gane - 'the governmentalities of neoliberalism

The governmentalities of neoliberalism:panopticism, post-panopticismand beyond

Nicholas Gane

Abstract

This paper draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, in particular his lectures onbiopolitics at the Collège de France from 1978–79, to examine liberalism and neo-liberalism as governmental forms that operate through different models of surveil-lance. First, this paper re-reads Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in the light of hisanalysis of the art of liberal government that is advanced through the course of theselectures. It is argued that the Panopticon is not just an architecture of power centredon discipline and normalization, as is commonly understood, but a normative modelof the relation of the state to the market which, for Foucault, is ‘the very formula ofliberal government’. Second, the limits of panopticism, and by extension liberalgovernance, are explored through analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s account of the shiftfrom disciplinary to ‘control’ societies, and Zygmunt Bauman’s writings on individu-alization and the ‘Synopticon’. In response to Deleuze and Bauman, the final sectionof this paper returns to Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics to argue that contempo-rary capitalist society is characterized not simply by the decline of state powers (thecontrol society) or the passing down of responsibilities from the state to the indi-vidual (the individualization thesis), but by the neoliberal marketization of the stateand its institutions; a development which is underpinned by a specific form ofgovernmentality. In conclusion, a four-fold typology of surveillance is advanced:surveillance as discipline, as control, as interactivity, and as a mechanism for pro-moting competition. It is argued that while these types of surveillance are notmutually exclusive, they are underpinned by different governmentalities that can beused to address different aspects of the relationship between the state and themarket, and with this the social and cultural logics of contemporary forms of marketcapitalism more broadly.

Keywords: Bauman, Deleuze, Foucault, market, neoliberalism, state, surveillance

For many years now, sociologists have drawn on Michel Foucualt’s (1977)work on the birth of the prison to explore the historical basis of present normsand practices of punishment through either a criminological lens (see, forexample, Garland, 1990), or to develop its central notion of panopticism into abroader theory of surveillance society (for an overview of such work, see Lyon,

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The Sociological Review, Vol. 60, 611–634 (2012) DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02126.x© 2012 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Publishedby Blackwell Publishing Inc., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,02148, USA.

1994: 67–71). Following the recent publication and English translation ofFoucault’s (2008) 1978–79 lectures at the Collège de France on biopolitics,however, it has become clear that Discipline and Punish is not concernedsimply with institutional forms of surveillance, discipline and normalizationthat emerged in settings such as prisons at the turn of the 19th century, but ispart of a much broader analysis of what he calls the liberal ‘art of government’.This is an important development that presents something new to existingreadings of Discipline and Punish and to work that addresses and extendsFoucault’s theory of governmentality (Burchell et al., 1991; Barry et al., 1996;Garland, 1997; Rose, 1999; Miller and Rose, 2008). Before the publication ofthese lectures on biopolitics, the standard reading of Foucault was that his laterwritings addressed relations between two poles of governance: governance ofpopulations and governance through technologies of the self. This led many tocomplain that Foucault’s analysis of government steered ‘clear of any institu-tional or substantive account of “the state” ’ (Garland, 1997: 175). Foucault’slectures on biopolitics address precisely this problem as they sit between hiswork on security, territory and the governance of populations (the subject ofhis 1977–78 lectures, see Foucault, 2009) on one hand, and on the ethics of thesubject and the self (the focus of his lectures from 1981 onwards) on the other(for an early attempt at outlining the content of these lectures prior to theirpublication, see Lemke, 2001). The importance of these lectures is that theyaddress the space between the two poles of governance identified by Garlandby analysing different liberal and neoliberal governmentalities that runbetween the state and the market. It is in this light that the arguments ofDiscipline and Punish take on a new significance, for in his biopolitics lecturesFoucault treats panopticism as a model of liberal governance that centres onthe capacity of the state to watch over the market; a model that under neo-liberal conditions is said to reach its limit.

The aim of this paper is to use Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics to addressthese governmentalities of liberalism and neoliberalism, and to explore theirconnection to panoptic and post-panoptic models of surveillance. There aretwo main reasons for pursuing such an exercise. First, while there has beenmuch sociological interest in surveillance, comparatively little attention hasbeen paid to its underlying political economy, and to the different configura-tions of state and market to which panoptic and post-panoptic models are tied.The question here is seemingly a simple one: if the Panopticon is a model ofgovernmentality within which the state is said to watch over and therebydiscipline the market, what of a post-panoptic or neoliberal arrangementwhereby the market increasingly structures the form and activities of thestate? For Foucault, such an arrangement involves a different type of surveil-lance, as watching is displaced by active intervention into the state and itsactivities; a development, it will be argued, that is accompanied by the formu-lation of new measures that work to promote competition and enterprisewherever they are deployed. Second, this idea of surveillance beyond thePanopticon is important as it both frames and is framed by a particular

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612 © 2012 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

understanding of neoliberalism. For Foucault, neoliberalism is not the samething as anti-statism or the devolution of powers from the state to the indi-vidual, but about the constant push to define and regulate social life throughprinciples that come from the market. For Foucault, neoliberalism has its owngovernmental logic and ‘should not be identified with laissez-faire, but ratherwith permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention’ (2008: 132). This aspectof neoliberalism has often been missed by commentators more concernedwith the disempowerment of politics in the name of economics, or with attackson the (welfare) state in the name of the market (see, for example, Hall,2011). Such processes are clearly central to the workings of neoliberalism(see, for example, Garland’s excellent account of the transformation of penal-welfarism in 2000), but they are also accompanied by new practices of regu-lation and intervention that have tended to receive less critical attention.Jamie Peck in his Constructions of Neoliberal Reason rightly argues thatneoliberalism is characterized by both ‘roll-back’ processes – ‘focussed ondismantling alien institutions, disorganizing alternate centres of power,deregulating zones of bureaucratic control and disciplining potentially unruly(collective) subjects’ (2010: 22) – as well as processes of ‘roll-out’ ‘typicallyassociated with an explosion of “market conforming” regulatory incursions’(2010: 23). For the purposes of this paper, it is the latter that are of primaryconcern, in particular mechanisms of regulation and surveillance which, asFoucault’s lectures on biopolitics show, are central to neoliberal forms ofgovernance that have all too often been missed.

This paper is made up of three parts. First, the core arguments of Foucault’sDiscipline and Punish are revisited in the light of the analysis of liberalgovernmentality that frames his subsequent lectures on biopolitics, throughthe course of which the Panopticon is defined as ‘the very formula of liberalgovernment’. Second, the limits of panopticism, and by extension liberal gov-ernance, are explored through analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s account of the shiftfrom disciplinary to ‘control’ societies and Zygmunt Bauman’s writings onindividualization and the ‘Synopticon’. It will be argued that while Deleuzeand Bauman offer useful ways of thinking about the post-panoptic dynamicsof contemporary societies, their work stops short of addressing the complexgovernmentalities that run between the state and the market and which arecentral to the neoliberalization of contemporary society and culture. Third, inresponse to Deleuze and Bauman, the final section of this paper returns toFoucault’s lectures on biopolitics to consider the underlying governmentalitiesof neoliberalism. In so doing, particular attention will be paid to the Germantradition of ordoliberalism, from which, Peck (2010: 23) argues, comes the‘ethic’ of neoliberal ‘roll-out’, rather than to the later and more aggressive freemarket economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School (for a readingof Foucault’s lectures on this strand of neoliberal thinking, see McNay, 2009;for an overview of the Chicago School and its history, see Peck, 2010; Horn andMirowski, 2009). In adopting this focus, this paper will seek to work againstpopular conceptions of the neoliberal as simply laissez-faireist ideology, and

Surveillance and neoliberalism

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will argue, in line with Foucault, that it is better understood as a form ofgovernmentality that runs from the market to the state, and which playsout through new practices of regulatory intervention and surveillance. Inconclusion, a fourfold typology of surveillance is advanced – surveillance asdiscipline, control, interactivity and as a mechanism for promoting competition– that might be used to explore further the liberal and neoliberal governmen-talities that underpin market capitalism today.

Panopticism and liberalism

In order to address the competing logics of what Foucault calls liberal andneoliberal governmentality, it is first necessary to return to the core argumentsof Discipline and Punish. The main thesis of this now famous work is thatthroughout the first half of the 19th century punishment as a public spectaclewas replaced by technologies of incarceration that worked instead throughtechniques of discipline and correction.This transition is summarized neatly inthe opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, where Foucault observes that‘At the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . the great spectacle of physicalpunishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical repre-sentation of pain was excluded from punishment. The age of sobriety inpunishment had begun. By 1830–48, public executions, preceded by torture,had almost entirely disappeared’ (1977: 14). This account of the displacementof the physical spectacle of punishment by the birth of the prison (the subtitleof Discipline and Punish) has been of general sociological interest as it isaccompanied by a deeper analysis of the societal powers and political econo-mies that accompany these different regimes of punishment. Foucault (1977)argues that punishment as a public spectacle was a mechanism for restoringand reaffirming the power of the sovereign, and that the culture of disciplinethat displaced this public display of punishment is framed by an architectureof power that works through the correction and normalization of the bodyand the soul or even life (see Foucault, 1990). This is the starting point forFoucault’s analysis of bio-politics: an analysis which centres on ‘the politicaleconomy of the body’ both as a force of production and as something consti-tuted through ‘a system of subjection’ (1977: 26). Foucault argues in Disciplineand Punish that such systems work at the level of knowledge or discourse(including knowledge produced by the ‘disciplines’ of the human sciences),and/or through institutions such as the penitentiary, which disciplines andnormalizes bodies through the exercise of a visual power that seemingly has nolimits.This form or architecture of power is famously termed panopticism, andis described by Foucault as ‘a state of conscious and permanent visibility’(1977: 201).

The key figure in the section on panopticism in Discipline and Punish(Foucault, 1977) is the English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham – achoice which, as we will see below, is significant. Bentham, in a letter written

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from White Russia in 1787, describes the Panopticon or ‘inspection-house’ as‘[a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hithertowithout example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured bywhoever chooses to have it so, against abuse’ (Bentham, 1995: 31). This powerwas to be achieved through the construction of a new prison-like architecturein which cells were organized circularly around a central tower, thereby ena-bling guards to exercise unlimited surveillance over inmates (for a detaileddescription, see Bentham, 1995).The Panopticon was never built exactly in theform that Bentham suggested, but its general logic fed into the design of arange of institutions, including early penitentiaries (for example, the peniten-tiary at Stateville, North Carolina, which opened in 1925). Foucault’s subse-quent interest in the Panopticon centres on the operation of this newarchitecture of power through visual means. He explains:

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible tosee constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the prin-ciple of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to depriveof light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two.Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, whichultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. (Foucault, 1977: 200)

Visibility in the Panopticon works two ways: the prisoners can always be seenfrom the central control tower, but through the use of blinds or screens thepresence of guards can be concealed. This means that the power of the Pano-pticon rests on the limitless capacity for watching, or what Bentham calls the‘apparent omnipresence of the inspector’ (1995: 45), rather than the physicalpresence of a guard, who may or may not be there. The model of the Panop-ticon works not because it produces a power that is verifiable but because itnormalizes the conduct of its inhabitants, who act as if they are being watched.This means, importantly, that the Panopticon is an economical model of power,for once its physical structure is in place, it confines the masses to their allottedspaces, and, at least in theory, disciplines the conduct of inmates at little or nofinancial cost to the institution.

There has been widespread sociological interest in the Panopticon, as manyhave sought to extend its model of power into a broader account and analysisof what might be called ‘surveillance society’. Oscar Gandy, for example, in hisseminal analysis of new panoptic technologies of identification, classificationand assessment, reflects that ‘The influence of Michel Foucault on my work isso substantial that it threatens to dominate the construction of my argumentsabout power and social control. It is from Foucault that I derive the underlyingconcept of panopticism as a technology of power realized through the practiceof disciplinary classification and surveillance referred to as the panoptic sort’(1993: 9). Foucault’s position on the possibility of developing a theory ofsurveillance society from an analysis of the Panopticon is complex (seeGarland, 1990). On one hand, it moves from a historical narrative about the



birth of prison to a much broader set of statements about the panoptic basisof modern society and culture more generally. Foucault declares, for example,that ‘one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society’ and of an‘indefinitely generalizable mechanism of “panopticism” ’ (1977: 216), and,more boldly, that ‘Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance’(1977: 217). On the other hand, just pages later, Foucault urges caution:‘Although the panoptic procedures, as concrete forms of the exercise of power,have become extremely widespread, at least in their less concentrated form, itwas really only in the penitentiary institutions that Bentham’s utopia could befully expressed in a material form’ (1977: 249). This latter statement suggeststhat Foucault was wary of abstracting a general theory of surveillance from ananalysis of a specific institutional setting. It also hints that while panopticismwas only fully expressed in material form in the penitentiary, perhaps itemerged in other ways (for example, as a cultural logic) outside of this insti-tutional space. This idea of a culture of surveillance within which visual formsof power have become near ubiquitous has been central to social studies ofsurveillance since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such work has raised impor-tant questions about the connection of surveillance to the state (see Lyon andZureik, 1996) and new corporate entities (Poster, 1995), as well as the impactof surveillance on everyday life (see, for example, Lyon, 2003). This has led, inturn, to a renewed concern for issues of privacy, trust and accountability incontemporary society, but rarely have these concerns been underpinned by adeeper political economy that ties panopticism, or more broadly surveillance,to the technologies and techniques of liberal or neo-liberal governance. Thisquestion of the connection of surveillance to the governmentalities of contem-porary capitalism, while neglected within the sociological literature on powerand surveillance, lie at the heart of Foucault’s project; something that, as statedabove, has only become clear with the publication of his lectures on biopolitics.It is to these that we now turn.

The political significance of the Panopticon as a mode of governance, alongwith its connection to the market and the state, is not addressed explicitly inthe pages of Discipline and Punish (the closest Foucault comes to this is a briefreflection on connection of discipline to the growth of ‘capitalist economy’, see1977: 221). However, in Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures from the Collège deFrance a different narrative emerges (one that is not fully addressed by exist-ing studies of governmentality such as Rose, 1996; Rose, 1999; Miller and Rose,2008). These lectures, in spite of their title, do not address biopolitics specifi-cally but rather what Foucault calls ‘the art of government’, or rather ‘thegovernment of men insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sover-eignty’ (2008: 2). Foucault starts with an analysis of liberalism, although whatis meant by this term is different from the definition usually found in politicalphilosophy, for as Barry et al. observe, it refers to a particular ‘ethos of gov-ernment’ (1996: 8). This becomes clear through the course of Foucault’s lec-tures, which begin by tracing a shift from the raison d’État characteristic ofFrance in the Middle Ages to liberal forms of governmentality that emerged in

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the late 18th century. The key point in this transition is a change in thegovernmental connections between the market and that state. Under theraison d’État of the Middle Ages, markets were subject to ‘extremely strict andprolific regulation’ (Foucault, 2008: 30), and for this reason were sites ofdistributive justice. However, by the late 18th century, the market started toappear as something that ‘obeyed and had to obey “natural”, that is to say,spontaneous mechanisms’ (Foucault, 2008: 31). The market was seen increas-ingly to have its own logic and truth, and for this reason was no longerconstituted in terms of justice and jurisdiction, but rather as a ‘site of veridic-tion’ (2008: 33). This is the start of a new relationship between the state andmarket, one in which the market increasingly is free to forge its own relation-ships between value and price, while at the same time the state, increasingly,has limits placed on its powers.

This new situation, advocated most famously by Adam Smith (1982) in TheWealth of Nations, is characterized by a ‘frugality of government’, but this inturn poses a problem: how can government impose its own limits without atthe same time making itself unable to operate or perhaps even redundant?Foucault considers two main ways that this difficulty has been resolved: first,through the French revolution and in the work of Rousseau, where the startingpoint is not government and its limitation but rather questions of law, right andsovereignty; and second, approaches which start with the analysis of govern-ment in order to establish its ‘de facto limits’, which may in turn ‘derive fromhistory, from tradition, or from an historically determined state of affairs’(Foucault, 2008: 40). One such approach is utilitarianism, which attempted tolimit the powers of the previous raison d’État by defining the competencies ofgovernment in terms of utility. The legacy of such thinking is that markets areconstructed as sites of unrestricted exchange, while at the same time the valueof state or public powers, including their ability to intervene in markets, is onlymeasured in terms of utility. This tension leads to what Foucault calls ‘thefundamental question of liberalism’, or what might be conceptualized morebroadly as the fundamental question of early capitalist modernity: what is theutility value of government and all actions of government in a society whereexchange determines the true value of things?’ (2008: 46).

It is in this context that Bentham’s writings on surveillance and the Pano-pticon take on a new significance. In his lecture dated 24 January 1979,Foucault declares that ‘Economic freedom, liberalism in the sense I have justbeen talking about, and disciplinary techniques are completely bound up witheach other’ (2008: 67). This binding, which initially seems somewhat paradoxi-cal, is rooted in the idea that liberalism does not ‘leave more white spaces offreedom’ but rather works to produce the possibility of freedom, which, as agovernmental form, it then proceeds to consume (2008: 63). In order to guar-antee, for example, the freedom of the market or the free exercise of propertyrights, Foucault argues that there must be government in the form of ‘control,constraint, and coercion’ (2008: 67). Liberalism, while underpinned by theself-limitation or ‘frugality’ of government, is thus not simply characterized by



laissez-faire economics or politics, for it involves the extension of governmentfrom the state to the market in order to guarantee the ‘freedom’ of the latter.This can take at least two forms. First, there is surveillance, as in the model ofBentham’s Panopticon. Foucault states: ‘Government, initially limited to thefunction of supervision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is nothappening according to the general mechanics of behaviour, exchange andeconomic life’ (2008: 67). Second, are the more direct strategies of governmentthat have ‘the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasingfreedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional control andintervention’ (Foucault, 2008: 67). Foucault cites Roosevelt’s welfare policiesof the 1930s as an example of such practice.

For the purposes of the present paper, it is the first of these two govern-mental techniques – surveillance as a disciplinary measure that creates‘freedom’ – that is of interest. Foucault here develops the arguments Disciplineand Punish into a much broader statement: that the Panopticon is ‘not aregional mechanics limited to certain institutions’ but instead is ‘the veryformula of liberal government’ (2008: 67). For Foucault, Bentham’s writingsare of interest precisely because they extend a visual model of disciplinarypower into a more general art of government. It is for this reason that Foucaultturns to Bentham rather than other figures usually associated with classicalliberalism, most notably Mill (see, for example Tribe, 2009, who locates Mill asthe central figure of British liberalism). This presentation of Bentham as thekey figure in the liberal tradition is not without its problems. David Garlandobserves that in Discipline and Punish Foucault’s conception of punishment isbased on a misreading of Bentham, for ‘Whereas Bentham set out his ration-alistic control framework as an ideal to aim for, and deplored the ritualistic,non-utilitarian actualities of punishment which he observed, Foucault seemsto assert that “Benthamism” is, in fact, a deep description of the actual natureof modern punishment’ (1990: 163). A similar tendency can be detected inFoucault’s biopolitics lectures. Contrary to Foucault’s argument (2008: 67),Bentham did not base his constitutional code explicitly upon his previousmodel of the Panopticon, and indeed the only references to the Panopticon inthis code appear in footnotes dealing with prisons and with early technologiessuch as parliamentary conversation tubes (see Bentham, 1983). However,while the details of Foucault’s reading of Bentham are not always accurate, thebroader thrust of his argument is more convincing: that the Panopticon is morethan an architecture of power that can be broadened in any straightforwardway into a theory of ‘surveillance society’. Rather, and this is the point thattakes us back to and at the same time beyond the text of Discipline andPunish, the Panopticon is a normative model of governance that recasts theconnection between the state and the market, and which seeks to promoteconditions of ‘freedom’ through the exercise of disciplinary techniques thatoperate through specific forms and practices of surveillance (for an alternativereading that draws parallels between the Panopticon and market, but one thatdoes not deal with the intricacies of Foucault’s writings on liberal and neolib-

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eral governmentality, see de Angelis, 2007). It is for this reason that Foucaultsees in Bentham an expression of classical economic liberalism, and for thisreason also that the Panopticon takes on a metaphorical and conceptualsignificance beyond its life as a prison-based architecture of discipline andpunishment.

Post-panopticism? ‘Control’ societies and the Synopticon

Foucault’s work presents us with a challenge, for if panopticism is central tothe design and operation of liberal governance, then what type of governmen-tality underpins more contemporary forms of post-disciplinary society andwhat Roy Boyne (2000) has called ‘post-panopticism’? For the purposes of thepresent paper, two theoretical resources will be employed to explore thisquestion: Gilles Deleuze’s essay on control societies (1995) and ZygmuntBauman’s writings on liquid modernity and individualization. While the writ-ings of these two thinkers are framed by quite different disciplinary andpolitical commitments, they can be read alongside each other to explore thelimits of Foucault’s panoptic model of liberal governmentality. In Deleuze, thequestion is not of the fixity of institutional structures such as the prison or eventhe state but of mobile forms of surveillance that can track or fix ‘dividuals’(monads defined not by their right to be individual or by their intrinsic worthbut by systemic process of coding that differentiate one member of a consumerpopulation from the next) in real time and space. Bauman’s work has adifferent focus to that of Deleuze, for it addresses the dynamics of consumersociety and what he calls the ‘synopticism’ of tele-visual culture. WhereasDeleuze focuses on the creation of ‘dividuals’, Bauman draws into questionprocesses of individualization that pass responsibilities down from the state tothe individual. These two positions will be considered in turn. It will be arguedthat while Deleuze and Bauman provide useful and in some ways complemen-tary ways for thinking about post-panoptic forms of power and surveillance,what is missing from both is a detailed account of the market and the state and,more pressingly, an analysis of the different forms of liberal and neoliberalgovernance that run between the two. It is for this reason that we will returnto Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, and in particular his analysis of post-warordoliberalism, in the final section of this paper.

The core argument of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’(1995) is that disciplinary societies, as analysed by Foucault in the concludingsections of Discipline and Punish, were short-lived. By the mid-20th century,Deleuze argues, such societies had started to fade, along with the once solidinstitutions within which disciplinary techniques traditionally existed. Hedeclares:

We’re in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement –prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. The family is an ‘interior’



that’s breaking down like all other interiors – educational, professional, andso on. The appropriate ministers have constantly been announcing suppos-edly appropriate reforms; but everyone knows these institutions are inmore or less terminal decline. It’s simply a matter of keeping people busyuntil the new forces knocking at the door take over. (Deleuze, 1995: 178)

Discipline is tied to fixed institutional spaces – from prisons to mad-houses toschools in Bentham’s account – whereas today not only are such spaces indecline but new mobile and flexible techniques of power are emerging thatare characterized by ‘ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control’(Deleuze, 1995: 178). Whereas discipline works through fixity and confine-ment, ‘control’ operates through mobility and speed. Deleuze writes: ‘Confine-ments are moulds, different mouldings, while controls are a modulation, like aself-transmuting moulding continually changing from one moment to the next,or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another’ (1995: 178–9).Control societies are ruled not by precepts (commands that originally had areligious or moral basis) but by passwords: the codes that allow one to passthrough the ‘mesh’, or more concretely through a database or across a nation-state border, through the opening of a designated point of entry. Control is nottied to a heavy architectural structure, but is a form of power that can bemodulated: its pitch and range can easily be varied. Unlike discipline, controlis not moulded to remain in a fixed form but can be open or closed to varyingdegrees to enable access for some while immobilizing others.

The technologies that underpin control societies are quite different fromanything found in Foucault’s writings on discipline. Deleuze argues that‘control societies function with a third generation of machines, with informa-tion technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and theactive, piracy and viral contamination’. He adds, importantly, that this newsituation is ‘rooted in a mutation of capitalism’ (1995: 180), and that controland contemporary capitalism have the same ‘dispersive’ logic. For whereascapitalism of the 19th century was ‘concentrative’, or directed towards pro-duction and tied to the factory ‘as a site of confinement’, capitalism today iscentred instead on what Deleuze calls ‘metaproduction’, or the buying andmarketing of finished products (to which sign-value can be added throughbranding, see Klein, 2000). Control, like contemporary capitalism more gen-erally, is defined by flexibility: it ‘is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at thesame time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infi-nite, and discontinuous’ (1995: 181). This mix of mobile yet continuous poweris achieved through ‘control mechanisms’, or what today might be calledinformation communication technologies, that can provide a spatial fix ofconsumers, or ‘dividuals’, and objects at any given moment. In his Postscript,Deleuze describes the emergence of a ‘new system of domination’ thatemploys computer-based systems of electronic tagging ‘to make sure everyoneis in a permissible place’ (1995: 182). Today, over twenty years on, evermore powerful surveillance technologies are emerging that extend such a

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system of control (see, for example, Graham and Wood, 2003, on algorithmicsurveillance; Crang and Graham, 2007, on ambient intelligence; and Lyon,2007, on biometric forms of surveillance). The most prominent of these areradio frequency identification tags (RFIDs), which stamp mass producedobjects with individual identities, and through connection to background data-bases potentially enable the tracking and potential surveillance of consumerpopulations to an extent that has previously been unimaginable (see Ganeet al., 2007; Hayles, 2009).

Zygmunt Bauman’s writings on liquid modernity and individualization givemany of these ideas of a post-disciplinary or post-panoptic society a sociologi-cal twist. In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman describes, like Deleuze,the collapse of the heavy institutional structures of industrial modernity, andthe emergence of new fluid and transient forms of sociality in their place (seeBauman in Gane, 2004: 19–20). Central to this transition is a process of indi-vidualization, whereby powers previously assumed by the state or institutionssuch as class or the family are devolved downwards to individuals. The situa-tion that results from this process is ‘liquid’ modernity:

an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden ofpattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on theindividual’s shoulders . . . Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids inshape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort –and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclu-sion. (Bauman, 2000: 7–8)

This new social world, characterized by the dissolution of institutional struc-tures and the promise of new individual freedoms, is accompanied by a chang-ing landscape of power and politics. For Bauman, in industrial modernity themain threat to freedom came from totalitarianism, or ‘the total annihilationof the private sphere’ (1999: 88). Today, he argues, it comes from the reverse:individualization, or the overrunning of the public sphere by private lives andinterests. This invasion of the public by the private not only cheapens publiclife and politics, but threatens to divorce individual from collective freedoms.Bauman’s answer, which at this point is quite different from anything found inthe work of Deleuze, is to call for a reconstitution of what he calls the agora:that space between the private (oikos) and public sphere (the ecclesia) inwhich private troubles can be translated into public issues (see Bauman, 1999,2001; and the concluding chapter of Gane, 2012 for a further assessment of thisposition). He declares: ‘To make the agora fit for autonomous individuals andautonomous society, one needs to arrest, simultaneously, its privatization andits depoliticization’ (Bauman, 1999: 107).

This theory of individualization is accompanied by an analysis of post-disciplinary forms of power. At surface level there appear to be similaritieswith the position taken by Deleuze, for Bauman declares that today thedatabase is a key ‘instrument of selection, separation and exclusion’ (1998:



51). The focal point of Bauman’s analysis, however, is not the capacity forinformation communication technology to offer new possibilities for surveil-lance, but rather the emergence of a post-panoptic culture that is far removedfrom the disciplinary techniques of the 19th century. At the outset of LiquidModernity, Bauman describes a world marked by new forms of ‘extraterrito-rial’ power, and by the end of ‘the era of mutual engagement: between thesupervisors and supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their followers,armies at war’ (2000: 11). Bauman explores this theme further in a key sectionof Globalization: The Human Consequences entitled ‘Is there life after Pano-pticon?’ (1998: 48–54), where he draws a distinction between the Panopticonand what Thomas Mathiesen calls (1997) the ‘Synopticon’. Whereas the Pano-pticon works through a coercive power that immobilizes subjects by confiningthem to a place, Bauman argues that in the ‘Synopticon’

locals watch the globals. The authority of the latter is secured by their veryremoteness; the globals are literally ‘out of this world’, but their hoveringabove the worlds of the local is much more, daily and obtrusively, visiblethan that of the angels who once hovered over the Christian world: simul-taneously inaccessible and within sight, lofty and mundane, infinitely supe-rior yet setting a shining example for all the inferiors to follow or to dreamof following; admired and coveted at the same time – a royalty that guidesinstead of ruling. (1998: 53–4)

This description of the Synopticon, which moves away from Mathiesen’s focuson print media and technologies for disciplining the soul, is tied to Bauman’sbroader theory of the individualization of power and politics. For while in thePanopticon, just as in totalitarian regimes, there is ‘no private space; at leastno opaque private space unsurveilled or worse still unsurveillable’ (1998: 49),in the Synopticon all spaces are seen to be overrun by personal and privatelives: the more revealing and explicit the better (see Bauman’s analysis ofBig Brother, 2000: 26–30). The model of the Synopticon is here depicted byBauman as reversing the underlying logic of the Panopticon, for now the fewdo not watch the many, but rather the many (the public) watch the few(celebrities). The Synopticon is a tele-visual technology that operates throughthe medium of the screen, and in this sense, like the Panopticon, it is tied to avisual model of power, but the difference is that its techniques are seductiverather than coercive: no one is made to watch, and any immobility resultingfrom watching is chosen rather than forced.

The basic idea of synopticism, as it is formulated by Bauman, is that tele-mediated forms of surveillance are tied to the pleasure principle, and to thedesire for people to watch and be watched. But this leads to a problem inBauman’s account, which has a tendency to present the contemporary worldas being populated by passive audiences or consumers, when it might beargued that the reverse in fact is true, especially as media culture todayinvolves heightened levels of involvement or interactivity.This is most striking

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in the world of social networking, where participants exercise constantvigilance over their presentation of self in the form of a ‘profile’, as well as overthe presentational labours of so-called ‘friends’ to which this profile is dis-played.This form of decentred and individualized surveillance is not just aboutpassive consumption or what might be called ‘viewing’ in Mathiesen’s sense,but participation and work. In light of this, what is needed in response toMathiesen and Bauman is a theory of the Synopticon 2.0 – which might bedefined as an ‘interactive’ tele-visual model in which the many watch the manyrather than just the few, as well as watching over themselves – to draw intoquestion the so-called interactivity of new media and its connection to emer-gent forms of neoliberal subjectivity. This connection has been touched uponby Andrew Barry (1999) in his work on museums, but needs to be reconsideredin the light of recent developments in social networking, which now makeMathiesen’s (1997) brief references to the Internet through the course of hisanalysis of the Synopticon look dated. Such work, however, lies largely beyondthe limits of the present paper, which instead is concerned primarily withbroader but related structural connections between the state and the market,and with the governmentalities that run between the two. It is with this interestthat a different line of critique of Bauman is to be pursued: one that calls intoquestion the idea of individualization that both underpins and plays outthrough his model of the Synopticon.

Governmentality: from liberal to neoliberal

Bauman extends many of the arguments of Deleuze’s Postscript by exploringsociologically the decline of heavy institutional structures and the fading oftheir associated precepts. In the concluding passages to his Postscript, Deleuzedeclares that ‘we’re at the beginning of something new’ (1995: 182). Bauman’swork on individualization and the Synopticon addresses this new situation byanalysing the limits of panopticism while at the same time developing a theoryof post-panopticism that is tied to a deeper theory of social and politicalchange. Bauman’s writings on individualization, and in particular his analysisof the downward movement of power from the state to the individual, are inall but name an argument about the effects of laissez-faireist neoliberalism.The term neoliberalism appears, albeit rather elusively, in key passages inBauman’s writings on individualization and the decline of the ecclesia. In InSearch of Politics, for example, Bauman argues that in the face of individuali-zation, contemporary institutional structures have been seduced by the indi-vidualizing logic of neoliberalism, and in so doing contribute to their owndisempowerment. He writes: ‘Instead of joining ranks in the war against uncer-tainty, virtually all effective institutionalized agencies of collective action jointhe neo-liberal chorus singing the praise of unbound “market forces” and freetrade . . .’ (1999: 28). Later, in the same book, he describes the current ascend-ency of the forces of the capitalist market, or what he calls consumerism (see



Bauman, 2010), over the state and public powers or politics (for a restatementof this position, see Bauman, 2002). He argues:

Once the state recognizes the priority and superiority of the laws of themarket over the laws of the polis, the citizen is transmuted into the con-sumer, and a consumer ‘demands more and more protection while accept-ing less and less the need to participate’ in the running of the state. Theoverall result is the present ‘fluid conditions of generalized anomie andrejection of the rules’ in all their versions. (1999: 156)

The tragedy of consumer society, for Bauman, is that it passes ‘freedoms’ downto individuals but at the same time depoliticizes and disempowers them byclosing down the agora as an active space for political engagement, and byleaving consumers (who are not citizens) to their own devices. Baumanresponds by pursuing a critique of individualization, and with this a critique of‘neo-liberal philosophy’ and what he calls the ‘laissez-faireist practice offreedom’ (1999: 72). His answer is to place the very idea of freedom intoquestion by drawing a distinction between republicanism, which seeks todeploy ‘individual liberty in the communal search for the common good’, andliberalism which ‘is inclined to alight from the republican train at the stationname laissez faire’, thereby producing ‘free yet lonely individuals’ (1999: 66–7).True freedom, he argues by way of response, has a collective rather thanindividual basis (see Bauman in Gane, 2004, for further detail).

Bauman’s writings on individualization and post-disciplinary society are acritique of market capitalism and the freedoms it promises but never ultimatelydelivers. They also contain a narrative about the shift from liberal (in theFoucauldian sense) to neoliberal or individualized forms of politics and power,and indeed this, arguably, is what is at stake in his account of synopticism. Butit is at this point that Bauman’s writings on liquid modernity and individuali-zation reach their limit, for while they are framed at key points in terms of acritique of neoliberalism, they contain no detailed analysis of the state or themarket, or the relation between the two. This means that neoliberalism and itsrelated governmentalities remain under-theorized in Bauman’s work, whichadvances a brilliant critique of the downward movement of power from insti-tutions to individuals, but at the cost of detailed analysis of institutionalstructures such as the state or social class (see Atkinson, 2008) that are still verymuch central to the operation of contemporary capitalism. It is surprising thatanalysis of the state, including its changing form and its relation to the market,is all but absent from Bauman’s ‘liquid’ sociology (an exception is Bauman,2007: 55–70, where there is no mention of neoliberalism, and 2011: 115, wherehe only briefly questions the function of the state in defending culture from‘market expansion’), particularly as in the aftermath of the financial crisis of2008 the state has returned to prominence as the institution to give the eco-nomic and political support necessary for the ongoing operation of marketcapitalism. In this context, there has been no simple devolution or weakening

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of state powers as Bauman’s work might suggest. In the face of such a situation,individualization needs to be addressed as part of a broader and more detailedanalysis of neoliberalism: one that does not read the neoliberal simply in termsof ‘laissez-faireist’ practices (which themselves have been strongly dismissed bykey neoliberal thinkers such as Hayek, see for example 1944: 17) or in terms ofwhat Jamie Peck calls ‘roll-back’, but also through analysis both of the ‘roll-out’of new post-panoptic forms of surveillance and of the underlying governmentallogics of neoliberalism that these conceal.

Before turning to such questions, it is worth noting that the concept ofneoliberalism is not an easy one: it has a complex history and has beenascribed different meanings by rival groups of political economists throughoutthe 20th century (for a comprehensive intellectual history of this term, seePeck, 2008). For this reason it has been branded variously as a ‘rascal’(Brenner et al., 2010) or ‘mongrel’ (Peck, 2010) concept, and some have com-plained that it risks lumping ‘together too many things to merit a singleidentity’ (Hall, 2011: 706). It is thus important to be clear about the way thisterm is to be used.

A popular definition of neoliberalism, which is partly reproduced in thework of Bauman, is that it is a laissez-faire political and economic culturewhich demands government and the state be limited in their power to inter-vene in the market or in the entrepreneurial activities of individuals. Theargument of the present paper is that this definition is only partially correct asneoliberalism is not just a normative discourse that seeks the devolution ofpower from the state downwards or a simple argument for either individuali-zation or laissez-faire as suggested by Bauman, but rather it addresses theappropriate powers of the state and the role it should play in ensuring thefreedom of the market (for a succinct overview of the role of the state underconditions of neoliberalism, see Harvey, 2005: 64; on the ‘false polarity’ oflaissez-faire and state intervention, see de Angelis, 2007: 10–12). Neoliberalismcentres on the relationship between the state and the market, or more precisely‘where to draw the line on the role of the state in the economy’ (Peck, 2008:26): a question that has divided many generations of neoliberal thinkers (fromFriedrich Hayek through to Milton Friedman). For this reason, neoliberalism,or what Bauman might call individualization or Deleuze flexible capitalism,does not simply involve the devolution of state or institutional powers but alsothe emergence of particular forms of governance. In the terms of Jamie Peck(2010), as stated at the outset of this paper, neoliberalism is about ‘roll-back’and ‘roll-out’: it is about market freedoms and forms of governmentality thatoperate through such freedoms and, moreover, through forms of surveillanceand regulation that are designed to inject market principles of competitioninto all spheres of social and cultural life. The primary value of Foucault’slectures on biopolitics is that they address neoliberalism in terms of theseunderlying governmentalities. They do so by tracing the emergence of neolib-eralism to the political-economic thought that laid the basis for the develop-ment of the social market economy in post-war Germany: ordoliberalism. It is



through an encounter with ordoliberalism, a movement which is only nowstarting to attract serious sociological attention (see, for example, Bonefeld,2012), that new light might be cast on the governmental dynamics and logics ofadvanced market capitalism of the present, and in this sense it might be arguedthat Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics are genealogical in form.

Foucault’s sweeping analysis of neoliberalism in his lectures on biopoliticsbegins with a group of German political economists associated with the journalOrdo, which was founded by Walter Eucken in 1948.This group, also known asthe Freiburg School, are of particular interest to Foucault because theyadvanced a new normative model of the relation between the state and market,and in so doing redefined not simply the limits of the state but more funda-mentally what a state is and how its institutions are to operate. Foucault arguesthat in liberal political economy the role of the state is to watch over the marketand to intervene only when it is necessary to protect its freedom.This, as statedabove, is reproduced in the model of the Panopticon: a form of government forwhich watching, for the most part, is power enough. However, in post-warGermany liberalism was confronted by a new situation, for a market existedbut no state as such.This reversed the problem faced by the physiocrats and theliberal economists of the 18th century, for whom there was an already existing,legitimate state which had to be limited in order to create the ‘necessaryeconomic freedom’. Indeed: ‘The problem the Germans had was to resolve theexact opposite: given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on thebasis of this non-state space of economic freedom?’ (Foucault, 2008: 86–7).The answer, for the ordoliberals, was to conceive of a ‘radically economic state’and to think of state-formation as a ‘commercial opening’. The model of thePanopticon is effectively reversed, for rather than the state ensuring the legiti-macy of the market, the market produces legitimacy for the state, which in turnbecomes its ‘guarantor’. Foucault argues that what underpins the formation ofthis type of state is the ‘guaranteed exercise of an economic freedom’, and thisis made possible by a ‘permanent genesis’ or ‘circuit’ that goes ‘constantly fromthe economic institution to the state’ (2008: 84). The problem this posed theordoliberals, and which subsequently prompted much debate, was how a statecould be founded upon, and yet at the same time be limited by, a principle ofeconomic freedom, or in Foucault’s terms how could it be the state’s ‘guaranteeand security’ (2008: 102)? Their answer was that the market economy should bethe principle of the state’s ‘internal regulation from start to finish of its exist-ence and action’ (2008: 116). Foucault explains:

instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it wereunder state supervision – which was, in a way, the initial formula ofliberalism . . . – the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formulaaround and adopt the free market as an organizing and regulating principleof the state, from the start of existence up to the last form of its interven-tions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market ratherthan a market supervised by the state. (2008: 116)

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The market economy is to serve as the ‘principle, form, and model’ of the state.This, for the ordoliberals, is the basis upon which a state can gain its legitimacy,and, following the horrors of Nazism, how it can be ‘made acceptable to thosewho most mistrusted it’ (Foucault, 2008: 117).

The argument of the ordoliberals is that the state and all its institutionsshould be marketized, but what, exactly, is meant here by the market? Foucaultargues that the market in liberal economics was theorized in terms ofexchange, or rather ‘free exchange between two partners who through thisexchange establish the equivalence of two values’ (2008: 118). A focus onexchange (and its different forms), one might add, can be found at the heart ofmost classical theories of the social. However, the ordoliberals break with thistradition and conceive of the market not as a site of exchange but rather as oneof competition. Interestingly, this is a position found earlier in the writings ofWeber, for whom the market is a competition between buyers and sellers, andbetween those buying and those selling, over price. Foucault argues that, forthe ordoliberals, the definition of the market in terms of competition has animportant consequence: the idea of laissez-faire is placed into question on thegrounds that it is nothing more than a ‘naive naturalism’. Competition, it isargued by contrast, ‘is absolutely not a given of nature’, for its ‘game, mecha-nisms, and effects’ are ‘not at all natural phenomena’ (Foucault, 2008: 120).This move is pivotal, for it suggests that there is nothing natural about themarket, and, because of this, markets cannot simply be left to their owndevices. Instead, they must be tied to government. In a key passage, Foucaultwrites:

Government must accompany the market economy from start to finish.The market economy does not take something away from government.Rather, it indicates, it constitutes the general index in which one mustplace the rule for defining governmental action. One must govern for themarket, rather than because of the market. To that extent you can see thatthe relationship defined by eighteenth century liberalism is completelyreversed (2008: 121).

For the ordoliberals, markets need government, just as government needs, asits founding principle, the market, but what type or art of governmentemerges from this relationship? Foucault argues that in this configurationgovernment works actively to create the space for competition to take place,and for this reason neoliberalism ‘should not be identified with laissez-faire,but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention’ (2008: 132,emphasis mine). Neoliberalism thus does not signify the absence of govern-ment or the state. Rather, it is an argument for the state to be marketized toits core, and for government to work tirelessly to ensure that competitionplays a ‘regulatory role at every moment and every point in society’, therebypromoting the ‘general regulation of society by the market’ (2008: 145).

In ordoliberalism, the market and its principles are simply everywhere,and nothing, conceivably, lies out of its reach (hence it might be said to be



biopolitical in form; a question Foucault neglects through the course of hislectures). The key point is that nothing is now sacred from the logic of mar-ketization: ‘the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touchand others that you are entitled to touch.The problem is how you touch them’(Foucault, 2008: 133). For Foucault, this spirit of ordoliberalism, in particularits emphasis on competition and marketization, lies at the heart of morecontemporary forms of neoliberalism (see 2008: 117). He qualifies this argu-ment by exploring in detail the continuities as well as the subtle differencesbetween ordoliberalism and later forms of French and American neoliberal-ism (for a summary, see Foucault, 2008: 192–3; on the American model ofenterprise, see McNay, 2009). The importance of Foucault’s analysis of ordo-liberalism is that it treats neoliberalism as a reversal of Bentham’s model ofpanopticism, or of a model of government in which the state is positioned towatch over the market (which in turn is said to require a minimum of inter-vention because it is something that is natural or self-normalizing).

This reversal is different to that described by Bauman in his theory of thePanopticon and Synopticon. For whereas the Panopticon is a model of powerbased on the state watching both the masses (Discipline and Punish) and themarket (Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics), the Synopticon, at least in Bau-man’s account, is a model in which the masses are immobilized, politicallyand spatially, by watching and participating in what is effectively the market.The main problem with Bauman’s work is that both the state and the marketdisappear in favour of a broader focus on processes of individualization but,as Foucault shows, analysis of the connection between state and market iskey to understanding the neoliberal art of government. For in the neoliberalmodel, the role of the state and government is to work actively to ensurecompetition in the market, and beyond this, as it is founded on principles thatalready come from the market, is to work to promote competition within itsown institutions and agencies. The state no longer watches the market, as inthe Panopticon model, instead, guided by the market, it increasingly watchesitself.

The task of neoliberal government, as outlined by Foucault, is to ensure thefreedom of the market and, as a marketized form itself, this freedom mustextend into and all state structures and institutions (at the point of writing, thepromotion of further competition or ‘choice’ in the British National Healthsystem is headline news). For the neoliberals this ‘freedom’ comes, most obvi-ously, through the opening up of competition through the privatization of stateactivities (see Foucault, 2008: 143–4), and in line with this the promotion of aspirit of enterprise that shifts ‘ “the centre of gravity of governmental actiondownwards” ’ (Röpke cited by Foucault, 2008: 148) – something that today iscentral to the idea of a ‘Big Society’. However, in cases where privatizationis not an immediate possibility, there is an alternative, yet complementarystrategy that furthers the logic of Foucault’s analysis: the introduction oftechniques of measurement or audit that enable the direct comparison ofinstitutions through the construction of classifications such as ‘league’ tables.

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At surface level this ‘audit explosion’ (Rose, 1999: 153–5) and proliferation of‘performance indicators’ (de Angelis, 2007: 219) can be read in terms of a shiftfrom government based on trust to a new regime of accountability (see, forexample, Power, 1994), but what sits beneath this notion of accountability is ademand for the state to justify itself to the market (for an analysis of the waysin which ‘calculative practices’ of accountancy are connected to neoliberaltechnologies of government, see Miller, 2001). The way the state can satisfythis demand, and with this prove its legitimacy, is by introducing principles ofcompetition from the market into all of its activities and agencies. One promi-nent example of this is the education sector in the UK. This was a sector that,under the liberal model governance, was largely immune to the principles ofthe market, but under neoliberalism such immunity has long gone. The ques-tion now, to paraphrase Foucault (2008: 133), is not if education can be touchedby the market, but how it is to be touched by market principles. In the sphereof secondary education, Graham Burchell observes a neoliberal ethos thatseeks ‘autonomization’ through the promotion of ‘a kind of economic orenterprise model of action that pursues a competitive logic’ (1996: 28). Thequestion this poses in turn is how competition is introduced and maintainedin such a sector? The answer is through active processes of (self-)governmentand (self-)surveillance that come from the market and which, most commonly,take the form of an audit. One of the few people to have sensed what is atstake here is Marilyn Strathern, who argues that new management practices ofaudit are ‘a now taken-for-granted process of neo-liberal government’ and lieat the core of its ‘ethos’. She writes: ‘Where audit is applied to public institu-tions – medical, legal, educational – the state’s overt concern may be less toimpose day-to-day direction than to ensure that internal controls, in the formof monitoring techniques, are in place’ (2000: 3). Measures such as theResearch Assessment Exercise in the UK higher education sector operate inexactly this way.They work to legitimize this sector in terms of ‘accountability’and ‘quality’, but most importantly work to promote competition in ways thatwere previously unimaginable. Whether such audits will exist once the princi-ples of competition and enterprise are fully at play with the sector remains tobe seen. For will there be any need for the market to watch state institutionsonce these are fully marketized: will regulation through competition be seen tobe regulation enough?

Conclusion

Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, which provide a longer and more detailedhistory of neoliberal reason than is common in the sociological literature onthis subject (see, for example, Harvey, 2005; Hall, 2011), provide a valuablecorrective to accounts of neoliberalism that are framed solely in terms oflaissez-faire or individualization, for they remind us that neoliberalism is notsimply about deregulation, privatization or governing through freedom, but



also about intervention and regulation with the aim of injecting market prin-ciples of competition into all forms of social and cultural life. Jamie Peckargues that such forms of governance and their associated ‘regulatory incur-sions’ rest upon the ‘rediscovery and reinvention of an Ordoliberal ethic’(2010: 23). In this regard, Foucault’s detailed study of ordoliberalism is par-ticularly useful as it tells us about the history of this ethic, and with this opensa path for the analysis of current forms of audit culture, classification or whatPeck calls ‘roll-out’ through a body of political-economic ideas that for themost part have been long forgotten. Indeed, it is through the study of ordo-liberalism that Foucault offers an analytic model for understanding neoliber-alism as a governmental form that moves in a loop from the market to socialinstitutions such as the state. It might be observed that there has been somedispute over whether Foucault’s concept of governmentality has ‘a textual andphilosophical bias’ (Garland, 1997: 199) or whether it is more concerned withwhat might be called ‘practices of government’ (Rose, 2000: 323). This is not adispute within which this paper seeks to intervene, but one way forward, asGarland suggests, is to conceive of Foucault’s models of liberal and neoliberalgovernmentality as ideal-types which can act as conceptual starting points forsociological analysis of governmental configurations between the market andthe state.With this aim in mind, this paper will conclude by offering a typologyof liberal and neoliberal governmentalities which includes the different pano-ptic and post-panoptic models of surveillance through which they operate.Thisis intended to be a heuristic typology to help orientate analysis of the concretepractices and technologies of liberal and neoliberal forms of government,rather than an ontology of governmentality that starts with analysis of thefundamental being or life of such forms. While there is no easy separationbetween these two ways of working (or more broadly between epistemologyand ontology), the idea here is that a typology of governmentality and itsconnected models of surveillance and regulation might in turn frame furtherwork on the operational dynamics of governance within different political,cultural and social contexts and settings – something that lies beyond thebounds of the present paper.

Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, when read alongside the writings ofDeleuze and Bauman on control societies and individualization, can be used toconstruct a fourfold typology of liberal and neoliberal governmentality. Thefirst such type is governmentality through surveillance and discipline. This isthe model of the Panopticon and of liberal governance more broadly in whichthe state watches over the market and over its citizens and intervenes onlywhen necessary, for surveillance or the very act of watching is, for the mostpart, deemed to be discipline enough. Second, is governmentality throughsurveillance and control. This is where subjects are no longer confined to aphysical space and where state institutions are not the only ones doingthe watching. In these terms, ‘control’ is underpinned by a post-disciplinarymodel of governance which devolves power downwards from crumbling stateinstitutions to new agencies of control that emerge from the market. Control

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societies break partly from the model of the Panopticon, for surveillance nowworks at a distance and operates through technologies of tagging and trackingthat enable the monitoring of mobile entities, but at the same time, watching,of sorts, is still the key (see, for example, Poster’s 1995 idea of the Superpano-pticon). In Foucauldian terms, the governmentality of control societies liessomewhere between the liberal and neoliberal models, for the emphasis is onthe state devolving power to the market, or commercial agencies that are wellequipped to track mobilities of different sorts, but there is no accompanyingtheory of what happens in return: the marketization of the state.

Third, is governmentality through interactivity. This takes us back to thelimits of Bauman’s theory of individualization and his model of the Synop-ticon. Like Deleuze’s control society, this model is built upon the movementof power from state to the individual but the difference is that it inverts thearchitecture of the Panopticon so that the many watch the few, or in govern-mental terms, individuals look to the market for guidance rather than thestate. What is missing from this account is an accompanying theory of whathappens to the state in such a situation. Bauman’s focus is instead on thedamage done to sociality by mechanisms of competition (see 2007: 68), andon the illusory freedoms promised by individualization, and more specifically,consumerism. This poses a problem back to the work of Foucault, whichlargely failed to address the governmental logics and dynamics of consumersociety (for an attempt to extend Foucault’s work along these lines, seeBinkley, 2006 or Miller and Rose, 2008). But at the same time Foucault’swork offers something back to Bauman, for rather than merely dismissingconsumer freedoms as fictions, it is possible to analyse such ‘freedoms’through a Foucauldian lens in terms of their underlying governmentalities(thereby extending the genealogy of freedom advanced by Rose, 1999). Thiswould mean moving beyond Bauman’s model of the Synopticon by concep-tualizing consumers not simply as passive entities but as willing and wilfulparticipants, and, as suggested through the course of the present paper, toanalyse the current freedoms of media ‘interactivity’ in critical terms bylooking at their role in the construction of emergent neoliberal subjectivities.This task is particularly pressing given that (new) media technologies barelyfeature in the accounts of either Foucault or Bauman, and perhaps becauseof this the governmentalities of such technologies remain under-theorizedwithin the discipline of sociology more generally.

Fourth, is governmentality through surveillance to promote competition.This idea lies at the heart of Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberalism in hislectures on biopolitics. In such a situation, the state remains crucial to theoperation of market capitalism, for in one direction it strives to create theconditions for the freedom of the market while in the other it works accordingto principles which themselves come from this market. This, as Foucaultobserves, is not a laissez-faire arrangement, for the state and its institutionshave to show ‘permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention’ (Foucault, 2008:132) through processes of self-surveillance and intervention or what might be



called audit to promote competition, and thereby to achieve legitimacy in theface of the market. This model of governance, which Foucault traces to thepolitical economy of post-war Germany, is the reverse of Panopticism, forrather than the state watching the market, which is seen to be natural orself-normalizing, the market now penetrates all aspects of both state andsociety, which in turn are to normalize themselves according to market prin-ciples. The value of this concept of governance lies in its attention to theconnection between regulation and competition, and to neoliberal processesof what Peck calls ‘roll-out’. In these terms, it is possible to explain the ongoingdrive for measurement, audit and classification within the state and publicsector institutions more generally: they are there to manufacture marketizedforms of competition where previously they did not exist.

Finally, it is tempting to construct a linear narrative of different types ofsurveillance out of the arts of government outlined above, and to think interms of the displacement of liberalism (state surveillance of the market) bynew forms of neoliberalism (the active marketization of the state), andperhaps, following the financial crisis of 2008, the displacement of neoliberal-ism by seemingly neo-Keynesian practices of state intervention into, andcontrol over, markets. But things are more complex than this, not least becauseas David Harvey (2010) and Slavoj Žižek (2009) have argued, the current crisisof capitalism has presented opportunities for the further neoliberalization ofthe state and civil society, or what Bauman has called ‘de-regulation-cum-individualization mark two’ (2007: 68). Such developments are beyond thescope of this paper, but nevertheless it might be argued that the above typol-ogy of surveillance and governmentalities might be useful for understandingthis post-crisis situation. One could, for example, explore the following, mul-tiple configurations: liberal (the state watches over the market and intervenesonly in the last instance through rescue packages and ‘bailouts’); control (thestate and a range of private agencies watch over the conduct of its consumersthrough technologies such as CCTV and RFID tags); interactive (consumersboth watch and participate in the market and the state, which increasinglytakes a marketized form); and neoliberal (the market introduces new auditsand measures into the state that in turn are used to justify its legitimacy andvalue). Such typological analysis clearly needs work, but there are at leastthree reasons why Foucault’s work might be useful for such an exercise: first,it offers a nuanced definition of neoliberalism that centres rightly on activetechniques of government rather than laissez-faire; second, it treats surveil-lance as something tied to, and thus potentially a window onto, an underlyingset of governmentalities; and third, it places intricate and fast-changing con-nections between the state, the market and (civil) society at the heart of itsanalysis: connections that have all too often been absent from the focus ofcontemporary sociology.

University of York Received 10 August 2011Finally accepted 23 May 2012

Nicholas Gane


Acknowledgements

This article began life as a keynote presentation at the Centre for Modern Studies conference‘Watching and Being Watched’ at the University of York, UK in the summer of 2011. I would liketo thank the organizers and participants of this event for their questions and comments, many ofwhich helped me formulate my argument in its early stages. I would also like to thank twoanonymous reviewers for providing useful and extensive comments which prompted me to makesubstantial revisions to an earlier draft of this paper.

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gane - 'the governmentalities of neoliberalism

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