope of the particular research enterprise, not an indication of a singular scale at which techniques of power are targeted.

547

Source of Power and Ascending Analysis Whereas biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power and its modern analog refer to targets of power, Foucault (1980c, 142) conceptualized the source of power as ubiquitous and “co-extensive with the social body,” consistent with the notion of power as extending far beyond the state. Accordingly, Foucault (1980f, 98) declared that power “is never localized” because “individuals are the vehicle of power, not its point of application.” Foucault’s starting point of analysis is at the bottom, not the top from a hierarchical vantage point of society (Foucault 1990b, see especially chapter 2 of part IV). He commented that “This point of view of the plebs, the point of view of the underside and limit of power, is . . . indispensible for analysis of its apparatuses . . . this is the starting point for understanding its functioning and developments” (Foucault 1980c, 138). Crucially, Foucault clarified that this view is not to be confused with neo-populism, which, consistent with Marxism or post-Marxism,40 would locate power in an entity. Rather, what he meant was that analysis should focus on actions and daily practices of everyday citizens (plebes) who produce power relations, consistent with the analytical significance of practices. This understanding of the starting point has important implications for research, namely that primary data collection in field research should at the outset target not elected or appointed political representatives of citizens but, rather, everyday citizens themselves; secondary research should begin not with societal structure but with mundane activity. Analysis of institutions and data collected from leaders (elected or otherwise) certainly is important; at issue is their place in analysis and the understanding of how institutions and leaders figure in power relations. For Foucault (2000h, 343), dynamics at the scale or level of institutions represent the crystallization, not the root, of power relations. Accordingly, he said, “One must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. . . . That is, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus.” Segregation, for example, is in part intelligible in terms of planning mentalities, which until the recent mixed housing paradigm, contributed to normalizing the location of different classes (and implicitly or explicitly races or ethnicities) in different localities of a city region

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

548

Ettlinger

(J. Powell 2002). Yet, although the planning discipline along with other institutions such as the real estate industry (Gotham 2000) crystallizes and formalizes segregation, the root of segregation lies in the everyday practices of people who choose to self-segregate and to exclude others, whether in lunchrooms at schools or sections of housing complexes within so-called mixed neighborhoods. Such self-segregation is a regular feature of everyday life across time and space (Ettlinger 2009b). Self-segregation entails practices that implicitly enroll actors in the macroscale societal project of segregation. In this way, discourses are produced and reproduced by everyday citizen-subjects, not imposed from the top. This understanding of the source of power “deep in the social nexus” helps explain how disciplinary power and biopower are mutually embedded: Calculated courses of action that target the population connect with mentalities that are produced by the citizenry. The understanding of power as diffuse also helps clarify Foucault’s conceptualization of power as productive; that is, producing a system of power relations, in contrast to the idea of power as negative, prohibitive (e.g., Foucault 1980c, 1980e, 1980f, 1990b). Specifying the root of power relations “deep in the social nexus” has important implications for analysis that seeks to connect the scales at which power relations are targeted. Foucault (1980f) engaged in what he called “ascending analysis,” whereby the researcher begins analysis at the microscale (understood as actor, not place based) and then connects to the meso- and macroscales. Although multiscalar analysis is hardly novel among geographers, as per Foucault, it matters at what scale analysis begins and, as per ascending analysis, analysis should necessarily begin at the microscale to account for the choices and actions of everyday actors (Foucault 1980e). This scale of accounting is crucial because tactics are “invented and organized from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs” (Foucault 1980a, 159). Toward connection, ascending analysis clarifies that mundane, everyday practices are part of a macroscale societal picture, precisely because power is diffuse, signifying that everyday practices produce, reproduce, and elaborate societal norms. Foucault distinguished ascending analysis from the Marxist descending mode of analysis, which begins at the macroscale (capitalist structures), predicts actions at other scales, and renders exceptional actions as outside the dominant structure and relatively inconsequential. For example, Harvey’s (1989) “structured coherence” can acknowledge patterns and processes

outside those that are dominant, but analysis centers on the dominant. Foucault recognized the hierarchical character of society, but his nonstructuralist view was that “the summit and the lower elements stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning, a mutual ‘hold’ (power as mutual and indefinite ‘blackmail’)” (Foucault 1980a, 159). This “mutual hold” refers to the “tricky combination” of totalizing and individualizing power, which are not hierarchically ordered but mutually embedded. Problems of domination, as in structuralist frameworks, exist; however, Foucault’s questions about governance pertain less to repression and more to how actors are guided into actions that can result in a wide variety of outcomes, including repression. At issue is how intolerable truths are produced and sustained (Foucault 1980e, 2007c). Whereas Marxists might focus on why class differences exist and persist, an analysis inspired by Foucault’s later thoughts about governmentality and modern, diffuse power would ask how citizen-subjects in their everyday practices contribute to the maintenance of inequality along a variety of axes of difference (i.e., not confined to class). In the former case, individual actions are preordained by the structure of capitalist relations; in the latter case, societal discourses and possible transformations are constituted by daily practices enacted by individuals. Whereas beginning with generalities avoids analysis of specific cases that do not fit the general picture, beginning with specific practices means that so-called outliers count. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is quite possible that practices can diverge from prescribed norms. The extensiveness of a mentality, as it iterates through societal institutions, organizations, and daily practices, unfolds under contingent conditions. Moreover, the articulation of a mentality with other mentalities and regimes of practices points to the complexity as well as the imperfectness of the system, specifically the possible ineffectiveness of techniques of power. For example, ➢ analytical anchor point: examine the (positive and negative, intended and unintended) effects of techniques of power

as previously indicated, multiculturalism as a set of programmatic strategies often fails. From a Foucauldian perspective there is no presumption of effectiveness of a technique of power. Rather, the relation between mentalities and practices is interrogated. To the extent that discursive and material realities diverge, governmentality as an analytical framework directs research toward problematizing that divergence. In contrast to structural analysis, which preordains material practices relative to structural constraints and

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology casts divergence between societal norms and material practices as exceptional and relatively inconsequential, such spaces of rupture in Foucauldian analysis represent a “field of possibilities” (2000h). An ascending mode of analysis that connects with power-as-diffuse opens analysis to identifying as well as counting individual actions, which can reproduce as well as challenge societal norms. For Foucault, resistance is a matter of challenging norms, discourses, mentalities— not entities or persons in particular positions in a hierarchy.

Spaces of Resistance Governmentality as an indirect means of regulating behavior and practices presumes that actors have choices. Choice, in turn, signifies that governmentality pertains both to the “conduct of conduct” as well to the possibility of rejecting norms and everyday practices associated with normalization (Foucault 1997a, 2007c, 2007d). As Foucault (2000d, 324; see also 1980c, 142) declared, “there is no power without potential refusal or revolt.” Thus, although some individuals have power over others (the basis of Marxist analysis), for Foucault, such power is not absolute because actors have choices in an imperfect system. Choices can materialize in actions or they can be a matter of developing thoughts that “desubjugate the subject” (Foucault 2007d, 47) and “promote new forms of subjectivity” (Foucault 2000h, 336) by challenging and dissolving apparent interpellation of identity. Foucault’s conceptualization of power as diffuse recognizes that entities such as institutions and individuals in positions of authority are part of what is being resisted, but the main point is that institutions and socalled power brokers, the foundation of conventional descending analysis, are part of a larger system that also includes everyday citizens. Indeed, such everyday citizens constitute institutions. All these actors in different ways produce and reproduce norms. Thus targets of resistance from a Foucauldian perspective are not entities or persons but rather mentalities and associated discourses and norms, which are produced and reproduced daily by actors. Resistance to normalization and other techniques of power is effected through power relations: “There is not a face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom as mutually exclusive facts (freedom disappearing everywhere power is exercised) but a much more complicated interplay. . . . The power relationship and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be sepa-

549

rated” (Foucault 2000h, 342). As per Foucault, however, although the field of possibilities for resistance is ubiquitous—consistent with the notion of power as diffuse—actual resistance is not inevitable and might be relatively scarce. From the vantage point of actors engaged in critiquing a mentality, its discourses, and associated techniques of power, the task of resistance is to “find out what are the links, the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge” (Foucault 2007d, 59). Such links or connections are crucial because, as Foucault (2007d, 67) went on to say, refusal to accept prescribed norms requires traveling down the same road but in the opposite direction. At issue is the identification of potential cracks or ruptures in techniques of power that might provide a space for resistance. For example, as indicated, demarcations of so-called blighted communities ➢ analytical anchor point: identify weak links in the system— spaces of rupture

derive from an external gaze, which is devoid of knowledge of local life and the value of local social relations. This point helps explain actions such as clearance and redevelopment, also pointing to a crack in the system that potentially can be filled in proactively and constructively. As documented by Lee (2007), the members of one such neighborhood slated for clearance in Vancouver recognized the nature of the external gaze and, rather than formally protesting gentrification, they placed faces and sociality into that gaze by inviting government officials into their neighborhood and engaging them in local festivities and walking tours, all the while calculating and orchestrating every detail of the events such as what foods were served, who sat next to whom, and so forth. The crack in the system that ordains declaration of eminent domain, slum clearance, and the like is that the social content of so-called urban blight is unseen. From a Foucauldian vantage point, resistance requires prescience at the outset regarding the mentality (or mentalities) and associated techniques of power that govern a situation from which actors wish to extricate themselves. The illumination of local social content by members of the Vancouver community worked; they countered the techniques of biopower and saved their neighborhood. Indeed their tactics are consistent with Foucault’s (2000h, 329) vision of resistance, which he clarified as follows: I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way that is more

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

550

Ettlinger

empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. . . . Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.

The ultimate target of resistance for the community in Vancouver was neither the government nor local government officials but rather the mentality because techniques of resistance or “counter-conducts” (Foucault 2007b, 201) represent counters to regulatory techniques of power, which connect mentalities (e.g., modernization) with practices (e.g., gentrification). ➢ analytical anchor point: specify techniques of resistance in relation to techniques of power and related mentality/ies

Effective resistance that employs techniques of resistance in relation to techniques of power is relatively uncommon, in part because activists often operate with a mentality of confrontational politics that derives from a top-down understanding of power relations in a system in which power is located in particular positions in a hierarchy. The dynamics of effective resistance from the vantage point of power-as-diffuse offers an incisive approach to proactive resistance and, moreover, it offers an analytical means by which to critically evaluate the effectiveness of strategies of resistance. Beyond the ineffectiveness of resistance, also at issue is explaining the absence of resistance in, actually, the majority of everyday practices. Indeed, if (effective) resistance were common, then there would be no need to problematize socially constructed norms. What, then, accounts for the relative infrequency of effective resistance? Whereas Foucault’s conceptualization of how people are regulated recognizes actors’ lack of self-consciousness, his conceptualization of resistance pertains to efforts to challenge existing mentalities, requiring, in turn, reflexivity. His scholarship on ethics suggests that the surfacing of an oppositional consciousness constitutes a reflexive agenda, a proactive matter of transforming oneself and producing a new subjectivity (Foucault 2007c, 2007d). In contrast to the conventional view of reflexivity in which one finds and locates truth at the essence of one’s soul—an exercise of memory of who one is— Foucault’s (2004, see especially chapter 24) view of reflexivity centers on meditation and the exercise of freedom so that “it won’t be a gaze directed towards the reality of essences, but one directed towards the truth of what we think. It is also a matter of testing the truth

of representations and the opinions that accompany them” (Foucault 2004, 459). As Foucault commented, “What is at stake in the practice of the self is precisely being able to master what one is, in the face of what exists or is taking place” (465). An “analytics of reflexivity” (Foucault 2004, chapter 24) requires that an individual situates herself or himself and understands the external gaze and techniques of power that govern his or her practices so as to be able to critically evaluate this objectification of the self and come to a reasoned conclusion about whether to pursue practices that reproduce and elaborate societal mentalities and norms or to challenge them. Enlightenment as holistic knowledge of the system (savoir) permits critique, which is “the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” to “insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth” (Foucault 2007d, 47). Indeed, such critical awareness entails work—ascetic practices (in, for example, reading, writing, listening, speaking); it is with regard to these concerns that Foucault (1988a, 1997a, 2001, 2004) immersed himself in Stoic philosophy as a guide to the “cultivation of the self” (Foucault 1988a). As Foucault (1990a, 28) clarified in his introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, the aim is not simply “self-awareness” but self-formation as an “ethical subject,” a process in which, the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself.

Crucially, formation of one’s self that enables critique permits the choice to resist normalizing pressures, which, if effective, reverses the effects of prevailing techniques of power (Foucault 2007d, 66). Voicing difference amid normalizing pressures risks alienation and prompts a decision to either conform or critique. Acting in compliance with prescribed norms with critical awareness of their implications can be as much an enlightened decision as resistance, on the condition that one continually works at critical awareness (Foucault 2007d, 46). Self-enlightenment and self-transformation require diligence, perseverance, and dedication to an arduous self-reflexive project to produce a new ontology of the self (Foucault 2007e). No wonder such resistance represents a minority of cases. We might imagine from Lee’s (2007) account of the remarkable community strategies in Vancouver that

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology some individuals in some way operated reflexively, although this is not part of the analysis. Indeed, there are few such analyses. The subjective dimension of Foucault’s framework (the right side of Figure 1) has been comparatively untouched in case-study analysis, although O’Grady’s (2004) chapter in Feminism and the Final Foucault (Taylor and Vintges 2004) offers an especially instructive entry point into analysis that taps Foucault’s scholarship of the governance of the self. She examined destructive societal mentalities that cast women as inferior to men and inadequate in a wide variety of ways, and how those mentalities become grounded in wide-ranging practices of self-deprecation among women. Tapping Foucault’s discussion of reflexivity and ethical decision making, she emphasized the need for women to engage in “relational externalizing”: coming to a critical understanding of how (by what means, by what techniques of power, and in relation to what mentalities and discourses) one’s negative sense of self has been socially produced; critically evaluating that process; and engaging in practices of the self that permit a proactive constitution of the self independent41 of the system. As Foucault (1984, 388) commented in an interview just before his death: Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.

O’Grady and other feminists (e.g., Cameron 1998) suggested that although gender narratives regulate gender relations, such narratives are not absolute. Beyond issues specifically of gender, use of Foucault’s late scholarship is sensible to anyone for whom sense of self and practices respond and are produced by deleterious discourses regarding any of many axes of difference and related techniques of power.

Critical Theory: Back to Scale Foucault clarified in his latest lectures and interviews that his concern for constructing a critical ontology of the self was connected to a political agenda, specifically an engagement with the future informed by a critique of the past. Critiquing conventional approaches to the future, Foucault (2004, 465) said, “That the future is either nothing or predetermined condemns us

551

to imagination or to impotence. Now the whole art of oneself, the whole care of the self is constructed against these two things.” His intention was to use his analytical framework: How can one analyze the connection between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—this is what I would call “political spirituality.” (Foucault 2000f, 233)

Although Foucault focused in the last phase of his work on the subject, he gave at least cursory attention to the relation of the self to others, to social relations, and to the governance of a population with the aim of realizing democratic processes (e.g., Foucault 2000c, 244–45; 2001, 108; 2004, 197; see also Rose 1999; Milchman and Rosenberg 2005).42 As per Foucault, practices of the self facilitate enlightenment (in the sense of savoir) and permit one to “know how to fulfill his duties as part of the human community. He will know how to fulfill the duties of father, son, husband, and citizen, precisely because he will attend to himself” (Foucault 2004, 197). Whereas ascending analysis regarding the art of governance (of a population) began with observations of practices and then connected with other practices (a regime of practices) and dynamics occurring at all “levels” or scales, ascending analysis regarding the art of living (governance of the self) begins with practices of the self, which then permit care of others and the art of governance (of a population). Accordingly, Foucault indicated that “care of the self, in itself and as a consequence, must produce or induce behavior through which one will actually be able to take care of others. But all is lost if you begin with the care of others” (Foucault 2004, 198). Thus the implication from Foucault’s scholarship on the processes by which choice can be engaged suggests the importance of examining how oppositional consciousness emerges in individuals, connects, and works toward collective transformational politics. Although an unfinished project, these concerns set the stage for linking the governance of the self and the governance of a population. As Foucault commented: I do not believe that the only possible point of resistance to political power—understood, of course, as a state of domination—lies in the relationship of the self to the self. I am saying that “governmentality” implies the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of “governmentality” to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

552

Ettlinger

the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other . . . I believe that the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship to others—which constitutes the very stuff of ethics. (Foucault 1997a, 299–300)

Foucault’s analytical framework not only connects with critical theory; it informs it. His late scholarship on issues of subjectivity introduced an interesting twist to the relation between mentalities and related discourses on the one hand and practices on the other. Whereas Foucault’s earlier scholarship on governmentality suggested that mentalities and related discourses produce practices and interpellate identities by way of techniques of power, his ethical turn at the end of his life suggests that practices of the self can possibly transform one’s subjectivity and produce a new mentality of the self, assuming a perpetual, proactively sustained process of critique. The implication from Foucault’s latest work is that change is effected not by discourse but by practices. Persuasion by reasoned argument is unlikely to be effective—a hard point for most of us who habitually engage in reasoned persuasion as a means to communicate alternatives! Yet, we know that political debates often serve more as a rallying exercise for the believers of each platform than as deliberative, public process. Most teachers, for example, know that lecturing alone delivers little; it is strategies—productive techniques of power—to help students connect with and internalize points from apparently objective material that deliver content (if effective) through engaging students in practices such as writing (papers, exams, exercises), interactive discussion (perhaps in small groups), and observation (perhaps in field activity). Change toward a transformational mentality also requires an ascending approach, beginning with practices. Yet activist campaigns typically remain informational. From the vantage point developed here, activism is effective when citizen-subjects become enrolled in practices that cultivate reflexivity and open spaces of resistance. The analytical imperative for critical theory is to clarify how problems have evolved and then specify the mechanisms, the techniques of resistance (or countertechniques of power) that can produce a new set of practices, in turn, to produce a new mentality. ➢ analytical anchor point: specify the mechanisms, the techniques of resistance to counter regulatory techniques of power to produce new practices, engendering reflexivity and new mentalities

Consistent with an ascending mode of thought and analysis, mechanisms must be designed to prompt practices that stimulate individuals to think, to meditate as per Foucault, and permit exercises of freedom (Foucault 2004). Campaigns that enlist people in their cause unconsciously might achieve a tactical goal (e.g., the purchase of fair trade products that are distributed widely around a city), but this should not be confused with long-run strategic change in terms of a transformational mentality.43 Consider the case of planning for mixed neighborhoods (by class as well as race or ethnicity) that often is implemented in the absence of mechanisms to stimulate interaction and communication in everyday life. The underlying locational paradigm that implicitly or explicitly views physical proximity as inducing or equating with social proximity belies on-the-ground practices in so-called integrated workplaces, schools, residential neighborhoods, and so forth that reproduce segregation at increasingly finer scales within those contexts. If we understand the problem to be social ignorance, which produces fear, distrust, and a host of negative imaginaries that govern everyday practices, then the task is not to locate minority persons near those of the majority but rather to design practices that would generate new social knowledges to avoid reproduction of majority–minority power relations and persistent segregation (Ettlinger 2007a). Far beyond once-in-a-while events, such practices must be embedded within the rhythms of daily life; they must be routinized to ensure the continual negotiation of knowledges and identities (Ettlinger 2009b; Riley and Ettlinger forthcoming). Specific designs—techniques of power—might entail brokering business networks constituted by a diverse membership so that learned knowledge (connaissance) related to work through collaboration becomes a means to social learning (the counter to social ignorance) as well as competitive performance (Ettlinger 2009b). Indeed, social learning underscored the strategy of the Vancouver community in their struggle to change the mentality of local government officials. In the context of schools, techniques of power to overcome tensions wrought of difference amid an increasingly diverse student body might entail pedagogical strategies that place students in groups using principles similar to those in the business context mentioned earlier; that is, constituted by diverse membership with goals of social learning in the context of developing knowledges (connaissance) related to course goals (Riley and Ettlinger forthcoming).

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology What distinguishes Foucauldian-informed critical theory from utopian reasoning is that the former engages in the design of tactics, mechanisms, and countertechniques of power to realize new conditions of life; the latter envisions unattainable images of life. Speaking of power relations, Foucault (1997a, 298) commented, “The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication, but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.”

Conclusion Governmentality, broadly construed to encompass Foucault’s scholarship through his ethical turn, offers a critical epistemology for interpreting empirics and, moreover, using our acquired knowledge (savoir) to work toward a better world by avoiding problems of the past and present. Although the focus here has been on how to interpret and engage empirics, the analytical framework offered by Foucault is inextricably related to his ontology of power as diffuse, which delivers a decidedly novel understanding of what “counts” and the relation of everyday practices and mundane activity to societal projects. Countering modernist, totalizing frameworks on the left as well as the right, Foucault’s overall framework guides us to consider hopeful possibilities amid normalizing constraints. His mode of analysis is multiscalar, and specifically ascending, to count hopeful possibilities as well as to uncover problems by way of identifying practices that do not conform to societalscale mentalities, the discourses through which they are communicated, and the techniques of power that attempt to materialize them. The span of Foucault’s empirical frame of reference extends across space to frame contexts relationally by problems that are spatially extensive yet variegated. Whereas in an interview in 1976 Foucault expressed a narrow view of the discipline of geography in terms of the study of spatial patterns, he had a very different view of space, which he expressed as an historic-politico-economic problem that requires detailed examination (Foucault 1980a, 149). In the ensuing years he developed governmentality, which, broadly construed, offers an analytical pathway toward this end.

Acknowledgments I thank Mei-Po Kwan and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments. I also

553

have very much benefited from insightful discussion and questions from students who have taken a course I developed, Geographies of Governmentalities, which I have been teaching once a year since 2008.

Notes 1. Epistemology refers to how one comes to know things, how one interprets the world around us. The definition of hermeneutics is the same. As D. R. Olson (1986) clarified, hermeneutics initially referred exclusively to the interpretation of texts, but its use has broadened, and epistemology initially was referenced in the context of science, but its use also has broadened. I use epistemology rather than hermeneutics only on the hunch that more readers are more familiar with it. 2. Until the English-language publication of Security, Territory, Population in 2007, what is now chapter 4 of the book was published in English as “Governmentality” (Foucault 2000b) in 1994 in Michel Foucault: Power (Faubion 2000), in 1991 in The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991), and in 1979 in the journal Ideology and Consciousness (Foucault 1979). This article suggests that this lone chapter represents Foucault’s opening statements on governmentality and is most fruitfully interpreted in the context of Foucault’s evolving thoughts. 3. The final acceptance of this article occurred before the English-language publicaitions of Foucault’s latest lecture series at the Coll`ege de France (Foucault 2010, forthcoming); discussion of these last lectures is therefore beyond the scope of this article. 4. There are many different views of relational thinking regarding an analytical focus on connections; some are consistent with a topological view of space (as indicated by the references in the text) and others are not, especially those that argue for the importance of face-to-face interaction or agglomeration economies in exchanges of information and knowledge (e.g., Scott and Storper 2003; Morgan 2004). 5. When Foucault (2007b) introduced the idea of the art of governance, he did so with reference to its emergence, historically in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (and initially focused more on government than governance more broadly; i.e., extending beyond the state); he suggested that a particular form of power associated with governmentality, biopower, emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. Curtis (2002) argued on empirical grounds that Foucault misconstrued historical events, in particular the placement of the “discovery” of population in the eighteenth century and more generally that Foucault’s historical argument is empirically weak. Arguments about empirics aside, what I find especially compelling is Foucault’s own statement in a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy (outside his lecture series at the Coll`ege de France) that he was much less interested in what time something happened or in comparisons between time periods but rather “to see under what conditions, at the cost of which modifications or generalizations we can apply this question of the Aufkl¨arung [Enlightenment] to any moment in history; that is, the question of the relationships

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

554

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Ettlinger between power, truth and the subject” (Foucault 2007d, 57). It is in this spirit that this article is written. Foucault indicated in this seminar that he planned a new book; unfortunately, his death in 1984 cut short that goal. In what are known as Foucault’s enlightenment lectures (Lotringer 2007), which reinterpreted Kant’s (2007) conceptualization, Foucault distinguished different types of knowledge, connaissance and savoir, both of which translate uniformly as knowledge in English but have considerably different connotations. Connaissance, consistent with Kant’s view of the enlightenment, refers to specific knowledge or information and is universally accessible. Savoir refers to the connections among myriad ramifications of connaissance and is not universally accessed; access is created, not given, by assiduous intellectual activity and critique. The difference between the two is analogous to the distinction in organization science between information and knowledge; the latter refers to what one does with information. Critical theory is normative insofar as it is oriented to specifying the means by which a desired outcome might be obtained; that is, the logic is oriented to things “as they should be.” This approach differs considerably from analysis (e.g., in mainstream economics and some subdisciplines in geography oriented to formal modeling) that are normative but not based on a critique of the existing system and its history (thus, critical theory). Critical theory overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, critical studies or critical human geography, which broadly is concerned with critiquing the existing system and its history; critical theory entails critical deconstruction but also, and crucially, from a critical normative vantage point, thinking about how to constitute a more positive future (Ettlinger 2007a, 2009b; Sayer 2007; E. Olson and Sayer 2009). Prominent feminists who earlier had been outspoken about the problems of Foucauldian analysis (e.g., Butler 1997) changed their view after reading some of Foucault’s later work (e.g., Butler 2004). Interestingly, in part because of relatively late English-language publications, quite a bit of the scholarship on Foucault’s engagement with subjectivity relies on cursory comments or interviews (e.g., Foucault 1997a, 1997b) but does not cite Foucault’s latest lecture series on The Hermeneutics of the Self (Foucault 2004) and Fearless Speech (Foucault 2001) or the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1988a, 1990a). This suggests that a constructive tapping of the “late Foucault” is, at present, in its infancy. Fearless Speech (Foucault 2001) is a lecture series delivered at Berkeley in 1983 and published in 2001; it is cited relatively rarely among geographers. These lectures pertain to “truth telling” or parrhesia, which Foucault took as “a guideline for democracy as well as an ethical and personal attitude characteristic of the good citizen” (Foucault 2001, 22). Also the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1988a, 1990b) were published in English in 1990 and 1988, respectively, although these volumes (both of which engage the governance of the self) are cited far less frequently than the first volume (Foucault 1990a).

11. I emphasize majority here. In recent years participatory action research, which is fundamentally political, has gained currency (e.g., Gibson-Graham 1997; Cameron and Gibson 2004; Cahill 2007, 2010; Kindon et al. 2007), although it nonetheless remains a relatively small percentage of the literature in human geography. 12. The relation between spatial segregation and discriminatory actions exemplifies the idea of spatiality: One might reasonably argue that ignorance and fear of others (based on lack of pertinent social knowledge) results in discrimination, which results in spatial segregation, which is the cause of ignorance—a chicken-and-egg problem. 13. During Foucault’s life, English- as well as Frenchspeaking geographers were aware of his work (Fall 2007), and new developments in critical human geography were published (e.g., Gregory 1978; Massey 1979). However, human geography during Foucault’s life nonetheless was largely dominated by neoclassical and structuralist, notably Marxist, analyses on the political right and left, respectively. It was not until after his death that critical human geography intersecting with Foucault’s poststructuralism burgeoned. My concern here is with the influence and visibility of a mode of analysis in geography as a discipline more than indications of publications at particular points in time, which might be relevant to Foucauldian scholarship but nonetheless are relatively isolated. From the perspective of Foucault’s critique of history, I am pointing to contexts for particular “truths” in regimes of academic practices, not the specific time at which a particular concept or theoretical language appears (Foucault 2001, 74). 14. In addition, Foucault’s conceptualization in the late 1960s of “heterotopias” (Foucault 1986, 1998a)— specific, internally heterogeneous sites of “otherness,” which are countersites by virtue of their opposition to the mainstream—also has received attention regarding Foucault’s geographic sensibilities (e.g., Soja 1989, 1996; Elden 2001). This said, I concur with Saldanha (2008), who commented that the concept of heterotopia pays curious homage to structuralism because of the totalizing presumption of society, to which spatial difference is counterposed in a spatialized binary (see also Thrift 2007). That Foucault dropped the concept relatively soon after introducing it is perhaps unsurprising because the concept is inconsistent with Foucault’s work both before and after developing it (Saldanha 2008); more generally, it is inconsistent with Foucault’s explicit attention to working out a nonstructuralist framework. Further, heterotopia as a representation of a type of context is inconsistent with the more topological view of context that Foucault eventually developed. 15. Cooper’s (2006) article is especially rich in terms of including multiple analytical dimensions—specifically regarding the governance of populations (i.e., the left side of Figure 1). 16. This paragraph with a variety of references to different types of case study analyses using governmentality is certainly not meant to be exhaustive. For many more examples and contextualization, see Hannah’s (2007) useful archaeology of Foucault in Anglo-American geography.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology 17. By racialized education I refer to a wide variety of practices that pertain both to the generation of a type of education system resulting in poor occupational opportunity in particular types of localities (e.g., low-income urban areas in the United States where property taxes, which fund public schools, are low) as well as types of practices within apparently integrated schools that actually reinforce segregation in both curricular and extracurricular activity. 18. In one ethnically diverse high school in a locality recently experiencing an influx of immigrants from Somalia and different countries in Latin America, English as a second language (ESL) classes were separated by ethnicity: Somalis had Somali ESL instructors, whereas Hispanics (regardless of nationality) had Spanish-speaking ESL instructors, reinforcing separatist senses of identity, namely, nationally specific Somali and generalized Hispanic (Riley and Ettlinger, forthcoming). 19. In a lecture delivered in Brazil entitled “The Meshes of Power,” Foucault (2007a, 156–57) talked about “local and regional powers” and the analytical problem of localizing power to study them in their “historical and geographical specificity.” For geographers, this is significant, but it is also problematic because throughout his other lectures and interviews Foucault explicitly emphasized that it is problems, not power, that require localization. It is possible that Foucault’s choice of words in “The Meshes of Power” was unique and possibly directed to a particular audience in a lecture that has a considerably different feel relative to his other scholarship. For example, “The Meshes of Power” is his only lecture that presents Marxism in a positive way. Note that localizing power is consistent with Marxist approaches but is fundamentally inconsistent with Foucault’s view of power as diffuse. 20. For example, Barry (2004) emphasized that approaching a broad issue such as ethical capitalism requires focusing on a regime of practices (as opposed to an ideology). Specifically, he examines a regime of practices in British Petroleum’s (BP’s) mode of operation that evolved following a particular event—the Brent Spar incident. 21. For example, Riley and Ettlinger (forthcoming) examined the failure of a multicultural program in a diverse high school; the analysis was prompted at the outset by Chris Riley’s firsthand observations of tensions (sometimes physical) among racial and ethnic groups. Ettlinger’s (2004) examination of the spatiality of social relations began with a hypothetical anecdote, which prompted problematization and explanation. 22. For example, Gibson (2001) examined the Latrobe Valley following restructuring. The analysis followed interviews in which comments made by interviewees required problematization and contexualization. 23. For example, Allen’s (2006) examination of ambient power in a German plaza was prompted by feelings produced by the experience of being there. 24. For example, Hurricane Katrina exposed a social disaster, in turn prompting questions as to why and how Katrina’s victims were overwhelmingly poor and African American and how the design of post-Katrina New Orleans might avoid historically long-standing segregationist processes (Ettlinger 2007a).

555

25. Legg (2007) made this case in the context of colonial India relative to reports on Delhi from a British officer and an indigenous lands officer and a memorandum written by local residents. ´ enementialisation is translated as “eventalization” in 26. Ev´ “Questions of Method” (Foucault 2000f ) and as “eventualization” in “What Is Critique” (Foucault 2007d). 27. These quotes come from Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” written in 1971 (Foucault 1998b); in this essay he critiqued conventional history and developed the idea of genealogy advanced by Nietzsche. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault 1998b), The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1988a, 1990a, 1990b), and notable examples of Foucault’s lecture series on modern European states (Foucault 2003, 2007b, 2008) for Foucault’s genealogical scholarship. When Foucault developed governmentality as a conceptual framework in the later 1970s, his thoughts about genealogy connected with what he then termed eventualization. A principal point of the essay—to oppose the search for “origins” and to engage in “numberless beginnings”—connects with Foucault’s later comments about eventualization in his interview on “Questions of Method” (Foucault 2000f) in 1978. 28. Riley and Ettlinger (forthcoming) examined two related but different branches of critical race theory: One emphasizes how individuals are racially interpellated (e.g., Omi and Winant 1994), whereas another emphasizes the mutability and multiplicity of identities (e.g., GoodingWilliams 1998). 29. During the foreclosure crisis in 2008, television network CNN displayed portraits of persons who were responsible for the crisis (a new portrait was added on a weekly basis to the gallery of culprits). In February 2010, the Real-World Economics Review listserv (pae [email protected]) reported results of an election among economists for the “dynamite prize” for the person most responsible for the global economic crisis. (Alan Greenspan won; second and third places went to Milton Friedman and Larry Summers, respectively.) 30. Foreclosure rates increased considerably during the 1990s (Kaplan and Sommers 2009; Dymski 2010). 31. Cities such as Baltimore have sued banks (Wells Fargo in the case of Baltimore) for pushing subprime mortgages on blacks in a regime of “ghetto loans” (M. Powell 2009). 32. Foucault (2000e, 416) implied the idea of multiple governmentalities when he commented that “political rationality is linked with other forms of rationality. Its development in large part is dependent upon economical, social, cultural, and technical processes.” One might reasonably extend this comment to recognize rationalities across as well as within spheres (economic, political, social, and cultural) to allow, for example, for multiple rationalities that are political. In a lecture at Dartmouth in 1978 entitled “What Is Critique?” Foucault (2007d, 60) commented that “No one should ever think that there exists one knowledge or one power.” 33. See Ettlinger (2007b) for elaboration of how microscale activity (from an actor, not place-based view) becomes “unchained” using an alternative approach to scale.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

556

Ettlinger

34. Foucault argued that governmentality pertains to populations, not territories, but see Elden’s (2007, 2009, 2010) persuasive argumentation regarding territory as a political technology. 35. Thinking about techniques of power that are targeted to different scales might connect fruitfully with A. Fraser’s (2010) “scalecraft.” 36. Foucault introduced the term biopower in 1976 in his first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990a) and in a lecture in 1976 as part of his series on Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003). 37. I do not follow common interpretations of the micro-, meso-, and macroscales as correlating with spatial units such as local, national, and global. Rather, following Ettlinger (2007a, 2010) I offer the following definitions. Macroscale refers to societal structures and to formal and informal institutions that shape collective and individual behavior and decision making. Mesoscale refers to specific contexts in which social relations occur and, crucially, such contexts need not necessarily be spatially circumscribed—that is, they can be spread across space—to allow for a topological understanding of context. Finally, microscale refers to individuals’ actions, thoughts, and feelings in an actor, not a place-oriented, conceptualization. I concur with Lemke (2001, 203), who commented on the elegance of governmentality with reference to its analytical connection of the micro and the macro political “levels” in addition to its connection of discursive and material realities. 38. Although commenting that Foucault suggested a historical chronology of disciplinary power (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and biopower (at the end of the eighteenth century) Hoy (2004, 75–76) nonetheless argued that disciplinary power and biopower operate concurrently and with regard to different “scope” and “direction”—disciplinary power referring to the “micro” and biopower referring to the “macro.” 39. Foucault (1980e, 121) famously said of political theory, “We need to cut off the king’s head,” signifying that governance extends beyond the state, which “is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth . . . this meta-power with its prohibitions can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations that supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power” (Foucault 1980e, 122). 40. From a post-Marxist perspective, Hardt and Negri’s (2004) Multitude exemplifies the location of power in an entity, namely, the multitude. 41. One might reasonably argue that complete independence from the system in which one is situated is impossible. The main point is that one can try to distance oneself as much as possible from the system to critique it so as to be able to constructively engage it. 42. Barnett (2005) criticized Foucault for leaving social relations unattended. I concur, although I would add the qualifier that Foucault did express interest in social relations and, crucially, the ultimate aim of linking the art of governance and the art of living. 43. Malpass et al. (2007) examined the ways in which Bristol was made into a fair trade city. Fair trade products were sold in a wide variety of stores and other venues, although

the level of consciousness of fair trade among consumers was highly variable. On the other hand, local producers were brought into an exchange program with local producers in less developed countries. One might suspect that the strategy regarding producers, which brought people together with their distant others, might have resulted in productive social learning (or the potential for such) and possibly a space for the development of a transformational mentality; however, the consumption strategy—making fair trade products widely available for purchase—seems considerably less likely to promote new subjectivities.

References Allen, J. 2003. Lost geographies of power. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2006. Ambient power: Berlin’s Postdamer Platz and the seductive logic of public spaces. Urban Studies 43:441–55. Allen, J., and A. Cochrane. 2007. Beyond the territorial fix: Regional assemblages, politics and power. Regional Studies 41:1161–75. Amin, A. 2002. Spatialities of globalization. Environment and Planning A 34:385–99. ———. 2004. Regions unbound: Towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler 86B:33–44. Ares, N. 2008. Appropriating roles and relations of power in collaborative learning. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 21:99–121. Barnett, C. 2005. The consolations of “neoliberalism.” Geoforum 36:7–12. Barry, A. 2004. Ethical capitalism. In Global governmentality: Governing international spaces, ed. W. Larner and W. Walters, 195–211. London and New York: Routledge. Bernstein, N. 2008. City of immigrants fills cells with its own. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/12/27/us/27detain.html? r=1&th=&e (last accessed 23 January 2009). Boggs, J. S., and N. M. Rantisi, eds. 2003. The “relational turn” in economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography 3:109–16. Bosco, F. J. 2006. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and three decades of human rights activism: Embeddedness, emotions, and social movements. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96:342–65. Braun, B. 2007. Biopolitics and the molecularization of life. Cultural Geographies 14:6–28. Burchell, G., C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2004. Bodies and power revisited. In Feminism and the final Foucault, ed. D. Taylor and K. Vintges, 183–94. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Buttle, M. 2007. “I’m not in it for the money”: Constructing and mediating ethical reconnections in UK social banking. Geoforum 38:1076–88. Cahill, C. 2007. The personal is political: Developing new subjectivities through participatory action research. Gender, Place and Culture 14:267–92.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology ———. 2010. “Why do they hate us?” Reframing immigration research through participatory action research. Area 42:152–61. Cameron, J. 1998. The practice of politics: Transforming subjectivities in the domestic domain and the public sphere. Australian Geographer 29:293–307. Cameron, J., and K. Gibson. 2004. Participatory action research in a poststructuralist vein. Geoforum 36:315–31. Catungal, J. P., and D. Leslie. 2009. Placing power in the creative city: Governmentalities and subjectivities in Liberty Village, Toronto. Environment and Planning A 41:2576–94. Clifford, J. 1988. The predicament of culture twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J., and G. E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cooper, D. 2006. Active citizenship and the governmentality of local lesbian and gay politics. Political Geography 25:921–43. Crampton, J. W. 2007. Maps, race and Foucault: Eugenics and territorialization following World War I. In Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden, 223–44. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Crowley, U., and R. Kitchin. 2008. Producing “decent girls”: Governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937). Gender, Place, and Culture 15:355–72. Cruikshank, B. 1999. The will to empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Curtis, B. 2002. Foucault on governmentality and population: The impossible discovery. Canadian Journal of Sociology 27:505–33. Dean, M. 2010. Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage. Dicken, P., P. F. Kelly, K. Olds, and H. W. C. Yeung. 2001. Chains and networks, territories and scales: Towards a relational framework for analyzing the global economy. Global Networks 1:89–112. Dymski, G. A. 2010. From financial exploitation to global banking stability. In The great credit crash, ed. M. Konings, 72–102. New York: Verso. Dodge, M., and R. Kitchin. 2005. Codes of life: Identification codes and the machine-readable world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23:851–81. Elden, S. 2001. Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the project of a spatial history. New York: Continuum. ———. 2007. Governmentality, calculation, territory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25:562–80. ———. 2009. Terror and territory: The spatial extent of sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2010. Land, terrain, territory. Progress in Human Geography 34:799–817. Eribon, D. 1991. Michel Foucault. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ettlinger, N. 2004. Towards a critical theory of untidy geographies: The spatiality of emotions in consumption and production. Feminist Economics 10:21–54. ———. 2007a. Bringing democracy home: Post-Katrina New Orleans. Antipode 39:8–16. ———. 2007b. Unchaining the micro. Socio-Economics of Space Discussion Forum (SECONS), track 3, no. 11.

557

http://www.giub.uni-bonn.de/grabher/ (last accessed 13 April 2008). ———. 2009a. Problematizing the presentation of poststructural case-study research, or working out the crisis of representation in the presentation of empirics. Environment and Planning A 41:1017–19. ———. 2009b. Surmounting city silences: Knowledge creation and the design of urban democracy in the everyday economy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33:217–30. ———. 2010. Bringing the everyday into the culture/creativity discourse. Human Geography 3:49–59. Fall, J. J. 2007. Lost geographers: Power games and the circulation of ideas within Francophone political geographies. Progress in Human Geography 31:195–216. Faubion, J. D., ed. 2000. Michel Foucault/power. New York: The New Press. ———. 2001. Toward an anthropology of ethics: Foucault and the pedagogies of autopoiesis. Representations 74:83– 104. Featherstone, D. 2004. Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: The construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle port strikes of 1768. Geoforum 35:701–11. ———. 2008. Resistance, space and political identities: The making of counter-global networks. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. Forest, B. 2004. Information sovereignty and GIS: The evolution of “communities of interest” in political redistricting. Political Geography 23:425–51. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. ———. 1979. On governmentality. Ideology and Consciousness 6:5–21. ———. 1980a. The eye of power. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 146–65. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1980b. The politics of health in the eighteenth century. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 166–82. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1980c. Power and strategies. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 134–45. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1980d. Questions on geography. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 63–77. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1980e. Truth and power. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 109–33. New York: Pantheon. ———1980f. Two lectures. In Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper, 78–108. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1984. Polemics, politics, and problematizations: An interview with Michel Foucault, trans. L. Davis. In The Foucault reader, ed. P. Rabinow, 383–90. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1986. Of other spaces. Diacritics 16:22–27.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

558

Ettlinger

———. 1988a. The history of sexuality: Volume 3. The care of the self, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1988b. Technologies of the self. In Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. H. Hartin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 1988c. Truth, power, self: An interview with Michel Foucault, October 25, 1982. In Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. L. H. Hartin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton, 9–15. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 1990a. The history of sexuality: Volume 1. An introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1990b. The history of sexuality: Volume 2. The use of pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997a. The ethics of the concern for the self as a practice of freedom. In Michel Foucault/ethics: Subjectivity and truth, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, 281–301. New York: The New Press. ———. 1997b. On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In Michel Foucault/ethics: Subjectivity and truth, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, 253–80. New York: The New Press. ———. 1998a. Different spaces. In Michel Foucault/aesthetics, method, and epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 175–85. New York: The New Press. ———. 1998b. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Michel Foucault/aesthetics, method and epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 369–91. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000a. The birth of social medicine. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 134–56. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000b. Governmentality. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 201–22. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000c. Interview with Michel Foucault. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 239–97. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000d. “Omnes et singulatum”: Toward a critique of political reason. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 298–325. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000e. The political technology of individuals. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 403–17. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000f. Questions of method. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 223–38. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000g. So is it important to think? In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 454–58. New York: The New Press. ———. 2000h. The subject and power. In Michel Foucault/power, ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley and others, 326–48. New York: The New Press. ———. 2001. Fearless speech, ed. J. Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2003. Society must be defended: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1975–1976, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fonatana, trans. D. Macey. New York: Picador.

———. 2004. The hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1981–82, ed. F. Gros, trans. B. Burchell. New York: Picador. ———. 2007a. Meshes of power. In Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and Geography, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden, 153–62. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ———. 2007b. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2007c. Subjectivity and truth. In The politics of truth, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and C. Porter, 147– 67. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2007d. What is critique? In The politics of truth, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and C. Porter, 41–95. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2007e. What is enlightenment? In The politics of truth, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and C. Porter, 97–119. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1978–1979, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2010. The government of self and others: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1982–1983, ed. F. Gros, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave. ———. Forthcoming. The courage of the truth: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1984, ed. G. Burchell. New York: Palgrave. Fraser, A. 2010. The craft of scalar practices. Environment and Planning A 42:332–46. Fraser, N. 1989. Foucault on modern power: Empirical insights and normative confusions. In Unruly practices: Power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social theory, ed. N. Fraser, 17–34. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, K. 2001. Regional subjection and becoming. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19:639–67. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1997. Stuffed if I know: Reflections on post-modern feminist social research. In Space, gender, knowledge, ed. L. McDowell and J. P. Sharp, 124–46. New York: Arnold. Gilmore, R. W. 2007. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gooding-Williams, R. 1998. Race, multiculturalism, and democracy. Constellations 5:18–41. Gore, J. M. 1995. On the continuity of power relations in pedagogy. International Studies in Sociology of Education 5:165–88. Gotham, K. F. 2000. Urban space, restrictive covenants and the origins of racial residential segregation in a U.S.city, 1900–50. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24:616–33. Gregory, D. 1978. Ideology, science and human geography. London: Hutchinson. Hannah, M. G. 1997. Space and the structuring of disciplinary power: An interpretive review. Geografiska Annaler 79B:171–80. ———. 2000. Governmentality and the mastery of territory in nineteenth-century America. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Formations of “Foucault” in Anglo-American geography: An archaeological sketch. In Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden, 83–105. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology Haraway, D. 1997. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Space, gender, knowledge, ed. L. McDowell and J. P. Sharp, 53–72. New York: Arnold. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin. Harvey, D. 1989. The urban experience. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hoefle, S. 2006. Eliminating scale and killing the goose that laid the golden egg? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31:238–43. Hoy, D .C. 2004. Foucault: “Essays in refusal.” In Critical resistance: From poststructuralism to post-critique, ed. D. C. Hoy, 57–100. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hughes, A. 2001. Global commodity networks, ethical trade and governmentality: Organizing business responsibility in the Kenyan cut flower industry. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 26:390–406. Huxley, M. 2006. Spatial rationalities: Order, environment, evolution and government. Social and Cultural Geography 7:771–87. Jonas, A. E. G. 2006. Pro scale: Further reflections on the “scale debate” in human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 31:399–406. Kant, I. 2007. Was Ist Aufkl¨arung? In The politics of truth: Michel Foucault, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and C. Porter, 29–37. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Kaplan, D., and G. G. Sommers. 2009. An analysis of the relationship between housing foreclosures, lending practices, and neighborhood ecology: Evidence from a distressed community. The Professional Geographer 61:101–20. Kindon, S., R. Pain, and M. Kesby, eds. 2007. Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people, participation and place. New York: Routledge. Langley, P. 2008. The everyday life of global finance: Saving and borrowing in Anglo-America. New York: Oxford University Press. Larner, W., and R. Le Heron. 2004. Global benchmarking. In Global governmentality: Governing international spaces, ed. W. Larner and W. Walters, 212–32. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, J. A. 2007. Gender, ethnicity, and hybrid forms of community-based urban activism in Vancouver, 1957– 1978: The Strathcona story revisited. Gender, Place and Culture 14:381–407. Legg, S. 2005. Foucault’s population geographies: Classifications, biopolitics and governmental spaces. Population, Space and Place 1:137–56. ———. 2007. Spaces of colonialism: Delhi’s urban governmentalities. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lemke, T. 2001. “The birth of bio-politics”: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Coll`ege de France on neo-liberal governmentality. Economy and Society 30:190–207. Lotringer, S., ed. 2007. The politics of truth: Michel Foucault. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Luxon, N. 2004. Truthfulness, risk, and trust in the late lectures of Michel Foucault. Inquiry 47:464–89. ———. 2008. Ethics and subjectivity: Practices of selfgovernance in the late lectures of Michel Foucault. Political Theory 36:377–402.

559

Malpass, A., P. Cloke, C. Barnett, and N. Clarke. 2007. Fairtrade urbanism? The politics of place beyond place in the Bristol fairtrade city campaign. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30:873–93. Marston, S., J. P. Jones III, and K. Woodward. 2005. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30:416–32. Massey, D. 1979. In what sense a regional problem? Regional Studies 13:233–43. ———. 1993. Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In Mapping the futures: Local cultures, global change, ed. J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, and L. Tickner, 59–69. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. For space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Massey, D., J. Allen, and P. Sarre., eds. 1999. Human geography today. Malden, MA: Blackwell. McGeehan, P. 2009. Pfizer to leave city that won landuse case. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/11/13/nyregion/13pfizer.html?scp=19&sq=new+ london+eminent+domain&st=nyt (last accessed 14 March 2010). McGushin, E. F. 2007. Foucault’s ask¯e sis: An introduction to the philosophical life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. McLaren, M. A. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and embodied subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press. McNay, L. 2009. Self as enterprise: Dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s The birth of biopolitics. Theory, Culture & Society 26 (6): 55–77. Milchman, A., and A. Rosenberg. 2005. Michel Foucault: Crises and problematizations. Review of Politics 67:335– 51. Miller, J. 1993. The passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mitchell, K. 2006. Neoliberal governmentality in the European Union: Education, training, and technologies of citizenship. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24:389–407. Morgan, K. 2004. The exaggerated death of geography: Learning, proximity and territorial innovation systems. Journal of Economic Geography 4:3–21. Moss, J., ed. 2009. The later Foucault: Politics and philosophy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. O’Grady, H. 2004. An ethics of the self. In Feminism and the final Foucault, ed. D. Taylor and K. Vintges, 91–117. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. O’Leary, T. 2006. Foucault and the art of ethics. New York: Continuum. Olson, D. R. 1986. Mining the human sciences: Some relations between hermeneutics and epistemology. Interchange 17:159–71. Olson, E., and A. Sayer. 2009. Radical geography and its critical standpoints: Embracing the normative. Antipode 41:180–98. Omi, M., and H. Winant. 1994. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. London and New York: Routledge. Paras, E. 2006. Foucault 2.0: Beyond power and knowledge. New York: Other Press. Philo, C. 1992. Foucault’s geography. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10:137–61. ———. 2000. The birth of the clinic: An unknown work of medical geography. Area 32:11–19.

Downloaded By: [Association of American Geographers - Referer URL for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and The Professional Geographer] At: 13:53 2 May 2011

560

Ettlinger

———. 2001. Accumulating populations: Bodies, institutions and space. International Journal of Population Geography 7:473–90. ———. 2005. Sex, life, death, geography: Fragmentary remarks inspired by “Foucault’s population geographies.” Population, Space and Place 11:325–33. ———. 2007. “Bellicose history” and “local discursivities”: An archaeological reading of Michel Foucault’s Society must be defended. In Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden, 341–67. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Pickett, B. L. 1996. Foucault and the politics of resistance. Polity 28:445–66. Powell, J. 2002. Sprawl, fragmentation, and the persistence of racial inequality: Limiting civil rights by fragmenting space. In Urban sprawl: Causes, consequences, and policy responses, 73–117. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press. Powell, M. 2009. Bank accused of pushing mortgage deals on blacks. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/06/07/us/07baltimore.html?sq=Baltimore%201aw% 20suit&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print (last accessed 14 March 2010). Rabinow, P., ed. 1997. Michel Foucault/ethics: Subjectivity and truth, trans. R. Hurley and others, 67–71. New York: The New Press. ———. 2009. Foucault’s untimely struggle: Toward a form of spirituality. Theory, Culture & Society 26:25– 44. Raco, M. 2003. Governmentality, subject-building, and the discourses and practices of devolution in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28:75– 95. Riley, C., and N. Ettlinger. Forthcoming. Interpreting racial formation and multiculturalism in a high school: Towards a constructive deployment of two approaches to critical race theory. Antipode. Rojas, C. 2004. Governing through the social: Representations of poverty and global governmentality. In Global governmentality: Governing international spaces, ed. W. Larner and W. Walters, 97–115. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, N. 1996. Governing “advanced” liberal democracies. In Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, ed. A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose, 37–64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rose-Redwood, R. S. 2006. Governmentality, geography, and the geo-coded world. Progress in Human Geography 30:469–86.

Routledge, P. 2003. Convergent space: Process geographies of grassroots globalization networks. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28:333–49. Routledge, P., A. Cumbers, and C. Nativel. 2007. Grassrooting network imaginaries: Relationality, power and mutual solidarity in global justice networks. Environment and Planning A 39:2575–92. Saegert, S., D. Fields, and K. Libman. 2009. Debating the dream: Radical risk and the neoliberalization of home ownership. Journal of Urban Affairs 31:297–317. Saldanha, A. 2008. Heterotopia and structuralism. Environment and Planning A 40:2080–96. Salzman, A. 2006. Connecticut city takes first step to evict in eminent domain case. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/06/nyregion/ 06domain.html?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt (last accessed 14 March 2010). Sayer, A. 2007. Moral economy as critique. New Political Economy 12:261–70. Scott, A. J., and M. Storper. 2003. Regions, globalization, development. Regional Studies 4:579–93. Smith, R. 2003. World city topologies. Progress in Human Geography 27:561–82. Soja, E. W. 1989. Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. New York: Verso. ———. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Taylor, D. 2009. Normativity and normalization. Foucault Studies 7:45–63. Taylor, D., and K. Vintges, eds. 2004. Feminism and the final Foucault. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thrift, N. 2007. Overcome by space: Reworking Foucault. In Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. J. W. Crampton and S. Elden, 53–58. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Voyce, M. 2003. The privatization of public property: The development of a shopping mall in Sydney and its implications for governance through spatial practices. Urban Policy and Research 21:249–62. Watts, M. 2003. Development and governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 24:6–34. Woodward, K., J. P. Jones III, and S. Marston. 2007. The eagle and the fly: A fable for the micro. Socioeconomics of Space Discussion Forum (SECONS), track 3, no. 12. http://www.giub.uni-bonn.de/grabher/ downloads/Woodward.pdf (last accessed 13 April 2008). Wyly, E., M. Atia, H. Foxcroft, D. J. Hammel, and K. Phillips-Watts. 2006. American home: Predatory mortgage capital and neighborhood spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States. Geografiska Annaler 88B 1:105–32. Yeung, H. W. C. 2005. Rethinking relational economic geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30:37–51.

Correspondence: Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, e-mail: [email protected].