A Governmentality Perspective on Polycentric Governing

This chapter explores the tension between how we are governed and how we think we are governed. The diffusion and multiplication of centers, practices, and techniques of power in a polycentric world challenges philosophical and political traditions which assume that we are liberal subjects, and that political power can be located in the state. Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, the chapter maps such increasingly dispersed and diverse techniques of power as they develop to create a neoliberal society of control. Whereas older forms of disciplinary control relied on more centralized and therefore more readily identifiable forms of power, neoliberal control thrives on continuous modulations and variations of power, which thereby becomes more elusive. The dispersion and invisibility of neoliberal power encourages a spread of uncertainty and paranoia in the contemporary West. Uncertainty extends to everything including knowledge (e.g. what news is ‘true’ and what is ‘fake’) and identity (e.g. what can replace the liberal subject). The (increasingly desperate) will for certainty brings an intensification of extremist and nationalist identitarian forces. Through it all runs a legitimacy crisis that emerges from the clash between deep-rooted conceptions of the liberal subject and neoliberal modes that no longer operate on the basis of such conceptions.

Ingår i:PolycentrismOxford : Oxford University Press, s. 305-32497801928668379780191957765

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