Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discovery

“Medieval cities, wrote Foucault, already relied on two types of measures to deal with perceived threats such as leprosy and plague: exclusion and quarantine (Curtis 2002).”

“In a highly perceptive and critical article, Bruce Curtis has analysed the use (and abuse) of the term ‘population’ in Foucault’s writings (Curtis, 2002).”

“To the contrary, he tended to naturalise population as an object on which power can act and as a thing that follows natural processes and laws (Curtis, 2002).”

“Curtis (2002) argued on empirical grounds that Foucault misconstrued historical events, in particular the placement of the “discovery” of population in the eighteenth century and more generally that Foucault’s historical argument is empirically weak.”

“Morbidity and mortality figures, as well as fertility figures, were key for the idea not just of ‘populousness’, but population (Curtis, 2002).”

“…that the population as an object of knowledge is rendered possible by the French Revolution, that puts all members of society on an equal standing (Curtis, 2002, p. 530). each class should have sufficient volume so as to remain statistically valid and to show the needed collective regularity…”

“Thus, the goal of democratic action is to contest continuously not the government, but the truths and rationality upon which the government relies for its techniques and strategies of governing the population (Curtis, 2002, p. 525).”

“(Foucault 1989, p. 106, cited in Curtis, 2002, p. 507) As Foucault (2001) comments in ‘The political technology of individuals’, the ‘rise and development of our modern political rationality’ as ‘reason of state’, that is, as a specific rationality intrinsic to the state, is formulated through ‘a…”

“For well over two decades, population geographers, including Curtis (2002), Philo (2001, 2005), Legg (2005), and Tyner (2009) have called on population scholars to engage critically with the work of Foucault.”

“It might be argued that contemporary regimes of governmentality are increasingly characterised by multiple forms of pastoralism that together contribute to the internalisation and normalisation of desirable, and self-governing, subjectivities (Curtis, 2002).”

“Nor did he devote much conceptual attention to the key term “population” (Curtis 2002).”

“on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, Curtis (2002) has described the lack of discussion as to how Foucault’s theories apply in real-world contexts, such as the government’s construction of populations as intelligible objects.”

“Catalyzed by the ‘politico-sanitary’ panics of the urban bourgeoise (Curtis, 2002; Foucault, 2000b), cleansing the public sphere from waste of every kind, be it physical or moral, became one of the central concerns of the state apparatus.”

“…it was the wide-spread systematic collection of information in anticipation of future analysis and retrieval that differentiates mid-nineteenth century documentary practices from existing administrative practices which tended to keep events filed in their ‘local singularity’ (Curtis 2002, p. 528).”

“The concept has been mobilised as a technology to investigate, control and intervene on the health of people (Curtis, 2002).”

“In the early 21st century, however, the thesis that the population ‘existed’ and was waiting to be ‘discovered’ has been challenged (Curtis, 2002).”

“Moreover, these biopolitical interventions produce the population as a national population (Curtis 2002; Foucault, 2007), with such practices also productive of national (and subnational) subjectivities (e.g. Agarwal, 2005) and notions of national exceptionalism (e.g. Puar, 2017).”

“The implications of this argument therefore are that understanding power solely as centralised at the level of global governance institutions (see Curtis 2002), while necessary, is not sufficient for grasping the challenges associated with ineffective development policy outcomes.”

“…to governmentality appear in state work, in the manner in which documents like the ‘transgender card’ are proposed as every-person-identifiers (Curtis, 2002, p. 532), it is the unevenness in the presence of multiple and contradictory signifiers – dysphoria, self-identification, ‘culture’ –…”

“The Canadian censuses have also recently been associated with the construction of the complicated relationships that one finds with First Nations people in Canada (Curtis 2002; Neu and Therrien 2003).”

“See Curtis (2001, 2002, 2006).”

“It is one of the primary ways the German state produces knowledge about its population, thereby constructing its population as an object of knowledge practices and political interventions (Curtis, 2002a, 2002b; Desrosières, 2010; Foucault, 2007; Sætnan et al., 2011).”

“These governing discourses resonate with Foucault ’ s argument that, ‘ he who governs, must only govern to the extent that he thinks and acts as if he were in the service of those who are governed ’ (Foucault, 1994, pp. 146 – 147; as cited in Curtis, 2002, p. 9).”

“In this regard, Curtis (2002) offers an interesting development of the concept of ‘population’ and points out an important distinction between populousness and population: ‘Population’ is dependent, in the first instance, on the establishment of practical equivalences among subjects, objects or…”

“In a commentary of Foucault ’ s history of population governance, Curtis describes how ‘ discovery is not a rediscovery, but a new construction ’ (Curtis 2002, 511).”

“Ultimately it is about making the individual govern herself or himself in a certain way (Curtis 2002; Foucault 2008; Nilsson 2008, p. 124).”

“See Curtis (2002) for the different ways that Foucault discusses population.”

“Next, Foucault traces the intensification of agricultural production and the attendant shift in enumeration techniques (but see Curtis 2002).”

“…a rejection of death, the Christian sense of community serves as a forerunner of the emergence of what Foucault calls a population – the reduction of the life of the collective to forms of variables that in the end turn collective life into a target of the modern exercise of power (Curtis 2002).”

“For well over two decades, population geographers, including Curtis (2002), Philo (2001, 2005), Legg (2005), and Tyner (2009) have called on population scholars to engage critically with the work of Foucault.”

“Moreover, authors such as Curtis (2002), or Singer and Weir (2008), suggest that the ‘doubly constructed object’ of population, upon which Foucault’s modern form and grid of power operates ‘is coincident with the effective capacity of sovereign authority to discipline social relations’ (Curtis…”

“커티스(Curtis)와 딘(Dean)에 따르면, 근대사회의 자유주의 시장경제는 경제 형식 이라기보다는 통치의 형식이다[4,5].”

“Foucault’s admonition that ‘he who governs must only govern to the extent that he thinks and acts … in the service of those who are governed’ (cited in Curtis 2002) underlines the essence of democracy and the practice of power.”

“The population was a statistical artifact that could be addressed in its generality—public health, birth rates, crime rates, and so on, where the individual was looked upon just as one constitutive element of a category.(29) In cases of medical practice, for example, the individual was foremost the constitutive member…”

“level of the state as experts make determinations that effect legislation (Miller & Rose, 2008; Curtis, 2002).”

“These new ‘regulatory controls of biopolitics’ supplemented the anatamo-political apparatuses of disciplinary power, which were primarily oriented towards the conduct of individual bodies (Curtis 2002, pp. 518–19; Foucault 1976, pp. 139–40; 2020b, pp. 242–43; Hoffman 2014, pp. 71–74).”

“Discussing Foucauldian understanding of control, Curtis (2002) writes, “Contemporary societies continue to contain struggles against direct domination and against capitalist exploitation, but increasingly they manifest social struggles against the forms of subjection themselves” (2002, p. 527).”

“…Foucault’s methodological approach, I focus on metropolitan governance, narrowing the scope to Warsaw between 1764 and 1794 and concentrating on ‘mid-level’ institutions like hospitals, prisons and municipal regulations instead of high-level state discourses (Curtis, 2002; Dean, 2002: 157–73).”

“…development of the work of abstraction whereby regularities emerge through the creation of relations of equivalence among heterogeneous entities. . . . ‘Population’ is dependent, in the first instance, on the establishment of practical equivalences among subjects” (Bruce Curtis 2002, 508).”

“Like the hospitals that enabled the species’s characteristics to be observed and life to become an object of power in Foucault’s histories (see Curtis 2002, 514–515), he contends that “[r]ationing underpinned the first ‘scientific’ account of Central Australia’s Indigenous people” (Rowse 1998, 4).”