Studies of Discourse and Governmentality (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture) [UK ed.] 9027206570, 9789027206572

Citation preview

discourse approaches to politics, society and culture

Studies of Discourse and Governmentality edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard

66

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC) issn 1569-9463

The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac

General Editors

Jo Angouri, Andreas Musolff and Johann Wolfgang Unger

University of Warwick / University of East Anglia / Lancaster University [email protected]; [email protected] and [email protected]

Founding Editors

Paul Chilton and Ruth Wodak

Advisory Board Christine Anthonissen Stellenbosch University

Michael Billig

Loughborough University

Piotr Cap

University of Łódź

Paul Chilton

Lancaster University

Teun A. van Dijk

Universitat Pompeu Fabra,

Barcelona

Konrad Ehlich

Free University, Berlin

J.R. Martin

Louis de Saussure

Jacob L. Mey

Hailong Tian

University of Sydney University of Southern Denmark

University of Neuchâtel

Greg Myers

Tianjin Foreign Studies University

John Richardson

Cardiff University

Luisa Martín Rojo

Lancaster University

Christina Schäffner

University of Portsmouth

Lancaster University Loughborough University Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Joanna Thornborrow Ruth Wodak Sue Wright

Aston University

Volume 66 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality. New perspectives and methods Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard

Studies of Discourse and Governmentality New perspectives and methods Edited by

Paul McIlvenny Julia Zhukova Klausen Laura Bang Lindegaard Aalborg University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

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 z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/dapsac.66 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016004377 (print) / 2016015446 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0657 2 isbn 978 90 272 6714 6

(Hb) (e-book)

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Acknowledgements chapter 1 New perspectives on discourse and governmentality Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard

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Part I.  Intersecting governmentalities in public discourse chapter 2 Governing citizen engagement: A discourse studies perspective Inger Lassen and Anders Horsbøl chapter 3 The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self in the face of climate change Laura Bang Lindegaard chapter 4 The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters Janne Solberg chapter 5 Governing governments? Discursive contestations of governmentality in the transparency dispositif Sun-ha Hong and François Allard-Huver

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Part II.  Discourse, practice and prefigurative governmentalities chapter 6 Governing safe operations at a distance: Enacting responsible risk communication at work Joel Rasmussen

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chapter 7 Dialogue and governmentality-in-action: A discourse analysis of a leadership forum 209 Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

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chapter 8 Diagnosing transnationality: Therapy discourse and psy practices in the ethicalisation of transnational living Julia Zhukova Klausen chapter 9 Governmentality, counter-conduct and prefigurative demonstrations: Interactional and categorial practices in the strange case of the United Nathans weapons inspectors Paul McIlvenny

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Part III.  Discourse, policy and governmentality chapter 10 Governmentality through intertextuality: Strategic planning discourse in the administration of tertiary education Derek Wallace chapter 11 Exploring the intersections between governmentality studies and critical discourse analysis: A case study on urban security discourses and practices Monica Colombo and Fabio Quassoli chapter 12 Revealing the governmentality of demographic change in Germany with the manifold discourse-analytical ‘toolbox’ of Foucault Reinhard Messerschmidt

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Notes on contributors

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Name index

393

Subject index

395

Acknowledgements

Firstly, we would like to thank the 16 authors who have contributed to this volume. After the call for papers was announced in January 2013, and after the rigorous selection process, those who were selected to contribute keenly attended the invitation-only workshop in November 2013 in Aalborg to present their work and share ideas about the book project. Over the next two years, they diligently and patiently attended to revisions, and yet more revisions, suggested by the editors and the reviewers. Some even attended a panel that we organised at an international conference in June 2014, which was devoted to analyses of discourse and governmentality. Without their scholarly dedication, as well as their cooperation and trust in us as co-editors, this volume would never have seen the light of day. We would also like to thank the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University for providing financial support for an interdisciplinary workshop called “Living in Transition: New Directions in Studies of Governmentality in Relation to Health, Climate Change, Protests and Migration/Borders” in June 2013, to which we invited William Walters, Carl Death, Johannes Stripple and Lars Thorup Larsen as keynote speakers. They have had a strong influence on the anthology and our own chapters. We are grateful to the incisive comments by Rodney Jones, who was the discussant for our panel on discourse and governmentality at the international Sociolinguistics Symposium in June 2014 in Finland. We would also like to thank Derek Wallace for his apposite suggestions after a careful reading of specific chapters. He contributes to this volume and visited us at Aalborg University during his sabbatical in the spring of 2014. Many thanks to the series editors for DAPSAC, and specifically Johann Unger, the editor in charge of the review process, who gently and generously guided us through what we needed to do to get the book accepted and published. Our gratitude goes to the reviewers, who painstakingly detailed their points of praise and criticism. Their suggestions have resulted in a significantly improved anthology. We are grateful to Isja Conen at John Benjamins Publishing Company for steering us through the publishing process to actually materialise this book in your hands or on your screen. And lastly, big hugs to our families for supporting us during the long and episodic process of writing and editing.

chapter 1

New perspectives on discourse and governmentality Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard Aalborg University, Denmark

In this comprehensive overview we familiarise readers with Michel Foucault’s publications that are relevant both to discourse studies and to studies of governmentality. We review the narrow impact that Foucault’s ideas have had on discourse studies and summarise the scant literature on discourse and governmentality across different disciplines. We elucidate the new scholarly understandings of Foucault’s later work, as well as engage with the debates about governmentality that have been generated after Foucault. In particular, we give a thorough assessment of the reverberations of Foucault’s later work on governmentality to clarify its contemporary relevance for discourse studies. Lastly, we introduce and contextualise the theoretical, methodological and analytical innovations in discourse studies to be found in the chapters in this volume, before concluding on the contributions that the book makes to both discourse studies and studies of governmentality. It is possible to govern only within a certain regime of intelligibility – to govern is to act under a certain description. Language is not secondary to government; it is constitutive of it. Language not only makes acts of government describable; it also makes them possible. This emphasis on language is not at all novel. […] However, analytics of government are not primarily concerned with language as a field of meaning, or with texts embodying authorial intentions which may be recovered and made intelligible in the appropriate historical context. They are concerned with knowledges, or regimes of truth. […] It is not so much a question of what a word or a text ‘means’ – of the meanings of terms such as ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘risk’, ‘social’, ‘civility’, ‘citizen’ and the like – but of analysing the way a word or a book functions in connection with other things, what it makes possible, the surfaces, networks and circuits around which it flows, the affects and passions that it mobilises and through which it mobilises.  (Rose 1999b: 28–30)

doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.01mci © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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1. Introduction This edited volume collects together a variety of empirical studies that illustrate new investigations of governmentality from the perspective of interdisciplinary discourse studies. Studies of governmentality inspired by Michel Foucault’s lectures and writings have slowly accumulated a body of work across a number of disciplines, including political science, policy studies, economics, sociology and history (Dean 2010; Miller and Rose 2008; Rose 1999b; Walters 2012). As a result of the recent publication in English (and French) for the first time of many of Foucault’s annual lecture series at the Collège de France from 1976 up until his death in 1984 (e.g. Foucault 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014), recent debates on governmentality have attempted to critically rethink Foucault’s ideas. This has been done both in relation to new areas of application (e.g. climate change, health, mobility, social movements, welfare and transnationality) and in relation to developing new theories and methods appropriate to tracking the transformations in governance, control, power, democracy, conduct, space, security, environment and citizenship taking place in contemporary societies and polities across the world (Binkley and Capetillo 2009; Bröckling, Krasmann and Lemke 2011; Falzon, O’Leary and Sawicki 2013; Faubion 2014; Nadesan 2008; Walters 2012). Therefore, it is becoming apparent that the concept of governmentality has overgrown its status as a minor element of the Foucauldian heritage and has become an interdisciplinary inquiry in its own right.1 However, while the body of work on governmentality crosses multiple disciplinary boundaries, it is held together by a common tendency to constantly return to Foucault’s works as a sort of ‘final destination’ for those theorising the conduct of conduct (Koopman 2011). It is in response to this inclination to treat governmentality as a set of arguments, as a social and political theory which can 1. There is also a comprehensive literature on governance. Following Walters (2012) and others, we draw a distinction between governmentality and governance. Theories and studies of governance have a different genealogy in political science, one that is distinct from Foucauldianinspired studies of governmentality. There are moments of overlap: for example, both move away from top-down notions of power, towards the conduct of conduct in studies of governmentality, and to steering and networking in governance theory. And both tend to focus on practices rather than institutions. But there are important differences, including the normativity, liberal bias and teleology of social development to be found in governance theory, of which scholars of governmentality are critical (Walters 2012: 64–68). Although outside the scope of this volume, we note that specific work on discourse and governance can be found in Chakrabarty and Bhattaccharya (2008), Hausendorf and Bora (2006), Healey (2002), Howarth and Torfing (2005), Lazar (2003), Mulderrig (2011), Schnurr et al. (2014) and Trenz (2004).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

only be understood and articulated through a re-reading of Foucault’s references to governmentality, that some scholars are proposing instead that a productive direction lies in viewing governmentality as a set of analytical tools rather than a theory per se. Furthermore, our task should be to produce new writings (and analyses) of contemporary forms of governmentality rather than new readings of it (Walters 2012). This entails that studies of new territories and topologies of power and new technes of governance should be, first and foremost, empirical and analytical examinations of the ways in which the rationalities and apparatus of governmentality are at work, both at the level of everyday practices, rather than just institutions of governance (Lemke 2012), and through assemblages of discursivities, textualities, materialities and social arrangements, rather than through the distinct and segregated realms of the technological and ideational (Latour 2005). Within discourse studies, there have not been many attempts to connect up the notion of discourse with the later work of Foucault and even fewer have attempted to explicitly investigate discourse and governmentality. Thus, there is a strong demand for interdisciplinary research that focuses on both the refreshed studies of governmentality and the richer discursive and interactional analyses of the forms, practices, modes, programmes and rationalities of the conduct of conduct today. Our interdisciplinary anthology contributes to this debate by engaging with Foucault’s work on governmentality and the studies of governmentality that have emerged in fields such as international studies, environmental studies, political science, public policy and organisation studies. Most importantly, the chapters have a substantial component of empirical analysis using approaches that come under the broad umbrella of discourse studies, including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, dialogic analysis, membership categorisation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, nexus analysis, prefigurative discourse studies, the discourse-historical approach, corpus analysis and French discourse analysis. In this chapter, we first familiarise readers with Michel Foucault’s publications that are relevant both to discourse studies and to studies of governmentality. Next, we review the narrow impact that Foucault’s ideas have had on discourse studies and summarise the scant literature on discourse and governmentality across different disciplines. Then, we elucidate the new scholarly understandings of Foucault’s later work, as well as engage with the debates about governmentality that have been generated after Foucault. We follow up with a thorough overview of the reverberations of Foucault’s later work on governmentality (and subjectivity) to clarify its contemporary relevance for discourse studies. Lastly, we introduce and contextualise the theoretical, methodological and analytical innovations to be found in the chapters in this volume, before concluding on the contributions that the book makes to both discourse studies and studies of governmentality.

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2. Perspectives on Foucault’s influential oeuvre We begin with an overview of some of the key theoretical, conceptual and methodological innovations that Michel Foucault has brought to bear across the disciplines. We do this in part to appreciate the limited extent to which approaches to studying discourse have drawn upon Foucault, and to reconsider the relevance of the revitalisation of Foucault’s later thought to discourse studies. First, we need to examine closely his oeuvre in order to map out clearly the forgotten or absent strands. For example, it is necessary to understand how he conceived of knowledge, truth and power in his early work in order to appreciate how he shifted after 1977 to consider governmentality and techniques of governing, as well as the ethicalisation of the subject and practices of subjectivation. We do not claim an authoritative or a final perspective on Foucault, but we do have confidence that we are presenting at least a more nuanced set of perspectives than is typical in discourse studies, perspectives which are drawn from an encounter with the flow of Foucault’s thought refracted through more recent, posthumous publications.2 The recent flurry of interest in Foucault has been prompted largely by the pivotal, posthumous publication of Foucault’s lecture series in book form, which for many years were unavailable in English (and in French), especially Security, Territory, Population (2007), The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), The Government of Self and Others (2010), The Courage of the Truth (2011) and On the Government of the Living (2014). Foucault, of course, published many seminal books over his career, and many of his shorter articles, interviews and prefaces have been collected together, though not without some confusion and ambiguity over the definitive source and best translation.3 Most recently, two comprehensive companions have been published to Foucault’s thought in general, as well as an up-todate concordance and bibliography of all his works and interviews published in

2. McHoul (1997: 779) warns that there has always been a tendency “to periodise Foucault – the classic example being that of Dreyfus and Rabinow [(1983)] in their book Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. One problem with this division into the early (psychological), the post-early (discursive), the middle (power-dominated) and the late (subjectivist) Foucault is that it does not take into account Foucault’s own continual rewriting of the purposes of his work.” 3. Lynch (2004: 71) notes that “such shorter works are critical for an adequate understanding of the evolution and force of Foucault’s work. But a number of difficulties arise when one tries to work with these materials. First, many of these articles appear in multiple publications – often with different titles, sometimes in variant translations, and occasionally altered or edited – and it is not immediately obvious how one can determine which is which.”



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

English (Falzon, O’Leary and Sawicki 2013; Lawlor and Nale 2014; Lynch 2013). Other useful attempts to order the Foucauldian archive include O’Farrell (2005) and Gutting (2005). In our overview, we focus on Foucault’s conceptions of discourse, knowledge and truth, of power and governmentality, and of the subject, ethics and the care of the self. 2.1

Foucault on discourse, knowledge and truth

In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault (1970: xvi) famously writes: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges… This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”

For Foucault, the purpose of this taxonomy is to make us realise that the knowledge stemming from it is neither more nor less true than the knowledge of the taxonomies of, for instance, modern biology books. As Schneck (1987: 17) puts it, the purpose of the Borges text is to make a too often forgotten point about truth and knowledge: “there is not seen to be any sort of underlying meaning or truth within the existence of things, nor any genuine transcendental meaning or truth to be imposed upon the existence of things. Such knowledge is not linked, even incorrectly or incompletely, with any actual order of animals.” Accordingly, whereas The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1971, translated as “The Order of Discourse” (1981), are commonly understood as Foucault’s main works on the notion of discourse, Martin Rojo and Pujol (2011: 86) are right to note that one of his “most significant contributions… to linguistic thinking and to discourse studies” can be found in The Order of Things (1970), in which he clarified the “exploration of the consequences for western epistemics of the break with two classical views of language and thought”. Already in this book, Foucault provided an illuminating critique of the classical views in which language was understood as a ‘mirror of mind’, “and the correlative view of mind as a ‘mirror of nature’ (‘reality’): which accurately reflects relations in the objective world”. As Martin Rojo and Pujol (2011: 86) point out, Foucault thereby transcends the classical, “correlative consideration of words as mere labels or names of concepts, and the understanding

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of those concepts as mere internal reflections of external realities.”4 Whereas this significance of discourse is first observable in The Order of Things, Foucault (1981) does, nevertheless, emphasise the consequences of the insight in “The Order of Discourse”. He writes: “We must not resolve discourse into a play of pre-existing significations; we must not imagine that the world turns towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive providence which disposes the world in our favour” (67). Accordingly, as Fadyl, Nicholls and McPherson (2013: 488) note, with Foucault we must understand discourse “as a human practice, not as a function of ‘reality meets perception’”. In order to unravel this insight, this section will discuss Foucault’s concept of discourse in more detail, focusing on how the concept is related to notions of knowledge and truth.5 In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1972) proposes an archaeological approach to discourse analysis, and, as such, the work can be understood as one of Foucault’s main methodological pieces. That said, however, the book is certainly not a stringent outline of how to do discourse analysis, but rather an exploration and discussion of certain principles that could, retrospectively, be said to point out Foucault’s archaeological way of working up until this book. Accordingly, the book does not provide any necessary and sufficient conditions for how to properly define key concepts such as ‘discourse’ and ‘statement’; rather, the definitions of these two concepts occur immanently through Foucault’s discussions of how certain statements at certain times and places co-constitute certain discursive formations, such as medicine, grammar or political economy (31). In slightly more detail, Foucault sets out to investigate four (often relied upon) hypotheses about how such discursive formations are generated. Negatively positioning himself, Foucault firstly points out that discursive formations are not assembled simply in and through the assumption that “statements different in form, and dispersed in

4. Of course, Foucault did not make this turn all by himself. As is well known, the turn was, more or less independently, co-constituted by other philosophers in both continental and analytical philosophy, such as Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle, and by scholars within sociological traditions, such as Garfinkel and Sacks. 5. Veyne (2010) argues that ‘discourse’ was ill-chosen as the name of the phenomenon Foucault was pursuing. Earlier, in a transcribed summary of a discussion of Frank’s (1992) article on Foucault’s conception of discourse, Veyne argues dismissively that he saw “no more than expediency in the use of the word ‘discourse’. Why should it be that Foucault used this word rather than words like ‘practices’, ‘archives’ or ‘presuppositions’ to designate this thing in which we are to recognise positive finitude or rarefaction? Maybe he was just sensitive to the linguistic fashion in France at the time, and there is nothing more to it than that” (quoted in a discussion after Frank 1992: 116).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

time, […] refer to one and the same object” (31); secondly, he notes that they are not generated through a recurrence to a particularly style (33); thirdly, that discursive formations do not occur through a group of statements characterised by a use of permanent and coherent concepts (34); and, lastly, that discursive formations are not characterised by an identity and persistence in themes (35). Giving up all such traditional searches for stability, Foucault, in contrast, observes that discursive formations are what can be located through certain systems of dispersion (37). He writes that “whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation” (38). Consequently, the critical purpose of the archaeological discourse analysis becomes the careful examination of the discursive formation and, by implication, the naturalisation of certain elements, namely what Foucault refers to as objects, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies (40–70). Because Foucault understands these four elements as produced through discursive formations, not as the governing origin of such formations, it is clear that he understands ‘discourse’ and ‘statement’ quite differently from traditional referential language philosophies. Despite this, it might still be difficult to draw a stable, de-contextualised definition of discourse from Foucault’s book. This is something he himself comments on in the following way: “Lastly, instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word ‘discourse’, I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualisable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements; and have I not allowed this same word ‘discourse’, which should have served as a boundary around the term ‘statement’, to vary as I shifted my analysis or its point of application, as the statement itself faded from view?” (80). On the other hand, as indicated in the quotation, whereas Foucault does not pursue his initial attempt to characterise the statement in and through a gradual narrowing down of the meaning of the word ‘discourse’, his understanding of ‘discourse’ unfolds as he discusses his understanding of the ‘statement’. Foucault describes the statement as the “atom of discourse” (80), defining it, symptomatically, in negative opposition to the sentence, the proposition and the speech act (86), as a “function of existence”. Firstly, Foucault points out that whereas the statement might, on first glance, appear to be equivalent to the grammatical sentence, since it is the case that one can “recognise the existence of an independent statement” whenever “there is a grammatically isolable sentence” (81), it is clear, however, that the statement must be something different since

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statements can appear in a variety of forms that are not recognisable as grammatical sentences, such as, for instance, graphs and maps (82). Secondly, the statement is different from the proposition since it is not the case that the occurrence of a statement is always equivalent to the occurrence of one and the same propositional structure, or “that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition” (80). For instance, Foucault remarks, the two equivalent propositions ‘No one heard’ and ‘It is true that no one heard’ cannot be considered one and the same statement since the latter clearly involves a more specific enunciative modality than the former (81). Thirdly, Foucault discusses how the statement is different from the speech act in Austin and Searle’s speech act theory. It is never absolutely clear how Foucault differentiates between his statement and the speech act; or, rather, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault primarily argues that the main difference between the two is that the statement is more fundamental than the speech act since “more than a statement is often required to effect a speech act” (83). It is, however, difficult to see that this is a sound argument, and in a later letter to Searle, Foucault himself observes that he might have been wrong, because one overall speech act can be unfolded through a number of more basic ones.6 Whereas it may be that the definitions of the statement and the speech act are rather equivalent, it is, of course important to remember that Foucault’s work is embedded in a completely different tradition than the analytical tradition out of which speech act theory emerged. Accordingly, Foucault’s perspective is quite different, and he is concerned with a different set of questions than are Austin and Searle. Whereas speech act theory is concerned with questions such as how to account for people’s interaction through speech acts, how to formulate felicity conditions for speech acts and how to systematise such conditions, Foucault is concerned with relatively autonomous statements and the ways in which they are embedded in formations with other statements; that is, Foucault is not really interested in what a given statement is and means, but rather in that it is. In “The Order of Discourse”, Foucault (1981) further emphasises this point as he observes that any given statement always is at the expense of other statements, where this existence depends on the power that disperses discursive formations. In this lecture, Foucault distances himself from his earlier, more conventional, approach to power as prominently a repressive force in favour of his well-known understanding of power as somehow productive. Accordingly, he now speaks of discourse not as a transparent medium, but as the power people fight in, for and about:

6. Cf. Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983: 46, note 1).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

It does not matter that discourse appears to be of little account, because the prohibitions that surround it very soon reveal its link with desire and with power. There is nothing surprising about that, since, as psychoanalysis has shown, discourse is not simply that which manifests (or hides) desire – it is also the object of desire; and since, as history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.  (52–53)

Through the emphasis on the power of discourse, the difference between speech act theory and Foucault’s position is further clarified. Whereas Austin and Searle work with an understanding of homogeneity between people, Foucault points out that human interaction, such as discursive interaction, always unfolds within a field of dispersed power relations. Thus, it may be possible to understand “The Order of Discourse” as representing the first work in which Foucault is working not only archaeologically, but also genealogically.7 As indicated, in his archaeological works, Foucault is prominently concerned with the examination of what appears to be unquestionable truths, critiquing (if only implicitly) all such naturalised contingencies, such as the appearances of certain objects, subjects, concepts and strategies (see also Fadyl, Nicholls and McPherson 2013: 480). Secondly, in his genealogical works, he expands this examination, as just seen, with studies also of how power is intertwined in the contingent and disruptive emergence of one or another discourse. Foucault (1981) points out the different principles for these two modes as follows: On the one hand the ‘critical’ section, which will put into practice the principle of reversal: trying to grasp the forms of exclusion, of limitation, of appropriation of which I was speaking just now; showing how they are formed, in response to what needs, how they have been modified and displaced, what constraint they have effectively exerted, to what extent they have been evaded. On the other hand there is the ‘genealogical’ set, which puts the other three principles to work: how did series of discourses come to be formed, across the grain of, in spite of, or with the aid of these systems of constraints; what was the specific norm of each one, and what were their conditions of appearance, growth, variation.  (70)

The four principles mentioned in the quotation above are the principles of reversal, discontinuity, specificity and exteriority (67). In greater detail, the first one – i.e. the one that is more critical, or archaeological, in nature – concerns the ambition 7. Although these two perspectives are sometimes seen as distinct and as, by implication, marking two quite different periods of Foucault’s work, it should be noted that Foucault himself points out that it is not possible to imagine a genealogical study that does not embed an archaeological – critical – element, and vice versa (Foucault 1981: 70–73; see also Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Fadyl, Nicholls and McPherson 2013 and Tamboukou 1999).

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to disrupt our usually unquestioned relationship with discourse through the procedures of exclusion, limitation and appropriation, or, in other words, it concerns the ambition to “call into question our will to truth, restore to discourse its character as an event, and finally throw off the sovereignty of the signifier” (66). As Fadyl, Nicholls and McPherson (2013: 485) point out, this principle concerns the critical ambition to explore the production of discourse: “applying the principle of reversal is about explicitly seeking to reveal ways in which discourse shapes our knowledge and truths by procedures that control, limit, select and organise discourse in a particular society”. As mentioned, the three remaining principles are all more genealogical in orientation, and, accordingly, Hook (2001: 524–525) suggests that the purpose of these principles is to expose “the analyst to the pervasiveness of the power-knowledge complex”. Because Foucault did his work on governmentality in his prominently genealogical period, it is not too surprising that the three genealogical principles all invoke observations that appear to be central also in studies of governmentality. The first of these, the principle of discontinuity, concerns Foucault’s often made point that we must remember that the present is a contingent matter, produced by a series of discontinuous practices: “Discourses must be treated as discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other” (Foucault 1981: 67). The principle of specificity reminds us, again, not to approach discourse as an innocent mirror of an already existing and directly observable reality, but as our own production. Lastly, the purpose of the principle of exteriority is to remind us that since there is nothing hidden to be revealed within or behind discourses, we should rather focus on the surface of the discourse, asking, on the one hand, what it opens up and makes possible and, on the other hand, what it excludes or renders impossible or unreasonable (67; see Hook 2001 for a further discussion of the significant implications of this point). Hence, the work on discourse that Foucault initiates in The Order of Things, and pursues in The Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Order of Discourse”, clearly demonstrates that he understands discourse as tightly intertwined with the notions of knowledge, power and truth. The importance of this (sometimes neglected) point is emphasised by a number of scholars (for example, Hall 2001; Hook 2001, 2005; McHoul and Grace 1995; Rabinow 1984; Veyne 2010; Young 1981).8 For instance, Hook (2001) critiques conventional approaches to discourse 8. It should be noted, however, that Rabinow (1984) sees a clear distinction between Foucault’s archaeological works (in which he includes The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge) and his later genealogical ones in that he stresses that only the latter “emphasise the political and social dimensions of [Foucault’s] work in which practices and discourses intertwine” (27).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

analysis (specifically Parker 1992; Potter and Wetherell 1987), pointing out that they fail to acknowledge that Foucault’s understanding of discourse is not readily related to more commonly narrow understandings of language, but is rather prominently intertwined with knowledge, materiality and power (36). Similarly, McHoul and Grace (1995: 31) note that Foucault moves the concept of discourse away from a linguistic system or a sociological notion and towards an understanding of discourse as “relatively well-bounded areas of social knowledge”, and Young (1981: 48) argues that “The Order of Discourse” can be understood as prominently focused on the rules, systems and procedures that co-constitute our ‘will to knowledge’; that is, it can be understood as focused on the orders of discourse that generate the possible domain of knowledge-production at any given time and place. Young points out that the analytical attention of “The Order of Discourse” is not merely aimed at pointing out what is thought or said, but also “all the discursive rules and categories that were a priori, assumed as a constituent part of discourse and therefore of knowledge” (48). Lastly, Hall (2001) conveniently sums up the observation, pointing out that Foucault does not attribute any meaning to things in themselves, but rather emphasises that meanings and knowledge (of things) is produced discursively (73). Accordingly, Foucault never reifies the notion of truth, but understands one or another discursive formation as sustaining one or another regime of truth, such as the current regime of advanced liberalism. In line with this extended understanding of discourse, Hook (2001: 37) suggests that Foucault’s work on discourse should not be understood as a series of readymade principles for conventional approaches to discourse analysis, but as a roughly outlined genealogical approach to discourse that sees the analysis of discourse as intertwined with “the broader analysis of power, the consideration of history, materiality and the underlying conditions of possibility underwriting what counts as reasonable knowledge”. In greater detail, Hook suggests that such an approach should recognise four principles. Firstly, he points out that discourse analysis should always be seen as partly a historical analysis in that discourse “indispensably requires the role of historical contextualisation”. Secondly, discourse analysis must recall the relationship between discourse, knowledge and truth – that is, it must focus on discourse “as a matter of the social, historical and political conditions under which statements come to count as true or false” (37). Thirdly, discourse analysis should pay attention to various forms of materiality (38). Lastly, summing up the three points in a fourth, discourse analysis needs to move not only inside, but also outside the text, that is, that it is necessary “to drive the analysis of the discursive through the extra-discursive” (37). Whereas this volume agrees that it is not fruitful to understand Foucault’s work on discourse as one or another blueprint for how to do discourse analysis, it certainly does pursue the understanding that certain forms of discourse

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analysis can be utilised as fruitful pathways to genealogical studies pointing out the intertwined and dispersed relationships of knowledge, materiality and power, and therein, importantly, the workings of various governmentalities. Furthermore, as pointed out below, the volume does so through the exploration of a number of rather different understandings of how discourse, history and materiality intersect. 2.2

Foucault on power and governmentality

It is no understatement to say that Foucault revolutionised how we think of power. From his earlier work that examined the shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power (Foucault 1977a) through to his intermediate work on power-knowledge and the microphysics of power (Foucault 1978a), and the later work on pastoral power, biopower and governmental power (Foucault 1983b, 2007), Foucault was in continual flight.9 He demanded that we rethink power in terms of relations of force, and he posited that resistance is co-extensive with power, that power is not totalising, and that power is only exercised over free subjects.10 But it is how he explored these re-conceptions in the context of governmental rationalities that is so revealing today. Indeed, from the recently published lecture series (from 1978 to 1984) it is clear that Foucault was freeing himself of the “now worn and hackneyed theme of knowledge-power” (Foucault 2014: 12) that he had developed particularly in The History of Sexuality, Volume I (Foucault 1978a), to replace it with an analytics of governmentality – defined loosely as the art of conducting the conduct of others – that still veered away from ideology critique, which Foucault was increasingly critical of. A recently published edited collection by Binkley and Capetillo (2009) explores the philosophical and political impact of the publication of Foucault’s 9. Given the extensive literature on biopolitics that has emerged in the last ten years (Blencowe 2011; Esposito 2008; Larsen 2011; Lemke 2011a, 2011b; Nilsson and Wallenstein 2013; Oksala 2013; Peters 2007; Rabinow and Rose 2003, 2006; Žižek 2004), it is surprising to find that Foucault only discusses the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ in a few of his publications, including The History of Sexuality vol 1 (1978a), and in a few lectures, such as Society Must Be Defended (2003) and Security, Territory, Population (2007). The terms surprisingly do not appear in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures (2008), except in the title. In his introduction to a collection of Foucault’s writings and interviews published in 1984, Rabinow (1984: 17) introduces Foucault’s use of ’bio-power’ to refer to a new regime of power, yet in a recent interview Gordon discusses the limited scope of ‘biopolitics’ in Foucault’s writings (Jardim 2013). 10. Walters (2012) documents how Foucault’s interest in a microphysics of power (Foucault 1977a, 1978a) developed into an alternative approach that steered away from the language of war and struggle with its rigid military metaphors and which re-engaged with larger configurations of rule.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

lecture series and the relevance of Foucault to the 21st century. After making the call for papers for their book, Binkley (2009: xvi) notes that what was particularly striking in the submissions they received was the volume of interest in two key themes: governmentality and biopolitics, and the noted under-representation of what had traditionally been for decades a topic that had drawn droves of scholars and activists to Foucault’s work: discipline and sexuality. In particular, the presence of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France loomed large, particularly those of 1978–79 – a presence confirmed in the overwhelming number of papers bearing the terms ‘governmentality’, ‘biopolitics’ or ‘neoliberalism’ in their titles.

This is indicative of the fashionability of the terms today, but this has not always been the case. Recent interviews and publications have revealed new perspectives on the history of the term ‘governmentality’ and its dissemination in different cultural contexts (Donzelot and Gordon 2008; Gordon 2013; Jardim 2013; Jessop 2011), which we elaborate below. Studies of governmentality can be traced back to the original publication and republication in English of one lecture (Foucault 1979, 1991; Gordon 1991) from Foucault’s lecture series at the Collège de France in 1978, a lecture series which was only published posthumously in English in its entirety in 2007 (Foucault 2007). Even though this initial conceptualisation of governmentality circulated, admittedly only in the form of one lecture, in a journal article published in 1979, it is notable that the concept of governmentality per se does not feature explicitly in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) seminal book on Foucault, neither in their contemporary overview nor in Foucault’s writings that were included when it was first published in 1982 and additionally in the second edition in 1983.11 Instead, Dreyfus and Rabinow highlight Foucault’s radical move to consider the constitutive relation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, and they argue for more attention to be paid to the subject, the ethics of the care of the self and genealogical analytics.12 It is not until the anthology edited by Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991) that a collection of loosely connected studies by scholars drawing upon the problematisation of governmentality set in motion by Foucault was made public (Donzelot and Gordon 2008).

11. Although ‘conduct’, ‘resistance’ and ‘freedom’ are explicitly addressed by Foucault in his afterword to the second edition (1983b). 12. In the introduction to a collection of Foucault’s writings and interviews published in 1984, Rabinow does discuss Foucault’s thoughts on government (Rabinow 1984: 14–23), citing the publication of his lecture on governmentality (Foucault 1979).

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In the lectures from 1978, Foucault (2007) shifted dramatically from the security – territory – population triangle of the title of the lecture series to security – population – government.13 He proposed that he was really undertaking a history of ‘governmentality’ or a genealogy of the modern state. In summary, Foucault’s main point was that a new art of governing had emerged after the Greeks, through its predecessors pastoralism, police and raison d’état, and on to the rise of liberal governmentality.14 In the lectures, he was primarily concerned with governance of and by states in terms of a history of the arts, practices and techniques that combined to make the state thinkable. Walters (2012: 20) summarises this specific stance in terms of “the question of how, at different times, in specific places, and always in connection with particular political issues, certain experts, authorities, critics and dissidents have come to reflect on the problem of how to govern the state.” Nevertheless, one way in which Foucault later formulated a broader understanding of governmentality was in terms of the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1983b, 2008: 186), in the sense of acting on the actions of others and of ‘action-ata-distance’ (Rose 1999b). Rather than see governance confined to the sphere of the state, he observes that it has broader ramifications, including “the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick” (Foucault 1983b: 221).15 Thus, Foucault focused on the techniques of government, a zone between the poles of ‘strategic relations or games’ and ‘states of (absolute) domination’ (Foucault

13. Hence, we see signs of the later blossoming of parallel research on securitisation and biopolitics (Blencowe 2011; Esposito 2008; Lemke 2011b; Nilsson and Wallenstein 2013), though some scholars see governmentality as the next logical step in Foucault’s thinking (Foucault 2007: 108; Oksala 2013). The chapter by Colombo and Quassoli in this volume explores urban securitisation discourses through the intersection of studies of governmentality and critical discourse analysis. 14. Even though Foucault was in part trying to understand the birth of liberalism, we need to be cautious about equating governmentality with liberalism; governmentality is much more than liberal and neoliberal forms of government (Walters 2012). 15. On the other hand, Lemke seems to reserve the concept of governmentality for political science and policy (Lemke 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011b, 2012). He does not appear to favour Foucault’s expansion (after Security, Territory, Population) of considerations of governmentality, namely “to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organise, and instrumentalise the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other” (Foucault 1997a: 300). Instead, Lemke (2002: 53) contends that “government refers to more or less systematised, regulated and reflected modes of power (a ‘technology’) that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power over others, following a specific form of reasoning (a ‘rationality’) which defines the telos of action or the adequate means to achieve it.” We definitely do not follow this narrower interpretation in this volume.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

1997a), an expanding zone populated by diverse practices that interest also scholars in discourse studies. Even though, as Walters (2012) notes, Foucault was not an ethnographer, his access to practices of the conduct of conduct came from a careful search of the archives for manuals, reports, guidebooks and treatises. However, he did not analyse them using the methods typical of discourse analysis. Nevertheless, Foucault’s insight into governmentality provides us with an analytical toolbox: “to understand governance not as a set of institutions, nor in terms of certain ideologies, but as an eminently practical activity that can be studied, historicised and specified at the level of the rationalities, programmes, techniques and subjectivities which underpin it and give it form and effect” (Walters 2012: 2). We shall see later how Foucault’s thinking on the concept of governmentality as the conduct of conduct allows discourse studies to bring its weight to bear by providing empirical analyses of ‘conduct’ as discursive and interactional practices. Nevertheless, before we jump ahead, Walters (2012) cautions us to reflect on five caveats concerning Foucault’s thinking on governmentality. First, that Foucault does not offer a single, consistent definition of the term. Second, that Foucault’s history of the art of government is incomplete. Third, that governmentality does not exist in a pure form anywhere. Instead, there are hybrid combinations of constantly evolving practices, rationalities, programmes, etc. (Rose 1999b). Fourth, Foucault was a mobile thinker and so it is inappropriate to look for an accumulative grand theory. Fifth, Foucault’s history is not normative, but it does serve critical purposes by fostering scepticism and inciting political creativity. Governmentality is not totalising, and conduct is not dominated by an exterior force. In his last lectures in 1984, Foucault (2011) notes that he has come back to the theme of government that he studied earlier. It seems to him that by studying ­parrhesia, or the courage of speaking the truth, “we can see how the analysis of modes of veridiction, the study of techniques of governmentality, and the identification of forms of practice of self interweave. Connecting together modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and practices of self is basically what I have always been trying to do” (8).16 He goes on to elaborate that when analysing the relations between modes of veridiction, techniques of governmentality, and forms of practice of self, “you can see that to depict this kind of research as an attempt to reduce knowledge (savoir) to power, to make it the mask of power in structures, where there is no place for a subject, is purely and simply a caricature” (9). Instead, there are “forms of knowledge (savoirs), studied in terms of their specific modes of veridiction; relations of power, not studied as an emanation of a substantial and invasive power, but in the procedures by which people’s conduct is governed; and 16. See Messerschmidt in this volume for a discussion of veridiction in relation to discourse analysis.

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finally the modes of formation of the subject through practices of self ” (9). This neatly summarises the key transformations in Foucault’s thinking, which have often been remaindered or forgotten in discourse studies. It is to his re-conception of the subject, ethics and practices of the self that we turn in the next section. 2.3

Foucault on the subject, ethics and the government of the self

In his later work, Foucault adamantly asserted that his primary concern was not with power but with the subject.17 In an essay written in English, he claims, My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire générale, philology, and linguistics. […] In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call ‘dividing practices’. The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivises him. […] Finally, I have sought to study – it is my current work – the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject. […] Thus it is not power, but the subject, which is the general theme of my research. (Foucault 1983b: 208–209)

Indeed, Foucault’s publications and lecture series from 1980 onwards until his death in 1984 increasingly shifted to reconsider self-formation within an ethics of living, thus looking at governmentality from new angles.18 In a series of lectures delivered at Dartmouth in 1980, Foucault (1993: 203) states that he was self-consciously moving away from an analysis of subjects driven by ‘techniques of domination’ to an interest in ‘techniques of the self ’. To give a genealogy of the subject, he notes, one would have to account for the interaction between these 17. In his overview of how Foucault initially understood the relationship of the subject to discourse, Hall (2001: 79–80) notes that “it is discourse, not the subjects who speak it, which produces knowledge. Subjects may produce particular texts, but they are operating within the limits of the episteme, the discursive formation, the regime of truth, of a particular period and culture. Indeed, this is one of Foucault’s most radical propositions: the ‘subject’ is produced within discourse. This subject of discourse cannot be outside discourse, because it must be subjected to discourse.” 18. It is important to note that in his apparently shifting focus on truth, power and the subject, which we have summarised above, Foucault was not arguing that his theoretical developments supplant those that came before, i.e. that an archaeology of truth (modes of veridiction) is replaced by an analytics of governmentality (power relations), which is replaced by a genealogy of practices of subjectivation.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

two techniques with respect to each other. From the point of view of domination, one “has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself ” (203). From the point of view of techniques of the self, one “has to take into account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination” (203). Where these two techniques meet, as a “contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government” (203).19 In the course summary for his lectures on “Subjectivity and Truth” in 1981, Foucault (1997c: 88, emphasis added) contends that “the history of the ‘care’ and the ‘techniques’ of the self would thus be a way of doing the history of subjectivity… through the putting in place, and the transformations in our culture, of ‘relations with oneself ’, with their technical armature and their knowledge effects. And in this way one could take up the question of governmentality from a different angle: the government of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others (such as one finds in pedagogy, behaviour counselling, spiritual direction, the prescription of models for living, and so on).” In a lecture given in 1982, Foucault (1988: 19) notes that the “encounter between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call ‘governmentality’.” And, finally, in his last interview given in 1984, Foucault (1997a: 300) says that “‘governmentality’ implies the relationship of the self to itself, and I intend this concept of ‘governmentality’ to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organise, and instrumentalise the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other.” Rose (1999b: 282–283) following Osborne, notes that Foucault’s fragmentary approach to life politics was defined, in part, by what it was not – it was not conducted under the sign of a morality (in the name of a heteronomous moral code), not conducted under the sign of an epistemology (in the name of a hidden truth or desire revealed by knowledge which it was one’s aspiration to realise), not conducted under the sign of a regime of authority (subordination to the organisational demands of a party) and not conducted in relation to an absolute end point at some future time (to which the present must be subordinated). Rather than subordinate oneself in the name of an external code, truth, authority or goal, such a politics would operate under a different slogan: each person’s life should be its own telos.

19. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures, a footnote by the editor indicates that “in the first, unpublished version of the 1981 lecture, Foucault defined ‘governmentality’ as precisely the ‘surface of contact on which the way of conducting individuals and the way they conduct themselves are intertwined’” (Foucault 2005: 548).

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In fact, Foucault (1985: 25) insists that ‘morality’ is not just a moral code; it also refers to the “real behaviour of individuals in relation to the rules and values that are recommended to them”. If the emphasis is placed on system of moral codes and rules of behaviour, then the process Foucault came to call subjectivation takes a quasi-juridical form (Foucault 1985: 29). This would suggest a set of connections between the government of others and the government of the self, for example in ethical self-formation. For Foucault (1983a, 1985, 1997a) there are four modes of ethical self-formation: 1. Ethical substance or “determination of the ethical substance; that is, the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct” (Foucault 1985: 26) or “the aspect or the part of myself or my behaviour which is concerned with moral conduct” (1997a: 263). 2. Subjectivation or “the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognises himself as obliged to put it in practice” (1985: 27) or ”the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations” (1997a: 264). 3. Method or “forms of elaboration, of ethical work that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into the ethical subject of one’s behaviour” (1985: 27) or “the means by which we can change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects” (1997a: 265). 4. Telos in that an act is moral “in its circumstantial integration and by virtue of the place it occupies in a pattern of conduct”, which commits an individual to ”a mode of being characteristic of the ethical subject” (1985: 28) or “the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way” (1997a: 265).20 In the introduction to his lecture series on subjectivity and truth, Foucault (1997c) notes that “the history of ‘care’ and the ‘techniques’ of the self would thus be a way of doing the history of subjectivity” (Foucault 1997c: 88). There is, however, some ambiguity over the appropriate interpretation of processes and practices such as ‘subjectivation’, especially in relation to Foucault’s earlier use of ‘subjectification’ in relation to power. Milchman and Rosenberg (2009) note that there is an important distinction to be made between (1) ‘subjectification’ (assujettissement) or the ways that “one is objectified as a subject though the exercise of power/knowledge, including the modalities of resistance through which those power relations can be modified or attenuated” (2009: 66), and (2) ‘subjectivation’ (subjectivation) or the “relation of the person to him/herself; to the multiple ways in which a self can be 20. Foucault (1985) notes that there are moralities in which the emphasis is placed more emphatically on forms of subjectivation and practices of the self. These are ‘ethics-oriented’ moralities, in contrast to ‘code-oriented’ moralities.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

fashioned or constructed on the basis of what one takes to be the truth” (2009: 66). Further, subjectivation itself can take either the form of the objectification of the self, seemingly in accord with processes of subjectification (objectified as a subject), or it can take the form of a “subjectivation of a true discourse in a practice and exercise of oneself on oneself ” (2009: 69), produced through practices of freedom in resistance to prevailing apparatuses of power/knowledge (see also Dilts 2011).21 3. The (un)familiar face of Foucault in discourse studies In this chapter we argue that, with few exceptions, only particular strands of Foucault’s thought summarised above were taken up in discourse studies as it developed after Foucault’s death. Moreover, because of the concerns of the time, a rather superficial interpretation and use of Foucault emerged, which has clear repercussions today. This has meant that substantial elements of the Foucauldian oeuvre, and later work by scholars inspired by Foucault, to be discussed in the next section, have been forgotten, mislaid or are simply absent. Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight: given the historical and cultural contexts of reception, this narrowness is understandable. To begin with, and in order to justify our claims, in this section we explore the ways in which Foucault’s thought in general has and has not been taken up in discourse studies.22 In an entry on Foucault in an encyclopaedic collection on pragmatics, Martin Rojo and Pujol (2011) trace the roots of particular strands of discourse analysis in Foucault’s work. Interestingly, they introduce the notions of ‘experimentation’ and ‘problematisation’ in relation to critique and intervention, but their useful sketch of Foucault’s influence stops short at the The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Foucault 1978a) and ideological processes of subjectification. More generally, Foucault’s ideas, particularly about discourse and power, have been folded into critical discourse studies in very specific ways.23 Indeed, much of the scholarship in critical 21. The critique of Foucault’s conception of power, resistance and the ethical subject that draws upon psychoanalysis to highlight the problematic of the productive, yet excessive subject is not addressed in this volume (Armstrong 2008; Butler 1997; Žižek 1999). 22. We tend to focus in this chapter on the narrow uptake of Foucault and the potential of his conception of governmentality in discourse studies, but there are also important consequences of the discourse studies approaches in this volume for studies of governmentality more broadly. We discuss this in our conclusion. 23. Other books that concern themselves with discourse and power include van Dijk (2008) on power in critical discourse studies, Howarth and Torfing (2005) on discourse theory in European policy and governance, and Bartlett (2014) on a systemic-functional approach to analysing power in language. None of these books engages with Foucault in any substantive way.

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discourse studies seems to be stuck on Foucault circa early 1970s, e.g. in his writings such as “Politics and the Study of Discourse”, “The Discourse on Language” or, in a later translation, “The Order of Discourse” (see Foucault 1972, 1978b, 1981). In critical discourse analysis (CDA), for example, Fairclough (1989) has cautiously drawn upon Foucault’s rethinking of power and his emphasis on the key role of discourse in sustaining power relations. In one of his earliest publications, Fairclough (1985) refers mainly to Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power (Foucault 1977a). In an influential book published later, Fairclough (1989) mentions an essay by Foucault on “The Subject and Power” to be found in the collection by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983). Fairclough also sets the foundation for incorporating Foucault’s ‘order of discourse’ into a dialectical critique of hegemony and ideology in texts (see also Fairclough 1992). Moreover, Fairclough appropriates Foucault’s revised conception of discourse, in which discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but it is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized (see Section 2.1). Later still, in a collection of published and unpublished essays, Fairclough (1995) invokes the notion of ‘technologisation of discourse’, for which he credits the influence of Foucault’s analysis of biopower. Thus, there is some recognition in Fairclough’s work of Foucault’s rethinking of power in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Foucault 1978a). Very early work on governmentality in the UK is also cited in his book – a reference to “technologies of government” and the autonomisation of the self – drawn from a conference paper by Nikolas Rose and a draft manuscript by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (see the following articles for similar work published at that time, Rose 1996a; Rose and Miller 1992). Later, Fairclough (2003) hinted that there were better ways to understand how governance works in discursive terms, e.g. in the case of genre chains. In this volume, chapters by Colombo and Quassoli, Lassen and Horsbøl, and Wallace explore further how critical discourse analysis can be brought into productive interplay with studies of governmentality today. There are other works and traditions in discourse studies in which Foucault is to be found. For example, Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) note the tendency to see power as abuse rather than productive in Foucault’s sense. In Silverman’s (1997) collection on qualitative analysis, two chapters out of fifteen focused on the relevance of using Foucault to complement discourse analysis, but neither addressed governmentality. Kendall and Wickham (2006) draw upon Foucault to re-examine CDA in terms of understanding the function of a critical posture and persona. And the philosopher Ian Hacking (2004) compares Foucault’s abstract approach to discourse with Goffman’s understanding of face-to-face interaction. Yet in some recent books within critical discourse studies Foucault is noticeably absent, such as van Dijk (2008), or downplayed, for example in Blommaert (2005). Two recent



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

anthologies edited by Dahlberg and Phelan (2011) and Sjölander and Payne (2011) consider discourse theory as inspired by Laclau and Mouffe (2001) in relation to other approaches, such as critical discourse studies and critical media politics. The anthologies have chapters that suggestively discuss governance issues (not governmentality) and the impact of Foucault’s thought. In an anthology on analyses of citizenship talk (Hausendorf and Bora 2006), issues of discourse and governance are raised in interesting ways in terms of social positioning, but Foucault’s and other’s work on governmentality is absent. When we turn to ethnomethodologically inspired conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis (EMCA), only a few scholars in ethnomethodology have attempted to hybridise EMCA with other approaches, particularly, perhaps, those approaches that embed any kind of historicism. Accordingly, it has not been common for ethnomethodologists to consider Foucault’s work, neither his reflections on discourse nor in general. However, Bailey (1988), Laurier and Philo (2004), Lynch (1993), McHoul (1986, 1988, 1994, 1996, 1997), McHoul and Grace (1995), Miller (1997) and Tate (2007) represent notable exceptions.24 In particular, Laurier and Philo (2004) and McHoul (1986, 1996) have considered the theoretical feasibility and productivity of juxtaposing Foucault and ethnomethodology, discussing the possibilities for an ‘ethnogenealogy’ and an ‘ethnoarchaeology’, respectively.25 It should be noted that the researchers themselves treat their focus on genealogy and archaeology, respectively, as of no particular relevance. Hence, McHoul tends to use archaeology and genealogy interchangeably (e.g. McHoul 1996: 101), and Laurier and Philo (2004) remark that they consider that the methods of genealogy and archaeology are closely related. Furthermore, Laurier and Philo point out that they sympathise with McHoul and make no ‘special point’ in calling their approach ‘ethnoarchaeology’ (422–423). McHoul (1996) observes that ethnomethodology and Foucauldian archaeology/genealogy represent the “two extremes of social theory” that any “effective semiotics” must encompass and, by implication, reconcile (101). Whereas Foucauldian approaches afford a more dispersed diachronic perspective, ethnomethodology affords a uniquely unimposing synchronic analysis of order as it is continually and reflexively accomplished (McHoul 1986: 66). Similarly, Laurier and Philo (2004) observe that the two positions should complement each other, because otherwise the historicism in Foucauldian studies would “risk becoming grand periodisations” (423), without the ethnomethodological attention to 24. Besides these more general accounts, recent studies have indicated the possibility of connecting ethnomethodology with studies of governmentality, but we will postpone the discussion of these to a later section. 25. See also Lindegaard (2012) for a discussion of McHoul’s and Laurier and Philo’s work.

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local, situated practices, which, in contrast, too often neglects the fact that any situated event is historically embedded. Hence, as indicated by both McHoul and Laurier and Philo, Foucault and ethnomethodology each represent their own superb approach; yet, each of the positions may face some lurking problems. Consequently, it is exactly because of the two positions’ radical differences that McHoul as well as Laurier and Philo find it not only interesting, but also important to connect the two. Interestingly, Lynch (1993: 131) cautiously notes that “Foucault’s descriptions nevertheless can be exemplary for ethnomethodological investigations, because they so clearly identify how material architectures, machineries, bodily techniques, and disciplinary routines make up coherent phenomenal fields. Whereas Foucault problematises the diachronic continuity of historical discourses, ethnomethodology explodes the contemporaneous landscape of language games into distinctive orders of practice, which are neither hermetically sealed from one another nor expressive of a single historical narrative.” Both McHoul (1986) and Laurier and Philo (2004) argue that Foucault shares some commonalities with ethnomethodology, thereby emphasising that despite the fact that the two have only rarely been connected, they do in fact have a rich common ground for commensurability. As McHoul observes, it appears that Foucault agrees with ethnomethodology in an understanding of problems as something which members necessarily deal with through social action or conduct. McHoul reminds us of Foucault’s later interest in how subjects settled, or projected, by discourses must accomplish their problems using the very same discursive resources,26 pointing out that this is fairly similar to, for instance, Sacks’ (1972, 1992) observation that phenomena like conversational sequencing should be understood as problems that members have to face by invoking collectively available solutions. McHoul concludes that Foucault can be seen as sharing an ethnomethodological interest in how everyday life problems are accomplished, solidifying discursive fields for another first time.27 Furthermore, 26. McHoul (1984: 66) mentions Foucault’s work on the stories of the murderer Pierre Rivière and the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin as concrete examples of this interest. 27. McHoul frames this point in terms of Foucault’s and Garfinkel’s respective wordings: “Foucault talks here of ‘eventualisation’ while Garfinkel talks of invariance (Discourse) as a function of contingency (discourse)” (McHoul 1984: 66). Note that McHoul also emphasises their similarities, as he points out parenthetically how the Discourse/discourse distinction is applicable also to the work of Garfinkel. Further, while McHoul does not mention Foucault’s lectures on governmentality in this argument, we would like to add that Foucault’s attention to the population as not merely the subject of needs, but also as the object utilised for fulfilling these needs in a similar way points to Foucault’s heightened interest in the continuous discursive negotiations and struggles which are an inevitable part of accomplishing, maintaining and managing the problems of everyday life.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

McHoul points out that this common attention to reflexively accomplished techniques of everyday life points to yet another attitude that Foucault could be said to share with ethnomethodology, namely his way of rejecting notions of reifying social structures (McHoul 1986: 66). That is, like ethnomethodology, Foucault never searches for truth behind the surface of actual observable interaction, but rather approaches the domain of the true or the socio-factual as the domain of the contingently accomplished at a given time and place. Laurier and Philo (2004) make a similar observation when they point out that Foucault is aligned with ethnomethodology in his interest in all the little details of the surface, or, in their pointed wording, Foucault is aligned with ethnomethodology in his “deep concern with the surfaces of the world” (429). From this discussion we can see that some ethnomethodologists have, traditionally, been interested in Foucault to the extent that they have tentatively explored combining ethnomethodological studies of locally accomplished interaction with a broader historical perspective.28 However, as it is, neither McHoul nor Laurier and Philo ever discuss the theoretical feasibility of connecting a synchronic perspective with a diachronic one when they discuss the compatibility of the two approaches. In contrast, this traditionally challenging question is addressed in several chapters of this volume (Bager et al., Lindegaard, McIlvenny, and Solberg). After this brief survey, we can see that a number of discourse studies scholars from different fields have touched upon or pointed towards the potential of Foucault’s work. However, whereas they, to varying degrees, are concerned with the relationship between the conception of discourse and Foucault’s thought, none of them in any detail discusses and demonstrates the methodological and analytical consequences of the confluence of discourse studies with studies of governmentality, and, as a consequence, there is still an important gap to be filled if discourse studies is to take full advantage of the opportunities of current and future work within studies of governmentality, a gap which traverses the fault lines of several disciplines. If it is true, as we argue above, that scholars in discourse studies have missed an opportunity to mine fully the Foucauldian archive, then we need to consider in more detail what can we salvage from earlier work and in which directions different approaches in discourse studies should move, especially with the turn to governmentality that we recommend. One scholar who did attempt more than superficially to engage with Foucault in studies of organisational discourse was Iedema (2003a), but his monograph on post-bureaucratic 28. However, it may certainly be a stretch to talk of a familiar face of Foucault within ethnomethodology because, as already mentioned, ethnomethodological scholars only rarely concern themselves with questions of how ethnomethodology could benefit from insights from other disciplines.

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organisational discourse predates all the recent lecture series publications and so relies on just one lecture by Foucault on governmentality, namely Foucault (1991). In his book, he presciently argues that a focus on governmentality grants the self or the individual a more prominent and constitutive role in power relations and effects, which CDA’s traditional focus on ideology or hegemony precludes (see the chapters by Lassen and Horsbøl, Colombo and Quassoli, and Wallace, in this volume). Besides Iedema (2003a), there are only a few isolated theses, journal articles and book chapters that attempt in more sophisticated and consistent ways to combine discourse studies with studies of governmentality (Hodges 1998, 2002; Rasmussen 2010, 2011; Summerville 2007; Summerville and Adkins 2007). They will be elaborated in a later section to illustrate key issues for discourse studies after the turn to governmentality. So far we have introduced the reader to the main strands of Foucault’s thought relevant to this book, and we have provided a critical overview of the limited impact of Foucault on discourse studies. Now we move to consider the most recent scholarly works concerning governmentality and the invigorated debates that have resulted from the recent publication of some of Foucault’s lecture series. 4. After Foucault: Contemporary debates about governmentality One of the goals of this introduction is to map out the path along which certain ideas in studies of governmentality have made their way into the conceptual and analytical fabric of discourse research, leaving others out of the loop, and to strive to make sense of this geography of governmental thought and its impact on discourse studies. Now we explore how some scholars have developed Foucault’s ideas about governmentality since his death in 1984, especially with the new insights and challenges posed by the recent publication of Foucault’s previously unpublished lecture series. Reflecting on his role in publishing and contextualising the governmentality lecture from 1978 (Foucault 1991), and now the publication of Foucault’s lectures in full, Gordon (2013: 1049) maintains that Foucault’s writings are of continuing contemporary relevance as “indicated not only by the spread of governmentality studies since the appearance of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, but specially by the dilemmas and ‘dead-ends’ that our political culture has brought us to.” In an earlier interview, Gordon notes that “the full publication of these lectures will revitalise this area of research. I think their publication will also show that this notion of governmentality can usefully be applied alongside Foucault’s earlier and later ideas (power/knowledge, discipline, government of self, perihelia). The theme of governmentality certainly needs to be seen in its continuity with the themes of the ‘late’ or ‘final’ Foucault (we are only talking here of an interval of



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

five or six years): ethics, care of self, parrhesia or truth‐telling, the conditions of existence of critical discourse” (Donzelot and Gordon 2008: 53). Because we are most interested in those threads and clusters of scholarly work which over the years have developed Foucauldian ideas in ways that some existing discourse writings have already found attractive or which we believe are yet to be made useful in discourse studies, in this section we provide an overview of the major contributions of Nikolas Rose (as well as Peter Miller) and Mitchell Dean. This is followed by an illustration of some of the contemporary issues that arise when one takes a specific disciplinary approach to studies of governmentality, namely environmental studies and the governmentality of climate change (see also the chapters by Lassen and Horsbøl, and Lindegaard in this volume). Finally, we exemplify some of the points made so far with a striking excerpt from a television drama. 4.1

Key figures

Among the many contributions to the study of governmentality, the collective body of work by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller stands out as one of the most comprehensive. They address a variety of questions not explicitly connected by the notion of governmentality, yet all in one way or another focus on the role of the “regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents” (Miller and Rose 2008: 216) in the governing of society. Miller and Rose (2008) take a retrospective look at their writings, observing that although both of them from the early 1970s have been contributing to the debates around the modes of subject formation and psychiatric politics inspired by Foucault’s work (Foucault 1965), these contributions however did not start out from the notion of governmentality, i.e. as a genealogical observation of the “co-emergence of specific programmes… that address the management of this or that problem” (Miller and Rose 2008: 19). This is reflected in Rose’s (1979) early work on the history of psychology. Nevertheless, even these early engagements with Foucault’s work clearly indicate the perspective that would shape the way in which Rose and Miller began to approach and develop the notion of governmentality. For instance, it can be seen when a history of the psychological sciences (and subjectivity) is linked to more general social transformations that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century in which psychology became part of a new rationale of government (Miller and Rose 1988; Rose 1999a). Later, they developed their understanding of governmentality in relation to the administration of the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in advanced liberal societies (Miller and Rose 1990; Rose 1996a; Rose and Gane 2004). Their perspective grasps not only the conceptual but, first and foremost, the analytical potential of ‘governmentality’. They were motivated to write the

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political histories of the present “in terms of the minor figures”, whose activities, knowledges and procedures are to be followed beyond concrete local domains (Miller and Rose 2008: 5). In Rose’s and Miller’s writings through the 1980s, they shifted their focus away from the “meticulous and scholarly tracing of the small and dispersed events” (Miller and Rose 2008: 4) that bring certain practices and subjects into being, which was initially tied to a Foucauldian analysis of the constitution of the politics of health and disease (Rose 1979). They increasingly moved beyond psychiatric and medical domains, to the intersections of other forms of expertise, developments and practices. Thus, in his book Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Rose (1999a) examines the ontology and ethics formed around complex apparatuses that target the child, manage military functions and administer work and organisational life. From the late 1980s, Miller engaged in genealogies of such aspects of state machinery and its planning instruments as national accounting, particularly focusing on how the knowledges and terminologies associated with different scientific disciplines (such as the psychiatric notion of ‘mental hygiene’ and the questions of ‘efficiency’ and ‘waste’ offered by scientific management) were brought together to construct a “governable person” (Miller 1986; Miller and O’Leary 1987). These publications clearly demarcate how a governmental analytics both draws on the Marxist understanding of ideological and political apparatus as premises and presuppositions, which constitute individuals and populations, and at the same time detaches itself from this understanding and its focus on the closed, accomplished orders and structures functioning to reproduce economic relations. This is done by shifting the focus of the analytics of governance from the modes of economic production and the apparatuses shaping the subjectivities which fit them, to the production of knowledges that isolate certain sectors of reality, making them “notable, speakable and writable”, and certain sectors of population, making them calculable through material traces (e.g. the reports and numbers of births, and deaths) (Rose 1999b: 6). This interest in tracing how matters are rendered governable – with a consistent analytical attention to the interlinking and overlapping of the personal, economic and social domains, and of the rationalities with which these domains are interleaved  – points towards an important conjunction between the concerns of governmental studies, highlighted in Rose and Millers’ work, and the concerns of another scholarly direction interested in unpacking the assemblages with which socio-natural realities are made, namely actor network theory (ANT) (Latour 2005). The role of materiality in administering the lives of individuals and populations emphasised in Rose’s work is undoubtedly echoed in ANT’s notions of ‘inscription’, ‘inscription device’ and ‘hinterland’, which grasp the machinery through which out-thereness manifests itself in-here generating statements which relate different materialities to each other (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Law 2004).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

At the same time, in identifying the place of ANT in the family of materialsemiotic approaches, Law (2009) outlines the conceptual surface at which ANT approximates and interacts with what Law describes as the post-structuralist rationality of Foucault and Deleuze. In doing so, Law links ANT’s intellectual focus on how different kinds of materials translate into each other and “hang together” in sustaining precarious relations (Law 2009: 145) to Foucault’s study of the translations of epochal epistemes (Foucault 1977a) and Deleuze’s notion of agencement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).29 In his discussion of the ways in which psy-practices in the ‘psy disciplines’ (a generic term for psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, etc. – see Rose 1989) grasp and calibrate human differences along the criteria of sickness and pathology, Rose (1988: 190) refers back to Latour’s (1986a) notion of ‘immutable mobiles’ to account for the practices of representation and technologies of visualisation employed in translating “ephemeral phenomena” into stable yet transportable material inscriptions which can be placed in different combinations and integrated with different inscriptional orders. Moreover, Rose (1988: 198) emphasises the indebtedness of this discussion to Latour’s conceptualisation of ‘inscription device’ (Latour 1987), thereby echoing ANT in his reflections on the ways in which the properties of the human soul become transformed into material form to make an individual visible, administrable and governable by the bureaucratic systems of hospitals, schools, prisons, etc.30 Another key figure in studies of governmentality is Mitchell Dean. Dean (2010: 31) stresses that an analytics of government “examines the conditions under which regimes of practices come into being, are maintained and are transformed.”

29. Agencement corresponds to ANT’s ‘assemblage’, not only linguistically but also through its reference to the “provisional assembly of productive, heterogeneous and (this is the crucial point) quite limited forms of ordering located in no larger overall order” (Law 2009: 145). 30. It is pertinent here to draw parallels between Foucauldian inspired ideas of governmentality and the work of Bruno Latour and Harold Garfinkel. These scholars are increasingly cited in reference to each other concerning ideas about power, social order, practice, conduct and government. For instance, McHoul (1986, 1996) draws family resemblances between the ideas of Garfinkel/Sacks and particular analytical directions of Foucault, as already discussed. Also, Latour, despite being rather scathing in his early work (1986b), ends up praising ethnomethodology in several more recent publications (Latour 2003, 2005). He proposes that “to put it simply, ANT [actor-network theory] is a direct descendant of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. One could say that it is a hybridisation of Garfinkel for humans and Greimas for nonhumans” (2003: 40). To make the circle complete, Rose (1999b) and Barry (2001) are indebted to Latour for anchoring their studies of governmentality to a richer agential and network ontology. For example, Rose (1999b: 48–49) specifically borrows the notions of ‘translation’ and ‘action at a distance’ from Latour.

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Dean (2010: 33–44) proposes an analytics of government, an approach which draws attention to four reciprocally conditioning, yet relatively autonomous dimensions of government as assemblages or regimes of practices: a. b. c. d.

The fields of visibility it creates and the ends to which it aims; The forms of knowledge it relies upon (the episteme); The particular technologies and apparatuses it mobilises (the techne); The subjectivities or identities it produces.

Here, Dean loosely draws upon Deleuze’s (1991) esoteric understanding of Foucault’s analysis of a dispositif (see chapters by Bager et al. and Hong and AllardHuver in this volume).31 Because in this chapter we are to some extent pre-occupied with writing a cartography of governmental thinking in relation to the field of discourse studies, it makes sense at this moment to reflect on the repercussions that the identified circulation of ideas across social theories has had for discourse research. As we have stressed earlier, only particular strands of the Foucauldian oeuvre seem to have made their way into the conceptual repertoire and scope of concerns of discourse studies. The question arises whether and to what extent any of the existing approaches to discourse have picked up this concern for the combination of practices, regimes, programmes and techniques in rendering human and material actors visible and manageable. Later in this chapter we attend to this question by making visible how the aforementioned ideas become folded into approaches such as nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) and mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 1999, 2001).32 Moreover, we point out how these perspectives provide the “empirical translation” (Law 2009) of Foucault’s concern for assemblages and orderings, by offering the analytical tools for navigating the cycles of discourse, interaction orders and semiotic shifts (Iedema 2003b) which connect ‘discourse’ and ‘action’ to the “large discourse-and-practice complexes that make up the powerful institutions of our society” (Scollon and Scollon 2004: 90).

31. Deleuze identifies four dimensions of an apparatus (or dispositif): (a) curves of visibility; (b) curves of utterance or lines of enunciation; (c) lines of force; and (d) lines of subjectivation. McHoul (1997: 772) notes with exasperation that “Anglophone Foucauldian[s] are startled into non-recognition when they read such things as Deleuze’s little book on Foucault where he appears as the ‘philosopher of the visible’ rather than, say, the philosopher of discourse, of discipline, or of subjectivity.” 32. See also Caronia and Cooren (2014), Cooren (2010) and Cooren et al. (2013) for a recent communications/discourse studies perspective on language, action and materiality that incorporates ANT, but which lacks a Foucauldian account of power and conduct.



4.2

Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

Disciplinary attachments

In addition to those scholars such as Rose and Dean who have contributed to advancing studies of governmentality in ways conducive to discourse studies, we can also learn from specific disciplinary attachments to studies of governmentality. As an example, relevant to several chapters (see Lassen and Horsbøl, and Lindegaard in this volume), we briefly consider environmental studies and the governmentality of climate change.33 Since the 1980s, the research field concerned with the government of climate change has been informed by the overall question about whether climate change should be approached prominently as a matter of individual preferences or of international politics, reflecting a dominating dichotomous understanding of action as generated either from below (that is, from single individuals) or from above (that is, from major political institutions such as the state). Concerned with the ways in which climate change enters into decision-making, disciplines such as psychology, economics and sociology have been focusing predominantly on individual agents (e.g. Gardner and Stern 1996; Nilsson, Borgstede and Biel 2004; Senecah 2004; Shove 2010; Stern 2000). Because they are understandably concerned more with international politics, disciplines such as international relations have, on the other hand, been dominated by a state-centric approach to international studies, characterised by a particular spatial and statist understanding of the international as constituted by territorially formed authority structures (e.g. Aldy and Stavins 2007; Luterbacher and Sprinz 2001). Scholars of global governance have recently attempted to soften such dichotomous accounts. Given that “it is possible to conceive of governance without government” (Rosenau 1992: 4–5), such scholars emphasise the fragmentation caused by the increased participation of non-state actors, public policy networks, supranational jurisdiction, partnerships and cooperation across the public–private divide. However, as pointed out by Lövbrand and Stripple (2014), such scholars also appear to invoke “two (separate) political worlds, one ‘state-centric’ consisting of ‘sovereignty-bound states’ and one ‘multi-centric’ consisting of ‘sovereignty-free’ actors” (30). Thus, they continue to presuppose and reify the notions of ‘nation state’ and ‘individual’ as analytical units even when questioning what goes on beyond the state. In contrast to both positions elucidated above, recent studies of governmentality have pointed out that the government of climate change needs to be approached 33. Interesting work can also be found on transnational and post-colonial governmentalities (Chatterjee 2004; Ferguson 2011; Ferguson and Gupta 2002), on disability and governmentality (Hughes 2005; Jolly 2003; Ransom 1994; Tremain 2001, 2005), and on feminism and ethics of the care of the self (Grimshaw 1994; Ramazanoglu 1994; Ransom 1994; Taylor 2013; Vintges and Taylor 2004).

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in new ways. According to Stripple and Bulkeley (2014), it is possible to identify an emerging field of critical approaches to the research into the government of climate change that is constituted by three interrelated areas of studies of governmentality: firstly, “the climate imagined as a historical and political object that is possible to govern”, secondly, “advanced liberal climate government”, and, thirdly, “subjectivity and the personal conduct of carbon” (10). Whereas the first group of studies is concerned with different aspects of the historical and political emergence of the climate and the environment as governable objects in the first place (see, for instance, Lövbrand and Stripple 2014 for an overview of how statistical and graphical inscriptions have co-constituted certain regimes of practices, rendering the climate an object that is possible to govern), the second and third group of studies are concerned with particular sets of processes or techniques that seem to be constitutive of the governing of climate. As indicated by the name, the second group concerns how the government of carbon markets displays roughly the same features as the mode of governing that Rose, among others, calls advanced liberalism. That is, according to Stripple and Bulkeley (2014: 12), the governing of carbon markets comes off as an instance of advanced liberalism in that “governing is not primarily about governing in a totalizing fashion, but about self-regulation and governing at a distance through technologies such as standards and accounting practices” (see also Methmann 2013 and Oels 2005 for discussions of advanced liberal governments of the climate). The third group is tightly related to or embedded in the second in that it concerns the accomplishment of different subjectifications around climate change and carbon (c.f. Goede and Randalls 2009; Paterson and Stripple 2010; Rice 2010; Rutland and Aylett 2008; Skoglund 2012; Stripple and Bulkeley 2014). Following Rose (1999b), advanced liberalism is dependent upon the governors’ successful utilisation of the governed ones’ freedom to govern themselves at a distance; or, in slightly different words, the conduct of conduct is dependent upon an accomplishment of certain subject positions, upon a certain shaping of the self. In line with this, Stripple and Bulkeley (2014) observe that the third group of studies within the field of climate analytics is concerned with how the “explosion of projects designed to enable individuals to ‘do their bit’” can be “regarded as one means through which such subject positions are enacted” (13). For instance, Paterson and Stripple (2010) point out a governmental rationality named ‘my space’, demonstrating how it proliferates due to its successful shaping of and governing at a distance through five subject positions characterised by how they govern their own emissions as ‘counters’, ‘displacers’, ‘dieters’, ‘communitarians’ or ‘citizens’.34 In greater detail, Paterson and Stripple (2010: 6) note 34. Skoglund (2012) outlines a governmentality called ‘climate change as bioaesthetic frame’, which is dependent on the shaping of ‘homo clima’, namely a new form of ideal subject who is concerned with the investment of its own vulnerability, adaptability and changeability.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

that “the concept of governmentality draws attention to the moulding and mobilising of individual subjectivity and individuals’ capacity to govern themselves”, but “this aspect of governmentality has received little attention from geographers and social science at large. The ways in which practices of self-government and subjectification are performed in programmes of government (including those largely conceived as programmes for governing others) have been ignored.” Capturing the dual sense of conduct, they wish to talk about the ‘conduct of carbon conduct’, by which they mean a government of people’s carbon dioxide emissions that does not work through the authority of the state or the state system, but through people’s governing of their own emissions. Different regimes of ‘carbon calculation’ operate so that individuals either work on their emission-producing activities or to ‘offset’ their emissions elsewhere. The conduct of carbon conduct is therefore a way of governing enabled through certain forms of knowledge (measurements and calculations of one’s own carbon footprint), certain technologies (the turning of carbon emissions into tradable commodities), and a certain ethic (low-carbon lifestyle as desirable).  (7)

They use Dean’s (2010) analytics of government approach, introduced above, to highlight the regimes of practices in different forms of individualised carbon governance, such as carbon foot-printing, carbon rationing, carbon dieting and carbon allowances. Thus, this disciplinary example of the governmentality of climate change at the intersection of the conduct of others and the conduct of the self illustrates the adaptability and unpredictability of a diverse and heterogeneous assemblage of changing discourses, rationalities, technologies, materialities and practices. 4.3

An example

To illustrate some of the points made so far in this introductory chapter let us consider the following example, namely an episode from the third season of HBO’s TV-drama The Wire. In a seminal scene, we see Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin, commander of the Western District in the Baltimore Police Department, who revisits what he calls an amazing moment of civic compromise in Baltimore’s history. According to a law passed by the Baltimore City Council, it is illegal to consume alcohol in public places, such as on the streets or street corners. However, as Bunny points out, the corner was, is, and always will be the poor man’s refuge. Hence, back when the ban on drinking in public places was first introduced, the Baltimore Police Department were presented with a severe civic dilemma. On the one hand, upholding the law criminalised one of the city’s biggest demographics and diverted police resources from, in Bunny’s words, real police work. On the

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other hand, disregarding the law jeopardised the public’s respect for the police and opened up the department to all kinds of ridicule. According to Bunny, the dilemma was solved sometime back in the 1950s or 1960s when one of the corner boys got the idea to slip his newly purchased beverage into a brown paper bag. In principle, the bag could cover any kind of beverage, making it conveniently invisible for the police, whether or not the bag covered an alcoholic beverage. Power, then, does not unfold unilaterally in the letter of the law, but also in the delicate interactional, embodied and material ‘work’ that renders the law operational in particular cases. Such interactional work is not simply an instrument of repression, standardisation and control, but also of resistance, diversity and creativity. Indeed, the difference between the former and the latter is often difficult to uphold. That is, whereas ‘the civic compromise’ allowed the public to disregard the ban on alcohol in public places in Baltimore, it simultaneously diminished any possible inclinations by the public to resist the ban more openly. In this way, Bunny’s story illustrates an important point: when we study power, we need to acknowledge that power, even in the form of written laws, is always dispersed and negotiated at all levels, and, accordingly, in current forms of ‘successful’ governing, governors have to “presuppose the freedom of the governed […] acknowledge it and […] utilise it for [their] own objectives” (Rose 1999b: 4). 5. Rethinking issues for discourse studies In part because of the new insights spurred by a close examination of Foucault’s later work published since 2007, as elaborated in the previous section, we argue that there is now an opportunity to revisit the question of the relevance of Foucault to discourse studies. In this section, we discuss the issues raised for discourse studies today by reconsidering seriously Foucault’s general thinking about the subject, power and governmentality as well as later work by scholars drawing upon Foucault, both outlined in earlier sections. However, even though several monographs have been published recently by political scientists reappraising Foucault’s approach to power and governmentality – e.g. Dean (2010, 2013), Lemke (2012) and Walters (2012) – all of which have created a strong foundation for studies of governmentality, none of them takes a language or discourse perspective into account. To our knowledge, only one scholar in this field has hinted at the importance of language to understanding governmentality, namely Rose (1999b) in his seminal book on power and freedom in advanced liberal societies.35 The issues for 35. See the epigraph to this chapter.



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

­ iscourse studies discussed in this section, and which recur across the chapters d in this volume, include the role of genealogical critique and an analytics of governmentality, the conception of conduct and practice, the role of resistance, the relation between rationality and moral order, the import of ethics in the constitution of the subject, and the conception of power as an assemblage or a topology. 5.1

Critique, problematisation and genealogy: tools for discourse studies?

Foucault was continually re-examining the theoretical and methodological tools he was developing. He is known particularly for his trademark reconceptualisations, for a marked sense of critique and its functions (Butler 2002; Foucault 1997d), for a shift towards considering problematisations within a genealogical approach (Foucault 2003, 2007; Walters 2012), and for an analytics of particular phenomena such as governmentality (Dean 2010). One issue is how these methodological innovations fit or not with different approaches within discourse studies, and what are the consequences (Foucault 1984a). In relation to Foucauldian thought and discourse studies, Martin Rojo and Pujol (2011: 98) positively note that it is certainly true that the ideological meaning of Foucault’s work (that is, for instance, his position on freedom, social change and social movements, and domination) has been evaluated in different ways. However, Foucault’s approach to discourse is a ‘critical’ one, and his influence can be seen in current approaches. To think critically is to problematise concepts, to call into question evidence and postulates, to break habits and ways of acting and thinking, to dissipate the familiar and accepted, to retrieve the measure of rules and institutions, to show the techniques of production of knowledge, and the techniques of domination, and also the techniques of control of discourse. Then starting from this (re)problematisation it is possible for citizens to take part in the formation of a political will.

In his overview of the relevance of Foucault across disciplines, Koopman (2011: 5–6) contends that the two central categories in Foucault’s empiricist critique are practices and problematisations, which are mutually constitutive. Koopman notes that “problematisations are formed at the intersection of congeries of practices and in such a way that stabilised problematisations themselves become platforms for the elaboration of newer practices. Problematisations are made possible by the assembly of practices and in turn these problematisations make further practices possible. According to Foucault’s method, that which conditions is also exactly that which is conditioned. Thus Foucault’s genealogies are meant to reveal conditioned conditioners which now condition (as problematisations) and are now conditioned (as practices).” One way to problematise concepts is to conduct a genealogy (or an historical ontology). Rose (1999b: 274–275), for

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instance, insists that his ‘analytics of government’ are “genealogical; they are neither sociological nor historicist. They do not narrate a history that takes the form of a succession of underlying unities but seek to unravel the naturalness of problem spaces in the present by tracing the multiple, heterogeneous and contingent conditions which have given rise to them.” Koopman (2011) highlights that a key contribution of Foucault’s genealogical approach consists in the revelation of the sheer contingency of the conditions of the practices which were the objects of his inquiries, which Foucault denaturalises and de-inevitabilises. Hence, there is an enormous critical potential released by explicating these contingencies. He suggests we distinguish two ways in which Foucault’s work mounts the concept of contingency for the purpose of critique. A first sense of contingency in Foucault is well known. Foucault’s historico-philosophical practice of course shows us that certain irreducibly central features of our present which we take to be necessary have in fact been contingently constructed. Beyond this, though, there is another sense in which contingency operates in Foucault’s work. Foucault not only shows us that heteronormative sexuality, or the author function, or our very sense of modern selfhood are contingent constructs, but Foucault also shows us how these contingencies have been historically composed out of a welter of practices that seem otherwise unrelated. Though analytically separable, these two senses of contingency are often intertwined in Foucault’s works, and the result is a provocative and challenging series of critical interventions.  (5)

In this way, one can explicate the details of how the present contingently came to be the way that it is (Koopman 2011: 5), and thus demonstate that the present need not be that way. In a simple sense, ethnomethodological conversation analysis is similar to genealogy in that both are particularly suited to the work of describing how our present practices have been contingently formed. However, the ‘how’ question of genealogy is not the same as the ‘how’ question that topicalises the social order accomplished by members. Walters (2012) argues that it is fruitful to connect governmentality and genealogy, but we must take into account that there are at least three different genealogical styles in the literature: (1) genealogy as descent (GI), i.e. genealogy as re-serialisation; (2) genealogy as counter-memory (GII), i.e. genealogy as the retrieval of the forgotten; and (3) genealogy as struggles and subjugated knowledges (GIII). For Dean (2010), the ‘how’ questions about regimes of practices must be given priority over traditional questions of governance, e.g. “who rules?”, “what is the source of that rule?”. He points out that it “doesn’t mean that we simply describe how authority operates in a particular situation, say a workplace or a school. Rather, it directs us to attend to the practices of government that form the



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

basis on which problematisations are made, and what happens when we govern and are governed” (2010: 39). It is not a concern simply with the construction of individuals, but with the conditions of possibility for individuals to recognise themselves as particular kinds of person and to reflect upon their conduct – to problematise it – such that they may work upon and transform themselves in certain ways and towards particular goals. We argue that there is a fourth understanding of genealogy, which also holds critical potential, and that is a molecular genealogical approach. Following Deleuze, by molecularity we mean a notion that is tied to a ‘micropolitics’ of perception, affect, and even errant conversation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 220). For example, chapters in this volume that use EMCA could be interpreted as documenting an interactional history of the present; that is, how a particular configuration/assemblage came to be contingently negotiated, achieved, maintained and disassembled in social interaction. In this way, we are enhancing the ‘interoperability’ of genealogy in the sense of increasing its “transposability across diverse and otherwise heterogeneous platforms”, as Walters (2012: 112) proposes. And in this regard, practices and conduct are essential elements. 5.2

Practice and conduct in Foucault and discourse studies

At first glance, one area of seeming overlap between Foucault’s understanding of governmentality and studies of discourse is in the common use of the terms ‘practice’ and ‘conduct’. The overlap is not surprising in this case, especially as scholars of discourse analysis were often inspired by Foucault (Fairclough 1985, 1989). In several phases of his inquiry into discourse, truth and power, Foucault drew on a conception of practice. However, Stone (2014: 386) argues that “one must be careful not to immediately equate Foucault’s focus on practices with some form of pragmatism or action theory. Instead, we must treat ‘practice’ as a metaphysical term, a word that expresses what there is in the world. […] practice is what follows from theory (namely, practices are the effects produced from arrangements of power/knowledge).” This would appear to make the relationship of Foucault’s views on conduct and practice tenuous and at odds vis-a-vis those of other scholars and traditions – for example, in practice theory and practice-based studies (e.g. Nicolini 2012; Reckwitz 2002, 2009; Schatzki 1996, 2002; Schatzki, Cetina and Savigny 2001), in ethnomethodology (e.g. Lynch 1997, 2001) and in social theory (e.g. Bennett 2008; McFall, Gay and Carter 2008). But are there overlaps that are more substantive, such that the tools and methods of discourse studies – for example, EMCA and MDA – may be applicable to analysing the practices and conduct of subjects in terms of governmentality?

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We cannot look to Foucault for much guidance in the analysis of actual practices. In his lectures entitled The Birth of Biopolitics from 1979, Foucault (2008: 1–2) justifies the strict sense in which he understood the ‘art of government’: “since in using the word ‘to govern’ I left out the thousand and one different modalities and possible ways that exist for guiding men, directing their conduct, constraining their actions and reactions, and so on. Thus I left to one side all that is usually understood, and that for a long time was understood, as the government of children, of families, of a household, of souls, of communities, and so forth.” For him, at this stage, it is ‘government’ in the strict sense, but also ‘art’, ‘art of government’ in the strict sense, since by ‘art of government’ I did not mean the way in which governors really governed. I have not studied and do not want to study the development of real governmental practice by determining the particular situations it deals with, the problems raised, the tactics chosen, the instruments employed, forged, or remodelled, and so forth. I wanted to study the art of governing, that is to say, the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing. That is to say, I have tried to grasp the level of reflection in the practice of government and on the practice of government. (2008: 2)

In an interview from 1978 published as “Questions of Method”, Foucault (2000) talks explicitly about the importance of his analysis of practices. In his research on prisons, the target of analysis wasn’t ‘institutions’, ‘theories’, or ‘ideology’ but practices – with the aim of grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practice are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances – whatever role these elements may actually play – but, up to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence and ‘reason’. It is a question of analysing a ‘regime of practices’ – practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and interconnect.  (2000: 225)

Nevertheless, Foucault contends that this point “doesn’t entail that these schemes [of the institutions, theories or ideologies] are therefore utopian, imaginary, and so on” (2000: 232).36 Instead, “these programmings of behaviour, these regimes of 36. Brownlie (2004: 515) misleadingly claims that “it is not surprising that Foucault, who described ‘actual practices’ as being like a ‘witches’ brew’ in comparison with ‘programmes of conduct’ [(Foucault 2000: 232–233)], did not choose to foreground [actual] interaction in his writing about the therapeutic”, i.e. that Foucault did not deal with actual practices because they were messy. In fact, Foucault notes that it is correct that “the actual functioning of the prisons… was a witches’ brew compared to the beautiful Benthamite machine” (Foucault 2000: 232–233,



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

jurisdiction and veridiction aren’t abortive schemas for the creation of a reality. They are fragments of reality that induce such particular effects in the real as the distinction between true and false implicit in the ways men ‘direct’, ‘govern’ and ‘conduct’ themselves and others” (2000: 233). For example, these programs crystallise into institutions, they inform individual behaviour, and they act as grids for perception and evaluation of things. Dean (2010: 31) defines ‘regimes of practices’ as “fairly coherent sets of ways of going about doing things. They are the more or less organised ways, at any given time and place, we think about, reform and practise such things as caring, administering, counselling, curing, punishing, educating and so on.” Some scholars argue that, in fact, Foucault was moving away from an analysis of discursive practices to consider the non-discursive. Consider the following interview with Foucault (1983a: 250), in which the interviewer queries whether “discourse plays an important role but always serves other practices even in the constitution of the self.” Foucault answers: It seems to me, that all the so-called literature of the self – private diaries, narratives of the self, etc. – cannot be understood unless it is put into the general and very rich framework of these practices of the self. People have been writing about themselves for two thousand years, but not in the same way. I have the impression – I may be wrong – that there is a certain tendency to present the relationship between writing and the narrative of the self as a phenomenon particular to European modernity. Now, I would not deny it is modern but it was also one of the first uses of writing. So, it is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system. It is not just in the play of symbols that the subject is constituted. It is constituted in real practices – historically analysable practices.

When we turn to governmentality, Foucault considered many terms to encompass his sense of the ‘medium’ in which one is governmentalised or the object of the arts of government, namely conduct (Foucault 1983b, 1984b; McCall 2014). Foucault (2007: 193) carefully defines ‘conduct’, noting it refers to two things: “Conduct is the activity of conducting (conduire), of conduction (la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the way in which one conducts oneself (se conduit), lets oneself be conducted (se laisse conduire), is conducted (est conduit), and finally, in which one behaves (se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduit) as the action of conducting or of conduction (conduction).” The translator notes that “when Foucault speaks of ‘a conduct’ (une conduit) the sense often embraces the activity by which some conduct others, the way in which some are conducted by others, and the way in which individuals conduct themselves within this form emphasis added). Foucault makes this comparison in order to point out that Bentham’s schemes are of little use in describing the ‘real life’ of prisons, which is not his concern, yet they are still fragments of reality that shaped how men govern.

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of ‘conduct’ (Foucault 2007: 193, fn †). Davidson (2011) proposes that the ingenuity of the notion of ‘conduct’ and the ‘conduct of conduct’ is that it enables both a political and an ethical consideration, bridging governmentality and subjectivation, a bridge which is explored in many of the chapters in this book. 5.3

Counter-conduct and resistance in discourse and social interaction

In an essay written in English, Foucault (1983b: 211) suggests that an economy of power relations consists of “taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. […] Rather than analysing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analysing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.” In his discussion of resistance, Foucault (1983b: 212) argues that the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much ‘such or such’ an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Foucault was very concerned with the conceptualisation of power relations and resistance but without falling into the traditional determinism of a resistance outside of power, of freedom from power by abolishing power. On several occasions, Foucault grappled with a way to think of resistance to governmentality and he settled on ‘counter-conduct’ in the Security, Territory, Population lectures (Foucault 2007). In one of his lectures, Foucault makes the case for using ‘counter-conduct’: what I will propose to you is the doubtless badly constructed word ‘counter-conduct’ – the latter having the sole advantage of allowing reference to the active sense of the word ‘conduct’ – counter-conduct in the sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others; which is why I prefer it to ‘misconduct’ (inconduite), which only refers to the passive sense of the word, of behaviour: not conducting oneself properly. (Foucault 2007: 201)

According to the general editor of the series of lectures given at the Collège de France (Davidson 2011: 26), “it is Foucault’s analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course”. Davidson argues that Security, Territory, Population “contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault’s thought. But this essential moment has been rather undervalued due to the fact that the main legacy of this course has been to give rise to so-called ‘governmentality studies’.”37 Davidson is adamant that Foucault’s outlining of the practices of governmentality, and the historically precedent practices of pastoral power, have opened up a new and significant field of inquiry, both within Foucault’s own work and more generally. He notes, as we discussed in the previous section, that Foucault cleverly writes of “the double dimension of conduct, namely the activity of conducting an individual, conduction as a relation between individuals, and the way in which an individual conducts ‘himself ’ or is conducted, ‘his’ conduct or behaviour in the narrower sense of the term. Yet Foucault moves quickly from the quite specific form of power that takes as its object the conduct of individuals to the correlative countermovements that he initially designates as specific revolts of conduct” (2011: 26–27). In an article entitled “What Is Critique?”, Foucault outlines what he means by counter-conducts as “the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price” (Foucault 1997b: 72). Later he clarifies: “I was not referring to something that that would be a fundamental anarchism, that would be like an originary freedom, absolutely and wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalisation […] it is supported by something akin to the historical practice of revolt, the non-acceptance of a real government, on one hand, or, on the other, the individual refusal of governmentality” (Foucault 1997b: 73).38 Analysing and critiquing power is a fundamental aim of many approaches in critical discourse studies, especially critical discourse analysis and the discoursehistorical approach (see Colombo and Quassoli in this volume), so what consequences does Foucault’s later rethinking of power and resistance have? Rather than see power as control or domination from ‘above’, which, if identified and

37. In one of the few scholarly references to ‘counter-conduct’ after Foucault’s death, but before the Security, Territory, Population lectures were published posthumously in 2007, Gordon (1991: 5) notes the “ways in which the terms of governmental practice can be turned around into focuses of resistance: or, as he [Foucault] put it in his 1978 lectures, the way the history of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of dissenting ‘counter-conducts’.” 38. In her essay on Foucault’s “What Is Critique?” (Foucault 1997d), Butler (2002) writes: “Whatever this is that one draws upon as one resists governmentalisation will be ‘like an originary freedom’ and ‘something akin to the historical practice of revolt’ [her emphasis]. Like them, indeed, but apparently not quite the same. As for Foucault’s mention of ‘originary freedom’, he offers and withdraws it at once. ‘I did not say it’, he remarks, after coming quite close to saying it, after showing us how he almost said it, after exercising that very proximity in the open for us in what can be understood as something of a tease. What discourse nearly seduces him here, subjugating him to its terms? And how does he draw from the very terms that he refuses?” (224).

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criticised, can be lifted, overturned and usurped by resistant forces, to reveal a pure domain of freedom and equality, it would be more useful and nuanced to heed Rose (1999b) when he concludes his book on governmentality and ‘powers of freedom’ in advanced liberal societies by reiterating Foucault’s warning about dichotomising power and resistance. He writes: “it requires us to abandon, once and for all, those binary divisions that have structured our political thinking and our theorizing about the political for so long: domination and emancipation; power and resistance; strategy and tactics; Same and Other; civility and desire. Empirical studies of regulatory problematisations, ambitions, programmes, strategies and techniques require us to jettison the division between a logic that structures and territorialises ‘from above’ according to protocols that are not our own, and a more or less spontaneous anti-logic ‘from below’ that expresses our own needs, desires, aspirations” (1999b: 277). He elaborates that contestations “are not between power and its others, but between diverse programmes, logics, dreams and ideals, codified, organised and rationalised to a greater or lesser extent. We need no ‘theory of resistance’ to account for contestation, any more than we need an epistemology to account for the production of truth effects  – except if we wish to use our theory to ratify some acts of contestation and to devalue others” (1999b: 278–279). Thus, it is by attending to the assemblage of the diverse practices of governmentality at the intersection of the government of the self and the government of others that discourse studies may find a more productive understanding of resistance and counter-conduct. Chapters by Lassen and Horsbøl, Lindegaard, Solberg and McIlvenny in this volume consider in different ways the discursive trace of counter-conduct and resistance in social interaction. 5.4

Rationalities, categorisation and the politico-moral order

It is unusual for studies of governmentality to concern themselves with the variety of everyday moralities that are bound up with government as the conduct of conduct. However, Foucault (1983b) does point towards this aspect of power as he discusses how power relations should be understood through the ways in which we attempt to resist them. As Foucault sums up various forms of struggles that are co-constituting power, he notes that such struggle “applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him” (212). In this way, Foucault indicates that governing does not only unfold through power struggles at more molar levels, but also through different everyday processes in which the self is established as a moral being; that is, through processes in which “the possible



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

field of actions” (221) is structured in a way that complies with the governmental rationality in question. Introducing the basic concepts to be found in studies of governmentality, Dean (2010) recalls this point as he notes that the notion of the ‘conduct of conduct’ implies an understanding of government as an inherently moral business. Dean stresses that this moral aspect becomes apparent already if one considers the reflexive verb ‘to conduct oneself ’ (17) because it invokes the understanding that government is a rational activity that is undertaken by a multiplicity of actors seeking to present themselves as sensible and ethically accountable beings.39 He contends that “if morality is understood as the attempt to make oneself accountable for one’s own actions, or as a practice in which human beings take their own conduct to be subject to self-regulation, then government is an intensely moral activity” (18). Whereas Rose and Miller (1992: 178–179) are less explicit concerning the relationship between the self and the morality of governmental rationalities, they do point out that such rationalities are morally coloured, grounded in knowledge and made thinkable through language. Similarly, Rose (1999b: 26–27) observes that rationalities have a certain moral form because they embody the ideals and principles that guide the exercise of government. However, despite acknowledging that the self co-constitutes governing through its moral work on itself, Dean (2010) is clear that his studies are concerned not so much with the conduct of the self, but rather with the “practices concerned to conduct the conduct of others” (20), and, as mentioned, it appears to be a general tendency in studies of governmentality to focus on the latter at the expense of the former. This is perhaps not too surprising considering that the genealogical approaches most often applied within such studies pursue enquiries into more dispersed governing, rather than into the capillaries of everyday moralities. In contrast, as Jayyusi (1984, 1991) has demonstrated, ethnomethodological discourse studies provide excellent tools for enquiries into the everyday accomplishment of moral order and ways of being proper, ethical beings, and a couple of recent studies have shown that it is possible to harness these tools in order to utilise discourse studies as a pathway into studies of governmentality.40 Like Dean, and Rose and Miller, ethnomethodology does not treat rationality and morality as separate fields of enquiry; rather, developing Garfinkel’s observations concerning the moral order of practical action, Jayyusi discusses how activities are continually accomplished as morally accountable and rational, and she demonstrates that 39. Of course, ‘rational’ refers here to any form of rationality that can be utilised in the name of such governing. That is, it implies an understanding of a multiplicity of rationalities in opposition to any notion of a single Reason or universal standard. 40. See Lindegaard (2012) for a similar, but more extended discussion of Jayyusi’s work in relation to studies of governmentality and McHoul’s work on a politicised ethnomethodology.

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Sacks’ work on sequential organisation and membership categorisation provides a unique set of methods for the study of the praxiology of everyday moral ordering (Jayyusi 1991: 237). For Jayyusi, communicative praxis is inherently moral in that it presupposes an ethical ‘stance’, a mutual trust. In this way, Jayyusi’s work clarifies how an analysis of the conduct of conduct can draw on ethnomethodology. In particular, recalling Dean’s observation that the moral side of governing is observable in peoples’ accounts for their conduct, it is clear that it can be seen as a matter of governing when one or the other category is accomplished as appropriate for all practical purposes.41 Pointing out that moral values are not private or inaccessible, but rather publicly available in everyday interaction, Jayyusi not only demonstrates that there is no exit from the moral order (247), she simultaneously suggests that there is no clear reason for rejecting the possibility that ethnomethodological analyses can provide a starting point for political studies, such as studies of governmentality. Although this is an uncommon position in ethnomethodology, McHoul (1994) pursues Jayyusi’s rare argument. While he does not consider actual questions of politics, he suggests that a future critical ethnomethodology would approach the concept of the political as simply meaning “the traditions of sociologics which come, historically, to inhabit a form of life, as that form of life’s routine ways of dealing with the practical limits of expressions’ indexical potentials” (114). In opposition to most ethnomethodology, he suggests that critical ethnomethodology acknowledges that contingently accomplished interaction is always afforded by and affords a particular politics; that is, critical ethnomethodology insists on the reflexive relation between politics and the practical limits of a given expression’s indexical potential. Not only does this come off as a clear invitation to connect ethnomethodology with studies of governmentality, but, considering McHoul’s emphasis that disorder, conflict, contradiction, struggle and antagonism are constitutional of interaction, it more specifically comes off as an invitation to connect ethnomethodology with a focus on resistance as a constitutive moment of government in studies of governmentality.

41. As indicated, Jayyusi’s discussion is not restricted to the domain of membership categorisation analysis; rather, she also discusses how everyday moral ordering can be studied through sequential analysis. Most prominently, she considers the notion of ‘preference’. As well-known in conversation analysis, a constitutive feature of adjacency pairs is that the first pair part projects a specific second; that is, the first pair part projects a context in which a specific second is the preferred second. However, Jayyusi (1991) importantly reminds us that this ‘preference’ is not due to a matter of empirical regularity, but rather a matter of normativity, that is, ‘preference’ is “grounded in our understanding of the contingencies of practical actions and their embeddedness in a moral context” (242).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

A few recent studies have utilised such an understanding of ethnomethodology to do more molecular studies of governmental rationalities and moralities (c.f. Lindegaard 2012; McIlvenny 2009; Summerville 2007; Summerville and Adkins 2007).42 For instance, Summerville and Adkins (2007) point out that whereas studies of governmentality are very good at enabling enquiries into the more general techniques of the conduct of conduct, they are perhaps not so good at pointing out how such techniques are accomplished and negotiated amongst those who are governed (430). As a means of remedying this possible shortcoming, Summerville and Adkins connect up studies of governmentality with ethnomethodological discourse analysis in a case study of how a policy document implicitly accomplished its audience as citizens according to a moral order that distinguishes sustainable and unsustainable planning practice. In particular, they utilise membership categorisation analysis as a means “to explicate the ‘common-sense’ and methodical ways in which ‘the citizen’ is interactionally produced […] in the ‘occasioned setting’ of a political decision-making exercise” (431). Similarly, Lindegaard (2012) connects up studies of governmentality with a combination of membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis in order to study how the citizens in a small village approach a municipal strategy as a governmentality strategy (as a strategy aimed at governing through the conduct of conduct), and how the citizens fulfil this strategy in and through their pre-emption of it. Arguing that such an approach “achieves the so far unfulfilled ambitions of studies of governmentality of attaining knowledge of the hows, namely the maintenance, resistance and negotiations of governmentalities at the least dispersed level of interaction” (35), Lindegaard suggests that her study shows the fine-grained ways in which the citizens ‘take advantage’ of the governmental utilisation of their freedom by subtly negotiating the subjectivities that co-constitute the rationality of the governmental strategy. On the one hand, then, both Summerville and Adkins and Lindegaard start out from the assumption that since neo-liberal governmentalities appear to involve the shaping of a form of “ethical subjectivity” (Rose 2000: 1404), studies of governmentality could benefit from insights and methods from ethnomethodology, because ethnomethods, such as procedures of membership categorisation, are responsible for the accomplishment of such rationalised, moral subjectivities. On the other hand, they differ slightly in that Summerville and Adkins are concerned with the category-work unfolded in the text of a particular policy document,

42. Rasmussen (2011, 2013) should also be mentioned. His studies are not particularly ethnomethodological in orientation, but rather discuss a broader discourse analytic approach to studies of governmentality, drawing particularly on discursive psychology. See also Rasmussen’s chapter in this volume.

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whereas Lindegaard is concerned with how citizens fulfil categorisations projected in policy documents as they are invoked in talk-in-interaction.43 Taking inspiration not only from ethnomethodological scholars such as Jayyusi and McHoul and recent studies such as Summerville and Adkins (2007) and Lindegaard (2012), but also from previously mentioned discussions of the common grounds of Foucault and ethnomethodology (see Section 5.2), several of the chapters of this book pursue the understanding that ethnomethodological discourse analysis can be fruitfully connected up with studies of governmentality. Hence, the chapters by Lindegaard, McIlvenny and Solberg in different ways draw on membership categorisation analysis and/or conversation analysis in order to demonstrate certain interactional accomplishments of, respectively, subjectivation, resistance and strategies of ambivalence in the face of having one’s conduct conducted. 5.5

Practices and discourses of ethicalisation

Rose (no date) argues that if we assume that power is ‘action upon action’ (i.e. governmentality), then the proliferation of the therapeutic through our culture – for example, in the form of therapeutic language, therapeutic techniques and therapeutic scenarios – “has a role in fabricating us as certain kinds of persons: certain human kinds who attend to ourselves in certain ways, value particular aspects of ourselves, take certain things as our truths, whether these be our desire or our identity or our skills, and act on those things in order to lead our own lives.” Hence, not only can we investigate what the everyday practices of conduct, discipline and liberty are, and how they are organised discursively and interactionally, we can also ask how the responsible, autonomous individual or family comes to take on their freedoms in advanced liberal societies in and through these practices (Miller and Rose 2008; Rose 1999b). Rose is not an ethnographer nor a discourse analyst, but he does admit that “if one did have detailed ethnographies of what went on in therapeutic situations, I think one would begin to observe the way in which, in a complex and subtle way, through the joint labour of the therapist and

43. Hence, as pointed out by Summerville and Adkins themselves, their more narrow focus on the policy text does not substantiate any conclusions regarding whether or not the citizens would in fact unanimously endorse or resist the projected citizen-category (441). It should be noted, however, that Summerville and Adkins argue that it is likely that citizens would, whether they resist the projected categories or not, orient to the morally loaded categorical demands of the policy text. In their words: “objections to the [policy document], or any part of it, would likely be organised in ways that attend to the procedurally produced moral demands of the interactional context” (441).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

the patient or client, the problem is shaped up according to certain grammars, repertoires or frameworks” (Rose no date). He gives the example of an empirical study by Ian Hodges, who looked at a rather particular kind of therapeutic situation, namely radio phone-in therapy (Hodges 1998, 2002, 2003a, 2003b). Hodges (1998: 110–111) notes that Foucault’s ‘map’ of ethical self-formation “begs questions concerning the relation between the ethical space exploited by therapeutic discourse and questions of regulation and governmentality.” He asks, to what extent are the patterns of conduct within a particular therapeutic ‘telos’ concomitant with liberal forms of government? The key point here is that therapeutics can be understood as, in some sense related to the contemporary exercise of authority. Drawing “selectively” from Cuff ’s arguments, and in a parallel move to Jayussi discussed in an earlier section, Hodges makes the link between the moral adequacy of selves (especially the speaker) and the moral adequacy of accounts (Cuff 1993; Hodges 2002: 461). Using a form of discursive psychology, he analyses a number of transcripts of telephone calls to the radio host. In reference to one of the calls, Rose positively notes that this is very interesting because it is a very, very intense two or three minute condensation of something which goes on at a slower pace and in a manner that is more difficult to discern, in other therapeutic contexts. In these radio phone-ins, within a matter of two or three exchanges between the caller and the counsellor, the person doing the counselling has transformed the problem that has been brought to them by the caller. It has been made amenable to therapy, has been transformed into therapeutic terms…. And one can see the way in which the caller is given instruction in certain ways of conducting self, or, at the very least, a valuation of certain norms of conduct and speech and a classification of others as suitable for treatment, requiring work, working on oneself.  (Rose no date)

In other work on the discourse of media therapeutics, McIlvenny (2009) discusses how embodied interactional and spatial practices are manifestly governmental in nature, and argues that the living space of reality TV is a quasi-laboratory for producing and domesticating problem behaviours and communicative troubles. In reference to the emergence of disciplinary techniques in the 18th and 19th centuries, Foucault (1977a: 171) called them “‘observatories’ of human multiplicity”. Hence, we may also see reality TV parenting shows as experiments in governmentality or the conduct of conduct (the conduct of the conduct of the parents as well as the conduct of the conduct of the children) in social interaction. It is no coincidence, as Donzelot (1979) and Rose (1999a) point out, that the family is and has been for quite some while one of the prime relays for the translation of governance practices and policies between the individual and the state. In advanced liberal democracies, according to Rose (1999a: 208), “parents are bound into the language and evaluations of expertise at the very moment they are assured of

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their freedom and autonomy.” In reality TV parenting programmes, parents learn to talk about and conduct the conduct of their children and to govern domestic space (and time) interactionally – for example, with the ‘time-out’ technique – in the same breath as their conduct is conducted by the resident psychologist in the mode of the psy disciplines (Rose 1989). Following on from Hodges (2002), Zhukova Klausen, in her chapter in this volume, focuses our attention on the role of the psy disciplines, identified by Rose, in the translation of the mediated practices of ethicalisation into new domains, such as transnational living, constituting new subjects of governmentality. 5.6

Mediated discourse, assemblage and the topology of power

In his book on Foucault, Deleuze (1988) argues that in contrast to his earlier work, which he formulates as “from archive to the diagram” (from archivist to cartographer), the later work is topological, in which knowledge is strata or historical formations, power is strategy or the non-stratified, and subjectivation is the folding or inside of thought. Indeed, Collier (2009: 78) re-examines the recently published lecture series by Foucault from 1975 to 1979 to show a shift towards a ‘topological’ analysis “that examines the ‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements – techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of power – are configured, as well as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed.” These are configured and transformed to regulate the conduct of individuals (e.g. transnational conduct examined in the chapter by Zhukova Klausen in this volume). Earlier in this chapter, we have shown how this approach is anchored in the later work of Foucault with its focus on the strata of historical formations rather than archives (Deleuze 1988), and how it is embedded in the clusters of concepts, such as ‘network’ and ‘assemblage’, which circulate across the social sciences (Latour 2005; Law 2004, 2009). The latter brings to the fore an interest in the layering, joining and modulating of equally ‘local’ and equally ‘micro’ fields of knowledge, representation and doing. Within discourse studies there is a troika of analytical perspectives which despite the heterogeneity of their concerns are all arguably steered by an interest in topology. This troika is formed by mediated discourse analysis (MDA) (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 1999, 2001), nexus analysis (NA) (Scollon and Scollon 2004) and those multimodal approaches to critical discourse studies which are concerned with the practices of resemiotisation (Iedema 2003b) and recontextualisation (Leeuwen and Wodak 1999). MDA and NA are closely related by their undivided and rigorous attention to the concrete moments of social life and interaction in which social actors come to engage with mediational means (both discursive and non-discursive) to mediate concrete social actions (Norris and Jones



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

2005; Scollon 2013). This orientation stems from the notion of mediated action introduced by Wertsch (1998), and it is both enabled and prompted by Foucault’s (1977b: 123) demonstration of the historical construction of the author function as the means through which diverse texts become grouped and related to shape the contours and status of discourse in a society. MDA and NA build upon and expands this aspect of Foucauldian thought to argue that “virtually everything is a medium or may be a medium for social action, and therefore, that everything is worthy of mediated discourse analysis” (Scollon 1999: 153). However, where the indebtedness of these perspectives to Foucault’s ideas becomes particularly visible is in their theoretical and analytical treatment of practice articulated as complex spatio-temporal linking between mediated actions and which make these actions recognisable to other social actors (Norris and Jones 2005: 99). This understanding of practice is a discourse analytical translation of a set of notions, such as ‘network’ (Latour 2005), ‘assemblage’ (Latour 2005), ‘agencement’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), ‘hinterland’ (Law 2004), appertaining to Foucault’s concept of apparatus as a network of discourses, institutions, moral propositions, etc. “inscribed in a play of power” and linked to certain knowledges (Foucault 1980a: 196). This translation enables MDA and NA to scale down the conventional social definition of practice as an unambiguous material and cognitive base for human activities to a much narrower, situated understanding of practices as real time occurrences constituted through the linking of actions (Norris and Jones 2005: 98). This view on practice affords MDA and NA a compelling base for empirical explorations of “the strategic, relational, and productive character of particular, smaller-scale, heterogeneous actor-networks” (Law 2009: 6), particularly when it is equipped with a variety of methods, such as multimodal discourse analysis. With their focus on the practices of recontextualisation and resemiotisation, multimodal approaches to discourse studies enable MDA and NA to trace and unpack the ‘shifting’ through which the networks are formed, from one context and semiotic mode to another, across knowledges, techniques and technologies (Iedema 2001). The majority of the scholarly works produced by the aforementioned discourse analytical approaches do not, or only indirectly, acknowledge the indebtedness of their conceptual and methodological concepts to the Foucauldian heritage. Moreover, the analytical power and potential which these connections generate for the empirical examinations of governance at a distance is yet unexplored and unexploited. An exception is Iedema, who employs the notion of resemiotisation to trace the genealogy of power in organisational discourse as a meaning-making resource that interactants mobilise in “the shared and self-initiated enunciation of (new) knowledges and the enactment of ‘new’ alliances”, which is what Iedema claims approximates organisational governmentality (Iedema 2003b: 46).

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This edited volume expands the scope of expertise and the reach of discourse studies in the examination of relations of power. This is undertaken by moving the focus of discourse analysis beyond specific forms and targets of domination and ideal ideological types, such as capitalism, to a more nuanced exploration of how the conduct of individuals and communities is regulated through the rhizomatic assemblages of agencies and practices, and therefore to a more potent critique of the social wrongs that these assemblages both accomplish and counter. 6. Overview of the chapters What sets this collection apart from many other scholarly explorations preoccupied with the Foucauldian heritage is that its view on, and insight into, Foucault’s oeuvre is not retrospective but anticipatory. We do not provide theoretical interpretations of the ideas formulated by Foucault in the past and about the past. Instead, we revisit his thought to make it operational for the rigorous examination of the present. In this chapter, we have traced the conceptions and ways of thinking about the government of the self and of others that were introduced by Foucault, and we have delimitated the scope of their impact on the works of his peers and successors. At the same time we systematically mapped out the future tasks and analytical missions of governmental studies. This entails that this book should not be viewed as some sort of intellectual ‘spirit medium’ session in which we divine what Foucault would reflect on, and lecture about today, expecting his writings to begin to speak to us through some hidden meanings or messages which have been overlooked by prior commentators of his work (see Section 5.1). Instead, this anthology extends studies of governmentality not only beyond Foucault’s writings, but also beyond the scientific disciplines within which this research commonly operates, by linking to a diverse variety of methods to be found in the conceptual and methodological tradition of discourse studies. It is now time to introduce the chapters in this volume in the light of the explication and discussion above. We have divided the chapters into three parts that reflect a key common focal point, though chapters in different parts may also have other specific commonalities, such as counter-conduct, rationalities, categorisation, ethicalisation and assemblage, which were discussed above in Section 5. Part I includes chapters that take up the important and often neglected topic of the intersection of attempts to governmentalise conduct and the actual conduct of those to be governed, for example at the nexus of the actions of politicians, institutions, scientists and the actions of citizens. The chapters in this section focus on how citizens and members of the public are engaged as responsible members of society in discourses of ‘climate change’, ‘green driving’, ‘welfare’ and



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

‘transparency’. The chapters focus on the ways in which one becomes responsibilised discursively, as well as the complex responses – e.g. inclusion, accommodation or resistance – of individuals and groups to attempts by others to conduct their conduct in specific settings.44 In Chapter 2, Lassen and Horsbøl open up the debate concerning the ways in which institutions, groups or individuals shape their own conduct or the conduct of others in public discourse (see Section 5.2). In their ethnography of the implementation (or ‘translation’) of a participatory process in a local climate mitigation project in a town in Denmark, they collected video recordings of six meetings between municipality representatives and citizen ‘activists’, as well as two interviews with municipality representatives on their own. Using critical discourse analysis and genre analysis, Lassen and Horsbøl analyse both the technologies of government and the continuous co-construction and (de)stabilisation of citizen identities as ‘participatory subjects’ during the meetings. This means they can investigate the fluctuating processes and practices of subjectification and subjectivation that are indicative of the shift to governmentality in advanced liberal societies. In this way, they are concerned with the tensions between processes that are seemingly ‘top-down’ – e.g. officials tendentiously calling on citizens to be ‘activists’ – and practices that are ‘bottom-up’ – e.g. individuals shaping the conduct of others through their participation and involvement. It is important to note, however, that these tensions are not borne out of ideology and domination, but arise from competing perspectives on how best to conduct (and to practise) the freedom of the participating citizens. As with many chapters in this volume, Lassen and Horsbøl trace the conduct of conduct in situated practices, and they point to the reproduction and contestation of discourses of sustainability and climate change manifested in the actual practices of such ‘public engagement initiatives’ that attempt to shape the conduct of others within a space of freedom. In Chapter  3, similarly to Lassen and Horsbøl (and Solberg), Lindegaard investigates how her participants skilfully engage with attempts to govern their conduct as citizens within a public discourse. However, Lindegaard focuses specifically on the participants’ resistance to being governed in a particular manner with regard to ‘green driving’ as an ethical concern. She collected video recordings of focus group meetings in a small town concerning a climate change mitigation 44. We could compare this with the notion of ‘proto-governmentality’, which van Krieken (1996) defines as “the alignment and coordination of the initiatives, projects and strategies of individuals and groups with those of a complex constellation of administrative and economic organisations” from the perspective of the governed. This term is also suggestive of the preliminary forms that emerge in the situated attempts and trials to inculcate conduct in governable subjects.

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campaign at the local municipal level (in a different region of Denmark to Lassen and Horsbøl’s study), which targeted, among other things, citizens’ transportation conduct. By examining the interactional practices and categorial work of the participants and tracking the rationalities by which participants order the world and respond in the focus group, Lindegaard investigates the negotiated accomplishment of doing being proper governable subjects at the nexus of governmental rationalities and practices of subjectivation (see Sections 5.4 and 5.5). While she documents how they are doing being governable subjects in terms of their negotiation of knowledge, rights and obligations, she does not see the conduct in her data as an example of ‘counter-conduct’ nor of ‘proto-governmentalisation’ (at least not of the sort suggested in van Krieken 1996). Nevertheless, she does demonstrate how the mutually constitutive relationship between power and resistance can be accomplished in social interaction at the intersection of the government of others and the government of the self. A key issue in this chapter – as it is in chapters by Bager et al., McIlvenny, and Solberg – is how to explore the commensurability of ethnomethodological conversation analysis and studies of governmentality in actual empirical analysis. In Chapter  4, Solberg explores the interrelationship of power and resistance in encounters between those who govern and those who are governed (see Section 5.3), especially when what might be called ‘resistance’ is not so overt and/ or political (as it is in Lassen and Horsbøl’s and Lindegaard’s data). Indeed, one of the key issues she deals with in her chapter is how to address the relationship of subtle forms of antagonism to subtle forms of governmentality in what is seemingly apolitical social interaction. Solberg’s data is collected from ‘work activation’ encounters with citizens figured as unemployed clients engaged in vocational rehabilitation in the Norwegian public welfare system. She argues that previous analyses of ‘passive resistance’ in institutional talk – such as minimal responses and silences – have tended to regard resistance as unilateral and unfaceted. Her analysis of the intersubjective character of governmental practices in six excerpts from her corpus reveals, instead, a more responsive and dynamic orientation from counsellors attempting to conduct the conduct of their clients, an orientation which might be characterised as displaying a more caring attitude that co-­constitutes the client’s agency while avoiding governing too much. Solberg’s findings help us to see alternative agencies and governmental strategies at work that more disciplinary accounts of the hegemony of neoliberal governmental rationalities may be blind to. Rather than focus on the more usual problematisation of how governments conduct those they govern, Hong and Allard-Huver (in Chapter 5) ask in a symmetrical fashion how the conduct of governments can be conducted, and thus how governmental rationalities can be contested in a different way. In a novel



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

twist, they ask if government is itself made the subject of governmentality in a discourse of transparency, then can governments initiate a ‘counter-conduct’ to think government otherwise? To explore this further, they have collected an archive of scientific articles, press releases, mass media articles, interviews, blogs and websites in French and English concerning the ‘Séralini Affair’ that erupted in France in 2012. Thus, they are able to analyse the transparency discourse used by major stakeholders in a very public scientific controversy about GMO research. With some indirect overlap with the methods of CDA, they use a variant of French discourse analysis to analyse formule – such as ‘independent’ or ‘accessibility’ – which are polysemic syntagms which actors use to deploy a specific field of relationships and values upon a debate, and which circulate across different domains of discourse. Similarly to Bager et al., Hong and Allard-Huver draw upon the Foucauldian notion of dispositif (apparatus). A dispositif is a heterogeneous network of logistics, discourses and subject positions that demarcate ‘zones of intelligible contestation’ in politics (Foucault 1980b). An apparatus of governmentality is a network of discourse, tactics, institutional processes and local subjectivities which articulates what kinds of actions and statements are admissible and tactically profitable for the actors involved. However, Hong and Allard-Huver maintain a critical stance on both the transparency dispositif and the accompanying celebratory rhetoric of citizen engagement. Their analysis entails that we challenge the transparency discourse itself and its assumptions in order to subject the notion of government to criticism (see Section 5.1). Part II focuses on the prefiguring and staging of governmentality in work sites, leadership forums, websites and protest events. By prefiguration, we mean the circulation and performance of specific discursive rationalities, programmes, routines, etc. in order to make subjects aware of how their conduct is being or needs to be conducted. The aim of such circulations may be to transform organisational or management practices in workplaces, to diagnose and treat the so-called pathological conduct of transnational subjects, or to reimagine another form of governmentality. In Chapter 6, Rasmussen analyses a small corpus of workplace interactions concerning risk communication. Rather than focus on official, archival texts, traditionally used in a Foucauldian genealogy, he explores how a discourse analysis of organisational talk (not interviews) in team meetings in an industrial workplace can elucidate how neoliberal forms of governance are implemented in practice; for example, how employees are discursively responsibilised within a discourse of risk communication and safety at work. Moreover, Rasmussen refocuses on the employees who are participants in organisational meetings, not the managers. He argues that it is not just the employees’ own responsibility for health problems that is administered, but that there are increasing governmental demands on communication itself. After conducting a partial ethnography of the workplace, he

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analyses how subject positions are created and negotiated with regard to a liability for risk communication in social interaction in five excerpts from safety meetings in a process industry firm in Sweden. To do this, he uses the tools of positioning analysis in discourse studies to focus on the effects that particular discursive actions have for establishing the identities of social actors. He demonstrates some of the ways in which employees negotiate their increasing visibility and governability in the workplace through how they manage their communication in terms of accountability and positioning, both in relation to others and to discourses of responsibility, economy and genuinity. His findings show that neoliberal forms of governmentality are increasingly inculcated in the implementation of discourses of ‘targets’, ‘strategies’, ‘risk’, and ‘commitment’ carried by the responsibilisation entailed in particular forms of communication. In Chapter 7, Bager et al. combine dialogue analysis with membership categorisation analysis (see also chapters by Lindegaard, McIlvenny and Zhukova Klausen) in a novel approach to analyse an attempt in a leadership development forum to mediate another way of governing management, i.e. an alternative to the mainstream ways of framing and staging dialogue in leadership education. We might see this as an attempt by the workshop leaders to conduct the conduct of managers, who themselves are to conduct the conduct of their employees. Thus, we can compare Bager et al.’s emphasis on topicalising how management itself is made the object of governmentality with Hong and Allard-Huver’s focus on how government itself is to be governed. Bager et al. have collected video recordings from a leadership development forum which brought together a group of interdisciplinary researchers/students and leaders from both governmental and private organisations. By combining dialogism and membership categorisation analysis, they explore in their close analysis of embodied conduct in an episode in the forum how governmentality can be understood as the complex network of dispositifs (apparatus) that seek to govern and control what can be said and done in situations (see Section 5.6). They conclude that despite the best intentions of the forum, in effect it was constrained (by centripetal forces) and a mainstream approach to management as governmentality was reproduced through traditional (non-plurivocal) pedagogical modes of interaction and category work. With this finding, they provide further support for Hong & Allard-Huver’s conclusion about the unintended and unforeseen consequences for conduct of seemingly progressive communicative dispositifs, such as dialogue and transparency. In Chapter 8, Zhukova Klausen takes up the challenge set by Hodges (1998, 2002, 2003a, 2003b) to analyse the practical ethicalisation of the subject by drawing on Foucault’s work on the government of the self, but she does so while foregrounding the role of the ‘psy’ disciplines (e.g. psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis) in governing the ‘transnational’ soul (Rose 1989, 1996b). Indeed,



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

critical, social and historical approaches to the so-called ‘psy’ disciplines are in a dialectic relationship with studies of governmentality. Rose and others have been concerned with the formation of the scientific history of these disciplines along the lines of normality and pathology, ordered and disordered behaviour, and adequate and distorted perception. They maintain that it is these authoritative divisions between “the sayable and the unsayable, the thinkable and the unthinkable” (Rose 1988: 180), enabled by the acts of inclusion and exclusion, which form the shared strategic ground between ‘psy’ practices and the technologies of governance. Given that her interest is in transnational governmentality, then Zhukova Klausen critically explores how the conduct of transnational subjects is increasingly targetted by the ‘psy’ disciplines as part of the ethicalisation of transnational living in the mode of pastoral care (see Section 5.5). Foucault (1983b: 334) argues that “the state can be seen as a modern matrix of individualisation, or a new form of pastoral power.” This new form of individualisation took on the form of a series of powers – for example, “those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers” (335). Zhukova Klausen argues that there are clear signs that transnational living and conduct is to be administered in the same fashion. Similarly to Hong and Allard-Huver, she analyses a diverse range of materials (see Section 5.6), including the websites of national and para-national institutions and professional associations, and transcripts of interaction on computer-mediated transnational spaces, in Russian, Spanish and English. Using a combination of mediated discourse analysis, virtual ethnography and membership categorisation analysis, she demonstrates that transnational living is being problematised in particular ways by ‘psy’ practices and discourses in order to administer it. This shows the dangers of the increasing mobilisation of governmental technologies to conduct the conduct of those who transgress the traditional jurisdiction of the governmental state. In Chapter 9, McIlvenny explores how Foucault’s suggestive understanding of counter-conduct from the 1978 lectures can be applied to a theatrical political protest that creatively operates in and between the local and the international. He analyses transcripts of video recordings of two occasions on which a peace activist group perform ‘mock’ inspections for weapons of mass destruction in American retail businesses in Denmark. By transforming the service encounter into an inspection through a variety of interactional, embodied and multimodal practices, the group accomplish a relay between the governmental rationalities of the inspection and the politicisation of the space of consumption. An analytics of the protest uncovers how fields of visibility, forms of knowledge, technologies and apparatuses, and subjectivities and identities were negotiated and accomplished collaboratively by the protestors and by the shop assistants and customers they encountered. In common with Bager et al., Lindegaard, and Solberg, McIlvenny draws upon the rich empirical analytical tradition of ethnomethodological conversation analysis,

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especially the analysis of sequential organisation and category work. He argues that conversation analysis can help us document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised, while membership categorisation analysis can uncover the categorial work by which subjectivation is morally accomplished in social interaction (see Section 5.4). The significance and meaning of the protest event depends upon how the participants skilfully stitch together disparate local practices, subjects, agencies and materialities in order to scale up the apparently routine practices of citizens inspecting a site of consumption on behalf of a global public to the scene of international politics and the UN inspection regime that was abused by the US government to justify war. In this way, they are performing a counter-conduct in a playful fashion, to prefiguratively construct a temporary, alternative discursive and interactional space of governmentality, in which new objects and interactional spaces of governance are accomplished and alternative governors do the governing (see Section 5.3). Part III collects those chapters that critically analyse contemporary attempts to govern strategically at the level of policy, for example, through discourses of planning, security and population. In Chapter 10, Wallace re-examines the discourses of strategic and investment planning and the role of texts and intertextuality in the ‘will to govern’ in the context of tertiary education planning. His data archive includes strategic tertiary education sector planning documents and investment plans produced by the Ministry of Education and its agents, and by a university, in New Zealand. For Wallace, governmental efforts and effects are evident from an analysis of textual production in the bureaucratic domain. Using intertextual analysis, he shows us how neoliberal practices of governmentality (managerialism) are ‘incorporated’ discursively as an organisational practice. He explores manifest (or actual) and constitutive intertextuality – terms familiar from critical discourse analysis – but also he refocuses our attention on anticipatory forms of manifest intertextuality, which are under-explored by Fairclough and others in discourse studies. For example, it is characteristic of strategic planning documents to allude to or call for future possible texts (and addressees). Surprisingly, Wallace finds that the bureaucracy of strategic planning actually enhances a liberal rationality of rule and the ability to govern at a distance, even though liberal governmentality encourages minimal government (see Section 5.4). This is indicative of the paradox of ‘regulated autonomy’ that characterises neoliberal governmentality. These are important findings that reveal the displaced and distributed discursive labour that goes into maintaining the illusion of the market efficiency of neoliberalism, much as Latour (1993) contends is true for modernity. In Chapter 11, Colombo and Quassoli focus on the analytical insights that critical discourse analysis and the discourse historical approach can give in a case



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

study of urban (in)security discourses in Italy. They argue that the discourse historical approach offers a set of analytical tools with which to investigate empirically – for example, by examining phenomena such as lexical choices, referential and predicational strategies, argumentative strategies, foregrounding and backgrounding strategies – how new rationalities (epistemes) and technes of governance have emerged in a variety of domains and how apparatuses of governmentality are at work at the level of everyday discourses and practices within institutions of governance (see Section 5.4). They draw upon a collection of policy documents, official statistics and research reports on urban policy in Milan in the mid-2000s just as a new framework for urban security policy emerged. They supplement this archive with semi-structured interviews with police officers charged with implementing the new forms of policing the conduct of citizens in the urban areas affected by the policy. By innovatively comparing these two forms of data, Colombo and Quassoli can move into the middle ground between policy and citizen conduct, i.e. the messy terrain on which local actors have to take on and implement policy in order to perform and negotiate its effects. In Chapter 12, Messerschmidt introduces a new corpus-based analytical technique which harnesses a type of quantitative coding and depth-structure analysis to explore the rationalities embedded in the media about changes in population and the forms in which an individual is constituted as a subject of a discourse of truth concerning demography. Messerschmidt draws on Foucauldian concepts such as veridiction and ‘alethurgy’ to explore orders of truth production. The term ‘alethurgy’ comes from Foucault’s last lectures from 1984.45 Foucault (2011: 3) writes that “rather than analysing the forms by which a discourse is recognised as true, this would involve analysing the form in which, in his act of telling the truth, the individual constitutes himself and is constituted by others as a subject of a discourse of truth, the form in which he presents himself to himself and to others as someone who tells the truth, the form of the subject telling the truth. In contrast with the study of epistemological structures, the analysis of this domain could be called the study of ‘alethurgic’ forms…. Etymologically, alethurgy would be the production of truth, the act by which truth is manifested.” In order to study the shifts in German demography discourses, Messerschmidt’s corpus consists of a very large number of German newspaper and magazine articles over a relatively long time period in recent history. By means of an analysis of textual, numerical (statistics) and graphical (graphs) forms in his archive, he challenges the hegemony of discourses of demographic change and the role of the media (and multimodal technologies) in attempts to calculate and administer the population (biopower). 45. The term is also written as aletourgia (Gordon 2013).

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7. Conclusion This edited collection contains chapters that use a broad array of theories and methods in discourse studies, not only critical analyses of texts in the tradition of critical discourse analysis and the discourse-historical approach, but also more inductively empirical analyses of interactional and categorial practices, such as ethnomethodological conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Each chapter explores a particular phenomenon or cluster of features that are assembled in particular governmental texts and/or practices. There are definite affinities and opportunities for new relays between theory and practice.46 For instance, given that the broader meaning of government in Foucault’s work (after 1979) encompasses not only legitimately constituted forms of political and economic subjection, but any mode of action, more or less considered and calculated, that constitutively structures the field of possible action of oneself and others, then there is an overlapping of interests of studies of governmentality with studies of discourse-as-mediated-action and talk-in-interaction. Indeed, as chapters in this volume have demonstrated, alliances can be made between the empirical elaboration of specific concepts, phenomena and/or practices in studies of governmentality and a particular methodology in discourse studies; for example, between rationality and the analysis of categorisation, between alethurgy and corpus analysis, between dispositif and dialogism, between counter-conduct and the analysis of talk-in-interaction, between ethicalisation and multimodal analysis, or between strategy and the analysis of anticipatory intertextuality. For much of this introductory chapter we have been arguing for the relevance of studies of governmentality to the concerns of discourse studies. Clearly, governmentality can serve as a useful theoretical framework for interpreting the findings that result from a discourse analysis of texts within discourse studies. However, we also feel that this volume, with its methodological and analytical focus on discourse, should be relevant to the study of governmentality today. Of course, some Foucauldian inspired social and political theory already includes a positive role for language (Rose 1999b), but we see a window of opportunity for more interesting relationships to be developed. A first point to make is that ‘discourse’ is not 46. In a way this book brings to the fore the relation between theory and the analysis of practice. Foucault and Deleuze (1977) discuss in a novel way the relays between theory and practice. Deleuze notes that “from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall” (206).



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

a placeholder that automatically does explanatory work. All too often, one sees the glib use of ‘discourse’ in a title or introduction to a political or social science publication, with little or no substantiation or evidence in what follows for the categorisation of the discourse that is asserted. A classic example today would be the hegemonic ‘discourse of neoliberalism’ that pervades the literature in political science. Instead, as the chapters in this collection show, much more detailed empirical analytical work can document which discourses and practices are at work, in what assemblages, working in often counter-intuitive ways that can only be revealed by careful analysis. This is true both at the level of policy and at the interface of the government of others and of the self. A second and related point is that the approaches discussed and used in the chapters provide a much needed toolkit for empirical analysis that can supplement the common analytic techniques in studies of governmentality. For example, critical discourse analysis and its variants give an analyst ways to pin point how in practice a text acts at a distance on governable subjects. With a nod to Deleuze as well as Foucault, Fairclough (1995: 103) does acknowledge that discourse is a ‘force’ in a complex assemblage of diverse forces – laws, professions, routines, norms. In fact, he suggests that discourse is “one such ‘force’ which becomes operative within specific ‘assemblages’ with other forces.” Conversation analysis can be seen as an analytical tool to document a sequential organisation that is indicative of the negotiation of a governmental action or rationality. Additionally, membership categorisation analysis is an analytical tool to document how members use categories to accomplish identities, roles and relationships that are to be governable. In examining intersecting governmentalities, discourse studies can provide tools to show empirically and in detail how governmental rationalities, procedures, routines, practices, etc. are assembled and stitched together. It is noteworthy that many chapters do not stick with one modality or one specific component of the assemblage. Rose (1999b) emphasises the proliferation and heterogeneity of assemblages which arise out of a complex field of contestation. One could say that a key strength of studies of governmentality is that they manifest a will to track the practical rationalities of the assemblages of procedures, schemes, programmes, etc. as they emerge and develop in advanced liberal societies in response to particular ‘problems’. An attention to the detail of these material-discursive practices is what interdisciplinary discourse studies can provide. A third point is that we need to reflect on the relationship of a discourse studies approach to the modes of analysis and critique in studies of governmentality, such as genealogy. We have argued in Section 5.1 that rather than a molar genealogical history of the present, many of the chapters in this volume are practising a molecular genealogy, for example by documenting an interactional history of the present that specifies how a particular configuration/assemblage came to be

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contingently negotiated, achieved, maintained and disassembled in social interaction. A fourth and related point is that many chapters attempt to go beyond the micro-macro debate that has ossified in many disciplines. Latour and ANT are popular in this regard, especially in practice-based studies. Countering any dichotomised conceptualisations of scales of action and power, studies of governmentality tend to approach political governance as a phenomenon that is constantly accomplished and negotiated in different networks of a human, material, social and semiotic character (Kendall 2004). Thus, rather than focusing on the who and the loci of government, a governmentality perspective focuses on the hows of the multifarious ways in which an activity or art that can be called governance is made thinkable and practicable (e.g. Dean 2010; Rose 1999b). Rose (1999b: 5) argues that “to begin an investigation of power relations at this molecular level, however, is not to counterpose the micro to the macro. This binary opposition seems natural and obvious. But it should be treated with some suspicion. If there are differences between the government of large spaces and processes and the government of small spaces and processes, these are not ontological but technological.” Hence, studies in governmentality are most often inspired by Latour’s insight that since common pairs like ‘micro’ versus ‘macro’ and ‘local’ versus ‘global’ do not reflect ontologically different phenomena, but merely phenomena dispersed into more or less reliable and effective ‘chains of command’, such a priori dichotomies should be dissolved (Rose 1999b: 4). However, it is our view that studies of governmentality have so far lacked methods fully reflecting this insight, and this book distinguishes itself by offering such methods. By connecting up studies of governmentality and a variety of approaches to discourse studies, the chapters of this book more or less explicitly attempt to rethink the persistent micro-macro dichotomy and propose different pathways to explore the connections between, on the one hand, longer and more efficient networks, which are often conceptualised with terms such as ‘macro’ or ‘the global’ and, on the other hand, the shorter and seemingly less efficient networks, often conceptualised with terms such as ‘micro’ or ‘the local’. A fifth and last point is that some of the chapters demonstrate how interdisciplinary discourse studies can contribute to rethinking policy formation and implementation with what are often counter-intuitive findings, for example with respect to contemporary attempts to govern citizens and populations strategically at the level of policy through discourses of security, planning and demography. More generally, some chapters can contribute to a better understanding of alternative and prefigurative governmentalities in praxis, thus informing ways of thinking of how not to be governed in quite that way, by those people, and on those occasions. We can learn about the circulation and staging of specific discursive rationalities, programmes, routines, etc. in order to make subjects aware of how their conduct is being or needs to be conducted, for example within a transparency dispositif. In



Chapter 1.  New perspectives on discourse and governmentality

this way we can help to critically resist, for example, the diagnosis and treatment of the so-called abnormal conduct of transnational subjects or the progressive transformation of organisational practices, or to prefigure, for example, the reimagining of another form of governmentality.

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Lemke, Thomas. 2011a. “Beyond Foucault: From Biopolitics to the Government of Life.” In Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. by Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke, 165–184. Abingdon: Routledge. Lemke, Thomas. 2011b. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Lemke, Thomas. 2012. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. London: Pluto Press. Lindegaard, Laura Bang, 2012. Automobility at the Intersection of Discourse and Governmentality: A Study of the Accomplishment of Rationalities that Co-constitute Car-Dependent Mobility in the Face of Climate Change. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Culture and Global Studies: Aalborg University. Luterbacher, Urs, and Detlef F. Sprinz (eds). 2001. International Relations and Global Climate Change. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Lynch, Michael. 1993. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Michael. 1997. “Theorizing Practice.” Human Studies 20 (3): 335–344. doi:  10.1023/A:1005336830104

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Rasmussen, Joel. 2013. “Governing the Workplace or the Worker? Evolving Dilemmas in Chemical Professionals’ Discourse on Occupational Health and Safety.” Discourse & Communication 7 (1): 75–94. doi: 10.1177/1750481312466473 Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2): 243–263. doi: 10.1177/13684310222225432 Reckwitz, Andreas. 2009. “Practice Theory.” In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. by George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell. Rice, Jennifer L. 2010. “Climate, Carbon, and Territory: Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Seattle, Washington.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (4): 929–937. doi:  10.1080/00045608.2010.502434

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part i

Intersecting governmentalities in public discourse

chapter 2

Governing citizen engagement A discourse studies perspective Inger Lassen and Anders Horsbøl Aalborg University, Denmark

This chapter sets out to explore tensions between bottom-up and top-down processes from a governmentality perspective. Using a discourse studies approach, we investigate how forms of public participation in a local climate mitigation project can be viewed as an instance of governmentality in the sense of how the conduct of groups and individuals is influenced by other forces and how groups and individuals influence the conduct of others through participation and involvement. This implies that governmentality is analysed as emerging in concrete, situated practices. Simultaneously, we investigate how a governmentality approach may enrich our understanding of public participation, dialogue and involvement, especially on the complex issue of sustainability and climate change mitigation.

1. Introduction Moves towards public participation and citizen involvement point on the one hand towards a widening of democracy by engaging actors from civil society. On the other hand, these moves can be said to represent new and possibly more efficient ways of governing citizens by means of letting them exercise their own freedom, in the sense of guiding the citizens to act within a space of freedom (Rose 1999). Following this line of thought, this chapter investigates how forms of public participation and involvement in a local climate mitigation project can be viewed as an instance of governmentality in the sense of “groups or individuals shaping their own conduct or the conduct of others” (Walters 2012: 11). We identify several governmentality features, but also shortcomings, in the transformation of a municipality driven project into public engagement initiatives. In general, we do not find a conflict between an authority trying to dominate and a group of citizens asking for more freedom, but rather a conflict between two views of how to properly conduct the freedom of the participating citizens. The study is inspired by Walters doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.02las © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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(2012: 5), who, quoting Rancière (1999), raises a critique against governmentality studies for paying too little attention to “events, acts and practices that actualize disagreement between groups, and bring into being, however momentarily, a situation of conflict and dissensus”. This chapter thus sets out to explore the nature of such events, acts and practices that unfold in the field of tension between bottomup and top-down processes. The literature on participation, citizenship and discourse has mainly addressed issues of governance understood as “a relationship between any kind of governmental institution and other social actors communicating with these institutions and with each other, i.e. citizens” (Bora and Hausendorf 2006: 28). Contributions to this field of study have focused on biotechnology issues, including par excellence the public debate over genetically modified crops. For example, Iványi et al. (2006) investigate the communicative achievement of citizenship in a local public meeting. In their study of data from the biotechnology industry, Fairclough, Pardoe and Szerszynski (2006) move away from preconceptions about what citizenship is to how citizenship is done by putting the emphasis on citizenship as “a communicative achievement” (118). Related research can also be found in an anthology by Rask, Worthinton and Lammi (2012) entitled Citizen Participation in Global, Environmental Governance, in which contributors examine global governance and international deliberation in relations to environmental issues. However, while these studies focus on governance by governmental institutions and address biotechnology and environmental issues in general, the focus of this chapter is on climate change issues and how citizens negotiate relations among themselves and with other social actors, rather than with forms of institutionalized governance of citizens. In the ongoing debate about climate change, bottom-up processes and public engagement are given increasing prominence as a way of encouraging citizens to participate in climate change mitigation efforts. In practice, however, as several studies document (for instance, Felt and Fochler 2010; Irwin 2006; Kurath and Gisler 2009; Phillips 2011), top-down approaches concerned with educating and convincing the public are still very much alive, and initiatives of public engagement often seem to be characterized by a tension between top-down and bottom-up strategies. However, although citizen participation would seem to be a truly democratic approach that allows citizens access to decision-making processes, there has been mounting critique of the so-called ‘participatory turn’ (Horsbøl and Lassen 2012: 168). For one thing, the concept of public participation has been seen as a gimmick to restore public trust in science (Wynne 2006), and secondly there seems to have been a lack of transparency as to processes inherent in citizen participation and involvement, processes often imbued with tensions and contradictions (Delgado, Kjølberg and Wickson 2011; Dietz and Stern 2008; Felt and Fochler 2010; Horsbøl and Lassen 2012; Irwin 2006; Phillips 2011). Thus, there is a need to explore how such tensions



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and contradictions are being articulated and “how participants ‘inhabit and appropriate’ discursive spaces offered to them” (Felt and Fochler 2010: 220). In the present chapter, we explore these tensions theoretically and methodologically from the perspective of governmentality studies. Thus, we do not ask whether citizen participation is truly democratic, but how it can be understood as an instance of a more indirect form of governing citizens. Furthermore, we discuss to what extent this governing can be said to be successful. We thereby investigate the possible interconnectedness of governmentality, public engagement and tensions between bottom-up and top-down processes. The use of an empirical case study is based on the view that whereas the argument that public participation represents an instance of governmentality can be easily made, there is a need to explore how this is realized in concrete, situated practices. This chapter aims to partly fill this gap. The attempt to explore the interconnections between public participation and governmentality seem of particular relevance to climate change mitigation and environmental sustainability efforts, where many of the more promising initiatives take place at a local, as opposed to a national scale, in the form of initiatives by towns, communities and regions where the potential for engaging the public seems strong. The discussion of public engagement and governmentality pursued in this chapter is situated in the local practices of a transition town illustrated here through the energy town project of Frederikshavn. The initial goal of the energy town project was to make the municipality of Frederikshavn entirely reliant on renewable energy sources before the end of 2015, a goal that has recently been postponed to year 2030 (Møller 2013). Using the energy town project as a window of opportunity for looking at aspects of governmentality, we have focused attention on how goals, processes and practices are construed by key actors in the project. These key actors include members of the general public, represented by citizens who have been invited to commit themselves as pro-active change agents in the transition process towards sustainable energy reliability, but key actors also include successive directors of the Energy Town Secretariat who – in addition to being citizens – primarily represent the official level of the energy town project. By key actors we understand actors who position themselves as central to moving the process forward. A description of Frederikshavn and its status as an energy transition town is provided on a website maintained by the energy town secretariat (EnergyCity. dk). Briefly summarized, Frederikshavn is located on the East coast of Jutland. The town has approx. 25,000 inhabitants, who receive electricity and heating energy through district heating from the local utility. The utility distributes energy from two sources, incineration and natural gas obtained from the North Sea. Membership of the local district heating system is obligatory for citizens in Frederikshavn, which may be assumed to lower their interest in investing in alternative sustainable solutions. However, a number of initiatives are being taken by

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the energy town project in collaboration with the local business community, university and the utility to accelerate the transition process. These include investing in renewable energy solutions in the local community, such as solar power plants, geo-thermal heating, heat-pumps, biogas plants, low-energy houses, wind power and electric cars. The citizens in Frederikshavn are in various ways encouraged to engage in this transition process. The decision to try to reach the goal of relying on renewable energy within a relatively short span of time was taken by the City Council in 2007, and in 2008 the organizational structure was implemented with a secretariat, a steering board and five working groups. The idea of initiating the project actually dates back to 2006 when participants in a so-called Energy Camp discussed how to make a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Because of its windy and sunny location on the coast, Frederikshavn was chosen as a test bed for experimenting with solar energy and wind power, and so the energy town Frederikshavn was a natural continuation of the initiative taken in 2006. Moreover, partly as a result of the closing down of two shipyards in the 1980s, Frederikshavn is today commonly referred to as a marginalized community with scarce job opportunities, and the municipality therefore hopes to combine the aims of building a sustainable environment with job creation through ‘green’ growth. This is evident from promotional material in which Frederikshavn municipality stresses the importance of making Frederikshavn attractive to present and future citizens, and for achieving this goal, citizen participation is seen as paramount (Lassen et al. 2011: 166). For example, the introductory pamphlet says: “If we are clever enough to convince the citizens about the perspectives in this magnificent project for sustainable prosperity, the politicians on all levels will support it too and the investors will see the business possibilities. […] this is why the involvement of the citizens is so important” (Energibyen Frederikshavn). 2. Theoretical reflections We address the concerns raised above from the perspectives of climate change and governmentality. We do this by introducing a number of key concepts in studies of governmentality as they are used by scholars engaged in climate change issues and discourses pertaining to this field of enquiry. In recent years there has been a surge in studies looking at climate change issues (Paterson and Stripple 2010; Stripple and Bulkeley 2013), and these studies are increasingly shifting the focus from what the state can do to what the individual can do to mitigate the effects of climate change. Simultaneous with this development, there has been a proliferation of discourses focusing on the responsibility of individuals in achieving



Chapter 2.  Governing citizen engagement

climate change mitigation goals. In current debates over climate change issues, a recurrent theme thus focuses on the relationship between ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘collective responsibility’, a theme that invites questions as to how we should “understand the complicated relationship between individual practice and identity […] and the broad collective understanding of the need to respond to climate change” (Paterson and Stripple 2010: 342). Addressing this issue from the perspective of governance practices relating to carbon emission, Paterson and Stripple (2010) argue that there seems to be a shift from ‘collective responsibility’ to ‘individual responsibility’ when we consider ‘the conduct of carbon conduct’. The authors refer to this as carbon governmentality that operates to “shape individual subjects through exhorting them to manage their climate-related practices themselves” (359). Individuals are thus shaped as subjects that ‘exercise their freedoms’ (Rose 1999) through channels of ‘calculative practices’ and they are at the same time articulated as agents serving the common public goal of mitigating climate change (Paterson and Stripple 2010: 359), which in the authors’ view is the essence of how power operates in neoliberalism. The concept of neoliberalism as we understand it here may be subsumed in what Walters (2012: 30) refers to as liberal governmentality, construed as “a broad field of power relations, one that encompasses the many ways in which individuals and groups in their diverse interactions will engage in more or less rationally reflected, calculated attempts to shape one another’s conduct”. The ideas suggested in Paterson and Stripple (2010) fall within this line of thought. They suggest that “power operates through individual practice, not over and against it” (344), and thus they see power not as being imposed upon citizens by a state or international treaties that regulate the behaviour of individuals, but as operating through subjects by shaping behaviour, rationalities, identities and habitual behaviour (Paterson and Stripple 2010: 359). This sort of power relationship is closely related to what Rose (1999) has referred to as subjectification. Following on from these ideas, and inspired by Foucault (2007), we understand governmentality as a specific form of governance that can be realized in many forms and historical contexts, but which is not to be characterized by addressing either “situations of absolute domination” or “strategic games” between couples, families or communities (Walters 2012: 11). Instead, governmentality “addresses a zone between these two poles of ‘strategic relations’ and ‘states of domination’” (Walters 2012: 11). Governmentality is arguably a central form of governance in modern societies, although not limited to these, where it is effective in a number of societal fields such as health, education, economy, religion and politics. However, governmentality takes on many concrete forms and the point of a governmentality study, in our view, is not to subsume these forms under the label of governmentality, but to improve our understanding of the specific form of

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‘conduct of the conduct’ at stake. In line with Walters (2012), we see the study of governmentality not as a full-fledged theory, but rather as a flexible methodology, a set of analytical tools that can be further developed and put to work differently in different contexts, not unlike a “software” that is open to continuous upgrading and development (Walters 2012: 45). It seems obvious to apply the notion of governmentality to environmental politics, including issues of sustainability and efforts to mitigate climate change. In order to reduce carbon emission in modern (liberal) societies, purely legislative or technological efforts do not suffice. In addition, it is crucial to involve both wider publics and citizens in attempts to conduct their carbon conduct (Paterson and Stripple 2010). However, so far these attempts at public engagement have not proven successful. One obvious challenge seems to be that taking steps towards mitigating climate change implies acting for the sake of people who are often remote both in terms of place (on the other side of the globe) and time (future generations). While the establishment of a “global citizenship” (Dobson 2003), guided by a self-disciplinary ethos of global responsibility might be a long term goal, governmentality efforts at a regional or local level may prove more effective because of the shorter distance from local policy makers to citizens. Examples of such local initiatives can be found in the international ‘Transition Town’ movement, which began as a civil society initiative in Britain (Hopkins 2011), and the ‘Energy Towns’ in Denmark, where local municipalities have been a driving force (Lassen et al. 2011), one of which will be the focus of the present article. Here, the community level may work as a mediator between the global issues and the actions of the individual citizens, by means of the public engagements efforts made by the municipality. 3. Methodology and data In order to pave the way for an empirical analysis of governmentality relating to sustainability conduct in a local community, we will employ a number of key notions developed by Rose (1999). First, we will regard the public engagement efforts by the municipality as an attempt of what Rose (1999) has referred to as translation, a term borrowed from Actor-Network-Theory (see, for instance, Callon 1986; see also Latour 2005). Translation indicates that a (government or municipal) plan or policy is not simply realized, transferred or executed locally, but that “alignments are forged between the objectives of authorities wishing to govern and the personal projects of those organisations, groups and individuals who are the subjects of government” (Rose 1999: 48). Whether emanating from authorities or organizations, governmentality takes place through these alignments – or it fails by not establishing them. In a similar vein Latour defines translation as “neither



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one actor among many nor a force behind all the actors transported through some of them but a connection that transports, so to speak, transformations” (Latour 2005: 108). In this sense translation “induces two mediators into coexisting”, and thus, following Latour (2005), Walters (2012: 77), and Rose (1999: 52), we understand translation as a transformational movement between technologies of government (techne/assemblages) and subjectified actors. It is worth noticing that the notion of translation is similar to notions like ‘recontextualization’ developed within discourse studies (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Linell and Sarangi 1998). A translation will typically also involve a ‘resemiotization’, in the sense of discourse being transformed from one mode to another, for instance from spoken discourse to writing, visuals or material objects (Iedema 2001). These notions from discourse studies may provide an orientation for an empirical analysis of a translation, as they imply a focus on the rich and ‘detailed’ semiotic processes that constitute a translation process. Secondly, we will investigate and map out the technologies of government present in the translation attempt. Rose defines technologies of government as those technologies imbued with aspirations for the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects and averting certain undesired events. […] A technology of government, then, is an assemblage of forms of practical knowledge, with modes of perception, practices of calculation, vocabularies, types of authority, forms of judgement, architectural forms, human capacities, nonhuman objects and devices, inscription techniques and so forth, traversed and transected by aspirations to achieve certain outcomes in terms of the conduct of the governed (which also requires certain forms of conduct on the part of those who would govern). (Rose 1999: 52)

The quote represents technologies of government in a diverse and encompassing way, and it is an open question how widely and with which concrete elements a technology of government is established. To operationalize the concept empirically, we draw on the notions of discourse, genre and genre networks, developed in discourse studies (Bhatia 2004, 2008; Fairclough 2003; Freadman 2002). We understand a discourse as “a cluster of context-dependent semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of action”, a cluster which is “linked to argumentation about validity claims such as truth and normative validity involving several social actors who have different points of view” (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 89). By rephrasing technologies of government in terms of discourse and genre (networks), we aim to focus the analytical attention on the semiotic practices that are ‘networked’ as well as on the concepts, categorizations and validity claims that are (re)produced in these practices. This operationalization is not exhaustive, but delimits the scope of the term ‘technologies of government’ in order to make it analytically applicable.

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Thirdly, we will view the public engagement process as a series of negotiations, and possibly struggles, over subjectifications. That is, we aim to identify “the ways in which human beings are individuated and addressed within the various practices that would govern them, the relations to themselves that they have taken up within the variety of practices within which they have come to govern themselves” (Rose 1999: 43). Rose’s understanding of subjectification seems to take up a post-structuralist position where subjectification relates to both how citizens are addressed, i.e. which subject positions are made available to them, and how these positions are ‘inculcated’ (Fairclough 2003), that is, how they are taken up, resisted or modified by the citizens. In such regard, social agents are socially constrained, but at the same time not entirely socially determined (22). Following on from this, it is fruitful to discern subjectification from subjectivation. Whereas subjectification concerns the ways “others are governed and objectified into subjects through processes of power/ knowledge”, subjectivation concerns “the ways that individuals govern and fashion themselves into subjects on the basis of what they take to be the truth” (Hamann 2009: 39; following Milchman and Rosenberg 2009). In our analysis, we will seek to identify both how citizens may be subjectified, in the sense of being invited to enter given subject positions, and how they subjectivate themselves by inculcating, resisting or reworking these subject positions (see also Bonnafous-Boucher 2009 for a discussion of tensions in subjectivation as a practice of individual freedom).  Empirically, this chapter analyses decision-making processes emerging in dialogic communication among citizens in the municipality of Frederikshavn. Our data spans a period of three years from 2009–2011 and consists of three types of data. These include an invitation letter to citizens to engage in the energy town project, transcribed audio-recordings from six public meetings (January to June 2009), when pro-active citizens met with the energy town Secretariat to discuss how to implement the project and move it forward, and, finally, interviews with the energy town Director in 2009 and with his successor in 2011. The interviews with two successive directors frame the interaction of citizens in the six public meetings. The recorded data consists of approximately ten hours of recorded speech, transcribed by a student assistant and analysed by the researchers. The analysis of the meetings and interviews will centre on language and will not account for features such as intonation or gesture. For that reason, the transcription represents the spoken words and does not cover paraverbal or multimodal aspects. This choice of transcription does not imply that modes other than language are seen as irrelevant. On the other hand, we are convinced that language is crucial when it comes to analysing processes of translation, subjectification and subjectivation. In what follows, we have structured the analysis along topics selected to reflect our analytical focus as outlined in Section 4. This involves topics of centrality for illustrating the process of translation exemplified by the (attempted) translation of



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an initial plan by the energy town secretariat into the planning of activities in the citizen group. While keeping the translation process in focus, we follow a coherent path of analysis, paying particular attention to technologies of government (in this case, genre and genre networks) and struggles/negotiations over subjectifications and subjectivations of the citizens vis-á-vis the secretariat, other citizens and other institutional players. 4. Analysis and discussion To obtain insight into possible rationales for establishing the energy town project, an interview was conducted with the project energy secretariat during the spring of 2009. The director of the secretariat explained that from the outset, the primary goals of the energy town project were to stimulate growth and generate jobs in the municipality. The idea of stimulating growth and employment dates back to a so-called energy camp, which was held in 2006, with the primary objective of discussing how Denmark could generate jobs by manufacturing renewable energy technology such as windmills or solar plants. Frederikshavn was selected as a ‘demonstratorium’ in order to show that energy needs can be fully covered by using renewable energy. The energy town project was thus based on a rationale of growth, which was gradually translated into a rationale of branding, in that the municipality could now be promoted as an attractive place to live because of job opportunities and a clean environment. In the interview, the director of the secretariat stressed that, all along, the main purpose had been to make a transition by replacing fossil fuel with renewable energy in order to “create growth and jobs in our region”. He continued with an afterthought: “That it then results in reducing CO2-emission to zero is fair enough, but the focus is on the actual transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy” (DES 2009). This seems to mark an important distinction between Frederikshavn and other climate cities that mainly focus on CO2-reduction. According to the director, other cities obtain a CO2-reduction by saving energy, whereas Frederikshavn creates growth through an entire transition, thus generating green growth and achieving a CO2-reduction as a side effect. He referred to this as a crucial distinction between Frederikshavn and other energy towns as it offers an important branding potential to the town.1 In the director’s view, branding is essential for attracting businesses and a qualified workforce to Frederikshavn, and more 1. At the time of the interview, three official Energy Towns had been appointed by the Danish Government, and three more towns were about to be appointed. Frederikshavn did not achieve an official appointment.

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specifically he claimed that “the brand or the image we obtain for being frontrunners within this area is important […] This is something everybody understands, including the citizens. This is what makes the project easy to sell. Regardless of political attitudes and attitudes to climate change, then anybody can see that this is a good idea. […] It makes it easier to convince the local population” (DES 2009). The interview thus focused on how citizens could be motivated to engage in the Energy Town project. However, when asked about the processes of initiating action, the director made it clear that it is not possible to plan and implement a transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy unless it is planned from above. On the other hand, he recognized that plans cannot be carried out if citizens are directly opposed to them, and in some situations “the initiative should even come from the citizens”. For instance, the director found that citizens should play an important role in “setting the agenda” in the case of changing people’s energy consumption behaviour (DES 2009). The basic tenets of the interview rest upon the idea of transition. The director of the secretariat voices concern about how to engage the citizens in a necessary transition process in which fossil fuel is gradually replaced by renewable energy. Such a transition invariably requires what Callon (1986) and Latour (2005) have referred to as translation, which in the case of the energy town project would build on an alignment of actors involved in the process, such as politicians, the town council, the energy town secretariat and the general public. These actors would engage in a translation process from one state of energy consumption to another, governing and being governed by assemblages available in each stage of the process. As a second element in the translation process, the director refers to branding as ‘something everybody understands, including the citizens’ and as something that would ‘make it easier to convince the local population’. Branding may here be understood as an assemblage/ technology of governance that assists the translation process. Moreover, the rationale for the energy town project seems intermingled with concerns about communication; the rationale of economic growth and job creation is given emphasis, not least because of the expectation that it will be supported by the vast majority of the citizens in Frederikshavn. Anticipatory considerations about whether the citizens would subjectivate themselves and exercise their freedom to support or not support the energy town project are thus present at an early point of time. Further to a translation process and technologies of government, we are able to identify here elements of what Rose (1999), Hamann (2009) and BonnafousBoucher (2009), following Foucault (1985), have referred to as subjectification, understood as how actors are ‘individuated and addressed within the various practices that would govern them’. In the director’s view, project goals combined with technologies of governance seem to determine the extent to which a process can be democratic and bottom-up. This limits the range of subject positions made



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available to citizens. When it comes to making a decision about the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the director leaves no discursive space to citizens because in his view planning must come from the top; on the other hand, when it comes to translating the transition plans into energy saving schemes, the citizens could be ‘setting the agenda’, indicating that citizens are given the subject position of agents of change. Whether the citizens accept subjectification by taking up the subject position offered them by the director of the secretariat will emerge from further analysis of examples from the citizens’ meetings. 4.1

Inviting the citizens

In the initial phase of the project, the Energy Town Secretariat reached out to the citizens by inviting them to participate in a citizen group – ‘my municipality’ – in relation to the Energy Town project. Before the first meeting, a press release was sent out and a letter of invitation published on the website of the Energy Town. Information about the meeting was also diffused through local media and the secretariat used word-of-mouth to reach people who had formerly participated in citizen driven activities. We will concentrate on two observations from this address. Firstly, in the invitation letter, the term “activist” is used to refer to the participating citizens. The headline thus reads: “The energy town project of Frederikshavn is looking for ‘activists’” and the term is used several times in the short text (IL 2009). Hence, citizens are subjectified in a paradoxical subject position. Commonly, the notion of “activists” refers to people engaged in grass root movements, who are “uninvited” and operate outside established systems of power and often in opposition to these. In the invitation letter, however, the Energy Town as a municipal organization makes a call for activists, and thereby appropriates the term within a frame of institutionally initiated and supported “activism”. In governmentality terms, the unrestrained and unconductable energy of the activist is invoked in order to conduct the conduct of the participating citizens. How the citizens take up this subject position and negotiate or resist a new, modified sense of subjectification as activists, will emerge from the further analysis of examples from the citizens’ meetings. Secondly, both the invitation letter and the press release underscore the freedom of citizens. The citizens are asked to “put your fingerprint on the way which the Energy Town should be now and in the future” and to “give some of your energy to the town and make something happen” (IL 2009).2 As these quotes 2. The original Danish quotations are reproduced in English in this chapter for ease of comprehension. Original quotations in Danish are available from the authors.

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suggest, the citizen actions called for are rather vaguely defined and leave a lot of space for the citizens’ own interpretation. When, in the invitation letter, the actions become more specific, for instance to “raise the profile of the Energy Town, participate in meetings, diffuse the knowledge [of the Energy Town] to others or perhaps to start energy reducing projects” (PR 2009), these specifications are presented with a low modality (e.g. “can be,” “could be”) that avoids explicit obligations. At the same time, “citizen support and participation” is described as a “prerequisite” for realizing the Energy Town goal of a 100% renewable energy supply by 2015. The importance of citizen participation is thus emphasized without raising moral demands on the citizen; citizens are invited and motivated, but not commanded to take part or addressed in a moralizing discourse. However, on the other hand, the energy town project appears also as an already defined project, for instance in the “how do we make the energy town project attractive?” (lL 2009), which presupposes that the energy town of Frederikshavn is a given entity which is to be made attractive. While part of the invitation texts represent the project as something to be influenced by the participating citizens, other parts represent it as an entity to be promoted by the citizens. In that sense, there is a tension between two very different subject positions for the participating citizens. Moreover, the subject positions are qualitatively different, in that the first enrols the citizens in an already defined project, whereas the second invites unrestricted and freely chosen participation. The second position thus implies a much wider space of self-formation, and may therefore be seen as not just another subject position but as a different way of subjectivating oneself. We regard this as the first step in an attempted translation process of the energy town project from a secretariat plan to the unfolding and ramification of the energy town project by way of public engagement. We shall now look into the ways in which this translation is taken further in the series of citizen meetings. 4.2

Between autonomy and governance

While the energy town secretariat had worked out an agenda for the first two meetings, the citizens were gradually encouraged to govern the process themselves over the next few meetings, thus encouraging the citizens to “fashion themselves into subjects” (Hamann 2009: 38), even if this opened up to a largely centrifugal process. However, it is noticeable that the citizens tended to resist the centrifugal forces generated through self-governance throughout the process, demanding more structure to the meetings. In a sense the actual citizen meeting genre, understood as “a staged, goal-oriented social process” (Martin and Rose 2007: 8), may be viewed as an assemblage or technology of government with a potential for enabling as well as constraining the freedom of the citizens (See Koester 2010 for



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a discussion of the meeting genre). As such, the citizens are in a sense enveloped in the public meeting genre and faced with the possibility of resisting generic boundaries by transgressing them, or alternatively, accepting to be bound by the conventions of the technology of government that this genre represents. Throughout the series of citizen meetings, the representative of the energy town secretariat takes pains to underline the open and unrestrained character of the contribution from the citizen group. For example, in one of the meetings, the citizens were told that they would have “entirely free hands” when planning their activities. The citizens did not question the reality of this freedom, but occasionally they did challenge the energy town representatives with regard to the preparation of the work in the citizen group. Not that the citizens called for more freedom, but in the sense that some citizens suggested a stronger framing of the activities in the group. For instance, at the early stages in the process, one citizen addressed the energy town representatives with the suggestion that she would perhaps like to call on you [the secretariat] to go an say eh how have they organized or what kinds of initiatives have there been maybe at some other places that where they have already had some success and where we may already now go in and be successful very, very fast because we can you know just as well take what is easy.  [Citizen meeting 2]

The citizen here calls on the energy town representatives to provide a stronger knowledge base for the activities in the group and in that sense to the take up of a more governmental role. Paradoxically, the suggestion is turned down by an energy town representative on the grounds that it conflicts with the organisers’ bottom-up ideals. Thus, in this example, we do not find a conflict between an authority trying to dominate and a group of citizens asking for more freedom, but rather a conflict between two views of how to properly conduct the freedom of the participating citizens (for a full analysis of this sequence, see Horsbøl and Lassen 2012). However, the fact that the representatives of the energy town repeatedly underscored the freedom of the participating citizens did not imply that they refrained from attempts to guide the citizens’ activities. For example, at the outset of the third meeting, just before discussions began in three subgroups, one of the energy town representatives said as follows: And then I have to say that we have an energy week on 23 and 24 October when we end the week by a conference on 23 October and a citizens’ day on 24 October – which is a Saturday. And it all takes place in Arena North and we thought that for the citizens’ day it would be really cool if you would participate in organizing some of the activities for the day. […] We have not done very much so far so your suggestions and ideas as to how to attract as many citizens as possible would be very welcome.  [Citizen meeting 3]

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Here, a concrete task is suggested, namely to come up with ideas for a so-called Energy Week arranged by the energy town secretariat. The suggestion does by no means try to force this activity upon the participating citizens, but invites in positive terms (“would be really great”, “is very welcome”) the citizens to come up with ideas. Moreover, it does not ask for specific ideas, but appeals to the creativity and ingenuity of the citizens to come up with something on their own. As such, it may well be regarded as an attempt to conduct the conduct of the citizens by setting up a space for them to exercise their freedom. In fact the suggestion was successful: the idea to generate ideas for the Energy Week was taken up by one of the subgroups in the following discussion and was later embraced by the whole group of citizens. 4.3

Citizens conducting other citizens

So far, we have viewed governmentality in the citizen group primarily as a relation between the Energy Town representatives and the participating citizens. However, as the example about the Energy Week indicates, governmentality also emerges as a relation between the participating citizens and the other citizens in the municipality. Thus, the participating citizens frequently refer to “people” [Danish: “folk”] as another group of actors different from both themselves and the Energy Town representatives. In the citizen meetings, there are plenty of ideas about how to make energy savings accessible to ‘people’, how to communicate the Energy Town to “people”, or how to make “people” think about and act on their energy consumption. Several times the terms “popular” [Danish: “folkelig”] and “popular support” [Danish: “folkelig opbakning”] occur, as in the following quotation: Our main task – that is – I guess – how do we raise this necessary public support, how do we generate ownership, how do we make it grow from the bottom? This is – I guess – this must be why are here today. Is that not the whole point?  [Citizen meeting 3]

The suggestion, which was agreed upon by the other participants, construes the main task of the citizen group as one of enabling public support in a bottom-up process. Whereas the citizen group was itself construed by the energy town representatives as bottom-up driven, the task of it is additionally seen as to enable a bottom-up engagement of other, less active citizens. The example illustrates a common subjectivation across the citizen meetings: the participating citizens subjectivate themselves as mediator between the Energy Town project and the citizens of Frederikshavn, i.e. as facilitators of sustainable change among the majority of citizens in the municipality. The citizens thus take over the concern with communication that was manifest in the director’s representation of the energy town



Chapter 2.  Governing citizen engagement

project. This is expressed in a plethora of ideas, accompanied by considerations on how to make energy saving and sustainable behaviour concrete, visible and easily understandable to the ordinary citizens. The ideas relate to, for example, energy smileys for private houses, face-to-face consultancy about energy saving investments, competitions with energy relevant prizes, and easy access to communicating the citizens’ own suggestions to the Energy Town secretariat electronically or via yellow sticky notes. Generally, the ideas address ways of motivating or engaging the ordinary citizens, not ways of forcing or obstructing them. As such, participation in the project aims to work positively on the freedom of the citizens. In conclusion, the crafting of these ideas at the citizen meetings can be regarded as a translation process, where the overall energy town plan, agreed upon by the city council and communicated by the energy town secretariat, is taken up by participating citizens and transformed into rather concrete ideas about how to engage other citizens in the energy town project. 4.4 Reaching out for alliances with institutional players: The utility As the meetings unfold, discussions focus increasingly on a number of constraints imposed on citizens living in Frederikshavn, constraints that discourage the citizens from investing in alternative sustainable energy sources. Constraining factors on making transitions to renewable energy include an obligation to use the local district heating utility and to pay a flat rate energy tax levied on all households. On top of that the citizens have difficulty reading the far from transparent energy bills distributed by the local utility. The citizens thus seem to be governed by a number of inadvertent regulatory instruments that contravene the goals of the energy town project. In an attempt to resist municipal governmentality efforts of conducting the citizens’ conduct, they align with members of the energy town secretariat to form what Hajer (2005) has referred to as a discourse coalition. Together the two parties to the coalition decide to invite the Utility to a dialogue meeting in order to try to convince the utility that a change of certain elements of the energy billing practices is needed for citizens to be seriously prepared to engage in energy renovation. While negotiating how to contravene regulation by the utility, a citizen encourages a dialogical approach: But could we suggest a slight change of perspective – in order to encourage dialogue. To say, well, how about one of us contacting the utility, to say well – how is it that these things are organized. What are the rules and what are the possibilities of changing things, to reward people who take initiatives to increase their use of sustainable energy?

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The citizen addresses the issue through a mitigated proposal, using deontic modality ‘could we’, ‘how about one of us contacting’, which may be seen as soft commands encouraging a certain behaviour from the discourse coalition. In the example, the speaker implicitly invites a change in governance and regulation proposing that the utility should reward, rather than punish people for energy renovation. The proposal is well received by the other citizens who stress that “we have to avoid a conflict”, in which the deontic utterance ‘have to’ indicates the urgency of choosing a dialogic approach. This is followed up by a citizen who suggests that the utility might be used as energy consultants as indicated in the following quote: But in a way I am also – in a way I need this kind of consultative advice on how I could reduce my fixed tax rate on district heating….

By attributing a consultative role to the utility, the citizen seems to discursively subjectify the utility in a way that makes dialogue possible. However, although there seems to be consensus that the utility should be invited, there still seems to be a slight tension between the citizens as to attribution of roles, as indicated in a quote from a citizen who suggested: We can always attack them a little and say – what do you suggest that we do?

Rather than subjectifying the utility as a consultant, and hence the citizens as learners, this citizen uses a war metaphor (‘attack’), thus setting up an alternative role formation among the citizens and the utility. The citizens are discursively constructed as attackers, albeit in a minor scale, and the utility as a target for the attack. The discourse thus invoked might instigate a barrier to dialogue by positioning the utility in an enemy role. The decision to invite the utility materializes in a meeting where citizens raise some of the issues that discourage them from ‘conducting their own conduct’ in terms of energy renovation and investment in alternative energy sources. In the meeting, the energy town secretariat and the citizens try to align with the utility by encouraging the utility to pull together with them as a team in the thematic group ‘My municipality’. However, while the citizens make an attempt at subjectifying the utility as a potential ally with a genuine interest in climate mitigation and energy saving initiatives, the energy consultant from the utility translates the meeting into an energy consultation, in which (s)he distributes information brochures about how the citizens may learn more about how to “think about making some changes to your use of energy in your houses”. The energy consultant thus seems to subjectify the citizens as laymen, which contradicts the subjectification imposed on them earlier by the secretariat as ‘activists’, let alone the subjectivation as ‘avant-garde citizens’ that some of the participants tried to accomplish in the process of planning the energy week. The attempt at forming an alliance between



Chapter 2.  Governing citizen engagement

the citizens, energy town secretariat and the utility thus turned out to be futile in that the energy consultant resisted any efforts made at ‘conducting the conduct of others’ – in this case the discourse coalition of citizens and energy town secretariat conducting the conduct of the local utility. 4.5

Governing through the ‘techne’ of incentives

Following the meeting with the utility, the secretariat tries to steer towards more concrete activities. The citizens’ day (24 October) is approaching very fast, which sets the process under a time pressure. This activates a discourse of motivation, translating ideas suggested in earlier meetings into concrete plans. From the assumption that citizens are generally not very interested in climate change issues, discussions focus on “how to lure citizens to visit the energy fair”. Suggestions include competitions, prizes and smiley-schemes. The list of activities is rather comprehensive, and members from the secretariat encourage the citizen activists to “be realistic and selective” in their choices of activities. They are also encouraged to commit themselves to concrete tasks such as organizing a prize-winning contest on energy saving performance: “That might be something we could take on, if any of you would want to go ahead – but think about it till next time”. The citizens are encouraged to go home and think it over, and perhaps characteristically, a decision is postponed till the next meeting. By inviting the citizen activists to go ahead, the energy town representatives subjectify the citizens as agents of change; however, the citizens do not whole-heartedly accept this kind of subjectification, although they do not actively resist the energy secretariat representatives’ attempt at ‘conducting their conduct’ either. 4.6 A revised strategy: ‘Attacking’ the neighbourhoods Whereas the citizen group was successful in terms of gathering together a group of citizens who produced a plethora of ideas on how to achieve the goals of the energy town project, it was less successful when it came to selecting among and realizing some of those ideas, partly through alliances with other players. Therefore, the translation aimed at by the energy town project was only partly realized. These limitations were reflected in a revised strategy concerning citizen participations in the energy town secretariat. In an interview conducted in 2011, the secretariat members described a new two-sided strategy that had replaced the “more or less closed down” citizen group. The first part of the strategy consists of the introduction of an Energy Magazine, which is to be distributed to all inhabitants in the municipality of Frederikshavn, focusing on concrete stories of energy

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transition, for instance in individual households that might serve as inspiration to others. Whereas this part represents a return to mass communication, the other part of the strategy designates a more local and dialogical orientation, in which the key addressee is not the citizens in the municipality as a whole, but the citizens in a specific neighbourhood. Discursively, this part of the strategy is built around a network of key metaphors such as ‘attacking’ a neighbourhood, ‘taking the pulse’ of it, and finding local ‘ambassadors’ for the Energy Town project in the neighbourhood. The new director of the Energy Town secretariat talks about “attacking” a neighbourhood by setting up informal meetings with local inhabitants and listening to their concerns as well as informing about relevant possibilities of energy renovation. The point, according to the director, is that each neighbourhood has different social resources and dynamics, and that understanding these differences is essential to achieving successful energy transition. The informal neighbourhood meetings with “coffee and raspberry jam pastry” are seen as effective means to enter into a dialogue with and “take the pulse of a neighbourhood”. The degree to which citizens in the neighbourhood know about and form social networks with each other will then determine whether for instance some citizens can be addressed as local “ambassadors” or whether a more individualistic approach is appropriate. Moreover, there is also a potential interplay between the mass media and the ‘pastry’ strategy in the sense that neighbourhood transition stories may appear in the Energy Magazine, which on the other hand may serve as inspiration for other neighbourhoods, especially if supported by face-to-face communication. Whether the revised strategy will work – and exactly how it will be carried out – is still an open question, but the outline formulated by the secretariat represents a central shift in what can be viewed as their governmental strategy. The attempt to govern by involving citizens instead of (only) by legislation has not changed, but in the new strategy the citizens are further ‘localized’ or ‘situated’ in a concrete and material sense since they are addressed as members not of a municipality, but of a neighbourhood, which can be targeted (‘attacked’), investigated (‘taking the pulse’) and partly turned into a helpful actor (‘ambassadors’) by way of interpersonal communication. The citizens are thus more likely to be invited to subjectivate themselves as actors in a local, physical network and/or as individual house owners or tenants. This stands in contrast to the subjectivations in the citizen group where the participating citizens partly subjectivated themselves as mediators and avant-garde citizens, concerned about communicating with and involving the less active citizens of the municipality. Thus, within the case of energy town project, a shift between two highly different forms of governmentality can thus be identified, including different forms of technologies (e.g. genre networks) and (attempted) subjectifications.



Chapter 2.  Governing citizen engagement

5. Conclusions In this chapter we have addressed some of the tensions arising in a transition process towards sustainable energy use and the creation of green jobs in a local community in Denmark. By analysing audio-recordings from public citizen meetings and interviews with two successive directors in the energy town project of Frederikshavn, we have focused on public engagement and citizen involvement as a form of governmentality, paying particular attention to the ways in which project goals and participants are translated and subjectified in a trajectory of activities aiming at changing social practice. Thus, accommodating a need to study how participants may be taking up the discursive spaces left open to them, we have explored public engagement as a function of governmentality in Foucault’s sense of the conduct of conducts. While we recognize that the energy town secretariat and the citizens did accomplish contemporary milestones in the ongoing process towards an ultimate goal, such as organizing an energy fair and a citizens’ day in the annual Energy Week and participating in the COP15 summit in Copenhagen in 2009, we have found that the road to the project goals failed on at least two counts. We noticed a failure to translate a secretariat plan into public engagement. This failure is possibly related to two competing subject positions, offered by the secretariat, i.e. either unrestricted and freely acting participators or citizens enrolled in an already defined plan. A similar translation failure is seen from the analysis of the public meeting with the utility, which revealed a misalignment between a discourse coalition and an energy consultant. Central to translation failures of this kind is the choice of technologies of government or assemblages used in the translation process. In the meeting with the utility, primarily two discourses, which in this context may be seen as part of technologies of government, seemed to clash in that what we have referred to as a discourse coalition (the citizens and the secretariat) approached the utility from a vantage point of dialogue, while the representative from the utility used a consultancy discourse as a technology of government to further the goals. Other technologies of government/assemblages used to bridge the translation gap were various kinds of incentives, such as smiley-schemes and prize-winning contests used to attract other less attentive citizens to the Energy Week. Our data does not indicate whether governing through the ‘techne’ of incentives was successful. As a part of the translation failure, subject positions were offered, but not always taken up. This was seen with the invitation to become ‘activists’, a subjectification resisted to some extent by citizens who required guidance from the secretariat. And it was seen especially when energy representatives tried to ‘outsource’ the communicative and involvement efforts to participating citizens. Although the citizens did subjectivate themselves as mediators between the Energy Town project and the other citizens of Frederikshavn, focusing on how to invite involvement by communicative

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means, they were disinclined to fully accept the subject positions they were offered and volunteered to do only part of the work. They subjectivated themselves as creators of ideas, but resisted subjectification when it came to prioritizing and realizing ideas. By inviting the citizen activists to go ahead, the energy town representatives subjectified the citizens as agents of change; however the citizens did not always accept this kind of subjectification, although they did not actively resist the energy secretariat representatives’ attempt at ‘conducting their conduct’ either. These governmentality shortcomings have been addressed in the revised strategy of the Energy Town secretariat. Most importantly, the attempt to ‘outsource’ the communication and involvement work has been replaced by a more local approach, where members of the secretariat set up meetings with citizens in their neighbourhoods in order to customize energy transition initiatives to the local conditions. Citizens are thus more likely to be invited to subjectivate themselves as neighbourhood members and/or as individual house owners or tenants. Whether this would lead to more successful translations remains to be seen. To conclude, we have not found a conflict between an authority trying to dominate and a group of citizens asking for more freedom, but rather a conflict between two views of how to properly conduct the freedom of the participating citizens. In more general terms, these findings offer a vocabulary and a conception of public engagement that does not revolve around the dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down processes of citizen involvement. Without dismissing that dichotomy, we would suggest that a governmentality approach has the potential of enriching our understanding of public engagement, as exemplified in the present case of climate change mitigation and sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the case study offers an understanding of governmentality as emerging in concrete and situated practices over a longer time span, which can be studied discursively by analysing how citizens and municipality representatives negotiate translations of a municipality initiative and how citizens subjectivate themselves by resisting or reworking municipality subjectifications.

References Bhatia, Vijay K. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse. London: Continuum. Bhatia, Vijay K. 2008. “Towards Critical Genre Analysis.” In Advances in Discourse Studies, ed. by Vijay K. Bhatia, John Flowerdew, and Rodney H. Jones, 166–177. New York: Routledge. Bora, Alfons, and Heiko Hausendorf (eds). 2006. “Communicating Citizenship and Social Positioning. Theoretical Concepts.” In Analysing Citizenship Talk, ed. by Heiko Hausendorf and Alfons Bora, 23–49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:  10.1075/dapsac.19.04bor

Callon, Michel. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. by John Law, 96–133. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.



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Bonnafous-Boucher, Maria. 2009. “The Concept of Subjectivation: A Central Issue in Governmentality and Government of the Self.” In A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. by Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo, 72–89. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Delgado, Ana, Kamilla L. Kjølberg, and Fern Wickson. 2011. “Public Engagement Coming of Age: From Theory to Practice in STS Encounters with Nanotechnology.” Public Understanding of Science 20 (6): 826–845. doi: 10.1177/0963662510363054 Dietz, Thomas, and Paul C. Stern (eds). 2008. Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Dobson, Andrew. 2003. Citizenship and the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:  10.1093/0199258449.001.0001

Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman, Simon Pardoe, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2006. “Critical Discourse Analysis and Citizenship.” In Analysing Citizenship Talk, ed. by Heiko Hausendorf and Alfons Bora, 98–123. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/dapsac.19.09fai Felt, Ulrike, and Maximilian Fochler. 2010. “Machineries for Making Publics: Inscribing and Describing Publics in Public Engagement.” Minerva 48: 219–238. doi:  10.1007/s11024-010-9155-x

Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975– 1976, trans., Graham. Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Freadman, A. 2002. “Uptake.” In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre. Strategies for Stability and Change, ed. by Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, 39–53. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Hamann, Trent, H. 2009. “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics.” Foucault Studies 6: 37–59. Hajer, Maarten A. 2005. The Politics of Environmental Discourses: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Rob. 2011. The Transition Companion. Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times. Totnes: Green Books. Horsbøl, Anders, and Inger Lassen. 2012. “Public Engagement as a Field of Tension between Bottom-up and Top-down Strategies.” In Citizen Voices. Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication, ed. by Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho, and Julie Doyle, 163–185. Bristol: Intellect. Iedema, Rick. 2001. “Resemiotiation.” Semiotica 137 (1/4): 23–39. Irwin, Alan. 2006. “The Politics of Talk: Coming to Terms with the ‘New’ Scientific Governance.” Social Studies of Science 36 (2): 299–320. doi: 10.1177/0306312706053350 Iványi, Zsuzsanna, Kertész, András, Marinecz, Kornélia, and Máté, Nóra. 2006. “Personal Reference, Social Categorization and the Communicative Achievement of Citizenship.” In Analysing Citizenship Talk, ed. by Heiko Hausendorf, and Alfons Bora, 223–250. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/dapsac.19.15iva Koester, Almut. 2010. Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum. Kurath, Monika, and Priska Gisler. 2009. “Informing, Involving or Engaging? Science Communication, in the Ages of Atom-, Bio- and Nanotechnology.” Public Understanding of Science 18 (5): 559–573. doi: 10.1177/0963662509104723

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Lassen, Inger, Anders Horsbøl, Kersten Bonnén, and Anne Grethe J. Pedersen. 2011. “Climate Change Discourses and Citizen Participation: A Case Study of the Discursive Construction of Citizenship in Two Public Events.” Environmental Communication 5 (4): 411–427. doi: 10.1080/17524032.2011.610809 Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linell, Per, and Srikant Sarangi (eds). 1998. “Discourse Across Professional Boundaries.” Text 18 (2). Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg. 2009. “The Final Foucault.” In A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. by Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo, 62–71. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Martin, Jim, and David Rose. 2007. Genre Relations: Mapping Culture. London: Equinox. Paterson, Matthew, and Johannes Stripple. 2010. “My Space: Governing Individuals’ Carbon Emissions.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 341–362. doi: 10.1068/d4109 Phillips, Louise. 2011. The Promise of Dialogue: The Dialogic Turn in the Production and Communication of Knowledge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/ds.12 Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rask, Mikko, Richard Worthington, and Minna Lammi (eds). 2012. Citizen Participation in Environmental Global Governance. Abingdon: Earthscan. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2009. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 87–121. London: Sage. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511488856 Stripple, Johannes, and Harriet Bulkeley (eds). 2013. Governing the Climate. New Approaches to Rationality, Power and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:  10.1017/CBO9781107110069

Walters, William. 2012. Governmentality. Critical Encounters. New York: Routledge. Wynne, Brian. 2006. “Public Engagement as a Means of Restoring Public Trust in Science: Hitting the Notes, but Missing the Music?” Community Genetics 9 (3): 211–220. doi:  10.1159/000092659

Websites http://www.Energycity.dk (NY) The Danish Model: Danish Experience with sustainable and low carbon urban development, p. 12. (accessed on 27 May 2013) http://www.Energibyen.dk (accessed on 27 May 2013) Møller (2013) http://www.Energycity.dk, Lars M. Møller, Mayor (accessed on 27 September 2013)

Coding system in transcriptions DES (2009). Interview with the Director of the Energytown Secretariat (DES) IL (2009). Invitation letter to citizens PR (2009). Press release

chapter 3

The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self in the face of climate change Laura Bang Lindegaard

Aalborg University, Denmark

The chapter demonstrates how empirical discourse analysis can contribute to the study of two issues of particular significance in recent studies of governmentality. Firstly, the observation that the relationship between power and resistance is specifically contradictory, in that resistance marks both a boundary and a constitutive moment of government, and, secondly, the realisation that governmentality is somehow intertwined with the continuous becoming of ethical subjects, or, in other words, with continuously negotiated practices of subjectivation. The chapter pursues and enforces the theoretical argument that practices of subjectivation should be understood as an aspect of the unceasingly negotiated interdependence of power and resistance. This suggests that this theoretical insight can be fulfilled in empirical research if studies of governmentality are interconnected with membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, the chapter provides an in-depth analysis of focus group data from sessions in a small Danish village in which citizens accomplish the contested discursive intersection of, on the one hand, a municipal strategy aimed at ‘greening’ the citizens’ transportation conduct and, on the other hand, the citizens’ attempt to conduct their own conduct.

1. Introduction Studies of governmentality emphasise that it does not make sense to speak of governmental strategies without speaking of resistance since the two are co-­ constituting phenomena (Bröckling et al. 2011; Davidson 2011; Death 2010; Malpas and Wickham 1995; van Krieken 1996). However, some studies of governmentality stress that the government of the self or practices of subjectivation should be understood as an inevitable aspect of governmentality (Bayart 2007; Bonnafous-Boucher 2009; Dean 2010). This chapter contributes to both of these areas. It discusses the doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.03ban © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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theoretical justification for an approach to practices of subjectivation that is sensitive to how this aspect of governmentality is accomplished at the intersection of power and resistance, and demonstrates the analytical benefits of this. In particular, the chapter proposes an argument for interconnecting studies of governmentality with ethnomethodological approaches, such as membership categorisation analysis and conversation analysis, demonstrating that such an approach affords the opportunity to pursue enquiries into the accomplishment of subjectivation located at the intersection of the government of others and the government of the self. Since studies of governmentality and ethnomethodology are often considered incompatible fields of enquiry, the chapter is based in a theoretical argument to the contrary. Only on this background, will the second half of the chapter demonstrate the analytical affordances of connecting up the two approaches. The chapter reports on an empirical study of the execution of a municipal transportation strategy in a small village in Denmark, aiming at ‘greening’ citizens’ everyday transportation practices. The chapter draws on data from a focus group session with four villagers who discuss the usefulness of a flyer that informs about different ways of ‘greening’ people’s driving. The analysis of this data shows the discursive accomplishment of a contested intersection: Whereas the Municipality aims to conduct the transportation conduct of the villagers, thereby turning them into ‘green drivers’, the villagers carefully resist having their conduct conducted. Thus exploring practices of subjectivation in relation to a low carbon initiative, the chapter could be understood as contributing to an as yet underdeveloped area within studies of governmentality, namely the area concerned with studies of environmental issues such as climate change. In particular, the chapter is contributing to studies addressing and examining certain forms of the ethics of the self in relation to the various climate change strategies in which authorities aim to enable individuals through policies to mitigate climate change. Acknowledging the important contributions of the few studies in this area (De Goede and Randalls 2009; Paterson and Stripple 2010; Rice 2010; Rutland and Aylett 2008; Stripple and Bulkeley 2013), the chapter aims at contributing with a new methodological perspective that is particularly sensitive to the continuously contested and resisted accomplishment of subjectivities in discursive interaction at the molecular level.

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self

2. Approaching the intersection of the government of others and the government of the self 2.1

Studies of governmentality

The notion of governmentality denotes a mode of governing that may best be explained through another Foucauldian notion, namely the notion of ‘the conduct of conduct’. Foucault continuously explored this notion, but perhaps he did so most explicitly in the essay ‘How is Power Exercised?’ (1983a). Here Foucault observes that the exercise of power, that is, the conduct of conduct, should be understood as: “a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action” (220). Foucault further notes that such an understanding of power implies that power is exercised only in the presence of freedom, “only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free” (221). Hence, without freedom one cannot meaningfully talk about power, but rather of mere physical slavery. Within current studies of governmentality, Rose (1999: 4) has formulated this idea concisely, pointing out that: “[When] it comes to governing human beings, to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed. To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilise it for one’s own objectives.” Within this mode of governing, the conduct of conduct is continuously coconstituted by all kinds of counter-conduct. When power is conceptualised as productive, as dispersed at all levels and as efficient to the degree that governors succeed in maintaining and utilising the freedom of the governed one to his or her own ends, it naturally follows that power and resistance are inevitably interdependent concepts. Regardless of the apparent logic, Foucault himself only discussed the interdependent relationship between conduct and counter conduct at any length in one of his lectures. In this lecture, however, he provides some illuminating examples, demonstrating that it is necessary to understand the notion of counter-conduct in order to understand the notion of the conduct of conduct and vice-versa. For instance, he discusses the practice of ‘waging war’. He focuses on the time at which this practice ceased to be merely a profession or a general law and became an ethic or a form of political and moral conduct. As being a soldier was no longer just a destiny or a profession, but a form of conduct, then another form of practice, desertion, appeared simultaneously. In Foucault’s (2007: 265) wording: “[refusing] to be a soldier and to spend some time in this profession and activity, refusing to bear arms, appears as a form of conduct or as a moral counterconduct, as a refusal of civic education, of society’s values, a refusal of a certain obligatory relationship to the nation and the nation’s salvation, of the actual political system of the nation.” The example illustrates that counter-conduct inevitably co-constitutes the form of governing that can be characterised as ‘conduct of

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conduct’. When people are governed through their freedom to act, governors all the time have to adapt to the attempts to resist their governance. Or, as Foucault (1997b: 75) puts it, governors have to rely on the governed ones’ “will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price”. In recent studies of governmentality, the insight that power and resistance are mutually constitutive phenomena has not always been reflected, but Malpas and Wickham (1995), van Krieken (1996), Death (2010), Bröckling et al. (2011) and Davidson (2011) represent notable exceptions. Death is arguably the scholar who has been working most empirically with the notion of resistance within current studies of governmentality, discussing and demonstrating how the theoretical insight can be acknowledged in an analytics of protests. Taking inspiration from Dean’s (2010) framework for an analytics of government, Death (2010) suggests that Dean’s framework can be utilised for an analytics of protest. Thus, substituting ‘government’ with ‘protest’, Death’s point is that such an analytics of protest will help to destabilise conventional binaries between power and resistance. I agree with Death that it is necessary to go beyond a dichotomous conceptualisation of power and resistance in order to properly acknowledge that the two are in fact co-constitutive. Yet, I would like to cautiously suggest that the proposed framework, by implying an analytical separation of power and resistance, only ends up reinforcing the binary understanding of the two concepts that the framework was indeed intended to challenge and destabilise. Suspicious, then, that it might not be sufficient to focus only on the more sedimented forms of resistance in, for instance, public protest actions or demonstrations, this chapter suggests that the relationship between power and resistance needs to be acknowledged also when it is accomplished in much subtler ways, such as in discursive practices of subjectivation at the molecular level. In his later work, Foucault increasingly shifted from a focus on how to govern or discipline the subject to a focus on the practice of becoming a subject; that is, he shifted from a concern with what one is to a concern with how one does in order to act as a proper, ethical, subject. Outlining a genealogy of ethics, Foucault (1983b) observes that his interest in practices of subjectivation entails the understanding that such practices are inherently moral or ethical, thereby explicating that he understands morality, ethics and subjectivation as closely intertwined, practical achievements. He emphasises that moral prescription is not only a matter of exogenous rules and codes, but also of the self ’s relation to the self; or, in Foucault’s words: “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport à soi, which I call ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions” (238). Whereas this work on subjectivation is an integral part of Foucault’s work on sexuality and on the hermeneutic of the self during Antiquity, already The Use of Pleasure (1985) indicates that Foucault’s interest in ethics and subjectivation might be relatable to

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self

governmentality. This is clear as Foucault suggests that practices of subjectivation are intertwined with a particular type of freedom. Since Foucault states that such practices highlight “the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognises himself as obliged to put it into practice” (27), it is clear that it is through practices of subjectivation that the self acknowledges not only how to become a subject, but also that this freedom of self-realisation is mutually constituted by an imperative to continuously free and fulfil oneself. Studies of governmentality often comment on the ways in which governing through the conduct of conduct implies a certain relationship between the government of others and the government of self in the continuous practice in which subjects become governable. In this respect, two notions are of particular relevance, namely subjectification and subjectivation. Foucault only discussed the latter term at the beginning of the eighties (see Foucault 2005), and it was never fully explored. Perhaps as a consequence, some scholars only concern themselves with the earlier notion, that is, subjectification (for instance, Dean 2010; Rose 1999), but recent studies have discussed also the less developed notion of subjectivation (for instance, Bayart 2007; Bonnafous-Boucher 2009; Hamann 2009; Milchman and Rosenberg 2009). Contrasting the two terms, both Hamann (2009) and Milchman and Rosenberg (2009) suggest that subjectification is referring to the ways that others are governed (Hamann 2009: 39; Milchman and Rosenberg 2009: 64), whereas subjectivation “pertains to the relation of the person to him/herself; to the multiple ways in which a self can be fashioned or constructed on the basis of what one takes to be the truth” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2009: 66; see also Hamann 2009: 39). This distinction may be relevant in some contexts, but I find it of little significance to distinguish between the government of others and the government of self in a context where power and resistance are treated as mutually constitutive. Thus, although I use the term subjectivation, it is important to note that I use it to cover the complex processes of ‘doing being’ governable, ethical subjects that unfold as the government of the self intersects with the government of others.1 The peculiar expression of ‘doing being ethical, governable subjects’ was used intentionally to anticipate my suggestion to connect up studies of governmentality

1. Here I depart slightly from Bonnafous-Boucher (2009: 73), who speaks of subjectivation as situated between governmentality and government of the self. In contrast, I am aligned not only with Bayart (2007: 28) who remarks that he approaches governmentality at the intersection of techniques of domination applied to others and techniques of the self, but also with Foucault (1997a), seeing as he speaks of governmentality as the “contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self ”. Also Michman and Rosenberg (2009: 71) appear to share this understanding as they argue that Foucault’s later notion “forged a direct link between resistance to political power and an ‘ethic of the self ’”.

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with ethnomethodological approaches to empirical data. Whereas studies of governmentality are good at pointing out the need to acknowledge that power and resistance are mutually constitutive phenomena in current forms of governing, they do not offer any comprehensive approaches for enquiries into the processes of subjectivation that unfold at the most mundane and molecular levels.2 Ethnomethodology, in contrast, provides a unique lens for enquiries into how ways of doing being proper subjects are continually accomplished and negotiated in talk in interaction, and, as a consequence, the next section concerns an introduction to an ethnomethodological approach to the study of processes of subjectivation. 2.2

Ethnomethodological discourse analysis

Ethnomethodology is founded on the assumption that social order is continuously accomplished in interaction, and, accordingly, Garfinkel’s (1967) main ambition was to describe the ‘ethno methods’ through which this is done. Since Garfinkel’s founding work, ethnomethodology has developed and come to dominate two research fields, both stemming from the work of Sacks (1992a, 1992b). Conversation analysis (CA) is concerned with the sequential organisation of talk, while membership categorisation analysis (MCA) is concerned with the interactional accomplishment of categories. Acknowledging that these two approaches are in fact complementary perspectives,3 this chapter understands social categories, or subjectivities, not as reified entities, but as ongoing negotiated and resisted accomplishments of interaction; that is, as accomplished at the contested intersection of power and resistance. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that ethnomethodology understands such accomplishments as an inherently moral business, rendering it particularly apt for enquiries into the becoming of different forms of ethical subjectivity or, in other words, for enquiries into practices of subjectivation. In order to clarify this, the following provides a brief outline of Jayyusi’s (1984, 1991) work on morality and categorisation, focusing on how it draws on and expands Sacks’ work on MCA and CA to develop and operationalise Garfinkel’s fundamental observation about the innately moral character of the interactional accomplishment of meaningful, social order.4 2. As common in studies of governmentality, I borrow Latour’s concepts of the ‘molecular’ and the ‘molar’ in order to signal that I do not want to maintain a dichotomous understanding of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. See Chapter 1 in this volume. 3. See, for instance, Watson (1997) for a discussion of this perspective. 4. See Lindegaard (2012) for a more extended discussion of Jayyusi’s work on morality and categorisation in relation to studies of governmentality.

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Illustratively, Jayyusi (1991) points out the importance of Sacks’ distinction between relevant and correct description. She emphasises that this everyday members’ distinction “marks out, more than anything, the moral weave, and the moral groundings of ordinary discourse” (237) and provides an exemplary discussion of how one correct description is produced and made visible as more relevant and intelligible than other equally correct descriptions. Reiterating Sacks’ (1992a) notion of membership device, prominently the logic of category-bound activities and the consistency rule, Jayyusi firstly demonstrates how the ordinary version of Sacks’ story “The baby cried. The mother picked it up” (236–51) provides for the routine, unproblematic hearing that the mother who picks up the baby is the mother of the baby. Then she discusses an alternative version of the story, namely ‘The baby cried. The scientist picked it up’. In this story, the second categorisation is not readily heard as stemming from the same device as the first, and ‘picking up a baby’ cannot readily be heard as an activity bound to scientists (Jayyusi 1991: 238). Hence, in this case it would not be co-operative to hear the scientist as the mother of the baby. Rather, based on a default orientation to the relevance of categorisations, the story would perhaps be heard as contexted in a laboratory setting. As Jayyusi remarks, the presumption that the task at hand is relevantly accomplished invokes Garfinkel’s idea of trust and the insight that communicative praxis is inherently moral. However, as Jayyusi reminds us, this ethical stance is not a pre-established phenomenon, but is rather “constitutive of, and reflexively constituted by, the natural attitude of everyday life” (239, emphasis in original). Hence, summing up, Jayyusi shows how Sacks’ distinction between relevant and correct description underlines the normative grounding of social ordering. Particularly, she shows that intelligible description is intertwined with an appraisal of relevance in its broadest sense: “the description […] is co-fitted to the appraisal, a feature of it, and is taken to be produced in this way by co-participants” (240). Furthermore, Jayyusi discusses how membership categories in and through their reflexively constituted character provide for the moral constitution of praxis. Of particular relevance to this chapter, Jayyusi observes that Sacks’ notion of category-bound predicates importantly provides for the moral accountability of certain actions and omissions (240).5 Sacks’ work, then, not only demonstrates the organisation of members’ conventional knowledge of the world, it simultaneously shows that such knowledge is morally constituted and constitutive of moral praxis. Hence, knowledge is constitutive of, and provides for, what Jayyusi calls “a 5. Sacks (1992a: 241, 260). As it is, Sacks only discusses category-bound activities, but the notion has later been expanded by, among others, Watson (1978) and Jayyusi (1984), and, accordingly, I understand Sacks’ notion of category-bound activity as just one type of categorybound predicate.

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moral inferential logic”, that is, “a logic of moral inference that is at the same time a moral grounding of practical inference” (240). According to Jayyusi, everyday category work involves such moral inference work in situ. For instance, whenever members use the mundane reference or description ‘mother’, it provides for a variety of inferential trajectories that are more or less moral due to the features’ more or less morally implying character. The bound rights and obligations of the category are ordinarily treated as morally implying features, and this is why the ‘mother’ is readily heard as having both an obligation and a right to pick up the crying baby – a matter that renders her morally accountable if she does not pick it up. It needs to be stressed, however, that this moral constitution of praxis is evidenced in members’ actual practices. For example, people may routinely draw on the obligations bound up with their membership of an ‘employee’ category to resist other obligations (such as, for instance, a possible obligation to drive in a less environmentally harmful way). Hence, the point is not that the category ‘employee’ or the category ‘mother’ is bound up with a prefigured and/or universal set of morally implying features (it is not the point that being a mother to a baby inevitably constitutes a moral obligation to pick up the baby when it cries). Rather, when Jayyusi draws on a story in which a mother picks up a crying baby, it is not to claim what mothers per se do and do not, but to trigger the acknowledgement that (when we hear the category ‘mother’ as co-constituted by, for instance, an obligation to pick up her baby) the intelligibility of the story, of any story or piece of interaction, is reflexively constituted in practico-moral terms. In Jayyusi’s words: “The practice, in which our category concepts are embedded and used, and the appraisal, the conceptual, moral, and practical are reflexively and irremediably bound up with, and embedded in, each other” (241). Lastly, it should be noted that Jayyusi mentions one more ethnomethodological domain, focusing on the hows of this intertwined relationship of the practical, the moral and the conceptual, namely the domain of conversation analysis. Most prominently, she considers the notion of ‘preference’ (Pomerantz 1984). Reiterating the observation that first pair parts of adjacency pairs project a context in which a specific second pair part is the preferred second, Jayyusi (1991) reminds us that this ‘preference’ is not due to a matter of empirical regularity, but of normativity, seeing as ‘preference’ is “grounded in our understanding of the contingencies of practical actions and their embeddedness in a moral context” (242). In summary, then, Jayyusi carries on the legacy of Garfinkel’s foundational work on the moral character of social ordering as she discusses the normatively sanctioned ways of doing being members of society or, in Foucauldian words, the continuously negotiated practices in which one becomes an ethical and governable subject. Accordingly, I would like to suggest that by studying how citizens negotiate, resist and subscribe to different more or less relevant categories, or

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category-bound predicates, projected by a municipal strategy aimed at greening citizens’ transportation practices, it is possible to attain a better understanding of how governmentality is negotiated at the molecular intersection of the government of self and of others; that is, I would like to suggest that ethnomethodology offers a set of methods uniquely sensitive to the mutually constitutive relationship of power and resistance in practices of subjectivation. However, considering that studies of governmentality and ethnomethodology could be seen as oppositions, concerned with the exclusively historical and the prominently situational, respectively, the next section points out that both positions do recognise that analysis is always already both historical and situational. 2.3

Considering commensurability

Considering studies of governmentality, Biebricher (2008: 396) points out that studies of governmentality should recognise the inevitable relationship between the situational and the historical, emphasising that future studies of governmentality should develop: “a more heterogeneous account of contemporary governmentalit(ies), both synchronic and diachronic [addressing] the teleological as well as the presentist aspects of Foucault’s account [emphasis added].” As I understand Biebricher, he herein stresses the need to go beyond a dichotomous understanding of the synchronic and the diachronic. In fact, I understand him as suggesting that the failure of some studies to point out discontinuities, contingencies and struggles at the diachronic level is at least in part a consequence of insufficient attention to the hows at the so-called synchronic level. Considering ethnomethodology, whereas the notion of ethnomethodological indifference is sometimes taken to imply that we can never extrapolate from the description of a particular interaction, Jayyusi (1991: 247) argues that the notion of indifference should be understood as more ‘localised’, namely as something which should be obtained “from within the analytic descriptivist ‘moment’” (emphasis in original). The emphasis on ‘within’ and the choice of ‘moment’ should be noted. According to Jayyusi, it needs to be recalled that an indifferent description constitutes an irremediably embedded activity (251, n. 17). Thus, she observes that even though the analyst must aim to describe what members focus on as observably relevant, he or she of course has to draw on his or her “own membership to identify and describe such relevances in the first place” (251, n. 17). Consequently, the ‘descriptive moment’ is an ongoing accomplishment and cannot be appointed any independent status, or, as Jayyusi puts it, an indifferent description cannot be extended beyond its moment of “‘uncovering’ without erasing the ‘boundaries’ which provided its context and point in the first place” (251, n. 17). It is significant

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to stress the more general implication of this argument: Both analysts and members are always already embedded in their own memberships and they have to draw on these in their ongoing accomplishment of intelligible interaction. Hence, depending on when, where and by whom a certain interaction is accomplished, members will need to utilise whatever membershipping resources there are, contingently but not arbitrarily, available to them, or, in other words, members will need to utilise their ‘diachronic’ embedding in order to make intelligible, ‘synchronic’ descriptions. Hence, it appears that both studies of governmentality and ethnomethodology recognise that analysis is always already both synchronic and diachronic. Accordingly, I am finally ready to demonstrate the affordances provided by the merger of the two positions. 3. “I know it’s cheaper”: Pre-empting accountability This chapter draws on data from a recent study (Lindegaard 2012) of the discursive intersection of the government of others and of the self in a small Danish village. At the time of the study, the village was engaged in a municipal project, designed to ‘green’ citizens’ everyday transportation practices. The study was carried out as a focus group study with villagers, moderated by the researcher and focusing on the villagers’ responses to a municipal information flyer about different ways of ‘greening’ one’s driving.6 Here, I draw on data from one such session in order to demonstrate how the villagers resist and negotiate the projected ways of ‘doing being’ proper, ethical transportation subjects. Thereby the chapter contributes to a yet underdeveloped area of studies of governmentality, namely the area exploring practices of subjectivation around climate change and carbon practices (De Goede and Randalls 2009; Paterson and Stripple 2010; Rice 2010; Rutland and Aylett 2008; Stripple and Bulkeley 2013). The interaction represented in the excerpt stems from a focus group session that concerned the villagers’ reactions to the municipal transportation strategy and their reflections over how the strategy could be related to their own practices. The interaction displays how practices of subjectivation unfold as the parties to the focus group setting negotiate the municipal strategy. Particularly, the interaction displays how 6. Scholars of ethnomethodology are often sceptical of the use of interview data such as focus group data. This chapter, however, relies on my elsewhere unfolded argument (Lindegaard 2014) that it is in fact possible to do committedly ethnomethodological studies of focus group data that demonstrate how members to a focus group setting accomplish certain rational orders, and, significantly, how they do so by utilising certain available resources.

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the participants accomplish themselves as already possessing all relevant knowledge of economic driving, pre-empting the municipal attempt to conduct their conduct. Furthermore, the participants accomplish economic driving as an individual choice, that is, as an individually achieved right, but not as an obligation. The session was initiated thirty-two minutes before the interaction represented in the excerpt. In brief, the moderator started asking whether and, if so, how the participants had noticed the transportation strategy in their village. After talking about the fact that they had not noticed anything, the moderator pointed out that the strategy focused on how one can drive in a more green way. More specifically, the moderator mentioned that the municipal project manager, Mette, had divided the strategy into minor focus areas, and that the first of these was concerned with fuel consumption and efficient driving.7 Then the moderator asked the participants whether the idea of economic driving made them think of anything. The question prompted several responses. Firstly, Tine said that she often considered ‘such things’ when driving, for example using the speed pilot in her car. Secondly, prompted by the moderator, the other participants said that their cars did not have such ‘advanced’ technologies. Sussi furthermore said that she did consider the economic aspect of driving, but that other things had to be considered as well. One such thing was that her foot rests better on the accelerator when she drives one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour than when she drives one hundred and ten kilometres per hour. Sussi’s foot account was followed by thirteen minutes of talk, prompted by the moderator and referring to different aspects of the focus areas of the theme month, such as how to brake economically and how and when to use air conditioning. The air conditioning talk ended thirty-two minutes into the session, and from that point the interaction is represented in the excerpt. (1)  Focus group session excerpt 17 mod: 18 19 20 21 22 23

((looks down towards papers)) ..h da ifølge ifølge det materiale ..hh when according according to the material ((looks up)) mette har: mette has ((looks down again towards papers)) gi:’d- har- har lavet de:r given- has- has made there’s øhm (0.8) da øh v- ka en (1.5) en um (0.8) then um can an (1.5) an

7. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity.

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24 >forøgelse af hastigheden< fra increase of speed from 25 hundredeti til hundredetredve (.).hh ka hundred and ten to hundred and thirty (.) .hh can 26 ((looks up)) 27 gi en stigning af forbruget på op til tyve procent. increase consumption with as much as twenty percent 28 (1.1) er det: >al’så på grund af- (.) af (1.1) is that >that is because of (.) of 29 vindmodstanden (0.6) er der nogen af jer der (1.2) wind resistance (0.6) are any of you (1.2) 30 der tænker over (0.9) a’så er det considering (0.9) well is it 31 ((tin turns back towards the moderator after placing a hanky in the pocket of her jacket hanging on her chair)) 32 er det blandt andet så’n nogen ting du is it for example things like that you’re 33 tænker på når du sætter fartpiloten på motorvejen considering when you’re seting the speed pilot at the motorway 34 (0.7) 35 tin: ((smacks lips)) 36 tin: (1.1) ja hvis jeg pl- (til å) sætter den tit på (1.1) yes if i (used to) often setting it to 37 hundredetyve fordi så synes jeg man har en hundred and twenty because then i think you have a 38 god fart hv- hvor- hvor ikk’ det good speed wh- where- where it doesn’t 39 ((makes movement with her hands)) 40 kører for vildt drives too wildly 41 mod: ja yes 42 (1.0) 43 tin: øh å osse hvis de:r meget trafik um and also if there’s a lot of traffic 44 mod: ja yes 45 tin: =så synes jeg nogengange hundredetredve then i sometimes think that hundred and thirty 46 næsten er for stærkt (øhm) (2.1) å det almost is too fast (um) (2.1) and that

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self 107

47 har da- jeg har da gjort det nogengange has of course- i have of course done it sometimes 48 fordi at je- je- jeg ved det er billigere. because i- i- i know it is cheaper 49 mod: ja yes 50 mod: [men der ikk’ [but there’s not 51 tin: [( ) 52 det har- har min søn osse prøvet han my son has has also tested it he 53 har lavet han har- hvor han kørte has done he has- where he drove 54 hundredetyve hele vejen hundred and twenty all the way 55 mod: ja yes 56 tin: =da kunne han se at han brugte mindre then he could tell that he used less 57 han havde lavet så’n en eller anden test eller. he had made such some sort of test or 58 mod: ja yes 59 (1.5) 60 tin: .hh men a’så ikk’ noget jeg så’n: (.) .hh but well not like something i [adj.] (.) 61 hver gang. overhovedet every time at all 62 mod: nej no 63 tin: det kommer an på igen hvad man skal å it again depends on what you have to do and 64 °å° (0.7) .hh å hvad man skal nå om man and (0.7) .hh and what you have to catch up with whether you 65 har god tid til å køre ogsåvidere ikk’ a’så h.. have plenty of time for driving you know and so on right h.. 66 mod: ja yes 67 (0.6) 68 tin: a’så så’n som- som (.) på torsdag hvor jeg for example like- like (.) this thursday where i

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69 ska nå en færge kvart over seks så skal jeg have to catch a ferry a quarter past six then i have to 70 videre til nyborg å- å være til tiden (.) .hhh da continue to nyborg and- and be on time (.) .hhh then 71 tænker jeg arh men jeg sætter den bare på hundrede i do think well but i just set it at hundred 72 ((crosses arms, leans back)) 73 fordi a’så så because well then 74 ((gesticulates with hands)) 75 kommer jeg måske for sent ikk’ i will maybe be late right 76 mod: ja yes 77 (.) 78 tin: hvis man bare overholder if you just keep to 79 (0.5) 80 mod: ja yes 81 tin: =a’så man ka ikk’ altid (.) well you can’t always (.) 82 ((makes rolling movement with hand)) 83 bare tænke (0.9) økonomisk man er os nødt til just think (0.9) economically you also need to 84 nogengange å passe sometimes to mind 85 ((moves both hands categorically downwards)) 86 nogen ting man skal some things you have to do 87 mod: ja yes 88 (2.1) 89 tin: °tingene skal jo ligesom hænge sammen° °things after all have to sort of fit together°

Although I will focus on a part of the interaction in which Tine negotiates a fuel/ speed argument put forward in a flyer in which the municipality inform about greener transportation practices, the interaction in lines 17 to 33 provides a necessary starting point for this analysis since it displays how the moderator’s first pair part co-constructs the following negotiations by projecting a specific context for Tine’s second pair part. In lines 18 to 27, the moderator reads from the municipal

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self 109

flyer, pointing out that it says that it is possible to save fuel by slowing down from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and ten kilometres per hour. Then, in lines 32 to 33, she orients directly to Tine, asking her, through the morally imposing format of a yes/no interrogative, whether this fuel/speed argument might be one of the things Tine considers when she sets her earlier mentioned speed pilot.8 In this way, the moderator’s proffer can be heard as invoking the understanding that economic driving could be related to Tine’s just mentioned pilot practice and, by implication, that Tine is already conducting her transportation conduct in an economically relevant way.9 On an overall level, Tine’s response can be said to comprise two parts: one predominantly oriented towards calibrating a type-conforming alignment, and the other predominantly oriented towards calibrating an action-type alignment (cf. Raymond 2003). The latter further comprises two parts: the first oriented towards accomplishing an autonomous right to drive economically, and the second oriented towards accomplishing a non-obligation to practice such driving. Accordingly, I begin by demonstrating how Tine focuses on the type-conforming constraints of the moderator’s proffer while she simultaneously negotiates its implications by accomplishing her reasons for driving like she does as founded in herself, not in the municipality’s campaign. Hence, I will begin by demonstrating how Tine accomplishes her already possessed knowledge of economic driving as relevant for all practical purposes, thereby reinforcing her autonomy and isolating her from the obligating and restrictive municipal call for greener transportation. Firstly, Tine’s verbal response in line 36 is initiated with a type-conforming positive response token (‘ja’/‘yes’) that displays alignment with the polarity of the yes/no interrogative it is, on one level, answering. Subsequently, Tine provides a double evaluation of her embodied experience of speed, thereby taking the (projected) opportunity not only to provide a preferred response, but also to accomplish that she is in charge of her own conduct. Glossing, Tine points out that she usually sets the speed pilot to one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour rather than to one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour. The reason she gives for this is her belief that one hundred and twenty is the ‘better speed’. The evaluation comprises two parts. In lines 36 to 40, Tine says that she often sets the pilot to one hundred and twenty [because she ‘synes’/‘thinks’ this is a good speed]. After the moderator’s ‘yes’ in line 41 and a pause in line 42, Tine continues in line 43, adding that when there is a lot of traffic she sometimes ‘synes’/‘thinks’ that one hundred and thirty is almost too fast. 8. Following Raymond (2003), I understand yes/no type interrogatives as fine-grained matrixes for negotiations of all sorts, displaying highly moral implications. 9. Throughout the analysis, I follow Schegloff ’s (2007) work on topic proffering sequences.

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The evaluation is interesting in two intertwined ways; firstly, in a predominantly sequential way and, secondly, in a predominantly categorial way. Considering the sequentiality, the account is delivered just after the briefly delivered, but aligned base second pair part (the ‘yes’ in line 36). Against this, it should be noted that it is not oriented directly to the ‘core’ of the moderator’s topic proffer. Particularly, the evaluation is not directly oriented to whether Tine finds the fuel/speed argument of the municipal material relevant or not. Rather, the evaluation comes off as negotiating the proffered topic in a preferred response design. Responding with a ‘yes’ in lines 41 and 44 the moderator fulfils Tine’s answer as a preferred response. In this way, Tine and the moderator cooperatively focus on the matter at hand as a matter of demonstrating that the participants already govern their conduct in accordance with the rationality in the suggested practice and do not, by implication, need to have their conduct conducted. Secondly, concerning the category work, Tine draws on a personal assessment of speed as she explains or justifies her speed. By drawing on an evaluation of ‘good speed’ as her main, or, more specifically, firstly delivered reason for driving at a specific speed, Tine displays epistemic primacy (cf. Stivers et al. 2011). In more detail, drawing on this specific evaluation, Tine claims private ‘ownership’ of the point of view that causes her actions. Whereas speed could be a matter of law or, as Sussi has suggested, a matter of foot comfort or, as the municipal material has suggested, a matter of fuel consumption, Tine makes it a matter of her autonomous experience of ‘a good, not too wild speed’ (lines 38 and 39). The display of epistemic primacy is also observable in the second part of Tine’s evaluation. Reporting that she drives one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour rather than one hundred and thirty because she finds one hundred and thirty almost too fast, Tine stresses the factuality/identity verb ‘er’/’is’ with upward intonation, thereby substantiating the importance of her own primacy and authority. Thus, Tine does not consider an argument that belongs to somebody else (here, the municipality), but presents her own assessment as, for all practical purposes, the more relevant one. Consequently, she is drawing on her own autonomy which entails a right to drive at a specific speed; or, in other words, she is appropriating her way of driving in a way that simultaneously draws on and maintains a ‘freedom as autonomy’ doctrine. In the second part of her second pair part, Tine further subtly negotiates the overall display of alignment in her response. On the one hand, she establishes that her knowledge-possessing membership entails a right to drive economically, thereby at one and the same time weakening the type-conforming alignment and increasing action type alignment. On the other hand, Tine shows that she does not subscribe to any membership which entails an obligation to drive in such a way, thereby also weakening action type alignment. Below, I consider firstly the accomplishment of the right and, secondly, the establishment of the non-obligation.

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self

In lines 47 and 48, Tine re-orients to the proffer. When she says ‘jeg har da gjort det nogengange fordi at jeg ved det er billigere’/‘i have of course done it sometimes because i know it is cheaper’, it comes off as rephrasing her type-conforming ‘yes’ in a non-confirming ‘sometimes’ format. Furthermore, saying ‘fordi at jeg ved det er billigere’/‘because i know it is cheaper’, Tine displays that she sometimes drives economically because she knows that it is cheaper to do so, not because the municipal flyer suggests it. Hence, simultaneously turning her type-conforming ‘yes’ into a non-conforming ‘sometimes’ and audibly stressing ‘ved’/‘know’, Tine reveals that it is of primary relevance that she already knows which form of driving is the most economic, not how she acts upon this knowledge. Further, Tine’s display of knowledge is extended and justified in lines 52 to 57 (line 51 is inaudible). In greater detail, in these lines Tine argues that she has an autonomous right to draw on the knowledge that it is cheaper to drive slower. She does so in a piece of category-work in which she draws on the membership device ‘family’. To establish the knowledge as her knowledge, she says that her son has been testing whether it is more economical to drive one hundred and twenty, thereby invoking her own membership of a parent category. Drawing on the duplicative organisation of the family device (as well as on Sacks’ consistency rule), the possessive pronoun ‘min’/‘my’ (line 52) readily invokes a parent category for the speaking part, as well as, by implication, the family device. Thus, Tine subscribes to a device that possesses the knowledge and, consequently, has an autonomous right to it. If, then, Tine acts in accordance with this knowledge, her actions will be premised on a corpus of knowledge held by a collectivity to which she is a member; she will be acting on her own behalf rather than imitating the ways and doings of some other collectivity.10 Hence, whereas the moderator’s proffer focused on whether the municipal piece of information could be consequential in relation to actual speed decisions, Tine focuses on her individual right to act in accordance with an already possessed piece of knowledge, and she thereby subtly negotiates the anticipated governmentality. Considering secondly the establishment of the non-obligation, Tine distances herself from the action type alignment of the preceding account in lines 60 and 61 as she underlines that ‘it’ (driving according to the fuel/speed rationale, one might hear her saying) is not something she always does. Literally, Tine merely says, ‘men altså ikke noget jeg sådan hver gang overhovedet’/‘but well not like something i every time at all’; she does not mention a specific activity. However, the lines readily display a negotiating stance to the preceding through, particularly, 10. See Sharrock (1974). Particularly, Sharrock demonstrates that owning knowledge might not be that different from owning other objects, in that it might generate much the same types of rights, obligations and responsibilities (52).

111

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the hesitating turn-initiating inhalation, the disjunctive connective ‘men’/‘but’ and the typical disagreement mitigating ‘altså’/‘well’. Accordingly, it is reasonable to hear Tine’s project as a matter of saying that she does not always drive in accordance with her knowledge and, as such, as a matter of weakening the alignment of stance projected in line 47. Furthermore, it should be noted that this weakening is displayed as reached for. In line 61, ‘hver’/‘every’ is audibly stressed, and the modal adverb ‘overhovedet’/‘at all’ is remarkably categorical. In combination the two features highlight that Tine definitely does not always drive in a way that (directly) reflects her knowledge of the fuel-speed relationship.11 In this way, economic driving is accomplished as a right, not an obligation. In lines 63 to 86, Tine accounts for this decreased alignment, emphasising her understanding that economic driving cannot be an obligation. The account comprises three parts. Firstly, in lines 63 to 65, Tine provides an explanation of why she does not always drive ‘economically’. Saying that ‘det kommer an på igen hvad man skal’/‘it again depends on what you have to do’, she implies that ‘man’ (you/one) has to consider other things when deciding how to drive.12 Particularly, by stressing ‘skal’/‘have to’, Tine displays that ‘man’ (you/one) might have other obligations, thereby negatively or indirectly invoking that economic driving is not quite compulsory. Hence, it should be noted that ‘driving economically’ is not approached as a category-bound obligation of primary relevance.13 Secondly, Tine unfolds this category work as she delivers a concrete and personal example in lines 68 to 75, thereby illustrating the general point that ‘man’ (you/one) cannot always drive economically. The form of the example is a typical conditional design, featuring an ‘antecedent’ from lines 68 to 70 and a ‘consequent’ from the end of line 70 to line 75. The design incorporates an example of a category-bound obligation that evens out any call to drive economically. In lines 68 to 70, Tine initiates the account by saying, ‘på torsdag hvor jeg skal nå en færge kvart over seks så skal jeg videre til nyborg og være til tiden’/‘this thursday where i have to catch a ferry a quarter past six then i have to continue to nyborg and be on time’. Then she takes a brief pause, but continues from the end of line 70 to line 71 (and also, it should be noted, non-verbally in line 72), delivering the remaining part of the antecedent of the account. It is not easy to make exact ‘grammatical’ 11. Again recalling Sharrock, the way Tine stresses that she does not always drive according to her knowledge could be heard as revealing that her knowledge entails the right, not the obligation, to drive in this specific way. 12. The Danish ‘man’ is a third person pronoun. Semantically, it is broader and less personal than the English ‘you’, but also less formal than the English ‘one’. 13. See Jayyusi (1984: 66) for a discussion of procedurally constructed hierarchy of relevance or consequence.

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self 113

sense of this part, but it seemingly displays a hypothetical consideration of how to use the speed pilot (‘den’/‘it’ comes off as referring to the speed pilot in ‘jeg sætter den bare på hundrede’/‘i just set it at hundred’). Lastly, represented as ‘fordi altså så kommer jeg måske for sent ikke’/‘because well then i will maybe be late right’, the consequent readily displays a concern about being late.14 Consequently, the account is readily heard as a qualification of why economic and, by local implication, slower driving cannot always be taken into account. That is, Tine invokes the obligation ‘to be on time’ to clarify why economic driving is not always an option. Thirdly, returning to the broad and unspecific personal pronoun ‘man’ (you/ one), Tine delivers a ‘conclusion’ to her response to the moderator’s proffer in line 78. From (the second half of) line 83 to line 86, Tine delivers her meticulously worked up argument in a rather direct version, saying that ‘man’ (you/one) cannot just consider the economic aspect, ‘man’ (you/one) also has to mind things that ‘man’ (you/one) has to do. Further, in line 89, Tine ends her second pair part with a closing, whispered concentrate of the account work she has done. Saying ‘tingene skal jo ligesom hænge sammen’/‘things after all have to sort of fit together’, Tine is readily heard to display that the right to drive economically and the obligations in relation to other aspects of life have to fit together. In summary, then, by accomplishing economical driving as nothing beyond how she already drives, Tine has negotiated the suggested relation between economic driving and a fuel-speed relationship. Subtly accomplishing herself as already a proper, ethical subject, Tine has taken advantage of the governmental utilisation of her freedom to act differently, and it should be noted that Tine has, thereby, approached the municipal strategy as a governmental strategy, as a strategy aimed at governing through the conduct of conduct. She has, in fact, fulfilled this strategy in and through her pre-emption of it: The particular accomplishment of her driving as already relevantly economical not only pre-empts the municipal strategy aimed at green driving; naturally, it also accomplishes it. Consequently, the analysis can be seen as demonstrating how the mutually constitutive relationship between power and resistance is unfolded in molecular practices of subjectivation at the intersection of the government of others and the government of the self. As such, the analysis contributes to the examination of practices of subjectivation related to the explosion of current, political projects designed to enable individuals to ‘do their bit’ to mitigate climate change.

14. Everyone present at the session knows that Tine is talking about a well-known road with an eighty-km/hour speed limit.

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4. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated an approach to enquiries into the contested intersection of the government of others and the government of the self in discursive interaction. As such, it has been concerned with two issues of significance in recent studies of governmentality. Firstly, the observation that the relationship between power and resistance is specifically contradictory, in that resistance marks both a boundary and a constitutive moment of government, and, secondly, the realisation that governmentality is somehow intertwined with the continuous becoming of ethical subjects, or, in other words, with continuously negotiated practices of subjectivation. Particularly, the chapter has argued that it needs to be acknowledged that practices of subjectivation can be understood as an aspect of the continuously negotiated interdependence of power and resistance or, in other words, that practices of subjectivation can be understood as accomplished at the intersection of power and resistance and that they should, as such, be understood as an element of governmentality. As such, the chapter has suggested that it is pivotal to investigate the intertwined relationship of the two phenomena in actual empirical research. In order to accommodate such research, the chapter suggested that studies of governmentality be connected up with a particular line of ethnomethodological research, and it provided a theoretical argument for this unconventional merger. Against this discussion, the second part of the chapter demonstrated the fruitfulness of the arguments through an analysis of selected parts of a topic-proffering sequence from a focus group session concerned with how villagers negotiate a municipal transportation strategy. The analysis demonstrated the delicate accomplishment of the intersection of, on the one hand, the municipal attempt to govern the transportation conduct of the villagers and, on the other hand, the villagers attempt to govern their own conduct, and the analysis pointed out how subtly the villagers resist and negotiate the governmental rationality anticipated by the municipality. As such, the chapter has contributed to already existing research at both a more general and a more specific level. At the general level, the chapter has contributed with insights into how it is possible to do enquiries into the co-constitutive relationship between power and resistance as it is accomplished in discursive practices of subjectivation at the molecular level. At the more specific level, it has contributed with knowledge about how practices of subjectivation co-constitute one of the many current climate change initiatives where authorities aim at getting individuals to act differently. Concluding, I would like to suggest that analyses, such as the one undertaken in this chapter, indicate the possible shortcomings of strategies in which governors aim to conduct the conduct of the governed through the utilisation of the abilities of the latter to act differently. It appears as if, in the

Chapter 3.  The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self

face of climate change, this way of governing might be somewhat deficient, seeing as the accomplishment of the government of transportation practices comes off as reinforcing the rationalities of already existing conduct. In other words, it seems to be the case that in and through the accomplishment of the municipal strategy as a governmentality strategy, governing car-dependent practices becomes an act of maintaining such practices.

Transcription conventions I follow the by now standard conventions within conversation analysis and use a system that bears a close resemblance with Jefferson’s system (see, for instance, Jefferson 1996): [ overlapping talk = no gap between turns (latching) (.) micro pause (2.1) length of pauses in seconds , continuing intonation . final intonation : vowel lengthening .h aspiration °okay° lower voice extra accentuated segment exTRA louder >well< faster par- truncation of word ((laugh)) comments () inaudible segment (you know) uncertain transcription

References Bayart, Jean-Francois. 2007. Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Biebricher, Thomas. 2008. “Genealogy and Governmentality.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (3): 363–396. doi: 10.1163/187226308X336001 Bonnafous-Boucher, Maria. 2009. “The Concept of Subjectivation: A Central Issue in Governmentality and Government of the Self.” In A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. by Sam Binkley, and Jorge Capetillo, 72–89. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

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Bröckling, Ulrich, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke (eds). 2011. Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges. Abingdon: Routledge. Davidson, Arnold I. 2011. “In Praise of Counter-Conduct.” History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 25–41. doi: 10.1177/0952695111411625 Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Death, Carl. 2010. “Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest.” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 9 (3): 235–251. doi:  10.1080/14742837.2010.493655

de Goede, Marieke, and Samuel Randalls. 2009. “Precaution, Preemption: Arts and Technologies of the Actionable Future.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (5): 859–878. doi: 10.1068/d2608 Foucault, Michel. 1983a. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, 229–252. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1983b. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 1997a. The Politics of Truth, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel. 1997b. “Technologies of the Self.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow, 223–251. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Lectures at the Collège de France 1981– 1982), ed. by Frédéric Gros. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory and Population (Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78), ed. by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hamann, Trent H. 2009. “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics.” Foucault Studies 6: 37–59. Jayyusi, Lena. 1984. Categorisation and the Moral Order. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jayyusi, Lena. 1991. “Values and Moral Judgement: Communicative Praxis as a Moral Order.” In Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, ed. by Graham Button, 227–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511611827.011 Jefferson, Gail. 1996. “A Case of Transcriptional Stereotyping.” Journal of Pragmatics 26: 159–170. doi:  10.1016/0378-2166(96)00010-0

Lindegaard, Laura Bang. 2012. Automobility at the Intersection of Discourse and Governmentality: A Study of the Accomplishment of Rationalities that Co-constitute Car-Dependent Mobility in the Face of Climate Change. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Culture and Global Studies: Aalborg University. Lindegaard, Laura Bang. 2014. “Doing Focus Group Research: Studying Rational Ordering in Focus Group Interaction.” Discourse Studies 16 (5): 629–644. doi: 10.1177/1461445614538563 Malpas, Jeff, and Gary Wickham. 1995. “Governance and Failure: On the Limits of Sociology.” Journal of Sociology 31 (3): 37–50. doi: 10.1177/144078339503100304 Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg. 2009. “The Final Foucault: Government of Others and Government of the Self.” In A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. by Sam Binkley, and Jorge Capetillo, 62–71. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press.

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Paterson, Matthew, and Johannes Stripple. 2010. “My Space: Governing Individuals’ Carbon Emissions.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2): 341–362. doi:  10.1068/d4109

Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raymond, Geoffrey. 2003. “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Social Review 68 (6): 939–967. doi: 10.2307/1519752 Rice, Jennifer L. 2010. “Climate, Carbon, and Territory: Greenhouse Gas Mitigation in Seattle, Washington.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (4): 929–937. doi:  10.1080/00045608.2010.502434

Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511488856 Rutland, Ted, and Alex Aylett. 2008. “The Work of Policy: Actor Networks, Governmentality, and Local Action on Climate Change in Portland, Oregon.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (4): 627–646. doi: 10.1068/d6907 Sacks, Harvey. 1992a. Lectures on Conversation: Volume I, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey. 1992b. Lectures on Conversation: Volume II, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sharrock, Wes. 1974. “On Owning Knowledge.” In Ethnomethodology, ed. by Ralph Turner, 45–53. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organisation in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511791208 Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig. 2011. “Introduction.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig, 3–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511921674.002 Stripple, Johannes, and Harriet Bulkeley. 2014. “On Governmentality and Climate Change.” In Governing Climate: New Approaches to Rationality, Politics and Power, ed. by Johannes Stripple, and Harriet Bulkeley, 1–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Krieken, Robert. 1996. “Proto-Governmentalization and the Historical Formation of Organizational Subjectivity.” Economy and Society 25 (2): 195–221. doi: 10.1080/03085149600000010 Watson, D. Rodney. 1978. “Categorisation, Authorisation, and Blame – Negotiation in Conversation.” Sociology 12 (1): 105–113. doi: 10.1177/003803857801200106 Watson, D. Rodney. 1997. “Some General Reflections on ‘Categorization’ and ‘Sequence’ in the Analysis of Conversation.” In Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis, ed. by Stephen Hester, and Peter Eglin, 46–79. Washington, DC: University Press of America.

chapter 4

The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters Janne Solberg

University College of Southeast Norway, Norway

This chapter uses ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the empirical manifestations of governmentality in vocational rehabilitation encounters in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. How can the counsellors’ actions be understood as conducting the conduct of clients in the setting of vocational rehabilitation? How do the counsellors’ practices, especially their ways of dealing with client resistance, relate to the core idea of governmentality as governing, not at the cost of, but through the freedom of individuals? The chapter analyses the dialogue techniques in six instances in which the client uses silence and minimal response tokens to resist the counsellor’s actions. Earlier CA research has suggested counsellors have a rather unilateral orientation to client resistance. However, this analysis reveals a more responsive orientation, since it demonstrates how counsellors choose inviting, non-intrusive action designs in the first place, as well as make adjustments to the cued client resistance. These practices may be understood as evidencing a technology of sensibility, co-constituting the client’s agency in situ.

1. Introduction Vocational rehabilitation is defined as “a process to overcome the barriers an individual faces when accessing, remaining or returning to work following inquiry, illness or impairment” (Holmes 2007: 10). For this group of clients, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) provides income insurance as well as case management at local NAV-offices. Using conversation analysis (CA), the chapter investigates the empirical manifestations of governance and dynamics in Norwegian vocational rehabilitation encounters, where the core-activities are planning and negotiating vocational rehabilitation services (Solberg 2011a, 2011b, in press). Studies of governmentality assume a technology of agency at work in such settings, but what do practices of governmentality actually look like at the level of institutional interaction? The practices of constituting and activating the client’s doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.04sol © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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autonomy (understood in a modern Kantian sense), as well as how clients negotiate such practices, remain opaque in studies of governmentality, thus the difference between disciplining power and governmentality becomes rather blurry. The aim of this chapter is to study the dynamics of governance ‘in flight’ through examining how NAV-counsellors manage minor resistance, or so called passive resistance, in six client encounters. How may the counsellors’ actions be understood as conducting the clients’ conduct? And how do the counsellors’ ways of dealing with passive client resistance in these cases relate to Foucault’s ideas of governmentality? CA research on counselling across settings has shown that passive client resistance is quite common, typically expressed as silences and/or minimal response tokens (mm, hm, yeah) (Heritage and Sefi 1992; Vehviläinen 1999). Moreover, this research suggests that the client’s resistance does not affect the professionals’ course of advice-giving (Heritage and Sefi 1992; Vehviläinen 1999): “it is difficult to resist the impression that the HVs [home visitors] would have initiated advice giving no matter how the mothers responded to their inquiries” (Heritage and Sefi 1992: 409f). Possibly, this may be taken to suggest a disciplinary orientation on the part of the counsellor, and from the view of disciplining, this kind of minor resistance may be of little significance (displays of conduct are good enough as the right motivation is expected to develop over time). Although this certainly may be part of the story, this chapter will demonstrate a more sensitive orientation that is more akin to a governmental perspective in which the client’s agency should be nourished (and utilised), rather than being a target of external regulation. 2. Foucault: Power, freedom and resistance As mentioned in Chapter 1 in this volume, governmentality is hybrid and does not exist in a pure form anywhere (Walters 2012: 41). This is likewise true for the provision of vocational rehabilitation that also has elements of disciplinary power, which is about examining, monitoring, and training in programs to improve (Lilja and Vinthagen 2014: 114), often through enclosing territories and people (Walters 2012: 35). Vocational rehabilitation services are certainly about disciplinary normalisation, as the task is to make disabled and unemployed persons conform to the norm of self-provision. Clients are, for instance, obliged to submit notification cards, to attend follow-up meetings, to participate in the making of individual action plans and to carry out planned activities. However, as noted by Simons (2013: 311), power relations can be analysed in terms of multiple power technologies. Hence, this chapter does not deny the disciplinary character of vocational rehabilitation services, instead it refocuses on “the conduct of conduct” under the rubric of governmentality.



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As accounted for in Chapter 1, Foucault’s lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population (2007) introduced the idea of a rationality of liberal government, which assumes humans to be autonomous subjects, capable to act on their own desires. Consequently, this ‘nature’ becomes a resource, which can be utilised for the common good: In his desire the individual may well be deceived regarding his personal interest, but there is something that does not deceive, which is that the spontaneous, or at any rate both spontaneous and regulated play of desire will in fact allow the production of an interest, of something favourable for the population.(2007: 73)

This perspective suggests new roles for those governing others: the problem of those who govern must absolutely not be how they can say no, up to what point they can say no, and with what legitimacy they can say no. The problem is how they can say yes: it is how to say yes to this desire. […] everything that stimulates and encourages this self-esteem, this desire, so that it can produce its necessary beneficial effects.  (73)

This way of thinking creates a concern to not be “governing too much” (Foucault 2007: 17). Thus, in contrast to disciplining power – correcting and controlling the outer behaviour of individual bodies – this new kind of government seeks to influence the self-regulation and self-reflection of free persons (Villadsen 2010: 126). In contrast to restricting the freedom of the governed (as in disciplinary power), governmentality presumes and integrates freedom into the art of government (Patton 2013: 183). As mentioned in Chapter 1 in this volume, Foucault (1983: 220) himself outlined power as action modifying other action rather than acting directly and immediately on others. This relational understanding of power presumes the existence of free subjects. Certainly, the parties do not need to be equal in every respect, but to Foucault it only makes sense to talk about power when there is some sort of opportunity to resist. In Foucault’s terms “it would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape” (Foucault 1983: 225). Power is thus never or seldom all-pervasive. If it is, it is simply domination or repression, and not a power relation in Foucault’s sense. In practice, an exercise of power will fall “somewhere on a continuum between ‘the free play of antagonistic reactions’ and the achievement of stable mechanisms that imply the ongoing possibility of governing or directing the conduct of others” (Patton 2013: 184f). In this floating, dynamic view of power, power and resistance are mutually constitutive (see the chapter by Lindegaard in this volume). It has been noted that Foucault seldom discussed the issue of resistance per se in his writings (Nealon 2008: 97), and in Section 5.3 in Chapter 1 in this volume it is suggested that this

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was not an important distinction to him (treating power and resistance as two of a kind). And while resistance could be expected to be outlined as an everyday phenomenon (“points of insubordination”), his account of “counter-conduct” in Security, Territory, Population focuses on movements: They are movements whose objective is a different form of conduct, that is to say: wanting to be conducted differently, by other leaders (conductors) and other shepherds, towards other objectives and forms of salvation, and through other procedure and methods.  (Foucault 2007: 194)

The selection of counter-conduct movements seems to suggest collective and alternative ways of living or believing, such as Protestantism and the peasant revolt at the time of reformation (Lilja and Vinthagen 2014: 119).1 As a consequence, resistance is associated with groups and activities operating on the margins of ordinary life (rather than embedded and everywhere). Thus, although Foucault elsewhere certainly suggests power operates at the level of “immediate everyday life” (Foucault 1983: 212), his account of counter-conduct seems to stress “common resistance that makes radical change possible” (McHoul and Grace 1997: 86). Foucault, nevertheless, remarks that a dimension of counter-conduct may be found “in fact in delinquents, mad people and patients” (Foucault 2007: 202). The lexical choice “in fact” is interesting as it marks his statement as somewhat unexpected or controversial. The notion of counter-conduct is possibly in any case too grand for the phenomenon of passive resistance in talk treated in this chapter. A person not talking at all or talking profoundly less than expected throughout the encounter would perhaps embody a refusal of talk as a power technique, but this is not the case in this data. The minor resistance is here better seen as an inherent element of “the free play of antagonistic reactions” (Patton 2013: 184f), which, although they do not question truths or suggest other truths, they nevertheless contribute to the negotiation of their terms of application. 3. The loose phenomenology of governmentality research As mentioned in Section 5.4 in the introductory chapter, governmentality studies have been much concerned with practices of conducting the conduct of others. Foucault’s ideas of governmentality have been used to describe the relationship of modern welfare-states and their “empowered” citizens, where the new practices

1. Also see Sokhi-Bulley (2013), who adopts the notion to analyse the riots in London in August 2011.



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of participation in decision-making tend to be understood as “new strategies of regulation and control” (Newman 2005: 12). But the crucial point of conducting in and through the subject’s voluntarily actions is nevertheless hard to spot in governmentality research. In an article about workfare, McDonald and Marston (2005: 381) speak of case managers as ‘engineers’ building active citizens in a job network system for unemployed persons, but this metaphor of engineering might not catch the dynamics at work in welfare-encounters very well. Another metaphor much referred to in this respect is Foucault’s account of pastoral power (or a certain version of it) as an overall description of modern authority (see the chapter by Zhukova Klausen in this volume). As the Christian forerunner to governmentality (Foucault 2007: 123ff), pastoral power is a power realised through techniques of confession and direction of conscience (Chrulew 2014: 56). Talk or dialogue is seen as a governmental technology allowing the subordinate party to speak (Villadsen 2010: 128), while the truths revealed might be utilised by the professional in the improvement process. Being an individualised power, modern pastoral government “invests in the capacities of the individual, developing qualities of rationality, autonomy, and decision making” (Simons 2013: 312). The welfare states’ policing of social problems, like health and employment, may be seen as a secularised version of this shepherd who “keeps watch” over the flock and each of its members (Foucault 2007: 127f). The services of vocational rehabilitation treated in this chapter are part of this welfare apparatus, which through calculation and a “power of care” (127), seeks to govern and facilitate the citizens’ self-governing, to enable the unemployed person to compete on the labour market. In governmentality research this modern version of pastoralism in relation to the governing of the unemployed is outlined by Dean (1995) in the following manner: Such practices seek to shape the desires, needs, aspirations, capacities and attitudes of the individuals who come within their ken. This, however, is not the entire story. These practices also engage ‘clients’ in their own government by demanding their complicity in these practices of self-shaping, self-cultivation and self-presentation.  (567) In short, through these practices the individual no longer claims a benefit but becomes a client of various agencies, seeking and obeying the directions of pastoral agents, and receiving an allowance conditional on establishing a particular relation to the self. (576)

But if the clients’ complicity is “demanded” and the clients are simply “obeying” the professionals’ directions, this sounds more like disciplinary power than the conduct of conduct in a Foucauldian sense. Foucault saw pastoral power as manifesting itself “in its zeal, devotion, and endless application” rather than “striking

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display of strength and superiority” (Foucault 2007: 127), thus the picture of the demanding pastoral agent misses the more gentle aspect of governance, which in this chapter will be referred to as a “technology of sensitivity” (Rose 1999: 77). Although Nikolas Rose (1999: 77) uses this notion to denote a growing pastoral relationship between teacher and pupil in the nineteenth-century, this might be applied to counselling settings as well.2 Moreover, it can be claimed that governmentality studies are seldom backed up with close-up data evidencing governmental practices as a solid empirical phenomenon. Despite the alleged priority given to “how” questions (Dean 2010: 39), the research rarely gives an in-depth description of just how professionals practically proceed in activating their clients’ autonomy, not to forget how such attempts might be resisted. Thus, there is a need to identify and account for governmentality practices and the dynamics in welfare encounters as an empirical real-time phenomena. 4. Conversation analysis as a tool to explicate governmental practices The rather loose phenomenology of governmentality research might be tightened by the analytic tools of ethnomethodological conversation analysis.3 In particular, conversation analysis might help to explicate the intersubjective dimension of governmental practices. For instance, practices of asking eliciting questions, investigating the client’s plans/ideas (“What have you thought about?”) has been demonstrated as one very common way to activate the client’s side in vocational rehabilitation services (Solberg 2011a, 2011b). Moreover, research on career counselling has shown that counsellors may withhold advice-giving when advice is actively pursued by the client, perhaps due to the ideal of self-directedness in adult education (Vehviläinen 2003). Whatever techniques are adopted, they are practically accomplished through the machinery of talk, and CA’s focus on action design and sequence as a vehicle of accomplishing actions is here understood as compatible with Foucault’s characterizations of power as decentred and everywhere “an action upon an action” (Foucault 1983: 155). Especially rewarding is the notion of “recipient design” which points out how co-participants are addressed in talk, or the “multitude of respects in which 2. Especially since Carl Roger’s Person-Centred Approach (1951), which was pioneering in terms of addressing the client’s inner life. 3. The methodology of conversation analysis is here put into the service of studies of governmentality, rather than following the ethnomethodological ideal of “unmotivated looking” (Have 2007: 120).



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the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the coparticipants” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974: 43). When designing actions in talk, the speaker displays an expectation of a certain (momentary) model of the receiver and this is a crucial analytics in terms of understanding instances of ‘subjectification’ in talk, that is, how the client is being objectified as a subject (see, in this volume, Chapter 1 and Lindegaard’s chapter for discussions of the notions of ‘subjectification’ and ‘subjectivation’). For instance, to ask a question implies that the receiver is informed about the matter at hand (Heritage 1984: 250), as when clients of vocational rehabilitation are addressed as potentially knowledgeable about solutions, and they are expected to suggest plans (Solberg 2011a, 2011b) or alternative plans (Solberg in press). In terms of sequence, such eliciting questions are initiating actions designed to project a (certain) answer as the preferred next action, thus a normative pressure for compliance is thereby established. In Heritage’s words the inherent relevance rule in so called adjacency turns represents ways for speakers to exert “some local influence over the conduct of their co-interactants” (Heritage 1984: 265). CA nevertheless deems participants to have agency in terms of being free to act otherwise. If not, practices of ‘subjectivation’, that is, a person’s relation to herself, would not have an outer manifestation other than simply confirming assigned identities. What the participant cannot choose is to step outside the situated nexus of conversational and social norms (given the ethnomethodological understanding of reflexivity). Whatever he or she does next, the second action produced is heard and interpreted as responding to the first action. And if the invited (or preferred) response is missing, this becomes an accountable matter, in need of an explanation. Deviances from the expected pattern are then possible, though they may be noticed by co-participants (as resistance or something else), and possibly addressed. CA’s description of turns of talk as projecting or inviting rather than automatically inducing compliance is thus here deemed to be in line with Foucault’s view that power presumes acting subjects with (at least some) freedom intact. However, it should be noted that domination in this respect should not be seen as merely brute physical force, controlling bodies so to speak. It is here assumed that even verbal actions might attain a character of domination if the conversational pressure is strongly sustained, giving the co-participant little choice in terms of how to proceed (see Extract (6) in the analysis section). Hence, Foucault’s assumption that freedom is something that is constantly produced is in this chapter understood as something being (at least partly), co-produced and co-constituted in and through discourse.

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Governmentality research has underscored the openness of liberal government. According to Walters (2012: 35) disciplinary power operates by enclosing territories and people, while “liberal governmentality is premised on a certain vector of openness. It opens the town and the territory, the nation and its borders.” Although this statement clearly relates to what Rose and Miller (2010) called “government at a distance”, this chapter argues that even communication in face-toface encounters (what might be called ‘government close by’) is also likely to have a character of openness. As described in the CA research, actions vary regarding their ability to make participants accountable for providing an answer, or a certain answer (preferred ones). Stivers and Rossano (2010) show that different actions mobilise response to different degrees, thus turn design is of much importance in addition to the pressure generated by sequential position. In studies across languages, questions and requests for information are regularly responded to, while actions like announcements, noticings and assessments are less likely to have a response (6, 9). According to Stivers and Rossano, interrogative syntax, interrogative prosody, recipient-tilted epistemic asymmetry and gaze are important features of turn design affecting the mobilisation of response. As will be shown in the analysis section, the counsellors in these data tend to choose action designs which only to a small degree make the client accountable for providing a response. Moreover, little is done to act on the client’s passivity in terms of pursuing more substantial answers. This soft interactional pattern, not making the client openly accountable, is here seen in relation to governmentality and the exercise of modern authority in welfare encounters. The counsellors may have chosen action designs which more clearly established a normative pressure to respond, but a too strong response pressure may on the other hand lead to inauthentic performances, which (at least in a governmentality perspective) is of little use. Given the belief in inner motivation as “the truth” in this field (see next section), the client’s volunteered response is perhaps more meaningful than a coerced one (Stivers and Rossano 2010: 23). Hence, non-coercive action designs may be a way for NAV-counsellors to in situ balance the concern to govern against the concern to constitute the client as an autonomous and efficient being. This chapter demonstrates the counsellors’ situated efforts to not govern too much, but first a brief look at the legal rules and the institutional frameworks of vocational rehabilitation (what Foucault called “sovereign power”), which represent the talk’s distal context.



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5. The policy of vocational rehabilitation Transnational organisations like the EU and the OECD have for a long time emphasised the need to shift from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ policies, where the primary goal is to enhance labour market participation among people of working age (Johnsson and Hvinden 2005: 103). In the Norwegian context the objective of the programme of vocational rehabilitation was to get disabled, unemployed clients into or back to work (according to § 11-6 in The Norwegian National Insurance Act [Folketrygdloven], current when the data for this study was collected, a “suitable” vocation, by means of “appropriate” and “necessary” initiatives). The benefit “vocational rehabilitation money” used to belong to the National Employment Services, but in 2010, during the NAV-reform (2006–2011) several benefits merged into what is now called “work assessment allowance” (but also this new benefit is a right-based benefit eligible for persons with health problems).4 Policies are implemented at local NAV-offices (usually one in each municipality), which offer a broad range of social and welfare services following a “one-door” policy, including services of vocational rehabilitation. The clients are expected to have “tailor-made” services and in the NAV-system there have been as many as 48 initiatives (Hernes, Heum, Haavorsen and Saglie 2010). Moreover, there has been a strong tradition in Norway for measures qualifying clients for employment (“train → place”), more than employment programmes orientated to direct inclusion in working life (“place = train”), though lately this thinking have been questioned (Frøyland 2006; Schafft 2008). Research has shown that clients often choose a more theoretical education leading them away from production work, customer service and into client work, education, administration, civil services and such (Grøgaard 1998). In 2006 as many as half of all clients of vocational rehabilitation took part in “education in regular schools” (Duell, Singh and Tergeist 2009). Other frequently used measures were “work experience in ordinary enterprises” (15%), “supported employment” (9%) as well as “work experience in sheltered enterprises” (9%) (Duell, Singh and Tergeist 2009). The frequent use of education programmes in case management fits very well with the neoliberal view on the subject as an enterprise (Patton 2013: 184), increasing the person’s capacities to compete in the labour market. However, there are 4. In this corpus health problems related to neck/back was most common, followed by psychological dysfunction, which is in line with the Norwegian population at large. Most clients had work experience of some length, and half of the group were skilled workers or had higher education at bachelor-level. Information about education is, though, inaccurate as they rely on self-reports using questionnaires.

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nevertheless strong accountability demands to be managed in situ for the participants in the process of creating an action plan since this is a service to be negotiated, rather than taken for granted. 5.1

The motivated client, the reasonable client

In modern welfare encounters the idea of the contract enshrines individualisation as well as responsibilisation (McDonald and Marston 2005: 376). In this setting of vocational rehabilitation both the counsellor and the client are expected to take part in the process of making an action plan, and, according to legislation and guidelines, the counsellor is expected to facilitate active client participation and provide individually adapted services. The policy rhetoric of client or “user participation”, drawing on a discourse of active citizenship and joint decision-making (Johnsson and Hvinden 2005: 102), is more recent, but in this setting, policy has been working on a construction of the active, self-governing client for quite a while. In the 1990s the theoretical foundation for the services of vocational rehabilitation was outlined in a policy document with the subtitle “Towards professional expertise in the work for vocational rehabilitation”. Here a new way of understanding the client role, called “the actor model” (Tøssebro 1999) was launched, and this new approach was framed as a replacement of the traditional Parsonian sick role, where the professional was the active party in making working life diagnosis, similarly to the role of doctors.5 In terms of its scientific basis, this document anchors the actor model in existential philosophy and constructionism and especially Nygård’s (1993) account of motivation psychology. The purpose of the actor model was to make the client think of herself as a responsible actor rather than a pawn that is passively moved around on the board (Tøssebro 1999: 23). Building on a “faith can move mountains”-thinking, the mantra of activation discourse is to focus on solutions rather than problems (Carstens 2002: 37). A strong motivation is deemed to overcome almost any obstacle, at the end of Section 6.1 in the Guidelines of vocational rehabilitation one could read: “A strong motivation can no doubt make up for poor health conditions” (NAV 2006). But in practice, facilitating the client’s self-governing is not the only concern for NAV-counsellors as the discourse of active citizenship is not the only one in the field of vocational rehabilitation. The law terms “necessary” and “appropriate” initiatives assume the counsellor to have a gate-keeper role as well. According to the

5. The present method of assessing the client’s work capability by means of standardised schemes is based on an evidence-based thinking, which is also common in social work, but originally adopted from medicine.



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Guidelines of vocational rehabilitation (Section 6.1.4) there are several elements which need to be considered in terms of appropriateness: the client’s education and work experience, the probability of achieving the goal, the availability of jobs or qualification initiatives, abilities, health conditions, wishes, needs and age. Thus, in addition to the client’s wishes there are many concerns to consider (“the client’s wishes” is not even top of this list). Moreover, the judgement of necessity is about deciding “which of the appropriate initiatives that will be right to choose economically speaking” (Guidelines of vocational rehabilitation, Section 6.1.5). Here is an example from the data of how this reasoning process may be practically implemented: (ID9) (Cl = male client, Co = female counsellor) 94 Co: After all it is a quite long race [or three years eh, you have probably heard some and 95 Cl: [°yes°, 96 Co: that [preferably it is) the shortest possibly route back to- to↑work, 97 Cl: [°sure° 98 Co: do you have an alternative plan or?

Before asking for an alternative plan (line 98), the counsellor explains the institutional context that short-term measures are preferred (line 96), and this is designed as knowledge the client is expected to have been given at an earlier occasion (“you have probably heard some” in line 94). Thus, in practice the model of the motivated, solution-seeking client needs to be carefully balanced against a model of the reasonable client, who cooperates in a rational decision-making process and is able to consider their case from different angles (such as economics or efficiency). Even though norms and procedures may derive their authority from scientific rules (for instance research evidencing the productive aspects of work life) or discourses (like “the actor model”), they are nevertheless negotiated at the micro level of institutional encounters and in the next section the intersubjective texture of governing practices will be analysed in more detail. 6. NAV-counsellors’ adjustments to passive client resistance In contrast to the findings of Heritage and Sefi (1992), which describe the professionals’ conduct as overwhelmingly unilateral, a more responsive orientation, suggesting that the counsellor’s actions are attempts at conducting the client’s conduct through a technology of sensibility (Rose 1999: 77), rather than controlling in an outer sense, will be demonstrated in this section. In six instances, the counsellors’ project of activating clients in finding solutions (“the motivated client”) or

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scrutinizing plans (“the reasonable client”) will be passively resisted by the client. In talk, this may be displayed through silences and minimal response tokens like “mm” and “yes”, and, following Heritage and Sefi (1992), such unmarked acknowledgements merely confirm that the message is received, without acknowledging their character, say as an advice (projecting an acknowledgement at least) or a suggestion (projecting an acceptance/rejection). These practices may also be characterised as negative resistance, as such actions fall short of producing the invited or preferred action (Heritage and Clayman 2010: 247). Now a silence in a slot where an answer was expected is readily seen as negative resistance in the case of a question, but what about actions, which not as clearly project a relevant next action? As mentioned the counsellors in this data often choose rather non-coercive action designs (e.g. status report, information giving), without interrogative morphosyntax and intonation “demanding” a response from the client. In Stivers and Rossano’s (2010: 17) terms one could possibly say that such designs “invite uptake but do not inherently pressure recipients for response”. Thus, does it make sense then to talk about client resistance at all when the counsellor adopts this kind of inviting turn design that only to a minor degree makes the client accountable to provide a response? To this it might be argued that even inviting actions establish a local relevance structure and thus project a certain course of action as preferred to others (probably both in a structural and psychological sense). This means that even such actions do have an inherent pressure to uptake, albeit not as strongly projected as in the case of inquiries and invitations. Moreover, to the participants the institutional context is also an interpretive resource in this respect, cuing the professional speech to have an institutional backside and thus to be important (or at least relevant) to the client’s case. This means that the client as a reflexive interactant is likely to ‘know’ what (s)he is doing when (s)he is not latching on to the counsellor’s apparently innocent reportings or information about an option, but treats them as reportings/information only. Thus, although not resisting in a direct and open sense clients are here seen as indexing resistance of some sort when implicitly declining the counsellor’s inviting actions. Despite the pastoral aspect character of these actions (merely inviting or “offering” something for the client) they nevertheless represent ways of conducting the client’s conduct (to accept options or to consider alternative options). Another pastoral aspect of the counsellor’s conduct is that the clients’ (missing) uptake of the offered topic is quite cautiously pursued in the talk (if at all).The conduct of conduct is surely not a one-way street, and when the client says something, it is an interpretive issue what counts as an adequate answer. A “mm” is normally heard as a continuer, and not as an answer to a question or as an acceptance of a suggestion (especially not in this setting involving long-term entitlements for



Chapter 4.  The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters 131

the clients). Following Lindström’s (1999) research on mundane talk, affirmative response tokens like “yes” tend to be produced as turn prefaces, introducing a longer turn of talk, rather than independent actions. And when they do appear as freestanding actions, they are not heard as doing adequate acceptance or granting. Here is one example from Lindström (1999: 115), where a grown-up daughter (D) talks with her mum (M) on the phone, and asks to be picked up at the train station: 13 D: Yes (can you no-) come you can you come and pick me up at ten I have walked so much today, 14 M: yes 15 D: Would that be okay

Lindström’s analysis suggest that affirmative response tokens like “yes” or “mm” can be treated as insufficient by the receiver and a more adequate answer will be pursued, as we see the daughter do in this extract in line 15. The counsellors in the NAV data do not tend to behave in this direct mundane manner in terms of pursuing a more adequate answer, thus clients’ passive resistance is only to a small degree treated as something to overcome. This suggests that some elements of the following interactional pattern are present in the NAV data: a. b. c. d. e. f.

The counsellor’s action of conducting the client’s conduct. The client’s minimal response. (The counsellor’s cautiously pursue of uptake). (The client’s minimal response). The counsellor aborts or backs down from action (a). (The counsellor proceeds to another, and sometimes more direct, action (a)).

Extract 1: The counsellor backs away from considering alternative plans In Extract (1), from a second meeting, the client wants to take a higher education programme, though she is just not sure what subject to choose, and different alternatives have been discussed. However, at the end of the meeting the counsellor nevertheless begins to talk about alternative measures, implying short-term qualifications (courses). (1) (ID8a) (Co = female counsellor, Cl = female client) 292 Co: Sånn so:m (1.0) ehm eg har oppfatta deg og sånn som vi har snakka om så Like (1.0) ehm I have understood you and like we have talked about so- so så æ har gått igjennom litt oversikten over ulike kurs vi har. so I have gone through a bit the overview over various courses we have. 293 Cl: mm. 294 (0.6)

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295 Co: berre for å SE: er det noe æ liksom umiddelbart kan tilby dæ (0.5) for at just to SEE: is there sort of anything I instantly can offer you (0.5) so that (0.7) du på en måte kan komme kjappere ut i den jobben, (0.7) you in a way can come quicker on the job, 296 Cl: mm, 297 Co: og ikkje vær avhengig av en sånn type UTdanning. and not be dependent on that kind of EDucation. 298 (0.5) 299 Co: .h Å- å det æ har funne det er jo det som går på h ((host)) .h And- and what I have found is what is about h ((coughing)) kontorfag og elektronisk arkivbehandling, som vi (.) også har commercial subjects and electronic records management, as we (.) also have vært borti. been involved in. 300 (1.2) 301 Co: e:h302 (0.9) 303 Co: Men But304 (1.8) 305 Co: Vi har jo diskutert at-= og stilt litt spørsmålstegn om det er (0.6) eh den mest We do have discussed that-=and questioned whether that is (0.6) eh the most høvelige jobben for deg på sikt da. appropriate job to you long term.

In the beginning of line 299 the counsellor contextualises her action of reviewing NAV’s course catalogue in her understanding of the client as well as earlier conversations with the client. This portrays her act of considering initiatives, getting the client to “come quicker on the job”, as conducted for the sake of the client (rather than economics as mentioned in the guidelines). A shorter route to work is presented as an advantage to the client, who does not have to be dependent on an education (lines 292–287). From the phrase “like we have talked about” it can be inferred that these matters may have been discussed with the client on an earlier occasion. Possibly this demonstrates what CA research on counselling settings have called a procedure of “stepwise entry”, where the professional uses the client’s answer to ground an advice in the client’s perspective (Heritage and Sefi 1992; Maynard 1992; Silverman 1997; Vehviläinen 1999), though, in this case, the client’s view is at best alluded to (“like we have talked about”). But instead of recognizing the matter as known, the client becomes all silent as soon as it becomes clear that this path would rule out a higher education (from line 298). We can imagine that the counsellor could have continued the proposal progression and directly asked the client whether the subjects mentioned in line 299 could be an option to her.



Chapter 4.  The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters 133

But the client remains silent (lines 300, 302), and in line 303 and 305, the counsellor produces an account backing away from the alternative options introduced in line 299. Thus, most likely, the counsellor hears the client’s persistent silence as displaying a negative stance to her project of considering alternatives that do not imply higher education. The case demonstrates that in an institutional context where the client’s view matters even silence might be heard as a contribution in the ongoing negotiation of what issues that should be discussed. In the context of vocational rehabilitation the client is expected to have a say in the process of coming to terms with the content of the action plan. But in this case the client does not even produce regular continuers like “mm”, and their absence seems to be noticed by the counsellor (signalling something like “I don’t want to go there”). Thus, by backing away from the topic (line 305), the counsellor preserves the client’s agency in this issue and in the rest of the conversation they continue to consider different programmes of higher education.

Extract 2: The counsellor backs down from considering a temporary initiative In Extract (2), the counsellor works around a policy ideal, suggesting clients to always be in a state of activity, rather than passively waiting for planned initiatives to start up. The period of idle time before the client’s initiative starts up is formulated as “weeks of pedalling” (line 127). But the client does not cooperate in the counsellor’s project of unpacking and solving this institutional issue. (2)  (ID 7) (Co = male counsellor, Cl = female client) 127 Co: Men nå er det litt sånn=det er litt pressa på: holdt jeg på å si- (.) Hvis jeg But now it is a little bit like=it is a little pressed fo:r I was about to say- (.) If I søker deg inn nå så kommer du ikke i gang før i januar, .h så det blir apply you in now then you will not get started until january, .h so it will be noen u- ukers tråkk fram til da. a few w-weeks of pedalling until then. 128 Cl: °mm°. 129 (0.6) 130 Co: E::h hva (er det du tenker om det=da?) Hvis du E::h what (do you think about this=then?) If you131 (1.2) 132 Co: Nå er det jul snart og da. Now it is christmas soon as well. 133 (0.8) 134 Cl: >Nå er det snart ↑jul. ((smilestemme)) >Now it is soon ↑christmas. ((smile voice)) 135 Co: j[a, y[es,

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136 Cl: [ja, riktig hhh ((latter)) [yes, right hhh ((laughter)) 137 Co: (hh) ((laughter?)) 138 Cl: .H 139 (0.5) 140 Cl: So: [H ((coughing)) 141 Co: Du [kommer nok ikke i gang før etter jul- jul altså.= You [will not get started until after christmas- christmas I mean.= 142 Cl: =nei. =no. 143 (1.7) 144 Co: Men det er klart at det er (jo) ingenting som hindrer deg i forhold til å så But surely it is nothing which prevents you as regards følge med på stillinger som kan være spennanes=og så hvis det er noe som du keeping up with jobs which might be interesting=and so if there is anything syns ser interessant ut, så ringer du til meg, så kan vi kikke på de:t which you think looks interesting, then you call me, so we can look at i:t [å: [a:nd145 Cl: [mm. 146 Co: da er det mulig (av deg) åsså prøve ut ting. then it is possible (for you) to try things out. 147 Cl: [mm. 148 Co: [(i forkant og uavhengig av det her altså). [(prior to and independent of this I mean). 149 (0.4) 150 Cl: Ja, yes,

Evidently the client does not take up the counsellor’s glossed status report in line 127: the “mm” in line 128 is very low and this minimal response is usually understood as a continuer, awaiting the co-participant to go on. However, the counsellor’s question in line 130, asking for the client’s view indicates that the report in line 127 rather might have been designed to invite or fish for the client’s point of view. Note that it is not made very explicit what the issue is (what “this” in line 130 refers to). The client is expected to infer from the noticing what ‘this’ is about, and there is nothing indicating that the client has not understood the question. Anyway, this quite direct request for the client’s view on the problem is not taken up by the client. In line 131 she is all silent, and this is a gap which clearly “belongs” (Bilmes 1994: 80) to her. This behaviour represents a violation of the relevance rule in question-answer sequences (a question makes relevant an answer), and possibly the counsellor



Chapter 4.  The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters 135

interprets the client’s missing answer as resistance. His noticing of the coming of Christmas in line 132 is hardly designed as merely a report of facts. This fact furnishes an account excusing a short period of inactivity, and might be read as backing down from the issue of activity. The client’s joyful treatment of his utterance in line 134 as only information does not seem to take this institutional framework into account, though the smile voice may be interpreted as an embrace of the offered excuse. After some laughing (at least the client laughs), the client seems to suggest by invoking the concluding term “so” in line 142 that the issue should be settled. But the counsellor is not ready to leave the issue of activity quite yet as he, in line 141 repeats the problem that the client will not get started until after Christmas. With this increment the client is given another opportunity to come up with an appropriate answer (for instance a positive answer, acknowledging the institutional ideal of being always active).6 But again, the client simply confirms this as information given to her (line 142), rather than treating it as a topic to be extended. Despite the client’s missing alignment to the agenda of talking about contemporary initiatives, the counsellor in line 144 informs about the client’s opportunity to be active after all (and to look for interesting jobs). And as with the increment in line 141, this also offers a slot for the client to embrace this sound advice and thus portray herself as an active client. But again the counsellor’s talk is merely given an unmarked acknowledgement (“mm” in lines 145 and 147 and “yes” in line 150); thus, it is not acknowledged as useful information/advice (Heritage and Sefi 1992). In this extract the counsellor introduces the agenda quite cautiously through a status report (line 127), awaiting the client’s reaction. And when the client does not respond to the counsellor’s eliciting of the client’s perspective, the counsellor backs down from the institutional issue of activity through offering an account, excusing inactivity (the coming of Christmas). But despite the counsellor’s alignment to the client’s potential negative stance, he nevertheless re-introduces the agenda as an issue to be further worked on (the increment in line 141 and the advice in line 144). In doing so, he once again addresses the client as a particular kind of recipient; that is, the client is modelled as a subject who is (or should be) interested in giving this some thought. But despite the counsellor’s insistence in terms of (re)introducing the institutional agenda, the client is all along invited to volunteer to the subjection of active clienthood, she is not at any moment “forced” to align at the conversational level. Thus, the counsellor’s repeated, but non-coercive, attempts at governing the client’s conduct also contribute to co-constituting the client as an autonomous subject. 6. An increment means an extension where a turn continues the action of the previous turn (Schegloff 1996). Such turns do not start “new actions,” but create new transition-relevant places at which the recipient can (once more) display recipiency (Thompson, Ford and Fox 2002).

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Extract 3: The counsellor minimises proposal before switching activity In Extract (3), the counsellor has also suggested that the client should look for a site for work training before starting up a planned education. At this moment, the counsellor has proposed multiple places to ask, but the client has so far resisted, both passively and actively (arguing that she does not feel competent to do this at the moment). The “but” in the beginning of line 413 probably refers to the client’s persistent resistance on this issue. (3) (ID13) (Co = female counsellor, Cl = female client) 413 Co: Men hvis du- hvis du (.)kommer og henvender dæ med det for øye at du bare But if you- if you (.) come and approach with the purpose that you just har lyst til å ha en plass der du kan ↑trene dæ litt [så er det helt greit. feel like having a site where you can ↑train a bit [then it is fine. 414 Cl: [m. m. 415 (0.5) 416 Cl: °.ja° °.yes° 417 (.) 418 Co: Og det kan (jo) godt hende at dem sier ja til det. And (sure) it may be that they say yes. 419 Cl: °mm°. 420 (3.0) 421 Co: mm. 422 (1.5) 423 Co: Og det treng jo ikkje være på full tid heller.= And after all it does not have to be full time either.= 424 Cl: =nei,= =no,= 425 Co: =ikkje sant,= =you know,= 426 Cl: =m,= 427 Co: =det kan jo være en til to daga i uka eller-= =and it may thus be one or two days a week or-= 428 Cl: =hm, hm, 429 (4.3) 430 ?: °°.ja°° °°.yes°° 431 (3.8) 432 Co: Men det var det der med hø- eh, skal vi se med (de derre) kurs(pengan). But about the eh- eh, shall we see about (the) course (money).



Chapter 4.  The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters 137

The hypothetical form of the candidate proposal in line 413 is ‘instructive’, embodying for the client how she could go along in contacting possible workplaces and how she might be met as well. However, the quiet “yes” in line 416 is far too weak to be heard as an affirmative response (Lindström 1999: 115), in which the client obligates herself to follow the advice. Thus, in line 418, the counsellor delivers an “increment”, offering the client another opportunity to take up the advice. Instead, the client produces a continuer (in line 419) and a gap of three seconds follows (line 420), which is extended through the counsellor’s continuer (line 421), thus refusing to take the floor. But this duel of silences does not activate the client’s engagement, so in line 423 the counsellor puts forward an argument that less than full time may be an option to the client. Adopting the expression “you know” (line 425), the counsellor attempts to establish her suggestion as common knowledge, but the client does not take the floor. And in line 427 the counsellor sets forth a moderated version of the proposal that would be far less obliging to the client (“one or two days a week”), although again without success. Through continuers (line 428) and substantial gaps (lines 429, 431), the client positions herself as not complying. Thus, in line 432 the counsellor changes the activity and starts to talk about a quite different issue (course money). In designing the advice in line 413 the counsellor assumes the client to be a subject open to the idea of finding a site for work training, but the candidate proposal also indicates an understanding of the client to be in need of some instruction and support. When the client does not demonstrate any uptake of the advice, the counsellor uses silence to induce talk as well as positive arguments about parttime, making the suggestion more tempting to the client. The client is given several opportunities to respond, but when the client’s passive resistance sustains across turns, the counsellor gives up the topic. This reveals an orientation, indicating that the client’s acceptance may be pursued to some degree, but if the client does not volunteer to engage in an issue, it does not make sense to go on unilaterally.

Extract 4: The counsellor cooperates in the client’s switch of activity As we will see in Extract (4), in this kind of encounter it is not only the professional who can initiate a switch of activity. The client in this extract is observably passive during the meeting, which may suggest that being taciturn is part of her “personal style”. In the extract the counsellor tries to convince the client to take a course for clients with anxiety (strangely, this option was brought onto the table by the client herself; see the analysis in Solberg 2011b). As we enter the talk the counsellor has been promoting this course for quite a while, without getting the client’s acceptance to sign up for this course.

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(4) (ID4) (Co = male counsellor, Cl = female client) 244 Co: Så det- (0.4) akkurat det som heter Steg for steg det kunne helt=klart vært et So that- (0.4) just the one called Step by step that could definitively been an alternativ hvis du:: alternative if you:: 245 (.) 246 Cl: mm, 247 (0.7) 248 Co: hvis du tenker at det kunne vært noe if you think that this could have been something 249 (1.0) 250 Cl: °ja,(det kan hende)° °yes,(that might be)° 251 Co: mm? 252 (2.3) 253 Cl: Og jeg- på en=måte så er jeg liksom veldig klar for å liksom begynne å jobbe And I–In a=way then I am sort of very ready for sort of starting to work og tjo og hei, and tally-ho, 254 Co: Ja? yes? 255 Cl: Men (0.4) så er det lissom- (.) jeg er veldig redd og da hh ((latter))= But (0.4) then it is sort of- (.) I am very scared too hh ((laughter)) = 256 Co: =Ja? =yes? 257 Cl: Det er veldig skummelt fordi:=jeg vet at hvis jeg får en arbeidsoppgave It is very frightening because:=I know that if I get a work task som jeg ikke forstår eller jeg er litt (nysgjerrig p[å) that I do not understand or I am a bit (curious ab[out) 258 Co: [mm, 259 Cl: (eller sånt noe) >så klarer jeg (det) ikkethen I will not make (it)< (0.6) But then (.) eh fikser (det)=ikke=liksom. ((tykk stemme)) do not handle (it)=sort of. ((thick voice)) 260 Co: nei, no, 261 Cl: >Da blir jeg helt ødelagtThen I’m totally screwedDet er (litt) vanskli`< >It is (a bit) difficult< 266 Co: mm. 267 (1.2) 268 Co: .h Sånn er det mange som har det. .h That’s how many people have it.

In line 244 the counsellor says “so”, which is a concluding term, but the incompleteness of the turn provides an opportunity for the client to join in. But she does not, and in line 248 the counsellor finishes the turn, in an incremental fashion. There is a one second gap (line 249) before she whispers in a very low and soft voice “yes, that might be” (line 250). Again this can hardly be heard as an acceptance of the course option and through the continuer “mm?” in line 251 the counsellor allows or perhaps encourages the client to carry on (note the rise of intonation). Instead another very long gap occurs (line 252), and when the client does take the floor in line 253 she does design her response as being an extension of the topic at hand (see the “and” in the beginning of the turn). However, this is not the case. She now starts to talk about her anxieties, and the counsellor cooperates in this shift of activity from decision-making to trouble talk. The pastoral dimension is perhaps noticeable in several places in this extract. The course option is introduced in an unobtrusive manner through the counsellor’s positive assessment, and care is taken to design the decision as belonging to the client (“if you think”, line 248). And when the counsellor gets an insufficient acceptance, “yes, that might be” (in line 250), he does not initiate a repair sequence, checking that this is what she really meant. His “mm?” can at most be read as encouraging her to elaborate, keep on talking. The counsellor’s actions represents a rather soft way of governing the client’s conduct, and when she switches activity into trouble talk she is not guided back. Thus, much care is taken in this instance to not interfere with the client’s agency in the talk.

Extract 5: The counsellor offers deferment of decision In Extract (5), we meet the same parties as in Extract (4), somewhat later in the talk. We enter the talk as the counsellor sets up various scenarios of how being in a sheltered workshop can be combined with taking a course for clients with anxiety. At this moment the client has neither accepted the sheltered workshop nor the course. (5) (ID4) (Co = male counsellor, Cl = female client) 335 Co: Eh: (0.4) o- og det kurset- hvert fall sånn som det har vært til nå så har det Eh: (0.4) a- and this course- at least the way it has been until now it has

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starta hvert halvår. Altså det starter i januar og det starter i- i: august. started every six months. Thus it starts in january and it starts i- i:n august. 336 Cl: mm, 337 Co: Så det er fra januar til sommern eller fra høsten og- og til jul. So it runs from january to summer or from autumn and- and to christmas. 338 Cl: mm. 339 Co: m. Så det holder på et sånt kurs nå som er ferdig i desember. m. So there is such a course now that is finished in december. 340 Cl: >°yes°< 341 Co: Mm. Å- å hvis det skulle på en måte vise seg at (1.0) du ikke kommer inn i Mn. A- And if it sort of should prove that (1.0) you do not get in in januar så kan det hende at du på en måte- (0.5) du trenger å være der oppe så january then it might be that you in a way- (0.5) you need to be up there as lenge som fram til (0.5) over sommern og at du kan begynne på det da i: long as until (0.5) over the summer and that you can start it then i:n (0.8) i august igjen lissom. (0.8) in august somehow. 342 Cl: mm. 343 Co: mm. Eller så kan det hende at det er andre ting som er aktuelt (.) når vi mm. Or there may be other things which are relevant (.) when we kommer så langt. get there. 344 Cl: mm, 345 Co: mm. 346 (1.9) 347 Cl: .H >Jayesword word< Inwards arrows show faster speech, outward slower

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References Bilmes, Jack. 1994. “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning.” Semiotica 98: 73–87. doi: 10.1515/semi.1994.98.1-2.73 Carstens, Annette. 2002. “‘Motivation’ i visitationssamtaler på aktiveringsområdet.” In Det magtfulde møde mellem system og klient, ed. by Margaretha Järvinen, Jørgen Elm Larsen, and Nils Mortensen, 28–60. Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Chrulew, Matthew. 2014. “Pastoral Counter-Conducts: Religious Resistance in Foucault’s Genealogy of Christianity.” Critical Research on Religion 2: 55–65. doi: 10.1177/2050303214520776 Dean, Mitchell. 1995. “Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society.” Economy and Society 24: 559–83. doi: 10.1080/03085149500000025 Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Duell, Nicola, Shruti Singh, and Peter Tergeist. 2009. Activation Policies in Norway. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 78. Paris: OECD Publishing. doi:  10.1787/226388712174

Foucault, Michel. 1983. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, 208–226. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the Collège de France 1977– 1978), ed. by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frøyland, Kjetil. 2006. Supported Employment or Segregated Rehabilitation? Oslo: Work Research Institute. Grøgaard, Jens B. 1998. Ordinær skolegang for yrkeshemmede: Effektevaluering basert på sammenligning med hospiteringstiltaket, vol. 255. Oslo: Fafo. Have, Paul ten. 2007. Doing Conversation Analysis. London: Sage. Heritage, John. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman. 2010. Talk in Action : Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Heritage, John, and Sue Sefi. 1992. “Dilemmas on Advice: Aspects of the Delivery and Reception of Advice in Interactions between Health Visitors and First-Time Mothers.” In Talk at Work, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 359–419. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hernes, Thorgeir, Ingar Heum, Paal Haavorsen, and Tor Saglie. 2010. Arbeidsinkludering: Om det nye politikk- og praksisfeltet i velferds-Norge. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Holmes, Jain. 2007. Vocational Rehabilitation. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnsson, Håkan, and Bjørn Hvinden. 2005. “Welfare Governance and the Remaking of Citizenship.” In Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere, ed. by Janet ­Newman, 101–118. Bristol: Policy Press. Lilja, Mona, and Stellan Vinthagen. 2014. “Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Power and Biopower: Resisting What Power with What Resistance?” Journal of Political Power 7: 107–126. doi:  10.1080/2158379X.2014.889403

Lindström, Anna. 1999. Language as Social Action: Grammar, Prosody, and Interaction in Swedish Conversation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Uppsala: Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Maynard, Douglas W. 1992. “On Clinicians Co-implicating Recipients’ Perspective in the Delivery of Diagnostic News.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 331–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



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McDonald, Catherine, and Greg Marston. 2005. “Workfare as Welfare: Governing Unemployment in the Advanced Liberal State.” Critical Social Policy 25: 374–401. doi:  10.1177/0261018305054077

McHoul, Alec, and Wendy Grace. 1997. A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject. New York: New York University Press. NAV. 2006. Directive on Vocational Rehabilitation. Oslo. Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2008. Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Newman, Janet. 2005. Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics and the Public Sphere. Bristol: Policy Press. Nygård, Roald. 1993. Aktør eller brikke? – om menneskers selvforståelse. Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal. Patton, Paul. 2013. “From Resistance to Government: Foucault’s Lectures 1976–1979.” In A Companion to Foucault, ed. by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 172–188. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781118324905.ch7 Rogers, Carl. 1951. Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. London: Constable. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511488856 Rose, Nikolas, and Peter Miller. 2010. “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government.” The British Journal of Sociology 61: 271–303. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01247.x Sacks, Harvey, Emmanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. doi:  10.1353/lan.1974.0010

Schafft, Angelika. 2008. Psykiske lidelser og arbeidsintegrering i Skandinavia: En kunnskapsstatus. Oslo: Arbeidsforskningsinstituttet. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction”. In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511620874.002

Silverman, David. 1997. Discourses of Counselling: HIV Counselling as Social Interaction. London: Sage. Simons, Jon. 2013. “Power, Resistance and Freedom.” In A Companion to Foucault, ed. by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki, 301–319. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Sokhi-Bulley, Bal. 2013. “Counter-conduct or Resistance? The Disciplining of Dissident in the Riot City of London.” In Counter-Conduct in Global Politics Workshop. University of Sussex, Brighton. Solberg, Janne. 2011a. “Accepted and Resisted: The Client’s Responsibility for Making Proposals in Activation Encounters.” Text & Talk – An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies 31: 733–752. doi: 10.1515/text.2011.035 Solberg, Janne. 2011b. “Activation Encounters: Dilemmas of Accountability in Constructing Clients as ‘Knowledgeable’.” Qualitative Social Work 10: 381–398. doi: 10.1177/1473325011409478 Solberg, Janne. 2016. “Argument in Professional-Client Encounters: Building Cases through Second-hand Assessments.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (2). Stivers, Tanya, and Federico Rossano. 2010. “Mobilizing Response.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43: 3–56. doi: 10.1080/08351810903471258

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Thompson, Sandra A., Cecilia E. Ford, and Barbara A. Fox. 2002. “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments”. In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Sandra A. ­Thompson, Cecilia E. Ford, and Barbara A. Fox, 15–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tøssebro, Aage Støren. 1999. Vocational Rehabilitation – An Integrated Part of Labour Market Policy: Towards Professional Expertise in the Work for Vocational Rehabilitation [translated from Norwegian]. Oslo: Directorate of Labour. Vehviläinen, Sanna. 1999. Structures of Counselling Interaction: A Conversation Analytic Study of Counselling Encounters in Career Guidance Training. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2003. “Avoiding Providing Solutions: Orienting to the Ideal of Students’ Self-directedness in Counselling Interaction.” Discourse Studies 5: 389–414. doi:  10.1177/14614456030053005

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chapter 5

Governing governments? Discursive contestations of governmentality in the transparency dispositif Sun-ha Hong and François Allard-Huver

University of Pennsylvania, USA / Paris Sorbonne University, France

In a world of controversy and suspicion, transparency promises a ‘virtuous chain’ of informed citizens, rational deliberation and democratic participation. In contrast, this essay conceptualises transparency as a Foucauldian dispositif: a network of discourse, tactics, institutional processes and local subjectivities which articulates what kinds of actions and statements are admissible and tactically profitable. Notably, transparency discourse mobilises individual citizens to audit the state – to govern governments. This becomes the basis upon which the state and other institutions may legitimise and delegitimise one another through strategic uses of transparency discourse. We illustrate these processes through an examination of the ‘Séralini Affair’: a prominent controversy over GMO, scientific expertise and transparency in France. We analyse transparency discourse invoked by major stakeholders in the Affair, drawing tools from critical discourse analysis and French discourse analysis.

Following his election as the President of the United States, one of Barack Obama’s first communications was a memorandum titled ‘Transparency and Open Government’ (Obama 2008). This resolution, and its guarantees of ‘accountability’ and ‘information’ for citizens, epitomises the normative and moralised form in which transparency in politics presents itself today. It declares: “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing […] Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government.” The memorandum conflates mere openness with accessibility (the ability to acquire, consume and understand) of information; with public trust (in government) with new technologies; with public participation; and finally, a somehow ‘strengthened’ democracy. The government reveals; the public examines. To produce ‘transparent’ information itself becomes an act of veridiction; as its counterpart, the citizen is morally obliged to do the work of observing, to stay informed, to participate. These conflations and connections expose transparency doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.05hon © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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as a régime du savoir, which in turn embodies contemporary notions of political citizenship and ‘good government’. The rise of transparency discourse symptomises the intersection of an active and liberal subject (Foucault 2008; Rose 1993: 291), the growth of political cynicism (Sloterdijk 1987; van Zoonen 2012), the politics of visibility in the age of new media (Thompson 2005), and continuing transformations of modern Western governmentality. In this chapter, our objective is to analyse transparency as a Foucauldian dispositif – not only an ideological and linguistic construct, but a heterogeneous network of logistics, discourses and subject positions that demarcates “zones of intelligible contestation” (Rose 1999: 28; also see Chapter 1 in this volume). In conflating data with information, access with accessibility, accessibility with critical-rational debate, transparency deploys a specific field of struggle which schematises what kinds of actions and statements are admissible, and moreover, tactically profitable for the actors at hand. Overhanging such a contest is the idealistic slogan of ‘good government’, which anchors accuser and accused, citizen and state, NGO and government bureaucrat, scientist and sceptic. This identifies contemporary transparency controversies as a struggle for ‘governing governments’, a multidirectional deployment of governmentality wherein it is the notion of government that is the object of contestation by citizens, the state, NGOs and the media. This essay explores the above conceptualisation of transparency as a governmental dispositif: first schematically, in terms of general principles of operation; then empirically. For the latter, we turn to the constellation of stakeholders, documents and utterances that constituted the Séralini Affair of 2012 – an international controversy over genetically modified foods and conventions of scientific verification. In it, Séralini, scientists for and against his research, government agencies in France and abroad, and the media were all embroiled in multiple contesting assertions and accusations of transparency. The Affair thus constitutes a media polemic wherein we can trace a clear circulation of formules; specific lexemes and syntagms that deploy the transparency dispositif for tactical objectives. These discursive artefacts thus instantiate the ideological, axiological and normative dimensions of the governmental dispositif. 1. The self-presentation of transparency Transparency presents itself to society is as a transcendent moral ideal that enables the Kantian public use of reason. In a world of controversies and global suspicion, transparency promises to enable a virtuous chain of informed citizens, rational decisions and democratic deliberation. Transparency has become a dominant criterion of legitimacy for public relations strategies online. When organisations look to improve or restore public trust, they invariably claim to



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be ‘transparent’; when public, economic or scientific actors attempt to prove their honesty and goodwill in public space, transparency is brandished forward as a sovereign Word which guarantees their independence and accountability. Notably, this legitimising force is manifest primarily in discourse and only secondarily in the act of exposure (of information). This is evident in the fact that, as in Obama’s Memorandum, transparency is rarely defined in terms of rigid or precise objective states, but as a kind of vision or attitude. Transparency’s moral efficacy – that is, its ability to ensure good government – is established not through a final confirmation of information’s correlation to political change, but through discursive conflations of openness and participation, an idealistic projection of Habermasian publicness. This self-presentation of transparency as a unified and transcendental vision rides upon a set of interconnected assumptions about the nature of communication, of the citizen, and of democratic government as a whole (also see Vattimo’s 1992 notion of the self-transparent society). Most obviously, it conflates the availability of information with the act of communication. It presumes unproblematic linkages between transparent information, its communication to publics, subsequent deliberation, and rational, consensual decision-making (e.g. Dahlberg 2007; Wojcik 2010). Yet informing is not communicating; the literal ‘availability’ of information does not necessarily entail the public’s actually consuming, comprehending and making use of that information (Wolton 2009). As such, this transcendental vision of transparency carries axiological and normative consequences. Transparency, by virtue of its assumptions, prescribes the ways in which the heterogeneous elements of political contestation – including citizens and the state, information and its host ‘texts’, and indeed, transparency discourse itself – may be deployed. It is in this sense that we must understand transparency as a dispositif, which includes both its ideological and strategic / practical aspects. And, as we will show later, discourse is one key object which traverses both dimensions, both in its semantic content and its performativity. 2. Transparency as dispositif A dispositif is a network of actualised elements that make actionable a particular state of affairs. What does this entail, and why should transparency be conceptualised as a dispositif? 1. Structurally, a dispositif entails a fluid and heterogeneous set of connections that encompass the ‘said as much as the unsaid’ (Foucault 1980: 194); a network whose relationalities demarcate what counts as truth, as knowledge, as

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a valid form of subject. Recall that transparency prescribes and makes profitable certain techniques and states of speaking, of making visible, of being ‘true’ (transparent, open). It takes the practice of politics and the object of government and subjects them to its own “curves of visibility and curves of enunciation” (Deleuze 1992: 160). Laurence Monnoyer-Smith (2013) argues that a dispositif is a source of constraints – but that these constraints have the virtue of provoking actors’ creativity. Because dispositifs configure the means by which one may ‘count’ as a subject and become visible, analysing their parameters, their design, can reveal what kinds of conflations, presumptions and idealisations become systematically privileged. Foucault argued that every discursive act is at the expense of other possible acts (see Chapter 1 in this volume). One corollary is that every invocation of transparency draws from, perpetuates, and challenges these structures of visibility and sayability. 2. In contrast to a more diffused and even supra-societal imagery of epistemes, dispositifs are “responding to an urgent need” (Foucault 1980: 195); they form and reform in “a perpetual inventiveness” (Bussolini 2010: 88), guided by this strategic purpose. A critique of transparency as ideology (or Althusserian apparatus) encourages a linear and deconstructive criticism that becomes stuck in a Freudian repetition: transparency is false consciousness, transparency is ideology, transparency is illusion…. An understanding of transparency as a strategic site, on the other hand, prepares us for ways in which different social actors can each make use of transparency discourse for competing strategic ends, and how this discourse becomes a tool for a critique of government as well as an instrument of governing. 3. Agamben locates the genealogy of Foucauldian dispositif in young Hegelian positivity, a historically constructed set of “rules, rites and institutions that are imposed on the individual… [and] become, so to speak, internalised” (2009: 5–6). The term’s initial appearance in Foucault’s theory in the 1970s was more or less a response to his earlier emphasis on discourse, turning outward to find a system that he had once looked for within the statement. The etymology of dispositif reveals “legal meaning of the force or finding of a decision”, a “judgment which contains the decision separate from the motivations” (Bussolini 2010: 86–7, 105). Transparency does not consist only of a transcendent moral discourse, but the ways in which this discourse distributes subjects and utterances along normative spaces of veridiction and legitimacy – the distributed positions from which subjects then make their own strategic moves. Analysis of the transparency dispositif therefore addresses the relationship between the technical constraints and the social production of discourses and knowledge within those constraints (Monnoyer-Smith 2013).



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These properties – relationality, strategic orientation and deployment/enforcement – have key implications for our understanding of transparency. In contrast to its common representation as a general and unified belief in visions of ‘open government’, the transparency dispositif embodies a viscous and diffused kind of knowledge, instantiated in many different places as ways of relating to politics and government. Of course, pieces of government regulation, conventional process or speech do not necessarily reify a singular body of transparency-knowledge. Nevertheless, they resemble similar forms of referencing and legitimating particular relations between subjects and institutions that are retroactively identifiable (and identified by stakeholders) as an ideal or norm. This relative flexibility means that transparency is not simply a (false) vision that is oppressively forced down the public’s throats by a determined government (or ‘society’). Rather, it is a specific mode of critique that can be strategically deployed by, for, and against the state as well as other social actors. 3. Transparency as governmentality It is in this sense that we designate transparency as a problem of governmentality and of ‘governing governments’. The meaning and utility of ‘governmentality’ as a general concept has been well summarised elsewhere (for example, see Foucault 2007: 108–9; Gordon 1991; Lemke 2002; Rose 1993: 287–8; Rose 1999: 7, 15–7, 20–1; see Chapter 1 in this volume). Here, we will focus on aspects of the notion most relevant to the transparency dispositif. Foucault noted that the modern notion of ‘government’ arises from antiMachiavellian literature in the 16th century, which opposed the sovereign and external figure of The Prince with an immanent and heterogeneous set of institutions and instruments (2007: 88–92, 121–2). This led Foucault to a dual definition of governmentality: generally, as an ensemble of things that look to shape the conduct of a person or persons; specifically, as the ensemble of Western state institutions that developed in the modern era (Foucault 2007: 108–9; Gordon 1991, 2–3). Notably, this involved a disembodiment of the notion of government. In contrast to The Prince, whose retention of power allegedly directed every aspect of Machiavellian theory, anti-Machiavellian literature developed a notion of government that was based on the nature of its task, its strategic need (see Foucault 2007: 88–92, 98–9; Rose 1999: 7). That is to say, governmentality is not necessarily what the government (state) does, but the problem of governing whose ‘solutions’ transform the state itself as much as the state’s subjects. This dovetails with our understanding of the transparency dispositif as deploying a specific zone of political contestation. What Foucault originally said of political

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economy is also instructive for transparency. Foucault argues that political economy emerged from a strategic need – to maintain an inter-state equilibrium for optimal market competition – and developed into an external, critical rationality that could criticise and advise politics precisely because it lay outside the realm of politics (Foucault 2008: 12–4). Governmentality has often been summarised as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Gordon 1991: 2). Transparency as conduct of conduct includes not only the question of how government governs, but also how government itself should be governed. What does it mean to ‘govern governments’? Firstly, it extends the genealogy of liberal governmentality. Not only is the active, liberal subject trained to ‘govern themselves’ according to the needs of government, he/she is enjoined to monitor the government, thoroughly inform themselves of its activities, and correct it through democratic process when it does not adhere to the normative principles of ‘good government’. In this context, what transparent politics demands of the citizen is qualitatively different from earlier forms of petitioning grievances and injustices: the long Western history of petitions, from written pleas to the Roman Emperor to the cahiers de doléances in 1789 France; or beyond the West, large drums peasants could beat on to present a petition to the King, such as the Vinijayabheri in 19th century Thailand or the Sinmun-go in 15th century Korea. Such earlier forms involved an extraordinary action by subjects, who would break out of their prescribed political role to raise grievances that were intimately tied to their particular demographic’s interests. The responsibility of redress remained in the hands of the governing Prince. For instance, mid-16th century English petitionary rhetoric constituted a ‘privileged communicative space’ which neither in principle nor practice called upon a public to listen or to act upon, but constituted a direct and private communication from the periphery for the state which remained ultimately responsible (Zaret 2000: 59). This was also the case for the literary trope of the King who speaks with his subjects in disguise to hear their grievances – most famously Shakespeare’s Henry V, and James V of Scotland’s legend as ‘King of the Commons’. Here it remains the King who must listen, to gather data, to make his population legible, and to reconfigure his apparatuses of government according to that knowledge. The transparency dispositif redistributes these responsibilities and relationships in a way we would call ‘neoliberal’, or to be precise, in alignment with the post-WW2 emphasis on self-improving, selfdiscovering and self-enterprising subjects of interest (e.g. Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989; Foucault 2008: 226; O’Malley 2008: 71–2; Rose 1999: 145). The state’s primary responsibility is to ‘be transparent’, that is, make information available to the public (or, make information available upon request by the public). This is an essentially passive position, where it is the citizen’s responsibility to paternally scrutinise the state. The King has no need to disguise himself as a peasant; any



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peasant can enter the Palace, he claims, and pore over the voluminous records of his government at their leisure, and tell him what to change. (This remains the case even in incidents where governments refuse to be ‘transparent’, and citizens take them to task for it; should they succeed, the task of examination, research and eventual correction remains the citizen’s.) But this is far from a binary of ‘governing populations’ and ‘governing governments’. We certainly do not intend to repeat the insubstantial cliché that new media technologies turn the all-seeing eye upon the powerful in a beautifully empowering reversal. For one, the Panoptic model was a pragmatic solution aiming at a radical reduction of labour for the state. Where the synoptic romance presumes politically energetic citizens who are all too happy and able to take on this work, the transparency dispositif can actually burden citizens with the opprobrium of uncertainty. Further, the age of the Panopticon was already an age of increasing scrutiny of political figures through new forms of mediated visibility and quasi-interaction (Thompson 2005: 31–3). The age of new media today is increasingly an age of big data collection, predictive algorithms, and other instruments by which the population becomes persistently observable (e.g. Andrejevic 2005, 2010; Beer 2009; Lessig 2006; Turow 2006). This is not, inherently or universally at least, resistance striking back. Nikolas Rose has shown how modern liberaldemocratic freedom is not a refusal of government and governmentality, but a historical invention as a result of modern governmentality’s strategic need for the control and productivity of populations; that to be ‘free’ means to be responsibly free (1999: 67, 73, 96–7). With transparency, this responsibility of the free citizen entails the labour of an auditor of government; there is, more than ever, an injunction to be informed. The original formulation of governmentality emphasised the need for patience and diligence (Foucault 2007: 99–100). In a transparent world, it is the public which must embody those virtues. Finally, transparency as ‘governing governments’ emphasises the dispositif as a site of struggle involving multiple lines of force, rather than a unidirectional ideological apparatus. Transparency discourse is not the sole purview of the state, nor is it always a discourse that the state is willing to embrace for a given situation. Just as with the discourses and formules of liberalism, political economy and freedom, the invocation of transparency furnishes a specific strategic terrain that provides non-state actors with ways in which to evaluate and compel the state – and through that governing of governments, achieve their own interests. As our cases will show, this terrain features a wide variety of actors, positions and alliances, all of which shift fluidly. NGOs in particular play a significant role by combining the expert authority of institutions with a claim to impartiality, even as this participation in the terrain of transparency exposes them to scrutiny and counter-denunciation.

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4. Discourse and the formule We now examine the discourse used in the Séralini Affair as one particular case of the transparency dispositif at work. Clearly, the heterogeneous nature of a dispositif makes it eligible for many different approaches. Among them, discourse is notable in that it is organised into (and it organises language and the world into) conventional and generic forms. The ‘classic’ Foucauldian definition (see Foucault 1972, and Chapter 1 in this volume), in particular, makes clear how this discourse enable a specific set of knowledge and power relations to be perpetuated across time and space and ultimately institutionalised. Hence, discourse is a dominant – though not unique – mode through which dispositifs establish their specific regimes of what counts as knowledge/truth, and position peoples, things and ideas into that regime. Discourse is also especially relevant to transparency as dispositif. Following on from our earlier point that being ‘transparent’ does not necessarily entail public consumption and discussion of the available information, it is clear that the discursive invocation of ‘transparency’ as an idea is itself central to the functioning of the dispositif. Hence, talking about transparency, in many ways, achieves the operation of the transparency dispositif. This notion of discourse has been taken up and modified in many rich traditions of analysis, from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. For our purposes, we will focus on the notion of the formule, primarily as developed in French discourse analysis (henceforth FDA). The formule focuses on the tactical invocation and circulation of specific lexemes/syntagms, like ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’, and how they can colonise an event and/or conversation in terms of a particular discourse regime; that is, how lexical resemblance is used to circulate and infect new discursive situations with parameters of visibility, validity and value. For example, the formule addresses the effect on a conversation on race when the so-called ‘N-word’ is deployed, or how the incantation of the Miranda warning prepares a forensic and legal frame for the ensuing interaction. The formule therefore directly emphasises the relationship between discourse and dispositif, making it a particularly appropriate tool for our analysis. In France, the formule enjoys a history almost as long as FDA itself. One of the first references to analyse du discours appears in Langages, the linguistic journal founded in 1966 by Roland Barthes. Joseph Sumpf and Jean Dubois’s influential “Problèmes de l’analyse du discours” (1969) soon followed, and through Michel Pêcheux’s efforts, FDA grew into a sizable discipline, hosting multiple research traditions (also see Maziere 2005). One of these was Jean-Pierre Faye, and his work on the formule. In Théorie du récit (1972), he identified the recurring nominal syntagms “total state” and “totalitarian state” in Nazi propaganda, and their effects on extermination policies. Faye’s work has been popularised and further



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theorised by Alice Krieg-Planque (2006), who examined the nominal syntagm “ethnic cleansing” during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and later the term “sustainable development”. Here, we primarily take after Krieg-Planque, who significantly questioned and expanded Faye’s definitions of ‘enunciation’ and ‘formule’ itself (Paveau 2012). She describes the formule as “a sequence, easily noticeable and relatively stable[, which] works in public sphere discourses like a commonly shared and problematised sequence” (Krieg-Planque 2009: 14). That is, a formule is an inherently polysemic ‘soundbite’ which is deployed to organise debate in terms of a specific mode of problematising – a judicial problem, a Holocaust problem, a privacy problem. This means that the formule is a discursive object defined by its strategic function, rather than a linguistic object defined by its grammatical form. After all, a buzzword (“austerity”) may take multiple grammatical permutations (“austere”, “austerity policy”), as might a more complex syntagm (“threat to our national security”, “keeping America secure”), but the functions we are tracking in the analysis would remain largely equivalent. It is the “social use [which] built and established the formule, and not some predictable linguistic codes or rules” (Mayaffre 2009). By identifying formules, one tracks how actors deploy specific discursive objects in order to manipulate this mode of problematisation. The concept thereby explains how an “ensemble of expressions […] crystallise political and social issues [and simultaneously] help construct these issues” (Krieg-Planque 2009: 7). The specific ways in which a formule is established and circulated, of course, vary greatly depending on the context. Studies such as Jeanneret’s (1998), on the popularisation of science through the circulation of formules, and Amossy and Burger’s (2011), on how scientific controversies ‘leak’ into the mainstream media, have described particular patterns of such circulation. We will attempt to show what kinds of transparency formules are used to what tactical effect in the case of the Séralini Affair. This approach, and the formule as a concept, complements many of the analytical concerns in Anglo-American traditions, such as CDA. CDA emphasises discourse in conflict, and thus discourse as the enactment of strategic moves (Fairclough 1992: 206) and domination (Fairclough 2001a: 26; van Dijk 1993, 2001). Similarly, our usage of the formule views discourse as an essentially tactical affair. This is especially the case in high-profile, politicised events like the Séralini Affair, though one might argue that discourse can be tactical without its subjects consciously understanding their behaviour as strategic. The formule, furthermore, extends the point that discourse lives intertextually (Fairclough 1992: 194–195, 206; see Wallace, this volume), and seeks to identify the performed meaning and significance of lexemes in their circulation. This is related to the formule’s own historical context, where French discourse analysis in the 1970s saw a push towards “un-compacting discourse formations, to think them as open, permeable and

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heterogeneous” (Krieg Planque 2006: 57). Of course, the affinities between CDA and formule are not total; for one, CDA covers a much wider range of discursive phenomena. However, the aforementioned similarities point to ways in which the formule could complement other Anglo-American concepts and approaches to discourse analysis. This conversation is already beginning to occur on the French side. Dominique Mainguenau, one of the most prominent figures in that community, has sought to introduce CDA more comprehensively to French researchers, aided also by Norman Fairclough (see Mainguenau 2005). Semen, one of the most reputed semio-lingustics journals in France, also published a special issue on CDA in 2009 (see Schepens 2009). Our primary concern in this chapter has to do with transparency, dispositif and the empirical case of the Séralini Affair. Nevertheless, we hope to make a small contribution to this conversation by demonstrating a basic usage of the formule. In this vein, we should note that the formule also connects directly to certain other Anglo-American concepts. For instance, Laclau and Mouffe (2001) argue that nodal points can accrue a certain meaning specific to its native discourse regime, then as floating signifiers, carry that set of significations onto another context. Van Dijk and Fairclough have discussed similar processes in terms of overwording – an unusual overlapping of near-synonymic words which typically is evidence of a struggle over meaning (e.g. Fairclough 2001b: 96). Finally, the notion of boundary object (Star & Griesemer 1989) also describes how objects can straddle different fields and stakeholders. Such concepts highlight the more technical and linguistic dimensions of the process. Meanwhile, the formule stresses directly and primarily the polemical and tactical/performative dimension. Following on from our earlier mention of ‘mode of problematisation’, the formule stresses how such circulation can be the means for contesting a given ‘description of reality’ (Krieg-Planque 2009: 111). Formules are not stable in meaning or context, but are themselves floating terrains of conflict; their semantics may matter less than their contextual, evocative function. Invoking ‘transparency’ in a conflict such as the Séralini Affair not only introduces a new interpretive regime into the event, but creates new possibilities for the formule itself, which now gains new connotations and associations. Hence, lexemes/syntagms which are initially arrayed for or against each other may later become newly distributed as a result of their circulation; each tactical usage of a formule is an opportunity for slippage. This process “reminds [us] that discourses produced in contradictory ideological positions do not constitute separated entities, but stay in contact through circulation and exchange of the formule” (Courtine 1981). With this in mind, we now turn to the Séralini Affair. We monitored two major newspapers (Le Monde and Libération) and three major magazines (the generalist Le Point and Le Nouvel Observateur, and a science-focused Sciences & Avenir)

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from September 2012 to November 2013, yielding over 70 articles of French origin (see Table 1).1 These were supplemented by discursive output from websites and press releases of the most directly affected stakeholders: the EFSA (European Food Safety Agency), the primary target of Séralini’s criticism, ANSES, the French agency for Food Safety, and CRIIGEN, Séralini’s independent lab at the University of Caen. In addition, relevant blog coverage and the EU’s legal texts relating to transparency were consulted. While discourse in GMO controversies have already been analysed in other ways (e.g. Augoustinos et al. 2010; Bonny 2003; Cook 2004; Horsbøl and Lassen 2011), this dispositif / formule-driven lens differentiates our analysis. Our question was not how actors responded to transparency as an ideal, but how the act of problematising the Affair as a transparency scandal was itself tactical. This was particularly visible thanks to an emblematic quality that the vision of transparency has accrued today. Parties in the discursive conflict can hardly ignore an argument in the name of ‘open government’, for instance, and are drawn to reposition themselves around this semantic artefact. Table 1.  Distribution of data corpus by actor and type Actor

Type

‘Actors’*   Media

Press releases Webpages Le Nouvel Obs. Sciences & Avenir Le Point Libération Le Monde

Total

No. 22 33 4 4 9 19 38 129

*This group comprises CRIIGEN, EFSA and ANSES – the three most immediate stakeholders.

5. On the Séralini Affair On September 19, 2012, Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team simultaneously published a scientific article, a book and a magazine special issue on their newest GMO study. The article, published in the well-known Food and Chemical Toxicology, discussed a study of rats fed with Monsanto NK603 GMO corn and watered with diluted Roundup, the famous Monsanto herbicide. Featuring

1. All data in original French was translated for this study by the co-author, François Allard-Huver.

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media-ready images of rats suffering from gigantic, bulbous tumours, the study pressed for stringent GMO bans by governments European and otherwise. Séralini also unveiled his findings through the book Tout cobayes! (translated as All of us guinea-pigs now!). A selection of journalists were given early access and duly reported on the book’s claims, including the Nouvel Observateur’s emphatic “Yes, GMOs are poison” (Malaurie 2012). As the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the scientific community and other stakeholders reacted to Séralini’s provocation, each side would explicitly mobilise the discourse of transparency. The Affair therefore constitutes a point of emergence, a polemical ‘peak’ where transparency becomes at once a cornerstone of the specific political dispute (over genetically modified foods) and a stumbling block for a pre-existing liberal governmental apparatus as it attempts to negotiate this new terrain. What began as a local controversy regarding Séralini’s research validity and the question of research methodology quickly spilled out of the scientific community, turning into a wider debate on transparency and institutionalised risk assessment as a whole. The European, and especially French, public was already well versed in narratives of risk, deception and mistrust vis-à-vis GMOs (Bonny 2003). CRIIGEN (Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering) – Gilles-Eric Séralini’s research lab – insisted that the study’s implications went beyond GMO safety: “the regulatory testing process for biotech and pesticide products should be transparent, open to public scrutiny, subject to independent review and performed independently of their firms in the future” (CRIIGEN 2012a). In the meantime, detractors like the French national Academies of Agriculture, Medicine, Pharmacy, Sciences, Technologies and Veterinary Sciences denounced Séralini’s move as a ‘coup’ – “an intelligently orchestrated media mobilisation about research results that offer no valid conclusions” by “a team of authors who saw fit to organise a vast ‘comm/media’ campaign about their work, to an extent that the operation seemed motivated more by ideology than by the quality or the relevance of the experimental data” (French national Academies 2012). The question of transparency emerged in the very first magazine article about Séralini’s study, and quickly became the dominant mode of problematisation. Transparency, in this sense, is not reducible simply to the lexeme ‘transparency’: what matters is not the occurrence of the exact word, but discursive elements which clearly invoke the family of ideals, logics and affects surrounding the concept today. This means a diverse set of lexemes and syntagms, such as “openness”, “transparent process” and even pejorative mentions of “secrecy” – which do not simply issue their semantic meaning and disappear, but clearly help frame the surrounding discourse. If not quite a speech act, the formule often reconfigures the rules of that local debate – even as the formule itself becomes open for discussion. Invoking transparency does not make everyone agree about Séralini or GMOs,



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but it does pressure actors to make their statements in terms of, in the language of, transparency. While many other discursive features contribute to ‘framing’ a given discussion (e.g. see Furchner and Münte 2006’s analysis of a local GMO debate), our focus on the formule is also a way to understand what kind of different competitive propositions co-exist within a similar discursive formation. For example, CRIIGEN’s website and press releases promoted Gilles-Eric Séralini interview, “GMO’s the moment of truth?”: Gilles-Eric SÉRALINI tells us about the origins of his research, the methods that were used, the difficulties encountered, the financing and the necessary element of secrecy that surrounded his laboratory. […] GMO’s the moment of truth? also deals with the credibility issues of the scientific expertise, the lack of transparency shown by the food security agencies and the influence that the industrial lobbies have on the political world.  (CRIIGEN 2012b)

The appearance of ‘truth’ in a privileged position in the text is bolstered and further specified by the syntagm “lack of transparency”. Meanwhile, we also have the appearance of ‘secrecy’, whose ambivalent life in the discourses of the Affair we shall address later. What we can observe here in a basic sense is the organising role played by lexemes/syntagms like ‘truth’ and ‘lack of transparency’, and their co-operation under the wider umbrella of transparency-as-concept. They ensure that any further discursive efforts by the food security agencies, for instance, cannot simply bank on pre-existing capital of notions like expertise and institutional authority. Besides explicit terms like ‘transparency’, the Séralini discourse also exhibits other lexemes/syntagms whose deployment shows them to be part of the transparency formule: 1. ‘Independent’, and its minor semantic variations like ‘impartial third-party’, occurs in most texts in the corpus. For instance, the EFSA’s own review of Séralini et al.’s paper opened with the disclaimer that “as scientists with respective expertise in the area of GMOs and pesticides, the external reviewers were asked to peer-review EFSA’s statement. Their role was limited to providing an impartial third-party critique of the statement” (EFSA 2012c). ‘Independent’ here functions in tandem with ‘transparency’, the former acting as a guaranteeing quality for the latter. Of course, by the very act of labelling it an ‘impartial third-party’ and nothing else, the EFSA’s processes, and the identity of its ‘reviewers’, remains non-transparent. Like transparency itself, ‘independent’ in the Affair often mattered more for its evocative, perlocutionary force than any provision of information to the citizen-subject. 2. ‘Data’, including variations like “data sets” or “raw data”, becomes not just a material object, but an entity with inherent truth value which the transparency dispositif purports to publicise. In one example, the EFSA proudly claims

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that it “has today given [Séralini] access to all available data relating to the Authority’s evaluation of genetically modified (GM) maize NK603 […] under a routine procedure for the release of information known as a Public Access to Documents request” (EFSA 2012a). Here, the EFSA’s strategy is simple. You want transparency? We will give it to you – at least, we will perform the relevant gesture! By emphasising the ostensible full availability of data, and attaching it to the weighty bureaucratic capital of the ‘Public Access to Documents request’, the EFSA defends its transparency credentials  – and in doing so, reaffirms transparency as the dominant dispositif for the Affair. ’Data’ is thus presented as the truth which non-transparent practices conceal, and in revealing it, ‘data’ claims to set the virtuous chain of information and good deliberation in motion.2 3. ‘Accessibility’, expressed in derivative forms like ‘release of information’, ‘public access’ or ‘full disclosure’, once again instantiates – and in doing so, fetishises – transparency’s ‘virtuous chain’ of information, truth and deliberation. Notably, these syntagms are produced by Séralini’s detractors more often than Séralini and his advocates. Consider one petition addressing Séralini et al.: “authors may be asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data […] Only a full disclosure of the data can quell any uncertainties over the results you published” (Anonymous 2012). We thus find transparency, instantiated through related formules as well as explicit expressions, working both for and against Séralini. These formules are not necessarily ‘subservient’ to transparency as formule. In this context, however, their proliferation clearly responds to Séralini et al.’s original invocation of transparency, and their deployment consistently reinforces transparency as the dominant lens for the situation. Whereas the above formules cooperate with transparency’s self-appointed guardianship of democracy, we also find formules that function as transparency’s necessary counterparts (Libaert 2003): opacity and secrecy. Where opacity is technically more appropriate as the inverse of transparency, ‘secrecy’ is more commonly invoked as the counterpart to transparency: the sin of concealment against the virtue of exposure. Transparency as a conceptual framework cannot exist without clearly defining opacity/secrecy as its limit-points, its negatives; one cannot circulate without the other (Grard 2000). The counter-formule of secrecy appears consistently in CRIIGEN’s press releases: 2. This contemporary belief in ‘data as truth’ has been closely examined (and criticised) by software studies and related research. For instance, see Amoore (2011), boyd & Crawford (2012), Cheney-Lippold (2011), and Mackenzie (2006).



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Until 2011, the researchers worked in conditions of virtual secrecy. They encrypted their emails as the Pentagon [does], banned all telephone conversation and even launched a lure study fearing a smear from multinational seed [referring to GMO products] companies.  (CRIIGEN 2012a)

This usage is faithfully replicated in the Nouvel Observateur’s initial report: With him comes the scandal. Today he launches a bomb against GMOs: after two years of work in the utmost confidentiality with a team of researchers in his lab in Caen on 200 rats fed with GM corn, Gilles-Eric Séralini demonstrates that even low dose, the GMO is heavily toxic for rats.  (Nouvel Observateur 2012)

A year later, the same promotion of heroic secrecy would be used to open the promotional blurb for Tous cobayes? [All of us guinea-pigs now?], Jean-Paul Jaud’s documentary on Séralini’s findings: under conditions of total secrecy, Professor Séralini and The CRIIGEN lead an experience with unsuspected consequences. It’s the world’s longest-lasting experiment: the first independent study of a GMO and the herbicide Roundup. The conclusions are appalling ….  (GMOSeralini.org 2013)

This use of the syntagm “secrecy” and its semantic field demonstrates an interesting double bind in the mind of the reader. The researchers had to keep their research secret in order to “bring the truth to light” about the GMOs industry secrets. Here, the “secret” surrounding the study is seen as a necessary evil. The implicit argument is that Séralini and his team, as individual scientists seeking the truth, are entitled to this ‘good’ secrecy; the mention of sabotage completes this rhetoric. This configuration was directly challenged by the press coverage of Le Monde and Libération. The two newspapers had been frustrated by Séralini’s press embargo; he had released his study to only a selection of journalists (primarily, the Nouvel Observateur) before its official publication, demanding a confidentiality agreement not to consult with other experts regarding the details of the analysis (also see Arjó et al. 2013 for an academic condemnation of the embargo). This was condemned by Libération as an affront to journalistic values: “no counter expertise, interdiction to show his article to other scientist and thus…no critics.” (Huet 2012). The two papers’ strategy was to criticise the secrecy of Séralini’s study. That is, they accepted Séralini’s presentation of transparency, and then worked within its distribution of ideals and values to accuse Séralini and CRIIGEN of secrecy. “The militant spirit in which [Séralini’s] work was carried out is also a source of embarrassment for the majority of researchers” (Le Monde 2012) – the majority who, it is implied, remain true to the values of transparency and impartiality. These critics challenged Séralini’s self-presentation as a necessarily secret seeker of truth, positioning his secrecy as evidence of his position as a biased stakeholder. At the same time, the general cause of transparency is retrieved: “his works, even

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if biased or inconclusive, raise the crucial problem of the independence of expertise” (Le Monde 2012). Similar tactics can be identified in responses by French government agencies. The national Academies of Sciences also combined opacity of motive and method in their rebuttal: In regard to the “conflict of interests” that G. E. Séralini constantly opposes to other scientists, whatever their origins or specialist fields, we can also legitimately surmise if there are not any conflicts of interest for G. E. Séralini and members of his entourage, aware as we all are of their ecological stances and of the financial support they receive from major food distribution groups who base their advertising campaigns on the assertion of absence of GMOs in the food they sell to their customers.  (French national Academies 2012)

The general lesson is that many different interests and strategies are able to be pursued within a unifying lens of transparency as a democratic concept. Each deployment of a related formule, including the counter-formules, allows actors to tap into the lines of visibility, validity and value. Consider a response by the French Agency for Food Safety (ANSES): This situation is by no means restricted to GMOs: there are several other areas marked by an equal lack of scientific knowledge and a particularly strong public desire for independent, publicly-funded research. To address this situation, ANSES calls for public funding on the national and European level to enable large-scale studies and research for consolidating knowledge of insufficiently documented health risks, similar to the National Toxicology Program implemented in the US.  (ANSES 2012)

Here, ANSES shifts to the scale of a ‘general cause of transparency’ in order to leverage the Séralini Affair for their strategic interests – namely, to legitimise their own policy objectives. In both Le Monde’s text and ANSES’s, the notions of independence and expertise are transferred to a general public existence. By depicting the majority of scientists (in Le Monde’s case) and governmental institutions (in ANSES’ case) as fundamentally transparent and truthful, they engage in a form of paradigm repair (Bennett et al. 1985), restricting Séralini’s criticism to a localised instance. Le Monde further argues that “this penultimate controversy illustrate the necessity – in France and in Europe – of a strong and independent public expertise” (Le Monde 2012). Again, a generalised ‘expertise’ is separated from government agencies and industries – even though those institutions are made up of the same individual scientists that would in turn constitute any ‘independent public expertise’! The same few words – public, independent, expertise – consistently appear not as particular objects with specific, non-transferable referents, but as instantiations of a larger and more diffuse idea.



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If many of Séralini’s critics thus manipulated transparency and its related formules for their own strategic needs, this also ended up concretising Séralini’s problematisation of the situation. The government agency primarily called upon to more stringently regulate GMOs was the EFSA. One of its responses to the Séralini Affair was to refurbish its public relations through a new FAQ section on its website, explicitly dedicated to the Affair (EFSA 2012c). A FAQ is, at first glance, a fairly straightforward means by which information is made available and comprehensible to the public. Notably, its formal structure creates an impression of a conversation initiated by a hypothetical public: ‘You asked, so we answer…’. The FAQ produces the impression that the EFSA’s discourse does not come from a specific and interested position, but is disembodied veridiction. Indeed, the formule “independent” appears frequently in the text, and is often supported by association with the terms “critique” and “review”. These co-occurrences reinforce the idea that the critique and review are, and must always be, considered as taking part in an independent and disinterested practice. The EFSA presents itself as if it is participating as a third-party observer. In doing so, they elide and manipulate the genre of controversy which by definition opposes, on a scene, two different parties in front of a third party which serves as a judge. A controversy is a “regulated debate” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1980: 16), a genre of discursive conflict which is fully integrated into the processes of scientific discourse (Latour 1987). But the EFSA’s discursive performance is not primarily directed towards a reconciliation of the two parties (Séralini and those he accuses of non-transparency). Rather, it is produced for another ‘third party’: the reading public. The situation is therefore made polemical, rather than controversial; the accused (EFSA) speaks not directly at its opponent, or to some official arbitrator, but to the ‘overhearing’ public and the media (see Yanoshevsky 2003). This performative strategy then licenses EFSA to attack Séralini on the grounds of transparency: “the authors did not respond directly to EFSA’s request for access to their study documentation and procedure” (EFSA 2012c). Rather than making a direct and substantive attack, the EFSA prefers to cry wolf over Séralini’s transparency to this presumed public. This chain of accusations reflects the indefinitely extending trajectory of revelation that is core to the transparency dispositif: the document, then the data, then the ‘raw data’, then the name of every expert… Given the impossibility of absolute transparency, every actor, including Séralini himself, risks becoming the saboteur hoisted by his own petard.

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6. Circulation and boundaries It is clear that we are not dealing with singular formules, possessing an abstract and Aristotelian form; rather, every statement involves a circulation of that formule, establishing a localised meaning even as it problematises and negotiates other instantiations. Each actualisation of the term ‘transparency’ is at once unique and invokes a larger referent of ‘Transparency’ in the virtual plane (in the Deleuzian sense). In this sense, the formule is viscous, ‘sticking’ to local instantiations without any single version fully encapsulating its range of significations.3 The problematisation of the Séralini Affair as a transparency debate is thus reinforced through a circulation of formules in discourse. A slew of open letters – drafted by third parties as well as the EFSA – were published in the wake of Séralini et al.’s paper, and exemplify the multi-levelled, multi-sited definitions of transparency. The first “open letter” is a web article (Independent Science News 2012) expressing support for Séralini. It leverages the study to levy a wider criticism at a scientific system “dominated by corporate influence”; a euphemistic formule for opacity that we have already seen used by the French national Academies. But the rhetorical effect of this demonstration is reinforced by the willingness to give a list of every researcher’s name endorsing the letter and supporting Séralini. Their point is that while the name of the corporate experts and the corporate data are hidden, “independent scientist[s] working in the public interest” do not hesitate to expose themselves. The technical and scientific debate becomes an unlimited spiral of transparency performances – how much can you reveal? How much of your own skin will you expose? If not – what are you afraid of? On the other ‘side’ of the conflict, the EFSA plays the same tactical game when it publishes its correspondence with Séralini. This move is an effort to reverse the field of forces, to itself champion the cause of transparency. The first letter from October 4th 2012 (EFSA 2012b) is a PDF scan of the letter sent privately to Séralini; that is, ‘material’ proof of the EFSA’s claim to transparency. It requests the authors of the study “to provide documentation” behind their claims by October the 12th. Following Séralini’s reticence, the second letter from October 18th 2012 (EFSA 2012d) emphasises that “until now EFSA has not received a response or documents from [Séralini]”, hence foregrounding their own transparency. This network of transparency requests culminates in the EFSA’s press release of October 22nd (EFSA 2012a). We can identify here numerous aforementioned formules: “all available data”, “fullest amount of material possible” “access has been granted to the data” and “public access”. The rhetoric is explicit: the press 3. We adopt the ‘viscous’ and distributed qualities from Morton’s (2013) philosophy of the ‘hyperobject’.



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release is titled “EFSA provides Séralini et al with data on GM maize NK603”, duly opens with the EFSA’s compliance to Séralini’s request for data, then describes the EFSA’s own repeated requests for documentation from Séralini et al., which they say has been ignored. These strategic displacements and manipulations of the formules in their circulation reinforce the double bind of secrecy and transparency. Although the EFSA is itself subject to claims of non-transparency (by Séralini’s initial discursive salvo), it plays a tactical game of affirming its transparency through the digital media apparatus (the data-sets made available online) and by criticising the lack of transparency of Séralini and his team. Ironically, it is as if pointing out the lack of available information from Séralini is even more effective than the information that is available to the public. In the case of the latter, the public must wade through large volumes of esoteric discourse to determine the positions of actors in the transparency dispositif; without performing this labour that the king has set for him/her, the subject cannot derive a definitive conclusion (also see Arjò et al. 2013: 257). Meanwhile, the simple assertion of non-information has a clear and effective significance: they have remained silent, they have failed the ideal of transparency. All the proof you need to condemn Séralini is already provided. We can see that the invocation of transparency does not always, or even primarily, work towards an informed public. For actors who criticise others of opacity, the release of information is not necessarily the most profitable outcome, since nonrelease enables them to continue to occupy favourable ground. Furthermore, once the data is released, it provides additional material for dispute over the motive and methodological transparency of that data as discourse – which gives no guarantee that the public will be ‘more informed’. The anthropologist Mary Douglas put it neatly: “the more indiscriminately a sensitive topic is opened to debate, the more intractable it is bound to become” (2001: 146). This paradox is replicated in the related formule of ‘Open Government’  – a term which has been criticised as exceedingly vague and, like the above strategic moves, makes no actual guarantee of public accountability (Yu & Robinson 2012). An example can be found in an online petition directed at Séralini, titled “Dr. Séralini – Please release data from your biotech corn study” (Anonymous 2012). The term ‘biotech corn’ gives away the probable source of this anonymous petition; the wording is traditionally used by ‘biotechnologies’ promoters, such as industry lobbyists and scientists in favour of GMO. Nonetheless, what is most interesting in this petition is the word “data” – repeated 9 times in a text totalling less than 180 – and mostly co-occurring with formules associated to transparency (“full disclosure”, “public access”) and opacity (“retention”). The petition also mentions the idea of ‘raw data’, an interesting variation which implies that only ‘raw’, that is, ‘unprocessed’ and ‘unmediated’ data, can fully disclose the truth. Of course, Séralini

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and CRIIGEN were not blind to this truth-value of ‘data’, either; in their own press release, they announced “legal actions to force disclosure of hidden and poor quality toxicological data” by other institutions. They argue that CRIIGEN’s own ‘raw data’ has already been delivered to a notary, and that public release will follow as soon as the regulatory agencies or Monsanto do the same for their data, or when governments consent to publish the industry data […] This will enable a true assessment, contradictory and transparent, and not a pseudo-assessment distorted by lobbies that are more concerned with protecting their own interests than with public health.  (CRIIGEN 2013)

This is a rather explicit provocation: ‘we’ll be transparent, as soon as you are’. Since institutions and studies can rarely be transparent in every imaginable way, the problematisation of the Affair in terms of transparency provides multiple ways in which actors on every side can mobilise the cause of transparency to their strategic benefit. While we have stressed the evocative and contextually performative force of these formules, they are not ‘just’ rhetoric. They influence and depend upon legal principles and institutional practices. For example, the EFSA mentions in its 22nd October press release (EFSA 2012a) a public access procedure which had previously allowed “public access [to EFSA data] on six previous occasions to various parties”. This procedure is indeed mentioned in various internal documents (EFSA 2003, 2006, 2009), as well as European Union official texts like Regulation (EC) No. 1049/2001 (European Union 2001). Such documents are part of an important juridical-institutional kernel within the transparency dispositif, and reflect the discursive construction and negotiation of transparency-related practices within the ‘act of government’ itself. For example, article 12 of Regulation (EC) No. 1049/2001 is dedicated to “direct access in electronic form or through a register”. Predictably, digital media is invested with a capacity to inform the public and actualise the positive effects of transparency: “opinions and other documents such as reports, statements and guidance documents will be made publicly available on the EFSA website.” But the limit-point is never far away in these dispositifs. Since no institution can practically make everything transparent, there emerge conventional forms in which transparency is delimited and tolerated margins of opacity – akin to the ‘good’ secrecy of Séralini – are established. The document describing dayto-day transparency practices of the EFSA is entitled “openness, transparency and confidentiality”: There is however a need to be clear as to how EFSA intends to operate these principles in practice and in particular to clarify those circumstances in which information may be sought from EFSA but will not or not immediately be made available. Openness on this point, including the need for confidentiality, is in itself an essential point of building trust with stakeholders.  (EFSA 2003)

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This leads to the paradoxical statement that transparency is ultimately predicated on some confidentiality: Confidentiality needs to be allowed for internal scientific debate on issues to ensure that those participating feel free to challenge any view put forward from any perspective. Full openness for such a debate would be likely to inhibit discussion in a way which would be damaging to consumers’ interests and reduce the likelihood of a high quality final (public) opinion. (EFSA 2003)

This articulation unpacks the power relation embedded within transparency’s idea of ‘governing governments’. On one hand, the transparency dispositif defers some of the labour of governing to the figure of the auditor-citizen. On the other, it is precisely the means by which a trust in the system as a whole (that is, the system of government, transparency, information and public debate) is maintained – what Giddens (1990) calls, via Luhmann, an ‘abstract system’. Hence, it is no mere irony that transparency is ultimately predicated on secrecy. Where secrecy previously possessed an open authority as arcana imperii, it now persists as a pathologised yet condoned modus operandi. The secrecy of a transparent government is itself a secret (see Birchall 2012; Horn 2012). By reserving the right to restrict the operation of transparency for the sake of efficiency or confidentiality, the state is able to make transparency ‘sacred’: transparency is “removed from the free use of men” and reserved for a specifically constrained deployment (Agamben 2009: 18). The transparency dispositif is thus shown to be delimited in two ways: in terms of institutional self-regulation and practice, and in terms of other formules, other discourses, other dispositifs – such as confidentiality and privacy – which keep transparency in check. The Séralini Affair would have one such postscript: in January 2013, EFSA published its data on Monsanto’s GM NK603 maize, the product at the heart of Séralini’s experiment. Monsanto would reply with judicial threats to safeguard its confidentiality rights, arguing that it “firmly supports transparency in European regulatory decision-making, but strongly objects to EFSA’s unilateral publication of Monsanto’s data” (Starling 2013). No debate is ever confined to a single formule, a single dispositif. 7. The politics of transparency discourse In examining the Séralini Affair, we have sought to demonstrate how transparency operates as a dispositif and through formules, deploying modes of problematisation across time and space to serve both short-term tactical interests of the actors and the long-term aggregation of transparency as a regime of knowledge. We have also examined how the liberal idea of ‘governing governments’ plays out discursively in

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specific, empirical situations. Our analysis turns away from any synoptic dream of ‘resisting’ governmental power and the neoliberal drive to responsibilise subjects, and any simple contrast between ‘governments that govern’ and ‘governing governments’. Through the Séralini Affair, we identify a qualitatively distinct level of effects: governmentality as a network of axiological determinations which organise what is valid, proper and possible within a democratic society. Whether it is the public auditing the government, secret researchers exposing government agencies, or NGOs governing scientific communities, our analysis of ‘governing governments’ re-emphasises Foucault’s original formulation. Governmentality is not, fundamentally, a technique for governments to subjugate its people. It is a regime by which certain rules for subjugation and governing, and for judging extant such practices, are made available to all actors. We would now like to conclude by briefly mentioning the ethical and political implications of the transparency dispositif. If transparency does not deliver rational and informed publics as it purports, and if demanding more transparency is not necessarily an emancipatory politics for the subject, what is to be our attitude? Our emphasis has been on how transparency makes government itself – as well as other stakeholders – the subject of governmentality. This is, of course, not new; rather, this flexible directionality was central to the very emergence of liberal governmentality. Foucault suggested that it was when the market as a ‘natural force’ became a general principle of governing that government could finally become a form of scientific knowledge, that ‘good’ government could be judged from the ‘bad’. One could then say: that is not an effective way to exercise your sovereignty, that is not good government (Foucault 2007: 350–1). Yet, crucially, this does not mean any heroic kind of ‘resistance’ where the citizen is empowered to be free of governmental deception or coercion. Rather, the notion of ‘good government’ was precisely a mode of problematisation which organised politics around its particular set of questions and values. Similarly, what we have tried to show through the Séralini Affair is that transparency is not an ideal unfulfilled; it is an already fulfilled configuration of political contestation. It is a schema wherein a general governmentality organises a distribution of forces and subject positions that includes both government’s critique of itself and its subjects on one hand, and subjects’ critique of government and themselves on the other. In other words, the transparency dispositif creates a situation where transparency does not necessarily correlate to resistance or empowerment. Again: what should then be our attitude to transparency? One suggestion is that it is the dispositif itself that should also be subjected to critique; that is, we might need to think about the ‘structural’ question of a transparency society as much as specific actors and their ‘failures’ to be transparent. Here, a governmentality perspective might ask: How does the state represent and problematise itself? How



Chapter 5.  Governing governments? 171

is the population problematised as an object of knowledge and intervention? For instance, Ferguson and Gupta (2002) have shown how a vision of the state as vertical and all-encompassing guides the state’s conceptualisation of its own activity in a case of an Indian health project, while Bigo (2002) has argued the state sees itself as a body or container for the polity in immigration discourse. In the case of transparency, we recall earlier suggestions that the state conceptualises itself as a passive entity; a storehouse and archive which is not directly responsible for citizen engagement or public deliberation, but merely facilitates it. Inversely, the population becomes the active agent that must seize the keys as offered, search the archives, learn the ‘transparent’ information, and make something of it. This line of critique exposes the sheer vagueness of transparency policies in many state and corporate institutions; the distribution of responsibility between public and state and its possible re-negotiation; and how the celebratory rhetoric of citizen engagement and participation can actually contribute to states’ irresponsibility. A dispositif critique of transparency therefore questions what this fixation with transparency makes us value and makes us forget; what kinds of labour it now demands of us, and divests of others; and what speech and action become thought of as possible and impossible within a transparency ‘problem’.

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part ii

Discourse, practice and prefigurative governmentalities

chapter 6

Governing safe operations at a distance Enacting responsible risk communication at work Joel Rasmussen

Örebro University, Sweden

This chapter argues that today’s organisational risk management, where employees are to adopt routines for proper self-control, is fruitfully approached as what Rose and Miller (1992) term governing-at-a-distance. Governing that relies on internal control and the self-governing capacity of citizens requires people to be involved in communication that signifies responsible behaviour. If there is hierarchical monitoring, then it is communication that is supervised which makes the signifying practices all the more important. While previous research has demonstrated that an increasing burden of responsibility is placed on citizens for the risks and health problems they face or envisage, less attention has been paid to the increased communication requirements this development involves. Bridging this gap, this chapter investigates how social interaction in meetings works to facilitate employees to become responsible risk communication subjects. An intensive discourse analysis of five safety meeting episodes demonstrates how the responsibilisation of employees’ risk communication extends questions of (a) form – such as the duration of talk, (b) paper work, (c) genuineness, (d) contributing on-topic, (e) economisation, and (f) reliability regardless of illness and place. The study takes inspiration from positioning analysis (e.g. Bamberg 2005), allowing for a detailed account of the moment-tomoment process of responsibilisation, something that previous research on risk management tends to skim over.

1. Introduction Risk management used to be about experts designing directives for workers or laypeople to follow. Other than hierarchical instructions, risk management was largely embedded in everyday practices and handled through tacit knowledge, largely beyond the management’s gaze and control. This has changed since management strategies increasingly attempt to reveal and use more of the ‘soft’ capacities of employees, through the use of culture management and employee doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.06ras © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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involvement, also known as ‘empowerment’ (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996). It has also changed as risk management has become a collective construction process in a network of managers, engineers, workers, and HSE-officers (health, safety and environment) who have to feed information to external bodies and headquarters. The requirements have risen for organisations to report to government and non-governmental bodies to obtain (a) voluntary certifications in risk management areas such as safety, health and environment, which is sometimes very much needed for credibility among business partners and customers, and (b) mandatory licences that governments demand (Frick and Wren 2000: 29). Various means of communication play an important role in facilitating these reports, programmes and other risk management activities requiring employee involvement. These developments invite attention to governing practices and discourse in relation to risk communication. The developments correlate well with the interest in the academic world of rationalised governing as opposed to sovereign governing (Foucault 2008), governing at a distance through responsibilisation (Rose 1999; Rose and Miller 1992) and textualisation at work (Iedema 2003). Previous research has tapped into these themes, analysing how risk and responsibility are distributed through the use of organisational practices and communication (e.g. Gray 2009; MacEachen 2000; Rasmussen 2013; Zoller 2003a, 2003b) and also how ICT such as incident reporting (Rasmussen 2011b; Waring 2009) and meetings (Iedema 2003; Rasmussen 2011a) are used to this effect. Concerning the research on meetings, several studies have focused primarily on the chairperson’s role (Iedema 2003; Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008; Rasmussen 2011a; Wodak, Kwon, and Clarke 2011), but what has been lacking is a focus on the growing responsibilities of employees to give meaningful feedback during meetings and how this feedback relates to the chair’s behaviour and, together, form more or less productive subject positions and outcomes. This study will thus contribute by focusing on how chair and employee interaction in meetings works to facilitate employees to become responsible risk communication subjects. Through its focus on how responsibility for risk communication is proclaimed, taken up or resisted in interaction, the chapter helps develop a discourse approach to the analysis of governmentality and responsibilisation. Drawing on ideas developed by governmentality theorists (Dean 2010; Foucault 2008; O’Malley 1996; Power 2007; Rose 1999), this study does not assume that it is obvious what a risk is, or that risk communication is primarily used in a non-constitutive way to conference about risks. It is rather that certain more or less hazardous phenomena become named risks, and they become objects of risk communication, organisational procedures, and collective control. It is useful to see these processes of becoming because risks are not perceived here as existing independently of human discourse (Power 2007). Dean (2010: 196) explains that: “Risk



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is a way of representing events in a certain form so they might be made governable in particular ways, with particular techniques and for particular goals.” This does not imply that there is no material world which, with its degree of toxicity or energy, may exceed the limits of what the human body can withstand – and injure or kill us. Instead, if such phenomena should be viewed and treated as risk objects they must be articulated as such through discourse. Moreover, if living things or property values are to be protected they must also be articulated discursively as somehow exposed and worthy of protection. Taking a discursive approach thus means to not overlook important steps in the analysis of the formation of risk management and its everyday political claims and negotiations. The chapter aims to investigate how social interaction is used by employees and chair to negotiate employees becoming responsible risk communication subjects. The study takes departure from the idea that identities are forged relationally and through discourse (Foucault 1972). However, in order to analyse in detail interaction and its identity-effects, the chapter draws on positioning analysis. First introduced by discursive psychologists Davies and Harré (1990), positioning analysis has been modified and developed into more concrete analytical tools (Bamberg 1997, 2005; Hausendorf and Bora 2006; Korobov 2010). It essentially centres on the effects that particular discursive actions have for establishing the identities of social actors. Using selected concepts from positioning analysis, the study seeks to answer the following research questions: – What subject positions are created with regard to the liability for risk communication? – How are discursive strategies used to create these subject positions? – How can these moments of risk-talk be said to challenge or reinforce more long-term and persistent rules, norms and logics in the area of risk and safety? In the following, a theoretical basis is provided for the study’s central themes; the governing of organisations and risks through the use of communication and workplace meetings. Subsequently, the study’s methodological approach and discourse analytical concepts are described, before moving on to the analysis of actual meeting interaction. Five episodes are examined carefully in order to demonstrate how the participants’ discursive choices form subject positions with regard to liability for risk communication. I end the chapter with a discussion of how the analysis complements earlier studies of meetings and governmentality.

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2. The governing of organisations and risks The increased demands for risk communication and the dispersion of responsibility for it in working life must be understood as part of a changing governing rationale, one that assumes control at a distance through encouraged self-­governance followed by responsible reporting, or perhaps ‘confession’, to superiors. In the following, two explanations of this development in work organisations are explored. First, Foucault traces this rationalised, governing-at-a-distance to the impact of the theory of human capital, developed by Chicago school economists Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz, among others. Their transformation of the category labour entailed that if more of the inner and individual needs and capacities of the employee are revealed and utilised, then the ambitions of the enterprise and of the worker may overlap and generate highly motivated and self-actualizing individuals, which implies more efficient human resources management and as a result improved business performance (Foucault 2008; see also Jacques 1996). Psychology research influenced the theory of human capital through the observation that an employee’s competence and skills are inseparable from the individual. Consequently, an organisation could create added value through educational investments bound for these individuals. Moreover, good employee health was deemed to be of paramount importance since health affects performance as well as the longevity of human resources, and the return on educational investments (Foucault 2008). So, according to the logic of human capital, everyone is morally obliged to manage risk and use proper self-care. Human vulnerability and proneness to injury and illness become perceived as originating in a lack of competence, which should be managed through education, training, and character development (Foucault 2008). So, somewhat paradoxically, while worker involvement earlier in the 1900s was a right that was captured through political struggle and trade unions, it is now, as a result of the impact of changing business management philosophies, encouraged by managers and even imposed sometimes (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). Second, from the late 1970s and early 1980s, political coalitions criticising welfarist, ‘big government’ and public spending on reactive risk insurance put expectations on both organisations and individuals to exercise greater preventive control of “risk behaviours” to avoid illness and related societal costs. This governing regime supports a combination of compulsory government standards; voluntary standards jointly developed by state and private actors; and private business consultancy programmes. The primary role of the state is to set the direction and aims of risk prevention, rather than bearing the major costs of direct monitoring and insurance (Frick and Wren 2000: 29). It is in line with these two historical developments that work organisations set up risk communication routines



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internally to maintain documentation confirming that they are responsibly taking care of risk management. Governing risk “at a distance” therefore implies internal and external, cross-professional communication (cf. Rose 1999). The present study looks at risk management practices that place demands on employees to handle risk communication. This is a process which requires subjects to adopt new discourses of responsibility and self-manage accordingly. Since this form of risk management does not involve the direct hierarchical supervision and correction of unsafe behaviour, power is exercised, rather, at a distance and through processes of subjectification, meaning that the subject responds to external pressures and discourses, and internalises these through reflection and self-management (Foucault 1991). Foucault views subjectification from a historical perspective as processes where actors are assigned subject positions, that is, the differentiated roles and statuses that are made available to people who become relevant to specific discourses (Schatzki 2002: 50). In contrast to Foucault, discursive psychologists (e.g., Bamberg 1997, 2005; Korobov 2010) analyse the positioning of actors using an interactional approach (rather than an historical one) and focus on the fluid and dynamic identity-effects of moment-to-moment social interaction. Bridging these two perspectives allows us to be sensitive to the ongoing positioning of participants in interaction, while at the same time trying to understand what is at stake and how the particulars of the interaction resonate with the bigger picture of risk management developments. Several studies have documented changing discourses, responsibilities and subjectivities in the area of risk and safety (e.g. Chikudate 2009; Collinson 1999; Gray 2009; MacEachen 2000; Packer 2003; Zoller 2003a, 2003b), although without focusing on communication as a responsibility or examining discourse in a detailed way as done in the present study. This chapter will allow for a more detailed analysis of responsibilisation through a focus on the local, “microscopic” discursive practices that Foucault (1978: 99f) ascribes constitutive capacity. 3. The ‘textualisation of work’ and workplace meetings There are some studies of the growing number of communication tasks, meetings and reporting practices in working life. Since the 1990s it has become evident that today’s organisational governing principles require of people that they talk and write about their work and not just simply perform it (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996). Iedema (2003: 53) terms this the textualisation of work – a process where new communication duties have been added, and the communication takes place on sites or via ICTs beyond the spaces where everyday work takes place,

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and together with colleagues that usually do not work together on a daily basis. Inevitably, when these communication duties are performed at remove from the ordinary work setting, the language also changes (Iedema 2003). Morrish and Sauntson’s (2010) study of such textualisation and language change demonstrated how universities’ mission statements included positive attitude markers such as “excellent”, “excellence”, “highest quality”, “committed to”, “strive for”, “professional”, “robust”, “innovative”, “flexible”, “new”, “outstanding” and “employable”. A change of commitments and subjectivities appeared. Gone were the traditional identities associated with research disciplines and their authoritative and somewhat detached voice, and in its place emerged a more egalitarian identity, one which is personalised, presenting an informal relationship with the “customers” (Morrish and Sauntson 2010). Other critical linguistic researchers have showed how these same features can be found in the promotional material of hospitals, where language foregrounded the values of “communication”, “public engagement”, “openness” and “commitment to excellence”, often against a background of massive cuts in spending and jobs freezes for health professionals (Machin and Mayr 2012). Typical of the textualisation of work, communication becomes not a process but an objective in itself (Cameron 2000). Communication takes on a moral quality, signifying openness and transparency, even when in fact the language being used is an abstract, generic management one. And importantly in all these cases the professional knowledge of educators and of health workers is backgrounded or completely absent (Machin and Mayr 2012). Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Iedema (2003) argues that meetings are used to make work more transparent and workers visible, to ensure that they embrace meta-discourses governing the organisation in their work. Meetings are used to make workers become, and confirm that they are, owners of new responsibilities. Meetings are thus about reconciling the individual with the logics of the organisation, and dealing with the dilemmas that inevitably emerge (Iedema 2003). Moreover, Iedema compares two meetings of which one was, at least on the face of it, successful in creating common views and task orientations, and one that was not. To successfully conduct a meeting in accordance with a strategic objective was much about balancing and neutralizing one’s self presentation and the wishes and voices of the participants. The successful senior planner adopted, as chair, self-positionings ranging from acceptably authoritarian to approachable and listening, and could change from the authoritarian to egalitarian style in a very subtle way. He did not provide too much information that could stir up controversy, he reduced negotiability by not naming the present parties – talking instead of “stakeholders” – and he obfuscated conflict by “defusing and neutralizing contradicting and incommensurable views” (Iedema 2003: 136).



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Moreover, Jarzabkowski and Seidl (2008) analyse how particular patterns of interaction during the initiation, conduct and termination of meetings affect the group’s collaboration and strategic outcomes. While meetings offer an arena for choice opportunities, different meeting practices tend to stabilise or destabilise top managers’ plans, voting being one of the most destabilizing practices and agendadriven control a stabilizing one. In a similar way, Wodak, Kwon and Clarke (2011) examine the discursive strategies that a leader uses as chair to achieve consensus at meetings. Five prevalent strategies are identified; bonding, encouraging, directing, modulating, and re/committing. For instance, the use of the pronoun “we” functions to form a common organisational identity and consensus, and is particularly a part of the bonding strategy. To encourage participation, the chair asks for advice or knowledge, asks open questions, supports existing opinions, gives praise to other participants, leaves room for others to speak, or legitimises what others have said through repetition. Other strategies of control are described in Rasmussen (2011a). The study examines how plans to implement a behavioural safety programme are presented and negotiated in a safety meeting at a chemical factory in Sweden. The study analyses in detail how the chair invokes discourses of partnership, hierarchy and competitiveness in order to gather consent around the programme implementation. The articulation of these three discourses constitutes a pervasive tactic of acting upon possible actions. That is, the discourse of equal partnership mitigates the hierarchical characteristics of the talk, making the differentiated right to direct, define, and decide more acceptable. Furthermore, the hierarchical discourse gives a strong sense of urgency to the competitive talk, which in turn aids implementation by connoting the positive, collective efforts of a sports team. The discourses therefore coincide in an attempt to create employees who are willing to implement a management program in which workers govern themselves through peer observation and by adopting conditions of self-control. Although the study gives some analyses of middle managers and workers’ positionings, many of them are largely silent during the sections analysed, leaving the contribution of less senior participants under-researched. The present study will analyse other recorded meeting data from the same factory, which allows for analysis of how social interaction is used by employees and chair. 4. Methodology With the purpose of studying how interaction is used to facilitate employees becoming, or resisting becoming, responsible risk communication subjects, a case-study design was used. The study uses what Alvesson and Deetz (2000) calls

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a partial ethnography, meaning that we set out to learn from a situation that has been observed for a limited time, unlike a traditional ethnography that examines, for instance, an entire organisational culture with numerous practices over a long period of time. The advantage of the partial ethnography is that the smaller amount of data allows for many careful observations, whereas a traditional ethnography demands a broader systematisation of a bulk of data which leaves less time for precise, in-depth situational analysis. The research project, from which this chapter is a spin-off, uses three case-study workplaces. All the data – 46 semistructured interviews, numerous documents and meeting transcripts  – were gathered between 2006 and 2008. This chapter focuses on one of the cases, a large-scale process industry, pseudonymously called West Plant. At West Plant, 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted. In addition, meeting interaction was observed, audio recorded and transcribed. In this chapter, the interviews provide contextual information rather than being analytical material, and the focus is instead on meeting interaction (for studies of the interviews at West Plant, see Rasmussen 2011b, 2013). The meeting that the present chapter focuses on lasted for 2 hours and 44 minutes. To enable the study of how employees and the chair negotiate risk communication responsibilities through the ways they position each other in talk, those passages where middle managers and workers responded to requests to participate were singled out for analysis. The analysis of positioning develops through three stages: – Firstly, I analyse which social actors or phenomena are constructed within the reported events (Bamberg 2005). Discursive devices that are relevant to pay attention to are pronominal choices and categorisation, but also heteroglossic speech – when the speaker makes reference to other putative actors and viewpoints. – Secondly, the analysis draws attention to how certain qualities and types of behaviour are assigned to these phenomena and to self and others, and how they are evaluated (cf. Hausendorf and Bora 2006). Some may be positioned as protagonists and others as antagonists (Bamberg 2005). These evaluations are produced through the way the speaker judges, proclaims, disclaims, intensifies, de-intensifies, uses metaphors, etc. (Martin and White 2005). – Thirdly, through the examination of how participants fashion different social positions, I also attempt to explain how certain rules, norms and identities are both endorsed and denounced as part of the social interaction (Korobov 2010: 274). The analysis thus leads progressively to distinguish what is at stake and how actors position themselves in relation to metanarratives or discourses (Bamberg 2005).



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To analyse social positioning in the manner described above implies certain choices with regard to the analysis of discursive action. Instead of looking for a hidden truth, the focus is on what appears on the surface of discourse, the spoken and written language, and in its patterns. There is no search for hidden meaning, which is the case in both ideology critique using the notion of false consciousness and in cognitivist approaches to identity (Korobov 2010). Moreover, the approach rejects any view of the subject as determined by “muscular” discourses in a unilateral world-to-agent process, but stresses more the agent’s attitude to the world, and a dialectical relationship between agency and structure (Bamberg 2005: 24). The analysis thus brings up discourses or meta-narratives in so far as such patterns of rules and norms are enacted by participants themselves (Korobov 2010). Finally, to notice and understand variations, contradictions, and dilemmas in interaction is seen as an integral part of the discourse analytical project (Oostendorp and Jones 2015). Analysing positioning in this fashion, using naturally occurring data, enables processes to be studied and reported on, rather than seemingly cemented political projects and discourses. The episodes to be included in the chapter were translated from Swedish to English. As others have done previously (e.g. Osvaldsson 2004) the transcription alternates line by line between the original (in italics for increased clarity) and the translation into English. Although the two versions are kept as consistent as possible, some lines appear unalike due to differences in syntax, word order and length of expression between Swedish and English. The transcription was done using some of the Jeffersonian conventions (Jefferson 2004), sumarised in the following transcription key: (.) A micro-pause (2.0) A longer and timed pause [word] Left square brackets show where overlapping speech begins, [word] the right where it ends >word< Arrows pointing inwards surround faster speech Arrows pointing outwards surround slower speech (  ) words within brackets were too unclear to transcribe ((  )) double brackets contain a description provided by the transcriber word WORD Underlined parts are louder than surrounding speech, words in capitals are even louder ↑ ↓ An arrow pointing up indicates an increase in pitch in the utterance that follows, an arrow pointing down indicates a drop in pitch .hh In-breath hh Out-breath

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::: Colons indicate prolongation of the preceding syllable, the more colons the longer prolongation - A dash denotes that a word is quickly cut off =word Equal signs indicate that the talk proceeds without any pause word= laughter Several participants laugh (in capitals if very loudly) hah hah hah One participant laughs

5. Results To begin with, the following eleven people from West Plant, seven men and four women, are participating in the meeting. Monica, the local manager, chairs the meeting. The TQM Coordinator, Ester, also represents the management team. Three department heads are present: the production manager, Marcus, the head of maintenance, Andreas, and the service manager, Thomas. Also present are Kent – the principal safety representative, Karin – representing the occupational health service firm hired by West Plant, and an instrument technician, Jens. Others participating are the operator and union representative, John, the safety representative of the office workers, Margareta, and a representative of the occupational health service that the company hires, Berit. 5.1

Taking responsibility for the form and duration of risk communication

In the first part of the meeting used for intensive analysis, Monica introduces the segment dealing with the reporting of safety groups. The safety groups are made up of different areas – production, service, and maintenance – with an area manager responsible for each. This is typically an occasion where middle managers will be responsible for constructing a story of past risk management work in their group. In this first case, it is Thomas, the service manager, who begins to describe the work of his group. Excerpt 1 1 Monica: ↑ja (.) ska vi skutta vidare till nästa punkt (0.5) skydds↑grupperna (2.0)  ↑yes (.) shall we jump to the next point (0.5) the safety ↑groups (2.0) 2 jag kommer inte ihåg vem som fick börja först sist I don’t remember who got to start first last time 3 Marcus: det va vi det it was us 4 Monica: ↑ja: då är det kanske det är ser:vice som ska börja nu då ↑ye:s well maybe it’s service that should start now then



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5 Thomas: ja: (.) vi har haft (1.0) skydds↓möte Ye:s (.) we’ve had (1.0) a safety ↓meeting 6 Monica: ↑ja’a ↑ye:s 7 Thomas: den ↑tjutredje hade vi det=då gick vi skyddsrond ↓också (1.5) och så hade on the ↑twenty-third we had it=we did a safety round ↓as well (1.5) and 8 vi sån här skydd- eller beteendebaserad säkert tänk rond (.) we did one of those safety- or behaviour based safe thinking rounds (.) 9 ska se vad vi gjorde mer (4.0) ↑ja: jag tror inte jag säger så mycket mer I’ll check what else we did (4.0) ↑ye:s I don’t think I’ll say that much more 10 Monica: inga ↑frågor till skyddskommittén no ↑questions to the safety committee 11 Thomas: um =nej um =no 12 Monica: ↑nej (1.0) ↑jättebra (0.5) föredömligt kort ↑no (1.0) ↑ great (0.5) admirably brief 13 LAUGHTER 14 Marcus: ↑jasså (1.0) ni som sätter standarden ↑okay (1.0) it’s you who set the bar 15 LAUGHTER 16 Marcus: >a- vi är klar< >yup- we’re done< 17 LAUGHTER

In this first excerpt, Monica introduces the safety groups as the “next point” and immediately uses a discursive device of encouragement (Wodak, Kwon and Clarke 2011), asking for others’ knowledge regarding who got to start last time, thus invoking a script regarding who’s taking the turn to begin. After Marcus’ short response, she continues by – justly – giving the floor to the service group, again positioning herself as an encouraging leader due to the softened directive (“well maybe it is service that should start” my italicisation) and the raised pitch in her accounts. Thomas, then, starts lining up safety routines that his group has performed. He provides a detail of when they had their safety meeting (line 7) which functions as proof that it was carried out. He stresses that they did not only carry out the safety meeting but the safety round as well, thus scaling-up with respect to responsibility taken. He then stumbles a bit when describing another type of safety round that had been carried out. This one was part of a consultancy programme – behaviour based safety – which is carried out via employees observing each other performing work tasks and looking out for risk behaviours. But in integrating the programme at the site, it was called “Safe Thinking” (Swedish “säkert tänk”) and the peer-observation rounds “safe-thinking rounds”.

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Consequently, since this programme had recently been introduced at the site (Rasmussen 2011a), Thomas had a couple of new concepts and routines to manage in addition to, for example, traditional safety rounds focusing on the facilities. Thomas then rounds off his account with modulation implying that more has been done but that it is unnecessary to occupy meeting time for it (“I don’t think I’ll say that much more”). In line 10, Monica then calls on Thomas to take up a subject position that is limited to asking questions instead of sharing ideas, new knowledge or complaints (“no ↑questions to the safety committee”). When Thomas confirms that they do not have questions, Monica gives an appreciative response to the work by Thomas’ group and his short presentation (“↑no (1.0) ↑great (0.5) admirably brief ”), but the group reacts with laughter to a humorous cue, which tells us that a longer presentation was expected of Thomas. Marcus adds to the evaluation of Thomas, jokingly constructing a competition between the groups (“it’s you who set the bar”) and positioning Marcus – through reported speech at increased speed – as if now self-satisfied with a quickly completed job (“>yup- we’re donemen han had- han ↑sa att han skulle skriva det på dagskiften innan men >but he had- he said he he would write it on the day shifts before but 12 det kanske kö:rde ihop sig (1.5) han har inte hört a:v sig i alla fall maybe something came up (1.5) I haven’t heard from him anyway 13 Monica: um um 14 Marcus:  men det (.) löser sig =vi har ju många som var med på mötet som är här but it (.) will work out =we do have many here who attended the meeting 15  mer än hälften (h) i alla fall .hh (1.0) ehm (3.0) vi har pratat om lite more than half in any case (h) .hh (1.0) ehm (3.0) we’ve talked a bit about 16  framtida fokus för skyddsarbetet så självklart så är det ju BBS då som är (.) the future focus for the safety work and of course it’s BBS which is the (.) fokusområdet focus area 17 Monica: ↑um’m ↑um 18 Marcus: för å jobba vidare inom drift’å’teknik (0.5) men även å jobba mä å to take the work farther in production’n’technology (0.5) but also to 19 förbättra (.) arbetet med ri:skanaly:ser och (.) processerna (2.0) work to improve (.) the work on risk analyses and (.) the processes (2.0) 20 Monica: um’m um 21 Marcus:  kring det då (1.0) och där är ju Flexite inblandat (1.0) de:lvis =så att det around them (1.0) and that’s where Flexite is involved (1.0) in part =so 22 är väl (.) .hh för å utveckla (.) bli ännu [bättre] I guess (.) .hh it’s to develop (.) get even [better] 23 Monica: [↑um’m] [↑um] 24 Marcus: så är det väl det vi tänkte fokusera [på] so that’s what we’re going to focus [on] 25 Monica:  [är] det (.) är det inom e:ran  [is] this (.) within your

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skyddsgrupp [så att säga] safety group [so to speak] 26 Marcus: [ja precis] [yes exactly] 27 Monica: ↑um’m ↑um 28 Marcus: sen påverkar det ju andra också självklart (.) när det gäller riskanalyser but it affects the others as well of course (.) when it comes to risk analysis 29 deltar ju många fler many more participate 30 Monica: um’m så det sker en samordning [över] um so there is coordination [across] 31 Marcus: [ja] [yes] 32 Monica: skyddsområdena the safety areas 33 Marcus: precis exactly 34 Monica: ↑ja bra ↑yes good 35 Marcus: det måste det göra det =det är därför jag berättar det there has to be =that’s why I tell you this 36 Monica: ↑um’m ↑um 37 Marcus: hä:r då (.) BBS är ju redan samordnat tvärs över hela he:re (.) BBS is already coordinated across it all 38 Monica: ↑ja ↑yes-

Marcus starts accounting for his safety group’s work using a three-part pronouncement, a tricolon (line 2), which gives emphasis to his group’s reliability. It also forecasts and counters any reliability doubts that his next sentence potentially could stir (“but we don’t have (.) the ↑minutes ready this time”), which reports the absence of a necessary document accounting for a prior meeting. He attributes the document not being ready to high workload and time pressure (line 4). The situation is, however, sharpened when John interrupts Marcus with a counter-proclamation (“no: there is ↓none”), and the status of the minutes goes from unfinished to non-existent. Marcus replies to this face-threatening act by repeating John’s comment (“there ↑is none”) indicating surprise and disbelief, and by laughing (line 8) which lightens the mood and displays strength rather than dejection. Then, Jens offers an explanation (“He went on vacation Roger so that’s probably why”) and Marcus positions Roger as the one responsible (line 11). However,



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again, drawing on the context of workload and time pressure, he down-scales Roger’s personal responsibility (line 12). Marcus then, skilfully, tries to salvage the situation with the missing protocol with a positive judgment and by appealing to collective memory (“it (.) will work out = we do have many here who attended the meeting”). In addition, his laughter (line 15) signals a good atmosphere, which prevents the situation from becoming articulated as serious. What happens in the next few lines is that Marcus continues to explain what his safety group has done, but the response from Monica is minimal. The reason seems to be that Marcus refers to site-wide projects, such as behaviour-based safety (BBS) involving all employees (see Rasmussen 2011a), which is also the case with the incident reporting program Flexite (see Rasmussen 2011b), and gives a very general attitude promise while Monica expects responsibility taken by his group specifically, which she eventually makes plain (“[is] this (.) within your safety group”). The contradiction that these processes could be both site-wide affairs and the concern of Marcus’ group is resolved by Monica’s positive interpretation, that Marcus’ group plays a role in coordinating joint risk communication work (line 30). Marcus endorses and is upscaling the validity of this assessment (line 31 and 33) and justifies further his previous account (“that’s why I tell you this”). Consequently, he has to struggle and re-position to make his group appear as having contributed to risk management in a genuine way. 5.3

Taking responsibility for communicating on-topic

Moving on to another example (Excerpt 3), in this case a safety representative speaks about the needs expressed by staff regarding facilities to clean rail carts and “cars” (probably slang for truck trailers) that have contained hazardous waste (abbreviated to “EWC”). The sequence is particularly interesting because what unfolds can explain why Stina, the safety representative, takes up a quite modest position, as the relevance of her contribution comes to be negatively evaluated by superiors. Excerpt 3 1 Stina:  Tessan tycker det finns ett stort behov av en spolplatta på ↓VP ((väte Tess thinks there’s great need for a swash plate at ↓HP ((hydrogen 2 peroxid)) (0.5) så man kan spola ur (1.5) järnvägsvagnar och bi:lar (2.0) peroxide)) (0.5) so you can flush out (1.5) rail wagons and ca:rs (2.0) 3 Monica: spola ↑ur: järnvägsvagnar och bilar flush ↑out rail wagons and cars 5 Stina: ja spola ur re:ngö:ra yes flush out cle:an

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6 Monica: ↑um’m (2.0) ↑um (2.0) 7 Stina: vi kanske kan ja >ta med det till nästa möte< maybe we can well >take it to the next meeting< 8 Monica: ja’a ye:s 9 Thomas: är det ↑in:vä:ndig rengöring du prata om is it ↑inte:rnal cleaning you’re talking about 10 Stina: ↑okej ↑okay 11 Monica: hh .hh hh besvä:rliga frågor hh .hh hh di:fficult questions 12 Stina: ja’a (0.5) re:ngöra dom invändigt (1.5) om det har varit EAK ((akronym ye:s (0.5) cle:an them internally (1.5) if there’s been EWC ((acronym 13  för Europeiska avfallskatalogen)) i dom till exempel så var det for European Waste Catalogue)) in them for example there’s a problem att få dom ren problem getting them clean 14 (5.0) 15 Monica: Det lå:ter- om jag ska säga- visst hör det hemma här om det är en skydd it so:unds- if I should speak- sure it belongs here if there’s a protection 16  och säkerhetsaspekt på det va annars så låter det ju mera kanske and safety aspect to it right otherwise it sounds more perhaps som en ↑investe:ring like an ↑investment 17 Marcus: kvalitetsaaspekt quality aspect 18 Monica: ja yes 19 Marcus: möjligen possibly 20 Monica: investe:ring också va (2.0) så det är kanske fle:r fo:rum som det här bör investment also right (2.0) so maybe there are more forums where this 21  tas upp i det är mera det jag menar med (2.5) men (.) ska vi hh (1.0) ja vi: should be raised that’s more what I mean by (2.5) but (.) shall we hh (1.0) well 22  vi får se om vi hinner diskutera för jag kan tänka mig att (1.0) de::t we: let’s see if there’s time to discuss it because I can assume (1.0) i::t’s annars så kanske [de::t] otherwise maybe [i::t] 23 Marcus: [ja det är inga] det är inga självklara svar i alla fall [>yes there are nomen vi- kan vi ↑säga så< (0.5) såå yes ↑um yes >but is- is ↑that a plan< (0.5) we:ll 31 Marcus: um um 32 Monica: gut ((tyska)) (1.0) ↑ja (1.0) va:l av ↑mötesekreterare (2.0) kan jag få gut ((german)) (1.0) ↑yes (1.0) election of ↑secretary (2.0) can I get några ↑försla:g some ↑suggestions

First off, safety representative Stina’s account is characterised by low investment as she attributes authorship to a third person (“Tess”) who reportedly is the one requesting better facilities for washing rail carts and truck wagons. This way she “represents the proposition as but one of a range of possible positions” (Martin and White 2005: 98). As safety representative, Stina could instead act as a representative of her colleagues. The local manager’s initial response in line 3 is only one of repetition (“flush ↑out rail wagons and cars”), which seems to restrain Stina from continuing more confidently. Stina suggests the issue can be managed in the next meeting instead of during the present one, and even then it is with low force and hurriedly (“maybe we can well >take it to the next meetingkan man sige< de:t her vi har placeret os

and that’s then >one can say< it i:s [here we have positioned us [((left hand to upper left part of blackboard)) ((hand away from bb, starts walking to his right))

5 6 7 8

så det jo så'n (.) lidt (.) ik lidt (1.0) det er (0.3) det- det der: præmissen for so it is in a way(.) a little (.) little right’ (1.0) it is (0.3) it’s- it is the: premise for projektet det er og sige nu vi er der egentligt set mange af de her koncepter bliver (udf)ørt the project it is to say now [we are there- have actually seen many of these concepts executed

11

through our own experiences both (.) at the university and in other practices (1.0) and it is

13 14

not always that has led to nirvana (1.5)[but the other we have not abandoned that one can [((left hand to the lower part of the figure on the

17 18 19

(0.3) can introduce well one can after all get something out of introducing diverse kinds af koncepter (0.3) det er jo ik sådan at vi så siger de:t ka slet ik bruges til noget (.) for of concepts (0.3) it is after all not like we say tha:t cannot be of any use at all (.) because

9 10

12

15 16

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

[((left hand zigzagging the lower two parts of the model on the bb)) igennem vores egne erfaringer både (.) på universitet og i andre praksisser (1.0) og det

ik altid det har ført til nirvana (1.5)

men det andet har vi ikke afskrevet at man godt ka

black board, moving between parts 1 and 2)) (0.3) ka indføre altså man ka jo godt få noget ud af at indføre forskellige typer

det ka det jo os (0.4) så meget godt at ha kommandobaseret ledelse i bestemte situationer og it can (0.4) also be very good to have command based leadership in certain situations and

meget=meget enkle (.) forretningsgange (1.5) [en i andre situationer (0.7) er det måske mere very=very simple (.) procedures (1.5)[but in other situations (0.7) it is perhaps more [((left hand to the upper left part of the model on the blackboard, holding it there))

hensigtsmæssigt at kigge på hvad sker der (.) hvordan ka jeg agere i det her felt

27 28 29 30

appropriate to look at what happens (.) how can I act in this field (3.0) [hvad tænker i om det lektoren spyttede ud af munden, [what do you think about what the lecturer spat out of the mouth,

32

((scattered laughter in the audience which Jørgen joins))

31

[((walks towards his seat))

In Extract (1), Jørgen uses the quadrangle in a typical programmatic (humanistic) university lecturer behavior when giving an account of the research group’s preferences. He provides both a visual and a metaphoric grid of perception for the audience to follow. He starts his explanation with a use of ‘one’ that is different from how he used the word just before. This time he makes a general comment in a quick aside (kan man sige, ‘one can say’, lines 1–2) about his and his colleagues’ actions. This, together with the hesitancy of the start, gives an impression of a considered, here-and-now re-evaluation of the research group’s placement (Speer and Potter 2002) in the dialogic paradigm, even if the whole setup was carefully planned to promote it. He continues with the hesitant turn but changes the description to be about the premise of the project being the researchers’ own experiences (vi, ‘we’, lines 1–2) with the other paradigms. He evaluates the practices that have been undertaken under the auspices of the two lower paradigms as something that has not always ‘led to nirvana’ (ført til nirvana, lines 12–13). The use of ‘nirvana’ is slightly humorous but is also a scenic description that implies a state of (an individual) mind that can be strived for but that only the Buddha has achieved.

226 Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

True to the heteroglossic nature of the situation, Jørgen emphasises that nothing is ruled out beforehand, and he mentions that the researchers, vi (‘we’), have not totally abandoned (lines 12–13) the two lower paradigms, which can be taken into use when needed. However, he places an emphasis on the theoretical nature of that aspect with the use of ‘one’ (man, lines 12–13 and 16–17), and the lecture ends by him going back to the upper left corner with the question ‘how can I act in this field’ (hvordan ka jeg agere I det her felt, lines 26–27), where ‘I’ this time can be interpreted as addressing all of the participants in the room. The question addresses and forms Foucault’s two types of subjugating power. First, it is an encouragement for the leaders to ask that about their practices, and second, it is also a question of theory, constituting Jørgen as a researcher. After a pause, Jørgen invites the audience for discussion by his humorous ‘what do you think about what the lecturer spat out of the mouth’ (hvad tænker I om det lektoren sypptede ud af munden, lines 29–30). The pause can now be interpreted as a transition relevance place from the lecture to the Q-A session (see Extract (2)) and the humorous remark as an extreme formulation to get the audience talking. By referring to himself with a third person declaration (‘lecturer’), Jørgen takes the perspective of the audience who has just seen a university employee talk about some theoretical issues. He belittles the categorical incumbency of ‘lecturer’ as someone with theoretical knowledge that is worth listening to despite the ‘spitting out of the mouth’. The audience welcomes this rhetorical move with laughter, which Jørgen also joins and starts moving to his seat (line 32). By discursively and embodiedly (he sits down with the others) lowering his status, Jørgen is in fact doing being a dialogist, an example of how to ‘act in the field’. In Figure 4, we have a visual depiction, (Figure 4) from the two cameras that captured the lecture when M1 (the back of his head visible in the second frame) starts talking.

Figure 4.  Jørgen returning to his seat

In line 1 in Extract (2), M1 asks for permission to speak (instead of asking the question) and thus can be seen as categorizing himself in this moment as a ‘student’, after Jørgen’s ascribed category ‘lecturer’, Jørgen corroborates his part of the SRP with his ja (‘yes’). The permission to speak comes after Jørgen’s humorous ending question (‘what the lecturer spat out of the mouth’) which can be seen as

Chapter 7.  Dialogue and governmentality-in-action 227



(2) Ml:

o jeg

har eto spørgsmål have ao question (0.3) oI

JØ: ja ((walks towards his chair))

yes Ml: du nævner genren [hvordan kan det være du ikkeyou mention the genre [how can it be you don’tJØ: [ja ((standing, hand on the chair frame)) [yes Ml: øh når (du tænker) systemisk du ikke tænker på (.)(Mary Jo Hatch uh when (you think) systemic you do not think about Mary Jo Hatch

JØ: >jo men det kan jeg også godt< ((sitting, peels sleeves down)) >yes but that I can also do very well< Ml: jeg tænkte (det er) måske (mere i linie med det) systemiske I thought (it is) perhaps (more in line with the) systemic JØ: [jah/yeah [((turns towards the blackboard)) det var for at give [et eksempel på [kulturanalyse og it was to give [an example of [cultural analysis and

[((points at bb)) [((stands up, to bb)) [hvis man tar Jo [Hatch og Schultz [if one takes Jo [Hatch and Schultz [((r. side to bb))[((head turn/gaze to Ml)) Ml: o ja o o yeso

JØ: [så vil de på en eller anden måde også ligge [hernede [then they will in one way or another also lie [down here [((gaze to bb, right index finger on bb)) [((gaze: Ml)) (1.0) JØ: fordi (.) med deres [tredeling (.) med det [interne because (.) with their [three partition (.) with the [internal [((arms open, step)) [((“ball”)) ((a loose “ball”)) [og det eksterne perspektiv (1.0) [øh så vil [and the external perspective (1) [uh then they [((wide arms to left and front)) [((gaze: side)) de jo også [forsøge at afdække med det interne perspektiv= surely also [try to uncover with the internal perspective= [((2xsmall hand movements in front; gaze to Ml)) =kultur er noget der [er der (0.5) det er en=et [etnografisk =culture is something that [is there (0.5) it is a=an [ethnographic [((hands open & back)) [((arms wide open)) perspektiv=[jeg må gå ud og undersøge (.) hvad er det folk siger og gør perspective=[I must go out and study (.) what it is people say and do [((stretched out arms, small hand movements)) [---] ((while having his gaze on Ml, walks slowly to his chair and sits down))

228 Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

emphasizing his person in the question format itself, but also him as a person with a sense of humour. This direction is continued by M1 when he addresses Jørgen with the singular 2nd person ‘you’ (du), rather than going directly to the issues he had been talking about (lines 6–7). Jørgen also answers as a private person ‘I’ (jeg) (lines 12–13). M1 in a way raises himself to a stronger position than that of a novice with his credential presentation (lines 10–11 and 14–15). His ‘I thought’ (jeg tænkte) in lines 14–15 underlines his personal consideration about what Jørgen had talked about. Following Foucault, we could claim that when, in this little account, M1 exhibits his knowledge about theories, he is showing a desire for the academic discourse as “the power which is to be seized” (Foucault 1981: 53). When Jørgen starts talking, he turns toward the blackboard, points at it, stands up and walks to it. This scenic incumbency reinstates Jørgen’s status as the knowledgeable participant who then starts talking about not just the researcher M1 mentioned, but also about another researcher closely connected to her. He changes the first person formulation to a more general description (18–20) and then to ‘one’ (man) in lines 21–23. Jørgen uses the blackboard to categorise the two researchers he mentions in the lower left part of the quadruple. Thus, Jørgen shows that he is familiar with the authoritative discourses in the field; he uses generalised others as a tool for proclaiming knowledge. We have omitted the rest of his long answer. However, note that he marks the ending of this turn, not through a verbalisation, but through embodied interaction. He simply walks to his seat with an intense gaze on M1. Jørgen’s quick answer (12–13) might also indicate as treating M1’s theoretically informed question as a test or criticism. When Jørgen is sitting on his chair, he says (in Extract (3)): (3) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

JØ: gir det mening, ((sitting on the chair; gaze on M1)) does it make sense,

Ml: ja det synes jeg det gør ((gaze from bb to JØ)) Yes I think it does (.) JØ: [altså (der=er-) jeg vil placere (.) Hatch og Schultz [hernede

[I mean (there=is–) I will place (.) Hatch og Schultz [down here [((gaze to bb, stands up and walks to the blackb.)) [((right hand on bb)) ((head turn/gaze to Ml))

(1) the expressive organization [og altså hele den tænkning om at the expressive organization [and you know the whole thought of to [((quick arms, sleeves up)) skabe [enhed over (.) [det interne det eksterne form [a whole between (.) [the internal and the external [((arms out)) [((right arm sharp to right and to left, hands together)) (2)

JS: [( ) JØ: [kultur identitet og image [culture identity and image

[((right hand batons on k, i, left hand on last i)



Chapter 7.  Dialogue and governmentality-in-action 229

From the video, it looks like M1’s (we can only see him from behind) gaze is on the blackboard while Jørgen sits down. That gaze might prompt Jørgen to ask his question ‘does it make sense.’ M1 gives a fairly positive answer (lines 3–4) and turns his head/gaze to Jørgen afterwards. The short mutual gaze (and the use of ‘I’ by M1) seems to prompt Jørgen to continue as an ‘I’, who walks to the blackboard again and places the two mentioned researchers in the lower part of the figure. By following the nonverbal and verbal clues while answering M1’s question, Jørgen displays responsibility and shows special care as a teacher/lecturer. With that type of sequential normativity he stabilises himself again as the teacher. In Extract (3), JS, a PhD student, is saying something in line 18 (with everybody in the audience turning to him). Immediately after JØ has finished, JS breaks the dyad that had emerged between Jørgen and M1 as he continues from where Jørgen stopped to give yet another explanation to M1 of what Jørgen has been talking about. In his contribution, JS also actively uses his hands and arms. He is also pointing when he tries to design his turn as intelligible. In his ensuing turn, JS also evokes ‘nirvana’ at which point there is a brief mutual gaze and smile between JØ and M1 that acknowledges the local history of the use of the concept (Scollon and Scollon 2004: 165). ‘Nirvana’ seems to have become a scenic metaphor or handy concept for the conduct of conduct that the setup is attempting to contest. After JS’s turn-at-talk, JØ again goes back to Jo Hatch and Schultz and the blackboard, where he reformulates his statement about them for the third time, strengthening the importance of Deetz’s model. 8. Summary As noted at the beginning of this chapter, this type of discourse analysis makes it possible to discuss the apparent banality and the concreteness of both dialogue and dispositifs as they occur in action. What is disclosed is the “body politic” (Foucault 1977: 28) in action which tries to govern the future but also constrains the goal of establishing plurivocal dialogue. Because a researcher team was involved and because they wanted to convey research-based knowledge, ‘teaching’ was a natural activity type to engage in with the leaders. However, on the basis of our analysis of the opening lecture we can see that it actually reproduces the dominant discourses of teaching rather than opening plurivocal dialogue. For instance, the generalised others that were drawn on (and concretely drawn by leaving traces on the blackboard) became the distant others who stayed active for the rest of the forum. We showed what kind of effects academic discourse can have (the model used in practice turned out to be a sticky one) and found the sources for these effects in the local accomplishment of multimodal and embodied practice.

230 Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

Thus, the lines of enunciation became constrained, and the interactional situation in the opening lecture seemed to foster certain centripetal forces of teaching and research, instead of becoming lines of resistance to a dominant dispositif of leadership. Instead of inviting a multiplicity of voices, the theoretical voices were seen to close down and restrict the possibility for other voices and discourses to emerge. Hegemonic powerful discourses governed the situation and hampered the centrifugal forces. As discussed at the beginning of the present chapter, we make a connection through dispositif and Bakhtinian dialogue to governmentality-in-action. We have now been able to demonstrate, through a careful discourse analysis, some of the practices, rationalities and procedures of governmentalityin-action in this setting. We are not evaluating the situation as such, but we do wish to show the banality by which power works, in the sense that the theoretical set-up provides a comfort zone for the researchers and provides them with control of the situation and a feeling of having given something to the leaders (as they usually do to students). But what happened in our interpretation was that the purpose of the forum can be said to be contradicted. One difficult thing to accomplish in plurivocal dialogues can be, for instance, to let go and follow the forces and stories of the others who were the leaders in the case of the forum. This is what Bakhtin invites us to do with his elaboration of the act as a fundamentally unique act that is not predefined and reduced by prevalent discourses or theories (Bakhtin 1993). However, it also may leave the responsible persons without the protective layer of control over what will happen next. Because of that subtle fear, the analysed situation in the opening lecture is never really opened up but constrained into reproducing theories and discourses of teaching and learning in a situation which seemed to be staged monologically. Thus, what we note is how difficult it is to stay multivoiced (that is, to do what the theory says) with the participants who are meant to take the experiences back to their organisational practices. What we suggest is for researchers and change agents to study local accomplishments to see what goes on in dialogue and with what consequences. Tracing which forces take over and which lines of subjectification embody certain interactional setups can point towards the alternative ways of organizing participatory multivoiced processes that would have a larger potential for creating what Deleuze refers to as “lines of escape”. In practice this means, for instance, that we must take the “other” seriously as a person who is radically different from me and follow her language, her stories, her practices and work from within them.



Chapter 7.  Dialogue and governmentality-in-action 231

9. Conclusion Governmentality-in-action concerns embodied and executed knowledge-in-action. By a close analysis of a researcher planned leadership forum aspiring to challenge the hegemonic ‘knowing that’ over ‘knowing how’ leadership practices, we have been able to use researchers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Bakhtin, Linell and the analytical tools of MCA to trace how knowledge about leadership practices was created and discussed, and how subjects and identities were constituted in that work. Our focus became the educational setting as a regime of practice, as “fairly coherent sets of ways of going about doing things” (Dean 2010: 31). In essence, we have tried to describe the formation of subjectivities – in reference to Dean’s “characteristic ways of forming subjects, selves, persons, actors or agents” (33) – as they emerged in the interplay with actualised lines of visibility and of enunciation – in reference to Dean’s “characteristic forms of visibility, ways of seeing and perceiving” (33) and “distinctive ways of thinking and questioning, relying on definite vocabularies and procedures for the production of truth” (33) – which are enabled by the theoretical discourses and practices of the university and the leadership discourses and practices of the participants. In other words, we have explored a specific knowledge management practice and focused on ‘conduct’ as composed of both discipline and practices (Hull 1999: 422). We could state that a certain framework (Deetz’s model), which was introduced at the beginning of the process in a traditional lecture format, was recontextualised in the ensuing discussions – in reference to Dean’s (2010: 33) “specific ways of acting, intervening and directing, made up of particular types of practical rationality” – almost to the extent of stopping people from exploring other avenues in the less traditional teaching setups (interviews, workshops) in the rest of the forum. This showed the strength of the traditional lecture format: the participants had learnt to use the model of four different categories of how organisational (leadership) practices can be conceptualised. Therefore, the interdisciplinary undertaking turned out to be more disciplinary in practice than in theory: the academic scene with its entangled lines re-created the work of extant dispositifs in the university. We started our chapter with Foucault’s governmentality understood as a network of dispositifs. This was discussed through the works of Deleuze’s and Agamben’s work on dispositif. When Agamben is considerably critical about contemporary dispositifs, the effects of dispositifs are a more open question for Deleuze that must be explored through empirical analysis. When we continued the concretisation of the concepts with Bakhtin and Linell, both Deleuze’s and Agamben’s theorisations of dispositif were useful because they could be compared to Bakhtin’s centrifugal and centripetal forces. With his model of social interaction, which

232 Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

contains an orientation to co-present others (‘you’, ‘we’), the topic (‘it’) and more remote third parties (‘we’), Linell gave us a definition that we found empirically useful. With MCA, we could go further and analyse these relations in detail produced by those members in that setting. The analyses made us realise how strong the scenic incumbency can be. That is, how it is that dispositifs as sedimenting forces work in practice by delimiting the centrifugal forces and the creation of new subject formations. In its material-discursive becoming, the lecture helped the participants create and visualise an illusion of all-encompassing knowledge, even if the knowledge or theory would be about the uncertainty and occasioned nature of knowledge. In other words, it reproduced certain ways of seeing and understanding, and not others.

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McHoul, Alec, and David Rodney Watson. 1984. “Two Axis for the Analysis of ‘Commonsense’ and ‘Formal’ Geographical Knowledge in Classroom Talk.” British Journal of the Sociology of Education 5: 281–302. doi: 10.1080/0142569840050305 Märtsin, Mariann, Brady Wagoner, Emma-Louise Aveling, Irini Kadianaki, and Lisa Whittaker. 2011. Dialogicality in Focus: Challenges to Theory, Method and Application. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Pålshaugen, Oeyvind. 2004. “Knowledge at Work: New Stories from Action Research.” Concepts Transform 9: 113–119. doi: 10.1075/cat.9.2.03pal Phillips, Louise. 2011. The Promise of Dialogue. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/ds.12 Phillips, Louise, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehviläinen, and Eva Gunnarsson. 2012. Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Raudaskoski, Pirkko. 1999. The Use of Communicative Resources in Language Technology Environments. Doctoral dissertation. University of Oulu. Available at: www.hum.aau.dk/~pirkko/ pirkkosphd.pdf. Raudaskoski, Pirkko. 2011. “When Lives Meet Live: Categorization Work in a Reality TV Show and ‘Experience Work’ in Two Home Audiences.” Text & Talk 31: 619–641. doi:  10.1515/text.2011.030

Ryle, Gilbert. 1945. “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46: 1–16. Scollon, Ron, and Suzanne Wong Scollon. 2004. Nexus Analysis. New York: Routledge. Silverman, David. 1998. Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Speer, Susan, and Jonathan Potter. 2002. “From Performatives to Practices.” In Talking Gender and Sexuality, ed. by Paul McIlvenny, 151–180. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:  10.1075/pbns.94.07spe

Stokoe, Elizabeth. 2009. “Doing Actions with Identity Categories: Complaints and Denials in Neighbour Disputes.” Text & Talk 29: 75–97. doi: 10.1515/TEXT.2009.004 Turner, Kevin. 2014. Governing To-Day: Towards an Analytics of the Contemporary. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Aalborg: Aalborg University.

chapter 8

Diagnosing transnationality Therapy discourse and psy practices in the ethicalisation of transnational living Julia Zhukova Klausen

Aalborg University, Denmark

The chapter investigates the genealogy of a transnational ethics. That is, in Foucauldian terms, how transnational living is constructed as an ethical substance, the modes through which the actors become invited to problematise their transnational conduct and the telos to which they are impelled to aspire. Using multimodal discourse analysis, the chapter uncovers the discursive technologies through which therapeutic practice (as well as the genres and institutions implicated in it) is employed in using the individual’s relationship to oneself to exercise and rationalise a transnational ethics. The analysis demonstrates how discursive practices, dispersed across multiple modalities, participate in the formation of alliances between diverse regimes of transnational living, such as computer-mediated transnational spaces, diaspora communities, national and para-national institutions and professional associations. In doing so, the analysis makes visible how new agents and authorities become recruited for administering transnational conduct. The chapter argues that these assemblages and the transnational ethics made visible through the analysis prime the mechanisms of transnational governmentality and prepare the basis for a restrictive morality through which transnational conduct can be regulated.

1. Introduction Transnational relations, intensified in the past few decades by technological and social innovations (e.g. the internationalisation of capitalist production, the elimination of barriers to the movement of commodities, people and capital across national borders, and the growth of the Internet) have long been one of the focal points of public, political and academic attention. However, many of these established voices tend to speak of transnational ways of living as deviant, chaotic and difficult (Burrell 2008; Stavrakakis 2005) through the metaphors of exile and of doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.08zhu © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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perpetual wandering between ‘here’ and ‘there’. In doing so, these studies do not fully capture the complexity of transnational belonging, nor do they pay enough attention to examining the ways in which the freedoms of transnational mobility are made manageable and the conduct of the people engaged in transnational living is rationalised. While this chapter does not seek to de-problematise doing being transnational, it contests the set of problems with which it is being associated and examines how individuals come to be diagnosed with these problems. The focus of the chapter lies in the intermediate space between governmentality and government of the self, i.e. between a political rationality with which the nation-state seeks to connect itself to the forces and groups shaping the lives of individuals across national territories and jurisdictions, and those technologies of the self and actions on the self which mediate an individual’s relationship to their constitution as a transnational subject. By examining how this space of “subjectivation” (Bonnafous-Boucher 2009) is formed and calibrated in relation to transnational living, the chapter participates in opening up “a new line of inquiry into the study of governmentality in the contemporary world” – the studies of transnational governmentality (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 996). The empirical focus of the examination lies within one of the discussion topics in the computer-mediated Russian-speaking social space, Rusforum1; the website of Sappir-Gasir, a “Psychopathologic and Psychosocial Care Service and Group of Health Assistance” for immigrants and refugees in Spain2; and the website of Iguana Journal, a publication for Russian-speaking immigrants in Spain.3 Through multimodal discourse analysis of these computer-mediated spaces, the article demonstrates how transnational regimes of subjectivation are constructed through the appropriation of the vocabulary, grammar of conduct and regulatory nature of psychotherapeutic discourse and practice (Hodges 2002: 455; Foucault 2005; Rose 1999: 264). This analytical work uncovers how transnationality is formulated as an essentially dangerous life enterprise instilling in individuals “a desire for radical ethical change” (Foucault 2005: 12) – a desire for taking care of the transnational self. In 1. “Здравствуйте, я [name of the participant] врач-психотерапевт из Ирландии.” ‘Hello, I am [name of the participant], doctor-psychotherapist from Ireland.’, accessed January, 2011, http://rusforum.dk/index.php?showtopic=21936. 2. “Sappir-Gasir”, accessed February, 2013, http://www.fhspereclaver.org/migra-salut-mental/ index_en.htm. 3. “Iguana Journal”, accessed January, 2011, and February, 2013, http://www.iguana.ws/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=295:sindromimm&catid=14:2009-12-09-14-2611&Itemid=173.



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addition, it demonstrates how these “strategic negotiations”, taking place in everyday interaction and in social spaces that are seemingly removed from the institutions of governance, allow the “games of power to be played with a minimum of domination” (Foucault 1988: 18). As a result of the analysis, I argue that the uncovered transnational ethics prepares the basis for a restrictive morality (Foucault 2005: 13) through which transnational conduct can be regulated. This discussion represents a critique of the regimes of subjectivation, made visible in the analysis, through which a transnational governmental rationale verifies particular subjectivities by hitching to the individual’s relationship with oneself, by exploiting the doubting nature of the modern human subject (Bonnafous-Boucher 2009: 79) and by utilizing the liberal spaces of freedom, which render the actors their role as active individuals. 2. Transnational governmentality The scholarship of governmentality has been significant because it allows the researcher to examine the transformation of a contemporary state and its governing tactics beyond political and administrative developments and to make visible the diversity of governmental apparatuses (e.g. institutions, procedures, reflections and calculations) through which the individual is incited to “strive for a status as subject that he has never known at any moment of his life” (Foucault 2005: 129). In the chapter, I examine this ethics of the self in relation to one of the ‘blind spots’ of governmental analytics  – “a displacement of the competences of the nation state” (Lemke 2007: 3) and the increased significance of transnational actors and transnational formats of life, which so far have received very limited academic attention. A number of governmental commentators (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Lemke 2007; Lippert 1999; Walters 2012) have pointed out this shortcoming of governmental research, advocating for the development of scholarly work that would go beyond conceptualizing transnational governance as merely a superordinate scale of administration to which national forms of governance add up and to which they are accountable. Recently, some important contributions to this project were made through the investigation of “the constitution, and governance of spaces above, beyond, between and across states” (Larner and Walters 2004: 2) in the context of European Union (Barry 1993; Walters 2010), by addressing the management of international borders and frontiers (Lippert 1999; Rumford 2003), from the perspective of the emergent “global civil society” (Larner and Walters 2004; Perry and Maurer 2003) and as transnational relations and networks (Humphrey 2010; Sawyer and Gomez 2008). These studies, and the direction of governmental research that they represent, make

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use of Foucault’s notion of “raison d’État” that considers the mechanisms of state survival in the context of interstate competition and in relation to the forces outside the state and which acknowledges the role of the territorial and statal plurality in shaping governmental technologies (Dean 2010: 230–236; Walters 2012: 87). Many such works focus on the technologies of securitisation salient in the contemporary context of the war-on-terror and on the ways in which “the raison d’etre of war” is used to legitimise and sanction the “rightful killing”, international surveillance, prosecution and the discriminatory singling out of the populations constituted as a threat to “the liberating states”, “in the name of rights, democracy, free market, and global security” (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002; Ibrahim 2005; Karyotis and Patrikios 2010; Shakhsari 2013: 340; Walters 2010). However, these studies “remain provisional and experimental” and somewhat unconcerned with theoretical content (Larner and Walters 2004: 17) as well as with why certain aspects of governance surpassing national sovereignty should be conceived of as international governmentality while others as global or transnational. With this chapter I approach this question as a matter of topology rather than typology. I argue that the development of transnational governmentality as a concept requires mapping the ways in which “a self-disciplined, methodical and calculative mode of conduct” (van Krieken 1996: 9) becomes assembled along social, technological, spatial and material interdependencies that cross the discursive and geo-political borders of nations. This approach to transnational governmentality does not break it away from the other research directions interested in tracing governmental mechanisms beyond national terrains. Instead, it merely suggests a particular perspective from which we can engage in examining these mechanisms – a perspective of everyday actions through which social and institutional practices and knowledges that rationalise these mechanisms are formed, which are segregated neither from national nor international and global facets of governmentality but which are not necessarily captured from these viewpoints because their focus lies somewhere else (such as the preservation of national frontiers, international diplomacy and policies, re-territorialising the impact of global flows, etc.) I see the examination carried out in this chapter as an encounter between governmental thought and the complexities of transnational living, which I arrange so as to be able to show analytically how transnational conduct becomes problematised and rationalised across multiple discursive regimes of representation, justification and categorisation, how these regimes are linked to diverse social and institutional practices and how this ongoing connecting is enabled by computermediated interaction and multiple modalities.



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3. Mediated discourses of transnational living Viewing transnationality as a type of connecting which the human actors enact across and beyond national points of reference, as well as viewing transnational governmentality as the conduct of conduct afforded by this interconnectedness, rests on the theorisation of the social proposed by actor network theory (Latour 2005). What conventional social science sees in terms of pre-determined and accomplished scales and frames, ANT approaches as both on-going and forthcoming tasks of scaling and framing through which the actors assemble the social landscape by linking and re-connecting, zooming into and stretching out those places and categories that they size up. Tracing how this work and these associations are being accomplished in discursive practices rests, in its turn, on a particular view of discourse as cycling through and “permeating our actions on all levels” (Scollon 2005: 29) with the “verbal and textual tools working their way into practices, material objects, and the built environments in which we interact” (Jones and Norris 2005: 9). This view developed within the framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis (Jones and Norris 2005; Scollon 2005) and Nexus Analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004), which situates and examines discourse in action at a complex nexus of social practices, sites of engagement and identities. By approaching social practices and situations from the perspective of mediated action, this view broadens the “circumference” of discourse analysis to include objects, environments, gestures, etc. and to grasp the complexity of the ways in which practices are sustained, re-organised and pre-figured through discourse. It is by approaching the study of transnational governmentality from the methodological perspective informed by these conceptualisations of the social, of discourse and of practice that I can examine how the strategies of transnational governmentality interact with and hitch to the everyday actions and concerns of the actors, avoiding unaccounted analytical leaping between various frames of reference. I begin the analysis at one of the numerous moments of the actors’ mediated action, in which they engage in real time-space “windows” (Norris and Jones 2005: 139; Scollon and Scollon 2004) and which become linked into durable, reproducible and recognisable mediated actions associated with particular situations, engagements, and institutions as social practices. The moment of action, through which I come to the examination of transnational governmentality, is a discussion topic in the computer-mediated Russianspeaking social space, Rusforum: Russian forum in Denmark.4 By unpacking 4. “Здравствуйте, я [name of the participant] врач-психотерапевт из Ирландии.” ‘Hello, I am [name of the participant], doctor-psychotherapist from Ireland.’, accessed January, 2011, http://rusforum.dk/index.php?showtopic=21936.

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the discursive mechanisms though which the author of the topic constructs and orients towards transnational subjectivities, I map out and follow how this site of the actors’ engagement becomes stretched and linked to the other moments of action, which are outside this immediate social situation and associated with other social and institutional practices (such as psy, therapeutic and academic practices), agencies (professional, para-governmental), physical spaces (e.g. hospital wards) and sites of engagement (such as the Sappir-Gasir and Iguana Journal websites). Within the framework of my analysis, I make visible how this connecting becomes mediated by diverse semiotic means which enable the incorporation and hybridisation of genres through intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Fairclough 2003), such as linguistic features (e.g. lexicalisation, metaphor, metonymy, compounding, acronymy), visual resources (e.g. images, photographs, icons) and the affordances of hypermedia genre (e.g. website layout and navigation, hyperlinking). More importantly, I demonstrate how diverse discursive frameworks, categorisations and vocabularies, through which transnational living is being made into an ethical subject and through which particular transnational subjectivities are invoked or resisted, circulate “from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of practice to the next” (Iedema 2001: 40–41). It is by analytically unpacking these intersemiotic transformations and connectivity, which Iedema (2001) describes as resemiotisation, that I examine how governmental technologies are at work across and beyond national terrains and how diverse practices and agencies that are not necessarily associated with governance or recognised as transnational become implicated in and recruited for conducting transnational conduct. I carry out this analytical work by assuming a multimodal approach to discourse analysis (Jewitt 2004; Kress 2010; Norris 2012) that allows me to trace how the actors employ the tools and meaning “potentials” (Jewitt 2012: 98) afforded by diverse semiotic systems and how meaning is constructed across diverse modes of representation in the “symbol rich” (Jewitt 2012: 108), hyper-linear environments powered by the Internet and computer technology, such as the computer-mediated sites on which I focus in the analysis. I assemble this approach by borrowing from the methodological repertoire of studies of computer-mediated communication such as Virtual Ethnography and Website Analysis (Herring 1996; Hine 2000), as well as other perspectives focusing on the role of hypermedia communication technologies in the construction of meaning (Jewitt 2012; Lemke 2002). These approaches allow me to examine how the diverse “organisational devices” afforded by hypermedia (e.g. hyperlinks, citation, layout) and the semiotic means on which computer-mediated interactional genres rely (e.g. use of emoticons, orthography, punctuation signs) are employed by the actors to cut across “the modal divide between text and image” (Lemke 2002: 301).



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By combining the methods of analysis offered by the studies of computermediated communication with the strategies of Membership Categorisation Analysis (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998; Sacks 1992), I demonstrate how particular formats of living and belonging are made relevant and categorised as dangerous or problematic. Such a “polyfocal perspective” is vital to the analysis that starts not with the text but with people’s actions (Jones 2004: 31) and that is concerned with the complexity of the actors’ engagement with the mediational means through which discourses and practices are enacted. 4. Discursive technologies of transnational subjectivation Michel Foucault argues that an individual’s conduct is governed in two allied ways: through the moral codes – the formulation of “what is forbidden and what is not” (Foucault 1983: 265) – and through the ethicalisation of the individual’s existence – “the set of transformations of the self, that are the necessary conditions for having access to the truth” (Foucault 2005: 17), to happiness, to the improved and moral self. In this section of the chapter, I examine the discursive technologies with which this practice of care for oneself and one’s soul is being assembled and applied in relation to transnational existence across particular moments and sites of actors’ actions and interaction. I carry out this analysis of transnational ethics by uncovering (1) how doing being transnational is made into an ethical substance, (2) the modes of subjectivation, “the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations” (Foucault 1983: 264) as transnational actors, (3) the work that the individuals are incited to do and the means through which they can change themselves to become “ethical subjects” (Foucault 1983: 265), and (4) the telos, the kind of transnational being to which the actors are encouraged to aspire. The analysis demonstrates that the techné of transnational care, its ends, object and nature (Foucault 2005: 58), rely on the vocabulary, techniques and organisation of the medical, therapeutic and psy genre of social practices. Before I begin to show how these genres mediate the ethicalisation and administration of transnational living, I shall make visible that it is, in fact, transnational categories that become diagnosed and problematised with the mediational means of the aforementioned practices. 4.1

The construction of transnationality as an ethical substance: Locating-and-stretching the problem

Transnational formats of life are made relevant by the author of the discussion topic already in the opening utterance of the first post (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.  Post 1 of the discussion topic “Здравствуйте, я [name of the participant] врач-психотерапевт из Ирландии.” ‘Hello, I am [name of the participant], doctorpsychotherapist from Ireland.’, accessed January, 2011, http://rusforum.dk/index. php?showtopic=21936

In this post, the author introduces himself (Extract (1)). (1) Ну так вот – это я, ваш сосед по Еврокоммуналке ‘So – this is me, your neighbour in a Eurodormitory’

Through the morphological metaphorical compound, ‘Eurodormitory’, the interactant invokes the category of transnational belongingness by referring to the recognisable qualities associated with this category – closeness, multitude and diversity of members  – which are highlighted through the metaphor of dormitory. The Latin-derived prefix morpheme ‘euro-’ modifies this metaphor by establishing the territory within which this category of life unfolds – a European territory. In the same line, the author both orients himself to the invoked category and assigns the forum participants to it by establishing his membership in this supra-national community: ‘this is me, your neighbour’, where ‘neighbour’ continues the metaphor of communal existence, while plural possessive pronoun your implicates the other interlocutors into the metaphorical construction, and thereby, into the proposed category. Further in the post (Figure 1), the author reproduces the same discursive mechanism to categorise himself and the other participants transnationally. This is visible in Extract (2):



Chapter 8.  Diagnosing transnationality 243

(2) Теперь мы «англо-россияне», айрусичи» и проч. aфро-украинцы… ‘Now we are “anglo–rossians”, irusiches” and misc. afro-ukrainians…’

The compounding accomplished in this line constructs transnational belonging across multiple categories: national  – ‘ukrainians’, ‘rossians’, ‘-rusiches’, ‘i-’ (referring to Irish); geographic – ‘afro-’; ethno-linguistic – ‘anglo-’. In the two compounds where the head morphemes allude to Russianness, ‘anglo–rossians’, ‘irusiches’, Russian nationality is constructed differently. The label ‘–rossians’ was coined by Boris Jeltsin, in his annual “New Year” TV addresses among other contexts, and refers to the federative organisation of the Russian state. In this sense, this seemingly national inscription invokes transnationality by overriding master national category (Russianness) and includes multiple ethnic and cultural memberships of the Russian Federation. ‘Irusiches’, on the other hand, makes Russian nationality relevant through ‘–rusiches’, a poetic old-Russian ethnonym that stems from one of the oldest literary examples of Russian folk mythology, “Сло́во о плъку́ И́горєвѣ”, dated from the 12th century. Through this ethnonym, included in the compound noun used to denote transnationality, Russianness is being construed with the conventional vehicles of methodological nationalism – the construction of a national narrative and of a foundational myth, and an emphasis on continuity and origins (Hall 1996). In both compounds, however, morphemes alluding to Russianness are the head morphemes as their stems are both fully reproduced and assigned syntactical features (plurality). The morphemes that stretch belonging across national borders, on the other hand, figure as prefixes attached either phonologically, through conjoining ‘r’ in ‘irusiches’, or orthographically, through a hyphen in anglo–rossians. Interestingly, ‘-i’ in the compound ‘irusiches’ – is the clipped and mediated through transliteration morpheme that stem from the English word Irish [ajrɪʃ], rather than from the Russian ирландский [irlantskij]. By adding to the act of compounding the strategies of borrowing, the participant, on the one hand, reenforces the stretching of the national category – by highlighting his cosmopolitan belongingness through the use of English, while on the other hand, he localises it – through demonstrating the linguistic literacy specific to the national context in which this inscription originates and from which he reports it by using citation marks. The use of citation marks around the two transnational categories analysed above hints at intertextuality, thereby classing these categorisations, and the ways of belonging that they invoke, as common, reproduced and reproducible. Another morphologically assembled transnational membership, ‘misc. afroukrainians…’, replicates the identified above patterns of centring Russianness as the dominant frame of reference. Both morphemes that assemble the compound ‘afro-ukrainians’ invoke the territories distant from the colonial (‘afro-‘) or imperial (‘-ukrainians’) centres. The imperialistic and colonising discourse is employed here to highlight the exotic, obscure, and multiple modes of transnational belonging.

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The abbreviated modifier ‘misc.’ repeated iconically through punctuation (…) reenforces the diversity and multiplicity assigned to the invoked category, while at the same time reproducing the derogatory view of the centre on the periphery. The analysis above demonstrates that transnational living is constructed not in opposition to nationality but through the continuous linking and hybridising, stretching and compressing of nationally- and transnationally-assembled categories, of localised and cosmopolitan points of reference, which both reproduces and defies methodological nationalism – what in my earlier work I describe as ‘transnational networking’ (Zhukova Klausen 2011, 2013). Extract (3) shows how in the same post (Figure 1) this networking implicates diverse societal actors and agencies (communal, institutional, governmental, political) and how it categorises certain formats of living as more valuable for the individuals and their personal and collective growth, than the other formats. (3) Сидеть по своим национальным ирландским и датским, пр. деревушкам скучно, интереснее общаться на наши общие актуальные темы в рамках Евросоюза – так легче развиваться, искать гранты, лоббировать свои интересы в правительствах. ‘Sitting in our national Irish and Danish, etc. small villages is boring, it is more interesting to talk about our shared relevant issues in Russian within the framework of European Union – it is easier to develop this way, search for grants, lobby for our interests to governments.’

Through the use of a metaphor, ‘small villages’, nationality, ‘Irish and Danish, etc.’, is being constructed as peripheral and provincial. The invoked national territories become sized up discursively through the use of a diminutising mechanism, ‘small villages’, which in Russian is accomplished morphologically with the diminutive suffix – ушк-. By invoking ‘sitting’ as the category-bound activity associated with doing being national, the author constructs nationality as an idle, secluded and passive engagement. This is reinforced by the attribute, ‘boring’, which is juxtaposed, through the use of an adjective in a comparative form, ‘more interesting’, to a different way of doing being national, which can be accomplished by engaging with the para-national governmental and political institution – ‘European Union’. Here, the European Union is made relevant not as a communal format of transnational organisation (as with the earlier-addressed metaphor of a dormitory in Extract (1)) but rather as a metonymic representation of those para-governmental agencies with and through which the actors are incited to take part in national governance, to ‘search for grants, lobby for our interests to governments’. Thus, in Extract (3), the author of the topic does not only juxtapose two formats of doing being national – a secluded, bound to the locality and state nationalism versus the extended forms of national belonging that transcend the political



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and symbolic borders of states – he also characterises the latter, transnational, format of life as more prolific and future-oriented, as more beneficial to the individual’s project of self-improvement (‘it is more interesting’; ‘it is easier to develop this way, search for grants’). In addition, he places with individuals the responsibility for administering the invoked formats of living by inciting the forum’s participants to engage with the national and para-national governing agencies (‘European Union’, ‘governments’) through the activities which imply movement, growth, having an impact (‘develop’, ‘search’, ‘lobby’). This analytical work demonstrates that the substance in question within the discussion topic is transnational living, and that the categories and practices, to which the actors are invited to relate and in relation to which they are invited to act, cross and override statal territories. The revealed discursive dissecting of the transnational substance into more problematic and less problematic engagements (e.g. ‘sitting in our national Irish and Danish, etc. small villages’ versus ‘talk about our shared relevant issues in Russian within the framework of European Union’, see Extract (3)) and more desirable and less desirable memberships (e.g. ‘anglo– rossians, irusiches’ versus ‘misc. afro-ukrainians’, see Extract (2)) as well as assigning to the individuals the responsibility for optimising their lives according to the proposed ideals of transnational existence, is what marks this substance as ethical. The analysis highlights the complexity of transnationality and the multitude of practices and institutions involved in its assembling, and which are, therefore, implicated when transnational living becomes ethicalised. In the next section, I begin to uncover how the practices of ethicalisation are accomplished. 4.2

Discursive problematisation of the transnational substance: Making the diagnosis – writing the anamneses

Ironically, the problematisation of transnational living in the analysed discussion topic begins with the de-problematisation of transnational categories. This de-problematisation begins in first post (Figure 1), when the author of the topic invokes the conventional discourse associated with migrant living within which migrancy is represented as an uncertain, insecure way of life (e.g. ‘rules of the game were changed’) and migrants as an agency-deprived community whose collective and individual fates are in the hands of the national government ruling these fates through more or less identifiable policies (Extract (4)), such as: a. the administration of the demographic patterns (‘now all have children (the government very much encouraged it)’), b. citizenship regulations (‘gave citizenship to the parents for this heroic act’) c. and other ‘rules of the game’.

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Already in these lines (Extract (4)), the writer begins to distance himself from this way of managing transnational existence. Firstly, by placing it in the past (‘10 years ago’). Secondly, through the sarcastic reference to having children as a ‘heroic act’ rewarded by the government with citizenship and by invoking the image of the multitude of pregnant programmers coming to the country and scaring the government. The humoristic effect of the construction is confirmed iconically through the use of an emoticon comically reproducing fear. (4) В Ирландии основная масса русскоязычных сформировалась 10 лет назад, в основном программисты. Теперь у все дети (правительство очень поощряло, давало гражданство родителям за этот подвиг). Приехало слишком много беременных программистов и правительство испугалось, правила игра поменяли. ‘In Ireland, the largest bulk of Russian-speaking community formed 10 years ago, mainly programmers. Now all have children (the government very much encouraged it, gave citizenship to the parents for this heroic act). Too many pregnant programmers came and the government got scared, rules of the game were changed.’

Later in the post (Figure 1), the actor continues to disassociate from this format of transnational governance (Extract (5)). (5) А люди остались. Теперь мы «англо-россияне», айрусичи» и проч. aфроукраинцы… Хотя большинство ощущают себя просто Европейцами. Или программистами. Или врачами, как я, например. Это было, теперь больше волнуют простые ежедневные, бытовые дела, чем антропологические или политические темы. Надоело уже. ‘But people stayed. Now we are “Anglo–Russians, Irusich” and misc. AfroUkrainians… Though the majority just perceive themselves as Europeans. Or programmers. Or doctors, as I do, for instance. This is how it was, now we are more concerned with banal everyday pragmatic issues, than with the anthropological or political topics. Sick and tired of them already.’

The disassociation takes place: a. by re-affirming the bygone character of this format: ‘this is how it was’ (это было); b. by juxtaposing it to the “real-time” moment through the use of a parallel syntactic structure that foregrounds the adverbial modifier of time, ‘now’: ‘now we are “anglo–rossians”, irusiches” (emphasis added)’ (теперь мы «англо-россияне», айрусичи»); ‘now we are more concerned with banal everyday pragmatic



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issues (emphasis added)’ (теперь больше волнуют простые ежедневные, бытовые дела); c. by countering the uncertainty of transnational existence through highlighting its durability: ‘but people stayed’ (а люди остались); d. by expressing his discontent with a set of problems with which transnationality is being associated: ‘anthropological or political topics. Sick and tired of them already’ (антропологические или политические темы. Надoело уже). Through this discursive work, the writer counters the governing strategies that handle the individuals engaged in transnational living as agency-deprived pieces in a political game on the unpredictable and constantly changing field of national interests. However, at the same time he adopts the problematizing technique with which the discourses associated with this mode of transnational rule operate: while disassociating transnationality from one set of problems, he assigns it another one (Extract (6)). (6) Вот например: были заморозки и водопроводные трубы полопались. Морозов в Ирландии не бывало раньше, вот и «катастрофа». Это актуально. Актуальны кредиты, взятые для покупки домов в момент, когда «Кельтский тигр» раздул цены на дома в 2,5–3 раза. Актуально образование детей. Создали много русскоязычных школ выходного дня. Есть чем гордиться!

‘Here, for instance: there was frost and the water pipes burst. There has been no frost in Ireland before, so here is your “disaster”. This is important. Important are mortgages taken for buying houses at the moment when “Celtic tiger” blew house prices up 2,5–3 times. Important is children’s education. Many Sunday Russian-speaking schools were opened. Something to be proud of!’

The difference lies in the mundane, everyday character of the new problems ascribed to transnational living, which become removed from the state-managed political and demographic domain into the intimate, personal sphere of the individual, such as: a. the living conditions worsened by the natural disaster: ‘there was frost and the water pipes burst’ (были заморозки и водопроводные трубы полопались); b. the financial crisis: ‘when “Celtic tiger” blew house prices up 2,5–3 times’ (когда «Кельтский тигр» раздул цены на дома в 2,5–3 раза); c. parenting: ‘important is children’s education’ (актуально образование детей).

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This shows how individual strategies make the actors’ relationship with a rule unstable and reversible and how the individuals can both recognise and enact some problems and obligations whilst diverging from the others (Bonnafous-Boucher 2009: 75). These strategies are neither the acts of liberation nor the opposition to domination, but rather the techniques of subjectivation from which the new technologies of rule can be formed – the technologies which can be more adequate and which can “modify certain constraints” engendering the positive effect from the power (Bonnafous-Boucher 2009: 76). However, while the discursive shifting mapped out above constitutes a “sedimentary layer of practices” that is enacted by an active individual and which forges the inconsistency in relation to a particular transnational subjectivity, it “does not provide a determinate framework for free acts” or for a freer transnational actor (Bonnafous-Boucher 2009: 77, 85). In fact, while replacing the set of transnational concerns, the acts of subjectivation mapped out above hand the responsibility for dealing with these concerns from the government to the individual. In Extract (7), the problematisation of transnational living closer to the body, home and family of the individual is continued by turning transnationality into a diagnosable and diagnostic medical and psychotherapeutic category. (7) Актуально здоровье, скорее нездоровье. Заболеваемость у иммигрантов, по данным местной статистики, в 5 раз больше по сравнению с местной публикой. Особенно плохо по психосоматике и депрессиям. Тем более, что иммигрантов увольняют первыми в кризисное время…

+“иммигрантский синдром” => Трудно семьям сохраниться. Рушатся семьи массово. Опять же детям слёзы, взрослым несчастливость.

‘Important is health, rather unhealthiness. Sickness rate among immigrants, according to the local statistics, is 5 times more than among the local public. Especially bad is with psychosomatics and depressions. Particularly because immigrants get fired first in the times of crisis…

+ “immigrant syndrome” => Difficult for the families to stay together. Families are falling apart massively. Again tears for children, unhappiness for adults.’

This discursive work begins by invoking transnational living as a health issue: ‘important is health’. Through the elaborative conjunction ‘rather’ this issue is immediately assigned a problematic quality of ‘unhealthiness’. By accomplishing this discursive work morphologically (by adding a negative prefix ‘un-‘) rather than semantically (by juxtaposing ‘health’ to its antonym, e.g. disease) the writer



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starts out by constructing transnationality as the intermediate, borderline state between healthiness and illness. However, already in the next sentence, the transnational condition becomes ‘upgraded’ to the status of a disease by demarcating the national scope of the ‘sickness’. Through the use of a statistical vocabulary (‘rate’, ‘statistics’, ‘5 times more’), often employed in hard-core natural and medical sciences, the participant juxtaposes immigrants to ‘the local public’, constructing migrancy as being in the category of more susceptible to illness. Further along this line, the actor specifies the place of the transnational form of life in the typology of illnesses by diagnosing it as a psychological or psychiatric condition: ‘especially bad is with psychosomatics and depressions’. Next, following the conventions of the medical genre, he traces the genesis of the diagnosed disease: a. Social: ‘Particularly because immigrants get fired first in the times of crisis…’ The use of ellipses marks this factor as a singular example from the more extensive list of social causes provoking the identified sickness. b. Embodied, inherent: ‘“immigrant syndrome”’. The use of quotation marks frames this factor as a concept. The inscription ‘syndrome’ identifies this concept as a medical term. As opposed to “sickness” or “illness”, which denote more short-term, temporal conditions, ‘syndrome’ assigns a chronic, durable quality to a medical problem. In diagnosing transnationality as a syndrome, the author of the topic characterises it as the sickness that is both advanced and difficult to treat. Finally, the interactant makes the prognosis and delineates the consequences of the illness, which are situated in the intimate, familial sphere of the individual, making the issue of attending to the established transnational problematics, once again, a personal issue: ‘Families are falling apart massively. Again tears for children, unhappiness for adults’. The analysis above uncovers the discursive work through which the participant formulates the anamneses of the transnational condition: typology, mechanisms, scope, genesis and prognoses of the diagnosed problem. This work is closely intertwined with the legitimising strategies through which this transnational problem becomes validated. One such strategy involves correlating those aspects of the individuals’ private sphere with which they become obliged to concern themselves (being happy, being a good parent, taking responsibility for one’s family) and the sources of these concerns rooted in the transnational ways of life, which make the individual inherently predisposed to specific psychological disorders and to specific acts of social injustice. This correlation is mediated through the semiotic resources of the algebraic system, which represents the constructed argument as logical and coherent: the use of mathematical signs ‘+’, ‘=>’ and the adoption of the vertical arrangement employed in algebraic formulas (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.  Use of the semiotic resources of the algebraic system in diagnosing transnationality

The relationship of the actors to their transnational selves constructed with the psychotherapeutic vocabulary and rationalised with the resources of diverse semiotic systems becomes legitimised through the professional status of the author of the topic (‘a doctor-psychotherapist’). This status becomes foregrounded already in the topic’s title: ‘Hello, I am [name of the participant], a doctor-psychotherapist from Ireland’ (Здравствуйте, я [name of the participant] врач-психотерапевт из Ирландии) and then confirmed in the first post (Extract (5)): ‘or doctors, as I do, for instance’ (или врачами, как я, например). Making one’s professional activity relevant in the discussion group ‘Welcome’ (добро пожаловать), designated to newcomers’ self-introductions, is not unusual. However, when this categorisation serves as the backdrop for the argument constructed within the framework of a medical, diagnostic genre, it adds authority to this argument, turning it into expert talk. In one of the other posts in the discussion topic (Figure 3), the participant stretches this expertise outside the immediate interactional context, connecting it to a different site of engagement and a different set of practices (Extract (8)).

Figure 3.  Post 7 of the discussion topic “Здравствуйте, я [name of the participant] врач-психотерапевт из Ирландии.” ‘Hello, I am [name of the participant], doctorpsychotherapist from Ireland.’, accessed January, 2011, http://rusforum.dk/index. php?showtopic=21936

(8) «Синдром иммигранта» или «Уиллис синдром» – смотри здесь, в русскоязычной Испании работают с этим, диаспоры продавили правительство с специальной медицинской программой для иммигрантов. А на нашей конференции это – тема «круглого стола»: лоббирование подобны программ для диаспор в Брюсселе.



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‘“Immigrant syndrome” or “Ulysses syndrome” – see here,5 in Russian-speaking Spain they are working with it, diasporas have pushed through the government the special medical programme for immigrants. As for our conference, this – the theme for a “round table”: lobbying in Brussels for such programmes for diasporas.’

This post (Extract (8)) verifies the formulated transnational problematics by mobilising, with the hyperlinking function, social and institutional sites and practices through which the inscriptions that invoke transnationality as a diagnostic category and as an essentially dangerous format of living circulate (see Figures 4 and 5): a. the website of Iguana Journal, where the vocabulary associated with the transnational subjectivities uncovered in the analysis above (‘Immigrant syndrome’ and its metaphorical synonym ‘Ulysses syndrome’) is reproduced on the advice page for the Russian-speaking immigrants in Spain. b. The printed addition of Iguana Journal which becomes invoked through the intertextual reference on the webpage c. ‘Sappir-Gasir, a Psychopathologic and Psychosocial Care Service and Group of Health Assistance for immigrants and refugees in Spain, Mental Health Unit of the La Mata hospital’ and ‘Lassus Association for help against depressive syndrome’, which are listed on the Iguana website as some of the medical institutions that realise the ‘government’s programmes of immigrant support’. d. ‘Line 900’ – television programme aired on the Spanish TVE 2 channelled and announced on the Sappir-Gasir website. These multimodal discursive mechanisms that draw on the affordances of hypermedia and hypertextuality in the interactional website make present diverse medical and governmental institutions, language regimes, psychotherapeutic routines – i.e. those absent “conditions of possibility and the practices” (Hodges 2002: 456) that transnational actors are invited to apply to themselves in order to work on the ethical concerns formulated by the discursive and non-discursive means that psy practices afford. It is these mechanisms, and the uncovered earlier ethicalisation of transnational living, that assemble and mobilise the apparatus previously “devoid of any foundation in being” and that restitute “to common use” the task of and the responsibility for reaching the subjectivities produced with this apparatus (Agamben 2009: 11, 12). In the following analysis, I continue to make visible the means and the procedures offered to the actors for their work on becoming ethical transnational beings and to examine what kind of being they are incited to aspire to. 5. Hyperlink in the original Russian text.

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‘‘‘Immigrant syndrom’’’ ‘ In the last issue, in the article on the functioning of the association “Almeria in Russian”, we have mentioned the “Ulysses syndrome” – a type of stress effecting the immigrants.’ ‘The “Ulysses syndrome” phenomenon is recognised in Spain officially, there are government’s programmes of immigrant support, special centres are open and functioning, providing psychological assistance.’ ‘SAPPIR Hospital Sant per Claver’ ‘Lassus Association for help against depressive syndrome’

‘La Mata hospital centre Mental Health Unit’

Figure 4.  Iguana Journal website, a publication for Russian-speaking immigrants in Spain

4.3

The techniques of care for the transnational subject: Prescribing the treatment

Extract (8) shows how the actors are invited to become entrepreneurs of their transnational selves by becoming active political agents on the national (‘the government’) and transnational (‘Brussels’) levels. Across the posts of the discussion topic in focus, this individual political engagement is proposed as the work that should be carried out in association with the communal format of transnational belonging (‘diasporas’) and with the practices of knowledge production stabilising the formulated transnational subjectivities: ‘a conference for psychotherapists and psychologists, social workers’ (конференцию психотерапевтов и психологов, социальных работников). The participants of the forum are incited to engage in these practices in a dual way – as the subjects of therapeutic care:



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‘Ulysses syndrome’

‘May 4th, 2003 at 20:30 on TVE2 “Ulysses syndrome”’

Figure 5.  Sappir-Gasir website, a “Psychopathologic and Psychosocial Care Service and Group of Health Assistance” for immigrants and refugees in Spain

a. ‘“our families”, moms and dads, the people with psychological overload and discomfort’ («наших» семей, мам и пап, людей с психологическими перегрузками и дискомфортами) – the targets of ‘social advertising’ (социальную рекламу); b. the participants of the ‘“workshops”’ («мастерских») with ‘the best coaches’ (лучшие тренеры) and of the ‘roundtables’ (круглого стола); and as the agents enacting this care: c. ‘specialists, psychologist and psychotherapists’ equally obliged to work on improving themselves: ‘to establish mutual support’, ‘to improve professional skills’. These regimes of action upon transnational selves demonstrate ‘the democratisation of pastoralism’ (Valverde 1998: 19) that takes place across multiple practices – psychotherapeutic, professional, academic, social and political – and that participates in gathering and making available for administering a transnational

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“multiplicity on the move” (Foucault 2007: 161) that is ungovernable by the singular apparatuses of national governance. These acts of collecting the transnational flock are mediated by: a. the lexical choices constructing the togetherness: ‘to get to know each other, to establish mutual support (emphasis added)’ (познакомиться, пообщаться, наладить взаимоподдержку); ‘together it is easier to survive, to integrate, to become successful in competing with the local population (emphasis added)’ (вместе легче выживать, интегрироваться, быть успешными в конкуренции с местным населением); b. alliteration: ‘to communicate on our common topical themes (emphasis added)’ (общаться на наши общие актуальные темы). c. repetition of the verbs ‘to communicate’ (общаться/пообщаться) and ‘to invite’ (приглашать). At the same time the techné of pastoral care is mobilised by assembling the agency of the Shepherd seeking “what is good” and undertaking the task of helping to do good for the mobile multiplicity of transnational actors (Foucault 2007: 169). Within the framework of psychotherapeutic discourse and practice employed in the ethicalisation of transnational living traced in this analysis, the pastoral agency is constituted by ‘practising child psychologists and psychotherapists for adults, psychoanalysts’ (практикующие детские психологи и взрослые психотерапевты, психоаналитики); ‘social workers’ (соц. работников) and ‘coaches’ (тренеры). The website of Sappir-Gasir reveals the same appropriation of the technologies of pastoral care in proposing the modes of the individuals’ actions upon themselves (see Figure 6). The active character of the task undertaken by this institution in relation to transnational actors is mediated by the links in the main menu of the centre’s website, which reiterate action (objectives; what we do; action lines). Across the pages accessible through the links in the menu, the invoked action is assigned meaning by means of the strategies of discursively collecting transnational multiplicity that are similar to the ones uncovered earlier in the analysis. These strategies accomplish multiple jobs. On the one hand, they assemble the category of transnational actors that are in need of care and the category of actors who are to develop and share knowledge of what type of care it should be and who are to provide the care (a multidisciplinary team of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and anthropologists; health and social science professionals). Both categories are invoked through the re-lexicalisations of togetherness and connectivity: team, collective, group, network, community. At the same time these categories become demarcated through the persistent references to (1) the unique and durable character of the problems associated with



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Figure 6.  Sappir-Gasir website: the Main Menu

doing being transnational, (2) the exclusive and specialised character of the work that people assisting the transnational flock carry out and (3) the knowledge and competences that this work requires. This is accomplished, for instance, through the lexical repetition: a. specialised service in psychopathology and psychosociology (emphasis added); b. specifically treats health problems experienced by this collective (emphasis added); c. develop specific programmes in the fields of psychoanalysis and mental health (emphasis added); d. with a special emphasis on treating chronic patients (emphasis added); e. to develop specific clinical research programmes focusing on the mental health of immigrants (emphasis added). These discursive mechanisms both gather and stabilise the apparatus of managing transnationality – the transnational collective as proto-patients of psychiatric care; the occupation of caring for transnational multiplicity; and the knowledge and truths that verify the appropriate, correct and fundamentally beneficent nature of this care, which represents the essential objective of a pastoral raison d’être (Foucault 2007: 172). Finally, the meaning-making that takes place across the website in focus formulates the work in which transnational individuals and the agency enacting care for them are invited to engage. This work implicates both categories as the projects of self-development and self-improvement organised with the vocabularies and styles of different practices:

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a. self-help practices that operate by inciting the actors to develop and mobilise their competences for reaching out and connecting to their peers (professional and social) to care for, to educate and to improve one another: promote collaboration between health and social science professionals; encourage contact between immigrants and social networks and with the local community. b. therapeutic and coaching practices that define the relationship between transnational individuals and psychiatric institutions and agents as one based on the recognition of moral superiority of the latter (knowing what is good and what is right for transnational actors) rather than of their medical expertise (general medical knowledge valid for all human subjects). These practices are mobilised through the lexical choices that constitute the offered psychiatric care as the acts of guidance and improvement: raise social awareness of the importance of helping to solve this problem (emphasis added); psychological and social support; training and supervision (emphasis added). c. academic practices of knowledge production and dissemination that generate, institutionalise and circulate the evidence of the modes and aims of self-care proposed to transnational actors: postgraduate course in mental health and psychological attention for immigrants, refugees and minority groups; interdisciplinary forum for reflection and debate; clinical research programmes. The analysis above makes visible how the types of ethical work offered to transnational actors within the institutional and discursive framework of psy practices, implicates people engaged in transnational living in multiple ways: as patients, as objects of study and as entrepreneurs. These transnational subjectivities, which turn transnationality into a manageable substance, are constructed not only across diverse elements of the hypertext in focus, but also across multiple modalities on which this hypertext relies. The image in Figure 7 demonstrates how the discursive work accomplished with the means of the written representational format and uncovered in the analysis above are anchored also in the visual elements of the website. The Image presented in Figure 7 reproduces connectivity, collectiveness and mutual support, which were revealed earlier in the analysis as some of the central aspects assigned to the ethical transnational conduct. Within the framework of the image, these characteristics are projected in association with a familial discourse mediated through the composition of the photograph foregrounding the so-called nuclear family – mother, father and children. The use of the black-and-white photography format as well as the low resolution and blurred focus of the image add a factual, documentary and amateur quality to it, mediating the everyday, ‘real’ character of the represented action. These visual means and resources of the photography genre constitute the self-help networking that the actors are invited to



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Figure 7.  Sappir-Gasir website: Action Lines

do as tangible and achievable actions in which transitional individuals can engage to care for themselves and for each other. In the Rusforum’s discussion topic, in Post 1 (Figure 1), the author of the topic reproduces similar patterns of addressing ethical transnational conduct as the work to be carried out by the individuals on themselves with the aim of personal improvement (Extract (9)). The individuals are invited to do this work under the conditions of perpetual rivalry with ‘the local population’ (с местным населением). The proposed mode of ethical work re-enforces the transnational-national, migrant-local binaries with which transnationality is commonly imagined. More importantly, it formulates the telos towards which the actors are incited to aspire and which they can achieve as a result of this work, by equating being ‘successful’ (быть успешными) and living ‘happily’ (жить счастливо) with being an adequate match or competitor to ‘the local population’: (9) Вместе легче выживать, интегрироваться, быть успешными в конкуренции с местным населением. Просто жить счастливо. ‘Together it is easier to survive, to integrate, to become successful in competing with the local population. Just to live happily.’

This formulation of the desired transnational being foregrounds transnationality as an essentially inferior format of life, which can be improved to reach the quality of nationality- and territory-bound living through enduring ethical work.

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The image in Figure 8 projects the same aspect of transnational telos: happiness, represented through the idealised imagery of familial joy and contentment. This representation acquires the envisaging, pre-figuring and at the same tangible value of the telos through its position in the Real New margin of the website’s layout (Cranny-Francis 2005: 51). Margin: Ideal Given

Margin: Ideal New

Margin: Real Given

Margin: Real New

Figure 8.  Sappir-Gasir website: Action Lines

Figure 8 demonstrates how the images are distributed in the webpage’s layout in a way that allocates the iconic representation of migrancy, invoked by the image of refugees stranded in a boat, to the Real Given margin of the layout, while assigning the image representing happiness, mutual support and care to the Real New margin. Whilst this layout highlights both images as the ‘real’, specific formats of transnational living (through their position in the margin Real), it offers the idealised representation of familial joy as the new way of doing being transnational to which the individuals should aspire (through its position in the margin New). This new (yet attainable, ‘real’) format of transnational being is juxtaposed to its existing, ‘given’, status through a visual contrast between the transnational multiplicity of the two images. The photo in the Real Given margin represents a scattered and scared crowd of people, whose togetherness is defined and forced only by the borders of the boat in which they are stranded – by fate and necessity, not the will and choice of a free individual. The dispersed character of this multiplicity and the loose, random quality of whatever ties hold its members are highlighted through the trajectories of the gazes of the people in the photograph, which are either directed outside the boat (away from the multiplicity) or down (inwards) or into the nothingness of the night and darkness. Seemingly, although the bodies of the people are positioned close to each other, these positionings do not project closeness. The bodies



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of the migrants are placed side by side rather than towards each other, many with lowered heads, sunken shoulders and arms folded in front or around themselves. In contrast, the photo in the Real New margin constructs the telos of transnational ethics – a desirable transnational multiplicity – as connected through strong ties within it and outwards. This connectedness is reproduced through the visual metaphor of familial relations and the visual resources, such as gaze and positioning. Three children in the photograph are turned straight towards the nucleus of the family, a mother and a father. The family members are represented holding their arms firmly around each other, demarcating the togetherness of the group in a purposeful and active way. The parents and the fourth child look straight into the camera, thereby extending the strength and purposefulness of this togetherness outside the context of the image to the viewer. 5. Towards the notion of transnational governmentality As Rose (2006: 481) points out, “medicine has always practiced beyond disease”. Health is a social concept and the ‘proper’ scope of a doctor’s attention regularly includes people who are not ill. This chapter, however, does not examine the general expansion of a medical domain. Nor does it in anyway diminish the severity of psychiatric illnesses or the significance of the medical and humanitarian work done to assist people, migrant or not, suffering from them. Instead, this research makes visible how a particular format of human life, transnational living, becomes elevated from the category of a way of life to a life problem, to a psychological disorder – a diagnostic category with which psy practices operate and which is formulated with the vocabulary of these practices. Multimodal discourse analysis carried out in this chapter reveals how the technologies of transnational subjectivation are constituted across multiple semiotic systems, social contexts and institutional regimes enlisting individuals as the subjects of this institutional care, turning them into proto-patients (Rose 2006: 481) of psychiatric wards, into the suitable targets of therapeutic programmes, into the objects of study. This ethicalisation of transnational living sets up an assemblage of discursive frameworks, mediational means, institutional practices, governmental and para-governmental agents, which can be mobilised to administer conduct that transgresses the governing jurisdiction of nation-states. In doing so, the uncovered transnational ethics primes the mechanisms of transnational governmentality, thereby not only disassociating governance from the absolute sovereignty of the state and placing it with the citizens, institutions and agents of this state, but also extending this governance at a distance beyond the state, beyond its geo-political borders and cultural domains claimed as national.

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I believe that this expansion of governmental technologies motivates recent demands to re-consider the notion of governmentality that is informed by the idea that it is an art of governance applied on one population by its state. The combination of mediated discourse analysis and governmental analytics in this chapter contributes to this task by uncovering how people engaged in transnational living are assigned “the obligation to maximise one’s life” (Rose, O’Malley, and Valverde 2006: 12) in order to achieve teloi formulated by the actors and institutions which are not necessarily recognised as agencies of transnational governance, but which become recruited as such in social actions and interactions. In this sense, my analysis feeds into and draws on Foucault’s work on the genealogy of problems – on how everything is made not into bad, but into dangerous, and on how these problematisations figure as omnipresent incentives for always having something to do, for continuous vigilance and ever-growing responsibility for self-care of one’s soul, health, security, etc. (Foucault 1983: 256). Taking mediated action as a primary analytical unit, I examined the problematisation of transnational living by tracing how it becomes assembled as a problem along and across connections between diverse social sites, physical spaces and practices. It is these associations, this “web of interdependencies” (van Krieken 1996: 9) which cross the symbolic and geopolitical borders of nationalities, boosted by the affordances of hypertext and computer-mediated interaction, that are the formative tissue of transnational governmentality understood as those channels, formed by human, material and technological actions and relations, along which transnational mobility and existence can be administered at a distance.

References Agamben, Georgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Antaki, Sue, and Charles Widdicombe (eds). 1998. Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Barry, Andrew. 1993. “The European Community and European Government Harmonization, Mobility and European Community and European Government.” Economy and Society 22 (3): 314–326. doi: 10.1080/03085149300000021 Bonnafous-Boucher, Maria. 2009. “The Concept of Subjectivation: A Central Issue in Governmentality and Government of the Self.” In A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium, ed. by Sam Binkley, and Jorge Capetillo. 72–92. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Burrell, Kathy. 2008. “Materialising the Border: Spaces of Mobility and Material Culture in Migration from Post-Socialist Poland.” Mobilities 3 (3): 353–373. doi: 10.1080/17450100802376779 Ceyhan, Ayse, and Anastassia Tsoukala. 2002. “The Securitization of Migration in Western Societies: Ambivalent Discourses and Policies.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27 (1): 21–39. doi: 10.1177/03043754020270S103 Cranny-Francis, Anne. 2005. Multimedia: Texts and Contexts. London: Sage.



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Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002. doi: 10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981 Foucault, Michel. 1983. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 229–252. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984.” In The Final Foucault, ed. by James Bernauer, and David Rasmussen, 1–20. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject (Lectures at the Collège de France 1981– 1982), ed. by Frédéric Gros. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory and Population (Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78), ed. by Michel Senellart. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 595–661. Oxford: Blackwell. Herring, Susan (ed). 1996. Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and CrossCultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/pbns.39 Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. Hodges, Ian. 2002. “Moving beyond Words: Therapeutic Discourse and Ethical Problematization.” Discourse Studies 4 (4): 455–479. doi: 10.1177/14614456020040040401 Humphrey, Michael. 2010. “Conditional Multiculturalism: Islam in Liberal Democratic States.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism, ed. by Duncan Ivison, 199–216. Farnham: Ashgate. Ibrahim, Maggie. 2005. “The Securitization of Migration: A Racial Discourse.” International Migration 43 (5): 163–187. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2005.00345.x Iedema, Rick. 2001. “Resemiotization.” Semiotica 137 (1/4): 23–40. Jewitt, Carey. 2004. “Multimodality and New Communication Technologies.” In Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, ed. by Philip Levine, and Ron Scollon, 184–196. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Jewitt, Carey. 2012. “Technology and Reception as Multimodal Remaking.” In Multimodality in Practice: Investigating Theory-in-practice-through-methodology, ed. by Sigrid Norris, 97–115. New York: Routledge. Jones, Rodney H. 2004. “The Problem of Context in Computer-Mediated Communication.” In Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, ed. by Philip Levine, and Ron Scollon, 21–33. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Jones, Rodney H., and Sigrid Norris. 2005. “Discourse as Action/Discourse in Action.” In Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, 3–14. London: Routledge. Karyotis, Georgios, and Stratos Patrikios. 2010. “Religion, Securitization and Anti-Immigration Attitudes: The Case of Greece.” Journal of Peace Research 47 (1): 43–57. doi:  10.1177/0022343309350021

Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Larner, Wendy, and William Walters. 2004. “Introduction.” In Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, ed. by Wendy Larner, and William Walters, 1–21. London: Routledge.

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Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lemke, Jay. 2002. “Travels in Hypermodality”. Visual Communication 1 (3): 299–325. doi:  10.1177/147035720200100303

Lemke, Thomas. 2007. “An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory”. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 8 (2): 43–64. doi:  10.1080/1600910X.2007.9672946

Lippert, Randy. 1999. “Governing Refugees: The Relevance of Governmentality to Understanding the International Refugee Regime.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 24 (3): 295–328. doi: 10.1177/030437549902400302 Norris, Sigrid (ed). 2012. Multimodality in Practice: Investigating Theory-in-practice-throughmethodology. New York: Routledge. Norris, Sigrid, and Rodney H. Jones. 2005. “Introducing Sites of Engagement.” In Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, ed. by Sigrid Norris, and Rodney H. Jones, 139–141. London: Routledge. Perry, Richard W., and Bill Maurer. 2003. Globalisation under Construction: Governmentality, Law and Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2006. “Disorders Without Borders? The Expanding Scope of Psychiatric Practice.” Biosocieties 1: 465–484. doi: 10.1017/S1745855206004078 Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London, New York: Free Association Books. Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Mariana Valverde. 2006. “Governmentality.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 83–104. doi: 10.1146/annurev.lawsocsci.2.081805.105900 Rumford, Chris. 2003. “European Civil Society or Transnational Social Space? Conceptions of Society in Discourses of EU. Citizenship, Governance and the Democratic Deficit: an Emerging Agenda.” European Journal of Social Theory 6 (1): 25–43. doi:  10.1177/1368431003006001555

Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. Sawyer, Suzana, and Edmund Terence Gomez. 2008. “Transnational Governmentality and Resource Extraction: Indigenous People, Multinational Corporations, Multilateral Institutions and the State.” UNRISD Publications 13: 1–52. Scollon, Ron. 2005. “The Rhythmic Integration of Action and Discourse: Work, the Body and the Earth.” In Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, ed. by Sigrid Norris, and Rodney H. Jones, 20–31. London: Routledge. Scollon, Ron, and Suzie Scollon. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. New York: Routledge. Shakhsari, Sima. 2013. “Transnational Governmentality and the Politics of Life and Death.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2): 340–342. doi: 10.1017/S0020743813000081 Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2005. “Passions of Identification: Discourse, Enjoyment and European Identity.” In Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance, ed. by David Howarth, and Jacob Torfing, 68–90. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Valverde, Mariana. 1998. Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Krieken, Robert. 1996. “Proto-Governmentalization and the Historical Formation of Organizational Subjectivity.” Economy & Society 25 (2): 195–221. doi: 10.1080/03085149600000010



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Walters, William. 2010. “Imagined Migration World: The European Union’s Anti-Illegal Immigration Discourse.” In The Politics of International Migration Management, ed. by Martin Geiger, and Antoine Pécoud, 73–96. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Walters, William. 2012. Governmentality: Critical Encounters. Abingdon: Routledge. Zhukova Klausen, Julia. 2013. “Mediated Discourses of Transnational Participation: The Study of Discursive Aspects of Transnational Networking.” Suomen Soveltavan Kielitieteen Yhdistyksen (AFinLA) Julkaisuja 71: 123–143. Zhukova Klausen, Julia. 2011. “Transnational Living in Everyday Practices: A Study of Social and Discursive Aspects of Transnational Networking and its Role in Identity Construction.” SPIRIT PhD Series 30.

chapter 9

Governmentality, counter-conduct and prefigurative demonstrations Interactional and categorial practices in the strange case of the United Nathans weapons inspectors Paul McIlvenny

Aalborg University, Denmark

The interactional and categorial practices of a prefigurative protest demonstration are examined using video recordings that document a theatrical protest event called “United Nathans weapons inspectors” in February 2003. The chapter undertakes an analytics of protest to uncover how fields of visibility, forms of knowledge, technologies and apparatuses, and subjectivities and identities are negotiated and accomplished collaboratively. Conversation analysis (CA) helps us document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised. Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) uncovers the categorial work by which subjectivation is morally accomplished in social interaction. The chapter shows how CA and MCA can help trace the interactional, embodied and categorial practices that are endogenous to conducting the conduct of others and the self, and thus which constitute or contest the rationalities of governmentality.

1. Introduction Political demonstrations by a range of social movements have been studied extensively, but few studies have focused on the interactional and categorial practices in which mediated actions, the assemblage of artefacts and actors, and relationships between the actors are creatively produced, contingently achieved and made visible in situ. In addition, it is rare to find a study of governmentality that attends to the micro-ethnographic detail of actual practices, procedures and technologies of governance, especially those practices that manifest as what Foucault called ‘counter-conducts’. In this chapter, I examine the interactional practices of a prefigurative protest event – the “United Nathans weapons inspectors” – an event which also illustrates how counter-conducts are achieved and made accountable. doi 10.1075/dapsac.66.09mci © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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2. Governmentality in practice This chapter draws upon Foucault’s later work, especially his suggestive exploration of governmentality and the ethics of the care of the self. Following on from Foucault’s published lecture on governmentality (Foucault 1991), studies of governmentality are flourishing in recent years (see Chapter 1 in this volume). In a lecture given in 1984, Foucault (1997a: 300) states that ‘governmentality’ implies the relationship of the self to itself, and he intends this concept of ‘governmentality’ “to cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organise, and instrumentalise the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other [my emphasis]”. However, it is rare to find a study of governmentality that attends to the rich micro-ethnographic detail of actual practices, procedures, tactics, technologies, vocabularies – the techne – of governance, especially those that manifest as what Foucault called ‘counter-conducts’, seen not simply as ‘failures’ of governmentality. But there are recommendations to do so made by key scholars of governmentality, including William Walters and Nikolas Rose. For example, Walters (2012: 14) notes that Foucault emphasised that governance is “an extremely pervasive and heterogeneous activity”, and methodologically it is important to situate the analysis of governmental power “in the study of definite practices and techniques [my emphasis]”. Following Latour, Rose (1999: 5) argues that “we need to pay attention to the ways in which, in practice, distinctions and associations are established between practices and apparatuses deemed political and aimed at the management of large-scale characteristics of territories or populations, and micro-technologies for the management of human conduct in specific individuals in particular locales and practices [my emphasis].” I argue that what is often lacking in the move to consider definite practices and micro-technologies at the intersection of the government of the self and the government of others is a more nuanced understanding of members’ everyday practices that accomplish the powers of freedom based on the assumption that “to govern is to presuppose the freedom of the governed” (4), to act upon action. 3. Counter-conducts In his development of the notion of governmentality, Foucault (2007: 193) cautiously defines it in relation to conduct. The translator of his lectures notes that “when Foucault speaks of ‘a conduct’ (une conduit) the sense often embraces the activity by which some conduct others, the way in which some are conducted by others, and the way in which individuals conduct themselves within this form of ‘conduct’” (193: fn †). Davidson (2011: 26.27) observes that Foucault cleverly



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writes of ”the double dimension of conduct, namely the activity of conducting an individual, conduction as a relation between individuals, and the way in which an individual conducts ‘himself ’ or is conducted, ‘his’ conduct or behaviour in the narrower sense of the term. Yet Foucault moves quickly from the quite specific form of power that takes as its object the conduct of individuals to the correlative countermovements that he initially designates as specific revolts of conduct.” In one of his lectures in 1978, Foucault makes the case for using the term ‘counter-conduct’: “what I will propose to you is the doubtless badly constructed word ‘counter-conduct’ – the latter having the sole advantage of allowing reference to the active sense of the word ‘conduct’ – counter-conduct in the sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others; which is why I prefer it to ‘misconduct’ (inconduite), which only refers to the passive sense of the word, of behaviour: not conducting oneself properly” (Foucault 2007: 201). In an interview, Foucault outlines what he means by the the term counter-conduct as “the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price” (Foucault 1997b: 72). Later he clarifies: “I was not referring to something that that would be a fundamental anarchism, that would be like an originary freedom, absolutely and wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalisation” (73). Indeed, Rose (1999) concludes his book on governmentality and ‘powers of freedom’ in advanced liberal societies by reiterating Foucault’s warning about dichotomising power and resistance. He writes: “it requires us to abandon, once and for all, those binary divisions that have structured our political thinking and our theorizing about the political for so long: domination and emancipation; power and resistance; strategy and tactics; Same and Other; civility and desire. Empirical studies of regulatory problematisations, ambitions, programmes, strategies and techniques require us to jettison the division between a logic that structures and territorialises ‘from above’ according to protocols that are not our own, and a more or less spontaneous anti-logic ‘from below’ that expresses our own needs, desires, aspirations” (1999: 277). Freeman (1970) concurs when she argues that the appeal of ‘leaderless’ and ‘structureless’ groups as an ideal political form is to revert to more covert forms of sovereign and disciplinary power. For Foucault, counter-conduct is not the same as disobedience, revolt, dissidence or insubordination. In the case study in this chapter, counter-conduct in its broad sense can be found empirically in the practices of protestors attempting to politicise the imposition of an international inspection regime for ulterior purposes. Death (2010) has outlined how we ought to investigate the rationalities, techniques, practices, programmes of protest events themselves; for example, how such groups conduct their own conduct, especially when they are experimenting with alternative forms of governance. He argues that the governmentality literature unfortunately “tends to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of

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government” (235). Instead, we need to “map the close interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilise the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time” (235). Death draws upon Mitchell Dean’s (2010) ‘analytics of government’ approach that appeals to four dimensions of government as assemblages or regimes of practices: (a) the fields of visibility it creates and the ends to which it aims; (b) the forms of knowledge it relies upon (the episteme); (c) the particular technologies and apparatuses it mobilises (the techne); and (d) the subjectivities or identities it produces. These categories can also be applied to the study of protests. Following Dean, Death (2010) suggests an analytics of protest, in which there are four comparable dimensions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Fields of visibility created by the protest. Forms of knowledge relied upon by protesters. Technologies and apparatuses mobilised by protestors. Subjectivities and identities produced by the protest.

Death (2010: 242) elucidates this approach by examining global summits from 1999–2009 – such as the WTO, the G8, and COP15 – and the accompanying protests. He argues that protests have “their own discursive norms of behaviour – of conduct – such as humility, imagination, patriotism, ecological sustainability or revolutionary fervour, and employ ‘techniques of responsibilisation’ (Rose 1999: 74) in a similar way to regimes of advanced liberal government.” These norms need to be studied critically. Death illustrates his argument with examples from global summits, but he does not analyse practices in any detail to see how actors negotiate and accomplish discursive norms and counter-conducts. 4. Conducting conduct in social interaction In order to analyse the interactional and discursive practices of counter-conduct, this chapter explores some of the tools and methods that are well suited to investigating the situated practices, procedures, tactics, technologies and vocabularies of governmentality in and across settings, namely conversation analysis (CA) (Have 2007; Sidnell and Stivers 2012) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) (Hester and Eglin 1997; Jayyusi 1984; Silverman 1998). The chapter shows how



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CA and MCA can help trace the interactional, embodied and categorial practices that are endemic and endogenous to conducting the conduct of others and the self, and thus which constitute or contest the rationalities of governmentality. CA helps us document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised (McIlvenny 2009). MCA provides an approach to uncovering the categorial work by which subjectivation is morally accomplished in social interaction (Lindegaard 2012; Summerville and Adkins 2007). The chapter explores the relations between social interaction, practices and the conduct of conduct in order to ascertain the ways in which ethnomethodological CA and MCA (EMCA) can offer more nuanced accounts of the local accomplishment of the conduct of conduct, and counter-conduct specifically. 5. Case study: “United Nathans weapons inspectors” The data for the case study was collected in February 2003 as part of the documentation of the actions of a peace group in Denmark protesting against the imminent invasion of Iraq by the USA and its coalition forces, which in fact took place on 19th March 2003 without the authorisation of the United Nations (UN). On 5th February 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the UN General Assembly, producing what later turned out to be false evidence for WMD in an effort to gain UN authorisation for an invasion. The consciousness-raising, theatrical protest event took place eight days later and two days before the global peace protests on 15th February 2003, which were heralded as the largest demonstrations in the world ever seen before a war began. The protest event was called “United Nathans weapons inspectors”, and it was conducted to highlight the lack of transparency on the part of the USA regarding its own stock of WMD (weapons of mass destruction), and thus the hypocrisy of the USA and its allies to demand that another country, namely Iraq, open up to inspections by UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) as a pretext for invasion.1 A multinational 1. In a study of the creative billboard protests by the non-proliferation and peace activism group LASG in New Mexico, Masco (2005) notes that the group sponsored a “citizens’ inspection team” modelled on the UN arms inspectors. The group “repeatedly demanded entrance to U.S. nuclear facilities in New Mexico in order to certify that the United States was living up to the terms of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (in which all signatories agreed to pursue the end of the arms race and work for global nuclear disarmament). By drawing attention to the expanding U.S. commitment to nuclear weapons in the post–Cold War period, the LASG has argued for a coherent global policy for nuclear disarmament, one that begins by rejecting the assumptions of American exceptionalism that currently support the U.S. nuclear arsenal” (491).

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group of a­ ctivists dressed as inspectors in uniforms with blue caps, UN insignia, Ziploc bags and clipboards – each called “Nathan” from the “United Nathans” – decided to inspect US and corporate businesses for WMD in order to focus attention on the matter, and to promote the upcoming peaceful demonstration. None of the businesses chosen had prior knowledge about the inspections. The group was followed by a reporter and video camera operator from the local division of a national TV station, as well as a student radio reporter.2 In order to establish an audiovisual representation for archiving and editing, a hand-held video camcorder was used to record the event. For each protest action that day, the camcorder recorded continuously without a pause. The group travelled by local bus (informing passengers of the rationale of the protest event and inspecting the bus) and visited and inspected several businesses in the city, including a Shell garage, a Levi’s shop, a Malboro Classics shop, a McDonald’s restaurant, a pharmacy, and a Blockbusters video rental shop. The analysis in this chapter will focus on the action in the Levi’s and Malboro Classics shops. The group entered both shops from the street and stayed for 4–5 minutes, with the permission of the shop assistant/manager in charge. The video recordings were transcribed using the standard transcription conventions for conversation analysis (Jefferson 2004). If necessary, individuals are anonymised in the transcript and the images. English is the predominant language (several of the group members were not Danish), though Danish (and Finnish) is also spoken. These instances are translated with an English gloss in the line underneath. The excerpts from the Levi’s shop are marked LV and Malboro Classics are marked MC in the analysis that follows.3 6. Inspections and demonstrations Before continuing to the analysis of the protest event, a discussion of the nature of the inspection as a mode of governmentality and the relationship between inspection and demonstration is needed.4 In relation to the ‘conduct of conduct’ in ­international relations, we can conceive of the threat of inspections as an attempt 2. Not only is the event performative, it is to be remediated. Clearly the group are aware of the need to perform mediatisable actions – e.g. quotable scenes and interactions – that will enable the TV news to present an informative news item that benefits the argument they are making. 3. An edited video of the protest event, which includes excerpts from the two sites analysed here, can be found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRFk1xLFZSw 4. The rise of the inspection as a mode of centralisation in factories, workplaces, prisons and schools in nineteenth century Britain has been well documented (Corrigan and Sayer 1985).



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to govern at a distance the conduct of a sovereign country according to international law. International inspection regimes provide examples of a particular rationality that enrols practices of transparency and accountability in order to conduct the conduct of others on an international stage (see Clarke 2014: for a discussion of inspections as a governmental rationality in educational settings). Such an inspection regime came under intense public scrutiny in 2003 in relation to Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. In a paper by Barry (2002) discussing the nature of “political events”, he questions the distinction between inspection and demonstration. As an example, Barry refers to the inspection by UN inspectors to confirm whether or not there were WMD in Iraq in 2002–3. He argues that these inspections were both routine and staged. The credibility of the inspections rested on the scientific and professional nature of the inspections. Nevertheless, the event was also political, though its success as a political act – a demonstration – with certain effects depended on the inspections being accountable as non-political. Paradoxically, Barry argues, the result of such inspections of unethical conduct, especially when mediated in the mass media, is that inspections begin to permeate the ethical such that all conduct is open to scrutiny and routine inspection. Barry (2001b: 175) also draws on Latour and Callon to argue that “government does not rely on the conduct and properties of persons, but on the actions of a whole array of technical objects.” As we can talk about the materiality of practices of government, we can also talk about the materiality of political conflict and protests. Indeed, “an analysis of the conduct of a political demonstration may demand careful attention to the technology and ethics of telling and witnessing the truth and the ways in which sites of demonstration are made. Demonstration is a technical, ethical and spatial practice” (176). The road protests in the 1990s that he also studied had the goal of demonstrating a truth which it would have otherwise been impossible to demonstrate in public in the more usual ways, thus making visible a phenomenon – the emerging reality of environmental damage and destruction – to be witnessed by others. Barry (2001b: 193) argues that “such direct actions reworked and reinvented a form of public demonstration. The demonstrators were visible and they successfully managed the form of their visibility.” Barry (1999) notes that there is an earlier sense of ‘demonstrator’, who was someone with the function of pointing out the feature of the body being shown in an anatomy lecture theatre; thus, “to be in the presence of a demonstration was a matter of witnessing a technical practice” (77). Barry (2002) argues that practices of demonstration, however, do not simply represent the world as it is, rather an “effective demonstration is one which renders an entity… into a new, more public, and more visible form. A demonstration helps to make a problem

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or entity visible in public and, in this way, turn it into a political issue.”5 However, “it takes a lot of work to make an object political, and to create the kinds of sites within which political action can happen” (2001b: 194) – and some of that work is, of course, discursive. In the “United Nathans weapons inspectors” protest event, the protestors can be seen as demonstrating the absence of truth in the actions of others – making hypocrisy visible – as well as discursively prefiguring another mode of inspection as demonstration. Maeckelbergh (2009, 2011) argues that prefiguration is a strategic practice of recent social movements, especially alterglobalisation movements in the 2000s. With the concern for modes of horizontal organisation – for example, in the Occupy movement in 2011 – movement actors experiment with a range of communicative and social interactional practices that support more democratic forms of social organising, deliberation and decisionmaking (McIlvenny forthcoming-a). Maeckelbergh (2011) contends that social change is a matter of practice and experience, but unfortunately she does not do any detailed qualitative analyses of actual practices. 7. Analysis of the “United Nathans weapons inspectors” event Video recordings of the “United Nathans weapons inspectors” event are analysed to investigate (a) how the ‘mock’ inspections were carried out as a practically organised activity, (b) what forms of knowledge were drawn upon by the protestors, (d) how the visibility of the object of the demonstration and the site of political action were accomplished in social interaction, (e) how a relay between the rationalities of an inspection and the politicisation of spaces of consumption was achieved, and (f) how an alternative way of conducting the conduct of others was discursively prefigured. This contributes to an analytics of protest practices which aims to uncover how fields of visibility, forms of knowledge, technologies and apparatuses, and subjectivities and identities are negotiated and accomplished collaboratively by the protestors and the people they encounter in practice. The mock inspections conducted by the group typically had several components: an entrance with a transition from service encounter to inspection; a negotiation of rights to inspect the site; the management of the neutrality of the inspectors and the transparency of the inspections; the handling of objects of 5. Barry (1999) argues that the road protests and similar forms of direct action involved a dispersion of politics. On the one hand, political activity was spatially dispersed away from the usual centres of political authority. On the other hand, the protests themselves were dispersed, in the sense that they could not be so easily reduced to a certain political logic or self-interest. The protestors also maintained a non-hierarchical organisation and an ethos of non-violent civil disobedience.



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suspicion; a report on the results of the inspection to the site manager; and a graceful exit. Ultimately, the inspection accomplished a series of transformations, particularly transformations of language, of mediated actions, of sites of engagement, of members’ categories, of frames and of salient objects. For example, the frame of the service encounter in retail business premises was transformed (or translated) into the frame of an international inspection for WMD. 7.1

From service encounter to mock inspection

In both shops, what could easily have been a routine service encounter – with the accompanying roles of customer and shop assistant, involving request formats (Sorjonen and Raevaara 2014), etc. – is step-by-step transformed into a mock inspection.6 This is undertaken by gaining permission to search for a particular item (hearable as associated with that shop) as a condition for conducting the mock inspections. In both cases, the opening sequence consists of paired greetings (asymmetrical in two languages) and identifications (see Figure 1 and Figure 2), followed by a question by the notional chief inspector K to determine the competence, and gain the consent, of the assistant to speak English. After a brief, but crucial, exchange, K performatively moves into the inspection phase by instructing the Nathans to begin their search for a specific object.

Figure 1.  The first encounter in Levi’s 6. Schenkein (1978) analyses the ways in which an insurance salesman attempts to transform the situation, imputing specific unofficial identities, and how the prospective customer passes on the attempt.

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Figure 2.  The first encounter in Malboro Classics

In Excerpt LV1, K enters the shop and first shakes hands with shop assistant A2 and then A1. He introduces himself as a representative of the United Nathans (lines 9 and 12). K quickly establishes a dialogue in English with A1, whom K treats as the gatekeeper from whom it is necessary to secure consent. Within the frame of the service encounter, K asks A1 whether or not a particular type/brand of jeans – “six six six” – is available (line 32). Because this is hearable as an artefact embedded in an activity bound to K’s incumbency as a customer, the assistant A1 orients to it as a reasonable request for a product. However, the shop assistant is not able to help. He hesitates and K repeats, to which the assistant replies negatively (line 37). K downgrades the seriousness of the request for assistance, and mitigates the ‘joke’, by making a more reasonable and answerable request for “five oh ones” (501s), which the shop assistant confirms they do stock (line 41). K then moves off to the right, turns and instructs the other Nathans, who are now all in the shop, to search for the suspicious object, namely the brand that A1 could not identify (666) (lines 44–5). Excerpt LV1.  Entrance and first encounter (Levi’s) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

((K walks in to shop and approaches A1 and A2)) K: ( ) A1: ( vi vil ikke noget) ( we will not anything) A1: det skal du ((A1 gestures)) bare vide you just need ((A1 gestures)) to know that K: tak skal du ha’ thanks



9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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K: united na:thans ((extends hand to A2)) ((A2 shakes K’s hand)) ((A1 twists to look at the video camera/operator)) K: united nathans inspe:ctors A1: hej ((to camera)) hi ((A1 twists back to K)) K: united nathans inspectors ((extends hand to A1)) ((A1 shakes hands)) A1: [god dag. good day. K: [good afternoon. ((K looks down at clipboard)) A2: (jeg går hen og ta’r noget bagved) (i go and pick up something in the back) ((A2 moves to back of shop)) ((A1 looks at the Nathans entering the shop)) ((K twists and points to the entrance)) K: heheh we’re just looking arou:nd if that’s okay=↑can you speak engli:sh= A1: =yeah of cou:rse= K: =ok K: >we’re just looking °around°< we’re looking=have you got jean six six six (1.0) A1: =[(°wha-°) K: =[levi’s six six si(h)x haha[hahah] A1: [°no°] A1: (i don’t [have it) [((K waves plastic glove down in front of A1)) ((K takes a step and twists to address A1)) K: ↑five oh one, A1: yeh K: ok cool. ok K: OKAY NATHANS CAN WE LOOK AROUND AND SEE IF WE CAN SPOT ANY JEANS SIX SIX SI:X

One can compare the tactics of the protestors to Sacks’ (1992: 3–11) discussion of how callers in telephone conversations collected at an emergency psychiatric hospital routinely avoid giving their name in their first exchanges. Although K has given a shortened name of the group (lines 9 and 12), he does not explicitly

276 Paul McIlvenny

announce their intention or mission. In LV1, K’s “we’re just looking around” (line 27) is innocuous; it is recipient designed to receive a polite and affirmative response by the assistant. At this point, K is a potential customer with rights to independently peruse the goods on offer in an appropriate manner without further assistance. In lines 44–5, however, K delicately transforms what is hearable as a customer’s enquiry about a product into an action in a pre-inspection sequence, in which the unhelpfulness of the assistant supplies the grounds for suspicion and a justification for an inspection to be initiated. By then instructing the other Nathans to search for that particular (fictional) product, K unilaterally treats his original request as unanswered. Moreover, within the context and rationality of the emerging ‘mock inspection’ frame, the search is deemed necessary since the assistant denies that such an object is present on the premises, thus raising suspicion. The right to inspect is now legitimated under the guise of an innocent customer enquiry.7 In Excerpt MC1, K enters another shop and walks towards the assistant, who is presently talking with a customer in Danish. This time K does not introduce himself as an agent of a particular organisation; instead, he quickly establishes a dialogue with A3, and again he treats A3 as the gatekeeper from whom it is necessary to secure consent. Excerpt MC1.  Entrance and first encounter (Malboro Classics) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

((K enters shop)) ((A3 is talking in Danish to a customer)) ((K walks up to A3)) A3: god dag good day K: good afternoon how are you:. A3: i a:m fi:ne? ((A3 looks over at who enters the shop)) K: good. how is your engli:sh A3: i: don’t kno::w=you can tell me la:ter A3: =[maybe] K: =[ah it] sou:nds [quite goo:d [hahahahahah •hh ():

7. In LV2, line 50, after K instructs his team to start searching, we see that A1 restates that they do not have the jeans called “666”. For K and the team, the negative answer to the query is interpreted as worthy of suspicion. For A1, on the other hand, there is no need for a search since he knows his stock. It is apparent that A1 treats the enquiry seriously; he does not see the joke in the biblical numerical reference to the ‘mark of the beast’.



15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Chapter 9.  Governmentality, counter-conduct and prefigurative demonstrations 277

((A3 scans those who have entered and looks to K)) K: have you got any cigare:ttes A3: no. K: =[malboro A3: =[no. ((A3 twists to left)) A3 no. ((A3 twists further to left)) K: cigarettes A3: sure ((A3 turns back to K)) K: it says ((K points to door)) =[malboro] A3: =[no problem] K: =[it says malboro] on the door A3: =[>yeah yeah yeah 150, percentages of annual articles)

Although addressing social insurances and privatisation remains a stable element, all related graphs show maxima between 2000 and 2003 which correspond to the influence peak of individuals and networks in Figure 12. Afterwards a strong decline follows and both discursive strands become more diversified regarding the topics, corresponding to the growing influence of think tanks and lobby organisations in Figure 12. In this diversification process, discursive strands aiming at the activation especially of elderly people become more and more relevant. After ‘reforms’ of the pension system which lead in fact to a massive pension cut and partial privatisation to fulfil the demands of insurance companies and the financial markets, ‘active ageing’ becomes now a dominant element of the public discourse (Van Dyk 2013; Denninger et al. 2014). Although both ‘paradigms’ of

382 Reinhard Messerschmidt

demographic governmentality coexist, there is an inherent temporal connection: the allegedly science-based increase of retirement age and enlargement of the life working time opened up the discursive space for further activation of potential productivity and growth on cost of former leisure time in retirement. In both of the governmentality ‘paradigms’, normative discourses become ‘true’ in close connection to power relations, according to Figure 12. For the entire period analysed, governmental and official data sources provide the majority of demographic future knowledge. Despite a notable bias which has been described in Section 3, this knowledge is usually only one of the fundamentals for political instrumentalisation. While in the first years a strong influence of individuals and networks supporting pension ‘reforms’ can be observed, there is a growing influence of think tanks corresponding to economic interests, which are connected to governmental programs of a neo-liberal or in fact neo-social (Lessenich 2008) character. On the one hand, the state rejects its former responsibility in the domain of social policy in favour of private insurances and assets on the financial or real estate market. On the other hand, there is a rising component of the governmentality of the self. It corresponds to the model of entrepreneurship of the self (Bröckling 2007), but in new domains, e.g. lifelong learning in order to be available for the job market as long as possible, longer life working time, and productive activation even after the age of retirement. In the beginning, the ‘formal core’ shaped demographic knowledge into a direction which allows political instrumentalisation for governmental purposes, which only allegedly serves the interest of the citizens but in fact focuses on generating new markets and profits. The ‘triple shift’ of power, knowledge, and subject is therefore a promising strategy to examine the prevailing dominance of this reductionist formalism of a ‘political science’ (Hummel 2000) directly in context of its political consequences. The majority of demographic researchers as ‘subjects’ seem to govern themselves at least unconsciously or even purposefully, when we consider the example of Herwig Birg’s (2001, 2005) alleged objectivity. Due to the high degree of technicality in the scientific discourse on demographic change, certain gaps of reflection may be brought forward when researchers tend to naturalise the categories they use. Although there is critical self-reflection by some demographers, it is not widespread among the majority of the researchers of the discipline. The hegemony of the ‘formal core’ and the allegedly inevitable consequences of demographic change is evident. This hegemony is the result of a governmentality of demographic change, which operates through three different sub-programs in favour of the contemporary governmentality described above. The first governmental program leads to an internal neglect of social construction. It goes hand in hand with a second program, which is based on the political charge of the discipline itself and a third program, which is based on the functional logics of the massmedia. The reduction and dramatisation of demographic knowledge is to a large



Chapter 12.  Revealing the governmentality of demographic change in Germany 383

extent a result of the media’s greed for scandals. Cautious and uncertain scientific knowledge is mostly incompatible with this functional logic, which requires clear predictions instead of complex reflections. But researchers, and especially demographers, need this attention in order to become visible, at least since the public discourse sphere had opened itself for their mostly dramatic topic. Consequently, at the intersection of the three different levels emerges a conceptually reductionist apparatus which affects researchers practice and leads to a distortion of generation and communication of demographic knowledge, which is multiplied in the process of the mediation of scientific discourses into the public. A variety of codes regarding the consequences of demographic change only makes sense with reference to governmentality regimes, e.g. more or less direct product-placement for private healthcare and pension insurances, sub-discourses regarding the labour or real-estate market, the education system, etc. These consequences can be interpreted as alleged ‘forceful’ (pseudo-)legitimation using “garbled demography” (Teitelbaum 2004) for a variety of economic and political interests with the scheme of “entrepreneurship of the self ” (Bröckling 2007). The parallel scheme of private use and socialised costs is characteristic of a neo-social society (Lessenich 2008). It can even be found expressed directly in the text corpus and is central to the hegemonic discourse of demographic change, together with a specifically limited quantitative reductionist view on the social, or in other words, its demographisation. Society in all its complexity is reduced to its demography. Instead of addressing population dynamics as symptom of social and political developments, the discourse hides normative positions behind the alleged objectivity of numbers, which are used to govern people in a demographic regime of “numerocracy” (Angermuller 2010), that opens a huge terrain for the misuse of scientific knowledge. The analysis described above provides a specific ‘tool-box’ meant to criticise such misuse based on a discourse analysis with the focus on multiple elements. These elements are: 1. the construction of demographic knowledge as a discourse which underlies specific rules of formation, precisely (a) internal rules based on the genealogy of demography with its specific ‘formal core’, that can hardly be separated from political influence, and (b) external rules based on power relations due to the impact of functional logics of the journalistic field into the scientific field; 2. the dominant forms of veridiction, including (a) ‘experts’ who do not take any risk due to delegation of responsibility to allegedly objective data, and (b) ‘prophets’ who do not speak in the own name, but instead for another voice, which is here the voice of the expert(s); 3. various power relations, which are present in all other elements of the analysis and shape the discourses in demography and the mass-media into specific directions corresponding to the political interests and influence on the discourse, which is measured via the distribution of code frequencies in the text corpus;

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4. the governmentality of the self and others, which is permanently contextual for the analysis of all other elements of this specific perspective on discourse. All four interrelated elements taken together provide answers to the question why these specific statements, and not others, appeared at a specific point in time.

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Notes on contributors

François Allard-Huver is a Lecturer in Communication at ESA – Agricultural Higher Education School, Angers, France and Associate Researcher at the Sorbonne University. He is interested in questions dealing with transparency policies and communication strategies in European and French Institutions, especially risk assessment authorities like EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) or ANSES (the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety). His PhD dissertation dealt with transparency, GMOs and pesticide controversies in the public sphere. He is interested in the question of frankness (parrhesia in Foucauldian theory) in the public sphere, as well as in the digital media strategies of risk assessment authorities and civil society actors. Ann Starbæk Bager, PhD, is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. She does research within the area of organisational and leadership studies and applies a dissensus-based approach that embraces ethical matters, plural meaning-making and complexities inherent in everyday organisational life. She mainly teaches and supervises on organisational discourse studies, action research, communication training and theories of communication, organisation, dialogue, power and leadership. Her PhD dissertation investigated the staging, analysis and critique of pluri-vocal dialogues as a means for the co-production of knowledge in/on leadership communicative practices. She has recently published articles in which she discusses a Bakhtinian approach to organisational and leadership studies. She is particularly interested in bringing both the broader discursive dimensions and the concrete discursive dimensions together when grasping organisational matters in order to create participatory and locally situated change. Monica Colombo, PhD, is currently an Assistant Professor of social psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy), where she teaches a course in communication and discourse analysis. She has researched widely on xenophobia, anti-immigrant discourse and political discourse from perspectives linguistic constructions of discrimination and social exclusion. She also works on qualitative research methodologies including multimodal analysis. She is the author and co-author of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. She is currently involved in a research project on urban governance and safety policies in Italy over the last two decades.

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Sun-ha Hong is a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research investigates the productive aspects of uncertainty in the new media society. His dissertation argues that state- and selfsurveillance reflect our efforts to knit together the immediate experience of technology ‘here’ with a vision of a vaster world ‘out there’, simultaneously producing and alleviating a crisis in the meaning of information. His other publications address this theme in terms of everyday speech, video games, the notion of the public, and more. His professional details and publications can be found at http:// sunhahong.org. He also runs untimely.co: an anachronistic repository of writings and reading notes on theory. Anders Horsbøl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has studied communication, philosophy and applied linguistics at different universities in Denmark, Germany, Austria and Great Britain. In addition to a doctoral thesis on the discursive construction of a political presidential candidate (2003), he has published especially in the fields of (multimodal) discourse analysis, political communication, health communication and environmental communication. His most recent publication is a co-authored monograph on climate change and everyday life (2015). Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen is a Professor in the Department of Business and Management at Aalborg University, Denmark. He researches and teaches organisational change and organisational learning. His research interests include power, materiality, narrative, storytelling and ethics in organisations and in leadership education. He has been involved in numerous projects on organisational change and learning. Kenneth has authored, co-authored and edited many books, book chapters and journal articles. Recent books include Power without Glory – A Genealogy of a Management Decision, Human Resource Development – A Critical Text, Educational Leadership, Management and Governance in South Africa and Critical Narrative Inquiry  – Storytelling, Sustainability and Power. Recent co-authored articles include “Resituating Narrative and Story in Business Ethics” (in Business Ethics: A European Perspective), “Towards a Post-Colonial Storytelling Theory of Management and Organisation” (in Journal of Philosophy of Management), and “Conceptual Bases of Problem-based Learning” (in Global Perspectives on College and University Teaching). Inger Lassen is a Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has a PhD in language for specific purposes, and teaches and does research within the fields of genre and discourse studies. Her publications include articles in international journals, a monograph on style (2003) and co-edited anthologies on Mediating Ideology in Text and Image (2006)



Notes on contributors 389

and Living with Patriarchy (2011). Her most recent publication is a co-authored monograph on climate change and everyday life (2015). Laura Bang Lindegaard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies and a core member of the Centre for Discourses in Transition (C-DiT) at Aalborg University, Denmark. She has published within the fields of the philosophy of language and critical discourse analysis, and, most recently, within conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Topically, her current research interests include the interactional accomplishment of the governing of climate change and the moral ordering of everyday transportation practices. Paul McIlvenny is a Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies, as well as Director of the Centre for Discourses in Transition (C-DiT) and Director of the Interdisciplinary Discourse Studies doctoral programme, at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published many journal articles and book chapters, as well as edited several books and journal special issues, in the fields of conversation analysis, discourse studies, media studies, gender studies, and most recently in interactional mobility studies. His current research interests include the everyday practices of vélomobility, skimobility and assisted e-mobility, and the mediated discourses and micro-politics of prefigurative protest movements. Reinhard Messerschmidt, M.A., studied Sociology, Philosophy and Political Sciences at the University of Rostock from 2002 to 2008. Afterwards, he was a scholarship holder of the European Doctoral School of Demography at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) in Paris. From 2009 to 2012 he held a doctoral scholarship at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne. From 2012 to 2014 he worked as a research scientist at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in the BMBF-funded digital humanities project eTraces. Since 2015, he is a research scientist at the Cologne Center for eHumanities at the University of Cologne. His main research interests are Foucauldian discourse theory and analysis understood as ontology of the present, epistemology, history of science and critical theory. These fields converge in a strong interest of crossing disciplinary boundaries as well as reflecting methodic paradigms of social scientific research. Fabio Quassoli, PhD, is an Associate Professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca, where he teaches qualitative research methodology and intercultural relations. His research interests focus on urban security and governance, immigration policies, immigrant criminalisation, ethnic discrimination, multiculturalism and intercultural communication. On these topics, he has published a book and several papers in international

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journals and edited volumes. He is currently writing a book on immigrant control and criminalisation in Italy. He is also involved in a research project on urban governance and safety policies in Italy over the last two decades. Joel Rasmussen is currently working as Director of Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University, Sweden, and before that was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on how risks and risk responsibility are understood and managed through the way we communicate. Recently he has become interested in how social media is used in risk communication. He has published articles in journals such as Human Relations and Discourse & Communication. Pirkko Raudaskoski is a Professor of Material-Discursive Practices in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she leads the research group Mattering: Centre for Discourse and Practice . Her main research interests are (1) how various meaningful communicative resources contribute to emergent practices; and (2) how “larger” societal, political, and cultural issues are related to the local accomplishments of action. She has a deep interest in the social, cultural and material context of discourse or language use and has done interdisciplinary empirical research in various settings with a focus on phenomena such as affect, attention and learning, and theoretical concepts such as identity, interactivity and practice. Her recent publications include “Relaying Experiences for Care Home Design” (in Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science) and “From Understanding to Participation: A Relational Approach to Communicative and Embodied Practices” (in AFinLA – a Finnish Applied Linguistics Association periodical). Janne Solberg works as an Associate Professor in social science at the University College of Southeast Norway. Her research interests are in the social interaction between clients and professionals in welfare encounters. In her PhD dissertation “Defensive accountings. An ethnomethodological study of clients’ resistance practices in vocational rehabilitation encounters” (2014), she analyses how clients are made accountable and make themselves accountable in the process of negotiating an action plan. While vocational rehabilitation policies presume clients to be active, Solberg’s research demonstrates in a detailed fashion how this is realised at the level of micro interaction. Two articles concerning the clients’ interactional dilemmas in planning-sequences were published in Qualitative Social Work (September 2011) and in Text & Talk (November 2011). A third article, in Pragmatics & Society investigates clients’ overt resistance practices in supporting their case through invoking a third person’s assessment.



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Derek Wallace is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches academic and professional writing at undergraduate level, and supervises doctoral students in several branches of linguistics and discourse analysis. His most longstanding research strand is an exploration of the role of writing in the formation and formulation of public policy and legislation, the most comprehensive accounts of which appear in Writing Selves/Writing Societies, edited by Charles Bazerman and David Russell (2003), and in the journal Text & Talk (2012, issue 1). The other main strand of his research is concerned with conceptualisations of ‘time’ and the production of futures, which provide the focus of the book Governing the Future published in 2011 by Common Ground. Julia Zhukova Klausen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies and a core member of the Centre for Discourses in Transition (C-DiT) at Aalborg University, Denmark. She is engaged in interdisciplinary research across the areas of multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics, computer-mediated interaction, transnational conduct and identity. She has published in the fields of nexus analysis, transnational networking and participation. Her current research interests include the ethicalisation of transnational living, diversity and transnational (dis)identification, governance-at-a-distance in today’s Russia and discourses of national sovereignty and cooperation in the Arctic.

Name index

A Adam, Barbara  306, 308 Adkins, Barbara  43–44 Agamben, Giorgio  152, 215 Allard-Huver, François  50–51 Austin, J. L.  6, 8–9 B Bager, Ann  52, 222 Bakhtin, Mikhail  217, 219, 221, 304 Barlösius, Eva  362 Barry, Andrew  271–72 Bayart, Jean-Francois  99 Biebricher, Thomas  103 Binkley, Sam  12–13 Birg, Herwig  366, 373–74, 378, 380, 382 Bonnafous-Boucher, Maria  99 Bora, Alfonz  21 Borges, Jorge Luis  5 Brownlie, Julie  36 Bryson, John  301 Bulkeley, Harriet  30 Bunny Colvin, Howard  31–32 Bussolini, Jeffrey  214 Butler, Judith  39 C Capetillo, Jorge  12 Colombo, Monica  54 Cooren, François  28 D Davidson, Arnold I.  38–39 Dean, Mitchell  27–28, 34, 41, 214, 268 Death, Carl  98, 267–68 Deleuze, Gilles  28, 215 Desrosières, Alain  369 Donzelot, Jacques  45 Dreyfus, Hubert  13 Dunmire, Patricia  309, 338

E Eglin, Peter  222 F Fairclough, Norman  20, 304–5, 325 Faye, Jean-Pierre  156 Foucault, Michel  2–24, 27, 34–40, 44–46, 97–99, 153–54, 241, 266–67, 355–57 Fournier, Philippe  328, 338 G Garfinkel, Harold  6, 22, 27, 100 Garland, David  330, 347 Gordon, Colin  24, 39 Groves, Chris  306, 308 H Hall, Stuart  11, 16 Hamann, Trent A.  99 Hausendorf, Heiko  21 Hodges, Ian  45 Hong, Sun-ha  50–51 Horsbøl, Anders  49 I Iedema, Rick  23–24, 47, 79, 184 J Jayyusi, Lena  41–42, 101–3 Jefferson, Gail  145, 187 Jeltsin, Boris  243 K Katz, Stephen  370 Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen 52 Krieg-Planque, Alice  157 L Lassen, Inger  49 Latour, Bruno  27, 58, 290

Laurier, Eric  21–23 Lemke, Thomas  14 Lindegaard, Laura Bang  43–44, 49–50 Linell, Per  211, 218–21 Lynch, Richard A.  4 M Maeckelbergh, Marianne  272 Mainguenau, Dominique  158 Martin Rojo, Luisa  5, 19, 33 McHoul, Alec  4, 21–23, 27, 42 McIlvenny, Paul  45, 53 Merriam, Charles  299 Messerschmidt, Rheinhard  55 Milchman, Alan  18, 99 Miller, Peter  20, 25–26, 41 Moratti, Letizia  332 P Paterson, Dan  30, 77 Philo, Chris  21–23 Pujol, Aangel Gabilondo  5, 19, 33 Q Quassoli, Fabio  54 R Rabinow, Paul  10, 13 Rasmussen, Joel  43, 51–52 Raudaskoski, Pirkko  52 Reisigl, Martin  326, 337 Rose, Nikolas  1, 20, 25–27, 40–41, 44, 58, 155, 266–67 Rosenberg, Alan  18, 99 Rossano, Federico  126, 130 S Sacks, Harvey  6, 101, 221, 275 Searle, John  6, 8–9 Séralini, Gilles-Eric  150, 159–63 Solberg, Janne  50

394 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

Stivers, Tanya  126, 130 Stripple, Johannes  30, 77 Summerville, Jennifer  43–44

V Vaupel, James  370 Veyne, Paul  6

T Teitelbaum, Michael S.  371

W Wallace, Derek  54 Walters, William  12, 14–15, 34, 73, 77, 266

Wittgenstein, Ludwig  6 Wodak, Ruth  326, 337 Z Zhukova Klausen, Julia  52–53

Subject index

A Accessibility 162 Action design  124, 126, 130, 143–44 lines 258 mediatisable 270 Action-at-a-distance 27 Action research (AR)  212 Activist  83, 88–89, 91, 270 Activity, category-bound  101, 244 Actor model  128 Actor-network theory (ANT) 26–27, 58, 78, 239, 290 interaction 290 translation 78 Addressivity  210, 216, 219 Advanced liberalism  11, 30 Afro-Ukrainians 243 Agency, client  120, 125, 139 Alethurgy 356 Alignment action-type  109, 111 type-conforming 109–10 Analytics of government  27–28, 31, 34, 98, 214, 268 Analytics of protest  98, 268 Anglo-Russians 243 ANSES (French Agency for Food Safety)  159 ANT, see Actor-network theory Anticipatory discourse  305, 310, 316 Apparatus  28, 214 protest  268, 289 AR (Action research)  212 Archaeology 21 The Archaeology of Knowledge 5–8, 10, 16 Argumentative strategy  334 Assemblage  27, 33, 46–48

Authoritative discourse  217–18, 221, 223, 228 Autonomy  84, 124 B Berlin Institute for Population and Development  378 Bertelsmann Foundation  378 BILD 372–74 Biopolitics 12–14 Biopower 12 Biotechnology 167 The Birth of Biopolitics lectures 12, 36 Bureaucracy, central government 298 C CA, see Conversation analysis Carbon conduct  31, 77–78 Care of the self  241 Categorical incumbency  222, 226 Categorisation  40–44, 100–101, 221, 250 Category  57, 100, 216, 221–22, 242, 290 categorical incumbency 222, 226 category-bound activity 101, 244 category-bound obligation 102 category-bound predicate 101, 103 category-bound right  102 citizen 44 duplicative organisation  111 ethnic 343 ‘extracomunitari’ 343 immigrant  249, 336

life 242 national 343 ‘survegliant’ 345 transnational, diagnosis  241 transnational belonging 242 CDA, see Critical discourse analysis Centrifugal force  84, 211, 217–18 Centripetal force  211 Cigarettes 277–78 Citizen 43–44 active 123 activist  89, 92 conduct 86 empowered 122 governing  73, 75 group  81, 83, 85–86, 90 meeting 85–87 participation  74–76, 83–86, 90, 92, 171 safety 331 Citizen-inspector 289 Citizenship 74 active, discourse  128 communicative achievement 74 Client  120, 123, 128, 134, 140, 142 actor model  128 agency  120, 125, 139, 143–44 compliance  141, 144 individualisation 145 motivated 128–29 passive 141 perspective 132 reasonable 128 resistance 143–44 unemployed 127 Climate change  30, 76–77, 96

396 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

attitudes 82 discourse 76 governmentality 29–31 initiatives 114 public engagement  74 transition 82 Codes, moral  18 Collège de France lecture series 4, 13, 16 Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN)  159, 161, 163, 168 Communication  184, 202 computer-mediated 240–41 duties 184 responsibilisation of  204 Computer-mediated communication 240–41 Conduct  33, 35–39, 41, 44, 46, 266–67 carbon conduct  31, 77–78 client  130, 139 the conduct of  12, 14–15, 38–39, 41–42, 97, 270 conflict 92 discursive  15, 292 individual 241 intertextuality 304–5 practice 15 protest 267 social interaction  268 sustainability 78 transnational 237–38 transportation  96, 109, 114 unethical 271 Conducting, one’s own conduct 88 Conduct of conduct  12, 14–15, 38–39, 41–42, 97, 270 Constitutive intertextuality 305, 307, 310 Conversation action response  126 advice-giving  124, 137 answer  126, 130–31, 134, 142 continuer 133 disagreement 112 greeting 273 identification  273, 275

increment  135, 137 preference  42, 102 question 105 request  274, 276–78 topic proffer  109–10 uptake  131, 137 Conversation analysis (CA)  21, 34, 42–44, 57, 96, 100, 124, 219–21, 268–70 Co-participants 134 Counselling, stepwise entry 132 Counsellor  45, 120, 124, 126, 128, 134, 140, 142 Counter-conduct  38–40, 97, 122, 267, 291, 318 constructive 319 discourse  38, 268, 292 social interaction  38 textual 315 The Courage of Truth lectures 15 CRIIGEN, see Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering Critical discourse analysis (CDA)  20, 57, 157–58, 312, 325 studies of governmentality 324–25 Critical discourse studies  19, 39 Critique  33–35, 367 Customer 276 D Data  80, 104, 127, 161–62, 185, 211, 326 audio-recording 80 blog 159 computer-mediated forum 236 focus group  104 interview  80, 104 meeting  80, 180–81, 184–86, 203 photograph  256, 258–59 public meeting  80 radio phone-ins  45

semi-structured interviews 186, 327, 340 video  222, 270 website  236, 240 Deetz quadrangle  222–24 Demodystopias 370 Demographer 367 Demographic change  354, 357, 359, 369, 374, 378, 382 discourse 353–54, 360–61, 383 governmentality 381–82 Demographic discourse  355, 360 visualisation 362 Demographic future  360 Demographic knowledge  357–58, 372, 375 communication 383 discourse 383 Demographic measures  357, 368–69 Demography  355, 357, 361, 363 critique 382 genealogy 383 Demonstration  270–71, 291 Demos 291 Deontic modality  309 Depth-structure 358 Der Spiegel 370–71 Description, correct  101 Destatis, see German Federal Statistical Office Desubjectification 215 DHA, see Discourse-historical approach Diachronic perspective  23, 103–4 Dialectical realism  370 Dialogicality, extended  318 Dialogic conduct  210, 212 Dialogic paradigm  224–25 Dialogism  210–11, 218 Linell’s model  219, 223 third parties  221 Dialogue  209, 212, 218–20 Bakhtin 217 conduct of conduct  210 dispositif  217, 220, 229 governmental technology 216



Diaspora 252 Die Welt 372–73 Die Zeit 370–71 Disciplinary power  12, 20, 120, 123, 143 Discipline 144 psy disciplines  27 Discourse  239, 373, 376 academic 229 anticipatory  305, 310, 316 authoritative  217–18, 221, 223, 228 citizenship 74 climate 76 of competitiveness  185 criticism of term  6 of demographic knowledge 383 of expertise  45 of fear  324 Foucault  5–11, 19–20, 23, 156, 324 of freedom  300 of governance  2, 21 governmentality  3, 20, 23, 32–48, 56 of hierarchy  185 liberal governmental  143 mass-media 371 of motivation  89 multimodal  216, 236 non-discursive 37 normative 382 order of  11, 20, 325 organisational  23, 47 of partnership  185 pedagogical 230 population 362 power 19 psychotherapeutic  236, 254 public  357, 359, 362, 371 of responsibility  183 scientific  165, 356–57, 362, 376, 382–83 security  327, 345 semiotic practice  79 subject 16 technologisation 20 therapeutic 45 transparency  51, 150–52, 155, 169, 289

Subject index 397

truth 356 urban security  330 veridical 289 Discourse analysis  6, 11, 15, 19, 35, 355 archaeology 6 circumference 239 conventional approaches  11 dialogue 220 empirical 356 ethnomethodological  43–44 mediated  46–47, 239 multimodal  47, 236, 240, 259 Discourse coalition  87–89, 91 Discourse-historical approach (DHA)  56, 326–27 levels of context  326 Discourse in action  239 Discourse studies  3, 19, 23, 32–48, 325 conduct of conduct  15 critical  19, 39, 46 ethnomethodological 41 Foucault  3, 5, 19–20, 24, 33, 35, 325 governmentality  19, 23–24 interdisciplinary 57–58 methodological tools  33–35 relevance for studies of governmentality 57 Discourse theory  19, 21 Discursive analysis  291 Discursive ‘crossing,’ 290 Discursive devices  338 Discursive formation  6–7, 11, 355 Discursive practice  37, 239, 268 Dispositif  28, 151–52, 155–56, 210, 214, 216–17, 324 action-in-the-world  220, 229 Agamben  152, 214–15 authoritative discourse  211, 218, 224 Bakhtin  217, 231 contemporary 231 Deleuze  28, 214–16 desubjectifying 216 discourse 156

dominant 162 Foucault  152, 215, 217 governmentality  150, 324 intra-active materialdiscursive 216 leadership 230 network 216 situated interaction  218 transparency  150, 153–56, 162, 165, 167–69 see also apparatus Domination  17, 39–40 technology of  17 Driving  105, 109 autonomy 110 economic  105, 109, 112–13 fuel-speed relationship  112–13 green  96, 105, 113 individual choice  105 obligation  105, 110 reasons for  109–10 speed 109–10 speed pilot  105, 113 E Education 307 higher 301 EMCA, see Ethnomethodological conversation analysis Energy Town  78, 81, 84, 86 ambassador 90 mass media  90 project  75–76, 80–81, 84, 90 secretariat  75, 80–81, 83–86, 88 Energy utility  87–88 Energy Week  86 Environment, as governable object 30 Episteme  28, 152, 268, 355 Epistemic primacy  110 Ethicalisation 241 practice  44–46, 245 Ethical self-formation  18, 45 Ethical subject  18, 113–14, 241 see also ethical self-formation Ethical substance  18, 241 see also ethical self-formation Ethical work  256–57 Ethics  16, 33

398 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

Ethics of living  16 Ethics of the self  237 Ethnoarchaeology 21 Ethnography, virtual  240 Ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA)  21, 35, 124, 219, 269 genealogy 34 see also Conversation analysis (CA) Ethnomethodology  21–23, 27, 35, 41–43, 96, 100, 104, 220 commensurability with Foucault  21–23, 44 critical 42 indifference 103 European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)  159–60, 165 European Union  244 Expert  375, 378, 380 Expertise 373 F FDA, see French discourse analysis Fertility 366–67 Focus group  104 Force centrifugal  84, 211, 217–18 centripetal 211 Formule  156–58, 160, 162, 167 counter-formule 164 dispositif 156 French discourse analysis 157 lexeme/syntagm  156, 158, 161, 163 nodal point  158 overwording 158 performative force  168 transparency  162, 166 Foucauldian discourse analysis 216, 353, 355–56 Foucault archaeology 21 The Archaeology of Knowledge  5–8, 10, 16 biopower 12 The Birth of Biopolitics lectures  12, 36 Collège de France lecture series  4, 13, 16

concept of discourse  6–11, 20, 355 contingency 34 The Courage of Truth lectures 15 discourse studies  19, 24, 35, 325 genealogy  10, 14, 21, 33–35, 57, 360 The Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures  17 The History of Sexuality, Volume I  12, 19–20 “The Order of Discourse”  5, 8–11 The Order of Things  5, 10 periodisation  4, 9, 21 ‘philosopher of the visible’ 28 power/knowledge  10, 12, 18, 20, 35 Security, Territory, Population lectures  13–14, 38–39 “The Subject and Power”  20 Subjectivity and Truth lectures 17–18 truth and knowledge  5 see also governmentality, see also genealogy Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) 372 Freedom 155 academic 320 autonomy 110 originary  39, 267 powers of  40, 267 practices of  19, 43 French Agency for Food Safety (ANSES) 159 French discourse analysis (FDA) 156–57 Future present  306 G Garbled demography  354, 358–59, 362, 368, 383 Gatekeeper  274, 276 Genealogy  10, 14, 16, 21, 33–35, 57, 360 as counter-memory  34 as descent  34 as re-serialisation  34 as subjugated knowledge  34

Genetically-modified organism (GMO)  150, 160 Genre  79, 165, 240, 298, 305–6, 310 chain 20 medical 249–50 network 79 German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis)  362–64, 366, 377–78, 380 Global summits  268 GMO, see Genetically-modified organism Good government  150, 154, 170 Governance 2 alternative forms  267 discourse  2, 21 governmentality 2 Governing-at-a-distance 126, 143, 182–83, 202, 298, 311, 314 Government 16 art of  36–37, 319 carbon market  30 governing  150, 153, 155, 169–70 liberal rationality  299 moral business  41 open 153 practice of  34, 36 technology  20, 79, 299 transparency 149 Governmentality  2–4, 10, 12–17, 19–20, 31, 37, 43, 56, 97, 100, 124 alternative space  291 biopolitics 13 conduct 266 contemporary 3 diachronic 103 discourse approach  96 ethical subject  114 governance  2, 77 inspection as mode of  270 language  1, 32, 56 leadership 214 liberal  14, 154, 312, 319 members’ everyday practices 43, 48, 266 municipal strategy  43, 103, 113 phenomenology 122 political 298 political science  14



Subject index 399

practice  39, 124 problem of governing  153 proto-governmentality 49 public engagement  75 synchronic 103 techniques 15 transnational 236–39 transparency 153 truth 356 see also studies of governmentality Governmentality-in-action 214, 216, 220, 231 Governmental practice  39, 329 Governmental rationality  12, 30, 41, 57, 114, 329, 339 Governmental strategy  90 limitations 114 Governmental technology  260 Government close by  126, 143 see also governingat-a-distance Government of others  18, 99 Government of self  18, 99 Government planning  299 Green driving  96, 105, 113

demonstration 270–71 justification 277 mock  272–73, 278, 284, 290–91 mode of centralisation  270 rationality 284 Inspection regime  271, 284, 290 Institution, social practice  239 Interdiscursivity 240 Interrogative, yes/no  109 Intertextuality  221, 240, 243, 298, 304–5, 318 anticipatory 305 constitutive  305, 307, 310 extended dialogicality  318 governmentality 320 manifest  305, 307, 311, 313–14, 318 Interview  80–82, 89 semi-structured  186, 327, 340–41, 344 ‘Irusiches’, 243

H Health 259 The Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures 17 Heteroglossic speech  186 Hidden transcript  291 The History of Sexuality, Volume I 12, 19–20 Human capital  182

K Knowledge  5, 11, 232 display in conversation  111 forms  28, 214, 268 see also analytics of government, see also episteme moral inferential logic  102 owning 111 production 256 regimes 289 truth 10–11

I Identity protest  268, 289 social 239 unofficial 273 Iguana Journal  236, 251 Immigrant syndrome  249, 251 see also Ulysses syndrome Incentivisation  89, 317 Individualisation 145 In-group  327, 346 Inspection  269–72, 278, 284, 287, 289–91 citizen 291 closing  284, 288

J Jeffersonian transcription conventions  115, 145, 187

L Language  5, 273, 373 governmentality  1, 32, 56 philosophy 7 Leadership forum  209–16, 218, 222–23 Le Monde  158, 163 Le Nouvel Observateur 158 Le Point 158 Levi’s 270 Lexical choice  254, 337 LexisNexis 371

Liberal governmentality  14, 154, 312, 319 genealogy 154 Liberalism  14, 320 advanced  11, 30 Libération  158, 163 Living present  308 Local Pacts for Urban Security 326–27, 332 M Malboro Classics 270 Manifest intertextuality  305, 307, 311, 313–14 Mass media  90 Materiality  26, 223, 284 Max Planck Institute of Demography (MPIDR)  370 MCA, see Membership categorisation analysis Mediated action  239 Mediated discourse  46–48 Mediated discourse analysis (MDA)  28, 35, 46–47, 239 Media therapeutics  45 Meeting  84–85, 180, 184–86, 188, 195, 203–4 citizen 83 public 80 Membership categorisation analysis (MCA)  21, 42–44, 57, 100, 216, 220–21, 241, 268–69, 290 and Bakhtin  216 Micro-ethnography 265 Minimal response tokens  130 Ministry of Education (MOE) 298, 302–3, 307–9 Misconduct  38, 267 Modality 338 Moderator  105, 110 Modes of veridiction  15–16, 358, 375 MOE, see Ministry of Education Molar 100 Molecular  35, 58, 96, 98, 100, 114 Moral adequacy 45 code  18, 241 conduct 18 order  33, 41–43

400 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

Morality  18, 41, 100 Multimodal discourse analysis 46–47, 236, 240, 258 N National identity  243 Nationality, formats  244 Neighbourhood  90, 346 Nexus Analysis (NA)  28, 46–47, 239 Nodal point  158 Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV)  119 Nouvel Observateur  158, 160, 163 O Objective/subjective divide  341 Object of suspicion  278, 284, 288 ‘Observatories,’ of human multiplicity 45 Open government  153, 159 Order of discourse  11, 20, 325 “The Order of Discourse”  5, 8–11 The Order of Things  5, 10 Out-group  327, 346–47 Overwording  158, 315 P Parrhesia  15, 359 Participation, public  73, 75 Passive resistance  120, 122, 129, 131, 137, 144 Pastoralism  139, 253 Plan investment 316–17 strategic  301, 306–7, 310, 314 Police  31–32, 288, 327, 340–41, 343–45, 347 Policy  127–28, 301 document  43–44, 128 Politico-moral order  40–44 Politics 272 dispersion 272 environmental 78 nongovernmental 291 Population  26, 328–29, 360–62, 367–68 ageing 368

discourse 361 apocalyptic 362 projection  357, 362, 364, 366, 374, 377–78 misinterpretation 371 scenario 364 Positioning analysis  181, 183, 186–87, 202 Power  8–9, 12, 16, 20, 33, 38–39, 44, 97 biopower 12 conduct of conduct  77, 97 disciplinary  12, 20, 120, 123, 143 dispersed 32 governmental 12 microphysics 12 pastoral  12, 39, 123, 143 relation  18, 38 resistance  40, 97–99, 113–14, 121–22, 267 sovereign 12 topology 46–48 Power/knowledge  10, 12, 18, 20, 35 Practice  2, 35–38, 47 categorial 269 discursive 37 institutional 240 regime  27–28, 31, 34, 36–37, 231, 268 relay to theory  56 self-help 256 therapeutic 256 Predicate, category-bound  101, 103, 278 Predicational strategies  327, 336 Prefiguration 272 Present future  306 Problematisation  19, 33–35, 160 Proposition 8 Protest  267–68, 291 analytics  98, 268 Protest event  269–70 governmentality 267 Protestor 284 Protests, prefigurative  292 Proto-governmentality 49 Psychiatric care  255 Psychotherapeutic discourse 236, 254

Psy disciplines  27 Public discourse  357, 359, 362, 367, 371–72, 380 Public engagement  74–75, 78, 84, 91–92 Public meeting  80 R Rationale of growth  81 Rationality  33, 40–44, 57 Raw data  161–62, 165, 167 Realism, dialectical  370 Recontextualization 79 Referential strategy  336 Regime of practice  27–28, 31, 34, 36–37, 231, 268 Relexicalisation 254 Renewable energy  76, 81, 87–88 Resemiotisation  46–47, 79, 240 Resistance  33, 38–40, 98, 114, 170, 318 client’s  120, 135, 145 employee 203 minor  120, 122 negative 130 passive  120, 122, 129, 131, 137, 144 power  12, 97–99, 113–14, 121–22, 267 Response, minimal  131, 134 Response token, typeconforming positive  109 Responsibilisation  128, 180, 183, 203 economic 199 Responsibility  202, 329 Risk  180–81, 196, 337, 372 communication  180–83, 196 responsible subjects 180–81 management  179–81, 183, 188, 202, 204 perception 342 prevention 182 S Safety  181, 331 Safety group  188–89, 204 Sappir-Gasir  251, 254 Sciences & Avenir 158



Scientific discourse  165, 356–57, 362, 376, 382–83 Secrecy  161, 163, 169 Securitisation  14, 328, 346 Security discourse 327 quality of urban life  335 Security, Territory, Population lectures  13–14, 38–39 Security, urban policy  326, 328 Self  16, 37, 99 government of the  17, 99, 382 technique of the  16–18, 99 Self-care  182, 256, 260 Self-development 255 Self-formation, ethical  18, 45 Self-improvement 255 Semantic field  163, 337, 340 Semiotic resource algebraic 249 blackboard 224 ‘given new’  258 ‘ideal real’  258 Séralini Affair  150, 157–60, 166 critics  162, 165 discourse 156 review 161 transparency  163, 165 Service encounter  273–74, 277–78 Silence  130, 133, 137, 142 Situational prevention  330–31, 339 Social interaction  35–36, 58 conduct of conduct  268 Social movements  272 Social practice  239 Social prevention  331, 339 Speech act  7–8 Speech act theory  8–9 Standardised relational pair (SRP)  222, 226 Statement 6–8 Statistics  249, 369 Strategic planning  298–301, 303–4, 307, 309, 313–14, 316, 320 document  305–7, 309–10 Strategy 327 argumentative 334 control 185

Subject index 401

predicational 336 referential 336 Studies of governmentality  2–3, 10, 13–14, 19, 23, 27, 29, 32, 39, 41, 43–44, 58, 324, 329 climate change  29 commensurability with ethnomethodology  21, 23, 42–43, 103–4 contemporary debates  24–27, 29–30 relevance of discourse studies 56–57 resistance 98 toolkit for empirical analysis 57 Subject  16, 33, 37 autonomous 135 becoming 98–99 discourse 16 ethical  18, 113–14, 241 genealogy 16 governable  99, 102 “The Subject and Power”  20 Subjectification  18–19, 77, 80, 82–83, 88, 99, 125, 144, 183, 216–17 lines 215–16 process  19, 215 Subjectivation  18–19, 28, 80, 88, 90, 92, 99, 125, 144, 236 acts 248 lines 28 practice  96, 98–100, 113–14 genealogy of  16 technique 248 transnational 236 see also ethical self-formation Subjectivity  28, 214 protest  268, 289 truth 17–18 Subjectivity and Truth lectures 17–18 Subject position  30, 80, 82–84, 181 Substance, ethical  18, 241 Süddeutsche Zeitung 380 Synchronic perspective  23 Syndrome, immigrant  249, 251 see also Ulysses syndrome

T Techne  28, 89, 266, 268 see also analytics of government Technique of domination  99 Technique of the self  16–18, 99 Technologisation of discourse 20, 209 Technology, governmental  260 Technology of discourse  241 Technology of domination  17, 99 Technology of visualisation  27 Telos  18, 241, 257–59 see also ethical self-formation Tertiary education, New Zealand  302–3, 308–9, 313 Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (TEAC)  303–4, 312–13 Tertiary Education Commission (TEC)  298, 303–4, 316–17, 319 Tertiary Education Institution (TEO)  303, 316, 319 Tertiary education organisation 308, 317 Tertiary Education Strategy 307, 310–12, 314 Text  1, 305, 373 bureaucratic 312 charter 302–4 corpus  358–60, 371–73, 375, 383 information flyer  104 legal 159 magazine 158 newspaper  158, 163, 354, 371, 373 pact  327, 332, 334–35 press release  83, 168, 378 strategic planning document 306 see also intertextuality Textualisation  183–84, 204 work 184 TFR, see total fertility rate Theory, relay to practice  56 Therapeutic care  252 Third party  221 Topological analysis  46 Topos 327

402 Studies of Discourse and Governmentality

Total fertility rate (TFR)  362, 366 Transcription conventions  115, 145, 187, 270 Translation  27, 78–79, 82, 84 Transnational  236, 243–44 actor  237, 254 belonging 243 category 243 deproblematisation 245 condition and disease  249 conduct  237–38, 240 ethical 256–57 ethics  241, 259 ethical subject  241 ethical substance  241, 245 mode of subjectivation 241, 248 telos  241, 257, 259 flock 254 format of governance  246 format of life  237, 241, 245, 258 governmentality  236, 238–39, 259 membership morphology 243 multiplicity  254–55, 258 networking 244 problematics  249, 251 subject 236 subjectivation 241 Transnationality  235–36, 243 diagnosis  249, 251 health 248 national identity  243 nationality 244 psychological disorder  249 ways of living  235–36, 244

Transparency  149–53, 160, 164, 166, 170, 288, 291 discourse  51, 150–52, 155, 169, 289 formule  162, 166 ideology critique  152 lack  74, 269 lexeme 160 self-presentation 150–51 symmetric 289 syntagm 160 Transportation conduct  96, 109, 114 practice 103 strategy 105 Truth  5, 99, 161 discourse 356 knowledge 10–11 subjectivity 17–18 U Ulysses syndrome  251 United Nathans  269–70 weapons inspectors  269 United Nations  269 United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) 269 University Grants Committee (UGC) 303 Unmotivated looking  124 UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) 269 Uptake  131, 137 Urban life, security  335 Urban security  329–30 discourse 330

governance 327 Milan 330 policy  324, 326, 328 V Veridiction  356, 358–59, 373, 375, 383 modes  15–16, 358, 375 Video recording  222, 270 Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) 363 Virtual Ethnography  240 Visibility 152 fields  28, 214, 268, 288 see also analytics of government lines 215 politics 150 Visualisation 362–64 Vocational rehabilitation services  119–20, 123–24, 128 guidelines 129 institutional framework  126 policy 127 Voice  218, 224, 230, 289 multi- 230 W Weapons of mass destruction (WMD)  269–70, 278, 284 Work experience  127 Y Yes/no interrogative  109

This volume brings together analyses of governmentality from diferent angles in order to explore the multiple forms, practices, modes, programmes and rationalities of the ‘conduct of conduct’ today. Following the publication of Foucault’s annual lecture series at the Collège de France, scholars have attempted to critically rethink Foucault’s ideas. This is the irst volume that attempts to revisit and expand studies of governmentality by connecting it to the theories and methods of discourse analysis. The volume draws on diferent theoretical stances and methodological approaches including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, dialogic analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach, corpus analysis and French discourse analysis. The volume is relevant to students and scholars in the ields of critical discourse studies, conversation analysis, international studies, environmental studies, political science, public policy and organisation studies.

isbn 978 90 272 0657 2

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY