Governmentality Kritik - Georgetown 2023

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Neoliberal governmentality uses public finance and budget as tools to spread market rationality – it constructs neoliberal subjects that internalize the state’s discipline to allow for unfettered control.
Gürkan 18 [Ceyhun Gürkan is a faculty member of Political Science at Ankara University. Ceyhun Gürkan, 7-31-2018, Foucault, Public Finance, And Neoliberal Governmentality: A Critical Sociological Analysis, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/611113]
In looking at the literature, few authors draw attention to the public finance from the perspective of governmentality after Foucault. Amongst them, Nikolas Rose (1993; 1996) and Peter Miller (2008, with Rose) refer to budget and budgetization as the mechanism of self-technology and rationalization pertain to neoliberal governmentality in advanced liberal countries. Budget and budgetization are seen as the essential sites and means of advancing expert knowledge, calculative rationalities and self-disciplinary procedures in governing individuals and population.
Taking inspiration from Rose and Miller, Stephan Collier (2007; 2011) makes an important contribution to the analysis of budget as social technology and budgetization as the rationalization of government in the context of and transition to neoliberalism. Collier’s studies are based upon the case of the Russian industrial city Belaya Kalitva in the post-Soviet period and aim to explain how the city has gone under a great transformation towards a social modernity managed by neoliberal governmentality. Following Max Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality, Collier argues that neoliberal governmentality and budgetary processes are not limited to the formal/calculative rationality which is carved out by the market logic. Collier identifies the substantive dimension of neoliberal governmentality and budget/budgetary rationalization, which suggests that governing population and individuals requires taking into consideration the long-term historical structures, norm systems, relations and cultural attitudes of the population. In doing so, Collier shows that neoliberal governmentality is not only concerned with the elimination of the centralized bureaucratic social welfare and planning system through the market mechanisms and formal rationality but also with the transformation and reconstruction of the embedded social structures, milieu, norms and values. This means that instead of pursuing a sharp rupture with the past, neoliberalism works on the continuity of the past values by articulating them to the grid of new societal system. The budget as a social technology is at the service of the neoliberal art of government to rebuild and govern society within its actual, historical and substantive conditions. Based upon the case study Collier argues that life at its micro and macro extent is the target in the process of constitution of social modernity through neoliberal budgetary practices and procedures which would be considered to be ‘biopolitical’ technologies of neoliberal governmentality concerned with both continuities and discontinuities. Thus, budget as a neoliberal social and biopolitical technology engages in the redistribution of the sources among the races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and other specific classifications of the life with an eye to improving and spreading the market rationality.
Following Collier, it is fair to say that budget as a biopolitical technology in neoliberal governmentality comes into play with strong microeconomic effects. As budgetary policies and rationalization which seek to establish symmetry between the budgets of official administrative units and those of households target the substantive and institutional transformation of individuals and society, the formalist rationality and calculative reasoning are, on the other side, founded on rational political-economy choices of individuals as opposed to central economic/fiscal planning. Budget becomes the managerial grid of extensive economic and political rationalization processes and it is deployed both as a constructive technology of the social control and self-technology in a way to make individual sovereign through the modification of his/her substantive habituation which is still subject to the macro-fiscal discipline. What is more, this does not exclude expert knowledge and management, and rational calculation of budgeting; they shift from the domain of central units of government to individuals. In this sense, Collier characterizes neoliberal governmentality and biopolitical government as the microeconomic critique of the welfare state bringing forward individuals’ choices geared towards re-programming of the society on the basis of micro foundations of power relations. As public choice theory contemplates, the calculative/formal rationality of taxation and expenditures is highly decentralized and becomes dependent upon choices, preferences and the power of political bargaining of the autonomous individuals and local units. The scope of public finance is not confined to the subject of scarce resource allocation managed by the central economic/fiscal planning institutions. Neoliberal governmentality employing budget as a biopolitical apparatus targets to undermine the ‘social capitalism’ in which individuals are envisioned as living encapsulated in an ‘iron cage’ that forces them to act like the state officials in their daily and private lives regulated by the bureaucratic rules instead of an autonomous and free individuals acting out of their own will to decide around self-preferences and -choices (Sennett, 2006: 33).
Drawing on Foucault and governmentality, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2014) are other two authors who deal with the question of how and through which mechanisms and technologies the autonomous individual freed from the ‘iron cage’ has been turned into or, better still, manufactured as a neoliberal subject. Like the aforementioned authors who pay specific attention to budget and budgetization, Dardot and Laval conceive neoliberalism as the new rationality, identifying the role of the budget as a social technology of control and self-technology in the process of neoliberal restructuring of individuals and society as a whole. Dardot and Laval put greater emphasis on the disciplinary and norm-imposing functions of neoliberal governmentality. For them, neoliberalism as an art of government has two interrelated aims: Construction of ‘entrepreneurial government’ and ‘neoliberal subjects’. Dardot and Laval see the budget practices and discourses as the essential mechanisms to achieve these ends. Budget functions both as a social/political technology to create an entrepreneurial government and a technology of the self to manufacture neoliberal subjects in the state sector and public life. Monetarism led by Milton Friedman made the early and general formulizations about the budget as a neoliberal technology, in which context “[t]he budget itself became an instrument for disciplining conduct” (Dardot and Laval, 2014: 171). The budget as a neoliberal technology of discipline and norm imposition is therefore not only concerned with fiscal discipline in the scope of macroeconomic policy that targets a balanced budget to accomplish the reduction of tax burden over profits, public debt, and public expenditures for welfare programs. It is also concerned with disciplining the conducts of individuals within the framework competition and entrepreneurial culture: This double constraint, monetary and budgetary, . . . was as if, by compelling agents to internalize them, the state was equipping itself with the means to constantly influence them via an ‘invisible chain’ (to employ a phrase of Bentham’s), which would oblige them to conduct themselves as individuals in competition with one another (Dardot and Laval, 2014: 172).
Biopolitical power exertion for the optimization of society enforces racialized and gendered definitions of who counts as ‘human’ and justifies violence towards non-white subjects as a necessity for preservation of the future.
Smith and Vasudevan 17 [Sara Smith is a feminist political geographer who focuses on the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. She is a professor of geography at UNC Chapel Hill. Pavithra Vasudevan is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Sara Smith and Pavithra Vasudevan, 3-27-2017, “Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section.” Sage Journals, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775817699494]
As the articles in this issue suggest, when racism is “crucified in public only to be born again in private,” (Goldberg, 2008: 24) we must attend to how race is (re-)produced globally through biopolitical practices. However, the sharp turn and parallel track of the present moment, in which white supremacy is once again openly embraced in the public sphere, only reveals the absurdity of claims to a “post-racial era.” Now, more than ever (or perhaps, just as much as always?), political life is figured as a battle for a particular kind of future; in fact, the future is the term of the battle itself. Trump’s signature phrase and line of hats, “Make America Great Again,” is a fundamentally biopolitical statement of a strikingly racialized and gendered future. Recent political events demand our attention not as breaks with the past, but for the continuities they reveal about the grammar of humanity (Spillers, 2003) through which life and death are made sensible.
These issues of national concern resonate with the global turn to the right – in Britain, India, the Philippines, Turkey, France, Brazil, and other contexts – that is emerging in local forms but holds at its center sharp disagreements over the future. While the Movement for Black Lives articulates the centrality of anti-Blackness to United States racialization, the embedded analysis questions the global workings of empire, and coloniality: when and how do some lives and bodies matter? Disciplinary mechanisms of anti-Blackness and white supremacy serve as a template for global variations of the biopolitical, which, at their very core, rely on fundamentally racialized definitions of who counts as ‘human’ that have proven very durable (Amin, 2010; da Silva, 2011; Sexton, 2008; Vargas, 2010; Weheliye, 2014; Wynter, 2003).
Global demographic changes – Europe’s influx of previously colonized peoples and predictions of a 2043 non-white majority in the US, for instance – have instigated deep-seated white racial anxieties in the Global North (Bialasiewicz, 2006), while in postcolonial contexts, racism intersects with ethnic, religious and class hierarchies (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 2005; Mamdani, 2009), adhering whiteness to some bodies through class processes (Schurr, 2017). Transnationally, Malthusian imaginings of population growth haunt biopolitical discourses, echoing colonial imaginaries – Schurr (2017: 250), recalls an IVF doctor casually remarking to her in Mexico City: “Look at all the traffic – we are just too many. We don’t have to think about how to make more babies with ART or surrogacy like you Europeans, for us the question is how to control fertility.” These anxieties hinge critically on visions of and meanings attributed to the future. In this special section, we argue that framings of race are crucially about shaping the future, and likewise, future imaginaries are central to present biopolitical operations. In the language of Anderson and Adey (2012: 1530), there is a “folding of futures and pasts into a present where, in turn, futures are constantly being produced.” Thus, we call for greater attention to the ways that temporality, and, in particular, futurity is at the heart of biopolitical practice.
This spatio-temporality of race is also caught up in the ways that people and places are temporally marked as being “advanced” or “backward” in relation to science and modernity, a biopolitical move critiqued by Du Bois (1899), picked up in this issue by Olund and by Ehlers and Krupar. This epistemological grammar centers futurity in the white subject and disqualifies non-white subjects from full humanity and thus from a forward-oriented agency, or confines these subjects to zones of death and sacrifice in service to white futurity (Banerjee, 2006; Chakrabarty, 2008; Mitchell, 2010; Olund, 2017; Povinelli, 2011; Sexton, 2011; Spillers, 2003; Wilderson III, 2010). Temporality allows us to unpack racial biopolitics and think through how whiteness is figured in terms of urgency and generational vertigo – irrevocable generational change (Anagnost, 2008; Cole and Durham, 2008; Smith, 2013). In contrast, the deaths of Black, brown, colonized, and other non-white subjects are infused with a sense of ordinariness, a wearing down of life towards slow and enduring death (Berlant, 2007; Povinelli, 2011). In particular, an ever present “vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore, 2007: 28), associates blackness with an unremarkable and inevitable “social death” intimately intertwined with the historical project of vitalism and the quest for optimization of life (Hartman, 1997; Jones, 2010; Sexton, 2011).
The alternative is adopting an ethics of care. This is imperative to not only changing the dominant framework for the relationship between the business world and ones personal but is a significant step in the direction for changing the global economy.
Fiona Robinson 06 Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science specializing in International Relations and Political Theory Beyond labour rights, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 8:3, 321-342, DOI: 10.1080/14616740600792871
It is this conviction of the importance of care in public life that has motivated the emerging research in care and social policy. In particular, this work has focused on ways in which paid labour and care can be combined in societies in order to ensure better and more readily available care for all citizens without placing undue burdens on the carers, especially women. Not surprisingly, however, most of this research relates specifically to developed, northern welfare states.3 I am arguing here, however, that a political ethic of care has a place in the development of social policy in the South, as well as in global social policy; in particular, a political ethic of care can provide a better framework from which to begin thinking about and acting to create better lives for working and caring women in developing countries. Work and Care in the Global Economy A feminist political ethics of care eschews the dominant idea of rights as the key moral concept for achieving social justice, and focuses instead on responsibility. But responsibility is not regarded as some kind of moral imperative that can be morally or legally enforced; rather, it is understood as an always, already existing part of the daily lives of all people. It recognizes that we all have developed relationships that are ‘thick with commitment or expectation’. Indeed, an ethics of responsibility aims to ‘accommodate the richness and diversity of what people have reasons to care about and take responsibility for’ (Walker 1998: 105–6). Translating this moral orientation into a public value and a policy standpoint means recognizing all people as existing within such networks of relationship and responsibility. Work, then, is not regarded as immune from these networks, but immersed within them. Indeed, research on work in the USA has shown that the difficulties employers have in trying to reduce the ‘work–family’ squeeze lie in deeply rooted assumptions about the nature of work and the workplace; in particular, the idea that the business world is a separate place with separate concerns from the private domestic domain, and has no responsibility for it (Harrington 1999: 52–3). These assumptions are widespread; indeed, they permeate both theory and activism related to globalization and workers in the South. The ‘antisweatshop’ movement, as well as other movements to enforce labour standards and workers’ rights, use the ILO’s core standards as a basis for their activist goals. As noted earlier, these standards focus on rights and freedoms associated with labour organization – including freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining – as well as minimum standards with respect to wages and working conditions, and bans on child and forced labour (DeWinter 2003: 142). As I argued earlier, however, these rights are limited, since they retain a narrow focus on work as paid labour, decontextualized from the household, and from the local and global relations of care in which people’s daily lives are immersed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fiona Robinson/Beyond Labour Rights 333 Downloaded by [Simon Fraser University] at 16:10 17 November 2014 Perhaps the first step towards creating global social policy that can improve the lives of women, and indeed all people of the South, is a shift in focus away from rights towards basic needs (Streeten 1981; Moser 1991). Indeed, as Naila Kabeer (2004: 27) argues, we must move away from the narrow preoccupation with labour standards in the globally traded sector to a consideration of working conditions in the wider economy. She argues for greater global redistribution that guarantees access to the basic means of survival; this, in turn, could enable them to engage as citizens in wider struggles for social justice in their society (Kabeer 2004: 28). A care ethics framework reminds us that caring activities and moral orientations are crucial for the provision of basic needs (Sevenhuijsen 2000: 14). A care perspective compels us to recognize the interrelatedness of care and work in the daily lives of many people, including and especially ‘working’ women in the South. Many of these women engage in a variety of kinds of work: paid wage labour in manufacturing; paid and unpaid ‘care’ work in the home or other social institutions, or often in others’ homes; informal sector activities inside and outside of the home; subsistence agriculture and other survival strategies which often fall outside of conventional categories of work. For these women, care and work are not separate; care, while often motivated by love and personal responsibility, is work, and work, traditionally understood, must continually be balanced with responsibilities of care.
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Fiscal policy
Fiscal policy is the weapon of the State to impose neoliberal norms into individuals to make them self-governing agents of the state.
Gürkan 18 [Ceyhun Gürkan is a faculty member of Political Science at Ankara University. Ceyhun Gürkan, 7-31-2018, Foucault, Public Finance, And Neoliberal Governmentality: A Critical Sociological Analysis, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/611113]
Monetarism was more of a disciplinary phase of the neoliberal governmentality. It ascribed disciplinary mechanisms to budgeting around limitations and restrictions. On the other side, it has laid one of the essential stones of neoliberal governmentality by establishing the recognition of poverty and unemployment as the natural situation of the market society.
The account of Dardot and Laval is helpful in recognizing that fiscal discipline resides in a wider scope of neoliberal disciplinary power regime. In addition, in comparison to monetarism, public choice, which escapes Foucault’s attention, aims for a broader spectrum and space of sociality and technologies to transform government and individuals within a constitutional framework.
Accordingly, budget in particular and public sector, in general, become the strategic sites of neoliberal governmentality in a way in which the meaning of the state and constitutional citizenship, as well as the relationship between the state a

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