The Technical and the Political: Discourses of Race, Reasons of State
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
| Author | Duncan Ivison |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399800700407 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE TECHNICAL AND THE
POLITICAL: DISCOURSES OF
RACE, REASONS OF STATE
DUNCAN
IVISON
University of York, UK
AT
THE
very end of their very interesting and suggestive paper, Rose
and Valverde suggest that we should ’step aside from the dreary
jL debate above sovereignty versus discipline, and ... engage directly
with the analysis and diagnosis of particular problematizations and of the
strategies used in their regulation’.1 Herein lie the seeds of my two complaints
and one comment. I deal with the complaints first, and then turn to the
relation between sovereignty and discipline by way of a discussion of
Foucault’s intriguing genealogy of racism, which runs alongside the dis-
cussion of the birth of ’biopower’ and the ’biopolitical state’.
THE TECHNICAL AND THE POLITICAL
’
/
First the two complaints. The last part of the sentence quoted above is worry-
ing. It implies we should forget about all this conceptual stuff and just get on
with analysing ’directly’ particular problematizations and strategies of regu-
lation. ’Problematization’ is defined loosely as the way in which ’experience
is offered to thought in the form of a problem requiring attention’. This is so
vague as to be almost empty; but leave that aside. My
first complaint is that
the governmentality literature is taking on an increasingly formulaic air.
There has been a bounteous proliferation of micro-studies of ’technologies
of government’. The same basic framework is deployed and applied in a
myriad of contexts - in law, childcare, education, psychiatry, political
economy, sociology, and even regimes of car insurance (I kid you not). And
genuine insights are undoubtedly being garnered. But little reflection seems
directed at the analytic framework itself, a most un-Foucauldian trait. More
significantly, the relentless micro-focus on the mundane, the practical, the
bureaucratic and ’the petty powers of adjudication and enforcement’, whilst
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199812) 7:4 Copyright @ 1998
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
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an important corrective to overly general approaches (such as in the philos-
ophy of law or normative political theory) risks being just as blind in other
ways; for example, to the way different rationalities of government intersect
and connect up to more general social and political theories to do with differ-
ent conceptions of citizenship or the state. Political and normative theory is,
after all, part of reality too.
My second complaint is more a whine, or perhaps a wish. Why do most
studies of governmentality eschew all form of ’positive’ claims? Are there not
’authorities’ or ’individualizations’ that work on the capacities of individuals
and groups that we might want to defend, for example, those which allow for
critical reflection on, or engagement with, the particular forms of government
or regularization shaping our lives in various contexts? This is not meant to
drag up that other dreary debate about whether Foucault has smuggled into
his account normative claims about autonomy or freedom. Rather, it is a plea
for more prefiguring of the kinds of practices...
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