Governmental practices rarely operate by direct command and control. Both the principle of obedience and—even more so—the exercise of constraint are very costly and tied to great risk. It seems more effective to guide individuals and collectives “through their freedom,” in other words to prompt them to govern themselves, to give them positive incentives to act in a certain way and understand themselves as free subjects. Governing means creating lines of force that make certain forms of behavior more probable than others. Measuring these lines of force does not mean asking how people actually move within them. Studies of governmentality are more interested in how people are invoked to move within these lines. The focus is on the interrelations between regimes of self-government and technologies of controlling and shaping the conduct of individuals and collectives, not on what human beings governed by these regimes and technologies actually say and do. (Brockling, Krassman, Lemke - Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges)
Posted on: Sun, 13 Apr 2014 17:33:49 +0000
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