Identities, Politics, and Rights

Taking Liberties in Foucault's Triangle: Sovereignty, Discipline, Governmentality, and the Subject of Rights

Taking Liberties in Foucault's Triangle: Sovereignty, Discipline, Governmentality, and the Subject of Rights Kirstie M. McClure SALUS POPULI SUPREMA LEX VOX POPULI VOX DEI By repetition across time and place old slogans have a way of taking on new meanings, new referents and resonances, new implications. With the emergence of what Tocqueville called "the democratic revolution " and, more particularly, with its articulation through the institutions of representative government, we might say that variations on these two were wedded into the hypothetical conditional of popular sovereignty: if the purpose of government is the good of the people, then the voice of the people must command the government. Sedimented as this is by now into the common sense of liberal democratic cultures, there may seem little need for evidencing either its virtue or its relationship to the language of rights. And yet, a variety of recent theoretical perspectives suggest the necessity of rethinking that common sense in fundamental respects. Michel Foucault, for example, argues that the legal-juridical frame of sovereignty within which rights make political sense has been not only colonized by new apparatuses of disciplinary knowledge, but deeply and complexly imbricated with "governmentality," with techniques of power concerned not with the obligations and liberties of rights-bearing juridical subjects but with the management of "population," with the "convenient 149 IDENTITIES, POLITICS, AND RIGHTS disposition" of people and things.1 These new forms of power, on his account, are sufficiently distinct from the questions of rightful resistance to oppression that circulate through the discourse of sovereignty as to preclude effective recourse to the language of rights.2 And yet, curiously, even Foucault refused to relinquish the notion of "right" entirely. "If one wants," he observed, " . . . to struggle against disciplines and disciplinary power, it is not towards the ancient right of sovereignty that one should tum, but towards the possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be anti-disciplinary, but at the same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty."3 What such a new form ofright might have to do with claims to rights is by no means clear. But what is crystalline above all else is that it calls not only for a rethinking ofrights but a rethinking as well ofthe notion of the autonomous "individual" who is supposed to be their necessary bearer. And it is this potent challenge, Foucault argued, that constitutes "the political , ethical, social, philosophical problem" of the present. As he posed it, the task is not to "liberate the individual from the state and the state institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries."4 Foucault's work, however, is not the only quarter from which we are urged today to rethink the relationship between sovereignty, resistance , and the language of rights. Concurring with his refusal of "the subject" as a unified and unifying essence, agreeing as well with his contention that "wherever there is power there is resistance," Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe pose a similarly provocative challenge by pointing to "the democratic revolution" as a series of historical struggles embracing successively broader and more dispersed fields of social 1. "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977 , ed. Colin Gordon (New York: PantheonlRandom House, 1980); "Govemmentality ," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); "Reason and Politics," in Michel Foucault Politics/Philosophy/Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 19771984 , ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988); "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed., ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 2. "Two Lectures," 108. 3. Ibid. 4. "Subject and Power," 216. TAKING LIBERTIES IN FOUCAULT'S TRIANGLE antagonism and political contestation.5 From workers' and women's struggles, to struggles for the civil rights ofethnic and racial minorities, to contemporaryresistancesaround questions ofsexualityand environmental politics, they argue that the historical expansion of that revolution has effected a series of displacements of the line of demarcation between public and private, bringing various forms of subordination once considered "private" into question. On Laclau and Mouffe's account , however, the possibility of sustaining such radicalizations...