On governmentality and screens
LEE GRIEVESON
In lectures and seminars at the Colle`ge de France in 1978 and 1979, the
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault delineated a project to
investigate ‘The government of one’s self and of others’, pursuing what
his initial course summary described as ‘an in-depth inquiry concerning
the history not merely of the notion but even of the procedures and means
employed to ensure, in a given society, the “government of men”’. In
doing so, Foucault described a ‘rationality of government’, or, in his now
widely used neologism ‘governmentality’, as a system of thinking about
the nature and goals of government, where ‘government’ itself is deﬁned
‘in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human
behaviour’. ‘To govern, in this sense’, he wrote in a short essay called
‘The subject and power’, ‘is to structure the possible ﬁeld of action of
others’; elsewhere he talked and wrote about government as the shaping
of the conduct of the self.1
One of his central lines of inquiry, in the classroom and in scattered
writings and interviews, was the question of how power was exercised –
how the actions of selves and others were shaped – in societies whose
modernity was bound up with their commitment to liberal government.
Liberal governmental rationality, Foucault argued, placed ‘at the centre
of its concerns the notion of population and the mechanisms capable of
ensuring its regulation’, a process carried through the invention of, and
experimentation with, ways of knowing, calculating and mobilizing
individual bodies and populations.2
(In this light, Foucault’s earlier
investigations of the human sciences, of health, of the prison and of
sexuality could be recast as aspects of this genealogy of liberal
governmentality.) Yet integral to this regulation was an ongoing
reﬂection in liberal thought on the proper limits of state government and
how to rationalize the exercise of power. Ideas and practices of ‘freedom’
1 Michel Foucault, ‘Security,
territory and population’, in Paul
Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault:
Essential Works of Foucault,
1954–1984: Volume I, Ethics
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 67;
Foucault, ‘On the government of
the living’, in ibid., p. 81; Foucault,
‘The subject and power’, in Hubert
L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), p. 21.
2 Foucault, ‘Security, territory and
population’, p. 67.
180 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009
&The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/screen/hjn079
Part4
and of laissez faire economic and political management were central to
the self-deﬁnition of liberal governance.3
Liberalism was founded on
what Patrick Joyce has termed an ‘agonism’ of freedom, an invitation to
freedom alongside the anxiety that such freedom would overwhelm
governmental order.4
Anxieties about the slippery dynamics of freedom and security would
underpin the establishment of ‘mechanisms of security’ (for example
social welfare, the regulation of popular cultures, the more recent
creation in the USA of a ‘Department of Homeland Security’ amidst
increased surveillance of populations). And, crucially, such anxieties
about rights and responsibilities would inform the elaboration of
‘technologies of the self’ whereby individuals would bring themselves
into conformity with the ideals of the autonomous, self-regulating and
civil subject of liberalism.5
The ‘government of one’s self’, the
acceptance and enactment of responsibilities, was integral to the
invention and spread of an expansive liberal governance and its
contemporary neoliberal incarnations. No less a political theorist than
George W. Bush observed, during his second inaugural address, that
‘Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self’.6
Clearly, everybody is reading Foucault these days.
Undoubtedly, this too-brief account of aspects of a fragmentary and
unﬁnished work on governmentality belies its historical and conceptual
complexity; yet so be it for now. I will in any case return to the import of
this work to argue for its usefulness for projects of screen studies, to
propose that this work on liberal governmental rationalities in particular
can open up new ways of understanding the role and function of media
cultures as aspects of liberal (and neoliberal) governance and the
concomitant cultural shaping of self-regulating citizens and populations.
This short essay will concentrate on ﬁlm, though I will draw on work
from television studies, cultural studies and cultural history (and part of
my argument will indeed be that this conceptual work forces us to think
across medium-speciﬁc boundaries).
Yet before pursuing that, it is worth pausing brieﬂy to elaborate the
conceptual intervention proposed by Foucault’s work for the dominant
conceptions of the functioning of power and the subject, particularly
those articulated in the Marxist and psychoanalytic scholarship at the
time of Foucault’s writing and teaching. There is a certain value to this
task in the context of the ﬁftieth anniversary of Screen, for it was a fusion
of Marxism and psychoanalysis that underpinned the elaboration of what
came to be called ‘Screen Theory’, and that had a decisive effect on the
shaping of ﬁlm scholarship and curricula as ﬁlm studies programmes
proliferated in the humanities in higher education throughout the 1970s.
The discipline of ﬁlm studies (as scholarship and as pedagogy) was
shaped in important ways by these conceptual models of ideology,
subjectivity and representation. Even though it is now routine to (mildly)
dismiss this tradition – attention to empirical audiences or the much
trumpeted ‘historical turn’, it is often claimed, are ways out of the
3 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon
and Peter Miller (eds), The
Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), in
particular pp. 99–103.
4 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of
Freedom: Liberalism and the
Modern City (New York, NY:
Verso, 2003), p. 15.
5 Foucault, ‘The political technology
of individuals’, in Luther Martin,
Huck Gutman and Patrick
H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of
the Self: a Seminar with Michel
Foucault (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1988), pp. 145–62.
6 George W. Bush, cited in James
Hay and Mark Andrejevic,
‘Introduction: toward an analytic
of governmental experiments in
these times: homeland security as
the new social security’, Cultural
Studies, vol. 20, nos 4–5 (2006),
p. 341.
181 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
‘impasse’ of Screen Theory – it still informs the routine critical practices
relating to textual analysis and the interpretation of representation and
ideology that pervade scholarship in the ﬁeld. If, as Foucault often
remarks, genealogy frequently begins from a question asked in the
present, I propose here a very brief genealogy of the formation of Screen
Theory as a political modernism, and of the different forms of critical
thought that were marginalized as ﬁlm theory and studies became tied to
particular intellectual traditions, in order to begin thinking about how our
present moment presents new possibilities for intellectual enquiry and
engagement with different traditions of scholarship.
It is by now an oft-told story, a sort of foundational myth for a
discipline often understood from within as radical: starting most notably
from the early 1970s, a group of left-leaning humanities scholars
developed in the pages of Screen a dizzying and inﬂuential blend of
Marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics that ultimately positioned
mainstream cinema as an ‘ideological apparatus’. Louis Althusser,
Antonio Gramsci and Bertolt Brecht frequently bumped into each other
on the pages of the journal; and intellectuals interested in ﬁlm, among
them Ben Brewster and Geoffrey-Nowell Smith, spent time translating
Althusser and Gramsci (between 1974 and 1977 Brewster and NowellSmith
also served consecutively as Screen editors). Althusser’s
rethinking of the Marxist thesis of economic determination was
particularly important. In work throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
Althusser had argued that ‘superstructures’ (legal/political and
ideological practices) had a greater effect on the social formation than
previous Marxist scholarship had suggested, even if the economy
determined that formation ‘in the last instance’.7
In his widely read essay
‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, for example, Althusser
argued that the reproduction of the conditions of production is
maintained by the ‘reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for
the workers’, that is the work of ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’,
including churches, schools, the family, the communications media and
‘the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)’.8
Althusser’s work increasingly utilized psychoanalysis to explain how
ideology shapes or ‘authors’ subjectivity. To do so, he drew in particular
on Jacques Lacan’s structuralist reworking of Freud to propose that
ideology ‘interpellates’ – that is, addresses, appeals to – an individual as
a free and uniﬁed subject, but that this position is an ‘imaginary’ one,
masking the ‘real conditions of existence.’9
‘Ideology is indeed a system
of representations’, Althusser wrote, ‘but in the majority of cases these
representations have nothing to do with “consciousness”. . . . They are
perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on
men via a process that escapes them.’10
Lacan supplied, for Althusser and
many others in his wake, what seemed to be an elucidation of the
recognition/misrecognition structures associated with ideology. The
connections drawn between ideology and the Unconscious shaped the
development of a Screen Theory that focused on the question of the
7 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses
(notes toward an investigation)’, in
Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(London: Verso, 1971), p. 130.
8 Ibid., pp. 128, 137.
9 Ibid., p. 162.
10 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans.
Ben Brewster (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969), p. 233.
182 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
spectator, conceived as a textually implicated subject.11
In a watereddown
version, this conception of the functioning of the Unconscious and
of ideology underpins the myriad readings of representation as ideology
that shape much (stale, repetitive, predictable) work in the ﬁeld.
In work throughout the 1970s on the prison, sexuality and, towards the
end of the decade, on governmentality, Foucault articulated a conception
of power that diverged from the then dominant Marxist model of
ideology and its connection to the State, and likewise proposed, if at
times sketchily, a different understanding of the interconnection of
subjects and power than that articulated in the fusion of Marxism and
psychoanalysis.12
Written in the context of a post-’68 breakdown of
Marxist orthodoxies, partly stimulated by the inﬂuence of Eastern
European dissidents (many of whom Foucault welcomed to France), this
work claimed that power was not located solely in the State and that the
economic infrastructure of capitalism did not determine the varied
operations of power. The formulation of the work on governmental
rationalities made this intervention clearer, for the argument that power
shifted from a juridico-discursive form – where power was concentrated
in a central source – to a more all-pervasive focus on populations
implicitly critiqued the conception of the functioning of the State in
Marxist analysis.
The realms of government and the State, Foucault argued, were (and
are) not coterminous. ‘“Government”,’ he observed in a note on the
history of the term and practice, ‘did not refer only to political structures
or to the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the
conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed.’13
Foucault’s
research on the history of prisons and of sexuality, for example,
suggested that this direction of conduct pervaded the social body; that it
did not emanate from a centre; that tasks initially taken up outside the
State were only later taken over by the State (what Foucault called a
‘governmentalization’ of the State);14
and that the direction of conduct
was not directly or univocally tied to economic goals (even if they were
frequently interconnected). As a further exploration of the genealogy of
this intellectual moment, it is worth noting also that Foucault’s work on
governmentality was articulated in the context of the full force of
neoliberal governmental rationalities that had ushered in, by the 1970s, a
series of profound shifts in conceptions of government and
corresponding conceptions of selfhood. These ideas included the belief
that the State had grown too big and inefﬁcient, that many projects of
governance could be better undertaken by the private sector, that welfare
liberalism should be rolled back, and that government should produce an
entrepreneurial self and an ‘enterprise culture’.15
Again, genealogy starts
from a question asked in the present.
If Foucault’s analysis was here partly a historical one, ultimately about
the formation of liberal governmentality and its rearticulation as
neoliberalism, it was also necessarily a conceptual one, for it was
predicated on a revision of contemporary Marxist scholarship’s
11 On this conﬁguration of ﬁlm
theory, see D.N. Rodowick, The
Crisis of Political Modernism:
Criticism and Ideology in
Contemporary Film Theory
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1988); and on the work in
Screen in particular, see Philip
Rosen, ‘Screen and 1970s ﬁlm
theory’, in Lee Grieveson and
Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing
Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008).
12 For a more detailed consideration
of Foucault’s work on
psychoanalysis, see Lee
Grieveson, ‘“The death of
psychoanalysis”?: Foucault on
Lacan’, New Formations, no. 31
(1997), pp. 189–201.
13 Foucault, ‘The subject and
power’, p. 221.
14 Foucault, ‘Governmentality’,
p.103.
15 Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing
“advanced” liberal societies’, in
Thomas Osborne, Andrew Barry
and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault
and Political Reason (London:
UCL Press, 1996).
183 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
understanding of the functioning of ideology and of the Hegelian traces
of essentialism therein. In an interview in 1977, Foucault delineated three
problems with the notion of ideology: ‘it always stands in virtual
opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth’; it
‘necessarily’ refers ‘to something of the order of the subject’; and
ideology stands in a ‘secondary position relative to something which
functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant’.16
Ideological critique poses a series of conceptual difﬁculties, then,
because it presumes that the real can be known outside of its
representations, and because it presupposes either the idealist subject of
philosophy, imbued with a consciousness ready to be worked upon, or a
‘hermeneutics of the subject’ – that is, the idea that there was a central
truth to the subject that could be revealed by knowledge (and that this
could free the subject from power or, in part, repression, as Marxism and
psychoanalysis proclaimed).
In this latter sense, Foucault’s disputation of the model of ideology and
the subject dovetailed with his critique of psychoanalysis, articulated
most clearly in the ﬁrst volume of The History of Sexuality, in which he
proposed that Freud marked the culmination of a hermeneutics of the
subject which located the truth of the subject in sexuality and rendered
this truth ‘knowable’.17
Psychoanalysis stands alongside other human
sciences that delineated the truths of subjectivity and that were enmeshed
with a ‘bio-power’ or liberal governmentality increasingly focused on the
understanding of individuals and populations – bringing ‘life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’ – as a necessary step
in regulating and managing them.18
The second and third volumes of the
History of Sexuality, published after Foucault’s death, trace a history of
subjectiﬁcation beyond hermeneutics, both decoupling ‘technologies of
the self’ from the modes of subjection central to liberal governmental
rationalities and the human sciences and tracing the history of their
interconnection.19
The ramiﬁcations of the critique of ideology and of psychoanalysis for
ﬁlm theory and ﬁlm studies were not considered in any great detail within
the discipline. Foucault’s work was occasionally engaged with – his
essay on authorship was published in Screen, for example, and those
engaged in debates about the auteur considered it;20
his work on sexuality
informed important work on censorship, pornography and queer theory
(where Judith Butler’s reworking of Foucault was particularly
inﬂuential).21
Yet for ﬁlm studies, engagement with the conceptual work
on power and the subject was largely avoided, effected perhaps by the
dominance of Althusserian and Lacanian paradigms and their importance
to the discipline’s proliferation in humanities faculties (where a ‘radical’
self-identity helped to deﬁne its place in the university).
The contemporaneous formation of undergraduate and graduate
programmes in ﬁlm studies produced scholars well versed in Screen
Theory; and continuing pedagogical pressures – as the study of ﬁlm,
television and new media proliferates within various departments in
16 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and
power’, in Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977 (New York,
NY: Pantheon, 1980), p. 118.
17 Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality Volume I: an
Introduction (1976), trans. Robert
Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990),
in particular pp. 118–47.
18 Ibid., p. 143.
19 Michel Foucault ‘Technologies
of the self’, in Martin et al.
(eds), Technologies of the Self,
pp. 16–49; The Use of
Pleasure: the History of
Sexuality, Volume II (New York,
NY: Pantheon, 1985); The Care
of the Self: the History of
Sexuality, Volume III (New York,
NY: Random House, 1988).
20 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an
author?’, Screen, vol. 20, no. 1
(1979), pp. 13–34.
21 Annette Kuhn, Cinema,
Censorship, Sexuality, 1909–
1925 (London: Routledge, 1988);
Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power,
Pleasure, and ‘The Frenzy of the
Visible’ (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1989); Elli
Hanson (ed.), Essays on Queer
Theory and Film (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999);
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (London: Routledge,
1990).
184 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
universities – push textual and interpretive analysis to the fore of what
frequently happens in classrooms. Shifting attention away from the
analysis of textual regimes, whose inﬂuence on consciousness is
invariably imagined as ideological, can lead us to ask different research
questions and to frame different objects of analysis. Ultimately, I want to
propose that engagement with governmental rationalities can lead to a
more thorough and precise reckoning with the place screen cultures have
played in the government of self and others, in the formation of
self-regulating liberal subjects and populations capable of civic and
productive conduct.
Models for this scholarly work do exist, notably in traditions of
cultural studies and cultural history, where a number of scholars have
engaged in particular with the work on governmental rationalities to
propose and model new methods of cultural analysis. I want to suggest
that ﬁlm studies can usefully draw upon this work, so becoming
repositioned as part of a broader cultural history (we might call this, in
the present context, ‘screen studies’). What questions, what objects of
analysis, what conceptions of the work of culture have been enabled by
this engagement with governmentality? Collectively, this work examines
culture as a regime of truth practices that are implicated in forms of
governmental rationality. In The Birth of the Museum, for example, Tony
Bennett shows how culture as morals, manners and beliefs became
increasingly important to liberal governmental rationalities focused on
the management of populations. In this context, museums emerge as a
corollary to liberalism, as an ‘environment which allowed cultural
artefacts to be refashioned in ways that would facilitate their deployment
for new purposes as parts of governmental programmes aimed at
reshaping general norms of social behaviour’.22
Museums functioned in
particular, Bennett argues, to endow the self with new capacities for
self-monitoring and self-regulation.
As Ian Hunter has suggested in Culture as Government, this function
was central also to the birth of literary education, which established the
study of literature as a form of ethical self-management, a mechanism to
produce civic subjects.23
Literature itself takes on parts of this role.
Feminist literary historians, for example, have shown how the
nineteenth-century genres of domestic ﬁction and advice manuals
modelled ‘ideal’ conﬁgurations of selfhood.24
Culture becomes, in
myriad ways, central to the concretization of technologies of the self in
concert with liberal governmental rationality. This work in cultural
studies and cultural history proposes that attention be paid to institutions
as well as to representations; that scholarly work assess more carefully
cultural policy as a way to understand culture as a form of governance;
that reﬂecting on the establishment of disciplines sheds light on the
cultural formation of governance (a project important to others in
historicizing the human sciences); and that marginal and didactic forms
of culture might usefully be excavated for their important roles in
fashioning selfhoods and governing conduct.
22 Tony Bennett The Birth of the
Museum: History, Theory, Politics
(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 6.
23 Ian Hunter, Culture and
Government: the Emergence of
Literary Education (London:
Macmillan, 1988).
24 See, for example, Nancy
Armstrong, Desire And Domestic
Fiction: a Political History Of The
Novel (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987); Mary Poovey,
Making a Social Body: British
Cultural Formation, 1830–1864
(Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1995).
185 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
The conﬂuence of governmentality studies with cultural studies and
cultural history informs a growing body of work in screen studies. It is
important, for example, to Toby Miller’s wide-ranging analysis in his
book Technologies of Truth of the institutional and discursive production
of what he calls ‘the well-tempered self’, and of the interconnections
between the production of that self and the governance of popular
culture.25
Likewise this conﬂuence informs work on the interconnection
of screen media and political rationalities, such as Lisa Parks’s analysis
of post-9/11 security cultures and of media policies in former conﬂict
states; or work on the place of cinema in a colonial governmentality and
management of subaltern populations that was always inextricably
enmeshed with the ‘freedom’ of liberal governmentality, as exempliﬁed
in Priya Jaikumar’s work, as well as in ongoing investigations of British
colonial cinema in a current Arts and Humanities Research Councilfunded
project in the UK.26
It also underpins Haidee Wasson’s work on
the import of institutions such as museums for the study of cinema and
our work together on the history of the discipline of ﬁlm studies.27
And
this conﬂuence of conceptual and historical work on governmentality is
clearly at play in the analysis of the neoliberal rationalities of postwar/
Cold War and contemporary media industries, for example, by Anna
McCarthy and Kay Dickinson.28
Currently, my own research is pursuing some of the conceptual and
historical questions opened up by work on governmental rationalities and
by the rethinking of the study of cultural forms and activities and the
relations of power that inform their production, distribution, exhibition,
and discursive and material effects. The work is grounded in the premiss
that cinema might be situated, at a particular moment (the ﬁrst third or so
of the twentieth century, say), as a node around and through which
ﬂowed discourses and practices of government as a shaping of the
modalities of selfhood, citizenship and populations. Three possible
avenues open themselves to analysis here. Firstly, knowledge about
cinema was produced from within the newly formed (and forming) social
sciences studying the potential effects of the medium on individual and
collective conduct. Counting audiences and examining their responses
and interactions with cinema was one part of a liberal political
technology. The innovation of the study of cinema as a way both of
knowing people and their interiority and of innovating forms of ethical
self-management was formed in this context also.29
Secondly, at the same time, cinema was being utilized and fashioned
by various elite individuals, groups and institutions as a resource to
manage conduct and thus to shape populations. Widely seen (but little
analyzed), a plethora of industrial, reform and government ﬁlms were
produced and disseminated via new circuits of distribution, carrying the
ﬁlms to various civic spaces – schools, church halls, factories,
community halls, prisons, immigrant landing stations – as participants in
a pedagogic shaping of conduct. A complex interface of education,
screen culture and government requires unpacking here. Undoubtedly,
25 Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered
Self: Citizenship, Culture and the
Postmodern Subject (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993); Toby Miller,
Technologies of Truth: Cultural
Citizenship and the Popular
Media (Minnesota, MN:
University of Minnesota Press,
1998).
26 Lisa Parks, ‘Points of departure:
the culture of US airport
screening’, Journal of Visual
Culture, vol. 6, no. 2 (2007), pp.
183–200, and ‘Satellite views of
Srebrenica: televisuality and the
politics of witnessing’, Social
Identities, vol. 7, no. 4 (2001), pp.
585–611; Priya Jaikumar,
Cinema at the End of Empire: a
Politics of Transition in Britain
and India (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006); the AHRC
project, ‘Colonial cinema: moving
images of the British Empire’, is
led by Colin MacCabe and
myself.
27 Haidee Wasson, Museum
Movies: the Museum of Modern
Art and the Birth of Art Cinema
(Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2005); Grieveson
and Wasson (eds), Inventing Film
Studies.
28 Anna McCarthy ‘Reality
television: a neoliberal theatre of
suffering’, Social Text, vol. 25,
no. 4 (2007), pp. 17–42; Kay
Dickinson, Off Key: When Music
and Film Don’t Work Together
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).
29 Lee Grieveson, ‘Cinema studies
and the conduct of conduct’, in
Grieveson and Wasson (eds),
Inventing Film Studies, pp. 3–37.
186 Screen 50:1 Spring 2009 . Lee Grieveson . On governmentality and screens
Part4
the emergence of work on non-theatrical cinemas, including the
formation of a Society for Cinema and Media Studies scholarly caucus
on non-theatrical cinema, symposia, websites and forthcoming edited
collections, is an important development in the ﬁeld.30
Thirdly, the analysis of textual forms can extend beyond non-theatrical
and/or didactic cinema to include mainstream cinemas. Conceptual
work on the production of liberal subjects might, for example, inform a
rethinking of longstanding questions about the formation of norms of
narrative form and characterization in classical cinema, which may be
repositioned as modeling aspects of liberal selfhood. Classical cinema, it
might be argued, is a particular technology of the self. In turn, speciﬁc
ﬁlms, cycles and genres may be conceptualized as symbolic spaces for
the articulation of ideas about conduct, government and the liberal
subject. Together, such ﬁlms and cycles arguably do more than simply
represent aspects of governance: they form part of structures of
knowledge and power, and enact models of selfhood and conduct that
participate in the production of liberal subjects.
Taken together, nascent work on governmentality and screen culture
enables a detailed examination of the interconnection of political
rationalities and screen media. Certainly, it is entirely plausible that other
traditions of scholarly work – aspects of sociology, social history and
political science, for example – may also open up aspects of this
examination. And no doubt examination of the interface of political
rationalities and screen cultures needs to be sensitive to the contingencies
of time and place, concretizing the sweeping and provisional nature of
Foucault’s sketches on governmental rationalities. For these purposes,
the categories of liberalism and neoliberalism are too broad and must be
supplemented by attention to speciﬁc strategies (for example, the
emergence of the New Deal in the 1930s as, thus far, the high-water mark
of interventionist social, cultural and economic policies in the history of
the USA). Notwithstanding the caveats, however, there is great promise
in this conceptual opening into thinking about governmentality and the
place of screen cultures within that – a promise that can productively
inform politically engaged future screen/Screen theories and histories.
With thanks to my students at UCL and Harvard for discussion of the issues raised in this essay and to friends for reading and
commenting upon it, including Kay Dickinson, Peter Kramer, Roberta Pearson, Lora Tomita and Haidee Wasson. This is for my
friend Thomas Austin.
30 Charles Acland and Haidee
Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema
(Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, forthcoming); Marsha
Orgeron, Devin Orgeron and Dan
Streible (eds), Learning with the
Lights off: the Educational Film
Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, forthcoming). The
Prelinger Archive at http://
www.archive.org/details/
prelinger hosts around two
thousand digitized ‘ephemeral’ or
‘sponsored’ ﬁlms from a
collection of over sixty thousand.
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