Lecture on Nikolas Rose

The Government of the Self

Examples that make us think critically about the reflexive individual of late modernity. We make choices about our lives, invest much in the active construction of own biographies but:

• The influences on ‘our’ choices. Also aware of agencies and institutions that set out to channel our desires and choices e.g. advertising and marketing.
• The involvement of professional expertise in providing ‘guidance’ on how we should lead our lives.
• What happens when we do not make the ‘right’ choices?
• Examples of being managed as individuals e.g. the Appraisal invites you to assess yourself and align your personal goals with the goals of the organisation.

Arguably there has been a weakening of social conventions, moral regulation and social stigma (more ‘permissive’) but has this external control of behaviour been replaced by internalised pressures to be the right sort of person. Has requirement to modify our behaviour according to external conventions and morals been replaced by a requirement on us to become certain sorts of people, to change the way we think and feel?

We are used to thinking equating individuality with freedom and autonomy - e.g. thinking of a ‘private self’ free of external control – but for some analysts the development of the experiences and values of individuality is intimately related to and is inseparable from the development of new systems and techniques of government and organisation. The history of the development of these systems and techniques involves nothing less than (Rose) “the shaping of the private self.”

Nikolas Rose and in particular his book Governing the Soul - offers an historical sociology of ‘subjectivity’ - the social shaping of the inner world of humans.

“ Our personalities, subjectivities, and ‘relationships’ are not private matters, if this implies they are not objects of power. On the contrary, they are intensively governed.”

The Preface begins:

“ This book is about the powers that have come to bear upon the subjective experience of people and their relations with one another: political power, economic power, institutional power, expert power, technical power, cognitive power.”

In the book Rose focuses on the rise of Psychology and associated disciplines such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis. These ‘psy’ disciplines not only develop new ways of talking and thinking about the human subject. They develop knowledge, practical techniques and institutional arrangements that allow them to measure, evaluate, understand and act on the human subject in ways not previously possible. The expertise of ‘psy’ disciplines have had a key role in constituting ‘governable subjects’ – created individuals that can be governed in modern liberal democracies

• ‘Government’ is not just ‘the government’. Government = ‘the conduct of conduct’ and State is only one of a number of different authorities.
• These disciplines are not ideologies in the sense of being false – they are a ‘regime of truth’ - “our lives really do become psychological in form”
• Nor can they be seen as stifling the individuality– individual and sense of individuality is constituted through these processes

Rose considers four aspects of life in his ‘genealogy of the human subject’:

Warfare : in WW2 psy involved in – home front morale, psychological warfare, selection and placement of officers and men, rehabilitation of psychiatric casualties. New gaze on ‘attitudes’, ‘personality’ and group dynamics. This is an important shift in the conduct of war but for Rose, more importantly, Psy stakes claim to key role in management of individuals in institutional life that continued into peace time.

Workplace In post war period psy applied to questions of productivity, labour relations, integrating individual into workplace. Work imperative becomes psychological as well as economic.

“ Employment has become construed as an essential element in individual psychological health, family stability and social tranquility.”

“ Work itself is a means to self-fulfilment, and the pathway to company profit is also the pathway to individual self-actualisation.”

Family and Child Psy links the ‘private’ realm of the family with the objectives of the government – for example it provides language for expressing concerns about child rearing and established norms of desirable childhood development and behaviour.

Theraputic culture Can see again here the spreading influence of psy. Psy provides techniques for reshaping selves – not just curing pathology but reshaping subjectivity.

To sum up: The development of a social setting where:

• Rulers see it as part of their task to shape our inner selves
• The management of subjectivity becomes central to organisation
• New expertise of subjectivity - authorities become ‘engineers of the human soul’

This is not just the story of new forms of power, it also about the development of new forms of subjectivity. People are reconstituted as psychological beings with enhanced subjectivity.

“ These new ways of thinking and acting do not just concern the authorities. They affect each of us, our personal beliefs, wishes and aspirations, in other words, our ethics. The new languages for construing, understanding and evaluating ourselves and others have transformed the ways in which we interact with our bosses, employees, workmates, husbands, wives, lovers, mothers, fathers, children and friends. Our thought worlds have been reconstructed, our ways of thinking about and talking about our personal feelings, our secret hopes, our ambitions and disappointments. Our techniques for managing our emotions have been reshaped. Our very sense of ourselves has been revolutionized. We have become intensely subjective beings.” (p3)

By recasting people as autonomous actors with responsibility for their own lives, these new forms of subjectivity allow ‘government through freedom’.

“ These new forms of regulation do not crush subjectivity. They actually fabricate subjects – human men, women and children – capable of bearing the burdens of liberty.” (viii)

Interpreting recent developments

“ There is a sense of ethical paucity of the contemporary obligation to fulfil ourselves through the mundane achievements of our everyday lives, and to evaluate all aspects of our lives in terms of the extent to which they do or do not contribute to such an inexorable trajectory of self-improvement and personal happiness through career enhancement and lifestyle maximization.” (xxiv)

“ Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided by others. Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body alteration, and the calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by the experts of the soul. The government of the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease generated by a normative judgement of what we are and could become, and the incitement offered to overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of experts in the management of the self.” (p11)