Technologies of Government

Abstract

In the last two decades, the deeply flawed ethical disposition of the press, or print media, and changes in the traditional business models of the print media have been carefully staged as policy challenges for both the Australian government and the eponymous public. This thesis attempts to characterise and critically untangle the technology of ‘inquiry’ that has been offered by government as a remedy to these perceived failings – a deeply intrusive, diagnostic, productive and creative technology that demands assessment when the traditionally unfettered and unregulated press becomes its field of intervention. With the print media as the key unit of analysis, ‘inquiry’ is historicised through genealogical analysis and subsequently refracted through the Foucauldian prism of governmentality to offer, quite simply, an analytics of inquiry as it relates to the print media in Australia. The first part of the paper undertakes a modest genealogical analysis of inquiry and traces a trajectory toward a governmentalisation of inquiry, before composing a general conceptual space for thinking of inquiries as ‘technologies’ by proposing a tetrad analytic encompassing the polytelic, polytechnic, polytemporal and polyspatial dimensions of inquiry. The second part of the paper patiently knits a governmental perspective with the discursive, using the tetrad as a starting point to analyse the 1992 Joint Select Committee Inquiry into the Print Media and the 2011 Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation. This offers a preliminary insight into the unstable ecology of rationalities, strategies, techniques, governmental programmes, powers, resistances and co-existing technologies that animated these two inquiries into the print media. By making the self-evident nature of inquiry contingent, it becomes possible to illustrate the specific historical conditions which render inquiries into the print media intelligible.