The limits of governmentality: Non-liberal subjectivities

What Arturo Escobar in 1985 called the ’steady and insidious spread to all societies’ of a ‘totalizing power’ is a common figure in Foucauldian critiques of the global dispositive, that is, contemporary global governance in general, and of the securitised practices of intervention, state-building and development aid in postcolonial contexts in particular. However, this outward movement of the dispositive into the postcolony seems quite ineffective in its aim of producing liberal subjectivities. In fact, given recent setbacks and challenges to Western pre-eminence, the labour of the dispositive could be more accurately described as irregular, retarded and even as retreating. Using the notion of non-liberal subjectivities, this paper’s point of departure is the continuing presence and proliferation of collective subjectivities that escape governmentalized subjectivation as liberal populations. Although the full repertoire of normalization techniques are deployed in the postcolony under the aegis of the contemporary security-development nexus, non-liberal subjectivities do not avail themselves as compliant ‘populations’ but often as life that is incompatible with, dysfunctional to and subversive to the standard template of social order made available by the dispositive. In juxtaposing three main figures of the postcolonial subject (the liberal, the Foucauldian and the postcolonial subject respectively) the paper frames the prevalence of postcolonial, non-liberal subjectivity as the limit of governmentality. Within this, the nature of resistance (“small-r” and “large-R resistance”) and the imperative of specifying a political posture appropriate to the postcolonial subject is discussed.