History of the Human

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Putting the technological into government

Mitchell Dean
History of the Human Sciences 1996 9: 47
DOI: 10.1177/095269519600900303

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 47-

Putting the technological into

government
MITCHELL DEAN

... the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual
employment and place in a system of purposes lie worlds apart; whatever
exists, and having somehow come into being, is again and again
reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by
some power superior to it. (Nietzsche, 1969: 77)

WHATS TECHNOLOGICAL ABOUT

TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNMENT?

This paper explores a series of themes raised by a certain use of the term
technology, particularly in expressions such as technology of power or, more
particularly, technology of government. Under the influence of Michel
Foucault, these terms have entered both the history of the human sciences and
the study of government conceived as the conduct of conduct, that is, the
study of the practices, techniques and rationalities involved in the calculated
shaping of human capabilities and structuring the field of possible actions.
Indeed the concept of technology of government might be said to provide the
crucial linchpin that links the development of the human sciences to the ways in
which various authorities and agencies have sought to govern the conduct of
particular populations and persons.
I argue that the use of these terms raises two possible dangers. The first is that
of reducing these technologies of government to the merely technological. In
consequence, the analysis of technologies of government would be absorbed
within a generalized critique of technocratic or instrumental reason, such as that
found in mid-20th-century German critical theory, in certain interpretations of

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Max Webers theories of rationalization, and in Heideggers overcoming of

metaphysics. This has not been, however, the central problem of the literature I am
seeking to address.
The second - and perhaps more pressing - danger is of missing the particularity
of certain forms of government as they become technological. Here, in the attempt
to avoid technological reductionism, the use of the term technology becomes
obscure and possible insights into technological aspects of forms of government
are lost. In this sense, the use of the terms technology of power and technology of

government has avoided the error of reductionism at the cost of not fully
benefiting from the potential insights into the operations of rule and authority to
be gained by stressing their technological dimension.
There are two key problems that follow from this diagnosis. The first concerns
what makes government technological; the second how a technology of
government is to be distinguished from other forms of technology. The present
paper concentrates on the former problem on the assumption of its greater
immediacy; it does make, however, some passing reference to the latter.
The point of engaging in this seemingly arcane task is twofold. I seek to
underline and even buttress the centrality of a concept of this type to a host of
studies that might fall within what could be called a critical history of rationality,
especially those studies concerned with the nexus between the human sciences,
practical forms of rationality, and forms and means of rule and authority. I also,
however, want to dissect the implications of the use of the notion of technology
itself in such a critical history of rationality. I am interested in what the term is
doing in this literature, what its rhetorical force is, and whether it is possible-and,
indeed, worthwhile-to match its rhetorical effects with greater analytic precision.
The argument of the paper is staged in four parts. The first investigates the use of
the concept and argues for the necessity of some such concept to the critical history
of rationality. The second part explores the ambiguous valencies of the use of the
term technology in such studies: its rhetorical effects, its tendency to multiply, its

application to issues of self and personal identity, and the images used to analyse
and describe it. The third part takes some cues, albeit in a limited and critical
fashion, from Heideggers essay on technology (1993) to argue that technologies
of government are distinguished by a particular orientation toward conduct that
takes the form of a strategic rationality concerned with the optimization of
performance, aptitudes and states. The final section summarizes the implications
of the overall argument by detailing some of the points at which it might be said that
the art or techne of government crosses technological thresholds.
z

A CRITICAL HISTORY OF RATIONALITY .

Consider three examples of the use of our concept. The first is from a famous
book that encapsulates the problem I wish to draw attention to here:

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Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human
sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on &dquo;

one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect,

according to ones point of view, see whether there is not some common
matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of
epistemological-juridical formation; in short make the technology of
power the very principle of both the humanization of the penal system and
of the knowledge of man. (Foucault, 1977: 23)
In this passage from Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault employs the term
of
technology power to suggest the linkages between the history of the human
sciences and the history of punitive practice within our legal systems. In the same
pages, he uses the term virtually interchangeably with the political technology of
the body. This political or power technology, then, is the medium which
nurtures the interrelated development of the practices of punishment and certain
of the human sciences. A similar point is made by his most interesting English
commentator:

... the historical matrix of conditions of possibility for the modern human
sciences must be understood in relation to the elaboration of a whole range
of techniques and practices for the discipline, surveillance, administration
and formation of populations of human individuals. (Gordon, 1980: 239)
Colin Gordons position seems to suggest the possibility of a history of the
human sciences that examines, at least among their conditions of possibility, a
panoply of techniques of administration and surveillance or what we have called
government. To accept this is not to say that these techniques are the sole
conditions of formation and existence of the human sciences. Nor is it to say that
the human sciences are reducible to the forms of practical rationality that are
involved in techniques of governing. Foucault and Gordons point is simply that
this technological domain is one, very important and hitherto neglected,
condition for the human sciences. A slightly different but related point is found
in the recent influential work on govemmentality by Peter Miller and Nikolas

:

Rose:
If political rationalities render reality into the domain of thought, these
technologies of government seek to translate thought into the domain of
reality, and to establish in the world of persons and things spaces and
devices for acting upon those entities of which they dream and scheme.
(Miller and Rose, 1990: 8)
For Miller and Rose technologies of government are one part of the conditions
of government; they are interwoven with political rationalities into the fabric of
rule and authority. The crucial point is that the critical history of rationality -
whether in relation to practices of punishment, the development of the human
sciences, or studies of practical rationalities and formulas of rule - has found it

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50

necessary to employ the notion of technology to describe how knowledge is

inscribed within the practical exercise of power, authority and rule. I take it as the
general thesis of such studies that there is a pattern of linkages between forms of
organized thought and knowledge concerning various domains of human
conduct and the practices, techniques, tactics and mechanisms that seek to shape
that conduct within such domains. This pattern of linkages is a key to
understanding the emergence and operation of both the human sciences and the
means and mentalities of rule and authority.

Why is this concept of such salience to these different studies of knowledge,

expertise and authority? To answer this, I want to distinguish between three
notionally distinct ways of approaching the history of the human sciences. Each
of these approaches, it might be said, takes its distance from questions of
epistemology, the status of discourse as true knowledge, as science, but at least
the first two offer the possibility of returning to it by other means.
The first approach is that of the history of ideas. Here the human sciences, and
related forms of knowledge and expertise, are not regarded as forms of true
knowledge but, above all, as ideas. For some, such as Quentin Skinner (1988),
this entails the recovery of the authors intended meaning; for others, it entails
what Germans call a Rezeptionsgeschichte, concerned with the reception of ideas,
their dissemination, diffusion, appropriation and influence (Ekegren, 1995: 84-
126). To return to the question of the human sciences as science, it might be
possible to write such a history of ideas from the perspective of a currently
constituted human science, taking the norms of that science as the basis for
tracing the trajectory of ideas as they move towards a threshold of scientificity.
Secondly, one can suspend the question of epistemology for what, after Karl
Mannheim (1936) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967), could be
called the sociology of knowledge. Such an approach makes a division between
macro-social and micro-social contexts of knowledge. In regard to the
macro-level, the history of the human sciences would be accounted for in the
familiar terms of broad social, political, economic and metaphysical processes,
e.g. the relations between classes, the formation of capitalism, rationalization,
industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and so on. At the micro-level, the
institutional settings of such sciences, the routines and rituals within them,
professional conflict and rivalries, the biographies of key actors, and so on,
become the stuff from which the human sciences are constructed. At either level,
such an approach can return us to the question of epistemology, by proposing
the agencies, means and conditions under which a discourse is able to attain the
status of a science.
In contrast to both these approaches, what I wish to call a critical history of
rationality suspends the epistemological question of the validity of statements in
a far more radical way. A part of its recent inheritance would no doubt be that of
the reluctant relativism of Thomas Kuhn. It might also include the work of
French historians of science, especially that of Georges Canguilhem (e.g. 1991)

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and Foucaults own work in the 1960s, and the rejection of the privileging of
3
epistemology by British critics of Marxism in the 1970s (Cutler et al., 1977).
While it bears similarities to recent themes in the sociology of science and
knowledge, a critical history of rationality remains radically agnostic about the
validity claims of the human sciences and other forms of knowledge it examines.
It accepts the emphasis of the sociology of knowledge on the institutional
location and the professional, legal and economic conditions of forms of
knowledge; however, it rejects the oppositions between macro- and micro-
levels, ideas and context, ideologies and science, characteristic of much of the
sociology of knowledge and its inheritance from Ideologtekritik.
A critical history of rationality is concerned with what forms of knowledge
make possible - with the different ways of representing, seeing, acting and
intervening they help to construct. Instead of checking the epistemological
credentials of the human sciences, it examines what they do and make possible
and how they operate in relation to organized regimes of institutional practices
and the practical rationalities that invest these regimes with various purposes and
goals. Social and political theory and philosophy can be placed with the human,
social and behavioural sciences in a kind of tableau of the will to govern - a
tableau that allows us to investigate their complex relations with various practical
rationalities, programmes of conduct, diagrams, models, formulas and pro-
cedures of rule and authority, and the techniques, practices, mechanisms,
routines and rituals through which the government of persons and populations is
accomplished.
What distinguishes a critical history of rationality is its emphasis on what
knowledge makes it possible to do within a complex rational-technical domain.
The concept of technology of government raises the relation of forms of
knowledge to certain practical and technical activities (e.g. those involved in the
direction of human conduct, the forming of capabilities, and the shaping of
persons, citizens and collective entities). It examines the effectivity of the human
sciences in terms of their embeddedness within a domain that is capable of having
real (but not necessarily intended) consequences. It thus helps provide what
might be called a materialist account of the conditions and consequences of the
human sciences and other forms of systematic knowledge if that means an
emphasis on the practical and pragmatic arenas in which human conduct and
capacities become problematized and rendered as fields of knowledge.
One of the effects of such an analytic framework is that it gives these analyses a
constructivist bent. However, where the phenomenological sociology of know-
ledge had grounded its constructivism in the proclivities of the social subject, the
concept of technologies of government allows non-human agents, such as
technical artefacts and recording and inscription devices, to participate in the
constructing. It thus opens itself to recent constructivist developments in the
sociology of science (e.g. Latour and Woolgar, 1979). A clear example of this is
Peter Millers discussion of what he calls the calculative technologies of

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accountancy (1992: 75). These technologies, he suggests, do more than

transform the capacities and attributes of the self. They also construct the
calculable spaces that individuals inhabit within enterprises and organisations by
making visible the hierarchical arrangement of persons and things.
The notion of technologies of government is a crucial nexus between the
study of forms of knowledge and the regimes of practices (of schooling, of
punishing, of curing, etc.) from which they emerge, and within which they are
applied and find a realm of effects. It is both necessary to the intelligibility of the
conditions of emergence and existence of forms of knowledge such as human
sciences and delineates at least one component of their means of action and
intervention.
z

UNCERTAIN EFFECTS .
>

The above exposition can be read as an argument for the necessity of a concept
that can do something like the work of a notion of technology of government or
technology of power. It does not, however, form an argument for employing
these particular terms. We shall now note, within the general appreciation of the
work that such a concept does, other aspects of the terms that have a more
ambiguous valency. The argument here is not that we should abandon the
concept but that we should be alert to some of the collateral effects of the use of
these terms.
The first feature concerns its rhetorical effects in relation to other forms of a
history of rationality. Gordon (1980:238) suggests that the employment of the
notion of technologies of power depends on the violation of a system of multiple
taboos. Among these are a set of assumptions that flow from the neo-Kantian
division between the human sciences (Geisteswissenscbaften) and the natural
sciences that leave the question of technology firmly on the latter side of the
division. It also violates what Gordon (1980: 238) calls the humanist conviction
that technology is intrinsically alien to the human sphere. In this sense, the
notion of a technology of power is a signpost that points to taking a distance
from a history of rationality and set of intellectual habits that represent an
attenuated and atrophied version of the arguments found in works like
Horkheimer and Adomos Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972). In such a version,
domination is tied to the instrumental rationalization of social existence that
arrives at its apotheosis in modern forms of technological mastery of the world
underpinned by the mathematizing and formalizing tendencies of the natural
sciences. Here, the critique of the human sciences is of a second-order type: they
are said to objectify and thereby falsify the human subject because they

mistakenly apply the methods and tools of the natural sciences that are
themselves already objectifying. The notion of a technology of power, then,

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throws into question what Gordon rightly identifies (1980:239) as a kind of

ethical polarisation of the subject-object relationship.

A now familiar series of axioms follows from these moves, developed and
explicated in an important literature (e.g. Minson, 1986; Miller, 1987; Patton,
1992). Power, domination and government come to be carefully distinguished
after Foucaults later interviews (e.g. 1988a). Domination and power are no
longer opposed to the subject. Power relations and forms of domination are
conceived as operating through modes of subjectification as much as forms of
objectification. The subject is held to be fabricated in relation to domains of truth
rather than falsified in its essence.
All these propositions might be regarded as having, to a greater or lesser extent,
a rhetorical coloration appropriate to an attempt to displace an anthropological

form of critique, a form of critique grounded in the inviolable truth or essence of

human (inter)subjectivity. At the very least the violation of the taboos of
humanist thought has brought about extremely fruitful approaches to various
human sciences and other types of rationality and to our concepts of power and
the subject. To note the rhetorical dimension of concepts and propositions is not
to suggest that thought can do without rhetorical forms, or can somehow be

purified and purged of them. It is to note that rhetorical effects are conjunctural,
that is, they depend upon particular circumstances in which a particular language
and approaches become embedded within distinct intellectual domains and
communities. One consequence of this is that the conditions in which a notion of
technology of power or government packed this particular rhetorical punch may
have passed or at least changed in some way. A basic point to make would be that
violating humanist taboos might no longer be as urgent and as necessary as it was
15 or even 10 years ago. The human sciences are now first-order objects of critical
historical research in the English-speaking world. The idea of power that
operates through the fabrication of forms of identity and subjectification is well
established. We no longer equate power with domination, or domination with
objectification, or objectihcation with a falsification of the human essence. One
part of an investigation into the concept of technologies of government would be
to consider the rhetorical conditions of its existence and the possibility that our
statements require a different tonality today.
A second feature to note about this use of the term technology is its tendency
to multiplication. We have already collapsed what might be thought to be two

separate categories, technologies of government and technologies of power.

However, these are only part of a wider multiplying tendency. One line of
multiplication occurs in relation to the domains of reference of the term
technology: from a political technology of the body, through technology of
power and technology of government, to - as a subset of the latter - intellectual
technologies and calculative technologies (Rose and Miller, 1992; Tiller, 1992).
The most vivid example of this proliferation is by Foucault (1988b: 18) himself
who speaks of four kinds of technologies - of production, of sign systems, of

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power and, finally, of the self, each a matrix of practical reason. As for the
extension of what might be regarded as a technology, we could simply note the
postulate of heterogeneity that is routinely invoked in this literature that allows
us to consider everything from architecture to statistical tables, diagrams and
maps, from forms of meditation and self-mortification, to management and
financial accounting, as either technology or a component in technology. Indeed,
language itself, and the language of the human sciences in particular, can be
considered as technological:
Vocabularies and theories are important not so much because of the
meanings they produce, but as intellectual technologies, ways of rendering
existence thinkable and practicable, amenable to the distinctive influence of
various techniques of inscription, notation and calculation. (Miller and
Rose, 1990:27)
Again, the multiplication of the technological is not in itself objectionable;
indeed, it can be extremely useful in making specific points. The analysis of
language as an intellectual technology does indeed violate, whether intentionally
or not, a set of assumptions about language as the repository of human meanings.

The multiplying tendency perhaps reinforces the necessity of the concept, or at

least the necessity of the place of the concept and the type of work it does in
specific arguments. It also, however, might suggest that the term suffers from a
certain indeterminancy. Part of the task of this paper might be said to be trying to
force the concept into a clearer focus.
The third feature of this literature concerns the notion of technologies of the
self. The idea of technologies of the self or indeed of a technology of the body
seems to find some authorization in Marcel Mausss celebrated lectures (1978).
Yet Mausss work on techniques of the body reveals a carefully delineated
concept referring to a specific class of phenomena. For Mauss (1978: 104),
techniques of the body are distinguished from among the other forms of
traditional action such as rites. They are forms of traditional action without an
instrument and they are effective in that they are felt as mechanical, physical, or
physio-chemical. However, he does explicitly indicate the relation between such
techniques and forms of social authority (Mauss, 1978:110) and implies this link
in examples concerning the military such as marching, work routines and
discipline. One of the difficulties of introducing Mausss notion into the present
discussion is the danger of importing the anthropological dichotomy of
traditional versus modern society - and the diacritical logic it is necessary to
avoid.
The concept of techniques of the body, nevertheless, provides some
clarification of the notion of a political technology of the body. A political
technology of the body comes into being precisely due to the extension of a
certain form of knowledge of the body and mastery of its forces made possible by
the human sciences (Foucault, 1977: 26). If disciplinary techniques of the body

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encompassed forms of training, exercise, repetitive movement, etc., that sought

to mould conduct and to foster capabilities, then such techniques would be a

necessary condition of the emergence of the political technology of the body.

The composition of such techniques into a political technology, however,
presupposes the emergence of a regular and continuous link between the powers
fostered by disciplinary techniques and functions and the knowledge of
individuals, bodies, their forces and capacities. It is in this sense that Foucault
argues that clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychol-
ogy, and the scientific management of labour are made possible when the
disciplines cross a technological threshold (1977: 224).
This initial linkage of techniques, technologies and the human sciences,
however, hardly clarifies what is specifically technological about technologies of
government. Were only the humble and mundane mechanisms (Miller and
Rose, 1990: 8) at stake, means of government would be a perfectly serviceable
alternative. The full force of the term technology is yet to emerge. To this end, I
want to attend to a final feature of this literature, that of the images employed to
describe such technologies. There are two that might prove useful to our tasks
here: that of assemblage and that of the network.
Rose and Miller (1992: 183) describe technologies of government as complex
assemblages composed of heterogeneous mechanisms, including legal, architec-
tural, professional, administrative, financial and judgmental ones. A similar
model seems to be at work in Foucaults political technology of the body
(1977: 26), which he characterizes as diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous or
systematic discourses, made up by disparate tools and methods, multiform and
non-localized. Moreover, the notion of an assemblage may have a technological,
or at least a machinic, dimension, as it does in Deleuze and Guattaris (1981: 50)
analysis of the book as a machine assemblage (agencement m{lchmlque). An
assemblage is made up of bits and pieces and operates in its coupling with other
assemblages. It is a way of thinking about entities as multiplicities rather than
unities, as complex ensembles of discontinuous elements and forces bound by
heteromorphic relations. It thus makes possible a way of considering social
apparatuses (Deleuze, 1992) as composed from diverse elements and relations
that are irreducible to a fundamental essence, and that are composed of multiple
and varying dimensions. The notion of an assemblage implies lines of continuous
variation that can never be homogenized into a linear process of change or
transformation. Objects of knowledge and perception, organizations, associ-
ations, subject-forms, and other more or less durable entities, can be approached
as assemblages insofar as they are analysed as an outcome or a compound of

forces and relations. The general principle of an assemblage is that every form is a
compound of the relations between forces (Deleuze, 1988: 124).
The second way of characterizing a technology of government is as a network,
and here we can make reference to the work of the sociology of translation and
the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon (Callon, 1986a,

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1986b, 1991; Latour, 1986a, 1986b, 1991). The notion of networks - the
translationists talk of actor-networks (Callon,1986a), sociotechnical networks
(Latour, 1991) and techno-economic networks (Callon, 1991) - seeks to
overcome a number of fundamental oppositions: between the social and the

technical, the human and the non-human, society and nature, science and its
context, and so on (Latour, 1992). These thinkers address networks in which
power is the result of the more or less successful coordination or alignment of
different actors (including non-human ones, technical objects and inscription
devices). Even a technical object might be described as a network. Callon
(1991: 136-7) has recently suggested that a technical object is a program of action
coordinating a network of roles. Technical objects (e.g. a video cassette recorder, a
personal computer) define and distribute roles to humans (salespersons,
consumers, repairers) and non-humans (the machine, its power supplies, its
accessories). They are linked to inscription devices of various sorts - codes,
checklists, maintenance manuals and user handbooks - that accompany them on
their travels. Such texts impute skills to humans, and order them around by
playing with their bodies, their feelings, or moral reflexes. Machines, as much as
tables, graphs, bosses, policy-makers, and forms of architecture, are involved in
the government of conduct. Technology is society made durable according to the
title of a recent paper (Latour, 1991).
One might prefer the notion of assemblage over that of network. The idea of
network is rather anodyne, risks a certain flattening-out of the relation between
the members and elements of the network and may result in a kind of realist
reductionism, to draw on Miller and OLeary (1994). They suggest this method of
study seems destined always to privilege the point of view of one key actor, as it
does in Callons paradigmatic analysis (1986a) of the plans by French Electricity
(EDF-Electricite de France) for an electric vehicle in the 1970s. However, it does
force us to pose the question of the relation between the social and the technical
outside of our customary assumptions about the ontological separation of the
human and natural worlds, and the residual effects of the neo-Kantian division.
The work of such thinkers poses the question of how we conceive the relation
between technologies of government and technologies proper if we no longer have
recourse to a division between the human and natural spheres, and we recognize
that machines themselves - as well as texts, codes, timetables and other technical
artefacts - can contain programmes for the direction of conduct.
This last point is made rather beautifully in an historical study by Thomas P.
Hughes called Networks of Power (1983). This book is an analysis of the
emergence and diffusion of modern electricity systems in the USA, Germany
and Britain between 1880 and 1930. The history of the development of electricity
systems is shown to be a history of not only technical innovation but also forms
of entrepreneurship, economic practices, financing arrangements, political
conflict and alliance, professional activities and rivalries, forms of expertise,
collective aspirations, distinctive cultural forms, and material resources. The

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 57

character of what Hughes calls a technological system can be derived from none
of its component parts. Where the system has achieved a certain durability and
necessity in regard to sociotechnical networks and political and social arrange-
ments, its own requirements take over to determine foci of innovation. The
notion of a network of power appears tailor-made for the discussion of a system
in which what Latour (1986a) has called the powers of association are
inseparable from the power generated by electricity systems. We need thus to be
able to think the system character or associative powers of certain technologies of
government, and the inseparability of technological systems from what we might
call governmental systems.
Hughes (1983: 14-15) introduces the notion of reverse salients to discuss
innovation in technological systems. It is a metaphor borrowed from military
historians who designate sections of the advancing line or front that have fallen
back as reverse salients. Because technological systems are subject to uneven
development, innovation within such systems occurs at points problematized as
backward, irregular, unpredictable, inefficient, and so on. For the first type of
electric systems, direct current had a reverse salient in that it was uneconomical to
transmit. Reverse salients are then defined as critical problems that become the
focus of attention and innovation. If government can be analysed in terms of the
local and domain-specific problematizations of conduct, then the study of
government made technological might be concerned with the reverse salients of
governmental-technological systems, e.g. the lack of competitiveness of the
Australian (or US or British) worker compared with the Japanese or South-East
Asian worker, the difficulties of regulating the managerially opaque activities of
medical professionals and academics in hospital and university systems. Certain
forms of problematizations could then be said to arise from the technological and
thus system character of governmental assemblages.

,
THE TECHNOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

I want now to use, if somewhat eccentrically, certain themes of Martin

Heideggers essay on The Question Concerning Technology (1993). A primary
point arising from this essay is that it is necessary to think the question of
technology outside the problematic of instrumentality. Heidegger demonstrates
(1993:312-13) the limitations of instrumentalism and the interdependence of
instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology. The assertions that
technology is a means to an end and technology is a human activity are two
sides of a single way of understanding human activity as the positing of ends and
the procuring of means to achieve these ends. There is thus no fundamental
opposition between the instrumental view of technology as a means to an end
and the philosophical anthropology that seeks to reappropriate technology for
the use and benefit of humankind.

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58

The concept of technologies of government shares some of this dilemma. On

the one hand it is an attempt to make visible what from an anthropological
perspective remains invisible. Thus if all the mechanisms and techniques of
government are conceived as forms of human activity, as stemming from a realm
of human values, meaning and projects, then they are hardly worthy of sustained
analysis. In order to contest this, the concept of technologies of government is
premissed on the assumption that the technological is necessary to government
and not simply a medium for the relay of human values and meanings. In order to
make this point, however, technologies of government at times appear to be
conceived instrumentally, as means to somewhat elusive ends, e.g. as means of
action and intervention, as means of translating thought into reality, as indirect
means for acting at a distance. This, of course, is appropriate. Similarly, we might
want to say that an electric power system is a means of generating and delivering

power to homes, offices, schools, hospitals and factories. But we should also note
that the system is a condition of particular forms of life and social and political
organization, patterns of consumption and communication, professional exper-
tise and methods of training, and so on, and that once made durable and
necessary it is able to exercise a certain determination on patterns of innovation.
This is why the thesis of technological determinism can be only partially rejected
-

it applies from a particular threshold of diffusion and normalization of

technological systems. Similarly a technology of government - say a system of
social insurance or social security (Donzelot, 1991 a, 1991 b; Ewald, 1991 ) - may
be understood as a means of distributing benefits, of collectivizing risk, of
achieving equity, or of increasing the efficiency of the population and national
competitiveness. Yet it also entails forms of individual and collective life and
organization, patterns of national economic management, and systems of
taxation. Moreover, it embodies a specific ethos, e.g. of collective solidarity, of
permanent retraining, of entrepreneurship and the enterprise culture, of active
citizenship and so on (Donzelot, 1991b; Rose, 1992; Dean, 1995), that is both
detachable from the practices that are its support and able to be rendered into
particular formulas or diagrams of rule which ramify through a range of different
settings. In this sense, it is worth drawing attention to the technological aspect of
government precisely because this aspect is so much more than a means or an
instrument of government, and because the realm of effects of technologies of
government does not return us to the human subject and its values.
Heideggers essay also allows us to identify the general domain on which the
technological aspect of government is located. Following it, one could here speak
of the techne of government. For Heidegger, techne is the name for a practical
way of knowing that is also a mode of revealing, unconcealment and
bringing-forth. Techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the
craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts (Heidegger,
1993: 318). Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.
The term art of government captures this general sense of the techne of

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government. Techne of government is that component of the general domain of

government concerned with forms of practical knowledge. It can be contrasted
with and complemented by episteme, the domain of veridical discourse and
theoretical knowledge (e.g. political philosophy, the social sciences, theories of
organization, management and administration, abstract schemata of social and
economic action, and so on). All of that which can be described as technical,
technological, practical, pragmatic, or concerned with know-how, can be
located within the techne of government.
Within this domain of the techne of government, however, we can begin to
distinguish the features of a technology of government. Rather than dichotomize
techniques and technology (and thus reintroduce the cliche of tradition versus
modernity) we can pursue the thresholds at which the techne of government
becomes technological. A technology of government, following Foucault,
presupposes the regular application of some form of relatively systematized
knowledge (such as that of the human sciences) to the pragmatic problems of the
exercise of authority and in the composition of practical rationalities, know-how,
expertise, and means of calculation.
Secondly, as already noticed, a technology of government is formed through
an assemblage of different techniques of government, technical objects, actors,

financial and other resources and sociotechnical forces. Such an assemblage can
be approached in terms of the capacities it makes possible. But it can also be
approached through a transformation of orientation. A technology of govern-
ment may be multiform, made up of discontinuous elements and disparate tools,
but once assembled its relation to the domain it claims is quite the opposite. It is,
to use Foucaults phrase, a multiform instrumentation which can never be
localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus (1977:26).
However, again to follow Foucault, in its mechanisms and its effects, it is
situated at a quite different level. At this level, it colonizes a domain, a space, or
an institution, to reshape it according to its own requisites, to maintain and

intensify the relations of authority it makes possible, to identify the reverse

salients that hinder this ambition, and to colonize ever new domains and spaces
with a kind of promiscuous and cynical rationality. At the level of effects, the
orientation of this multiform instrumentation is thus a kind of reversal of the
principles of its construction. A detour through some exainples from Heideg-
gers essay may prove helpful in understanding this orientation.
Heidegger draws (1993:32~2) a contrast between a windmill and a coal-
mining industry as energy sources. The first depends on the blowing of the winds
to provide energy. It does not seek to command the winds to blow or to unlock

energy within the wind currents and store it. The latter, by contrast, partakes in
the character of what he calls modern technology in that it sets upon nature so
that it may unlock its powers and put those powers at call ready to do such things
as to deliver the steam to turn the generators that keep a factory running. The

crucial difference here is that this technology challenges or sets upon nature

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with the demand that it provide energy. The challenging implicit in technology,
then, is about unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing and switching about
the energies concealed in nature. Nature and its energies are ordered to stand by,
as a standing reserve (Heidegger, 1993: 323). Human energies and
powers are
not of course exempt from this and Heidegger somewhat whimsically uses the

example of the forester. While the forester of today may still be engaged in the
same activities as his grandfather, his labours are subordinated to the need of

papermills for cellulose to supply the media monopolies with paper for the
magazines and newspapers that make public opinion available on demand.
Whatever one thinks of Heideggers idyll of the forester, its point is quite clear.
What distinguishes technology is that it assembles (i.e. combines and concen-
trates in particular loci) human, technical, and natural beings as resources in the

generation of powers that can be unlocked, stored, transported and distributed.

Heidegger speaks of this as a gathering-together.
A technology of government accomplishes something of the same kind in
relation to government or the calculated direction of conduct. From a
technological orientation, human action is not simply something to be
problematized so that it can be turned to specific ends. It becomes an element of
the standing-reserve, something to be gathered-together, so that the powers of
its combination and assemblage may be unlocked, extracted, stored, transported
and distributed. Technologies of government are precisely the multiform
instrumentation of the constitution of particular locales as powerful or
authoritative ones, ones that can unlock, harness and store certain powers and
capacities, and that enable authorities and agencies to act over time and space and
to co-ordinate with the activities of other locales (Rose and Miller, 1992).

Technologies of government permit the concentration and composition of

human mental and physical forces together with natural and technical resources
so that a site can act not only as a power-container (Giddens, 1985), but as a kind
of power-storage unit, and as a terminal of power-transportation and
power-distribution.
This, however, is about as far as Heideggers essay can take us in regard to
technologies of government. It allows us to locate the specificity of the
technological orientation toward human being in regarding it as a resource, the
capacities of which are to be unlocked, harnessed, etc., and combined with other
types of resources in the constitution of centres of power. This makes the detour
worthwhile. However, it cannot tell us anything at all about what is specific
about technologies of government. This is because Heidegger has no means of
discriminating among the beings that are part of the standing reserve - between
material, natural, human and technical beings. However, following the literature
on govemmentality, a technology of government differs from a
technology of
production, for example, because government is about ways of conducting
conduct, ways of acting upon the actions of others. A technology of government
does not seek a total regulation or ordering of human beings as a technology of

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production might aim at producing a completely ordered and replicable material

object. It seeks rather to structure the field of possible actions. The question
becomes then: what does it mean to be oriented toward the field of possible
actions as a part of the standing reserve, as a resource? What is the it, moreover,
that is oriented so?
To answer this, consider the notion of strategy. Studies of govemmentality
have often noted the intentional but non-subjective character of government,
the fact that regimes of practices often seem to evince a strategic rationality that is
not intended by any particular agency or actor. Strategy is here used to describe
the minimal form of rationality that can be discerned on the basis of the diverse
effects of regimes of practices, and that invests those regimes with a relative unity
and functionality in relation to a dynamic and variable set of objectives. As
Gordon suggests ( 1980: 251 ), there is strategy without a master strategist or
grand programmer, and strategy, in contrast to the programme and the plan, is
essentially a non-discursive rationality. I would like to suggest that the point at
which practices of government attain a technological orientation is when their
assemblage evinces a certain kind of strategic rationality. The general form of this
strategic rationality is one that brings governmental requirements of conduct into
a kind of perpetual loop with technical requirements of performance. It yokes the

moral and political shaping of conduct to the maximization of aptitudes and

behaviours and the optimization of performance. Disciplinary technology, for
example, can thus be described as a relation of docility-utility (Foucault,
1977: 137), linking the production of docile and obedient individuals with useful
and efficient ones. To render conduct calculable is to render it as performance, as
in the setting of performance indicators, qualitative or quantitative standards of
assessing and examining performance. When the conduct of individuals and
groups is made calculable over time, or within periods of time, within spaces or
over distances, so that it can compete or be compared with the conduct of others,
it is rendered as performance. Sportspersons, such as swimmers and runners,
seek to achieve peak performance in a particular temporal and spatial frame.
Heideggers still meandering forester will soon not only use a four-wheel drive
vehicle and a mechanical chainsaw or even a bulldozer; he will find himself part
of a work-team and a work-force, with divisions of labour and of authority and
subject to scrutiny over such things as his efficiency and output. We have known
all this, of course, since Marxs analysis of the social subordination of
labour-power, the latter being understood as the capacity for a specific kind of
performance.
A technology of government constitutes those over whom authority is
exercised as subjects of performance. It acts on the action of such subjects so that
they engage their own conduct as something that is testable, monitorable and
calculable. Here we can draw upon Michael Powers (1994) work on the
explosion of auditing. Auditing represents itself as a derived activity, a form of
neutral and independent monitoring, a technology of mistrust to restore trust in

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the activities of firms, government departments, service providers, universities,

and so on, by delivering accountability, visibility and democratic control. As
Power shows, however, auditing is an active intervention into these organiz-
ations that reshapes their activities according to the norms of a fundamentally
opaque and non-democratic expertise. The practice of audit itself transforms the
conduct of the auditee by requiring its complicity in rendering its activities visible
in terms of standards of performance or the identification of risks. Audit is thus
to a large extent a question of making organizations auditable, a practice that

requires the construction of the auditee in a form receptive to audit expertise. It is

a technology that seeks to reshape the conduct of professionals and organizations

according to standards of performance by which it asks them to evaluate

themselves.
The audit explosion is one illustration of the strategic binding of conduct to
performance standards. There are numerous other examples in the literature
which highlight the polymorphous and promiscuous character of this strategic
rationality. Peter Millers work (1992) on managerial or cost accounting in the
20th century shows how accounting operates by reconstructing particular actors
as calculating individuals, transforming diverse locales into calculable spaces,

and enclosing such individuals within specific calculative regimes. Even risk
technologies derived from actuarial or epidemiological calculation can be
understood as yoking conduct to performance (Ewald, 1991; Castel, 1991).
Certain at risk or high-risk populations become subjects of various inter-
ventions and screening mechanisms, health promotion and public health
campaigns, and so on, designed to optimize their performance according to a
specific calculation of risk minimization. Further, such technologies are used to
subsume the conduct of professionals and technicians according to measures of
the optimal allocation and utilization of resources. To take yet another example,
technologies of citizenship, such as those employed in the War on Poverty in
the United States in the 1960s, which sought to empower the poor, can be
described in terms of the optimization of performance (Cruikshank, 1994). Here
the poor were to be governed by eliciting their involvement in anti-poverty
programmes according to the formula of maximum feasible participation.
The point to be stressed here is that problematizations of conduct are no
longer simply contingent upon a set of diverse circumstances; they arise, rather,
from the identification of reverse salients identified in terms of indicators of
performance and its calculability. Technologies of government are the matrix of
the human sciences not only because the objects of the human sciences are
formed in relation to domains of government, but also because such sciences are
implicated in the identification, calculation and evaluation of the critical
problems that arise from the reverse salients of these technologies. Government
crosses the technological threshold when the formation of knowledge of a

particular domain and the optimization of powers and capacities regularly

reinforce one another in a circular fashion (cf. Foucault, 1977: 22~).

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Government can be understood as a practical and technical domain concerned

with the shaping of conduct and as a condition of its problematization. But when
government becomes technological it seeks to render some aspect of conduct
continuously and systematically calculable, measurable and comparable. It
discovers critical problems not only so that it might set upon and challenge
them but so that it might maximize aptitudes and capabilities, e.g. in the way that
certain forms of social policy expertise have identified the job readiness of the
unemployed as the critical problem of systems of income support (Keating,
1994; Dean, 1995). The degree of job readiness is not only an aptitude or
inaptitude of individuals; its absence or insufficiency is a reverse salient in a
complex technology of government comprising such things as practices of
economic management concerned with intensifying the competitiveness of the
national economy and limiting its inflationary tendencies and budget deficits,
social welfare practices concerned with equitable and efficient forms of
assistance; and ethical and moral practices dealing with the morale, attitude and
outlook of the population and the prevention of the formation of a permanent
underclass. Because a technology of government locks conduct into performance
it is not simply a means to an end, or even a generalized system of means, as Max
Webers celebrated distinction between substantive and formal rationality might
suggest, but is already a form of life-conduct, a way of shaping moral and
political existence while acting to optimize performance.
Problematizations of conduct, then, come to look like the patterns of
innovation within technological systems. They are no longer more or less
contingent phenomena; what is problematized are those aspects of conduct that
reduce its calculability as performance. The practice of auditing problematizes all
those aspects of professional culture that are not able to be monitored through
the technology of audit - that which is opaque, diverse, incomparable,
constituted by administrative discretion, professional judgment or subjective
evaluation, and so on. It is, if one likes, a problematization that challenges human
conduct to take the form given by what the technology reveals as its governable
aspect, performance. In the case of an active system of income support for the
unemployed, someone receiving unemployment allowance, training and other
services, is called upon to take the form of a job-seeker, i.e. one who has
optimized his or her chances to get a job should one be on offer.

THRESHOLDS OF TECHNOLOGICAL
GOVERNMENT .

perhaps not possible or even desirable to come to an exhaustive definition of

It is
a technology of government. However, we can mark important technological

thresholds for government understood as the conduct of conduct. It should be

said that these thresholds do not mark stages. They are not consecutive. They

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64

have no particular order. Indeed, it is not necessary that all of them be present for
government to have become technological. They are simply several provisional
indicators that, in a given instance, government has become technological.
A threshold of assemblage: government becomes technological when we can
identify a complex assemblage of diverse elements, held together by hetero-
morphic relations, concerned with the direction of conduct. A technology of
government includes techniques governing the body or self, i.e. methods of
training in which conduct is shaped, directed and regulated. However, a
technology of government includes much else besides: inscription devices for the
recording, storing, transportation and use of information, means of constituting
relatively stable forms of authority, domination and surveillance, mechanisms of
coordination and organization of activities across locale and over time, technical
objects, spatial enclosures and divisions, and a range of human and non-human
actors. It is also characterized by explicit forms of practical rationality, such as

programmes, policies and plans, that invest this technology with a certain set of
purposes and codify its functioning, and by specialist knowledge or expertise
that acts as a means of calculation and allows planning and evaluation to occur.
These programmes and expertise bear a complex set of relations to veridical
discourses such as those of the human sciences.
A threshold of system: to use a term borrowed from the history of technology
and science, this would mark the point at which it is possible to identify the ways
in which technologies of government are attached to technologies of production,
consumption, communication, etc., to form systems composed of technical
objects, money, energy sources, communication networks, texts, humans,
professions, expertise, and so on. It is difficult to imagine a technology of
government that is not (capable of being) inserted within technological systems.
A threshold of force: when government becomes technological, the forces and
capacities made available are qualitatively different from any simple augmen-
tation or synthesis of existing forces. The description of organizations as
power-containers captures only something of this sense. A technology of
government makes possible the constitution of specific sites as power-
containers, as places for the interdependent generation of goods, energy,
information and services, and forms of social authority, regulation and control.
Technologies of government constitute specific locales not only as power-
containers but also as power-storers and power-generators and make possible
a coordination of activities across these different locales in time and space. These
forces are qualitatively different in that they are conditions of forms of action not
available through Maussian techniques of the body or self. Technologies of
government are, in this sense, logistical. The powers they constitute are
infrastructural powers (Mann, 1988). The logistics of the occupation of a
Caribbean island-nation by the USA requires rather more, for example, than the
systems of military discipline used in the basic training of soldiers. Technologies

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 65

of government are conditions of durable social, political, economic and military

organization and association over time and space and form the logistical
infrastructure of their possibility of action.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, comes a threshold of the orientation
of government. Forms of exercise, and other physical and mental techniques,
have long linked the ethico-political requirements of conduct with the technical
requisites of performance. A technology of government, however, approaches
the forces of bodies, and the aptitudes and capabilities of individuals, groups
and populations, as something to be intensified, augmented and optimized. It is
invested with a strategic rationality that seeks to subsume the moral and
political shaping of conduct to the requirements of performance.
This paper has sought to open up some ways of thinking about technologies
of government. It has attempted to avoid the analytic confusion of technologies
of government with other kinds of technologies, and to resist a totalizing
critique of technocratic reason, while being able to discuss assemblages of
different kinds of technology and to admit the empirical insertion of technolo-
gies of government within technological systems. It has also tried to distinguish
between the thresholds at which the arts of government become technological
without falling into the bipolar structures of modernity and tradition. The
Roman military machine, or the Chinese bureaucracy, for example, would
appear to have the characteristics of technological government. In carrying out
its purposes, this paper has sought to use certain forms of thought without
collapsing the critical history of rationality into the well-worn story of the
instrumental rationalization of the lifeworld or the Heideggerian equivalent
that reveals technology as the essence of western metaphysics and its
humanism.
We should seek, then, a purchase on the history of the human sciences not
simply through those linkages with thought that make government creative,
artful, or technical, but at those thresholds at which government becomes
oriented to the intensification, multiplication and ramification of the capacities
and forces of human action and at which there is a kind of reciprocal subservience
between the shaping of conduct and the requisites of performance. For the
human sciences are integral to our practices of governing not only because they
constitute domains and objects of knowledge, and produce diagrams of truth
about subjects, but also because they emerge from and inform the practical
rationalities, forms of expertise and know-how that can render our being in the
doublet of conduct-performance. This no doubt is why such sciences are
continually forced to choose between the interpretative gambit that postulates a
primary freedom, if only in the representation of meaning, and the behavioural
one that is fixated on the exterior lineaments of action.

Department of Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia

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66

NOTE

I should like to acknowledge expressly the written comments of Paul Henman, Peter
Miller and Mariana Valverde on earlier drafts of this paper and the indulgence shown my
ideas by those present at the Department of Political Science seminar, Research School of
Social Sciences, the Australian National University, in October 1994, and by my
colleagues at the Sociology Department colloquium, Macquarie University, in September
1995. My sincere thanks also to Graham Burchell for access to his notes on the
technological aspect of disciplinary power which clarified much of my thinking.

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