The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads Sam Binkley,

48. Elena - March 9, 2010 [Edit]

I continue to find these articles based on Foucault interesting because they are studying a different form of power over people than the one we lived in the FOF Cult but they are not unrelated.

Another aspect in this article is that of how people perceive themselves and what we are able to aspire to according to that perception. Another term to look at that with the System was “the imaginary picture”. What imaginary picture are people “trained” to respond and live with throughout their lives in society? After going through a cult experience it is not difficult to realize how easy the manipulation of people’s “self” actually is; a manipulation that unstopped, will gradually lead to the annihilation of the individual after a life of apparently voluntary self sacrifice to the cult.

The “annihilation” of the individual or rather the “mutilation of the self” is what we are witnessing in cults. It is the practice of rendering a human being a slave to an organization not through the use of force and the threat of death as was common in slavery but through gradual and methodical submission of the member’s will. As the member’s will is slowly “sucked” out of his daily life, the self weakens to a point of no return. It is “voluntarily” giving one’s self up to the Cult’s cause and absorbed by the guru’s will. What we are witnessing with the more than a thousand members of the FOFCult that have been unable to leave although it is clear that it is a criminal organization, is that they are already at a point of no return.

It is no coincidence that over three thousand cult members have committed suicide under the guru’s direction in recent history all over the world. By the time the guru gives such instruction to his followers, decades have passed without their real existence even if they get up, go to work everyday and bear children. Automatons, is a good word for cult members. They are no longer humans for the human I is shrunk to its minimum expression, conditioned to function for the cult and not for the member. They are infrahumans: people who have discarded their human qualities intellectually, emotionally and have even allowed so much manipulation of their physical bodies that men become femenine while women become masculine if the guru so dictates. These are all truths about the Fellowship of Friends Cult where I belonged for seventeen years.

http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2472

ARTICLE

The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality:
Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads
Sam Binkley, Emerson College

ABSTRACT: This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality,
and argues for the need to better theorize the specific ethical practices through
which such programs of governmentality are carried out. Arguing that much theo-
retical and empirical work in this area is prone to a “top down” approach, in which
governmentality is reduced to an imposing apparatus through which subjectivities
are produced, it argues instead for the need to understand the self-production of
subjectivities by considering the ethical practices that make up neoliberal govern-
mentality. Moreover, taking Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad as an illustra-
tive case, the point is made that the work of neoliberal governmentality specifically
targets the temporalities of conduct, in an attempt to shape temporal orientations in
a more entrepreneurial form. Drawing on Foucault’s lecture courses on liberalism
and neoliberalism, and Jacques Donzelot’s work on the social, the case is made that
neoliberal governmentality exhorts individuals to act upon the residual social tem-
poralities that persist as a trace in the dispositions of neoliberal subjects. Moreover,
the paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials for resistance in this relation,
understood as temporal counter-conducts within neoliberalism.

Key words: neoliberalism, governmentality, temporality, the social, Foucault, Don-
zelot, counter-conduct.

Every day with every dollar, you choose to be rich, poor or middle class. 1
Rich Dad Poor Dad is a best selling book on financial advice written by Robert T.
Kiyosaki. Originally self-published in 1997 as supporting material for Kiyosaki’s fi-

1
Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad/Poor Dad, (New York: Business Plus, 2000), 197.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
61

nancial advice lectures, and later picked up by Warner Business Books in 2000, the
text relates a rich allegorical narrative about the mental hard wiring required for fi-
nancial success, and the concealed “ways of thinking” practiced by the wealthy.
Kiyosaki’s method is comparative: he tells of his childhood relationships with two
fathers; one a biological parent, the other a friend’s father who undertook the task of
young Robert’s financial education. Each father presented radically distinct outlooks
on financial life. His own father, the poor dad, was a government man, head of the
Department of Education for the state of Hawaii who, in spite of his impressive qua-
lifications and career accomplishments, remained “poor” his whole life, snarled in a
plodding, credentialist faith in institutional advancement as a slow climb up the
ladder of bureaucratic hierarchy. The rich dad, on the other hand, was a self-made
millionaire with an eighth grade education who held a deep distain for the naïve ap-
proach to wealth generation practiced by the majority of Americans—one that con-
ceived of earned reward in terms of educational credentials and the patient advance
to higher salaried positions within a single firm. Throughout the book, poor dad’s
dour lectures on the virtues of patience, loyalty and circumspection were contrasted
with rich dad’s exhortations to swashbuckling fiscal adventurism, self-interest and
self-responsibility. Kiyosaki compares the advice offered by his two dads:

My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought…
One dad recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to work
for.” The other recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to
buy.”
One dad said, “the reason I’m not rich is because I have you kids.”
The other said, “the reason I must be rich is because I have you kids.”
One said “when it comes to money, play it safe, don’t take risks.” The other said,
“learn to manage risk.”2

2
Ibid, 15-16.

At first blush, the case of Rich Dad Poor Dad might seem innocuous enough: another
proselytizing tome in a long tradition of entrepreneurial boosterism extending from
Horatio Alger through Norman Vincent Peale to Donald Trump—a discourse on fis-
cal self-realization extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship and voluntarism as a
personal ethic. Yet what distinguishes this example is not just its timeliness given the
current zeal for anti-welfarist, anti-statist rhetoric, and its veneration for market
cowboyism, (nor it’s stunning popularity, becoming a New York Times best selling
title in 2002), but the specific way in which it dramatizes the dynamism within this
space, what we might describe as the inner life of the neoliberal subject. This space is
characterized by a specific tension between the inertia of social dependency and the
exuberance and vitality of market agency—a tension that is, in Kiyosaki’s prose,
barbed with exhortations to mobilize the latter against the former.
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
62

In what follows, the provocations posed by Kiyosaki’s tale of two dads will
provide a backdrop for an inquiry into debates around what has come to be termed
“neoliberal governmentality.”3 I take this term to indicate the ways in which subjects
are governed as market agents, encouraged to cultivate themselves as autonomous,
self-interested individuals, and to view their resources and aptitudes as human capi-
tal for investment and return.4 Neoliberal governmentality presumes a more or less
continuous series that runs from those macro-technologies by which states govern
populations, to the micro-technologies by which individuals govern themselves, al-
lowing power to govern individuals “at a distance,” as individuals translate and in-
corporate the rationalities of political rule into their own methods for conducting
themselves.5 However, in much recent work on governmentality, the emphasis has
fallen on the institutional logics, the assemblages, technologies and dispositifs, as
Foucault called them, through which the rationalities of neoliberal governmentality
invest populations, while less emphasis has been placed on the practical, ethical
work individuals perform on themselves in their effort to become more agentive,
decisionistic, voluntaristic and vital market agents.6

3
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.
Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Michel
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France. Translated by Graham
Burchell. (New York: Palgrave, 2008). Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose,
“Introduction” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and
Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996). Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule
in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999). Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and
Techniques of the Self” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Os-
borne and Nikolas Rose. (London: UCL Press, 1996). Thomas Lemke, “’The Birth of Bio-
Politics”–Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neoliberal Governmen-
tality” Economy & Society, 30, 2 (2001): 190-207.
4
Nikolas Rose, “Governing `Advanced’ Liberal Democracies” in Foucault and Political Rea-
son, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996).
5
Sam Binkley, “Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies” Sociology Compass, 1: 1 (July 2007):
111-126. Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde, “Governmentality” Annual
Review of Law and Social Science, 2 (2006): 83-104.
6
Sam Binkley, “The Perilous Freedoms of Consumption: Toward a Theory of the Conduct
of Consumer Conduct” Journal for Cultural Research, 10: 4 (October 2006): 343-362. Barbara
Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1999).
The tale of Rich Dad Poor Dad
reminds us of the dynamic practices by which neoliberal governmentalities are in-
corporated. Moreover, it suggests that these practices are ethical, in the sense that
Foucault used the term in his later work: they involve daily work performed upon
specific objects or features of the self held to be problematic—“ethical substances,”
as Foucault called them, which in this case implicates and acts upon the embodied,
moribund collectivist dependencies and dispositions that are the legacy of poor
dad’s mode of existence.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
63

In short, governmentality expresses a certain series or relation between pow-
er and the subject, yet it is important to remember that this series is not seamless and
complete. Instead, governmentality represents what Foucault called an unstable
“contact point” between techniques of domination (or subjection), and the actual
practices of subjectification by which neoliberal subjects govern themselves. Or, as
Foucault put it in his 1980 lecture at Dartmouth College:

The 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. Governing
people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force
people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with
complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and
processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. 7
More precisely, in seeking to emphasize these practical dimensions, I will
highlight the precise object of everyday conduct that appears as the ethical sub-
stance, or the specific material upon which ethical practices work—that part of the
self that is made the object of the transformative work of neoliberal governmentality.
This substance is defined by time and the changing practices of temporal calculation
and practical orientation by which everyday conduct is undertaken. Considering the
temporal sensibility of social dependence as the substance of an ethical problemati-
zation within the practice of neoliberal governmentality, it is possible to consider
how neoliberal subjects work to optimize, individualize and entrepreneurialize

In other words, the relation of the subject before power is not reducible to the simple
production of neoliberal subjects: what is involved is the production of self-
producing subjects—subjects whose own self-production is prone to reversals and
appropriations, to “mis-productions” through which the subject produces herself
differently than is intended by power itself. By considering the specific ethical prac-
tices through which individuals isolate and act upon certain elements within them-
selves, as they work to transform themselves from socially dependent subjects into
neoliberal agents (or from poor dads into rich ones), it is possible to draw out the
ambivalence that operates in this point of contact. Between dispositifs and ethical
practices, or between techniques of coercion and the processes by which subjects
construct themselves, there is, implicit within neoliberal governmentality, an inde-
terminacy that leaves open the possibility of doing things differently. Toward this
end, I will attempt a theoretical reconstruction of the ethical dynamism that consti-
tutes the work of subjectification, drawing anecdotally and for illustrative purposes
on the allegory of the two dads, and the specific kinds of work on the self related in
Kiyosaki’s gentle exhortation.

7
Foucault 1993: 203-4, cited in Thomas Lemke “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique”
Rethinking Marxism, 1, 3, (2002): 49-64(16).
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
64

themselves and their conduct—a program of subjectification centered on the vitali-
zation and responsibilization of a dependent subjectivity, but also one shadowed by
a certain ambivalence and instability, a technique of subjectification that remains
open to the potential for being otherwise practiced.

1. Governmentality, Subjection and Subjectification

I will begin with the question of this ambivalence within governmental practices.
While it is not my intention to expand the already voluminous exegetical literature
on Foucault’s oeuvre (much less evolve a prescriptive template for how “resistance”
might be strategized), it is nonetheless helpful to locate my project within the famili-
ar reference points of his scholarship.
By considering governmentality not as a political rationality in a technical
sense, but as an everyday ethical undertaking, I am attempting to incorporate ele-
ments from what are considered distinct moments of Foucault’s intellectual trajecto-
ry, drawing from his later work of the 1980’s on the ethics of the self, in order to re-
solve problems posed elsewhere, in the late 1970’s, in his studies of governmentality,
biopower and discipline.8 Indeed, between these two moments are distinct and con-
trasting understandings of how it is that subjects are produced in relationship to the
larger structures they inhabit. In a general sense, Foucault’s work of governmentali-
ty occupies a position between his genealogical studies of dispositifs, (or the appara-
tuses of power by which modern societies organize their populations through state
apparatuses and institutional structures), and his studies of the ethical practices of
the Ancient world, where the emphasis falls on the specific creativity of the individ-
ual in fashioning a unique relation to herself.9

8
Foucault, “Governmentality”. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fonta-
na (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave,
2007) and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
9
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The
Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
At the risk of over-simplification, it
can be argued that, while in the case of the former, the subject is produced by power,
in the case of the latter, the subject is produced by power as a self-producing subject.
Foucault arrives at a discussion of the latter relation, the production of self-
production, with the term assujetissement—a term that is variously translated in Eng-
lish as subjection, subjectification or subjectivation, each term shaded with subtle
differences of meaning. “While such a meaning implies the passivity of the subject,”
Rosenberg and Milchman write, “Foucault also sees assujetissement as entailing more
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
65

than relations of domination, as involving the autonomy, and the possibility of resis-
tance, of the one who is assujetti [subjected] as well.”10
Such shifts of emphasis become important in the pivotal lectures of the late
1970s, where Foucault began to unfold his notion of governmentality, the elabora-
tion of which developed against the backdrop of his wider efforts to reform and ex-
pand the analysis of power he had developed earlier, largely under the banner of
discipline. Here power is a phenomenon of those “complete and austere institu-
tions” so richly described in Discipline and Punish, whose power was the power to act
on subjects, through the optimization of forces and the perpetual exercise of their ca-
pacities. Foucault attempted to attenuate this constraint in the first volume of the
History of Sexuality and later in his lecture course of 1976-77, Society Must Be Defended, through an engagement with biopower as a broader exercise of power encompassing a range of extra-institutional societal deployments, centered on the very life of the population.

11
However, in the lecture course of the following year, Security, Territory, Population, the concept of biopower is quickly abandoned for an analysis of go-
vernmentality, understood not as a medico-juridical deployment, but as a state ap-
paratus, first of popular security, and later, in his lectures of 1978-’79, The Birth of
Biopolitics, as a technology of political and economic liberalism.12 While there are
strong arguments to be made both for a marked shift of emphasis in Foucault’s work
during this time (a case recently put forward by Eric Paras in Foucault 2.0) and for
the persistence of underlying themes (as Jeffrey Nealon argues in Foucault Beyond
Foucault), it is certainly the case that an incremental drift from discipline to biopower
and ultimately governmentality is one which increasingly describes the production
of subjectivity before power, or assujetissement, as a practice of self-formation, as the
production of self-production.13 Or as Graham Burchell has argued: “the introduc-
tion of the idea of techniques of the self, of arts or aesthetics of existence, etc. seems
to imply a loosening of the connection between subjectification and subjection”.14
there remains, I would argue, the powerful imprint of Foucault’s genealogical study
of power, and a depiction of the production of the subject before power as a funda-
mentally top-down process of subjection/subordination—the production of subjects
but not the production of self-producing subjects.

15

10
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics
of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault” Parrhesia, 2 (2007): 55.
11
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.
12
Foucault, Security, Territory and Population and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
13
Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006) and
Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
14
Burchell, 20.
15
Ben Goldner, “Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power” Radical Philosophy Review,
10: 2 (2007): 157–176.
This is not to force a overhasty
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
66
Such loosening notwithstanding, within the framework of governmentality,

reduction on these two moments in Foucault’s work, nor to assume that, in his work
on dispositifs, Foucault left no room at all for a reflection on the self-forming activities
of discipline, for indeed he did. Yet there is undeniably a shift of emphasis in the
passage from his middle to later works, one which gradually gives increasing weight
not only to the autonomy of these practices, but to the uncertainty of their outcomes.
In this regard, this tendency has carried over into the expanding field of governmen-
tality research that has emerged in recent years, wherein, as Katharyne Mitchell has
argued: “the work often seems top heavy and seamless, with an inexorable and ines-
capable quality to the situations and transformations depicted by governmentality
scholars.”16
An alternative, bottom-up approach to governmentality, it would seem,
would describe the negative operation of ethical work by which the rationalities of
domination are extended into a program of self government itself—the actual prac-
tices of shaping, changing or negating some feature of the self. Writing several years
after his pivotal lectures on governmentality, and to a very different set of concerns,
Foucault described these ethical practice as processes in which “the individual deli-
mits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines this
position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of be-
ing that will serve as his moral goal.”

17
Moreover, an important element of such an
operation could be identified in the “ethical substance,” the “prime material of his
moral conduct,” or the raw material upon which the ethical practitioner works.18
For Kiyosaki, the path to riches is one that leads us through a difficult labor of self-
transformation. Ostensibly written for children of poor dads, or readers who were in fact poor dads themselves, the text gently exhorts us to go to work on ourselves, to
transform our poor dad habits into rich ones. The outlooks of the dads are described:

One dad believed in a company or in the government’s taking care of you and
your needs. He was always concerned about pay raises, retirement plans, medi-
cal benefits, sick leave, vacation days and other perks. He was impressed with
two of his uncles who joined the military and earned a retirement and entitle-
ment package for life after twenty years of service. He loved the idea of medical
benefits and PX privileges the military provided its retirees. He also loved the te-
nure system available through the university. His idea of job protection for life
and job benefits seemed more important, at times, than the job. He would often
say, “I’ve worked hard for the government, and I’m entitled to these benefits.”
…The other believed in total financial self-reliance. He spoke out against the “en-
titlement” mentality and how it was creating weak and financially needy people.
He was emphatic about being financially competent.19

2. The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality

16
Katharyne Mitchell, “Neoliberal Governmentality in the European Union: Education,
Training, and Technologies of Citizenship” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
24 (2006): 390.
17
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, 28.
18
Ibid., 26.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
67

For
it is in operating on this ethical substance that the subject is both subjected to power,
and enacts a practice of subjectification—an active shaping of the self as a subject. To
locate the specific ambivalence operative in this point of contact, it is necessary to
consider the active dynamics of self-governmental practices, the active negation of a
prior ethical substance, or the work one performs on that dimension of the self one
seeks to transform through government. In the case of neoliberal governmentality,
this element appears, I have suggested, in the sedimented residue of earlier inscrip-
tions of power, in the lazy predispositions to social welfare and institutional depen-
dency that characterize the specific temporality of the poor dad.
Although both dads worked hard, I noticed that one dad had a habit of putting
his brain to sleep when it came to money matters, and the other had a habit of
exercising his brain. The long term result was that one dad grew stronger finan-
cially and the other grew weaker. It was not much different from a person who
goes on to the gym to exercise on a regular basis versus someone who sits on the
couch watching television. Proper physical exercise increases your chances for
health, and proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. Laziness
decreases both health and wealth.

Poor dad’s sedentary life is embodied in the flabby matter of sedimented habits and
unthought routines, shaped around social trust, institutional norms and the organi-
zational protocols of managerial hierarchy. While poor dad plodded through life in a
resigned, faithful spirit, seldom questioning the doxa of financial common sense,
rich dad’s self-reflexive, hyper-voluntaristic outlook emphasized choice, agency, the
examination of life and exercise of self-control on all levels. The transformative task
to which Kiyosaki exhorts us takes the form of an exercise, the effect of which would
effectively invigorate the body and the spirit by dissolving dependency and assum-
ing full autonomy, injecting a vital life force into otherwise inactive material.

20
In his lectures of 1978-79, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spelled out the radi-
cally different ways in which classical and neoliberal thought confronted basic ques-

Exercise, in this regard, indicates the work that is performed to facilitate the circula-
tion of vital forces within the mind and the body—a vitality that is at once a funda-
mental biological drive, and also a dispositional pre-requesite for neoliberal conduct.

19
Kiyosaki, 16.
20
Ibid., 15.
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
68

tions of autonomy and constraint.21 These differences can be briefly summarized:
while classical liberalism viewed the agencies and initiatives constitutive of market
conduct as generic to social life itself, from the standpoint of neoliberalism, such dis-
positions had to be actively fostered through state interventions. The problem con-
fronting early liberalism in the eighteenth century was how to establish a market
within and against an existing state, and how to limit the interventions of that state
in order that the market could assume the dynamism and rationality to which it was
naturally inclined—a process which would, if allowed to occur, enrich the state eco-
nomically and militarily through the practice of governing less.22
What distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism, then, is their dif-
fering views on the naturalness of these market rationalities, and consequently their
contrasting views on the role of the state in creating the conditions for market activi-
ties. In his discussion of the German post-war liberalism of the Ordo School, Fou-
cault described how the problem facing liberalism in the aftermath of the Second
World War was not to carve out a space of freedom within an existing state, as it was
for classical liberalism.

23
Instead, the task was to devise a state capable of creating,
through its own programs and initiatives, the voluntaristic, entrepreneurial and self-
responsible dispositions, upon which market forms depend. Neither the market nor
the competitive dispositions upon which market rationality draws, were considered
sui generis features of social life: they had to be actively fostered through the inter-
ventions of a liberal state, whereby individuals were brought to cultivate an entre-
preneurial disposition within their own modes of conduct. From this perspective,
neo-liberalism is seen to invert problems long attended to by the agencies of Key-
sianism and the welfare state: against the Schumpeterian orthodoxy which holds
monopolistic tendencies of capitalism as an intrinsic consequence of capitalism’s
economic logic, Ordo liberals consider this a fundamentally social problem, whose
remedy is open to forms of social intervention, which target the tendencies toward
collectivism by aiming to ignite competitive conducts.24

21
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics and Lemke, “’The Birth of Bio-Politics”–Michel Foucault’s
Lecture at the Collège de France on Neoliberal Governmentality”.
22
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 27-51.
23
Ibid., 183-5.
24
Ibid., 185.
Blockages to economic activ-
ity originating in the social fabric, the Ordo liberals argued, could be negated
through programs of state intervention, aimed at suppressing collectivism, and sti-
mulating entrepreneurial, market behaviors. Practices of neoliberal governmentality
express the extension of these interventionist strategies into the social field, but also
into the very domain of subjectivity itself, where, as Graham Burchell has put it:
“Neo-liberalism seeks in its own ways the integration of the self-conduct of the go-
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
69

verned into the practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly
appropriate forms of techniques of the self.”25
Yet while Burchell and others quite adequately account for this practice of
self government by which market actors produce themselves through the inscription
of a certain economic rationality, he does not say what stands in the way of this op-
eration, what inner constraints within the individual have to be broken or what ma-
terial was in need of work in order that such an ethical program be realized. In other
words, the work of neoliberal governmentality entails important negative programs,
undertaken through an active practice of self-transformation, requiring the break up
and dissolution of those sedentary collectivist dispositions and anti-competitive ha-
bits that were the accidental and periodic consequence of capitalist life itself—those
very same forms of cooperative collective social life that Keynsianism and the wel-
fare state actively sought to foster and solidify. “There is a clear sense,” writes Bur-
chell, “in which neoliberalism is anti-society.”

26
Such collectivist dispositions originate with a figure of power characterized
by Jacques Donzelot as “the social”—a mode of government which arose in the in-
tervening period between classical and neoliberal forms of rule.
To understand this negation as the
active inner principle of a mode of ethics, we must better understand the ethical sub-
stance upon which this work is carried out—a substance rooted in the collectivist
dispositions fostered by social government. Moreover, it is in this collectivist dispo-
sition that we discover the specific temporality, the time consciousness by which
specific forms of conduct are oriented, and which appears, in the work of neoliberal
governmentality, as the unique ethical substance of a practice of self-government.

3. Docility and Social Time

Clearly, rich dads and poor dads conduct themselves within radically distinct tem-
poral frames: while poor dads practice a docile compliance to the prescribed
rhythms and schedules of the institutions within which their faith is invested and
their trajectories marked (poor dads, we recall, count sick days and look forward to
earned vacations), rich dads, or neoliberal agents, take this docility as the specific
object of an ethical program, assuming full responsibility for the temporality of their
own conduct, managing risks and projecting their futures against opportunistic ho-
rizons tailored to their own unique projects. To grasp this process, we must under-
stand the emergence of the temporality of the social both as a historical event, and as
a residue accumulated in the bodies and dispositions of contemporary individuals.
27

25
Burchell, 29-30.
26
Ibid.,27.
27
Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
The social
Jacques Donzelot, L’Invention du Social (Paris: Fayard, 1984). Jacques Donzelot, “The
Promotion of the Social” Economy and Society, 17:3 (1988): 394–427. Jacques Donzelot,
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
70

represents a problem-space wherein the excesses of liberalism (in the form of an ac-
celerated capitalist economy and the over-extension of market sovereignty) are held
to be problematic, identified and acted upon as a force eroding other forms of popu-
lar solidarity and creating fertile ground for revolutionary challenges to capitalism
itself. From the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, social gov-
ernment developed through a technology of rule entailing, as Mitchell Dean has de-
scribed, “a set of problematizations of the liberal governmental economy (e.g., the
‘social question’, social problems, social issues), a set of institutions and practices
(e.g., social welfare, social insurance, social work), a set of laws and legal jurisdic-
tions (e.g., the juvenile court, family law) and a variety of actors, agencies and au-
thorities (e.g., social workers, schoolteachers, police officers, general practitioners).”28
The solution proposed to the problem of too much liberalism was, as Donzelot has
argued in his genealogical analysis of the welfare state, the production, through state
programs, of new social solidarities and new collectivist units.29 Through the tech-
nology of welfare, the state assumed a function described by the French legal theor-
ist Charles Gide as the “visible expression of the invisible bond”—an instrument for
the fostering of a normative moral order amid conditions of social disintegration re-
sulting from the atomizing effects of industrialization.30
In his L’invention du Social, (1984) Donzelot traces social government to a spe-
cific set of policy debates and legislative initiatives that developed in France during
the nineteenth century. With an increasingly militant labor movement and the inci-
pient threat of socialism, liberal legislators sought policies that would mitigate anta-
gonism between labor and capital without mandating too radical an agenda of social
reform. The resulting “social rights” legislation was a specific instrument of social
government meant to foster solidarity, both among workers and between labor and
capital more generally, as a means of ensuring social integration while blunting the
specific indictment of the social order emerging from the socialist camp. Appropriat-
ing key Durkheimian themes, Donzelot describes the welfare state as one in which
Two important features of
this new technology of rule must be understood if we are to apprehend it in terms of
its specific temporal dimension: first, we must point out the capacity of social gov-
ernment to shift responsibility for risks from individual to collectivist forms, and
second, we must understand the resulting durational temporal sense that emerges
from this allocation. These points will be discussed in turn.

“The Mobilization of Society.” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Gra-
ham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 169-179. Jacques Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Go-
vernmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1991), 251–280.
28
Dean, 53.
29
Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social.
30
Ibid., 403.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
71

“this concept of solidarity serves to define not only the framework but also the spe-
cific mode of state intervention, one which affects the forms of the social bond rather
than the structure of society itself.”31
Social rights legislation, Donzelot argues, extended a set of protectionist
measures to workers, meant first to mitigate the specific risks and uncertainties aris-
ing from the industrial labor process (principally workplace accidents), but later ap-
plied more generally to a range of social and personal risks associated with health,
fiscal security and social well being.

32
In its incipient form, this displacement ad-
dressed the question of culpability for workplace accidents, whose occurrence typi-
cally became flashpoints between labor and capital. In the industrial firm of the nine-
teenth century, industrial accidents immediately raised difficult and often irresolva-
ble questions of responsibility, with both bosses and workers seeking to blame each
other in squabbles over compensation payments, the award of which could alter-
nately drive owners into bankruptcy, or abandon injured workers to pauperism. The
solution arrived at by social legislators was that of the “insurance technique”—a sys-
tem successfully applied in Germany under Bismarck, wherein regular individual
payments into a common fund served to finance compensation paid to the injured in
the event of accidents.33
With so many cases remaining unresolved due to the characteristic difficulty of
ascribing fault to anyone, wouldn’t it be better to regard accidents as effects of an
unwilled collective reality, not of an individual will but effects arising from the
general division of labour which, by making all actors interdependent, results in
none of them having complete control over their work, or consequently being in
a position to assume full responsibility.
Such a seemingly simple policy measure, reproduced and
disseminated across a range of institutional settings, carried with it a more subtle
realignment in the practice of government: the insurance technique succeeded in
shifting culpability from individuals (workers or managers) to the institutional con-
ditions of work itself. Donzelot writes:

34
The institutionalization of such an “unwilled collective reality” entailed the sociali-
zation of risk, relieving individuals and management of responsibility for unfore-
seen outcomes of their own conduct.

35

31
Donzelot, “The Mobilization of Society”, 173.
32
Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social,” 400 and Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work,” 256.
33
Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social,” 399.
34
Ibid., 400.
35
Ibid., 398.
A swarming of welfarist agencies and services
throughout the industrializing world variously seized upon this model, fashioning
solutions to the problem of social disintegration and strife resulting from too much
liberalism, and particularly the profusion of risks, in the form of a renewed solidari-
ty capable of absorbing those risks into itself. Moreover, this entailed state interven-
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
72

tion aimed at the normalization and regulation of workplace conditions (and later of
social conditions more generally), as it became these conditions themselves, and not
the owners of capital, that were ultimately liable for risks incurred.36 The application
of Taylorism to the French industrial economy in the years preceding World War I is
a process aimed at enhancing worker productivity, not only through the technical
division of labor for which it is best known, but through the adjustment of the work-
er to the mosaic of normalized interpersonal relationships into which work and its
risks are socialized.37
Of course, the docile conduct into which the solidarities of social government
induced its members did not originate with social rights themselves, nor did they
appear with the normalized social units into which such individuals were adjusted.
Such modes of conduct, and the specific temporalities through which they were
enacted, were for two centuries already being quietly insinuated into the conducts of
modern people through those disciplinary institutions Foucault so well documented
in Discipline and Punish—the schools, prisons, hospitals and military barracks. In-
deed, there is a specific link between the forms of social government by which risk
was transposed from individual conduct to the collective responsibility of the social
totality and the docile temporality of the disciplinary institution. Foucault has de-
scribed the specific manner in which the production of docility is accomplished
through technologies of temporalization, and specifically with the deployment of
“duration” as a temporal frame.
Better adjustment of the worker to the normalized conditions of
production reduced the risk of accidents—a key governmental objective of welfar-
ism, yet one that substituted a collectivist, institutional responsibility for the indi-
vidual culpability for output and risks. As such, life under social government was
characterized by a certain docility of conduct under the normalized conditions of an
engineered solidarity—a “unwilled collective reality” in which individual agency
was itself no longer willed, but instead suspended within a socialized horizon of ex-
pectation, futurity and temporality.
38
The emergence of durational time is often tied to the dissemination of clock-
time in the labor process.
As a durational act, the temporality of an action is
not bound to its immediate outcome—the risks it entails—which have become re-
mote from the actor, incorporated into the institutional totality within which it is ex-
ecuted. The time of the docile body (and by extension, the time of socialized risk) is
measured simply as “duration”—as abstract, homogenous time, whose ultimate mo-
tivation and endpoint is “unwilled,” remote from the responsibilities of the actor,
fixed in the remote planning schemes of the institution.
39

36
Ibid., 412.
37
Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work,” 255.
38
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 151.
39
E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, 38
Linked with a wider rigidification of the intrinsic volun-
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
73

tarism and spontaneity that characterizes personal and social life, the notion of dura-
tion is, in historical literature on temporality, associated with the reification of the
natural rhythm and meter of everyday practice, specifically for the purposes of a
more thorough exploitation of the productive capacity invested in the temporality of
the act.40 E. P. Thompson’s well-known study of this process uncovers the manner in
which a task-oriented temporality takes over and displaces traditional temporal sen-
sibilities tuned to the rhythms of natural processes, such as the seasonal regularities
of agriculture.41 However, durational temporality is not simply a medium for the ex-
ploitation of labor: it is a means through which labor power is produced and sus-
tained as a force, both within the individual and within the social unit as a whole.42
Foucault provides such an account in his detailed discussion of the produc-
tion of docility in the incipient institutional temporalities of early modern societies.
He describes the inscription of durational temporality as a positive operation, one
that entails the decomposition of modes of conduct into administratively discreet
moments, and their simultaneous recomposition in the sequence of a disciplinary
practice. Foucault’s account of the “temporal elaboration of the act” describes the
precise manner in which an increasingly refined demarcation and segmentation of
temporal units takes place in the marching instructions given to French foot soldiers
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein the simple step of the soldier is
subjected to an increasingly precise division that expands from one to four basic
movements in the course of a century.

Thompson shows how the disciplining of work-time functioned as much to fashion
the basis for collectivist opposition to capitalist exploitation as to ensure the condi-
tions for the extraction of profits from the bodies or workers. Similarly, durational
time is, as Donzelot has shown, a mechanism of social integration and for the forma-
tion of unwilled collective realities and de-responsibilized conducts, wherein risk is
socialized and the agency of individuals is transposed from to the horizons of indi-
vidual actions to those of institutional norms.
43
“The act is broken down into its elements;
the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are as-
signed a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed.
Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.”44
This segmentation is not without aim, but neither is it specifically teleological.
It is not completed with the exploitation of labor for profit, but is instead ongoing
and productive, seeking as much to produce labor power as a permanent potential

(1967): 56-97 and Evitar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1985.
40
Zerubavel, 2-5.
41
Thompson, 61.
42
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 159.
43
Ibid., 151.
44
Ibid., 152.
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
74

of the individual and to articulate this potential together with the ongoing function-
ing of the factory, as to secure its exploitation.45 Foucault describes the production of
durational temporality: for the French foot soldier of the eighteenth century, bodily
practice was reintegrated into a new docile temporality—the military march—which
is directed to a new endpoint or goal, characterized by the general enhancement of
productive forces, both for the individual himself, and for the institution of which he
is a member. In other words, durational time acquires meaning as a permanent and
ongoing exercise. “Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of
the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a sub-
jection that has never reached its limit.”46
Keep working, boys, but the sooner you forget about needing a paycheck, the
easier your adult life will be. Keep using your brain, work for free, and soon your
mind will show you ways of making money far beyond what I could ever pay
you. You will see things that other people never see. Opportunities right in front
of their noses. Most people never see these opportunities because they’re looking
for money and security, so that’s all they get. The moment you see one opportu-
nity, you will see them for the rest of your life.
As such, duration, measured by the
rhythms of military training, the educational calendars of the public schools or the
pay schedules imposed by the wage system, has no specific beginning and no end,
and thus inscribes no agency or telos—no will. For the worker, the prisoner, the stu-
dent or the soldier, the performance of a task is ongoing and often without purpose.
Temporality itself has been socialized.
It was precisely this durational temporal orientation, the unwilled faithful-
ness to the rat race of a salaried job, that rich dad took as the object of the ethical
work to which he exhorted his young student. He chastised this durational disposi-
tion for the flaccid spirit it exuded, but also for the lack of reflective awareness, the
truncation of the horizons of economic action it imposed. The way out was first
through the renunciation of the mind- numbing comforts supplied by such conduct,
from which would follow an revitalization of one’s willingness to confront risk, and
a vast expansion of the horizon of economic opportunity. One of rich dad’s lessons
involved inducing the two ten-year olds to work without pay for several weekends,
under the argument that the experience would teach them that salaried labor reflect-
ed a lazy and dull-minded faith in a structured reward system, and that the true re-
ward of work lay beyond the narrow rewards of the wage system. Rich dad ex-
plained his rationale:

47
The awakening intended by this exercise was one that was meant to turn the two
boys to work on themselves—on the traces and residues, the inscribed habits and

45
Ibid., 161.
46
Ibid., 162.
47
Kiyosaki, 50.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
75

dispositions remaining from an earlier deployment of a collective social reality, and
the displacement of responsibility and risk it entailed. The social, durational tempo-
ralities that are the residue of docility and durational time can be identified, not just
in the generational rift between poor dads and their sons, but in the historical sedi-
mentations accumulated in the bodies of those sons themselves, and in the readers to
whom Kiyosaki appeals—a body that, as Foucault wrote in his essay Nietzsche, Gene-
alogy, History, can be understood as the repository of historical inscriptions, or as he
put it, the “inscribed surface of events.” Indeed, it is in this work that the ambiva-
lence between the institutional forms of self-government, and the individual practic-
es of self-rule, or subjection and subjectification, becomes operative.

4. Conclusion: Temporality and Counter-Conduct

The emphasis placed here on the work of neoliberal subjectification has indicated the
need to consider the ambivalence between subjection and subjectification, or the
“loose fit” between power and the subject. So far, however, little has been said of the
specific content of this ambivalence, or of the general forms it might take. Of what,
then, might this ambivalence consist? How is the work one performs on residual du-
rational temporalities, the ethical substances of social conduct, or the residual in-
scriptions of Donzelot’s “unwilled collective reality” to be practiced differently? I
will close with a very general and brief suggestion for the direction in which such a
study might move—a purpose for which it is useful to consult Foucault’s discussion
of what he termed “counter-conduct,” or the tactical reversals to which rationalities
of governmentality are prone.
Arguments for the tactical reversibility of clock-time as a technology of do-
mination in the capitalist labor process are not unfamiliar: Thompson has described
the process by which, a generation after the appearance of clocks in the labor
process, struggles increasingly took place within the framework of scheduled labor:
“[workers] had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back
within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well.”48
Foucault’s many statements on practices of resistance need not be rehearsed
here, save to point out some elements that are relevant to our effort to understand
the neoliberal government of temporality as a practice characterized by ambivalence
and tactical reversal. Toward this end, two points will be made, the first concerning
the persistence of earlier temporal sensibilities in the conducts of individuals. In his
Yet
the notion of a temporal counter-conduct within neoliberal governmentality requires
that we move beyond Thompson’s analysis of time as an instrument in the exploita-
tion of labor, to a consideration of temporality as an object in the ongoing and open-
ended practice of government, or as the self-forming work of subjectification itself.

48
Thompson, 91.
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
76

statements on counter-memory and counter-history, Foucault describes the manner
in which “subjugated knowledges” are carried over from previous, now forgotten
struggles, “left to lie fallow, or even kept at the margins” of the body and in every-
day rationalities that shape conduct, yet which contained “the memory of combats,
the very memory that had until then been confined to the margins.”49
A second point derives from the idea of “counter-conducts,” or revolts of
conduct, which Foucault elaborated in his lectures of 1977-78, and through which
practices of government can be understood in terms of their own potential for rever-
sal. Counter-conducts, Foucault explains, are distinguished from economic revolts
against power (such as those described by Thompson), by their emphasis on the
government of the self as the stake of revolt, and the specific rejection, through in-
version and reversal, of the precise ways in which one is told that one should govern
oneself. Counter-conducts emerge from within the specific logics of a given mode of
conduct, inverting the series that runs from the macro-level technologies of rule to
the specific ethical practices by which individuals rule themselves. Foucault de-
scribes the “pastoral counter-conducts” developed in opposition to ecclesiastical rule
during the medieval period, illustrated by the Flagellants, for whom extreme forms
of asceticism took up specific features of Christian pastoral governance, while redep-
loying them in practices that were ultimately antagonistic to the pastoral establish-
ment itself.
What I have
described here as the residual temporalities of social conduct that appear as ethical
substances in the work of neoliberal governmentality, share important features with
such subjugated knowledges: to do the work of neoliberal governmentality diffe-
rently is to engage differently the sedimented memory of social time that is the ethi-
cal substance of neoliberal governmentality, to engage this trace, not through a prac-
tice of disaggregation and responsibilization, but through a reactivation and redep-
loyment of the “unwilled collective reality” that is the fabric of social time.
50
Similarly, temporal counter-conducts within neoliberal governmentality
might choose to practice differently certain tenets of neoliberal rule, specifically the
mandate to assume agency, to responsibilize oneself and to orient one’s actions with-
in a temporal horizon specifically conceived around one’s own enterprising conduct.
In doing so, such conducts might operate upon the ethical substance defined by the
residual docility of social time in a manner opposed to that which it was intended by
power. Rather than inscribing an individualizing responsibility through the tempo-
rality of personal conduct, neoliberal counter-conduct might undertake to transpose
that responsibility elsewhere, to undertake the work of an unwilled conduct, of not
acting, or withholding agency, of refusing to project one’s conduct into the opportu-
nistic temporal horizons that characterize the entrepreneurial outlook—the initiative
to which rich dad inspired us. The temporal counter-conducts of neoliberalism

49
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8.
50
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 207.
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
77

might, instead of shaping new temporalities around the radical responsibilizing of
one’s own conduct, remobilize the subjugated memory of poor dad’s unique pen-
chant for the unwilled life, recovering the capacity for inaction, irresponsibility and
the refusal to seek out opportunity. Indeed, it is possible that such moments of coun-
ter-conduct punctuate the everyday lives of individuals in contemporary neoliberal
societies. An illuminating example comes from the rising psycho-social phenomenon
of procrastination—a cresting lifestyle affliction affecting larger numbers every year
and garnering around itself an ever more verbose clinical discourse and practice,
suggests some ways in which exhortations to self-responsibilization might provoke
unique counter-conducts. Procrastination, recent studies have shown, is increasingly
evident in public and private life, ever more present in the lives of students, spouses,
taxpayers, politicians and professionals.51 In a 2007 study published in Psychological
Bulletin, Piers Steel describes the growing prevalence of procrastination: among the
general population, 15%-20% consider themselves procrastinators, while among col-
lege students the figure is much higher, reaching 75%, almost 50% of whom procras-
tinate “consistently and problematically.”52 Within the clinical literature on procras-
tination, the phenomenon is defined in strictly utilitarian terms: “procrastination is
most often considered to be the irrational delay of behavior,” where rationality en-
tails “choosing a course of action despite expecting that it will not maximize your
utilities, that is, your interests, preferences, or goals of both a material (e.g., money)
and a psychological (e.g., happiness) nature.”53
Indeed, procrastination has become a growing topic in the self-help literature
category, described in books with suggestive titles such as Do It Now: Breaking the
Procrastination Habit,

54
and The Procrastination Workbook: Your Personalized Program for
Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back;55 The Now Habit: A Strategic Program
for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play,56 and The Procrastinator’s
Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now.57
The power of procrastination erupts from deep within. It often masquerades as a
friend. “Let it wait,” we hear ourselves say, “for when you feel rested, you‘ll fly
A description of the procrastinator’s
disposition is offered:

51
Piers Steel, “The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of
Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure” Psychology Bulletin, 133, 1 (2007): 65–94.
52
Ibid., 65.
53
Ibid., 66.
54
William Knaus, Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit, revised edition (New York:
Wiley, 1997).
55
Ibid.
56
Neil Fiore, The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying
Guilt-Free Play, revised edition (New York: Tarcher, 2007).
57
Rita Emmet, The Procrastinator’s Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now (New York:
Walker & Company, 2000).
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.