Governmentality, Counter-conduct and Prefigurative Demonstrations: Interactional and Categorial Practices in the Strange Case of the United Nathans Weapons Inspections

This chapter attends to the micro-ethnographic detail of actual practices, procedures and technologies – the techne – of governance, especially those practices that manifest as what Foucault called ‘counter-conducts’. The interactional and categorial practices of a prefigurative protest demonstration are examined using video recordings that were made of a theatrical protest event called “United Nathans weapons inspections” in February 2003. The chapter draws upon Mitchell Dean’s analytics of government and Carl Death’s analytics of protest. A first step in an analytics of protest is to uncover how fields of visibility, forms of knowledge, technologies and apparatuses, and subjectivities and identities are negotiated and accomplished collaboratively. Specific tools and methods that are well suited to investigating the situated practices, procedures and technologies of governmentality in a specific setting are explored. Conversation analysis (CA) helps us document the ways in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised. Membership categorisation analysis (MCA) provides an approach to uncovering 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.