This article presents Foucault's governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucault's novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucault's ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors’ practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucault's early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory fram...