2.1 Rationality and Reality
The first important aspect of the concept of governmentality is that it does not juxtapose
politics and knowledge but articulates a “political knowledge”. Foucault does not pose the
question of the relation between practices and rationalities, their correspondence or noncorrespondence
in the sense of a deviation or shortening of reason. His “main problem” is not
to investigate if practices conform to rationalities, “but to discover which kind of rationality
they are using” (Foucault 1981, p. 226). The analytics of government not only concentrates on
the mechanisms of the legitimisation of domination or the masking of violence, beyond that it
focuses on the knowledge that is part of the practices, the systematisation and
“rationalisation” of a pragmatics of guidance. In this perspective, rationality does not refer to
a transcendental reason, but to historical practices; it does not imply a normative judgement,
since it refers to social relations. Foucault makes this point very clear: