Mariana Valverde

Pleasure, Freedom and Drugs: The Uses of ‘Pleasure’ in Liberal Governance of Drug and Alcohol Consumption

The article explores the ways in which discourses of pleasure are deployed strategically in official commentaries on drug and alcohol consumption. Pleasure as a warrantable motive for, or descriptor of, drug and alcohol consumption appears to be silenced the more that consumption appears problematic for liberal government. Tracing examples of this from the 18th century to the present, it is argued that discourses of ‘pleasure’ are linked to discourses of reason and freedom, so that problematic drug consumption appears both without reason (for example ‘bestial’) and unfree (for example ‘compulsive’), and thus not as ‘pleasant’. In turn, changes in this articulation of pleasure, drugs and freedom can be linked with shifts in the major forms taken by liberal governance in the past two centuries, as these constitute freedom differently.

Governed By Law

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law... I do not mean to say that the law fades into the back ground or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, adminis trative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A nor malizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 1979: 144)

Questions of security: A framework for research

Scholars have noted that we are increasingly being governed in the name of security, in literature that usually treats security as an entity in need of a theory. This article begins by noting that ‘security’ does not need theories, but rather questions that can generate concrete analyses. Three sets of questions are elaborated here. The first concerns the logics of security projects. The second set raises questions of scale and jurisdiction. Finally, governance projects are distinguished by the techniques used. This set of questions about security—which, this article argues, always need to be posed in relation to specific security projects—is a theoretically significant revision of the governmentality literature’s distinction between rationalities and technologies of governance.

Genealogies of European states: Foucauldian reflections

Abstract The public lectures given by Foucault at the Collège de France that are only now being published demonstrate that, just before he turned his attention to the history of sexuality, Foucaults thorough historical research had laid out many of the elements needed for a genealogy of modern practices of state governance. This review essay pieces together elements provided in the lectures, and in a few already published writings, to prove that research on state powers and state knowledges can benefit a great deal from a close reading of the lectures.

‘Slavery from within’: The invention of alcoholism and the question of free will∗

The will is at the root of human conduct. It is the basis of moral action. It is the foundation of wisdom. It is the controller of impulse. Without it duty cannot be done.... It is the regulator of passion and desire. Without it in some strength no civilized, moral and permanent form of human society could exist. If it be true that this most authoritative faculty of man is in any way lessened by alcohol, that substance would seem to need no other condemnation. (Sir Thomas Clouston, MD, igi4)1

Studying the governance of crime and security: Space, time and jurisdiction

That the governance of crime and security often works on and through space is well known by now; but this article argues that temporality and jurisdiction are equally important dimensions of law and governance. These three dimensions are not independent, and the article gives some concrete examples of how temporalization shapes spatialization and in turn interacts with jurisdiction.

The Harms of Sex and the Risks of Breasts: Obscenity and Indecency in Canadian Law

This article analyzes the contradictory deployment of the new test of obscenity and indecency in Canadian law, the ‘risk of harm’ test. Rather than argue with the traditional tools of CLS that the modernizing moves made by the Canadian judiciary are mere rhetorical covers for the continued existence of patriarchal and heterosexist moral regulation, it is argued here that the ‘risk of harm’ test is remarkable for its multivocality. ‘Harm’ has been interpreted by judges to mean many different sorts of things - harm to society, to morals, to women, to the constitutional values of equality. This is related to the extra-legal fact that there are many different groups inside and outside courtrooms who can take the standpoint of ‘victims of pornography and sex trade work’ and who are likely contenders for the position of legitimate authorities on the nature and significance of different harms. This does not mean that all meanings of the term ‘risk of harm’ are equal: it is clear, particularly in the recent Mara decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, that the ‘risk of harm’ test is not meant to be interpreted from either a feminist standpoint or from a standpoint sympathetic to sex trade workers and other sexual minorities. Because the ‘risk of harm’ test can and does have many meanings, even just across different courts, and because it has been re-interpreted by the same justice who originally devised it, it can therefore serve as a site upon which to reflect on the ways in which courts continuously open up new avenues for political challenges even as they attempt to reinstitute sovereignty and limit epistemological ‘pluralism’.

Analyzing punishment: Scope and scale

In her article in this issue, Mary Bosworth remarks that the sociology of punishment, a field of study with considerable theoretical as well as political credentials, has in recent decades acted to revive the previously moribund subdiscipline of penology. But one wonders if current studies of punishment have revived penology or have instead killed it. The ‘new penology’ pioneered by Jonathan Simon and others was and remains, arguably, not a penology at all, but rather the beginning of a post-penological criminology. Significantly, other contributors proceed to document and analyze practices of state punishment without even mentioning the largely discredited term ‘penology’. The fact that there is no consensus on whether penology has been ‘revived’ or killed by the newer literature on punishment is in keeping with broader intellectual trends. Since the Enlightenment, intellectuals, in the universities and out of them, have been very keen to analyze the latest governing trend to appear on the horizon—such as (in recent years) ‘governing through freedom’, ‘the audit society’, ‘reflexive modernity’, or ‘the risk society’. But while providing sharp critical analyses of emerging trends, we have been, as a group, largely unwilling to take the time to document and reflect on the demise—or complete transformation—of the desires and hopes operationalized in older governing projects that (like penology) may be on their way out. The rather contemptuous attitude toward the past that marked the Enlightenment’s proclamations about the great future of reason and freedom is still with us, even if in keeping with the pessimist ethos of our time we tend to act as prophets of doom, rather than as poets of a new era. If we experiment with thinking with Hegel and Marx rather than with Voltaire and Tom Paine, and thus start by reflecting on the recent past rather than immediately proceed to

The Crown in a Multicultural Age: The Changing Epistemology of (Post)colonial Sovereignty

In Canada as in other (post)colonial settings, courts have been facing the challenging task of redefining both substantive aboriginal legal rights and evidentiary rules that now look ethnocentric. Recent litigation has shown that while rights claims made by indigenous collectives are difficult to make and sustain in court, the newly revived doctrine of the Crown’s inherent ‘honour’ can work for aboriginal peoples precisely because the Crown’s honour is, as it were, self-acting. But the neo-medieval discourse of the Crown coexists, in the text of Canadian courts, with discursive practices that enact a contemporary, pluralistic, socially aware form of judicial anthropology. These two wholly conflicting representations of the Canadian state live happily side by side in current Canadian judicial discourse. This easy eclecticism stands in marked contrast to the difficulties and embarrassments experienced by aboriginal leaders testifying before judges. The close judicial scrutiny of aboriginal claims contrasts with the tolerance of major epistemological contradictions in the state’s discourses about itself.

Comment on Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Theoretical Coda’ to Punishing the Poor

Loïc Wacquant’s well-known work on urban poverty and criminalization has been very influential in left circles, and has been read by activists perhaps as much as by scholars. Personally, I’m pleased to see that the audience for left-wing analysis is not as small as mainstream media gurus suggest. And given the new popularity of Keynesian economics since the subprime crash, Wacquant may find an even larger audience. As someone whose formative years were spent in the socialist-feminist left of the midand late 1970s, and who has remained to the left of all social democratic and New Labour-ish options, I am extremely pleased with the popularity of Wacquant’s analysis. However, while politically he and I are on the same side, theoretically and methodologically there are major differences between his approach and mine, differences which are perhaps of some general interest. In fact, a very good way to begin a friendly debate is to point out that one of the key differences between Wacquant’s approach and mine is that I no longer believe (as did Althusser, second-wave feminism and Bourdieu) that theoretical differences are necessarily indicative of or hard wired to political differences. One thing that I have learned—from the dead-end 1980s debates about ‘feminist epistemology’ as much as from Nietzsche—is that successful political projects are more often than not pragmatic coalitions among people who want the same things but don’t necessarily have a common vision—or a common methodology (which is what social scientists have instead of a vision). The debate within which this comment appears is thus a good opportunity to explore basic philosophical differences that, contrary to the 1970s view of ‘praxis’, have very few if any political effects. Wacquant’s key proposal is to ‘reintegrate’ criminology and the study of social policy and social welfare. I wholeheartedly agree that criminal justice policy is not usefully regarded as a separate field of governmental activity (as most mainstream criminology does). The same politicians who pass law-andorder legislation have also been instituting harsher social assistance measures, Theoretical Criminology