Governing T&M

Question 1

Describe Foucault’s apparatuses of power.

Answer 1

Sovereignty:

• Middle Ages
• (violent) prohibition, absolute control
• operated through exclusion, legislation, centralisation
• e.g. establishing low emission zone.

Discipline:

• C18-C19
• taming naturally occurring flows for the sake of efficiency
• operated through isolation, enclosure, containment, surveillance.
• e.g. CCTV at stations

Security:
- C20-C21?
- allow, facilitate and control naturally occurring flows
operated through expansions of infrastructures, statistics
e.g. creating cycle lanes

Question 2

What do apparatuses of power create?

Answer 2

1) Norms and expectations:
Discipline – ‘normative’ norms: prescribed from the outside and configured by discourses and materiality – e.g. docility, being self interested, preference for speed
Security – ‘normalistic’ norms: derived from statistical data (e.g. average, mode)

2) Subjectivities = imagined ways of being for individuals – e.g. docile inmate, obedient child, able-bodied user of a bus, the automobile adult, the responsible cyclist.

Question 3

Critiques of governmentality?

Answer 3

Critiqued for giving little/no room for individual agency and for producing overly generalised narratives without due attention to contexts and place-specificity of governmental activity.

Foucault responded with ‘technologies of the self’ (1988).
Technologies of the self – “permit individuals by their own means or with help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct of ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to obtain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality”.

Question 4

What does the apparatus of security look like in the 21st century?

Answer 4

Governmobility (Bærenholdt 2013) – use of mobilities to govern societies and individuals in order to achieve/ maintain prosperity, safety, public health, climate, etc.

After events (e.g. bird flu, 9/11, SARS) a dual logic of:
Mobilisation ≈ encouraging mobilities deemed desirable
Immobilisation ≈ blocking/preventing mobilities deemed undesirable

Computational environmentality (Gabrys 2014) – governing cities and mobilities using code, sensors & big data