The Separation between State and Religion

In time we will realize that Democracy is the entitlement of individuals to every right that was in its times alloted to kings. The right to speak and decide, to be treated with decency, to serve and be served by people in a State of “love” that is, to serve with one’s work for the development of ‘life’. To belong to the Kingdom of Human Beings without racial, national, social or academic separations. To love and be loved. To die at the service of the whole and be honored in one’s death, for one’s life and work was legitimately valued. To be graceful and grateful. To have the pride and the humility of being One with the Universe, One with every realm of Existence, One with every living and deceased soul. To treat with dignity and be treated with dignity for One is dignified together with All others and Life itself. To walk the path of compassion, not in the sorrow of guilt but in the pride of being. To take responsability for one’s mistakes and sufferings and stand up again and again like a hero and a heroine and face the struggle that is put at one’s feet and in one’s hands. Millions of people, millions and millions of people might take many generations to realize the consciousness of our humaneness but there is no other dignified path for the human being.

The “work” as I conceive it is psychological and political. Psychology is the connection between the different dimensions within one’s self and Politics is the actualization of that consciousness in our practical lives. Religion is the ceremony that binds the connectedness between the individual and the Universe. The separation between religion, politics and science, the arts and sports is, in the sphere of the social, the reflection of the schizophrenia within the individual and the masses. The dialogue between individuality and the "human" belongs to consciousness. The tendency to develop cults resides in the shortcomings we’are finding in life as it is structured today. “Life” has become the private property of a few priviledged who cannot profit from it because as soon as it is appropriated it stops to be “life” or “life-giving”.

We are all the victims of our own invention and each one is called upon to find solutions. The only problem is believing our selves incapable of finding them. We are now free to use all Systems of knowledge objectively, sharing them without imposing our will on each other. To become objective about our lives means to understand that the institutions that govern its experience are critically important. That we are one with the governments, one with the religious activities that mark its pace, that the arena’s in which we move our bodies and the laboratories in which we explore our possibilities are ALL part and parcel of our own personal responsibility. That WE ARE ONE WITH EACH OTHER AND EVERYTHING AROUND US and acknowledge for ourselves a bond of love in conscious responsibility. That we human beings know ourselves part of each other and are willing and able to act on our behalf for the benefit of each and every individual. That we no longer allow governments, industries, universities or any other institution to run along unchecked by the objective principles of humaneness. That we do not allow gurus to abuse their power or governors to steal the taxes and use them to their personal advantage in detriment of the whole. That we do not allow abuse from anyone anywhere because life is too beautiful to do so and that we are willing to stop the rampant crime with the necessary compassion Conscious knowledge is every individual's right. Conscious action is every individual's duty.

Blog Archive

Saturday 19 March 2011

Study of The Emotional Life of Governmental Power


35

Elaine Campbell 2010

ISSN: 1832-5203

Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53, September 2010

ARTICLE

The Emotional Life of Governmental Power

1

Elaine Campbell, Newcastle University

ABSTRACT:  This paper explores the emotional life of governmental power through the affective domains of confidence and respect in criminal justice, in  the context of a climate of insecurities and uncertainties with existing modes of governance.  The paper problematises some of

the key tenets of the governmentality thesis and questions its core assumptions about forms of

rationality, processes of subjectivation and the conditions of possibility for ethical conduct.   It

also prompts us to reconsider the tenets of contemporary neo-liberal governance, its

‚rationalities of rule,‛ technologies and apparatuses, how these work to capture hearts as well as

minds, and how these may promote an ‚emotionalised‛ art of government such that we might

properly speak of ‚emotionalities of rule.‛ 

Keywords: Governmentality; Foucault; subjectivation; rationalities; emotionalities; Deleuze; the

fold; criminal justice; security; confidence.

Introduction

Studies in governmentality have opened up our understanding of how neo-liberal strategies of

rule govern through the self-regulated, entrepreneurial, competitive choices of autonomous

individuals who exercise economic, political and social rationality in the choices and decisions

they make.  As Burchell puts it, ‚(g)overnment increasingly impinges upon individuals in their

very individuality, in their practical relationships to themselves in the conduct of their lives; it

concerns them at the very heart of themselves by making its rationality the condition of their active

freedom.‛

2 Throughout Foucaultian accounts of neo-liberalism we consistently encounter a

citizenry of responsibilised subjects who self-integrate into a myriad of  ‛calculative regimes,‛

                                               

1 Earlier versions of aspects of this paper were presented at the Stockholm Criminology Symposium held at the

University of Stockholm, 4-6 June 2007, paper entitled ‚Public confidence as an emotionality of rule;‛ and at

the Fifth Social Theory Forum, held at the University of Massachusetts, 16-17  April 2008, paper entitled

‚Powers of life and death in the governance of affect.‛  I am grateful to conference delegates for their constructive feedback and comments on the paper.  I am also indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their

very helpful and fulsome reviews of this article.  These have been invaluable to shaping the final version of the

paper.  

2  Graham Burchell, ‚Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self‛ in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism,

Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30, Original emphasis.Campbell: The Emotional Life

36

subscribe to their own privatised forms of  ‛risk-management‛ and adopt an ethics of



‛utilitarianism‛ such that they maximise their lifestyles and then (mis)take these as a product of

their own personal choice.  According to this description, it would seem that neo-liberal subjects

have a purely instrumental relation to themselves and others; identifications with governmental

technologies and practices, and obligations to align  themselves with them, is represented as a

purely cognitive affair. 

Elena: I do love how these very sophisticated writers put things! They make inhumanity sound almost interesting. It’s a little ironic but what I realize as I study these texts is that in effect, groups of people develop particular languages even if we are all talking about the same things. This utilitarianism, maximizing lifestyles and thinking it is their choice is another way of saying that people adapt to the system through their instinctive center in essence and live our whole lives without knowing what or why things happened to us. The instrumental relation that is defined by purely instinctive connections defined by the identifications with governmental technologies and practices and the OBLIGATIONS to align themselves with them, are represented as a cognitive process.

They even use the same words as those we used in the system: identification and explain the whole phenomenon so beautifully and without the pain with which I screamed out loud when I left the Fellowship. Almost as if they themselves were too professional to feel what the are talking about and one never knows if it is that they are too professional or equally related to the subject as a ‘purely cognitive affair’

For me, they are talking about the same cult behavior characteristic of cults but in society, the one all these blogs I’ve been writing in are about. But they don’t call it cult behavior or seem to mind or think up solutions. They just observe like cats. Beautiful and disturbing.__________________________






 I have no difficulty in accepting the view that the figure of a self-actualising citizen is ‛the most fundamental, and most generalizable, characteristic of these new

rationalities of government,‛

3 but what is understated, and largely ignored in this perspective, is

the possibility of a neo-liberal subject who is ‛actualised‛ by something other than (or as well as)

governmental reason.   In short, the governmentality thesis appears to make little room for responsibilised individuals who may 


‛decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as

subjects of desire,‛

4

and whose affective selves, therefore, constitute a key site for the exercise of

governmental power.

Elena: I don’t quite understand what she’s saying here, I’m not familiar with this language but if I get the gist, subjects who decipher, recognize and acknowledge themselves as subjects of no matter what would be conscious of themselves and their situation and I think that’s precisely not the case but let’s see where she takes it.________________








This focus follows, and builds on Rose’s influential work on the genealogy of the self in

which he expounds

‛the technologies and techniques that hold personhood – identity, selfhood,

autonomy and individuality – in place.‛

5

  In this work, Rose acknowledges that desire, passions,

sentiments and emotions are integral to such technologies, but he does not explicate this

theoretically and provides no conceptual tools for understanding the governmental relations of

affective life.  Similarly, and inspired by Spinozan philosophy,

6

a range of scholarship7 has consolidated what Patricia Clough has identified as an ‛affective turn‛ in the humanities and social

sciences.

8

   However, it is not until the collection of original essays edited by Clough and Halley

that affect is theorized as having political potential within relations of power  – a perspective

which moves beyond Massumi’s supposition of affect as  ‛pre-social.‛

9 As the sub-title of the

collection suggests, here is a series of papers which see the affective turn as necessary, if not

central to ‛theorizing the social,‛ and which explore the affective life of, inter alia, organised sex

                                               

3 Nikolas Rose, ‚Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies,‛ in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne  & Nikolas

Rose  (ed.),  Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1996), 60.

4 Michel Foucault,  The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 5.

5 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1996), 2.

6 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985),

Part 3.  Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Transl. by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books,

1990).

7 See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick & Adam Frank (eds.), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).  Michael Hardt, ‚Affective Labour,‛ Boundary 2, 26, 2 (1999): 89-

100.  Lauren Berlant, Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).  Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).  Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics

of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

8 Michael Hardt, ‚Foreword: What Affects Are Good For,‛ in Patricia Ticineto Clough & Jean Halley (eds.), The

Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.

9 For this argument, see Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‚Introduction,‛ in  Patricia  Ticineto Clough  & Jean Halley

(eds.), The Affective Turn, 2.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

37

work, health care training, Korean diaspora, cinematic technologies and fashion modeling.  It is

in this spirit that this paper uses the domain of criminal justice, security and crime control in an

age of risk and uncertainty as a lens  through which  to investigate the emotional life of

governmental power.   

In many respects, a focus on emotional life problematises some of the key tenets of the

governmentality thesis and forces us to question some of its core assumptions about forms of

rationality, processes of subjectivation and the conditions of possibility for ethical conduct.   It

also prompts us to reconsider the tenets of contemporary neo-liberal governance, its

‛rationalities of rule,‛ technologies and apparatuses, how these work to capture hearts as well as

minds, and how these may promote an  ‛emotionalised‛ art of government.  The discussion is

divided into three parts.  The first explores forms of rationality and makes the case for thinking

about the mutually sustaining relationship between cognition and affectivity, between the

instrumental and expressive capacities of the subject of power.   The discussion moves on  to

consider processes of subjectivation, paying particular attention to the problematic of Foucault’s

‛subject-less subject.‛  Using a framework based on the Deleuzian notion of ‛the fold,‛ the third

part of the discussion sets out a case study exploring the affective domains of confidence and

respect to suggest ways in which subjectivities of affect constitute a key site for the exercise of

governmental power.   The case study centres on a period of intensified and highly mediated

governmental concern for freedom, protection (from risk) and the minimisation of harm and

threat from dangerous others.  Though it refers to a particularly eventful year in the United

Kingdom, 2006, the case study explores a range of contemporary modes of government which

are by no means exceptional, but are fairly typical of governmental mechanisms deployed in the

name of security and which seek to reassure the public and restore confidence in, and respect for

systems of governance. 

1. Forms of Rationality

Foucault’s interest in rationality should not be confused with the Weberian conception and

analysis of rationality as a global and historical process.   As Smart points out, for Weber, a

process of rationalization had permeated all spheres of social life such that he proposed it as the

principal defining feature of modernity.

10 By contrast, and at times defending himself against

the allegation that his work  ‛boils down to one and the same meta-anthropological or metahistorical process of rationalization,‛

11 Foucault emphasises the contextuality and historical

variability of different forms of rationality, their specific functions and effects.  Of all the forms,

then, which  ‛rationality‛ can take, a globalising, trans-historical and universal form is not

amongst them.  Rather, ‛rationalities of rule‛ are specific ways of thinking about how to govern

at particular times and places.   This is not a question of formulating and implementing some

grand design distilled from political and philosophical analysis, or imposing a schema of

governmental logic on an imperfect reality.   ‛Rationalities‛ are discursive; they propose strategies, suggest reforms, identify problems, recommend solutions and constitute a series of

                                               

10

  Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2004), 138.

11 Michel Foucault, ‚Questions of Method,‛ in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon  & Peter Miller (eds.), The

Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 78.Campbell: The Emotional Life

38

suppositions, instructions and assumptions which are encapsulated in discourses and knowledges  that guide, advise and inform our ways of being in the world.   As Rose reminds us,

‛(t)hese rationalities< operate not so much to describe the world as to make it thinkable and

practicable under a particular description.‛

12 Lemke uses the phrase a  ‛pragmatics of guidance‛

13

and goes on to assert that a political rationality is not some kind of pure, neutral

knowledge, nor is it exterior to knowledge, but is an ‛element of government itself which helps

to create a discursive field in which exercising power is ‚rational.‛‛


Elena:

If ‘rational’ has anything to do with reasonable, then I have to disagree with the previous assumptions on rationality. I would agree with the discursive field, etc but instead of it being a ‘rational’ well reasoned formulation the deep problem is that it is precisely not rational but irrational, instinctive, emotionally dependent and imposed by the hierarchic order in the unconscious structure._____________________



14

   Lemke’s use of quotation

marks to indicate the ambiguity of  ‛rational‛ is significant here.   He  is drawing attention to

Foucault’s rejection of any notion of an ideal, transcendental reason against which can be

counterposed nonreason or irrationality.   Foucault describes such a comparative exercise as

‛senseless‛

15

and he compares corporal and carceral forms of penality to make the point:

The ceremony of public torture isn’t in itself more irrational than imprisonment in a cell; but

it’s irrational in terms of a type of penal practice which involves new ways of calculating its

utility, justifying it, graduating it, etc<16

Foucault’s refusal to evaluate systems of penality by a criterion of scientific rationality is typical

of postmodern accounts  that regard reason and logic  ‛on the same footing‛ as myth and

magic.

17 However, Foucault’s typicality is short-lived and he parts company from postmodern

perspectives on  ‛rationality‛ by insisting that we should restrict our  ‛use of this word to an

instrumental and relative meaning.‛

18 Though he repeats here the importance of contextspecificity, he nonetheless substitutes instrumentalism for  ‛reason‛ as the yardstick of  ‛rationality.‛ For those of a postmodernist persuasion,  instrumental or purposive ways of  ‛reasoning‛ are especially objectionable since they emphasise utility, efficiency, reliability, durability,

superiority, at the expense of expressive values and sentient forms of human existence.  Even

modernist commentators complain that Foucault is  ‛unduly instrumental and purposive;‛

19 or

worse, that he subscribes to a ‛dogmatic functionalism.‛


Elena: If I understand correctly, I’d agree with Foucault that it is ‘rational’ in as much as the process that takes place involves a particular mind process but the mind process that it involves is much better understood if we accept the System’s concept of a formatory apparatus. The formatory apparatus is described as the mechanical part of the intellectual center that functions in ‘automatic’ just as Foucault describes above and understanding that, I believe gives us a grounding to state that it is a rational process in as much as it involves a particular mind process but an irrational process in as much as it happens ‘mechanically’, instinctively, irrationally. __________________






20

However, much of the evidence for these accusations centres on his theoretical work on

disciplinary and bio-power, suggesting that while critique may be analytically persuasive, it is

nonetheless specific to Foucault’s genealogical studies and is primarily relevant to his contemporary focus on disciplinary society, bio-politics, surveillance and panopticism.   Similarly,

Foucault’s self-incriminating assertion of the utilitarian ethos of  ‛rationalities‛ should not be

overstated or taken as his only or last word on the matter.  It is debatable, for example, whether,

                                               

12 Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1999), xxii.

13 Thomas Lemke, ‚Foucault, Governmentality and Critique,‛ Rethinking Marxism, 14, 3 (2002), 55.

14

Ibid., 55.

15 Michel Foucault, ‚Afterword: the Subject and Power‛ in Herbert L.  Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel

Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 210.

16

  Foucault, ‚Questions of Method,‛ 79.

17 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), 146-150.

18 Foucault, ‚Questions of Method,‛ 79.

19 David Garland, ‚Frameworks of Inquiry in the Sociology of Punishment,‛ British Journal of Sociology, 41, 1

(1990), 3

20

  Ibid., 4.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

39

in using the term  ‛instrumental,‛ Foucault is referring to an ambitious schema of calculative,

technocratic utility, or to something more modest, such as the ‛practical‛ or ‛do-able‛ qualities

of governmental techniques, discourses and practices in their experiential immediacy 

‛rationalities,‛ then, as a sort of everyday  ‛how-to‛ or  ‛know-how.‛    Such an interpretation

does not, therefore, exclude a consideration of what we might usefully term  ‛emotionalities of

rule‛– that is, discursive and material forms which propose and suppose particular ways of

feeling about the world.  We could suggest, then, that  ‛rationalities of rule‛ is a more inclusive

concept than has hitherto been suggested, and refers to all manner of governmental technologies

and apparatuses that render practicable how to think, how to act, and how to feel. 


Elena:
All this is true but what matters about it is missing: HOW does that happen and why? We cannot understand it unless we are aware precisely of the emotional connections between individuals through identification. It is the identifications what determine how people connect to the government as a figure of authority. ________________



 

On purely nominal grounds, we might refer to processes that sustain the emotional life of

governmental power as  ‛emotionalities of rule.‛    This does not suggest their opposition to

‛rationalities of rule,‛ but encourages an inclusive frame of reference  that recognises the

mutually sustaining relationship between the cognitive and instrumental, on the one hand, and

the affective and the expressive, on the other.  Put another way, in order for neo-liberal subjects

to think differently about the choices and decisions they can make, they may also need to learn to

feel differently about them. 


Elena: I wasn’t planning to speak to Elaine, the author of this article but maybe it would be more polite if I actually address you and eventually get to communicate! What is being said here is no other than the idea that if the individual stops being identified with the same things then they’ll think differently about them. That is of course, one possibility but probably that one is equally connected to the idea that the individual needs to not be identified with his own self to be able to feel and think differently. As long as We continue to be identified with our own ‘programming’ or predetermined structures, we will continue to ‘fall’ on the same pebbles, stones and precipices and we’ll just continue to rebuild the same structures with different names and forms but if the individual changes the relationship to his or her own self then there are possibilities of change because we can then construct our own center of gravity.

One of the difficulties with these papers is that they talk about the individual as if all individuals were always the same and they don’t really take into account that a human being is one in essence, another one in false personality and still another one in true personality. The ‘being’ present in each of these phases is completely different.

I’ll work some more tomorrow.

_________________


2. Processes of Subjectivation

Many scholars have been swift to point out how governmentality recognises the multidimensionality of power relations, and suggest  that the thesis overcomes much of what was

regarded as Foucault’s one-dimensional focus on disciplinary power and forces of domination.

21

 

As Lemke puts it; the notion of governmentality has  ‛innovative potential‛ in so far as it 

recognises how power is both an objectivizing and a subjectivizing force, bringing into view the

idea of a constituted-constituting subject permanently positioned within the interstice of  individualising power and individual freedom.

22 McNay suggests that one of the key analytical

advantages to Foucault’s concept of governmental power over that of disciplinary power is that

it introduces the idea of an active subject who has the capacity to resist the ‛individualizing and

totalizing forces of modern power structures.‛

23

Endowed with a capacity for resistance, a citizenry of (neo-)liberal subjects are capable,

then, of transforming, subverting and challenging governmental relations of all kinds  – from a

refusal to commit to a healthy diet, to a failure to provide evidence as a witness of crime,

through to a rejection of the need to recycle in the name of environmental protection.  Implicitly, then, resistance is configured as a matter of self-reflexive choice or personal motivation to

opt out of, ignore or dissociate from particular technologies and practices.  This sits easily within

a model of generative, autonomous agency, but is difficult to square with Foucault’s idea of

subjectivation which denotes the dialectical nature of constraint and freedom – that ‛the subject

is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices

                                                

23 Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).  Paul Patton, ‚Foucault’s Subject of Power,‛ in Jeremy Moss (ed.), The Later Foucault (London: Sage, 1998).

22 Thomas Lemke, ‚’The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on NeoLiberal Governmentality,‛ Economy and Society, 30, 2 (2001), 191.

23

  McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction, 123.Campbell: The Emotional Life

40

of liberation, of liberty.‛

24 McNay complains that Foucault fails to offer a satisfactory account of

agency and that he vacillates ‛between moments of determinism and voluntarism.‛

25 Butler is

critical of the term  ‛subjectivation,‛ seeing it as paradoxical in so far as it  ‛denotes both the

becoming of the subject and the process of subjection – one inhabits the figure of autonomy only

by becoming subjected to a power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency.‛

26 Tie

points out that Foucault’s constructed subject stands in a difficult relationship to itself in as far

as the reflexive self is unable to ‛strike a radically resistive, critical distance from the terms of its

construction.‛

27

Foucault’s failure to provide an account of agency makes it difficult, then, to distinguish

practices of the self that are imposed on individuals through governmental sanctions and

regulatory norms, from those which express relations of resistance.  Equally there is no basis for

understanding the nature of compliance – whether it is the consequence of self-reflexivity, or the

realisation of a (perverse) attachment to subjection.   In a mixed economy of power relations

wherein  ‛individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which

several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized,‛

28

processes of subjectivation can never be linear or homogenous.  Consequently, Tie argues, the

cumulative effects of this heterogeneity cannot be predicted, and in the absence of a

hermeneutics of selfhood and agency, the  ‛possibilities for resistive action will always emerge

accidentally‛

29

rather than through a reflexive and critical process of self-realisation. 

The problematic of Foucault’s  ‛subject-less subject‛ continues to haunt his analytics of

power and has generated a subsidiary scholarship  that, in various ways, attempts to theorise

governmental subjectivities.  Psychoanalytical approaches feature prominently in this work and

the contributions of Žižek, Butler and (the application of) Lacan, Klein and Freud to

understanding the psychic dimensions of the constituted-constituting subject is of particular

relevance.   In an eloquent and perceptive article, Tie discusses the relative merits of these perspectives suggesting that  ‛subjects‛ complicity in their subjectivation cannot be understood as

being purely the effect of their positioning in discourse.  Rather, their complicity has an ‚affective

dimension.‛

30

   Of interest here is how that  ‛affective dimension‛ is conceptualised within these

particular psychoanalytical theories, and how it is mobilised as an exercise of power.  Žižek, for

example, talks of an ‛unconscious supplement,‛ and posits a kind of sub-terranean reservoir of

feeling which exists as Other to sovereign power, and which  ‛provides enjoyment which serves

                                               

24 Michel Foucault, ‚An Aesthetics of Existence‛ in  Foucault Live.  Transl.  by John Johnston. Ed. Sylvère

Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 313.

25 Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Oxford: Polity Press,

2000), 9.

26

Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),

83.

27

  Warwick Tie, ‚The Psychic Life of Governmentality,‛ Culture, Theory and Critique, 45, 2 (2004), 164.

28

  Foucault, ‚Afterword: the Subject and Power,‛ 221.

29 Tie, 165.

30

Ibid., 161, Emphasis added.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

41

as the unacknowledged support of meaning.‛

31 However, it is debatable how far (or whether)

Žižek’s thesis adequately addresses the question of agency, but this is of less concern here than

his formulation of an ‛unconscious supplement.‛   It is not clear, for example, why ‛economies

of pleasure‛ are regarded as  ‛extra-discursive,‛ and therefore positioned in a pre-linguistic

realm of the unconscious.  This would seem to support an essentialist position  that posits the

notion of a pre-social, biological and ‛extra-conscious‛ realm of emotionality. 

Meanwhile, for  Butler, the  ‛self-realisation‛ of the constituting subject occurs in a moment of trauma induced by a continual inability to constitute the self as a coherent and complete

entity.  Butler posits the endless need to reiterate  ‛who we are‛ as demonstrative of the incoherence of selfhood, a state of affairs which emerges from an unruly residue of psychic life

‛which exceeds the imprisoning effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity,

to become a coherent subject.‛

32 The psychic in Butler circulates in zones of un-intelligibility, is

surplus to the requirements for subject-hood and is disruptive to it.   This is a pretty familiar

psychoanalytic account of resistance.   For example, in Rose,

33

the disruptive potential of the

psyche is read through the Lacanian lens of an  ‛alienating destiny‛ wherein the subject is

rendered permanently unstable through the constitutive loss of (the possibility of) selfidentification.   In Jefferson,

34

the ambivalence of Mike Tyson’s selfhood (as convicted rapist, as

superstar boxer, as hypermasculine superstud, as  ‛juvenile delinquent,‛ and as  ‛little fairy

boy‛) is understood through the Kleinian notion of an anxiety-reducing, psychical defencemechanism.  Tie invokes the Freudian motif of ‛the uncanny‛ as a ‛special shade of anxiety‛

35

which arises from  ‛a return of unresolved psychic dilemmas‛

36

– such as the realisation that

what had seemed familiar (a sense of self, for example) turns out to be disturbingly and,

perhaps, pleasurably strange.   Similarly, Butler has applied Freud’s concept of melancholia to

understand the trauma of the impossibility of coherent subject formation; as she puts it,  ‛the

melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that

ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief.‛

37

In each account, subjects’ resistance is located in an affective dimension of psychic life 

alienation, anxiety, uncanniness and melancholia.   As such, it is not clear how these various

psychic (or emotional) states reformulate or subvert the conditions of subjection, or redirect the

discursive and material effects of power, so much as remain in a state of permanent powerlessness at the margins of subject formation.  And what are we to make of a psychic life  that is

                                               

31 Slavoj Žižek, The Mestases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 56-57, cited

in Tie, 162, Emphasis added.

32

  Butler, 86.

33

Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1987).

34 Tony Jefferson, ‚From ‘Little Fairy Boy’ to the ‘Compleat Destroyer’: Subjectivity and Transformation in the

Biography of Mike Tyson,‛ in Mairtin Mac An Ghaill (ed.),  Understanding Masculinities (Buckingham: Open

University Press, 1996), and Tony Jefferson, ‚The Tyson Rape Trial: The Law, Feminism and Emotional

‘Truth,’‛ Social and Legal Studies, 6, 2 (1997), 281-301.

35 Anneleen Masschelein, ‚The Concept as Ghost: Conceptualization of the Uncanny in Late Twentieth Century

Theory,‛ Mosaic, 35, 1 (2002), 54 cited in Tie, 170.

36 Tie, 170.

37 Butler, 23.Campbell: The Emotional Life

42

energised by such a limited repertoire of emotions?  ‛Good humours‛ such as delight,

excitement, satisfaction and optimism do not feature in a psychoanalytic register of affects; yet

there are no grounds to suppose that any emotional state – apart from apathy, perhaps – cannot

be experienced as excess.  Citing de Beauvoir,

38 McNay notes, ‛the language of psychoanalysis

suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds only within the self and this obscures the

extent to which the individual’s life and actions involve primarily a ‛relation to the world.‛‛

39

 

There is clearly merit in drawing attention to the libidinal, kinetic energy of psychic life as a

destabilising force, but without an account of intersubjective relations, in which power is always

implicated, it induces/incites neither complicity nor resistance within processes of subjectivation. 

A significant route out of this impasse is found within the Deleuzian notion of ‛the fold.‛ 

Deleuze invents this metaphor to denote a ‛zone of subjectivation,‛

40

adding that ‛subjectivation

is created by folding.‛

41

‛The fold‛ does not presume a self with any essential interiority; nor is

it the effect of an exterior field of power relations; it is, rather  ‛a threshold, a door, a becoming

between two multiplicities.‛

42 The notion of ‛the fold,‛ then, not only rejects psychoanalytical

suppositions of an interiorised psyche, but also addresses (and overcomes) the paradox of Foucault’s constituted-constituting subject.

43 As far as Deleuze is concerned  ‛self-realisation‛ has

nothing to do with a psychic residue or unconscious excess, neither is it the effect of the limits

and exclusions of individualising practices; he argues:

There never ‚remains‛ anything of the subject, since he (sic) is to be created on each

occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize

knowledge and bend each power<   The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore,

as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis.‛

44

 

Deleuze’s thesis of enfolding has been taken up by a number of governmentality theorists, most

notably Dean, whose essay stands, perhaps, as the clearest exemplar of Deleuzian-Foucauldian

eclecticism on matters of government.

45 Dean undertakes what he refers to as a  ‛critical

ontology of our selves‛ to explore how modes of ‛governmental authority,‛ and ‛rationalities of

rule‛ are doubled or enfolded into our ways of being, thinking and doing – ‛(i)n this sense,‛ he

                                               

38

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 80.

39 McNay, Gender and Agency, 129.

40 Gilles Deleuze, ‚Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation),‛ in  Michael Kelly (ed.),  Critique and

Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT, 1995), 337 Diagram.

41

  Ibid., 323.

42 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. by Robert Hurley, Mark

Seem & Helen R.  Lane (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 29.

43

In ‚Afterword: The Subject and Power‛, Foucault talks of struggles against the ‘government of

individuation’ which ties an individual to ‘his own identity in a constraining way’ (Ibid., 212.)  However, he

leaves us with no analytical tools to think through how, in these ‘moments of struggle,’ we can overcome the

submission of subjectivity.

44

  Deleuze, 325.

45 See, for example, Nikolas Rose, ‚Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism,‛ Economy

and Society, 22, 3 (1993), 283-299, and Nikolas Rose, ‚Authority and the Genealogy of Subjectivity,‛ in Paul

Heelas, Scott Lash & Paul Morris (eds.), De-Traditionalization: Authority and Self in an Age of Cultural Uncertainty

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

43

writes, ‛one might speak of a folding of exterior relations of authority to sculpt a domain that

can act on and of itself but which, at the same time, is simply the inside marked out by that

folding.‛

46 As valuable as this work is for thinking about processes of subjectivation as the ‛enfolding of authority,‛ it rests on a somewhat selective and partial reading of Deleuze, one which

has the effect of obscuring from view the enfolding of ‛emotionalities of rule.‛   It is a surprising

oversight given that most commentators acknowledge the complementarity of Foucault’s

machinic theory of power, and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s machinic theory of desire.

47

In Deleuze

and Guattari, desire is regarded as the productive motor force of social relations.   In  AntiOedipus, they assert:

We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically

determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation,

any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive

forces and the relations of production.   There is only desire and the social, and nothing

else.

48

From within this schema, affects are conceptualised as forces of desire, continuously flowing as

‛intensities of movement, rhythm, gesture and energy.‛

49 Affects follow  ‛lines of flight,‛ escaping  ‛planes of consistency,‛ such as centred subjectivity and habitual routines, moving in

unpredictable directions as a deterritorialising and productive wave of libidinal energy.   As

Patton summarises,  ‛the  feeling of power is an affect which is associated with a process of

becoming-other than what one was before.‛

50

It is this notion of ‛becoming-other‛ as an ‛enfolding‛ of ‛emotionalities of rule‛ that I

want to unpack in the remainder of this paper.

51

  Based on Foucault’s original framework set out

in The Use of Pleasure,

52 Deleuze outlines ‛four folds of subjectivation;‛

53

this frame of reference

has been applied to great effect by Dean54

to elaborate the  ‛enfolding of authority,‛ and it is

being used here to structure and inform an exploration of the ‛enfolding of emotionality‛ using

the affective domains of confidence and respect as a case study.  The analysis develops four key

aspects for thinking about the  ‛emotional self‛ as a problem of government; this involves, as

                                               

46 Mitchell Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,‛ in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne

& Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 222.

47 See, for example, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989).  Paul Patton, Deleuze and the

Political (London: Routledge, 2000).  Maria Tamboukou, ‚Interrogating the ‘Emotional Turn:’ Making Connections with Foucault and Deleuze,‛ European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 6, 3 (2003), 209-223.

48

  Deleuze and Guattari, 29.

49 Brian Massumi, ‚The Autonomy of Affect,‛ in  Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1996).

50

  Patton, Deleuze and the Political, 74-75, Emphasis added.

51 See also, Elaine Campbell, ‚Narcissism as ethical practice? Foucault, askesis and an ethics of  becoming,‛

Cultural Sociology,  4, 1 (2010), 23-44.

52 See, Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 26-28.  Foucault, The Care of the Self, 238-239.  Foucault, ‚On the Genealogy

of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,‛ 352-357.

53 Deleuze, 323.

54 Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority.‛Campbell: The Emotional Life

44

Dean puts it, posing  ‛questions of  asceetics (the governing work)< ones of  ontology (the

governed material), deontology (the governable subject) and teleology (the telos of government).‛

55

  

3. Protecting Our Freedom

For me, building a foundation of security, public order and stability is the basis for the trust

and confidence which individuals, families and communities need to fulfil their potential. 

We can only drive lasting and sustained change by empowering people to take greater

responsibility for the strength and well-being of their own lives and communities in a way

that establishes a different relationship between Government and the governed.

56

In this foreword, the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, neatly articulates the normative

conditions for neo-liberal subjects to fulfil their potential  – security, public order, stability,

empowerment and responsibility for self and community.  What appears to be ‛different‛ about

the governmental relationships iterated here is the emphasis placed on their anchorage in an

affective relationship of trust and confidence.  It is nothing new for liberal democratic societies

to value, if not sanctify such affectivities as necessary conditions of governmental legitimacy,

authority and consent, most especially in terms of the political institutions which embody,

uphold and protect the rule of law.   However, in this document and elsewhere in speeches,

launches, press conferences, media interviews, consultation papers and policy statements, it is

the absence of trust and confidence and the presence of fear, insecurity and uncertainty, which is

routinely foregrounded as a problem of government.   

A telos of negative freedom

In a speech to DEMOS in 2006, the Home Secretary (now John Reid) proclaimed that  ‛we now

live in a world where insecurity is a phenomenon that crosses the economic and the social, the

domestic and the foreign, the psychological and physical, the individual and the collective.‛

57

 

Such assertions reinforce Giddens’ somewhat overworked notion of ‛ontological insecurity‛

58

as

a general  descriptor of our common experience in late modernity.   While there is much to

support this gloomy outlook, the rhetoric of a runaway world and its accompanying narratives

of disembeddedness, suspicion, precariousness, risk, threat and fear, serves as an  ‛organising

disposition,‛ an  ‛affective register‛ or an  ‛emotionality of rule‛ for re-imagining the kind of

government which can be fashioned in the name of freedom.  When the boundaries of the state

of nature and the state of civil society are blurred, a self-interested citizenry will not only be

receptive to emphatic (and oft-repeated) banner headlines, such as ‛Our citizens should not live

                                                

55

Ibid., 226. 

56 Home Office, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain: The Home Office Strategic Plan 2004-2008, Cmnd. 6287,

(London: Home Office, 2004), 7-8.

57

John Reid, Security, Freedom and the Protection of Our Values, Speech given by the Home Secretary to DEMOS,

London, UK (August 9, 2006)  http://press.homeoffice.gov.uk/Speeches/sp-hs-DEMOS-090806?version=1 (accessed

January 9, 2007).

58 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

45

in fear;‛

59 but they will also be open to governmental techniques and modalities which promise

to realise the utopian telos of order, safety and stability.  Such an eventuality is made possible by

a negative formula of freedom grounded in an ontology of (self-) protection.  As Blair put it:

 this is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who do not.  It is an...

argument about the types of liberties that need to be protected...   and it is an attempt to

protect the most fundamental liberty of all – freedom from harm by others.

60

 

This begs a number of questions, not least the matter of who are  ‛the others‛ from whom we

must be protected, and what kinds of harms can ‛these others‛ inflict which inhibit and threaten

our freedom to govern ourselves and be governed as confident and secure individuals.  I want

to suggest that an oppositional relation between self and  ‛harmful others‛ is currently, and

primarily mobilised through the inculcation of certain affective states of being in the world;

these, in turn, encourage a receptivity to alternative governmental realities and forms of (self-)

government – an ontology which Bennett theorises as ‛a mood with ethical potential.‛

61

 

More or less government?

In the late spring of 2006, the UK experienced what might best be described as an emotional

rollercoaster of existential angst.

62

    Scandals, crises, fiascos, incompetencies, controversial sentencing, murders, abductions, rapes, ministerial sackings, prison abscondings, clandestine employment and a call from the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Lord Ramsbotham, for the

Prime Minister to  ‛shut up,‛

63

created the conditions for a very public, and highly mediated

debate on the scope and ambition of government, and its ability to meet  ‛its core purpose of

protecting the public.‛

64

                                                

59 Tony Blair, ‚Our Citizens Should Not Live In Fear‛,  The Observer (December 11, 2005),

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1664591,00.html (accessed May 17, 2007).

60

  Ibid.

61

Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 131.

62

I am not suggesting that the UK experience is, or was unique.   Indeed, the UK government’s responses to the

risks and threats posed by terrorism, crime and disorder, as well as the (assumed) public receptivity to them,

are fairly typical of liberal democratic governance in the name of security.  See, for example, the series of essays

published by the US Social Science Research Council  - Seyla Benhabib, ‚Unholy Politics,‛ After September 11:

Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC, 2002),  www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/benhabib.htm (accessed 12 April

2010).  Didier Bigo, ‚To Reassure and Protect After September 11,‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic

Virtues (SSRC, 2002),  www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/bigo.htm (accessed 12 April 2010).  Kansishka Jayasuriya,

‚9/11 and the New ‚Anti-politics‛ of ‚Security,‛‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC,

2002), www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/jayasuriya.htm (accessed 1 May 2009).  Peter A.  Meyers, ‚Defend Politics

Against Terrorism,‛ After September 11: Terrorism and Democratic Virtues (SSRC, 2002), found at

www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/meyers.htm (accessed 12 April 2010).  See also, Chris Sparks, ‚Liberalism, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear,‛ Politics, 23, 3 (2003): 200-206.

63

  Nigel Morris, ‚Blair Told to ‘Shut Up’ About Prison Sentencing,‛ The Independent (June 16, 2006), 4

64 Home Office, From Improvement to Transformation: An Action Plan to Reform the Home Office So It Meets Public

Expectations and Delivers Its Core Purpose of Protecting the Public (London: Home Office, 2006), 2.Campbell: The Emotional Life

46

In the United  Kingdom in 2006, over the course of a few months, there was scarcely a

governmental constituency which did not in some way constitute a ‛harmful other.‛   Amongst

these, the usual suspects of terrorists, criminals and the  ‛permanently delinquent‛

65 did not so

much loom large as form a backdrop of prevailing terror, suspicion, fear and intimidation upon

which a range of different emotions came to be refracted.   The passions stirred by the  ‛most

harmful‛ are nothing new and form the kernel of primordial affectivities  that sustain the need

for government of any kind.   What was novel about 2006 was how a series of  ‛unfortunate

events‛ triggered a range of emotional dispositions  that called into question what it means to

govern and be governed; and as the year progressed, different emotional harms not only

exposed the self as vulnerable, unprotected and ontologically precarious, but also came to

invest, inspire and produce an affective formation of uncertainty.   In April 2006, the  ‛foreign

prisoners scandal‛ focused attention on the Home Office; whether it and the Home Secretary

were ‛fit for purpose‛ was a question which persisted long after Charles Clarke’s dismissal in

the following month, and continued under the incoming stewardship of John Reid.  The scandal

centred on the revelation that an estimated 1,023 foreign prisoners had been released from

prison between 1999 and March 2006 and had not subsequently been deported.   It further

emerged that there was an unknown number of serious offenders (murderers and rapists)

among those released, but the actual number was never determined and was variably reported

as anything from 5 to 179.

66 Perhaps the most honest report came from David Roberts at the

Immigration and Nationality Directorate who admitted that he had not got the ‛faintest idea‛ as

to how many illegal immigrants there were in the United  Kingdom.   Later that same week,

attention turned to the revelation that more than  twenty convicted murderers had absconded

from Leyhill Open Prison in the past five years; but this figure was to be quickly revised

upwards following a BBC investigation which found that more than three hundred inmates had

absconded from the prison in the previous three years.

67

In the meantime, the head of the Prison

Service, Phil Wheatley, was compiling his own statistics, and two days later admitted that

around  seven  hundred prisoners had absconded from the open prison estate in the previous

year alone.

68 Not to be excluded from what was rapidly becoming a spectator sport, the

spotlight belatedly fell on the Criminal Records Bureau when it made public that 2,700

‛innocent people‛ had been wrongly screened as having criminal records, with some being

turned down for jobs as a result.

69

It was little wonder that as this catalogue of errors began to

unfold, the Prime Minister ‛stumbled over answers when he gave them, and his mood appeared

something between depressed and fed up.   The authoritative, commanding,  dismissive Blair

was nowhere to be seen.‛

70

    3,822 comments were contributed to the online discussion,  Should

                                               

65 Mitchell Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ Economy and Society, 31, 1 (2002), 48.

68 BBC News, ‚At-a-Glance: Home Office Woes,‛ BBC News (May 22, 2006)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4946460.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).

67 Chris Kelly, ‚Inmates Walk Out Weekly From Jail,‛ BBC News (May 19, 2006)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4998306.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).

68 BBC News, ‚At-a-Glance: Home Office Woes.‛

69

Ibid.

70 Nick Assinder, ‚Clarke Starting to Look isolated,‛ BBC News (April 26, 2006)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4946460.stm (accessed December 14, 2006).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

47

Charles Clarke Resign?

71 with ‛shocking,‛ scandalous,‛ ‛sickening,‛ ‛dismayed,‛ ‛annoying‛ and

‛stunned‛ featuring prominently as emotional harms caused by the saga of Home Office and

ministerial blunders. 

If the ‛foreign prisoners scandal‛ and its aftermath had not already shaken confidence in

the capacity of the state to protect the public, further revelations continued to expose the

fragility of government in uncertain times.  A series of high-profile murders which culminated

in court trials and sentencing in the spring of 2006, raised serious concerns about the

effectiveness of offender management within the community.  For example, on November 2005,

Mary-Ann Leneghan was kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered by  six youths, four of

whom were under the supervision of the Probation Service at the time.  Quite predictably, and

responding to a wave of public criticism and negative press coverage, the incoming Home

Secretary, John Reid, was swift to pledge a review and overhaul of the Probation Service

admitting that there were ‛shortcomings< to be frank, the probation system is not working as

well as it should.‛

72 By the end of the year, the Home Office had published figures which

confirmed that more than  five hundred serious, violent and sexual offences (including rape),

and ninety-eight murders had been committed by offenders under probation supervision in the

previous two years (The Scotsman, December 6, 2006).  Even though the politicians restated the

issue as one of organisational and operational failures  that could be addressed by reform, a

bystanding public grew ever anxious but in a much more diffuse sense.   In desperation, a

contributor to the online discussion,  Do we need a Probation Service review? pleaded  ‛for God’s

sake protect us!‛

73

In the same discussion, Ian from Whitwick asked:

How many more innocent people have to be murdered before the public are protected.  I

am really so angry that the Courts, Police and Probation services have failed to achieve their

prime directive: TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC FROM DANGEROUS PEOPLE! (sorry for

shouting).  (Uppercase in original).

74

From this perspective, which was shared by many other discussants, the failures of one

statutory service was taken as symptomatic of a wider malaise of institutional government  that

was rapidly losing its protective appeal.  In an article which was cautious of punitive remedies

and sceptical of the ‛good sense‛ of organisational overhaul, Mary Riddell argued of the MaryAnn Leneghan case, that:

                                               

71 BBC News, ‚Should Charles Clarke Resign?‛ Have Your Say, BBC News (Discussion opened April 25, 2006,

and closed May 2, 2006).

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/no1/thread.jspa?threadID=1570&&&edition=1&tt1=20061219180037

(accessed December 19, 2006).

72

  BBC News, ‚Reid proposes Probation Overhaul,‛ BBC News (November 7, 2006).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6123966.stm (accessed December 19, 2006).

73 Lend a Hand, ‚Do We Need a Probation Service Review?‛Have Your Say, BBC News (Discussion opened and

closed March 20, 2006). 

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=i&threadID=1374&start=0&tstart=0&edition=1

(accessed December 19, 2006).

74

Ibid.Campbell: The Emotional Life

48

The Probation Service is the wrong target here.  If Michael Johnson and his five co-torturers

were really all ‚psychopaths‛ that would not be so frightening.  Johnson himself sounds a

particularly brutal character.  But some of his gang sound chillingly normal  – young men

who tangled with drugs and relatively minor offences before somehow bonding together to

form a death squad.

75

Here, Riddell hints at the collapse of the binary which separates ‛Us‛ and ‛Them,‛ the ‛normal‛

and the  ‛pathological,‛ the  ‛fearful‛ and the  ‛feared.‛ Such a collapse evokes a Gothic sensibility, triggering emotional displacements about our being in the world and amplifying deepseated concerns and anxieties associated with a specific socio-political and historical moment.  In

short, things are never quite what they seem.

76 A different kind of expressive logic was articulated in the online discussion.   Nick from Warwickshire, UK wrote:

The most frightening thing about the gang that killed that teenager is that they didn’t care;

care about abducting the girls, care about torturing and raping them, care about killing

them,  care about being caught or care about going to prison.  How are we going to deal

with individuals like this is anyone’s guess.  We have a whole generation coming up that

doesn’t give a second thought about using extreme violence as a daily event.

77

For Nick, the greatest fear was the apparent loss of an ethics of care and the absence of

mutuality; in prospect was the advent of a Hobbesian state of nature, and a future which was in

the hands of a generation  that, having already normalised violence, were sounding the death

knell for sociality. 

Even without a prevailing meta-narrative of insecurity, these several events conspire to

further undermine trust and confidence in the capacity of governmental authorities, techniques

and forms of expertise to police the boundary between order and chaos leaving the self exposed,

vulnerable and seeking its own protection.  Mead suggests that when the conditions for stability

and certainty are not met, people will gravitate to more authoritarian forms of government – he

notes  that  ‛(p)eople are not interested in  ‛freedom‛ if they are<    in any fundamental way

insecure.  They will want more government not less.‛

78 This view may account for the emergence of an ‛authoritarian liberalism‛

79

and the ‛ratcheting up (of) one of the undisputed core

functions of government  – the maintenance of order and security  – creating more and more

efficient police, and promoting more punishments.‛

80

It also goes some way to accounting for

                                                

75 Mary Riddell, ‚Savage Truth?‛ Comment Is Free, Guardian Unlimited (March 23, 2006).

http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree>mary_riddell (accessed May 17, 2007).

76 See, for example, Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996).

77 BBC News, ‚Do We Need a Probation Service Review?‛

78 Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Press, 1986), 6, cited in

Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ 38.

79 See, for example, Marianne Valverde, ‚’Despotism’ and Ethical Governance,‛ Economy and Society, 25, 3

(1996), 357-372.  Barry Hindess ‚The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,‛ Alternatives: Social Transformation and

Humane Governance, 26, 1 (2001), 93-111.  Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛ Mitchell Dean,

‚Powers of Life and Death Beyond Governmentality,‛ Cultural Values, 6, 1&2 (2002), 119-138.

80 Malcolm Feely, ‚Crime, Social order and the Rise of neo-Conservative Politics,‛ Theoretical Criminology, 7, 1

(2003), 124.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

49

the advent of the  ‛new punitiveness‛ driven by a virulent  ‛punitive populism‛ and its

concomitant clamour for retributive, incapacitative and deterrent forms of justice.

81 The punitivity/authoritarian thesis has a certain prima facie appeal, but in much the same way as Žižek’s

notion of the  ‛unconscious supplement‛ it rests on some dubious and contradictory assumptions about both the strength  and direction of the relationship between  ‛structures of feeling‛

and authoritarian forms of  rule.

82 Moreover, and again following Žižek, it tends to regard

‛collective sentiments‛ as the expression of a monolithic public in a universally punitive mood. 

Put another way, ‛punitive passions‛ do not exhaust the range of sensibilities that an affectivity

of insecurity and uncertainty might involve  – for example, feelings of disappointment,

frustration, bewilderment, sorrow, despair, anger, shock, insult and confusion all feature in the

public discourse detailed above.   Consequently, we would need to ask how an ontology of

confidence and trust in the work of government – especially its sovereign and disciplinary forms

– is conjured out of an aesthetic of these negative dispositions; how is a state of confidence

rendered technical, governmental and political and what kinds of ethical commitments are

inspired by it; what are the techniques of self-government which enfold insecure subjectivities

and reproduce them as confident, assured citizens?

Authoritarian and other selves

Whenever attention is paid to the authoritarian orientations of liberal democratic societies, there

is a tendency within criminology to focus exclusively on statutory institutions and those measures which rely on the exercise of sovereign and disciplinary power – such as harsher, deterrent

sentencing; high visibility and targeted policing; greater use of surveillance technologies;

intensification of juridical powers.  This limited focus results in a void in our understanding of

what it means to govern the  ‛authoritarian self‛ in a context of insecurity and disorder. 

Nonetheless, there are important expositions of the form, means, function and content of

‛authoritarian techniques of the self‛ to be found in the wider sociological literature.   I am

thinking here of Hindess’ essay on the notion of ‛(self-)improvement‛ and its centrality to what

he describes as ‛the liberal government of unfreedom;‛

83

and Valverde’s innovative work on the

notion of ‛habit‛ and its role as a key technique for different forms of self-despotism.

84

In each

of these accounts, practices of self-government are always-already embedded within the

‛common obligations of citizenship‛

85

such that by working through a programme of selfimprovement, or resolving to rid oneself of  ‛bad habits‛ expresses a social and political

relationship and an ethical commitment to others. 

Dean talks of the formation of citizen-subjects as concerning a ‛‛mode of subjectification‛

or ‚mode of obligation‛< the position we take or are given in relation to rules and norms<

                                               

81 See, for example, David Garland, The Culture of Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).  John Pratt,

David Brown, Mark Brown, Simon Hallsworth  & Wayne Morrison (eds.),  The New Punitiveness: Trends,

Theories, Perspectives (Cullompton: Willan, 2005).  John Pratt, Penal Populism (London: Routledge, 2007).

82

  See, for example, Roger Matthews, ‚The Myth of Punitiveness,‛ Theoretical Criminology, 9, 2 (2005), 175-201.

83 Hindess, ‚The Liberal Government of Unfreedom.‛

84 Valverde, ‚’Despotism’ and Ethical Governance.‛

85 Mead, 12, cited in Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,‛ 39.Campbell: The Emotional Life

50

why we govern ourselves or others in a particular manner.‛

86 Though I agree with Dean’s

analysis, deontological questions do not solely involve normative ways of  thinking,  being and

doing; this overlooks the transformative potential of affective modes, and how particular ways of

feeling are implicated in practices of the self, in the production of self-alterity, of becoming-other,

of feeling otherwise in order to be otherwise. 

In September 2005, the UK government set up a Respect Task Force, appointing both a

Government Co-ordinator (Louise Casey) and a Minister for Respect (Hazel Blears) to oversee

its progress.  Committing £80 million of new funding to the programme, in January 2006, the

Prime Minister published a Respect Action Plan and by the end of October 2006, the Respect

agenda had established its own Respect Squad and set up its own web-site and action hotline. 

With its nifty logo and catchy sound bites, the roll-out of the Respect programme was well

underway before, during and after the spring scandals had left the UK citizenry reeling in

despair for its own protection.   Accompanied by a good deal of trumpet-blowing, the programme promised to deliver an  affective mode of obligation which would enhance ethicality,

mutuality and sociality.  In the launch speech for the Respect Action Plan, Blair announced:

Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community.  It is about the

consideration that others are due.   It is about the duty I have to respect the rights that you

hold dear.  And vice-versa.  It is about our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant

that we have with one another.

87

To earn respect, feel respect, be respectable, act respectfully is, then, expressive of an affirmative

ethical affiliation, and for Blair, is an affective disposition held by the majority of people.  For

example, in the launch speech, he comments,  ‛(o)f course, the  overwhelming majority of people

understand this intuitively and have no trouble living side by side with their neighbour;‛

88

and

in the foreword of the Respect Action Plan, he notes that  ”(m)ost of us learn respect from our

parents and our families.‛

89

It is this reference to ‛the majority‛ – those who are capable of selfgovernment as respectable citizens  – juxtaposed with ‛the minority‛ – those who have limited

or no capacity for living an ethical life based on respect for others  – which is of particular

interest here.  As Dean reminds us, in liberal democratic societies, those who do not, cannot or

will not form themselves as subjects of government are eligible for authoritarian techniques of

rule.

90 Thus, the Respect Action Plan makes it crystal clear that  ‛(e)veryone can change  – if

people who need help will not take it, we will make them.‛

91

What seems to be proposed here is a cartography of  un/governable subjects.  With the

assurance that those who lack respect are to be subjects of and subjected to authoritarian

technologies of rule, the  ‛rest of us‛ can be (more) confident of living in a stable, ordered and

                                               

86 Dean, ‚Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,‛ 224.

87 Tony Blair, Respect Action Plan Launch Speech, (January 10, 2006, original emphasis)

http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page8898.asp (accessed May 17, 2007).

88

Ibid., Emphasis added.

89 Respect Task Force, Respect Action Plan (London: COI, 2006), Emphasis added.

90 Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛

91 Respect Task Force, 1.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

51

certain society.  To realise this telos, rather than rely on ‛deep-end‛ authoritarian measures  as

conventionally conceived in articulations of  ‛more government,‛ sovereign and disciplinary

forms of government are to be put to work in, by and for the community.  In other words, in a

process of responsibilisation,

92

civil society forms the key locus for the deployment of a range of

affective technologies for constituting subjectivities of both confidence and respect, displacing

(though not replacing) the need for overt practices of  ‛crime control‛ in favour of a series of

networks of obligation and alliances of mutuality. 

Arts of the emotional self

The Respect programme assumes the existence of a  ‛respectable majority‛ who, despite their

own capacity to self-govern, need to work on themselves and others to achieve an affective state

of confidence and assurance.   Such an ascesis is most clearly spelled out in the strategy document, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain: The Home Office Strategic Plan 2004-2008,

93 which

is further elaborated in the Together We Can Action Plan,

94

and is articulated repeatedly as  ‛our

(the government’s) commitments to law-abiding citizens.‛ Amongst other things,  ‛the respectable majority‛ is encouraged to make use of an array of ‛new‛ opportunities and arrangements

for getting involved in community concerns by, for example, keeping themselves informed of,

and getting involved in the steps taken by local agencies to address local cultures of disrespect;

by taking a stand against anti-social behaviour by reporting incivilities; by regular updating to

the  ‛relevant authorities‛ of the impact of anti-social behaviour in neighbourhoods; and by

helping to set local policing priorities and making suggestions for specific actions from local

policing teams.  Through  these governmental modalities, the  ‛respectable majority‛ is thereby

transformed into a variegated and fluid network of responsible authorities, and through this

process is enabled to self-actualise (become-other) as a confident citizenry.  But what of ‛the minority,‛ those who lack respect and for whom a more authoritarian approach may be necessary? 

As Dean notes, authoritarian liberalism distinguishes between subjects according to their

relative capacities for autonomy.

95 Thus, as well as their difference from  ‛the majority,‛ within

‛the minority‛ are those  ‛who can be profitably assisted in the exercise of their own freedom

and those who must be coerced.‛

96

In relation to the former, the Respect agenda holds that

‛parenting is one of the most important responsibilities in creating a strong society based on

mutual respect.‛

97 Parenting technologies, therefore, constitute a key component for inculcating

appropriate dispositions and aesthetic comportments.   It may be that individuals within  ‛the

minority‛ are capable of self-governance in some aspects of their lives  – as consumers, as

employees, as tenants, for example  – but if, as parents, they  ‛are unwilling, or unable to meet

their responsibilities we (‛the majority‛) must ensure that they are challenged and supported to

do so.‛

98 Support comes by way of various  ‛new‛ services, interventions and sources of

                                               

92 Rose, ‚Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism.‛  Garland, The Culture of Control.

93 Home Office, Confident Communities in a Secure Britain.

94 Civil Renewal Unit, Together We Can (London: Home Office, 2005).

95 Dean, ‚Liberal Government and Authoritarianism.‛

96

Ibid, 47.

97 Respect Task Force, 17.

98

Ibid., 17.Campbell: The Emotional Life

52

financial, social and cultural help for both parents and their children.  Challenge, on the other

hand, renders support compulsory, enforced via a panoply of new and extended (out-of-court)

summary powers of which the ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) is the most notorious.  At

the level of ascesis, then, the operationalisation of liberal/illiberal modes of governance maps

onto a dichotomised population wherein membership of  ‛the majority‛/‛the minority‛ is

determined by the presence/absence – and within this latter, the educability – of an aesthetics of

respect.  In light of this, I want to suggest that the modalities and techniques of liberal/illiberal

forms of government are mobilised through familiar  ‛taxonomies of affect‛ or what I have

termed,  ‛emotionalities of rule.‛    In this paper, I have examined confidence and respect as

‛emotionalities of rule,‛ as preferred and promoted sensibilities which are  nurtured, engendered and enfolded through specific governmental technologies and practices.   Of course,

confidence and respect do not exhaust the emotionalities  that circulate in governmental

discourses; we can think, for example, of how tolerance, compassion, optimism and (even)

happiness

99

assume a special relevance and importance within liberalism – these are not merely

personal dispositions but are expressive of a specific political and ethical relation.   Quite

properly, then, we can speak of ‛emotionalities of rule‛ as arts of government through which we

seek to govern and be governed in sentient, aesthetic and affective ways. 

4. Conclusion

Analyses inspired by Foucauldian governmentality do not purport to apply theory to the

empirical world, and thereby explain it.  Rather, the Foucauldian project suggests a number of

conceptual tools for understanding how different forms of government are made thinkable and

do-able, and  how subjectivities are formed and transformed when autonomous individuals

identify with a complex array of governmental technologies, strategies and expert authorities. 

However, and despite a rich and diverse ‛governmentality scholarship,‛ little attention has been

paid to how desire, affect and sensate life is implicated in processes of subjectification; how

passion can prompt (or not) an identification with governmental programmes; and how

‛emotionalities of rule‛ propose and suggest ways of feeling about the world – how we should

feel about ourselves and others, how we participate in, cultivate and enact an aesthetic life, and

how we seek to govern and be governed in sentient, expressive ways.  The case study presented

here demonstrates how questions of government, power and politics, morality and ethics can

never be solely a matter of cognition and reason.   To assume that self-directing individuals

identify with particular technologies and practices of the self on purely instrumental grounds is

to deny the emotional and affective intensities which circulate, permeate and inform cognitive

and discursive ways of being, doing and saying.   It is these intensities which confront and

unsettle our ontological security, and which not only trouble our sense of social order and

stability but also provoke a questioning of the work of government and its capacity to direct our

own and others‛ conduct.  Moreover, such emotional  ‛disturbances‛ are not reducible to a

singular psychic state  – melancholia, as psychoanalysis would have it  – but are highly

differentiated, complex and fluid such that they open up multiple ‛lines of flight‛ and initiate a

plethora of alternative possibilities for the (re-)formation of un/governable subjectivities. 

                                               

99 Minette Marrin, ‚The dangerous Business of happiness,‛ The Sunday Times (June 18, 2006), 16.Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.

53

However, such moments of intensity may incite new identities and provoke ethical attachments

that are inimical to particular regimes of rule such that they pose dangers for that regime, and

problematise its modes and rationalities of governance.  In the case study, loss of confidence in

the work of government, along with expressed feelings of distrust, disappointment, shock,

outrage, confusion and fear, create the affective conditions for questioning the exercise of

governmental power in a liberal, democratic society, and prompt the need to realign an

uncertain citizenry as confident, assured subjects  – a process which I have described as the

‛enfolding of emotionalities.‛ There is much to be learned from an account that places affective

agency at the heart of an analytics of government.   First, it alerts us to the way in which modes

of obligation within liberalism involve obligations not only to legal and moral codes, but also to

normative sensibilities, particular ways of feeling which are deemed appropriate to sustain

political and ethical life in a liberal society  – for example, tolerance, confidence, compassion,

trust, optimism.  Secondly, it suggests that participation in and full membership of civil society

relies as much on an affective identity as it does on any other kind of selfhood, as a  ‛rational

actor,‛ for example.  Thirdly, and following this last point, an account which centres on affective

life emphasises how politico-ethical credentials are demonstrated and established not solely by a

capacity to be a self-enterprising or self-sufficient individual, but also relies on expressive

capabilities and the display of certain aesthetic qualities.   Finally, while the co-existence and

intersection of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power has been widely recognised,

very little attention has been paid to the way in which taxonomies of affect underwrite the

deployment of liberal/illiberal modes of governance across constituencies differentiated by

ontologies of feeling.  Governing through subjectivities of affect is, then, an integral strategy of

governance and is indispensable to the notion of governing through freedom. 

Elaine Campbell

Reader in Criminology

School of Geography, Politics and Sociology

Claremont Bridge

Newcastle University

Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU

United Kingdom

Elaine.Campbell@ncl.ac.uk

No comments:

Post a Comment