Governmentality and the Aesthetic State: A Chinese Fantasia

Since Michel Foucault proposed the concept of "governmental rationality" or "governmentality" in a series of lectures in the late 1970s, it has inspired a distinct body of scholarship on the art or practice of government—who can govern, what governing is, and who is governed. According to Foucault and his interpreters, from the ancient Greek and Christian notion of "pastoral power," to early modern European theories of the raison d'état or Polizeiwissenschaft, and to the modern welfare state, a common pattern of governmental rationality is discernible that aspires to be a government of all and of each, to totalize as well as to individualize.¹ Key to governmentality is the operation of "biopower," or "a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them."² The prime object of biopower is people conceived of as "population." In the nineteenth century, the rise of the notion of population marked the "entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques."³ For the first time in history, governments became directly involved in the species problems of health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, and race.⁴

Although much of the scholarship on governmentality has focused on modern Europe, recent efforts have brought Foucault's insights to postcolonial studies. David Scott positions his own work beyond the Orientalist problematic, which in his view has largely limited postcolonial criticism to "writing back at the West" and exposing the mechanisms of discrimination, exclusion, and depredation.⁵ The Foucaultian approach introduces the notion of power that works not against but through the construction of the social and ethical subject. It therefore shifts our attention to the political rationalities of colonial power, specifically its targets and field of operation. In highlighting the historically differentiated structures of colonial rule, Scott hopes to mark the modernity of a specific moment in the career of colonial power, which for him is the turn from mercantilism to governmentality. He seeks to understand the practices, modalities, and projects through which colonial power inserts itself into the lives of the colonized, disabling old forms of life and constructing new forms, and constituting "the domain of the colonial."⁶ Likewise, Prasenjit Duara seeks to understand the political rationality of Japanese colonial power in Manchukuo, arguing that the concept of governmentality captures, in a comparable but more complex and less teleological way, the process previously known as "modernization."⁷ By focusing on the government of conduct, or colonial power relations at the level of civil society, he is able to shed light on the complex linkage among imperialism, nationalism, and the discourses of sovereignty and civilization in ways that conventional modes of historiography have failed to do.

In the same way that the concept of governmentality takes postcolonial criticism beyond Orientalism, it enables us to recuperate Benedict Anderson's important thesis that colonial nationalism is "modular" without reducing it to a derivative discourse or mimicry. The modernizing elites of early-twentieth-century China, like Anderson's bilingual intelligentsias in colonial Asia and Africa, consciously drew on earlier models of nationalism in deploying modern educational systems, republicanism, party organizations, and cultural celebrations in order to stretch the tight skin of the nation over the gigantic and decrepit body of the dynastic empire.⁸ In the process, they mobilized modern political rationalities and techniques to meet the challenges of managing the newly emerging Chinese "populations" and to countervail the spiraling process of "state involution."⁹ From Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles to the rise of the social sciences in China, the state-sponsored and elite-led quest for modernity can very well be characterized as a quest for total knowledge: measures, statistics, surveillance, ordering, examination, and interventions. If the welfare of the people has, in a fateful way, become the central concern of the state, it is because the state, newly legitimized by nationalism, conceives of the people—as population—as...