Page 145 - Cultural Theory

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••• Tim May and Jason Powell •••

governmentality: an assemblage of ruling practices, knowledge authorities and moral
imperatives that converged on the population in order to extend the reach of the
state. The controversial point is that governmentality is more complex than state
power. Custodial institutions and health programmes configured individuals into
sub-strata of the population. For example, pension policies define ‘the elderly’ as a
particular group of people, while statistics elaborate their status as a demographic
entity (an ‘ageing population’). Thus, the disciplinary formation of subjects as a pop-
ulation makes possible the government of subjectification.

Discussion: The Legacy and its Implications

It may be that the problem about the self does not have to do with discovering
what it is, but maybe has to do with discovering that the self is nothing more
than a correlate of technology built into our history.
(Foucault, 1993: 222)

Foucault’s formulation presumes the notion that individual lives are never quite
complete and finished – that in order to function socially, individuals must somehow
work on themselves to turn themselves into subjects. The notion of ‘technologies’
offers the opportunity for a particular analysis of the sites and methods whereby cer-
tain effects on the subject are brought about. We spoke earlier of how objectifying
technologies of control are, for example, those invented in conformity with the
facets of discourses provided by criminality, sexuality, medicine and psychiatry.
These are deployed within concrete institutional settings whose architecture testifies
to the ‘truth’ of the objects they contain. Thus, the possibilities of self-experience on
the part of the subject are, in themselves, affected by the presence of someone who
has the authority to decide that they are ‘truly’ ill such as a ‘doctor’ of medicine
(Powell and Biggs, 2000). However, ‘subjectifying’ technologies of self-control are
those through which individuals:

effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of oper-
ations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so
as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity,
wisdom, perfection or immortality.
(Foucault, 1988: 18)

The important issues that Foucault raises via a questioning of the centrality of the
subject are associated with ‘truthful’ formulations of the task or the problem that cer-
tain domains of experience and activity pose for individuals themselves. The bound-
aries of self-experience change with every acquisition, on the part of individuals, of
a possibility, or a right, or an obligation, to state a certain ‘truth’ about themselves.
For example, biotechnology in popular culture can tell a ‘truth’ of selling a dream of
unspoken desire of ‘not growing old’ to people. However, it is the self-experience of

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