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
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