A growing number of geographers are beginning to explore Foucault’s later work on ‘governmentality’, which examines the relations between the production of governmental rationalities and the technologies of modern power. The current paper traces this critical engagement between geographical scholarship and governmentality studies. Many geographical accounts consider governmentality in terms of the mechanisms of knowledge production that states have used to constitute their subjects and territories as ‘governable’. While this line of inquiry has produced considerable insights, I argue that analyses of governmentality should also explore how various non-state actors have utilized technologies of government in myriad ways. I further suggest that geo-coding was one of the main spatial prerequisites for the larger biopolitical projects of census-taking and mapping at least since the eighteenth century. A critical spatial history of the ‘geo-coded world’, therefore, is required if we are to understand the geographical underpinnings of governmental knowledge production.
Agamben, G.1998: Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
2.
Agamben, G.2005: State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3.
Agnew, J.2005: Sovereignty regimes: territoriality and state authority in contemporary world politics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers95, 437-461.
4.
Agrawal, A.2005: Environmentality: technologies of government and the making of subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.
5.
Barnett, C.2001: Culture, geography and the arts of government. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space19, 7-24.
6.
Barnett, C.2005: The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’. Geoforum36, 7-12.
7.
Barry, A.1996: Lines of communication and spaces of rule. In Barry, J., Osborne, T. and Rose, N., editors, Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 123-141.
8.
Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N.1996: Introduction. In Barry, J., Osborne, T. and Rose, N., editors, Foucault and political reason: liberalism, neoliberalism and rationalities of government, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1-17.
9.
Berman, M.1988: All that is solid melts into air. New York: Penguin Books (first published 1982).
10.
Blake, L.1999: Pastoral power, governmentality and cultures of order in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Transactions of the Institute of British GeographersNS 24, 79-93.
11.
Blomley, N. and Sommers, J.1999: Mapping urban space: governmentality and cartographic struggles in inner city Vancouver. In Smandych, R., editor, Governable places: readings on governmentality and crime control, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Co., 261-286.
12.
Bratich, J., Packer, J. and McCarthy, C., editors 2003: Foucault, cultural studies, and governmentality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
13.
Braun, B.2000: Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada. Ecumene7, 7-46.
14.
Braun, B. and Castree, N., editors 1998: Remaking reality: nature at the millenium. London: Routledge.
15.
Brenner, N.1994: Foucault’s new functionalism. Theory and Society23, 679-709.
16.
Brenner, N., Jessop, B., Jones, M. and MacLeod, G., editors 2003: State/space: a reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
17.
Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P., editors 1991: The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18.
Castree, N. and Braun, B., editors 2001: Social nature: theory, practice, and politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
19.
Cohen, P.1999: A calculating people: the spread of numeracy in early America. New York: Routledge (first published 1982).
20.
Crampton, J.2003: The political mapping of cyberspace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
21.
Curry, M.2005: Towards a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes. Annals of the Association of American Geographers95, 680-691.
22.
Curry, M., Phillips, D. and Regan, P.2004: Emergency response systems and the creeping legibility of people and places. The Information Society20, 357-369.
23.
Dean, M.1999: Governmentality: power and rule in modern society. London: Sage.
24.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.1987: A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (first published 1980).
25.
Downs, R. and Stea, D.1977: Maps in minds: reflections on cognitive mapping. New York: Harper and Row.
26.
Elden, S.2001: Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the project of a spatial history. London: Continuum.
27.
Elden, S.2002: Book review: Governmentality and the mastery of territory in nineteenth-century America. Political Geography21, 957-959.
28.
Eudaily, S.2004: The present politics of the past: indigenous legal activism and resistance to (neo)liberal governmentality. New York: Routledge.
29.
Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A.2002: Spatializing states: towards an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist29, 981-1002.
30.
Foucault, M.1972: The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books.
31.
Foucault, M.1979: On governmentality. Ideology and Consciousness6, 5-22.
32.
Foucault, M.1980: Truth and power. In Gordon, C., editor, Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, New York: Pantheon Books, 109-133.
33.
Foucault, M.1983: The subject and power. In Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P., editors, Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 208-226.
34.
Foucault, M.1988: Technologies of the self. In Martin, L., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P., editors, Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 16-49.
35.
Foucault, M.1989: Clarifications on the question of power. In Lotringer, S., editor, Foucault live: interviews, 1961-1984, New York: Semiotext(e), 255-263.
36.
Foucault, M.1990: The history of sexuality: an introduction, volume 1. New York: Vintage Books (first published 1978).
37.
Foucault, M.1991: Governmentality. In Gordon, C. and Miller, P, editors, The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago, 87-104.
38.
Foucault, M.1995: Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books (first published 1975).
39.
Foucault, M.2003: ‘Society must be defended’: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (edited by M. Bertani and A. Fontana). New York: Picador.
Gibson-Graham, J. K.1996: The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
42.
Gibson-Graham, J. K.2003: The impatience of familiarity: a commentary on Michael Watts’ ‘development and geography’. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography24, 35-37.
43.
Gregory, D.1998: Power, knowledge and geography. In Hoyler, M., editor, Explorations in critical human geography, Hettner-Lecture 1997, Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 9-40.
44.
Hall, S.1996: The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. In Morley, D. and Chen, K., editors, Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, London: Routledge, 25-46 (first published 1986).
45.
Hannah, M. 1992: Foucault deinstitutionalized: spatial prerequisites for modern social control. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University.
46.
Hannah, M. 2000: Governmentality and the mastery of territory in nineteenth-century America. New York: Cambridge University Press.
47.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A.2000: Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
48.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A.2004: Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
49.
Harvey, D.1996: Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
50.
Harvey, D.1999: The limits to capital (new edition). London: Verso (first published 1982).
51.
Huxley, M.2002: Governmentality, gender, planning: a Foucauldian perspective. In Allmendinger, P. and Tewdwr-Jones, M., editors, Planning futures: new directions for planning theory, London: Routledge, 136-153.
52.
Huxley, M. 2005: ‘The Soul’s Geographer’: spatial rationalities of liberal government and the emergence of town planning in the twentieth century in England and Australia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Geography Discipline, Open University.
53.
Jessop, B.1990: State theory: putting the capitalist state in its place. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
54.
Joyce, P.2003: The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city. London: Verso.
55.
Larner, W. and Walters, W., editors 2004: Global governmentality: governing international spaces. London: Routledge.
56.
Latour, B.1986: Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present6, 1-40.
57.
Latour, B.1997: Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (first published 1987).
58.
Latour, B.1999: Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
59.
Lefebvre, H.1991: The production of space. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (first published 1974).
60.
Lemke, T.2002: Foucault, governmentality and critique. Rethinking Marxism14, 49-64.
61.
Luke, T.1996: Governmentality and contragovernmentality: rethinking sovereignty and territoriality after the cold war. Political Geography15, 491-507.
62.
MacKinnon, D.2000: Managerialism, governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance. Political Geography19, 293-314.
63.
MacPherson’s directory, for the city and suburbs of Philadelphia1785: Philadelphia: J. MacPherson.
64.
Mann, M.1993: The sources of social power: the rise of classes and nation-states, 1760-1914, volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
65.
Merrifield, A.2002: Metromarxism: a Marxist tale of the city. New York: Routledge.
66.
Merry, S.2001: Spatial governmentality and the new urban social order: controlling gender violence through law. American Anthropologist103, 16-29.
67.
Milchman, A. and Rosenberg, A.2002: Marxism and governmentality studies: toward a critical encounter. Rethinking Marxism14, 132-142.
68.
Miller, P. and Rose, N.1990: Governing economic life. Economy and Society19, 1-31.
69.
Mobile directory or strangers’ guide1839: Mobile, AL.
70.
Monmonier, M.2002: Spying with maps: surveillance technologies and the future of privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
71.
Moon, G. and Brown, T.2000: Governmentality and the spatialized discourse of policy: the consolidation of the post-1989 NHS reforms. Transactions of the Institute of British GeographersNS 25, 65-76.
72.
Murdoch, J. and Ward, N.1997: Governmentality and territory: the statistical manufacture of Britain’s ‘National Farm’. Political Geography16, 307-324.
73.
O’Brien’s wholesale business intelligencer and southern and western merchants’ pocket directory1838: Philadelphia: J. O’Brien.
74.
Ó Tuathail, G.1996: Critical geopolitics: the politics of writing global space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
75.
Pickles, J.2004: A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world. New York: Routledge.
76.
Pronteau, J. 1966: Les numérotages des maisons de Paris duXVe siècle a nos jours. Paris: Ville de Paris Commission des Travaux Historiques, Sous-Commission de Recherches D’Histoire Municipale Contemporaine.
77.
Raco, M.2003: Governmentality, subject-building and the discourse and practices of devolution in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British GeographersNS 28, 75-95.
78.
Robins, S.2002: At the limits of spatial governmentality: a message from the tip of Africa. Third World Quarterly23, 665-689.
79.
Rose, N.1993: Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism. Economy and Society22, 283-299.
80.
Rose, N.1996: The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government. Economy and Society25, 327-356.
81.
Rose, N.1999: Powers of freedom: reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
82.
Rose, N. and Miller, P.1992: Political power beyond the state: problematics of government. British Journal of Sociology43, 173-205.
83.
Rose-Redwood, R. 2006: Governmentality, the grid, and the beginnings of a critical spatial history of the geo-coded world. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University.
84.
Schmitt, C.1985: Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (first published 1922).
85.
Scott, J.1998: Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
86.
Simmons’ Norfolk directory1801: Norfolk, VA: C. Simmons.
87.
Smail, D.2000: Imaginary cartographies: possession and identity in late medieval Marseille. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
88.
Walters, W. and Haahr, J.2005: Governing Europe: discourse, governmentality and European integration. London: Routledge.
89.
Watts, M.2003: Development and governmentality. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography24, 6-34.
