governmentality (gouvernementalité) Foucault, Michel’s word for the set of assumptions underpinning a particular mode of government. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler defines governmentality as a mode of power focused on the production, control, and regulation of bodies and persons. It operates through bureaucracies and institutions like the police and the law, but it can also be found at work in apparently non-regulated spaces of everyday life as well. It is diffuse, tactical rather than strategic, and impossible to trace to a single source or origin. Studying it amounts to a deciphering of its logic. Foucault coined this term in the course of his lectures on security, territory, and population and suggested that where before he had spoken of biopower, this was what he had in fact meant. Although the words are obviously related and share a common point of origin, they are nonetheless distinct: governmentality defines a general problematic, while biopower refers to a specific historical example. In a separately published lecture from the aforementioned series from 1977—8 entitled ‘Governmentality’, Foucault explains that he means three things by this term: (i) the ensemble of institutions and procedures that enable the exercise of a very specific type of power; (ii) the tendency that has over time led to the predominance of a specific model of power (i.e. biopower); and (iii) the processes by which previous models of power came to be governmentalized. In Foucault’s view, what he terms ‘government’ (by which he means something approximating bureaucracy, though he has in mind something rather more active than that) has basically supplanted the state and the sovereign. Governmentality also implies something like the old sociological notion of ‘mentality’, meaning a way of thinking as much as a set of practices. Perhaps most importantly, governmentality implies the passing of a certain kind of sovereignty, which in everyday parlance we think of as ‘top-down’, whereby a single powerful figure such as a king or president is able to exert their will. Further Reading: G. Burchell (ed.) The Foucault Effect (1991). M. Dean Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (1999). M. Foucault ‘Governmentality’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault 1954—84, vol. 3 (2000). M. Foucault Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977—78 (2007).