Governing Readers from Limitation to Proliferation

Abstract

In this chapter the concepts of government, strategy of government, governmentality and a variety of associated concepts shall be elaborated upon. The government of reading will then be analysed to describe how a shift in the strategy of governing literacy helped to constitute dyslexia’s conditions of possibility. These concepts help to provide a theoretical framework, and illuminate the empirical context that makes it possible for me to conduct the precise genealogy of this diagnostic category, a technology of power—dyslexia. This book primarily studies the operations of technologies of power. I am not studying the formation of a governmentality, but rather how they relate to technologies of power. It is necessary to develop a more elaborate description of government and governmentality so that it is evident that my analysis of technologies and machineries of government refer back to a particular reading of the usage of the concepts of government and governmentality in the post-Foucauldian genealogical tradition.