governmentalisation definition
governmentalisation of the state, by which he means the acceleration of a form of power „that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument‟ (ibid., 108). Foucault‟s insights about governmentality are important here insofar as they set Spike Peterson‟s insight against itself: protection systems are both participatory and non- participatory, simultaneously remaking and dispersing the state, wilfully insecure and wilfully secure. It is in this context that we might read Foucault‟s characterisation of contemporary state power as a „tricky combination...of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures‟ (1982: 782). The subjects of this power are both subordinated and „free‟, protected and endangered, participative and docile.