Från hegemoni till governmentality

Simon Gunn börjar sin artikel om "From Hegemony to Governmentality" med att diskutera vad som var nytt med socialhistoria på 1960-70-talen. Man brukar säga ämnena, vad man forkade om -- nya grupper, nya fält som brottslighet eller populärkultur. Men, säger han, också teoretiska perspektiv var nya. Med Thompson, Genovese och andra växte nya perspektiv på makt fram:

"Social history proposed a substantial extension to the understanding and expression of power; it was no longer seen as restricted to institutions of government and state, but operative in multiple sites: in the workplace, on the streets, in the home. Social history, it was emphasised, was not history with the politics left out; instead, political history was radically expanded by looking beyond parties and organised movements to the political cultures rooted in the labour process and structures of popular belief. Power was at issue outside the frame of what had conventionally been deemed ‘political’. Women, workers, slaves were not to be viewed as victims or as passive objects of power—they too had agency, were engaged in struggle. At its roots, social history challenged a traditional version of power as a smooth, one-way process; it represented the past as replete with checks, resistances, dissonances." (705)

Teoretiska omvärderingar skedde förstås inte isolerat i historieforskningen. Filosofen Steven Lukes skrev 1975 om makt från ett radikalt perspektiv, influerat av Gramsci, som också influerade historikerna. Hans inflytande är tydligt i arbeten som Thompsons om 1700-talets folkliga kultur, Hobsbawms The Age of Capital (1975) och i mer teoretiskt äventyrliga studier som Robert Grays "Bourgeois hegemony in Victorian Britain" (1977). Gray skilde på "the governing fraction", jordägare, och "the hegemonic fraction", gruppen vars intressen gynnades av statsmakten, vilket enligt honom var den industriella bourgeoisien. (Alltså ett slags bonapartism-argument.)

På 1980-talet utmanades den gramscianska analysen av foucauldianska perspektiv. Foucault skrev i Power/Knowledge, och Gunn förklarar:

"“Power must be analysed as something which circulates : : : It is never localised here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth.” This meant that power was to be analysed in its effects rather than its sources and at the margins rather than at the centre." (709)

F ville bryta med marxismens ekonomism, och inte se som gramscianerna genom staten på makten där bakom, utan se på staten och maktens mekanismer.

Bland brittiska historiker plockades Foucaults perspektiv upp t ex av Mary Poovey i Making a Social body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (1995). I F:s efterföljd fokuserade hon på produktion på kunskap och reglering, och studerade utifrån detta hur en "masskultur" utvecklades på 1800-talet, och hur "det sociala" utvecklades som en relativt autonom domän. På 1800-talet ersattes 1700-talets statscentrerade "politiska ekonomi" av en "social body" och fokus på "sociala" frågor som befolkning, hälsa, brottslighet och utbildning. New Poor Law från 1834 presenterade Poovey som ett exempel på detta. Makt och kunskap är hos foucauldianen Poovey intimt sammanfätade.

Utöver epistemologi har foucauldianerna också analyserat "liberal governmentality", som i Patrick Joyce (2003) The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. Joyce studerar informationsinsamling ,kartor etc och stadens styrning och reglering.

"Drawing extensively on Foucault, The Rule of Freedom provides a significant re-conceptualisation of nineteenth-century politics. Its focus is not parties, classes or ideologies but techniques of rule, the strategies and practices by which governance was enacted. The study therefore accords with Foucault’s injunction to analyse the exercise of power instead of those deemed to hold it. By extension, power is seen as the product of abstract political rationalities rather than of individuals and groups with coherent interests. Political change involved shifts in governmental rationality and the techniques of rule, not new policies or altered class alignments." (715)

Gunn prisar flera drag i den foucauldianska historiska forskningen:

"the notion that power is always an exercise and not simply an attribute, is likewise crucial, for it highlights the need to show how power works, rather than assuming that it derives automatically from a political position or set of social relationships. Perhaps most important of all, it extends what I described at the outset as one of the pivotal insights of an earlier social history, the idea that power and power relations are located in the fabric of everyday life and are not confined to ‘politics’ in the narrow understanding of the term. The concept of governmentality invites us to explore how the conduct of the self might be linked to the management of the household and, indeed, the running of the state—what Foucault himself termed the “contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self.”" (716)

Men han ser också ett par problem med den neo-foucauldianska approachen. (Jag vet inte var han får "neo" ifrån.) Ett, att de tenderar att forska top-down, trots det teoretiska argumentet att makten cirkulerar. Poovey utgår från ett uppifrånperspektiv, och både hon och Joyce diskuterar kunskap i mycket abstrakt form, som "epistemologi" eller "rationalitet". Två, frågan om agens. Och det här tycker jag är en otroligt viktig, helt central invändning:

"in The Rule of Freedom the reader is confronted by statements such as “it was necessary to moralise” the city or the state “felt its way into the future.” Why it was necessary, what impelled the state and, indeed, what constituted ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ are all questions, however, that remain unexplained. The rejection of social agency becomes particularly acute in areas such as political rights or public health where the intervention of institutions, groups or even individuals clearly had a significant part in changing the relevant discourse. Furthermore, by placing the emphasis on historical phenomena as the effects of knowledge, neo-Foucaultian perspectives fail to explain certain persistent features of the organisation of power in modern societies. Why, for example, did all modern definitions of the social focus remorselessly on the bodies of workers and the poor while excluding the well to do? Why, if power is dispersed and multivalent, did it so often appear as unidirectional?" (716-7)

Gunn avslutar efter detta sin artikel med en appell för att studera kroppen och det materiella i historien, och på så sätt ta med sig insikter från Foucault utan att falla i de två fällorna diskuterade ovan. Jag blir inte särskilt övertygad om detta, och är besviken på att det är så lite diskussion om hegemoni-begreppet och forskning som använt det i artikeln. Men kritiken mot Joyce bristande förståelse av agens tar jag med mig.

Referenser

Simon Gunn (2006) "From Hegemony to Governmentality: Changing Conceptions of Power in Social History", Journal of Social History, Volume 39, Number 3, Spring 2006, pp. 705-720.