In the style of the criticism we have been considering, our aim here is not so much to reject as to find ways to modify the governmental approach. But in no sense would we claim to address the arguments of the critics in their entirety. Rather, the more modest aim is to begin to restore attention to the specificity of practices of governing (Barratt, 2008). The identification of rationalities that span institutional fields remains vital, not least as a means of illuminating commonalities in different fields of political struggle. The intention here is to balance this by respecting the singular forms of government. We share the nominalist perspective of Dean and Hindess (1998): modes of government appear in definite institutional, social or professional settings and should be assigned a time and place. The focus here is on how particular categories of person are formed or ‘made up’. But genealogical enquiry can serve also as a reminder of forgotten possibilities in the sense of historical experiences that have been suppressed in the course of time, which can nonetheless be of relevance to contemporary struggles (Barratt,2003;Burchell,1996). Accordingly, our interest