Abstract
When discussing the relations between an analytics of governmentality and that of sociologies of governance, Nikolas Rose suggests that the former is most usefully distinguished in terms of the orientation which guides inquiry and directs its focus. As distinct from the concern with the networks of relations between individual and institutional actors that characterises sociologies of governance, studies of governmentality are concerned with ‘a particular ‘‘stratum’’ of knowing and acting’ (Rose 1999, p. 19). By examining the role played by particular regimes of truth, and the ways in which these are assembled into distinctive apparatuses through which specific forms of power are organised and brought to bear on specific problems, such studies trace the conditions which make possible varied kinds of intervention into the conduct of conduct, whether of oneself or of others. And their orientation, Rose argues, is ‘diagnostic rather than descriptive’ in the sense that, by adopting ‘an open and critical relation to strategies of governing attentive to their presuppositions, their assumptions, their exclusions, their naiveties and their knaveries, their regimes of vision and their spots of blindness’, their concern is to open up a ‘space for critical thought’ that operates within and against the present (Rose 1999, p. 19). By focusing on the contingency of the forms of power that are assembled in the present, an analytics of governmentality makes it possible to think how the present could be made otherwise, and it does so, Rose argues, from the perspective of bringing about different articulations of the relations between government and freedom from those which currently obtain.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 525-548 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Cultural Studies |
Volume | 21 |
Issue number | 45416 |
Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Keywords
- culture
- sociology