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The Foucault Effect THE FOUCAULT EFFECT STUDIES IN GOVERN M EN1l\LITY WITH MOLECTURES BY ANDAN INTERVIEW WITH MICHEL FOUCAULT Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 © 1991 Editors and Contributors All rights reserved. Published 1991 Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 II 10 09 08 07 6 7 8 9 ISBN: 0-226-08045-5 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault I edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-08044-7 (cloth). - ISBN 0-226-08045-5 (pbk.) I. Reason of state. 2. Welfare state. l. Foucault, Michel. II. Burchell, Graham. III. Gordon, Colin. IV. Miller, Peter, Ph.D. ]CI3I.F63 1991 320'.0I'I-dc20 91-10456 CIP e The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Contents Acknowledgements Vll Preface IX 1 Governmental Rationality: An Introduction Colin Gordon 2 Politics and the Study of Discourse 53 Michel Foucault 3 Questions of Method 73 Michel Foucault 4 Governmentality 87 Michel Foucault 5 Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital - Police and the State of Prosperity 105 Pasquale Pasquino 6 Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing 'The System of Natural Liberty' 119 Graham Burchell 7 Social Economy and the Government of Poverty 151 Giovanna Procacci 8 The Mobilization of Society 169 Jacques Donzelot 9 How should We Do the History of Statistics? 181 Ian Hacking 10 Insurance and Risk 197 Fran�is Ewald 11 'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology 211 Daniel Defert v Contents 12 Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge 235 Pasquale Pasquino 13 Pleasure in Work 251 Jacques Donzelot 14 From Dangerousness to Risk 281 Robert Castel Index 299 VI Acknowledgements Chapter 2 originally appeared in the French journal Esprit, no. 371 (May 1968) pp. 850-874. An English translation first appeared in the journal Salmagundi, no. 20 (Summer-Fall, 1972) pp. 225-48. A revised translation by Colin Gordon originally appeared in Ideology and Consciousness, no. 3 (Spring, 1978). The present version has been fu rther extensively revised. Chapter 3 originally appeared in Michelle Perrot, ed., L'impossible prison: Recherches sur Ie systeme pinitentiare au XIXe siecle (editions du Seuil, Paris, 1980). The translation by Colin Gordon, reproduced here with minor corrections, originally appeared in I&C, no. 8, Power and Desire: Diagrams of the Social (Spring 1981). Chapter 4 is a lecture given at the College de France, February 1978. The first publication was in an I talian translation by Pasquale Pasquino, in the journal Aut ...aut, no. 167-8 (September - December 1978). An English translation by Rosi Braidotti originally appeared in I&C, no. 6 (Autumn 1979). A French version, re-translated from the Italian, appeared in Actes No. 54 (ete 1986) pp. 7-15. The present version was revised by Colin Gordon. Chapter 5 was given as a paper to a seminar organized at the College de France by Michel Foucault in 1978. A translation by Colin Gordon originally appeared in Ideology and Consciousness, no. 4 (Autumn 1978). The present translation has been extensively revised. Chapter 7 originally appeared in Aut ...aut, no. 167-8 (September­ December 1978). A translation from the Italian by Jennifer Stone originally appeared in Ideology and Consciousness, no. 4 (Autumn 1978). The present version has been extensively revised by Colin Gordon. Chapter 8 was written for a conference on neo-social democracy held in 1982. The translation by Colin Gordon appears here fo r the first time. Chapter 9 originally appeared in I&C no. 8 (Spring 1981). The text and notes for this version have been revised by the author. Chapter 12 was written for a seminar organized at the College de France in 1979 by Michel Foucault. The translation by Colin Gordon, reproduced here with minor modificationsoriginally appeared in I&C no. 7, Technologies of the Human Sciences (Autumn 1980). The present version has been further revised. Vll Acknowledgements Chapter 13 originally appeared in Jean Carpentier, Robert Castel, Jacques Donzelot, Jean Marie Lacrosse, Anne Lovell and Giovanna Procacci, Resistances a fa midecine et demultiplication du concept de sante (C.O.R.D.E.S.lCommisariat General du Plan, Paris 1980). The transla­ tion by Colin Gordon originally appeared in I&C no. 9, Life, Labour and Insecurity (Winter 1981-1982). Chapters 1, 6, 10, 11 and 14 are published here fo r the first time. Vlll Preface An effect of this kind is by no means an appearance or an illusion. It is a product which spreads or distends itself over a surface; it is strictly co­ present to, and co-extensive with, its own cause, and determines this cause as an immanent cause, inseparable from its effects, pure nihil or x, outside of the effects themselves. Such effects, or such a product have usually been designated by a proper or singular name. A proper name can be considered fu lly as a sign only to the extent that it refers to an effect of this kind. (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 70) Michel Foucault's contemporary and friend Gilles Deleuze glosses here a practice in scientificnomenclature, the naming of certain special physical phenomena, such as the Kelvin effect or the Compton effect. He is also hinting something about individuality: that its fullest achieved form can embody the same kind of impersonal singularity as that designated by the physicists' name for an 'effect'. Our title for this collection of studies invokes this idea. The 'Foucault effect' documented here is - briefly stated - the making visible, through a particular perspective in the history of the present, of the different ways in which an activity or art called governmenthas been made thinkable and practicable. Our title also intends justly to convey what, personal connection aside, our authors have in common, something rather different from member­ ship of a school or subscription to a manifesto. What they share is a particular exploratory passion, a striving to capture and analyze, across a range of its modern 'manifestations (reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarisme, welfare, risk management and others) a dimension of historical existence which Michel Foucault, perhaps, did most to isolate and describe. We think there is something in this work which is still new, which has not been digested or staled by the intellectual trends of the past decade, and which can help us to understand, to respond to and perhaps even to look beyond our present. Foucault wrote in 1976 that in political analysis we have still not cut off the king's head - meaning that thought about politics is trapped by the antitheses of despotism and legitimation, repression and rights. In Britain, critical political culture now espouses the aims of a written constitution and a Bill of Rights. Certainly Foucault IX Preface did not mean that these were futile objectives. But government is not just a power needing to be tamed or an authority needing to be legitimized. It is an activity and an art which concerns all and which touches each. And it is an art which presupposes thought. The sense and object of governmental acts do not fall from the sky or emerge ready fo rmed from social practice. They are things which have had to be - and which have been - invented. Foucault observed that there is a parcel of thought in even the crassest and most obtuse parts of social reality, which is why criticism can be a real power fo r change, depriving some practices of their self-evidence, extending the bounds of the thinkable to permit the invention of others. The 'Foucault effect' may, or such is our hope, contribute to a renewal of these powers of critique. x CHAPTER ONE Govemmental rationality: an introduction Colin Gordon Between 1970 and 1984, Michel Foucault delivered thirteen annual courses of lectures at the College de France in Paris. Foucault's duties at the college, as professor in a specially created Chair in the History of Systems of Thought, were not to teach a syllabus but to report on the results of his own researches. Several of these lecture series, Foucault's own official summaries of which have been republished as a volume by l the College de France, are preliminary explorations of themes taken up in various of Foucault's later books. But others contain rich seams of material which he never chose or had time to work up in a finalwritten form. Perhaps the two most remarkable annual courses of which this is true were those of 1978 and 1979, entitled respectively 'Security, territory and population', and 'The birth of biopoli tics'. One of the 1978 lectures was published (although not in French) in Foucault's lifetime, and is reprinted in this volume (Chapter 4). A provision in Foucault's will has been interpreted by his literary executors as precluding posthumous publication of the complete lecture series; but the exceptional interest of the 1978 and 1979 courses has been recognized by the recent publication on cassette tape of the initial lectures of the two series, and a complete tape edition of the two series is currently under consideration. Complete recordings of these lectures are available to researchers in .the Foucault archive at the Bibliotheque du Saulchoir in Paris. In these lectures Foucault defined and explored a fresh domain of research into what he called 'governmental rationality', or, in his own neologism, 'governmentality'.
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