What is the kind of power apparatus do we see in India today ? India under Modi seems to be under sovereign power. It appears that Modi is ruling with a strong hand. Maybe some of us may say that we are become a disciplinary society. We as citizens are told with the force of power what we have to eat, what we have to dress or who are we to marry. Some others may say that we have entered Michel Foucault’s society of Governmentality as the fear of lost future seems to be hauntingly controlling us. Hindutva is certainly a governmentality. Maybe we have to come to Foucault to understand the power dynamics at play in India.
Foucault introduced a neologism , Governmentality in his lecture series in late 1970s . The lecture in which this term was introduced was published in 1979, ‘ ideology and consciousness’. But the rest of the series lectures saw its English translation only by 2007. Much of his teaching on Governmentality was in oral lectures and was published only posthumously . Foucault used to term Governmentality to refer to a modern form of art of governance that was significantly different from sovereignty, discipline and pastoralism. He teaches that Governmentality gave rise to a complex array of programs and techniques of governing people and things. These new practices of governmentality were diverse but were based on existing institution and processes and were future oriented, interwoven with a particular modality of power that sought to know all that which will could affect the ‘ population’. Foucault’s notion of Governmentality, then, offered itself for revealing, diagnosing, and mapping modern art of governing large population. Governmentality takes disciplining society of Foucault to a new level. Governmentality was developed out of Foucault’s genealogical stage.
Foucault’s starting point was practices. He saw the practices as the signifiers and wanted to understand them to see how they produced power and subjection. Practices to him, therefore, were governing techniques. Hence, he saw governmentality as techniques of directing human conduct using state power. He seems to say that disciplinarity is for prison, biopower iss for medical institutions and governmentality is for the state. Foucault indicates that governmentality as a distinct exercise of power began in the 18th and 19th centuries. It brought in a new ‘mentality’ of governing people and things completely different from sovereign power. Sovereignty was tied to the law of command and worked through the desire to be loyal subject, governmentality did not see the people as subjects of the laws of the land or as flocks that needed pastoral care instead people were viewed as elements existing within the fields of relations between people, events and things (chain of signifiers). Instead of controlling territories and ensuring the loyalty of the people, the governments began to govern the future. This means it considered all the risks and opportunities that future offered. Thus, by controlling the future the governments controlled the present. This required statistics of birth, death, crime, health, education, migrants, jobless etc., for the logic of governmentality to take effect. The future that is sought to be controlled is one that effects the population and not the government. Thus, the Government polices the statistics that will shape the future and the present of the people brings them under its power.
Genealogy does not admit a progressive teleological path of history. It presents breakdown and discontinuities. Foucault sees that sovereign societies, were replaced by disciplinary societies. Gilles Deleuze sees further and tells us that disciplinary societies have ruptured into societies of control. Disciplining societies work to produce conformity to the norm. Disciplining practices isolate people and keep a watch over them. Discipling occurs through the power of the gaze. With the development of surveillance technology gaze is multiplied and hence there is no need of enclosures to discipline people. This is why Deleuze says that we have landed into societies of control. The panopticon of Foucault is fast tuning into a banopticon. While we have tried to understand sovereignty, discipline and governmentality, Foucault indicates a multiple-technologies or a triangle of sovereignty, disciple and governmentality is ruling our present. Therefore, for Foucault, strictly speaking, there are no sovereign societies, disciplinary societies and societies of governmentality ( society of control). What we have is an assemblage of these technologies of power. All these technologies of power whose several combinations are at play are craftly used by the Government to mobilize power and state craft. We can see that technologies of power have an architecture of the play of signifiers that produces effects of power that lead to the triumph of a particular telos of the ruler.
The assemblages of power that are employed by the governments are not unidirectionally productive. They are productive to the people who are sort to be controlled by the governments. This suggests that people can resist and they have possibilities to resist within the power apparatus that is operating on them. There are always lines of flight out of any assemblage of the power regime. Thus, for instance, disciplining power can produce self-regulating (free) citizens. But Foucault does not see them as always emancipative. They can also be dangerous as they can put up other oppressive assemblages of power regimes. We have to take risks in our quest for emancipation. This is only by our quest for emancipation that we can invent new futures.
Foucault’s analysis of power shows us that we have a complex assemblages of power at play in India. It can at best be seen as triangulation of sovereignty, discipline and governmentality. Perhaps, we can see it as a bio-power that is moving towards what we call necropower. Biopower controls and administrates life while necropower administrates death. He seem to have reached the assemblage of a regime of power that administrates death in our country. Life has become disposable and who is to live in India and who has to die seems to be in the hands of the all-powerful state. Do we not have hope? Foucault has taught us there are lines of flight. But these have to be chosen carefully and critically to bring emancipation, harmony, peace, prosperity and love to all.
