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The governmentalities of neoliberalism: panopticism, post-panopticism and beyond

Nicholas Gane
Abstract
This paper draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, in particular his lectures on biopolitics at the Collge de France from 197879, to examine liberalism and neoliberalism as governmental forms that operate through different models of surveillance. First, this paper re-reads Foucaults Discipline and Punish in the light of his analysis of the art of liberal government that is advanced through the course of these lectures. It is argued that the Panopticon is not just an architecture of power centred on discipline and normalization, as is commonly understood, but a normative model of the relation of the state to the market which, for Foucault, is the very formula of liberal government. Second, the limits of panopticism, and by extension liberal governance, are explored through analysis of Gilles Deleuzes account of the shift from disciplinary to control societies, and Zygmunt Baumans writings on individualization and the Synopticon. In response to Deleuze and Bauman, the nal section of this paper returns to Foucaults lectures on biopolitics to argue that contemporary capitalist society is characterized not simply by the decline of state powers (the control society) or the passing down of responsibilities from the state to the individual (the individualization thesis), but by the neoliberal marketization of the state and its institutions; a development which is underpinned by a specic form of governmentality. In conclusion, a four-fold typology of surveillance is advanced: surveillance as discipline, as control, as interactivity, and as a mechanism for promoting competition. It is argued that while these types of surveillance are not mutually exclusive, they are underpinned by different governmentalities that can be used to address different aspects of the relationship between the state and the market, and with this the social and cultural logics of contemporary forms of market capitalism more broadly. Keywords: Bauman, Deleuze, Foucault, market, neoliberalism, state, surveillance

For many years now, sociologists have drawn on Michel Foucualts (1977) work on the birth of the prison to explore the historical basis of present norms and practices of punishment through either a criminological lens (see, for example, Garland, 1990), or to develop its central notion of panopticism into a broader theory of surveillance society (for an overview of such work, see Lyon,
The Sociological Review, Vol. 60, 611634 (2012) DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02126.x 2012 The Author. The Sociological Review 2012 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published by Blackwell Publishing Inc., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.

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1994: 6771). Following the recent publication and English translation of Foucaults (2008) 197879 lectures at the Collge de France on biopolitics, however, it has become clear that Discipline and Punish is not concerned simply with institutional forms of surveillance, discipline and normalization that emerged in settings such as prisons at the turn of the 19th century, but is part of a much broader analysis of what he calls the liberal art of government. This is an important development that presents something new to existing readings of Discipline and Punish and to work that addresses and extends Foucaults theory of governmentality (Burchell et al., 1991; Barry et al., 1996; Garland, 1997; Rose, 1999; Miller and Rose, 2008). Before the publication of these lectures on biopolitics, the standard reading of Foucault was that his later writings addressed relations between two poles of governance: governance of populations and governance through technologies of the self. This led many to complain that Foucaults analysis of government steered clear of any institutional or substantive account of the state (Garland, 1997: 175). Foucaults lectures on biopolitics address precisely this problem as they sit between his work on security, territory and the governance of populations (the subject of his 197778 lectures, see Foucault, 2009) on one hand, and on the ethics of the subject and the self (the focus of his lectures from 1981 onwards) on the other (for an early attempt at outlining the content of these lectures prior to their publication, see Lemke, 2001). The importance of these lectures is that they address the space between the two poles of governance identied by Garland by analysing different liberal and neoliberal governmentalities that run between the state and the market. It is in this light that the arguments of Discipline and Punish take on a new signicance, for in his biopolitics lectures Foucault treats panopticism as a model of liberal governance that centres on the capacity of the state to watch over the market; a model that under neoliberal conditions is said to reach its limit. The aim of this paper is to use Foucaults lectures on biopolitics to address these governmentalities of liberalism and neoliberalism, and to explore their connection to panoptic and post-panoptic models of surveillance. There are two main reasons for pursuing such an exercise. First, while there has been much sociological interest in surveillance, comparatively little attention has been paid to its underlying political economy, and to the different congurations of state and market to which panoptic and post-panoptic models are tied. The question here is seemingly a simple one: if the Panopticon is a model of governmentality within which the state is said to watch over and thereby discipline the market, what of a post-panoptic or neoliberal arrangement whereby the market increasingly structures the form and activities of the state? For Foucault, such an arrangement involves a different type of surveillance, as watching is displaced by active intervention into the state and its activities; a development, it will be argued, that is accompanied by the formulation of new measures that work to promote competition and enterprise wherever they are deployed. Second, this idea of surveillance beyond the Panopticon is important as it both frames and is framed by a particular 612
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understanding of neoliberalism. For Foucault, neoliberalism is not the same thing as anti-statism or the devolution of powers from the state to the individual, but about the constant push to dene and regulate social life through principles that come from the market. For Foucault, neoliberalism has its own governmental logic and should not be identied with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention (2008: 132). This aspect of neoliberalism has often been missed by commentators more concerned with the disempowerment of politics in the name of economics, or with attacks on the (welfare) state in the name of the market (see, for example, Hall, 2011). Such processes are clearly central to the workings of neoliberalism (see, for example, Garlands excellent account of the transformation of penalwelfarism in 2000), but they are also accompanied by new practices of regulation and intervention that have tended to receive less critical attention. Jamie Peck in his Constructions of Neoliberal Reason rightly argues that neoliberalism is characterized by both roll-back processes focussed on dismantling alien institutions, disorganizing alternate centres of power, deregulating zones of bureaucratic control and disciplining potentially unruly (collective) subjects (2010: 22) as well as processes of roll-out typically associated with an explosion of market conforming regulatory incursions (2010: 23). For the purposes of this paper, it is the latter that are of primary concern, in particular mechanisms of regulation and surveillance which, as Foucaults lectures on biopolitics show, are central to neoliberal forms of governance that have all too often been missed. This paper is made up of three parts. First, the core arguments of Foucaults Discipline and Punish are revisited in the light of the analysis of liberal governmentality that frames his subsequent lectures on biopolitics, through the course of which the Panopticon is dened as the very formula of liberal government. Second, the limits of panopticism, and by extension liberal governance, are explored through analysis of Gilles Deleuzes account of the shift from disciplinary to control societies and Zygmunt Baumans writings on individualization and the Synopticon. It will be argued that while Deleuze and Bauman offer useful ways of thinking about the post-panoptic dynamics of contemporary societies, their work stops short of addressing the complex governmentalities that run between the state and the market and which are central to the neoliberalization of contemporary society and culture. Third, in response to Deleuze and Bauman, the nal section of this paper returns to Foucaults lectures on biopolitics to consider the underlying governmentalities of neoliberalism. In so doing, particular attention will be paid to the German tradition of ordoliberalism, from which, Peck (2010: 23) argues, comes the ethic of neoliberal roll-out, rather than to the later and more aggressive free market economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School (for a reading of Foucaults lectures on this strand of neoliberal thinking, see McNay, 2009; for an overview of the Chicago School and its history, see Peck, 2010; Horn and Mirowski, 2009). In adopting this focus, this paper will seek to work against popular conceptions of the neoliberal as simply laissez-faireist ideology, and
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will argue, in line with Foucault, that it is better understood as a form of governmentality that runs from the market to the state, and which plays out through new practices of regulatory intervention and surveillance. In conclusion, a fourfold typology of surveillance is advanced surveillance as discipline, control, interactivity and as a mechanism for promoting competition that might be used to explore further the liberal and neoliberal governmentalities that underpin market capitalism today.

Panopticism and liberalism

In order to address the competing logics of what Foucault calls liberal and neoliberal governmentality, it is rst necessary to return to the core arguments of Discipline and Punish. The main thesis of this now famous work is that throughout the rst half of the 19th century punishment as a public spectacle was replaced by technologies of incarceration that worked instead through techniques of discipline and correction. This transition is summarized neatly in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, where Foucault observes that At the beginning of the nineteenth century . . . the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment. The age of sobriety in punishment had begun. By 183048, public executions, preceded by torture, had almost entirely disappeared (1977: 14). This account of the displacement of the physical spectacle of punishment by the birth of the prison (the subtitle of Discipline and Punish) has been of general sociological interest as it is accompanied by a deeper analysis of the societal powers and political economies that accompany these different regimes of punishment. Foucault (1977) argues that punishment as a public spectacle was a mechanism for restoring and reafrming the power of the sovereign, and that the culture of discipline that displaced this public display of punishment is framed by an architecture of power that works through the correction and normalization of the body and the soul or even life (see Foucault, 1990). This is the starting point for Foucaults analysis of bio-politics: an analysis which centres on the political economy of the body both as a force of production and as something constituted through a system of subjection (1977: 26). Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish that such systems work at the level of knowledge or discourse (including knowledge produced by the disciplines of the human sciences), and/or through institutions such as the penitentiary, which disciplines and normalizes bodies through the exercise of a visual power that seemingly has no limits. This form or architecture of power is famously termed panopticism, and is described by Foucault as a state of conscious and permanent visibility (1977: 201). The key gure in the section on panopticism in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977) is the English political philosopher Jeremy Bentham a choice which, as we will see below, is signicant. Bentham, in a letter written 614
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from White Russia in 1787, describes the Panopticon or inspection-house as [a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse (Bentham, 1995: 31). This power was to be achieved through the construction of a new prison-like architecture in which cells were organized circularly around a central tower, thereby enabling guards to exercise unlimited surveillance over inmates (for a detailed description, see Bentham, 1995). The Panopticon was never built exactly in the form that Bentham suggested, but its general logic fed into the design of a range of institutions, including early penitentiaries (for example, the penitentiary at Stateville, North Carolina, which opened in 1925). Foucaults subsequent interest in the Panopticon centres on the operation of this new architecture of power through visual means. He explains: The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide it preserves only the rst and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. (Foucault, 1977: 200) Visibility in the Panopticon works two ways: the prisoners can always be seen from the central control tower, but through the use of blinds or screens the presence of guards can be concealed. This means that the power of the Panopticon rests on the limitless capacity for watching, or what Bentham calls the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (1995: 45), rather than the physical presence of a guard, who may or may not be there. The model of the Panopticon works not because it produces a power that is veriable but because it normalizes the conduct of its inhabitants, who act as if they are being watched. This means, importantly, that the Panopticon is an economical model of power, for once its physical structure is in place, it connes the masses to their allotted spaces, and, at least in theory, disciplines the conduct of inmates at little or no nancial cost to the institution. There has been widespread sociological interest in the Panopticon, as many have sought to extend its model of power into a broader account and analysis of what might be called surveillance society. Oscar Gandy, for example, in his seminal analysis of new panoptic technologies of identication, classication and assessment, reects that The inuence of Michel Foucault on my work is so substantial that it threatens to dominate the construction of my arguments about power and social control. It is from Foucault that I derive the underlying concept of panopticism as a technology of power realized through the practice of disciplinary classication and surveillance referred to as the panoptic sort (1993: 9). Foucaults position on the possibility of developing a theory of surveillance society from an analysis of the Panopticon is complex (see Garland, 1990). On one hand, it moves from a historical narrative about the
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birth of prison to a much broader set of statements about the panoptic basis of modern society and culture more generally. Foucault declares, for example, that one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society and of an indenitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism (1977: 216), and, more boldly, that Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance (1977: 217). On the other hand, just pages later, Foucault urges caution: Although the panoptic procedures, as concrete forms of the exercise of power, have become extremely widespread, at least in their less concentrated form, it was really only in the penitentiary institutions that Benthams utopia could be fully expressed in a material form (1977: 249). This latter statement suggests that Foucault was wary of abstracting a general theory of surveillance from an analysis of a specic institutional setting. It also hints that while panopticism was only fully expressed in material form in the penitentiary, perhaps it emerged in other ways (for example, as a cultural logic) outside of this institutional space. This idea of a culture of surveillance within which visual forms of power have become near ubiquitous has been central to social studies of surveillance since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such work has raised important questions about the connection of surveillance to the state (see Lyon and Zureik, 1996) and new corporate entities (Poster, 1995), as well as the impact of surveillance on everyday life (see, for example, Lyon, 2003). This has led, in turn, to a renewed concern for issues of privacy, trust and accountability in contemporary society, but rarely have these concerns been underpinned by a deeper political economy that ties panopticism, or more broadly surveillance, to the technologies and techniques of liberal or neo-liberal governance. This question of the connection of surveillance to the governmentalities of contemporary capitalism, while neglected within the sociological literature on power and surveillance, lie at the heart of Foucaults project; something that, as stated above, has only become clear with the publication of his lectures on biopolitics. It is to these that we now turn. The political signicance of the Panopticon as a mode of governance, along with its connection to the market and the state, is not addressed explicitly in the pages of Discipline and Punish (the closest Foucault comes to this is a brief reection on connection of discipline to the growth of capitalist economy, see 1977: 221). However, in Foucaults 197879 lectures from the Collge de France a different narrative emerges (one that is not fully addressed by existing studies of governmentality such as Rose, 1996; Rose, 1999; Miller and Rose, 2008). These lectures, in spite of their title, do not address biopolitics specically but rather what Foucault calls the art of government, or rather the government of men insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty (2008: 2). Foucault starts with an analysis of liberalism, although what is meant by this term is different from the denition usually found in political philosophy, for as Barry et al. observe, it refers to a particular ethos of government (1996: 8). This becomes clear through the course of Foucaults lectures, which begin by tracing a shift from the raison dtat characteristic of France in the Middle Ages to liberal forms of governmentality that emerged in 616
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the late 18th century. The key point in this transition is a change in the governmental connections between the market and that state. Under the raison dtat of the Middle Ages, markets were subject to extremely strict and prolic regulation (Foucault, 2008: 30), and for this reason were sites of distributive justice. However, by the late 18th century, the market started to appear as something that obeyed and had to obey natural, that is to say, spontaneous mechanisms (Foucault, 2008: 31). The market was seen increasingly to have its own logic and truth, and for this reason was no longer constituted in terms of justice and jurisdiction, but rather as a site of veridiction (2008: 33). This is the start of a new relationship between the state and market, one in which the market increasingly is free to forge its own relationships between value and price, while at the same time the state, increasingly, has limits placed on its powers. This new situation, advocated most famously by Adam Smith (1982) in The Wealth of Nations, is characterized by a frugality of government, but this in turn poses a problem: how can government impose its own limits without at the same time making itself unable to operate or perhaps even redundant? Foucault considers two main ways that this difculty has been resolved: rst, through the French revolution and in the work of Rousseau, where the starting point is not government and its limitation but rather questions of law, right and sovereignty; and second, approaches which start with the analysis of government in order to establish its de facto limits, which may in turn derive from history, from tradition, or from an historically determined state of affairs (Foucault, 2008: 40). One such approach is utilitarianism, which attempted to limit the powers of the previous raison dtat by dening the competencies of government in terms of utility. The legacy of such thinking is that markets are constructed as sites of unrestricted exchange, while at the same time the value of state or public powers, including their ability to intervene in markets, is only measured in terms of utility. This tension leads to what Foucault calls the fundamental question of liberalism, or what might be conceptualized more broadly as the fundamental question of early capitalist modernity: what is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things? (2008: 46). It is in this context that Benthams writings on surveillance and the Panopticon take on a new signicance. In his lecture dated 24 January 1979, Foucault declares that Economic freedom, liberalism in the sense I have just been talking about, and disciplinary techniques are completely bound up with each other (2008: 67). This binding, which initially seems somewhat paradoxical, is rooted in the idea that liberalism does not leave more white spaces of freedom but rather works to produce the possibility of freedom, which, as a governmental form, it then proceeds to consume (2008: 63). In order to guarantee, for example, the freedom of the market or the free exercise of property rights, Foucault argues that there must be government in the form of control, constraint, and coercion (2008: 67). Liberalism, while underpinned by the self-limitation or frugality of government, is thus not simply characterized by
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laissez-faire economics or politics, for it involves the extension of government from the state to the market in order to guarantee the freedom of the latter. This can take at least two forms. First, there is surveillance, as in the model of Benthams Panopticon. Foucault states: Government, initially limited to the function of supervision, is only to intervene when it sees that something is not happening according to the general mechanics of behaviour, exchange and economic life (2008: 67). Second, are the more direct strategies of government that have the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasing freedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional control and intervention (Foucault, 2008: 67). Foucault cites Roosevelts welfare policies of the 1930s as an example of such practice. For the purposes of the present paper, it is the rst of these two governmental techniques surveillance as a disciplinary measure that creates freedom that is of interest. Foucault here develops the arguments Discipline and Punish into a much broader statement: that the Panopticon is not a regional mechanics limited to certain institutions but instead is the very formula of liberal government (2008: 67). For Foucault, Benthams writings are of interest precisely because they extend a visual model of disciplinary power into a more general art of government. It is for this reason that Foucault turns to Bentham rather than other gures usually associated with classical liberalism, most notably Mill (see, for example Tribe, 2009, who locates Mill as the central gure of British liberalism). This presentation of Bentham as the key gure in the liberal tradition is not without its problems. David Garland observes that in Discipline and Punish Foucaults conception of punishment is based on a misreading of Bentham, for Whereas Bentham set out his rationalistic control framework as an ideal to aim for, and deplored the ritualistic, non-utilitarian actualities of punishment which he observed, Foucault seems to assert that Benthamism is, in fact, a deep description of the actual nature of modern punishment (1990: 163). A similar tendency can be detected in Foucaults biopolitics lectures. Contrary to Foucaults argument (2008: 67), Bentham did not base his constitutional code explicitly upon his previous model of the Panopticon, and indeed the only references to the Panopticon in this code appear in footnotes dealing with prisons and with early technologies such as parliamentary conversation tubes (see Bentham, 1983). However, while the details of Foucaults reading of Bentham are not always accurate, the broader thrust of his argument is more convincing: that the Panopticon is more than an architecture of power that can be broadened in any straightforward way into a theory of surveillance society. Rather, and this is the point that takes us back to and at the same time beyond the text of Discipline and Punish, the Panopticon is a normative model of governance that recasts the connection between the state and the market, and which seeks to promote conditions of freedom through the exercise of disciplinary techniques that operate through specic forms and practices of surveillance (for an alternative reading that draws parallels between the Panopticon and market, but one that does not deal with the intricacies of Foucaults writings on liberal and neolib618
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eral governmentality, see de Angelis, 2007). It is for this reason that Foucault sees in Bentham an expression of classical economic liberalism, and for this reason also that the Panopticon takes on a metaphorical and conceptual signicance beyond its life as a prison-based architecture of discipline and punishment.

Post-panopticism? Control societies and the Synopticon

Foucaults work presents us with a challenge, for if panopticism is central to the design and operation of liberal governance, then what type of governmentality underpins more contemporary forms of post-disciplinary society and what Roy Boyne (2000) has called post-panopticism? For the purposes of the present paper, two theoretical resources will be employed to explore this question: Gilles Deleuzes essay on control societies (1995) and Zygmunt Baumans writings on liquid modernity and individualization. While the writings of these two thinkers are framed by quite different disciplinary and political commitments, they can be read alongside each other to explore the limits of Foucaults panoptic model of liberal governmentality. In Deleuze, the question is not of the xity of institutional structures such as the prison or even the state but of mobile forms of surveillance that can track or x dividuals (monads dened not by their right to be individual or by their intrinsic worth but by systemic process of coding that differentiate one member of a consumer population from the next) in real time and space. Baumans work has a different focus to that of Deleuze, for it addresses the dynamics of consumer society and what he calls the synopticism of tele-visual culture. Whereas Deleuze focuses on the creation of dividuals, Bauman draws into question processes of individualization that pass responsibilities down from the state to the individual. These two positions will be considered in turn. It will be argued that while Deleuze and Bauman provide useful and in some ways complementary ways for thinking about post-panoptic forms of power and surveillance, what is missing from both is a detailed account of the market and the state and, more pressingly, an analysis of the different forms of liberal and neoliberal governance that run between the two. It is for this reason that we will return to Foucaults lectures on biopolitics, and in particular his analysis of post-war ordoliberalism, in the nal section of this paper. The core argument of Gilles Deleuzes Postscript on Control Societies (1995) is that disciplinary societies, as analysed by Foucault in the concluding sections of Discipline and Punish, were short-lived. By the mid-20th century, Deleuze argues, such societies had started to fade, along with the once solid institutions within which disciplinary techniques traditionally existed. He declares: Were in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of connement prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. The family is an interior
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thats breaking down like all other interiors educational, professional, and so on. The appropriate ministers have constantly been announcing supposedly appropriate reforms; but everyone knows these institutions are in more or less terminal decline. Its simply a matter of keeping people busy until the new forces knocking at the door take over. (Deleuze, 1995: 178) Discipline is tied to xed institutional spaces from prisons to mad-houses to schools in Benthams account whereas today not only are such spaces in decline but new mobile and exible techniques of power are emerging that are characterized by ultrarapid forms of apparently free-oating control (Deleuze, 1995: 178). Whereas discipline works through xity and connement, control operates through mobility and speed. Deleuze writes: Connements are moulds, different mouldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting moulding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another (1995: 1789). Control societies are ruled not by precepts (commands that originally had a religious or moral basis) but by passwords: the codes that allow one to pass through the mesh, or more concretely through a database or across a nationstate border, through the opening of a designated point of entry. Control is not tied to a heavy architectural structure, but is a form of power that can be modulated: its pitch and range can easily be varied. Unlike discipline, control is not moulded to remain in a xed form but can be open or closed to varying degrees to enable access for some while immobilizing others. The technologies that underpin control societies are quite different from anything found in Foucaults writings on discipline. Deleuze argues that control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. He adds, importantly, that this new situation is rooted in a mutation of capitalism (1995: 180), and that control and contemporary capitalism have the same dispersive logic. For whereas capitalism of the 19th century was concentrative, or directed towards production and tied to the factory as a site of connement, capitalism today is centred instead on what Deleuze calls metaproduction, or the buying and marketing of nished products (to which sign-value can be added through branding, see Klein, 2000). Control, like contemporary capitalism more generally, is dened by exibility: it is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, innite, and discontinuous (1995: 181). This mix of mobile yet continuous power is achieved through control mechanisms, or what today might be called information communication technologies, that can provide a spatial x of consumers, or dividuals, and objects at any given moment. In his Postscript, Deleuze describes the emergence of a new system of domination that employs computer-based systems of electronic tagging to make sure everyone is in a permissible place (1995: 182). Today, over twenty years on, ever more powerful surveillance technologies are emerging that extend such a 620
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system of control (see, for example, Graham and Wood, 2003, on algorithmic surveillance; Crang and Graham, 2007, on ambient intelligence; and Lyon, 2007, on biometric forms of surveillance). The most prominent of these are radio frequency identication tags (RFIDs), which stamp mass produced objects with individual identities, and through connection to background databases potentially enable the tracking and potential surveillance of consumer populations to an extent that has previously been unimaginable (see Gane et al., 2007; Hayles, 2009). Zygmunt Baumans writings on liquid modernity and individualization give many of these ideas of a post-disciplinary or post-panoptic society a sociological twist. In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman describes, like Deleuze, the collapse of the heavy institutional structures of industrial modernity, and the emergence of new uid and transient forms of sociality in their place (see Bauman in Gane, 2004: 1920). Central to this transition is a process of individualization, whereby powers previously assumed by the state or institutions such as class or the family are devolved downwards to individuals. The situation that results from this process is liquid modernity: an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individuals shoulders . . . Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping uids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion. (Bauman, 2000: 78) This new social world, characterized by the dissolution of institutional structures and the promise of new individual freedoms, is accompanied by a changing landscape of power and politics. For Bauman, in industrial modernity the main threat to freedom came from totalitarianism, or the total annihilation of the private sphere (1999: 88). Today, he argues, it comes from the reverse: individualization, or the overrunning of the public sphere by private lives and interests. This invasion of the public by the private not only cheapens public life and politics, but threatens to divorce individual from collective freedoms. Baumans answer, which at this point is quite different from anything found in the work of Deleuze, is to call for a reconstitution of what he calls the agora: that space between the private (oikos) and public sphere (the ecclesia) in which private troubles can be translated into public issues (see Bauman, 1999, 2001; and the concluding chapter of Gane, 2012 for a further assessment of this position). He declares: To make the agora t for autonomous individuals and autonomous society, one needs to arrest, simultaneously, its privatization and its depoliticization (Bauman, 1999: 107). This theory of individualization is accompanied by an analysis of postdisciplinary forms of power. At surface level there appear to be similarities with the position taken by Deleuze, for Bauman declares that today the database is a key instrument of selection, separation and exclusion (1998:
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51). The focal point of Baumans analysis, however, is not the capacity for information communication technology to offer new possibilities for surveillance, but rather the emergence of a post-panoptic culture that is far removed from the disciplinary techniques of the 19th century. At the outset of Liquid Modernity, Bauman describes a world marked by new forms of extraterritorial power, and by the end of the era of mutual engagement: between the supervisors and supervised, capital and labour, leaders and their followers, armies at war (2000: 11). Bauman explores this theme further in a key section of Globalization: The Human Consequences entitled Is there life after Panopticon? (1998: 4854), where he draws a distinction between the Panopticon and what Thomas Mathiesen calls (1997) the Synopticon. Whereas the Panopticon works through a coercive power that immobilizes subjects by conning them to a place, Bauman argues that in the Synopticon locals watch the globals. The authority of the latter is secured by their very remoteness; the globals are literally out of this world, but their hovering above the worlds of the local is much more, daily and obtrusively, visible than that of the angels who once hovered over the Christian world: simultaneously inaccessible and within sight, lofty and mundane, innitely superior yet setting a shining example for all the inferiors to follow or to dream of following; admired and coveted at the same time a royalty that guides instead of ruling. (1998: 534) This description of the Synopticon, which moves away from Mathiesens focus on print media and technologies for disciplining the soul, is tied to Baumans broader theory of the individualization of power and politics. For while in the Panopticon, just as in totalitarian regimes, there is no private space; at least no opaque private space unsurveilled or worse still unsurveillable (1998: 49), in the Synopticon all spaces are seen to be overrun by personal and private lives: the more revealing and explicit the better (see Baumans analysis of Big Brother, 2000: 2630). The model of the Synopticon is here depicted by Bauman as reversing the underlying logic of the Panopticon, for now the few do not watch the many, but rather the many (the public) watch the few (celebrities). The Synopticon is a tele-visual technology that operates through the medium of the screen, and in this sense, like the Panopticon, it is tied to a visual model of power, but the difference is that its techniques are seductive rather than coercive: no one is made to watch, and any immobility resulting from watching is chosen rather than forced. The basic idea of synopticism, as it is formulated by Bauman, is that telemediated forms of surveillance are tied to the pleasure principle, and to the desire for people to watch and be watched. But this leads to a problem in Baumans account, which has a tendency to present the contemporary world as being populated by passive audiences or consumers, when it might be argued that the reverse in fact is true, especially as media culture today involves heightened levels of involvement or interactivity. This is most striking 622
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in the world of social networking, where participants exercise constant vigilance over their presentation of self in the form of a prole, as well as over the presentational labours of so-called friends to which this prole is displayed.This form of decentred and individualized surveillance is not just about passive consumption or what might be called viewing in Mathiesens sense, but participation and work. In light of this, what is needed in response to Mathiesen and Bauman is a theory of the Synopticon 2.0 which might be dened as an interactive tele-visual model in which the many watch the many rather than just the few, as well as watching over themselves to draw into question the so-called interactivity of new media and its connection to emergent forms of neoliberal subjectivity. This connection has been touched upon by Andrew Barry (1999) in his work on museums, but needs to be reconsidered in the light of recent developments in social networking, which now make Mathiesens (1997) brief references to the Internet through the course of his analysis of the Synopticon look dated. Such work, however, lies largely beyond the limits of the present paper, which instead is concerned primarily with broader but related structural connections between the state and the market, and with the governmentalities that run between the two. It is with this interest that a different line of critique of Bauman is to be pursued: one that calls into question the idea of individualization that both underpins and plays out through his model of the Synopticon.

Governmentality: from liberal to neoliberal

Bauman extends many of the arguments of Deleuzes Postscript by exploring sociologically the decline of heavy institutional structures and the fading of their associated precepts. In the concluding passages to his Postscript, Deleuze declares that were at the beginning of something new (1995: 182). Baumans work on individualization and the Synopticon addresses this new situation by analysing the limits of panopticism while at the same time developing a theory of post-panopticism that is tied to a deeper theory of social and political change. Baumans writings on individualization, and in particular his analysis of the downward movement of power from the state to the individual, are in all but name an argument about the effects of laissez-faireist neoliberalism. The term neoliberalism appears, albeit rather elusively, in key passages in Baumans writings on individualization and the decline of the ecclesia. In In Search of Politics, for example, Bauman argues that in the face of individualization, contemporary institutional structures have been seduced by the individualizing logic of neoliberalism, and in so doing contribute to their own disempowerment. He writes: Instead of joining ranks in the war against uncertainty, virtually all effective institutionalized agencies of collective action join the neo-liberal chorus singing the praise of unbound market forces and free trade . . . (1999: 28). Later, in the same book, he describes the current ascendency of the forces of the capitalist market, or what he calls consumerism (see
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Bauman, 2010), over the state and public powers or politics (for a restatement of this position, see Bauman, 2002). He argues: Once the state recognizes the priority and superiority of the laws of the market over the laws of the polis, the citizen is transmuted into the consumer, and a consumer demands more and more protection while accepting less and less the need to participate in the running of the state. The overall result is the present uid conditions of generalized anomie and rejection of the rules in all their versions. (1999: 156) The tragedy of consumer society, for Bauman, is that it passes freedoms down to individuals but at the same time depoliticizes and disempowers them by closing down the agora as an active space for political engagement, and by leaving consumers (who are not citizens) to their own devices. Bauman responds by pursuing a critique of individualization, and with this a critique of neo-liberal philosophy and what he calls the laissez-faireist practice of freedom (1999: 72). His answer is to place the very idea of freedom into question by drawing a distinction between republicanism, which seeks to deploy individual liberty in the communal search for the common good, and liberalism which is inclined to alight from the republican train at the station name laissez faire, thereby producing free yet lonely individuals (1999: 667). True freedom, he argues by way of response, has a collective rather than individual basis (see Bauman in Gane, 2004, for further detail). Baumans writings on individualization and post-disciplinary society are a critique of market capitalism and the freedoms it promises but never ultimately delivers. They also contain a narrative about the shift from liberal (in the Foucauldian sense) to neoliberal or individualized forms of politics and power, and indeed this, arguably, is what is at stake in his account of synopticism. But it is at this point that Baumans writings on liquid modernity and individualization reach their limit, for while they are framed at key points in terms of a critique of neoliberalism, they contain no detailed analysis of the state or the market, or the relation between the two. This means that neoliberalism and its related governmentalities remain under-theorized in Baumans work, which advances a brilliant critique of the downward movement of power from institutions to individuals, but at the cost of detailed analysis of institutional structures such as the state or social class (see Atkinson, 2008) that are still very much central to the operation of contemporary capitalism. It is surprising that analysis of the state, including its changing form and its relation to the market, is all but absent from Baumans liquid sociology (an exception is Bauman, 2007: 5570, where there is no mention of neoliberalism, and 2011: 115, where he only briey questions the function of the state in defending culture from market expansion), particularly as in the aftermath of the nancial crisis of 2008 the state has returned to prominence as the institution to give the economic and political support necessary for the ongoing operation of market capitalism. In this context, there has been no simple devolution or weakening 624
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of state powers as Baumans work might suggest. In the face of such a situation, individualization needs to be addressed as part of a broader and more detailed analysis of neoliberalism: one that does not read the neoliberal simply in terms of laissez-faireist practices (which themselves have been strongly dismissed by key neoliberal thinkers such as Hayek, see for example 1944: 17) or in terms of what Jamie Peck calls roll-back, but also through analysis both of the roll-out of new post-panoptic forms of surveillance and of the underlying governmental logics of neoliberalism that these conceal. Before turning to such questions, it is worth noting that the concept of neoliberalism is not an easy one: it has a complex history and has been ascribed different meanings by rival groups of political economists throughout the 20th century (for a comprehensive intellectual history of this term, see Peck, 2008). For this reason it has been branded variously as a rascal (Brenner et al., 2010) or mongrel (Peck, 2010) concept, and some have complained that it risks lumping together too many things to merit a single identity (Hall, 2011: 706). It is thus important to be clear about the way this term is to be used. A popular denition of neoliberalism, which is partly reproduced in the work of Bauman, is that it is a laissez-faire political and economic culture which demands government and the state be limited in their power to intervene in the market or in the entrepreneurial activities of individuals. The argument of the present paper is that this denition is only partially correct as neoliberalism is not just a normative discourse that seeks the devolution of power from the state downwards or a simple argument for either individualization or laissez-faire as suggested by Bauman, but rather it addresses the appropriate powers of the state and the role it should play in ensuring the freedom of the market (for a succinct overview of the role of the state under conditions of neoliberalism, see Harvey, 2005: 64; on the false polarity of laissez-faire and state intervention, see de Angelis, 2007: 1012). Neoliberalism centres on the relationship between the state and the market, or more precisely where to draw the line on the role of the state in the economy (Peck, 2008: 26): a question that has divided many generations of neoliberal thinkers (from Friedrich Hayek through to Milton Friedman). For this reason, neoliberalism, or what Bauman might call individualization or Deleuze exible capitalism, does not simply involve the devolution of state or institutional powers but also the emergence of particular forms of governance. In the terms of Jamie Peck (2010), as stated at the outset of this paper, neoliberalism is about roll-back and roll-out: it is about market freedoms and forms of governmentality that operate through such freedoms and, moreover, through forms of surveillance and regulation that are designed to inject market principles of competition into all spheres of social and cultural life. The primary value of Foucaults lectures on biopolitics is that they address neoliberalism in terms of these underlying governmentalities. They do so by tracing the emergence of neoliberalism to the political-economic thought that laid the basis for the development of the social market economy in post-war Germany: ordoliberalism. It is
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through an encounter with ordoliberalism, a movement which is only now starting to attract serious sociological attention (see, for example, Bonefeld, 2012), that new light might be cast on the governmental dynamics and logics of advanced market capitalism of the present, and in this sense it might be argued that Foucaults lectures on biopolitics are genealogical in form. Foucaults sweeping analysis of neoliberalism in his lectures on biopolitics begins with a group of German political economists associated with the journal Ordo, which was founded by Walter Eucken in 1948. This group, also known as the Freiburg School, are of particular interest to Foucault because they advanced a new normative model of the relation between the state and market, and in so doing redened not simply the limits of the state but more fundamentally what a state is and how its institutions are to operate. Foucault argues that in liberal political economy the role of the state is to watch over the market and to intervene only when it is necessary to protect its freedom. This, as stated above, is reproduced in the model of the Panopticon: a form of government for which watching, for the most part, is power enough. However, in post-war Germany liberalism was confronted by a new situation, for a market existed but no state as such.This reversed the problem faced by the physiocrats and the liberal economists of the 18th century, for whom there was an already existing, legitimate state which had to be limited in order to create the necessary economic freedom. Indeed: The problem the Germans had was to resolve the exact opposite: given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space of economic freedom? (Foucault, 2008: 867). The answer, for the ordoliberals, was to conceive of a radically economic state and to think of state-formation as a commercial opening. The model of the Panopticon is effectively reversed, for rather than the state ensuring the legitimacy of the market, the market produces legitimacy for the state, which in turn becomes its guarantor. Foucault argues that what underpins the formation of this type of state is the guaranteed exercise of an economic freedom, and this is made possible by a permanent genesis or circuit that goes constantly from the economic institution to the state (2008: 84). The problem this posed the ordoliberals, and which subsequently prompted much debate, was how a state could be founded upon, and yet at the same time be limited by, a principle of economic freedom, or in Foucaults terms how could it be the states guarantee and security (2008: 102)? Their answer was that the market economy should be the principle of the states internal regulation from start to nish of its existence and action (2008: 116). Foucault explains: instead of accepting a free market dened by the state and kept as it were under state supervision which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism . . . the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as an organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state. (2008: 116) 626
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The market economy is to serve as the principle, form, and model of the state. This, for the ordoliberals, is the basis upon which a state can gain its legitimacy, and, following the horrors of Nazism, how it can be made acceptable to those who most mistrusted it (Foucault, 2008: 117). The argument of the ordoliberals is that the state and all its institutions should be marketized, but what, exactly, is meant here by the market? Foucault argues that the market in liberal economics was theorized in terms of exchange, or rather free exchange between two partners who through this exchange establish the equivalence of two values (2008: 118). A focus on exchange (and its different forms), one might add, can be found at the heart of most classical theories of the social. However, the ordoliberals break with this tradition and conceive of the market not as a site of exchange but rather as one of competition. Interestingly, this is a position found earlier in the writings of Weber, for whom the market is a competition between buyers and sellers, and between those buying and those selling, over price. Foucault argues that, for the ordoliberals, the denition of the market in terms of competition has an important consequence: the idea of laissez-faire is placed into question on the grounds that it is nothing more than a naive naturalism. Competition, it is argued by contrast, is absolutely not a given of nature, for its game, mechanisms, and effects are not at all natural phenomena (Foucault, 2008: 120). This move is pivotal, for it suggests that there is nothing natural about the market, and, because of this, markets cannot simply be left to their own devices. Instead, they must be tied to government. In a key passage, Foucault writes: Government must accompany the market economy from start to nish. The market economy does not take something away from government. Rather, it indicates, it constitutes the general index in which one must place the rule for dening governmental action. One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market. To that extent you can see that the relationship dened by eighteenth century liberalism is completely reversed (2008: 121). For the ordoliberals, markets need government, just as government needs, as its founding principle, the market, but what type or art of government emerges from this relationship? Foucault argues that in this conguration government works actively to create the space for competition to take place, and for this reason neoliberalism should not be identied with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention (2008: 132, emphasis mine). Neoliberalism thus does not signify the absence of government or the state. Rather, it is an argument for the state to be marketized to its core, and for government to work tirelessly to ensure that competition plays a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society, thereby promoting the general regulation of society by the market (2008: 145). In ordoliberalism, the market and its principles are simply everywhere, and nothing, conceivably, lies out of its reach (hence it might be said to be
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biopolitical in form; a question Foucault neglects through the course of his lectures). The key point is that nothing is now sacred from the logic of marketization: the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touch and others that you are entitled to touch. The problem is how you touch them (Foucault, 2008: 133). For Foucault, this spirit of ordoliberalism, in particular its emphasis on competition and marketization, lies at the heart of more contemporary forms of neoliberalism (see 2008: 117). He qualies this argument by exploring in detail the continuities as well as the subtle differences between ordoliberalism and later forms of French and American neoliberalism (for a summary, see Foucault, 2008: 1923; on the American model of enterprise, see McNay, 2009). The importance of Foucaults analysis of ordoliberalism is that it treats neoliberalism as a reversal of Benthams model of panopticism, or of a model of government in which the state is positioned to watch over the market (which in turn is said to require a minimum of intervention because it is something that is natural or self-normalizing). This reversal is different to that described by Bauman in his theory of the Panopticon and Synopticon. For whereas the Panopticon is a model of power based on the state watching both the masses (Discipline and Punish) and the market (Foucaults lectures on biopolitics), the Synopticon, at least in Baumans account, is a model in which the masses are immobilized, politically and spatially, by watching and participating in what is effectively the market. The main problem with Baumans work is that both the state and the market disappear in favour of a broader focus on processes of individualization but, as Foucault shows, analysis of the connection between state and market is key to understanding the neoliberal art of government. For in the neoliberal model, the role of the state and government is to work actively to ensure competition in the market, and beyond this, as it is founded on principles that already come from the market, is to work to promote competition within its own institutions and agencies. The state no longer watches the market, as in the Panopticon model, instead, guided by the market, it increasingly watches itself. The task of neoliberal government, as outlined by Foucault, is to ensure the freedom of the market and, as a marketized form itself, this freedom must extend into and all state structures and institutions (at the point of writing, the promotion of further competition or choice in the British National Health system is headline news). For the neoliberals this freedom comes, most obviously, through the opening up of competition through the privatization of state activities (see Foucault, 2008: 1434), and in line with this the promotion of a spirit of enterprise that shifts the centre of gravity of governmental action downwards (Rpke cited by Foucault, 2008: 148) something that today is central to the idea of a Big Society. However, in cases where privatization is not an immediate possibility, there is an alternative, yet complementary strategy that furthers the logic of Foucaults analysis: the introduction of techniques of measurement or audit that enable the direct comparison of institutions through the construction of classications such as league tables. 628
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At surface level this audit explosion (Rose, 1999: 1535) and proliferation of performance indicators (de Angelis, 2007: 219) can be read in terms of a shift from government based on trust to a new regime of accountability (see, for example, Power, 1994), but what sits beneath this notion of accountability is a demand for the state to justify itself to the market (for an analysis of the ways in which calculative practices of accountancy are connected to neoliberal technologies of government, see Miller, 2001). The way the state can satisfy this demand, and with this prove its legitimacy, is by introducing principles of competition from the market into all of its activities and agencies. One prominent example of this is the education sector in the UK. This was a sector that, under the liberal model governance, was largely immune to the principles of the market, but under neoliberalism such immunity has long gone. The question now, to paraphrase Foucault (2008: 133), is not if education can be touched by the market, but how it is to be touched by market principles. In the sphere of secondary education, Graham Burchell observes a neoliberal ethos that seeks autonomization through the promotion of a kind of economic or enterprise model of action that pursues a competitive logic (1996: 28). The question this poses in turn is how competition is introduced and maintained in such a sector? The answer is through active processes of (self-)government and (self-)surveillance that come from the market and which, most commonly, take the form of an audit. One of the few people to have sensed what is at stake here is Marilyn Strathern, who argues that new management practices of audit are a now taken-for-granted process of neo-liberal government and lie at the core of its ethos. She writes: Where audit is applied to public institutions medical, legal, educational the states overt concern may be less to impose day-to-day direction than to ensure that internal controls, in the form of monitoring techniques, are in place (2000: 3). Measures such as the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK higher education sector operate in exactly this way. They work to legitimize this sector in terms of accountability and quality, but most importantly work to promote competition in ways that were previously unimaginable. Whether such audits will exist once the principles of competition and enterprise are fully at play with the sector remains to be seen. For will there be any need for the market to watch state institutions once these are fully marketized: will regulation through competition be seen to be regulation enough?

Conclusion
Foucaults lectures on biopolitics, which provide a longer and more detailed history of neoliberal reason than is common in the sociological literature on this subject (see, for example, Harvey, 2005; Hall, 2011), provide a valuable corrective to accounts of neoliberalism that are framed solely in terms of laissez-faire or individualization, for they remind us that neoliberalism is not simply about deregulation, privatization or governing through freedom, but
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also about intervention and regulation with the aim of injecting market principles of competition into all forms of social and cultural life. Jamie Peck argues that such forms of governance and their associated regulatory incursions rest upon the rediscovery and reinvention of an Ordoliberal ethic (2010: 23). In this regard, Foucaults detailed study of ordoliberalism is particularly useful as it tells us about the history of this ethic, and with this opens a path for the analysis of current forms of audit culture, classication or what Peck calls roll-out through a body of political-economic ideas that for the most part have been long forgotten. Indeed, it is through the study of ordoliberalism that Foucault offers an analytic model for understanding neoliberalism as a governmental form that moves in a loop from the market to social institutions such as the state. It might be observed that there has been some dispute over whether Foucaults concept of governmentality has a textual and philosophical bias (Garland, 1997: 199) or whether it is more concerned with what might be called practices of government (Rose, 2000: 323). This is not a dispute within which this paper seeks to intervene, but one way forward, as Garland suggests, is to conceive of Foucaults models of liberal and neoliberal governmentality as ideal-types which can act as conceptual starting points for sociological analysis of governmental congurations between the market and the state. With this aim in mind, this paper will conclude by offering a typology of liberal and neoliberal governmentalities which includes the different panoptic and post-panoptic models of surveillance through which they operate.This is intended to be a heuristic typology to help orientate analysis of the concrete practices and technologies of liberal and neoliberal forms of government, rather than an ontology of governmentality that starts with analysis of the fundamental being or life of such forms. While there is no easy separation between these two ways of working (or more broadly between epistemology and ontology), the idea here is that a typology of governmentality and its connected models of surveillance and regulation might in turn frame further work on the operational dynamics of governance within different political, cultural and social contexts and settings something that lies beyond the bounds of the present paper. Foucaults lectures on biopolitics, when read alongside the writings of Deleuze and Bauman on control societies and individualization, can be used to construct a fourfold typology of liberal and neoliberal governmentality. The rst such type is governmentality through surveillance and discipline. This is the model of the Panopticon and of liberal governance more broadly in which the state watches over the market and over its citizens and intervenes only when necessary, for surveillance or the very act of watching is, for the most part, deemed to be discipline enough. Second, is governmentality through surveillance and control. This is where subjects are no longer conned to a physical space and where state institutions are not the only ones doing the watching. In these terms, control is underpinned by a post-disciplinary model of governance which devolves power downwards from crumbling state institutions to new agencies of control that emerge from the market. Control 630
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societies break partly from the model of the Panopticon, for surveillance now works at a distance and operates through technologies of tagging and tracking that enable the monitoring of mobile entities, but at the same time, watching, of sorts, is still the key (see, for example, Posters 1995 idea of the Superpanopticon). In Foucauldian terms, the governmentality of control societies lies somewhere between the liberal and neoliberal models, for the emphasis is on the state devolving power to the market, or commercial agencies that are well equipped to track mobilities of different sorts, but there is no accompanying theory of what happens in return: the marketization of the state. Third, is governmentality through interactivity. This takes us back to the limits of Baumans theory of individualization and his model of the Synopticon. Like Deleuzes control society, this model is built upon the movement of power from state to the individual but the difference is that it inverts the architecture of the Panopticon so that the many watch the few, or in governmental terms, individuals look to the market for guidance rather than the state. What is missing from this account is an accompanying theory of what happens to the state in such a situation. Baumans focus is instead on the damage done to sociality by mechanisms of competition (see 2007: 68), and on the illusory freedoms promised by individualization, and more specically, consumerism. This poses a problem back to the work of Foucault, which largely failed to address the governmental logics and dynamics of consumer society (for an attempt to extend Foucaults work along these lines, see Binkley, 2006 or Miller and Rose, 2008). But at the same time Foucaults work offers something back to Bauman, for rather than merely dismissing consumer freedoms as ctions, it is possible to analyse such freedoms through a Foucauldian lens in terms of their underlying governmentalities (thereby extending the genealogy of freedom advanced by Rose, 1999). This would mean moving beyond Baumans model of the Synopticon by conceptualizing consumers not simply as passive entities but as willing and wilful participants, and, as suggested through the course of the present paper, to analyse the current freedoms of media interactivity in critical terms by looking at their role in the construction of emergent neoliberal subjectivities. This task is particularly pressing given that (new) media technologies barely feature in the accounts of either Foucault or Bauman, and perhaps because of this the governmentalities of such technologies remain under-theorized within the discipline of sociology more generally. Fourth, is governmentality through surveillance to promote competition. This idea lies at the heart of Foucaults analysis of ordoliberalism in his lectures on biopolitics. In such a situation, the state remains crucial to the operation of market capitalism, for in one direction it strives to create the conditions for the freedom of the market while in the other it works according to principles which themselves come from this market. This, as Foucault observes, is not a laissez-faire arrangement, for the state and its institutions have to show permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention (Foucault, 2008: 132) through processes of self-surveillance and intervention or what might be
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called audit to promote competition, and thereby to achieve legitimacy in the face of the market. This model of governance, which Foucault traces to the political economy of post-war Germany, is the reverse of Panopticism, for rather than the state watching the market, which is seen to be natural or self-normalizing, the market now penetrates all aspects of both state and society, which in turn are to normalize themselves according to market principles. The value of this concept of governance lies in its attention to the connection between regulation and competition, and to neoliberal processes of what Peck calls roll-out. In these terms, it is possible to explain the ongoing drive for measurement, audit and classication within the state and public sector institutions more generally: they are there to manufacture marketized forms of competition where previously they did not exist. Finally, it is tempting to construct a linear narrative of different types of surveillance out of the arts of government outlined above, and to think in terms of the displacement of liberalism (state surveillance of the market) by new forms of neoliberalism (the active marketization of the state), and perhaps, following the nancial crisis of 2008, the displacement of neoliberalism by seemingly neo-Keynesian practices of state intervention into, and control over, markets. But things are more complex than this, not least because as David Harvey (2010) and Slavoj iek (2009) have argued, the current crisis of capitalism has presented opportunities for the further neoliberalization of the state and civil society, or what Bauman has called de-regulation-cumindividualization mark two (2007: 68). Such developments are beyond the scope of this paper, but nevertheless it might be argued that the above typology of surveillance and governmentalities might be useful for understanding this post-crisis situation. One could, for example, explore the following, multiple congurations: liberal (the state watches over the market and intervenes only in the last instance through rescue packages and bailouts); control (the state and a range of private agencies watch over the conduct of its consumers through technologies such as CCTV and RFID tags); interactive (consumers both watch and participate in the market and the state, which increasingly takes a marketized form); and neoliberal (the market introduces new audits and measures into the state that in turn are used to justify its legitimacy and value). Such typological analysis clearly needs work, but there are at least three reasons why Foucaults work might be useful for such an exercise: rst, it offers a nuanced denition of neoliberalism that centres rightly on active techniques of government rather than laissez-faire; second, it treats surveillance as something tied to, and thus potentially a window onto, an underlying set of governmentalities; and third, it places intricate and fast-changing connections between the state, the market and (civil) society at the heart of its analysis: connections that have all too often been absent from the focus of contemporary sociology.
University of York Received 10 August 2011 Finally accepted 23 May 2012

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Acknowledgements
This article began life as a keynote presentation at the Centre for Modern Studies conference Watching and Being Watched at the University of York, UK in the summer of 2011. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of this event for their questions and comments, many of which helped me formulate my argument in its early stages. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing useful and extensive comments which prompted me to make substantial revisions to an earlier draft of this paper.

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