Cover not available
Part of
Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New perspectives and methods
Edited by Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 66] 2016
► pp. 265–294

Governmentality, counter-conduct and prefigurative demonstrations

Interactional and categorial practices in the strange case of the United Nathans weapons inspectors

The interactional and categorial practices of a prefigurative protest demonstration are examined using video recordings that document a theatrical protest event called “United Nathans weapons inspectors” in February 2003. The chapter undertakes an analytics of protest to uncover how fields of visibility, forms of knowledge, technologies and apparatuses, and subjectivities and identities are negotiated and accomplished collaboratively. Conversation analysis (CA) helps us document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised. Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) uncovers the categorial work by which subjectivation is morally accomplished in social interaction. The chapter shows how CA and MCA can help trace the interactional, embodied and categorial practices that are endogenous to conducting the conduct of others and the self, and thus which constitute or contest the rationalities of governmentality.
Published online: 29 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.66.09mci
References (44)
References
Barry, Andrew. 1999. “Demonstrations: Sites and Sights of Direct Action.” Economy and Society 28 (1): 75-94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2001a. “Demonstrations: Sights and Sites.” In Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, 175-198. London: The Athlone Press.Google Scholar
. 2001b. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: The Athlone Press.Google Scholar
. 2002. Political Events. Workshop on ‘The Governmental and the Political’, School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, University of Keele.Google Scholar
Clarke, John. 2014. “Inspections: Governing at a Distance.” In Governing by Inspection, ed. by Sotiria Grek, and Joakim Lindgren, 11-26. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Corrigan, Philip, and Derek Sayer. 1985. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Davidson, Arnold I. 2011. “In Praise of Counter-Conduct.” History of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 25-41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dean, Mitchell. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society ( 2nd edition ). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Death, Carl. 2010. “Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest.” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 9 (3): 235-251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feher, Michel (ed.). 2007. Nongovernmental Politics. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Facing Governments: The Rights of Man [Face Aux Gouvernements, Les Droits De L’Homme].” Libération, 30 June - 1 July 1984, 22.Google Scholar
. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87-104. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
. 1997a. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow, 281-301. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
. 1997b. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer, 41-81. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
. 2007. Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the Collège De France 1977-1978), ed. by Michel Senellart. [first published in French: Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 2004]. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Freeman, Jo, 1970. The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Available online: [URL].
Have, Paul ten. 2007. Doing Conversation Analysis: A Practical Guide (2nd edition). London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hester, Stephen, and Peter Eglin (eds). 1997. Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorisation Analysis. Washington, DC: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Jayyusi, Lena. 1984. Categorisation and the Moral Order. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene Lerner, 13-31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keenan, Thomas. 2007. “‘Where Are Human Rights...?’: Reading a Communique from Iraq.” In Nongovernmental Politics, ed. by Michel Feher. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds). 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Lindegaard, Laura Bang, 2012. Automobility at the Intersection of Discourse and Governmentality: A Study of the Accomplishment of Rationalities that Co-constitute Car-Dependent Mobility in the Face of Climate Change. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Culture and Global Studies: Aalborg University.Google Scholar
Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2009. The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
. 2011. “Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement.” Social Movement Studies 10 (1): 1-20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Masco, Joseph. 2005. “The Billboard Campaign: The Los Alamos Study Group and the Nuclear Public Sphere.” Public Culture 17 (3): 487-498. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McIlvenny, Paul. 2009. “Communicating a ‘Time-out’ in Parent-Child Conflict: Embodied Interaction, Domestic Space and Discipline in a Reality TV Parenting Programme.” Journal of Pragmatics 41 (10): 2017-2032. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. forthcoming-a. “Mobilising the Micro-Political Voice: Doing the ‘Human Microphone’ and the 'Mic-Check'.” Journal of Language and Politics.
. forthcoming-b. “Refusing What We Are: Communicating Counter-Identities and Prefiguring Social Change in Social Movements.” In Identity Revisited and Reimagined. Empirical and Theoretical Contributions on Embodied Communication across Time and Space, ed. by Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Aase Lyngvær Hansen, and Julie Feilberg.
Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ranciere, Jacques. 2004. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. 1972. “On the Analysability of Stories by Children.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Dell Hymes, 325-345. New York: Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
. 1992. Lectures on Conversation: Volume I, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schenkein, Jim. 1978. “Identity Negotiations in Conversation.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 57-78. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack, and Tanya Stivers (eds). 2012. The Handbook of Conversation Analysis: WileyBlackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverman, David. 1998. Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Sorjonen, Marja-Leena, and Liisa Raevaara. 2014. “On the Grammatical Form of Requests at the Convenience Store: Requesting as Embodied Action.” In Requesting in Social Interaction, ed. by Paul Drew, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 243-268. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Summerville, Jennifer, and Barbara Adkins. 2007. “Enrolling the Citizen in Sustainability: Membership Categorization, Morality and Civic Participation.” Human Studies 30 (4): 429-446. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walters, William. 2012. Governmentality: Critical Encounters. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Winther, Bjarke Zinck & Laura Bang Lindegaard
2021. In the name of democracy: UNSC reform at the intersection of discourse and governmentality. Discourse & Society 32:2 ► pp. 231 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.